551–560 of 1001 posts
This is what Sony did with the PS3, but afaik Linux was then used as a backdoor to jailbreak the "PS3 OS" and sideload games.
I guess, this is why Sony abandoned the idea of allowing Linux on their consoles. Kind of sad, but understandable.
One of the biggest problems (if not the biggest) is that this desire is still a niche desire. If non-techie people would somehow be convinced that indeed hardware/software freedom is a basic right no matter the device we would be in a different position to pressure governments. How can people be convinced about it is the hardest part. How do you convince people that have no idea about how technology and corporation i…
I do think there is growing discontent with MS and Google, and you see Linux sentiment changing and the userbase growing. But it's still a small fraction of the populus even though it's grown a lot in the last decade probably
People are switching to Linux now because it works better. The privacy is still a nice-to-have bonus.
If the government would enforce laws about computer security, tech companies would not have to restrict user freedom.
Obviously this situation benefits those tech companies, but honestly the solution is not as easy as it seems.
Of course it's a different story for the right to repair and DRM.
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Only competition can provide a solution. We have lost sight of this principle even though all Western democracies are built on the idea of separation of powers, and making it hard for any one faction of elites to gain full control and ruin things for everyone else. Make them fight with each other, let them get a piece of the pie, but never all of it. That's why we have multiple branches of government, multiple partie…
>There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future. I wouldn't call it utopian, but I'd say we are way past "peak democracy" at this point. There was a time in which corporations did get broken up when too large, when we did understand that it's about serving the population first and accumulating wealth after that, when corporations influencing politics was widely seen as a negative. It doe…
Personally I think there are technological preconditions for stable democracy that have recently been countered by authoritarian leaning technology. We need to invent counter technology to those things.
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Even the smallest nations have the legal right to permanently incarcerate, strip you of your assets or even murder you if you are in their sphere of influence. I would hope you'd agree those are not powers that we should grant to large corporations... I think it's shocking how many people Google can affect through its search algorithms (more than any nation on Earth) and yet there is no democratic system to hold them…
Kill, not murder. If the country ends your life they are doing it under their authority, not outside their authority.
Point being, also states can do murder.
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Even the smallest nations have the legal right to permanently incarcerate, strip you of your assets or even murder you if you are in their sphere of influence. I would hope you'd agree those are not powers that we should grant to large corporations... I think it's shocking how many people Google can affect through its search algorithms (more than any nation on Earth) and yet there is no democratic system to hold them…
>Even the smallest nations have the legal right to permanently incarcerate, strip you of your assets or even murder you if you are in their sphere of influence. A nation that did that would be able to do that exactly once before everyone decides to never do business with it ever again, which they can afford to do because it's such a small market. Exercising arbitrary power is not the trump card you think it is. Hell,…
I want my less tech savvy family members to be able to buy locked-to-the-company-store hardware, that they can’t run other things on, as it protects them from one avenue of scams and hacks. This protection can and will be worked around if it can be easily disabled. Fully open phone systems consistently fail to sell enough to make a difference, which is a bit of a shame, but honestly at this point the market has spoke…
Nothing prevents that the device is locked by you instead of the "store" or even that the device has a "safe" mode that has to be explicitly disabled by the user in a non obvious way like connecting the device to a computer and running a command or so. The only important thing is for the bank, Netflix and co to not be able to discriminate. But again nothing would provide the bank to offer a setting for the user to re…
It’s a security measure, particularly as we place more responsibility on banks to prevent their customers being defrauded.
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Joining all the other comments agreeing completely with this take. I think it's worth adding that this is fundamental enough to not just be a tech issue. There's a strong legal framework in almost all developed companies for regulating companies where acting in their self interest harms the consumer interest. Without which, lots of things we take for granted (electrical safety certification, usb c, splits between ser…
Most politicians would find that argument confusing and not agree with you. I don't think the outcomes of running to government would be what you expect. It could easily backfire. Politics is a spectrum. Some claim that model is oversimplified but it's not. Here you're making a left wing argument that individual bad actors must be regulated for the good of the collective. However, left politicians would look at the s…
I think you're simplifying a few things here, mainly the amount of different views that are under the umbrella you're classing as "left-wing" (some of which will fit your categorisation, and some won't) and the amount of different issues under the umbrella of "running your own things".
What I'm trying to say is that there's multiple arguments to be made along the lines of "large companies can and should be restricted from blocking out freedoms of smaller companies and individuals". There's a big economic argument to allowing competition, and I think that's something that unites a lot of thinkers you'd probably class as right wing, as well as the traditional left.
I want my less tech savvy family members to be able to buy locked-to-the-company-store hardware, that they can’t run other things on, as it protects them from one avenue of scams and hacks. This protection can and will be worked around if it can be easily disabled. Fully open phone systems consistently fail to sell enough to make a difference, which is a bit of a shame, but honestly at this point the market has spoke…
That is understandable, most people are not technical but the few who has a need for it should have an option for it. As a developer I write apps for myself and I side-load them. Why take away my right to do so, just because other people can't then nobody should?
Buy a specifically open phone, and support that market segment.