[HN Gopher] Taking a Stand in the War on General-Purpose Computing
___________________________________________________________________
Taking a Stand in the War on General-Purpose Computing
Author : Funes-
Score : 109 points
Date : 2021-02-23 21:16 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cheapskatesguide.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cheapskatesguide.org)
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| This is irrelevant. The general public has no interest in
| "General Purpose Computing". I am a nerd, but while I have an
| interest in a laptop that is general purpose, I have no interest
| in a phone that is general purpose. I want it locked down. I also
| have to keep my mom online, and tend to steer her towards her
| iPad rather than her iMac, because there's just been less tech
| support (on my part) required for it.
|
| General Purpose computing and Privacy have little to do with each
| other. There is more malware installed on General Purpose
| computers than there are iPhones. Facebook tracks you on your
| computer just as much as your phone. However, the phone is
| becoming a place where they can't track you, and there's little
| Facebook can do about it. Contrast with Sony found installing
| exploitable root-kits on PCs (to stop you copying CDs IIRC).
| guidoism wrote:
| This exactly. I read the essay and said to myself "meh". Having
| a phone that I can't mess up is actually pretty dang nice.
|
| High performance computing is definitely locked down. An M1 Mac
| is pretty dang nice.
|
| But for general purpose computing you don't need those fancy
| graphics. I've been thinking of microcontrollers as the
| equivalent of our 1980s general purpose computers more so than
| the rpi. The rpi still requires a lot of software. An mcu just
| works. And we can create a nice little gpu for it with an fpga.
|
| Big corporations aren't locking you out of this world. They are
| actually helping you get this awesome stuff for pennies as a
| consequence of the massive supply chain.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > And even so, Raspbian relies on Systemd, despite the privacy
| fears of many.
|
| While I do agree with Systemd bashing in general since it
| completely breaks with Unix design principles... this is the
| first time I have seen privacy as an argument?
| tyingq wrote:
| They could mean the default setting of LLMNR=yes. Not sure why
| it's on by default.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| The author may have the systemd-resolved privacy complaints in
| mind, where the systemd DNS daemon has Google's DNS servers
| hardbaked into the source code. It will fallback to Google DNS
| if the configured server is down.
|
| A few concerned individuals raised their worries in a ticket
| and were shut down for 'tinfoil hat reasoning' or something
| like that.
|
| It may be an extreme case, but many Linux users would rather
| not have any particular provider baked into core system
| services. Personally I'd rather know my DNS server is down or
| that I've misconfigured it, much more than I would have my
| system contact Google without my knowledge.
|
| Src:
| https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/41c81c4a626fda0969fc...
| eecc wrote:
| Also NTP points to Google's servers
| e2le wrote:
| Here is the rationale for using Google as the default for
| ntp which appears to be a problem with ntppool.org than any
| supposed favouritism for Google.
| https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/16148
|
| However I was under the impression an OSS project could use
| *.pool.ntp.org as their default but was preferred that they
| get a vendor zone.
|
| https://www.ntppool.org/en/vendors.html
| oytis wrote:
| I mean. It's an open-source software. Those concerned can
| just use a patched version. Not even patched - this is fixed
| with a build flag - I'm sure security-oriented distributions
| have already specified the right one.
|
| As a last resort, you can always block requests to 8.8.8.8
| with iptables.
| e2le wrote:
| While it's possible for it to be patched out, the default
| behaviour of any application with similar scope to systemd
| should be to respect the users privacy. If every
| application required the user to "opt-out" of privacy
| infringing features, it would be a very time consuming and
| costly activity that only knowledgable users could do.
| oytis wrote:
| Regular users are likely to spend most of digital lives
| on a device fully controlled by Google, I doubt that a
| couple of requests to 8.8.8.8 will be a significant
| compromise to their privacy (how do they know that
| whatever they get from their provider is better by the
| way?).
|
| My main point here is just that open source maintainers
| don't owe humanity anything - they already gave it a lot
| of their time. If people strongly disagree with some
| design decisions - and it's not a backdoor or something,
| it's a pretty innocent design decision to rely on a
| highly available DNS server as a last back up - open
| source gives them a lot of opportunities to do their own
| thing.
| e2le wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't find your argument to be
| convincing, the knowledge of such privacy concerns varies
| significantly amongst regular users. I don't believe they
| are using such software with full knowledge of their
| privacy-infringing features. Unfortunately with every
| feature that evolves privacy-infringing default
| behaviour, it risks snowballing into ritualistic
| behaviour that must be performed and done only by those
| knowledgeable enough.
|
| > I doubt that a couple of requests to 8.8.8.8 will be a
| significant compromise to their privacy It could be, it
| could be more. I don't think either of us are in a
| position to say exactly and likely largely depends on
| whether such default behaviour was changed by package
| maintainers in the various distributions.
|
| > My main point here is just that open source maintainers
| don't owe humanity anything - they already gave it a lot
| of their time. This is something we both can agree on
| however I tend to apply this only to those not receiving
| a salary for doing OSS work. I am of course not endorsing
| harassment or anything of the sort. People should always
| choose respectful conversation and debate when discussing
| these issues.
| Datagenerator wrote:
| No need for firewall configuration, just: ip route add
| blackhole 8.8.8.8
| sverhagen wrote:
| Those concerned may be as much or more concerned about
| fixing this for the masses as they are about fixing it for
| themselves, hard to speculate on their motivations.
| josefx wrote:
| I would be more interested how much systemd made from
| selling its users tracking data to Google and if they
| didn't it would be interesting which idiot passed up a
| chance to secure a possibly sizeable budget increase by
| handing Google all that data for free. Mozilla got
| millions from making Google the default search and you
| can't tell me Google doesn't value the data it gathers
| from this, they have a tendency to kill under performing
| projects.
| oytis wrote:
| It's still not a reason to harrass a maintainer who
| already provided a convenient override to set it to
| whatever one wants. Maybe Ubuntu distro is a better place
| to get the "safe" configuration to the masses.
|
| It's a pretty rare phobia to be honest, and I think
| people who consider 8.8.8.8 a reasonable default are
| totally justified to. For those who don't agree there are
| plenty of options, that's how open source is supposed to
| work.
| birktj wrote:
| The page linked says "space-separated list of default DNS
| servers". From this I would assume that this is just an
| option one could simply overwrite by using a non-default
| configuration. That doesn't seem so bad, however I could also
| be misunderstanding and in order to disable these servers one
| would need to patch the source code like you imply. Do you
| have a more specific source that would answer this question?
|
| Edit: from the other comments in this thread it seems like it
| it is a build time option
| rgovostes wrote:
| The author admits in the comments that they have no real basis
| for accusing systemd of violating privacy.
|
| > I think the problem many see with systemd is that it is a
| very large block of code that is hard to understand and modify.
| This makes it possible for unscrupulous organizations to hide
| things in systemd for spying on users. This also makes it more
| susceptible to hacking and less secure. I'm not knowledgeable
| enough about the subject to have a strong opinion about it. I
| just know that many Linux users strongly oppose it.
|
| In my view it's hard to take the author seriously with claims
| like this, and in the same paragraph praise for the Raspberry
| Pi as an open platform (it contains proprietary components).
|
| Edit: More egregiously, the author claims that iOS and macOS
| are based on Linux.
| oytis wrote:
| His stance on TLS is also quite... peculiar. I wonder if the
| author is a technical person at all.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Deep down in in systemd-resolved there's hard coded fallback
| DNS and NTP addresses. They're build-time options with defaults
| set to Google and CloudFlare. They _only_ see is in
| catastrophic misconfigurations. They 're also completely under
| the control of the distro which can set whatever defaults it
| wants.
|
| The anti-systemd brigade has translated this into "OMG LENNART
| SPIES ON MY DNS!!1!". There's cogent arguments to be made
| against systemd but the privacy angle is one of the weakest.
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| It's not the argument anyone else is going to make, but as an
| example... the last time I checked, ecryptfs had been rendered
| nonfunctional in Debian Buster because the current revision of
| systemd had made changes that made ecryptfs nonfunctional.
| Supposedly they're going to have a solution in systemd that'll
| be of equivalent functionality, but in the meantime, in debian,
| you're stuck with the systemd stack and not using software that
| systemd renders nonfunctional.
|
| So I had to back up, reinstall and encrypt the whole hard
| drive, including swap space, because that's how debian
| installers do it...
| antattack wrote:
| It's not about privacy per se, but rather giving away your
| personal information for free so google can make profit out of
| it.
| mrob wrote:
| Assuming your distro hasn't fixed this antifeature, systemd
| sends your NTP and DNS requests to Google as a fallback if
| there's no other configuration or DHCP. Previous HN discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23712434
| superluserdo wrote:
| >Assuming your distro hasn't fixed this antifeature
|
| I was under the impression that changing the default NTP
| servers was an expected part of bundling systemd in a distro?
| uniqueid wrote:
| This essay a great example of online culture. So many stock
| received ideas: the 'shadowy elites' message, the Walter Mitty
| 'only we few dared to take the red pill' heroism, the conflation
| of freedom of speech with forcing a private company to host a
| photo of your asshole at no charge. We even get mentions of TS
| Eliot (guess Pound is too edgy) and Glenn 'my editor is
| oppressing me' Greenwald. In short, I did not enjoy it.
| walrus01 wrote:
| This seems to have no real coherent message and confuses MacOS
| with Linux, which greatly reduces any credibility it might have.
| young_unixer wrote:
| The solution is to foster an appreciation of the values of
| freedom and independence in the population, not only with regards
| to computing, but about life in general (freedom of speech,
| freedom of press, economic freedom, etc).
|
| I've always admired how much the general population defends
| freedom of speech in the US. In the rest of the world, freedom of
| speech is constantly eroded with laws against "hate speech",
| because our cultures (latin american here) don't value freedom of
| spedch. If we could capture the appreciation Americans have for
| freedom of speech and extrapolate it to all areas of human
| activity, we would rest assured that our computers would keep
| being general-purpose.
| BEEdwards wrote:
| Umm.. white nationalist tried to pull a coup a month ago.
|
| It's just possible that maybe, just maybe some speech isn't
| compatible with democracy...
| trav4225 wrote:
| It's difficult to imagine anything more democratic than free
| speech.
| centimeter wrote:
| > boomer panty raid
|
| > "coup"
|
| Come on, man.
| taylus wrote:
| Yeah it's not like they killed a cop and dragged an enemy
| flag through the senate
| splintercell wrote:
| They killed a cop? Wow, I only read NYT's retraction of
| the story, if there was an update on the retraction then
| it missed my radar. Can you point me to a link from NYT
| claiming that rioters killed a cop?
| ttt0 wrote:
| It's not like, because they didn't, as far as we know.
| It's unclear how that cop died, there wasn't any official
| statement.
|
| To people who are downvoting, the NYT story was made up:
| https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/feb/22/what-we-
| know-...
| beloch wrote:
| Few states have ever pretended that speech should be
| absolutely free. The U.S. draws the line at speech that
| incites the imminent and likely violation of the law[1].
| Canada only guarantees free speech within "reasonable
| limits"[2]. It's still worth fighting against governments
| natural desire for control to ensure "reasonable" speech
| remains as free as possible.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
|
| [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_expression_in_C
| an...
| lou1306 wrote:
| Also, Europe has been torn apart for centuries by religious,
| ethnic, or nationalistic hatred. The current laws reflect
| that. And communities that had to endure such hatred in the
| past will not be easily convinced that free speech is always
| a good thing.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Even with concerns with people fomenting ethnic hatred,
| Europe in the past several decades has still had vibrant
| movements for libertarian ideas and freedom of expression.
| Just look at May '68, or the Czech dissidents, or the
| Scandinavian and Dutch alternative press. They are little
| different than Richard Stallman's philosophy.
|
| The progressive wing has always comprised both people
| cautious about freedom of speech and collectivist, and
| people who are more anarchic about expression and focused
| on the individual, and that holds in Europe as well. There
| is no reason that the OP's point about praising freedom of
| expression as a way to spur interest in general-purpose
| computing, couldn't resonate with Europeans today who are
| in the latter camp.
| afavour wrote:
| Eh? By your own reckoning the existing defense of freedom of
| speech doesn't extend to general purpose computing, so why
| would you focus on increasing that which already exists and has
| proven to not have a connection?
|
| IMO one of the greatest enemies to success is broadening scope.
| General purpose computing: it's a good, specific focus.
| "Freedom in all areas of human activity" means endless
| conversations about what that means, what to focus on, what to
| prioritise, blah blah blah.
| centimeter wrote:
| > The solution is to foster an appreciation of the values of
| freedom and independence in the population
|
| This is almost entirely heritable, and can only be "fostered"
| through demographic management.
| throwawayaworth wrote:
| Freedom of speech all around the world is eroding (some places
| more than others of course), step by step, we agree on that.
|
| But I disagree that the US is any different, and is certainly
| not at the top of the ladder. To be clear: I mean freedom in
| practice, not freedom in legal theory.
|
| "freedom of speech" is to the US as "politeness" is to
| Canadians: mostly true, but generally a stereotype that is
| fading with time.
|
| I always thought it was funny in a tragicomic way, that a
| country that has freedom as one of its top virtues is the same
| one where you would quickly get sued (if not imprisoned) for
| acts considered harmless in other countries.
|
| Perhaps the true free citizens of the US are corporations, to
| the detriment of natural persons.
|
| Maybe this is not obvious until you've lived both _in_ and
| _out_ of North America for long enough.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I have little to add except perhaps that the truly free
| citizens have the capital to either a) hire good lawyers, or
| b) scoff any financial expenses and fines because they are
| the equivalent of pennies to them.
|
| IIRC Jeff was renovating an apartment in NYC and he had his
| car parked somewhere for days with accumulating fines in the
| order of 10s of thousands but really, those numbers are 6-7
| orders of magnitude smaller than his wealth.
| eplanit wrote:
| > In the rest of the world, freedom of speech is constantly
| eroded with laws against "hate speech"
|
| America is very quickly (and sadly) trending towards this, too.
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| Based on...?
| mr-wendel wrote:
| Religion hammered into me as a kid that anything you do for good
| will _always_ be partial subverted by the devil. While I don 't
| agree with that literally, I think the general principle is 100%
| correct.
|
| I've worked (and around) in many parts of the Internet (and
| precursors): dial-up BBS's, web hosting, VPNs, etc. It is
| virtually guaranteed that the better you are at upholding
| security and privacy the more certain you will (hopefully
| unintentionally) facilitate some absolutely dastardly
| shitbaggery. The kind you can honestly loose a little bit of your
| soul over.
|
| I do think standing up for these kind of freedom of speech
| principles are important. However, the bottom line is that if the
| solution doesn't embody a reliable way to address the problems it
| enables then an external entity will attempt to do it, along with
| whatever extra agenda it represents.
|
| You can't solve for freedom alone.
| threevox wrote:
| > I have a mirror of cheapskatesguide.org on ZeroNet at
| https://127.0.0.1:43110/1CpqvBQWSzZSmnSZ58eVRA9Gjem6GdQkfw
|
| Am I missing something, or is this guy trying to get people to
| visit his localhost?
| neilalexander wrote:
| You're missing something. You would need to be running the
| ZeroNet daemon on your own machine (presumably on the same
| port, if it's not the default) for that link to work.
| sverhagen wrote:
| That's apparently ohw ZeroNet works, from Wikipedia:
|
| > Sites can be accessed through an ordinary web browser when
| using the ZeroNet application, which acts as a local webhost
| for such pages.
| unicornporn wrote:
| After ZeroNet is installed on your computer and you have it
| running on port 43110 you can visit his site using that link.
| jpochtar wrote:
| General Purpose Computing is and ought to be an app on a user
| friendly internet device. An important app, but one of many.
|
| The fact that the internet device is actually a special-purpose
| simulator running on general-purpose hardware is an
| implementation detail. Even most programmers want to do other
| activities on their devices, like check their email. This should
| be co-equal with programming; anything you do in your coding
| environment shouldn't break your ability to get email.
|
| Is general-purpose-computing-as-an-app dying? No: repl.it for
| kids/consumers is great, there's an explosion of nocode/locode
| for consumers/businesses; and free tiers of the public clouds are
| available if you really really want to muck with linux.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _Apple has gone in the direction of net appliances_
|
| I agree that, with "Apple Silicon", they have left behind
| anything that could reasonably be traced back to the "openness"
| of old desktop computers.
|
| New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you
| only get to do what Apple lets you do. As the Star Wars quote
| goes, _" Pray I do not alter [the deal] further"_.
|
| Sure, some people have managed to boot Linux on the ARM cores of
| the M1, but it's about as useful as pitching a tent in a corner
| of a stadium and declaring it useable housing. There is so much
| on the SoC that's closed and out of reach that I can only see the
| effort as misguided.
| ttt0 wrote:
| What Apple is doing with their hardware trumps anything that
| Microsoft or Google does with the software, in my opinion. With
| software at least it's more or less possible to hack it to your
| liking or replace it with something else. Thankfully I never
| had the displeasure of owning any of Apple products and
| hopefully I never will.
| glial wrote:
| I don't understand the vitriol towards Apple. They are selling
| a closed (eco)system, definitely. But many people have lived
| through the virus-ridden 90s and early 2000s and _want_ the
| confidence that comes with pre-approved software. Who over the
| age of 30 doesn 't remember doing tech support on crappy
| Windows computers for family for years? Is that still needed
| for those family members with Apple computers? Not in my
| experience.
|
| I also want the ability to choose and use an open computer -
| and I can still do so. I have both Apple and non-Apple devices.
| Apple hasn't destroyed my ability to build a Linux box. Chill.
| hugi wrote:
| I find this attitude a bit misguided. There's never been as
| much availability in open computing as there is today. These
| are good times. A Raspberry pi running linux is miles and
| planets above what I could have imagined when I was a kid. And
| people somehow still pick an appliance explicitly designed to
| be closed (for a good reason) as an example of something. I
| don't get it.
| lxgr wrote:
| 100% agreed. I had a Palm OS PDA back when I was young, and
| while there was a healthy community of app developers, most
| of that was shareware, and the OS was pretty closed down. The
| IDE to develop for it was prohibitively expensive for me as a
| high school student.
|
| Today, I can run full Linux distributions on both iOS and
| Android, interface with USB and Bluetooth devices via open
| APIs on Android, get a Raspberry Pi for less than the price
| of a full-price video game...
|
| I'm certain that there are high school students out there
| doing just that and much more that I'm not even aware is
| possible. Many of them are sharing their progress on YouTube.
|
| There's many things I worry about - the accessibility of
| computing and hacking is definitely not one of them.
| lxgr wrote:
| That's what I've heard about UEFI, TPM and Windows Vista too,
| yet people are happily building their own PCs and merrily
| running all kinds of software and operating systems on them.
| Others are buying heavily locked down iDevices [1] and are
| happy with them too. '
|
| People that want openness and the freedom to tinker with their
| own devices will always find a way to do so, moving away from
| systems that inhibit their efforts (or just breaking them open,
| getting people interested in reverse engineering, an invaluable
| skill even as an open source developer). Others that don't care
| will continue to not care and buy the system that best fits
| their needs.
|
| I think it's almost an egocentric worldview to demand that
| everybody use an open system even if they have no desire to
| make use of that openness whatsoever at best, and see it as a
| security/complexity risk at worst.
|
| [1] By the way, both iOS and Android can run a full Linux
| userspace today!
| federona wrote:
| The only problem is that from a political perspective you
| have given away all of your power for convenience which is
| not a problem in say a country like the US until someone
| comes into power who does not like you or the people you
| associate with. So yes as long as things are going well
| security is better taken care of, etc. but when things are
| not going well for you then all your bases belong to them...
| like imagine China for instance. So if you had the foresight
| to build you own bases and your political system goes to
| shit, you still have the right to carry on with your life
| whereas in other cases you could be sent off to some place
| you rather not be sent off to and your life destroyed because
| the political system and/or company does not like you. And
| such change is swift, damaging, and isolating as the majority
| will usually fall in line or not have done anything enough to
| warrant any attention -- i.e. like as in your average Chinese
| citizen... but a minority will have and then will be
| persecuted and have their lives destroyed as a result.
| rektide wrote:
| apple didn't put up huge insurmountable barriers on m1.
| microsoft's secure boot mandates certain keys be shipped on
| devices but also requires users be able to add their own keys.
|
| thus far it's been phones where users have no rights to their
| devices g no access to bootloaders. if you do jailbreak or
| root, on Android SafetyNet comes & slaps you in the face,
| disables a bunch of apps. I think apple has some similar
| restraint?
|
| I think you'll be shocked how much use folks make of these
| systems, with reverse engineering, even with no support. if the
| door is left open people do amazing things. the gpu should be
| working very well. some problems spots may remain. but running
| a system, watching it tick, carefully, reveals so many secrets.
| it's only when humanity is locked out, when the process of
| human discovery & collective advancement are blocked, that our
| great human potential is squandered, wasted.
| rgovostes wrote:
| > New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and
| you only get to do what Apple lets you do.
|
| This easily-debunked claim is repeated daily on HN. Obviously,
| macOS is a less malleable platform than some others. But the
| introduction of Apple Silicon did not radically change the
| extent to which the platform is "locked down." You can still
| boot alternative operating systems, disable system protections,
| and compile and run your own code (even the kernel!).
| turminal wrote:
| Can we be confident things are going to remain like that in
| the future with newer hardware?
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the consumer industry trend will be to follow
| Apple. I see little hope for competitive open computing
| devices. Ever since the Nokia N900, openness has consistently
| lost in the market against faster, slicker, more integrated
| competitors.
|
| Only in those markets where computing is a fungible commodity,
| i.e. servers, is the flexibility of openness any benefit, and
| even there it loses some autonomy to black-box "management
| engines". While these are still the most plausible vehicle for
| open computing, I only see them as appealing to a niche of
| amateurs buying cheaper refurbished machines.
|
| Some may tout stuff like the RasPi as a viable alternative.
| Sure, but with the understanding that the RasPi is a CPU riding
| along a beefy VideoCodec/GPU, which has taken years of
| (ongoing) effort to implement open drivers for, and the RasPi4
| still remains 2x slower than my 15 year old laptop.
|
| In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open
| computing.
| est31 wrote:
| I don't think much is changing when it comes to gaming PCs.
| They have been extremely modular and I see no trend for them
| to change. But when it comes to anything of mobile form
| factors, like laptops, I agree with you. Less and less
| ability to change and replace parts.
| pdimitar wrote:
| But then again the gaming PCs are full of malware -- most
| game launchers can be very easily called that. Not to
| mention that part of them have been caught to install
| rootkits, or the more modest ones just don't allow the game
| to be started if you have Process Explorer running (they
| claim it's for preventing game cheats -- which doesn't work
| anyway).
|
| So while I have a gaming PC myself, I have long ago removed
| anything personally sensitive from it. I can't view it as a
| platform for open computing by any means.
| est31 wrote:
| I agree with you about the software part, but I mostly
| meant the hardware. What I meant by gaming PCs was that
| there is a market of modular computers, mainly but not
| exclusively serving gamers. You can still build your own
| computer from parts you ordered on the internet. You
| don't have to put Win 10 with a bunch of games on it. You
| can install GNU/Linux. I have done precisely that.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The _consumer industry_. And I think it is to be expected,
| and frankly, not a bad thing.
|
| For example, I am not a car guy, so I just want my car to get
| me where I want to. I much prefer an engine I can't access
| that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but
| requires maintenance on my part. And I understand that people
| feel the same with computers.
|
| But Macbook Pros are not supposed to be consumer products! It
| is called "pro", that should be for a reason. People work on
| these machines, there are developers, sysadmins, etc... You
| can almost consider it a dev kit for the entire Apple
| ecosystem. That's why I am a bit concerned. The "consumer
| product" trend is starting to overstep its borders.
| bscphil wrote:
| > I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs
| over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance
| on my part.
|
| Sure, but the right comparison is between an engine that
| you can access and might sometimes require work on your
| part (or you can hire someone else to do it) and an engine
| you can't access, and in fact is so locked down that no one
| not approved by the manufacturer can access it, so when you
| encounter any problem you have to take it back to the
| manufacturer, who (it turns out) almost always says the
| only solution is a total replacement of the engine.
| greedo wrote:
| Pro has been and is just a marketing term for Apple.
| federona wrote:
| The meta problem is that hackers love to contribute to stuff
| just for the challenge. They don't have a consolidated
| philosophy to make things and a mega corporation that put out
| products that the public buys. You basically need a Linux
| foundation that competes and fights with Microsoft and Apple
| but instead you have Google co-opting open source stuff to make
| a viable competitor and closing things down even further, where
| pretty much everything happens on their servers. It seems that
| democracy and openness in that sense always creates value that
| it can't capture but is instead captured by Capitalists with
| deep pockets. The value created by open source can't be used to
| forward the open source or user centric philosophy.
|
| How could it? Well you need the same level of zealotry and
| fundamentalism that Steve Jobs inspired in Mac users and then
| deliver products that capture that Zeal. Where you could not
| pry me away from a Mac for a decade until Windows created WSL 2
| so is now bareable as a daily driver. Before that it was a
| decade of Linux, which was as good and useful as a Mac... just
| never bundled, marketed, all the quirks worked out, so it could
| be sold properly. What made Macs replacement for Linux was the
| community which made tools like Brew which would make it
| possible to install all the goodies you need for development.
| It seems all the software still gets developed by open source,
| and all the value is captured by Capitalists.
|
| As Theil pointed out you need a monopoly, competition
| distributes which is not good for someone looking to maximize
| capital. But at the same time necessary for society, for what
| good is society without distribution. It seems he's basically
| advocating for working against society and everyone with money
| is like yes we need more of that.
| zokier wrote:
| The problem is that most people don't seem to want do any
| computing, general purpose or not. They want 21th century version
| of telephone and cable tv, computing behind the scenes is
| incidental and implementation detail.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think I have whiplash from the transition from starting by
| framing big tech companies as the villains, and then proposing
| the way to fight back is to buy lots of general purpose computers
| from ... big tech companies.
|
| Sure, support the companies that produce products you think
| should exist in the world. But that doesn't make you some kind of
| warrior, it just makes you one type of discriminating consumer.
| Giving them money is not exactly combat.
|
| I think the "right to repair" movement is an interesting avenue,
| which has had some meaningful successes which obligate companies
| to share enough information to allow users to wrest back some
| control of what they actually own, and interact meaningfully with
| the guts. What if we pulled lots of stops to lobby for this from
| multiple angles, and emphasize that if a company stops providing
| security updates to original software, "repairing" means
| providing an ability to use new software which isn't abandoned?
| theamk wrote:
| Does this war exists in the real life? Is there any evidence that
| "the lords of technology and their masters" are making any moves
| against IPFS and general computing?
|
| Because I see the opposite. For example Sony, one of the most
| proprietary companies, is now releasing source code and
| bootloader unlocker [0]. Could you imagine this 10 years ago?
|
| [0] https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Unlocking the bootloader on your phone will make the phone fail
| the security check required for online banking and other apps.
| Therefore, it is not something that the general public can
| really take advantage of. It is great that Sony provides
| unlocking, but it will remain the purview of a small community
| of nerds like us, and it does nothing to improve accessibility
| to general computing for the masses.
| fsflover wrote:
| Ues, it's happening. For instance, Apple is attacking general-
| purpose computing consciously: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/
| JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG....
| theamk wrote:
| I don't see anything about general computing there, am I
| missing something?
|
| Apple still makes macbooks, and those have documented and
| well supported methods to disable all protections so that
| user code can be loaded.
|
| If you are trying to say that iPhone should be a general-
| purpose computer, then I am going to ask: "why?". There are
| different devices for different purposes. The phone does not
| need to be general purpose, and back in the day my Nokia had
| no software customizeability at all. And if you want a phone
| which can run arbitrary software, there are plenty of
| unlockable Android headsets on the market.
|
| It is like saying "Ford is attacking fuel-efficient cars"
| because they are making F-150 truck.
| justicezyx wrote:
| I am not sure the authors did a careful study of the computing
| history.
|
| Computing as a way of human activity has always been evolving in
| the direction that the core platform technology moves up in the
| abstraction stack:
|
| * We first invented the abstraction concepts with close tie to
| physical items. I.e., people are counting their possessions in
| the literal mass. Or very basic abstract concept: using ropes for
| numbering. As a form of computing, it can only record limited
| information, and perform very little computing (addition
| subtraction).
|
| * Then fully fledged abstract concepts in human languages, which
| enables human mind as the major computing platform, plus various
| physical aids (papers, pens, etc.)
|
| * Then there are actual machines that perform certain computation
| with very limited scope. Mechanical computer etc.
|
| * Till the modern era we started the electronic computing. Then
| we have a primary device that can take over the computing task
| with minimal human involvement. Even just inside this era, the
| progressing has a long history that does not simply reduce to
| "general computing".
|
| The modern day computing platform is not CPU. It's the web. With
| CPU you cannot do much useful thing. It's with github, linux, and
| etc. that one can start quickly perform computing. This platform
| itself does not lend CPU much credits of being more important
| than any other components.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_rope [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware#...
| antattack wrote:
| I have to sound like a fatalist but today's software resembles
| yesterday's malware. It does not matter if you're running a
| general purpose computer if you have no control over 'your'
| applications or even OS (Windows 10).
|
| In addition, new privacy features such as HSTS and DNS over
| https, ESNI, etc degrade what control you had even further
| stopping you from even knowing what data gets out of your network
| and when.
| lxgr wrote:
| > In addition, new privacy features such as HSTS and DNS over
| https, ESNI, etc degrade what control you had even further
| stopping you from even knowing what data gets out of your
| network and when.
|
| Inspecting these, on a machine you control, is still 100%
| possible - I do it all the time.
|
| Are you proposing we should go back to plain HTTP and DNS just
| to make tinkering easier? I'd argue that that would come at the
| expense of the vast majority of users.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| How do you know what you're inspecting is actually what is
| contained inside the request?
| [deleted]
| freeaswartz wrote:
| They have already won it is over. Op's post is 30 years too late.
| Please press F.
|
| "First it came for my shopping habits, and I did nothing because
| I didn't care. Then it came for my location data, and I did
| nothing because I didn't care. Then it came for my thoughts, and
| I did nothing because I didn't care. Then it came for my juices,
| and it knew exactly where I kept them."
| lxgr wrote:
| I'd argue that computing has never been more accessible than it
| is today.
|
| A Raspberry Pi costs less than an HDMI dongle for an iPad these
| days and there is more free educational material available on the
| web than ever before.
|
| When I went to high school and started becoming interested in
| programming, I was using Windows XP on my general-purpose PC back
| home, as were all my classmates - yet only two out of more than
| 20 ended up going into tech.
|
| I think articles like this commonly make the mistake of
| romanticizing the author's personal way of getting into tech and
| thinking it's the only way possible for others as well.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Even the Raspberry pi has a few areas of concern with propriety
| firmware and closed codecs. It is not a completely open
| hardware platform, it does run code that no eyes can see.
| oytis wrote:
| Go Beaglebone then. The SBC market is enormous these days.
| rektide wrote:
| yes but: the % of computing that people do that can be engaged
| in, explored, enhanced, modified continues to drop. most
| computing happens in far far away data centers, happens in
| invisible far off processes that society can not see or
| understand or learn about or tinker with. most computing done
| is now special purpose, and its purpose is alien & it's
| presence is saturating, utterly surrounding us.
|
| that we have some freedom for low cost on our tiny little free
| computing reservation does little. there is a full on society,
| a massive world of computing about, that we get to know nothing
| of, but if we want to set ourselves free & try things & explore
| we must utterly renounce the world about us & head off, like
| the elves of middle earth, cross the seas & leave the world
| behind.
|
| society is becoming ever more blind to what computing is. thank
| you cheap single-board-compyters for providing some
| homesteading experience. but the megalopolises of computing
| being all effectively alien artifice, impervious to science,
| too far away to learn about, secured against us: this is a real
| & genuine horror, something no technical advance has ever
| corrupted society with before. we have always been free to
| observe & learn but now we are denied at the firewall.
| knowledge burns.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I cant even get through a few sentences of this bullshit. They
| lost me on how Microsoft Apple and Google are blind followers of
| money
| theurbandragon wrote:
| What say we bow to our overlords and hope they be benevolent?
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _listen to music and watch movies_
|
| I guess that's what they call "computing" now... Anyway, does my
| using of a GPC as an HTPC count? (Still, you can take my iPad
| from my dead, cold hands!)
| hertzrat wrote:
| If the goal is to encourage the general public to use general
| purpose computers, then I suggest the community try to temp some
| good UX designers to take part in foss projects. I suspect they
| many UX people are not extremely informed about foss and it would
| benefit the community a lot to have a reputation for programs
| with great workflows
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I used to work as a front-end dev. The biggest issue facing
| good OSS UI is the fact that everyone throws their support
| behind Qt. Consumer OSS, and especially the Linux Desktop, will
| not take off until the community make the tough decision to
| first starve, then excise this God-awful cancer of a framework.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Can you extrapolate on why you think Qt is a "God-awful
| cancer"? I've never used it as a developer, so I'm curious.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| From the 2.0 version on, GNOME based many of their UI changes
| on research studies of what ordinary computer users want,
| chasing after the corporate desktop and tablet markets. The
| result was something that alienated many techies, but failed to
| see much mass-market adoption.
|
| I don't think the problem is UI. I think the problem nowadays
| is that many people are so used to an Android phone (with
| Google Play Services and all apps sourced through the Play
| store) or iPhone that they are increasingly forgetting that
| ordinary computers exist at all.
| Funes- wrote:
| Your argument reads like a fallacy (over-generalization):
| "UI/UX modifications were carried out on a single project
| with terrible results, so _all_ UI /UX changes must be
| useless on _any other_ project ".
|
| Look at it this way (taking a decentralized network as an
| example): either one of I2P's two most used implementations
| (Java & C++) would _greatly_ benefit from adding an
| informative configuration wizard to set speed limits,
| enabling or disabling features, help set up UPnP or manually
| forward ports, etcetera. Such a small addition would make
| wonders for adoption. UX improvements cannot be ruled out,
| especially not that hastily.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Ironically, setting up UPnP or manually forwarding ports is
| hard in some countries today because the ISP insists you
| use their broadband router, and it runs a locked-down
| firmware where those settings are not available to end
| users (unless customers upgrade to their more expensive
| business plan). So, another example where it is the
| ecosystem that is biased against general-purpose computing
| - or at least general-purpose networking - and UI tweaks
| can't change that.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| I fell into this, and it was easy.
|
| My laptop and desktop broke around the same time. I had an
| iPad Pro for work and next thing I knew I was just living in
| iOS. I did this for a few years before finally pushing back
| into desktop Linux during COVID lockdowns.
|
| There's a lot of reasons behind why it's so easy to become
| used to living in the mobile ecosystems but for me it was
| very much about form factor. It's just so much easier to
| carry around a slim tablet with amazing battery life and
| software that "just works" when you live a very on-the-go
| life.
|
| Projects like PinePhone give me hope that one day we can have
| general purpose computers in the form factors that made
| Android and iOS so popular to begin with. Obviously, this is
| a software and hardware problem, it's just that the world
| moved on to more and more mobile devices and FOSS stuck to
| less portable hardware.
| jxy wrote:
| THIS!
|
| It's the ecosystem. Niche phone OS is not going to dominate
| the market until they have a competing app store that as good
| as Android's or iOS's. People uses Adobe will forever bounded
| by whatever OS Adobe truly supports. People uses MS Office
| will forever bounded by whatever OS MS Office truly supports.
|
| Nobody really cares about UI. Everybody hates new UI. Once
| you are settled in the local comfort zone of the app that you
| use the most, nothing else would replace it unless that app
| goes out of support.
| doteka wrote:
| You are talking about UI though. UI is not UX. The last time
| I was forced to use a Linux desktop environment for work, the
| resolution that I needed it to run on was not supported. It
| took me 10 minutes of googling to find the arcane invocations
| to perform this simple task. The UI looking really pretty did
| nothing to improve the situation.
|
| Normal people outside of tech just want their problem solved.
| They couldn't care less about some theoretical software
| freedoms. For them, freedom is being able to accomplish work
| without fiddling, close their laptop and have a beer. And I
| think this is fundamentally incompatible with what FOSS
| advocates are trying to accomplish, which is why we will
| never see the year of the Linux desktop.
|
| Put another way: computers are just tools. The less fiddling
| my tools take, the better. I don't want the freedom to modify
| my hammer, I just care about how easy it is to drive nails
| with.
| neolog wrote:
| OP said UX, not UI.
| vkou wrote:
| UX people are quite informed about FOSS, but it seems that FOSS
| is not extremely informed about how important UX is.
| vetinari wrote:
| UX and FOSS are orthogonal issues; there are both FOSS apps
| with good and bad UX, and so are there proprietary apps with
| the same.
|
| See for example the recent discussion about City bank and
| their expensive mistake involving UX.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is the big problem. OSS advocates have been pushing
| software that is both open and completely terrible. It's no
| surprise that the public doesn't care.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| As far as end user devices go, it's a mature industry now. Once a
| certain level of functionality has been achieved, the devices
| become more polished but also more locked down. Happened to
| things like cars, stereos and others before. I bet full self
| driving cars will be completely sealed and no tinkering or self
| repair possible. They will be as or less repairable as an iPad.
|
| Developer machines will probably soon be viewed as specialized
| devices that most normal users will not even know how to use.
|
| This is mostly ok. Most end users don't want or need general
| computing.
| fsflover wrote:
| Some companies fight on the side of users in this war:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881988.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| This problem is real and important. My uncle who is a lawyer knew
| how to use dBase IV in the 80s. Nowadays young people, even
| university graduates, struggle to use a mouse. Scrolling is the
| pinnacle of competence it seems.
|
| We need people going back to buying PC. Thanks to corona, they do
| now. We should focus on those rich-capability apps and software
| evan_ wrote:
| Does using a mouse have something to do with general purpose
| computing? Does a spreadsheet program?
|
| You should ask your uncle (who's a Lawyer by the way) if he was
| using a mouse to work with dBase IV.
| afavour wrote:
| > Nowadays young people, even university graduates, struggle to
| use a mouse
|
| I'm sorry, I laughed out loud at this. What are you talking
| about?!
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