871–880 of 1001 posts
Before the middle ages, you'd make your own product. That turned into local production, mass productio, but still devices could be desicected and analyzed how they worked. A car from the 60's as an example.
So for the most part of our society, reverse engineering was possible. It is only the last decades with closed source software that the opposite is occuring. But did 'we' ever made this a consious decision? Or our we sucker punched by progress
I didn't buy a box of transistors, I bought a "smart phone", a pocket sized computer. The OS and hardware are parts of the whole. So you're phrasing it wrong. I should have the ability to run any code I want on my smart phone that I own. And to my clear, I own my smart phone. You own your smart phone. Any EULA to the contrary should be null and void.
Now, if you want to install Linux on that hardware you should be allowed to do so.
I think the conversation needs to change from "can't run software of our choice" to "can't participate in society without an apple or google account". I have been living with a de-googled android phone for a number of years, and it is getting harder and harder, while at the same time operating without certain "apps" is becoming more difficult. For example, by bank (abn amro) still allows online banking on desktop via…
I do think the personal mental health angle matters a lot, but it adds urgency to consider school, banking, etc being dependent on private company memberships.
My local gym did something wonderful. They retained a keyfob-based access system instead of using an app, specifically because the owner knew "someone's going to have a dumbphone and complain they can't get in."
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For Netflix sure. I don't care. But when it comes to banking and you are forced to use between two OS or this means no access to your bank digitally, this is a massive problem and restriction to citizens' freedom. Everyone needs a bank to operate, and they need to maximize the options available to use them.
I mentioned that in another thread, but banks have a legal obligation to to assess and mitigate risks in the service they give to you- you, personally, might be tech savvy enough to understand what you are doing but most people are not and the bank is held accountable when something bad happens. This is why they limit service to certain devices or OS versions, even when it comes at the expense of convenience.
It's obviously not about risks. It's about convenience on their side to only support 2 platforms and call it a day.
Run doom on my Air conditioner?
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> I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders. They're graphical consumer devices, the quality bar is so high nobody can reach it except huge well funded teams. It's like asking why desktop Linux doesn't still attract OS builders, or for that matter, why the PC platform doesn't attract OS builders. Occasionally someone makes an OS that boots to a simple windowed GUI as a hobby, that's as far as i…
> Nobody is building a compelling new OS Eh, Redox probably counters your statement here. It's just in that wide gulch of "the easy part is done and the hard parts are hard". But it is being built, and some would definitely consider it compelling.
Command+F 'drivers' 0 results These things are never thought through. Sure, Apple could unlock the whole thing, tell everyone to go nuts. Who's writing the damn drivers? Apple's certainly not obligated to open source theirs, I also can't imagine them signing someone else's. So we end up with a bunch of homebrew drivers, devices crashing, getting pwned, and the dozens of people who install a third party OS on their iP…
Open source drivers are the overlooked heroes that make everything work. If linux hadn't had all these drivers written or ported to it (think of your intel NICs) the OS would be dead in the water
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Sure. You ship the device in open mode, and then doing it is easy. The device supports closed mode (i.e. whatever the currently configured package installation sources are, you can no longer add more), and if you put the device in closed mode, getting it back out requires attaching a debugger to the USB port, a big scary message and confirmation on the phone screen itself, and a full device wipe. Then you put grandma…
Make it an obscure option in the first time setup so all the users that click next next next will end up with the secure mode, while the open mode requires fiddling. This isn’t a gdpr opt out where both alternatives need to be equally easy. We (as a society) absolutely need the devices to default to the current model when purchased.
I feel like this is completely the opposite. The case for closed devices is that if grandma is senile she can't be trusted to make sound choices and needs a piece of hardware to limit her options, whereas that isn't the case for random chemists and college students and farmers, i.e. the general population.
It's one of the cases where tech people can't see the forest for the trees. The vast majority of people can make reasonable decisions about their own lives, but then if a tiny percentage make mistakes, those are the ones who come to you with problems and then it seems like everyone who comes to you is having problems because only the people having problems come to you.
Then megacorps use that false perception that everyone is incompetent to try to weasel their way in as a middle man taking a thick margin while locking the doors so the average person can't go to the competition, which is the option that needs to be not just preserved but actually used by ordinary people.
And not just because of the margins. Centralizing everything is a skeleton key for authoritarians. If you want to ban a social media app because people are using it to find out about something you want to censor or organize opposition to your administration and having it banned from Google Play and Apple makes it so 99% of people can't use it, you'd win when we need you to lose.
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You realize you’re discounting 98% of the world’s population, right?
98% of the world population is rooting their phone and installing unsigned binaries? Really? Are you sure you maybe don't have this the complete opposite way around?
> If you can't figure out a computer perhaps you're just unfit to participate in the modern economy.