Every day I feel like a passive spectator watching the industry move in a direction that is worrying: more telemetry, harsh rules about binary signing that hurt small developers, difficulty of accessing one's own system with full privileges, online accounts required everywhere, pushes to do away with traditional "general-purpose computers" in favor of restricted devices oriented around consumption.
I know that this post is peak HackerNews hipsterism/"old man yells at cloud," so I want to try to make it constructive: what can be done, at this point? What is the strategic move, beyond something like going with Linux or BSD for personal use? Is it too late and we've entered "hope for the best" territory?
Edit: To clarify, I do already use Linux, which wasn't clear from my initial wording. It's just that I worry it isn't "enough."
Being a Windows or macOS user starts to feel a bit like living in a Cold War Eastern Bloc country, doesn't it? The government knows what's best for you, now be a good citizen and don't make such a fuzz about it, if we all follow the great vision of the Party the future will be glorious, promised!
The big difference is, if you make a fuzz, Apple or Microsoft won't send the secret police after you (not yet anyway), so I guess the only option left is organized outrage on social media (or flee the country to an uncertain future in the "Free West").
Have you noticed the curious absence of independent commercial database or cloud platform benchmarks? If you publicly post benchmarks of most commercial database products or public cloud services, you'll get a scary letter from some expensive lawyers threatening to end your career, bankrupt you, and ruin your life.
They're not secret police because they're not secret, and they're not police. But in the same way, even if you broke no laws, they will punish you all the same. Small people punishing other small people for angering their "betters".
"Benchmarking. Customer may conduct benchmark tests of the Services (each a "Test"). Customer may only publicly disclose the results of such Tests if it (a) obtains Google's prior written consent, (b) provides Google all necessary information to replicate the Tests, and (c) allows Google to conduct benchmark tests of Customer's publicly available products or services and publicly disclose the results of such tests."
It would seem this should be easy to work around. Simply assign the worst possible benchmark value since test cannot be conducted and make annotation as to why. Infinite time to run a query since benchmarking requires sneakernet approval from commercial provider, or some such.
Put open source in the best possible light and highlight the DeWitt clause at the same time.
Are you suggesting that if you post a performance benchmark about a commercial database that you’ll get threatened with legal action? Do you have anything to back that up? It sounds far fetched, and a cursory search finds many such benchmarks on random people’s blogs.
"e.Benchmark Testing. You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of either the Server Software or Client Software to any third party without Microsoft’s prior written approval."
Hasty addition: I doubt random benchmarks would be threatened with legal action -- but the key is you are technically breaking your license agreement by posting a benchmark. I'm sure the likelihood of whatever DB company pursuing action depends on both the company, who you are, and in what avenue you posted your benchmark.
If you're well known, have a large audience, and publish a bad benchmark of Oracle DB, I would be very surprised if Oracle didn't contact you directly and demand some action.
They’d be hard-pressed to make that case in Germany (or the EU actually, as they took our laws in that regard), the EULA has to follow the pretty strict regulations for AGBs which also can’t contain surprising clauses.
Doesn't matter if that doesn't hold in court. The whole problem is that loosing in court has no cost for them, but just going to court is a net loss for you.
Again, doesn't matter. Ruling takes years. If you take $40k from me to give them back to me 7 years later, I'm still screwed. Not to mention time, energy, stress, uncertainty, and the lost of opportunity.
It's all cost for me, none for them, just to make them behave decently in the first place.
I believe that most of that clauses are there for tit for tat reasons. Someone (Oracle?) was the first to do one--and then they published comparative benchmarks showing that their product was better than the competitors.
The competitors could not respond with counter comparisons due to the first company's license, and so instead they added their own prohibitions to stop the first company.
Some of them just adopted the same blanket prohibition, but some were more subtle, going for reciprocity rather than prohibition--you could not publish benchmarks comparing their product to others unless you could grant or obtain for them permission to also publish benchmarks doing the same comparison. Some also required that you publish complete details of your testing so that it could be reproduced.
I don't know if anyone still uses the reciprocity approach. I'd expect that there would be plenty of loopholes that someone (Oracle?) could use to get around it that any big player using it would have given up and went for a straight prohibition.
> I believe that most of that clauses are there for tit for tat reasons. Someone (Oracle?) was the first to do one--and then they published comparative benchmarks showing that their product was better than the competitors.
Actually there is a good story behind it. See: "Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle" [0] and the related HN discussion. [1]
Speeding is illegal but people do it all the time. Small time blogs posting a few numbers might not rise to the attention of the big dogs, but their license terms are clear and Oracle for sure has threatened action in the past.
You forgot the part that owning a system running anything else makes you dissident, worthy to be invited to a private "talk" with the security state police.
macOS is nowhere near as bad as Windows. You can still use it without an Apple account, and there are no ads/spyware (unless you really want to pick straws) even if you do use an Apple account.
That's not true. Apple devices maintain 24/7 persistent connections back to Apple with client certificates based on the unchangeable hardware serial number. Apple knows (or can know) the approximate location of every modern Apple device.
Also it has a mesh network of devices (see airtag), which makes it even more intrusive: you can be offline, but if you use your BT headphones, they can get to you. They say they protect your privacy but I never forget they were part of PRISM, so their words are worth nothing.
That's not the worst part. MacOS monitors every time you run an executable, which executable, when and where, and it shares this with unencrypted traffic. Not only that, but the data is collected as part of PRISM, so there is no court order to get it. https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
It's not "collected as part of PRISM" any more than any other thing is.
PRISM is an internal codename for (not bulk! specific!) downloading of data direct from FAANG et al servers under FISA Amendments Act section 702. It's warrantless but is not bulk/mass surveillance. (Also, it technically is a "court order" as there is a secret rubber stamp "FISA court", but it doesn't require a warrant or probable cause, or allow for review/appeal because it's proceedings are classified.)
Theoretically it's not supposed to be used against US citizens but Snowden has claimed that a secret interpretation in a secret court has decided that it can be.
They use it a ton, though, as it's the #1 most used source in the US IC. Apple turns over more than 30k user accounts of data under warrantless FISA orders each year, per their own transparency report.
That said, Apple has (in response to my blog post you linked) committed to a) encrypting that OCSP traffic in the next macOS, and b) deleting all of their stored logs.
That wouldn't have stopped the IC from monitoring all of that previous unencrypted traffic and logging it themselves, though, but that has nothing to do with PRISM/FISA. That's bulk collection, which is a different thing than PRISM.
Oh, it's also worth mentioning that even if you don't use the App Store, iCloud, or an Apple ID, you cannot opt out or disable these push connections. You have to filter them at the network level if you don't want a mac, iPhone, or iPad to phone home.
It might be time to accept that the general public does not need "general-purpose computers". We're at a fork in the road, and both paradigms of computing are here to stay. It's up to us to make sure our branch of the fork is great at what it does, not fight the one that's backed by the giants. It's
not all grim, there are some wins for consumers, not the least of which is security and user friendlyness.
There is strength in numbers. If most people stop using general purpose computers, those will stop being available except for people with special licenses. When arguments are made about general purpose computing being dangerous, the argument that a tiny minority of nerds like them won't win much support.
The general public doesn't understand the difference, but what they do understand is that an unmanaged open computer gets malware while a locked-down machine is much less likely to. This translates to: locked-down machines are more reliable and thus better.
We have to make general purpose computers secure or they die out except for servers and hobbyists.
Every time we try, communities such as HN share around ways to disable the security features for their own simple convenience or preference. Thus, a correction:
We have to make GP computer users accept the inconvenience of security, or GP computers will die out.
I don’t think that’s a viable plan.
I’ve seen countless HN and HN-alike folks talk about how they hold the root ssh keys to their kingdoms on a Mac that they’ve disabled SIP on, simply because it inconvenienced them one time (and not for genuine technological necessity).
If you can think of a way to change our collective minds, you have my support, but I’ve tried everything I know and essentially given up talking about such things on HN anymore. Everyone who understands is already doing the right things; everyone that isn’t talks as loudly as possible about their way of doing it, and swarm to shut down any suggestion that they should burden themselves with security.
Indeed, it is not all bad at all. Ecosystems are so well integrated that as a consumer it really makes sense to just pick one and try to stay within the realm of what works out of the box. While advanced users are able to "mix and match" and get deeper into how certain tools work or how to replace them, that's not a task for the usual consumer.
The future might be going towards affordable jailed devices to the general public, and expensive general-purpose devices for specialists. Definitely most people just want consumption devices.
There are many people that wants child rapists to get death penalty, a lot of people liked Bush, Trump or Putin, or believe some guy living 2000 years ago did wonderful things against the laws of physics. They are not really thinking about the consequences on society, they don't know how a computer work and what is going to happen if behemoths get in control of their entire life, which is well on its way.
Because a computer is not your regular run off the mill appliance. It drives the way people communicate, think, consume, are informed and monitored.
You're not alone. My disillusionment with what computing has become is reaching the point of me considering a career change, preferably one with as little computer interaction as possible. But that means going back to school.
When even Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi jump on the bandwagon of "oh, we changed your configuration behind your back whether you like it or not," it's hard for me to have hope for the future. But Windows 11 is beyond the pale. As it is, I've already skipped Windows 8 and 10, and 11 is an even harder pass.
It probably is time. This civilization is on the verge of being the next Atlantis. Materialism is thoroughly penetrated all aspects of our lives and we've become wholly dependent on electrification which can be completed knocked out with a kerrington event at any time and it will be all gone, no quick recovery possible.
I'm on Ubuntu and feeling similarly. OpenBSD is looking more and more intriguing, but the further one pushes off in that direction, the more challenging hardware compatibility and access to important applications become -- or at least, that's my perception so far from the outside.
Ubuntu: the appearance of ubuntu-advantage-tools, or moving Chromium to a snap.
Raspberry Pi: the addition of a Microsoft apt repository without so much as asking.
To me this is a problem of user effort. Free open source software is not advertised as aggressively as paid versions so you have to go out and find it rather than it coming to you. There is still a preconception that paid software is somehow better than free open source software despite the abundant evidence to counter it. If you are scared of Linux then don't be. Something like Linux Mint is closer to Windows 7 (the last UI friendly version of Windows IMO) than Windows 10 and 11. Wine (for running Windows programs on Linux) is so good these days you can sometimes even play graphics intensive games using it.
There are more options than ever before to avoid corporate lock-in nowadays. It just doesn't come to you - you have to go to it.
What's the best Linux laptop option these days? Are there any with decent build quality, solidness, aesthetics, and reliability compared to recent Macs?
Also how's hardware support? Last time I used Linux on a desktop, admittedly a few years ago, I still had to futz around with wireless and video drivers routinely.
I use a little Intel Nuc which fits in my pocket and set up screens at home and at work and just plug it into a cheap hub on either end. That way I get the equivalent power of a $2k laptop without the noise, upgrade restrictions and sore neck peering down at a small laptop screen.
BUT, if you want to use a laptop then I believe the System76 or Dell XPS line of laptops (just be careful about the nostril camera models) are quite Linux friendly.
Edit: My main PC has an nvidia graphics card (GeForce GTX 1070) and I admittedly had to use the proprietary Nvidia drivers instead of the FOSS equivalent for better performance. Like you I had to fuss around a little to find a version that did not crash my system (I settled on nvidia-driver-460 for Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon kernel 5.4). I probably wouldn't go for Nvidia next time and do my homework before buying graphics hardware. But I can play Windows games using Wine and it uses the graphics card which was surprising for me! For anything else like wireless stuff I find that most hardware just works out of the box. I usually just look for the word "linux" somewhere in the description and then I know that it will work. And you usually don't have to install drivers for stuff like wireless cards / dongles, bluetooth, keyboards, and mice. It just works in my recent experience.
Since 2016-ish, I've been using the Dell XPS 13 "Developer Edition" (3 models so far), and they're consistently decent machines.
I still have a Linux workstation for big tasks, but XPS has been good enough to wean me off Macs ever since they introduced the touch bar, which was a hard pass for me.
Caveat:
I had to swap the radio in the first one due to driver issues, and I continue to experience occasional issues with Bluetooth, suspend and graphics rendering.
It's not all roses, but the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages (for me at least).
I've changed my personal laptop to Linux, and my development platform from desktop/PC to html5/web. I think (hope?) there's too much momentum with the free web for the same tricks to happen there.
The problem is most people are on mobile now. And Apple have crippled the web on iOS cus they want everyone going through the app store. So web stuff will be janky / broken on a decent sized cohort of the populations devices.
ps.
Also, forget about iOS. Half the websites I try to use nowadays dont even work on Firefox on desktop and I need to use a chromium browser to get them to work.
> Half the websites I try to use nowadays dont even work on Firefox on desktop
I assume half is hyperbole, but even then, I can’t remember a single site (besides some experimental demos) that doesn’t work for me. What do you do that you encounter so many?
I had some issues loading pages on Firefox (mostly Togo order sites). Firefox is my primary browser.
Turned out it was ulock-origin. Disabling it for those sites made the sites work. I’m not entirely sure exactly what JavaScript package was being blocked but try that .
"Half the websites I try to use nowadays dont even work on Firefox on desktop and I need to use a chromium browser to get them to work."
Are you sure they don't work because some parts are axed by an adblocker? I use only Firefox without any issues, except a few cases in which turning off or reconfiguring the usual adblockers does the job. And I keep uMatrix on, which blocks a lot of stuff by default.
I have had about 2 or 3 internal websites only work on a combination of Chrome, Edge or IE at my jobs. They all sucked and were very important, like time reports or data processing.
I guess the open web is a bit better in this regard?
Recent stuff. google play console (cant upload a build, keeps failing), App store connect(input fields are fucked) Ironsource (cant login or reset password). Ive had issues in the past few days on those that required me to switch to chromium to get my work done.
Use GIMP, they are not
that far behind in functionality. Image magick and FFMPEG are great for batch processing.
I never personally met anyone installing a non cracked version of photoshop in windows.
But if you definitely need photoshop (case: you are a real comercial designer/photographer)is best to get a Mac, you can get 5 years out of it if you tweak it a bit. I just find mac is going the wrong way just to make more money and that is the world we live in!
I believe the parent comment is referring to user freedom, not really user privacy. Freedom isn't Signal's strong suit (e.g. strict stance on third party clients and incorporating bloat into their application like MobiCoin), something with federation like Matrix might be a better option.
>beyond something like going with Linux or BSD for personal use?
Why is this off the table? This is precisely what you do. The other thing you do is tend your own garden and not worry about what operating system other people use.
Dare I say that MacOS and Windows are no longer for you or I.
With almost all OS updates I find the focus of new features are things that I never use even on my personal machines as a regular user, though I recognize many people do use these features. Computers are appliances for most people. Steve Jobs vision is coming to full fruition. Smart phones just had to show how it could work. And for most people computers are infinitely more usable and less scary today.
With that being said, I do think Windows 11 looks quite nice and there are a lot of little quality of life improvements. Also the removal of the awful tiles in the start menu will save me time from removing each tile one by one, so I can’t be all mad here.
I imagine if you have Windows 10 Pro you can upgrade to 11 Pro for free. I also wonder if the consumer version of Windows 11 just starts becoming truly free because Microsoft knows they will make money on search, subscriptions, and enterprise.
This direction feels too natural to me: there's so much motivation for a corporation to control the consumer that I don't see how any individual solution will enact change as a steeply uphill battle. The whole situation is almost like climate change, where the corporations responsible are too big and too misaligned to change.
If it's not too late to radically alter our economic system to combat climate change (which I certainly hope it isn't) I think we can fix tech by almost extension.
> Every day I feel like a passive spectator watching the industry move in a direction that is worrying ... What is the strategic move, beyond something like going with Linux or BSD for personal use?
The solution is to stop being a passive spectator and to start making proactive decisions. To make proactive decisions, you will need to decide what is important to you since you will never find the perfect solution. (There never was a perfect solution in any domain, only better and worse ones for a particular situation.)
If you've decided that you need Windows, that's fine. You will have to deal with the consequences of that particular decision, but it does not have to dictate every decision that follows. You can still choose applications that don't impose some sort of consumption model, require online accounts, or depend upon telemetry. I don't know what the situation is like for commercial software under Windows (surely there are some vendors who respect privacy), but there are always open source alternatives to consider. Feel free to choose according to your circumstances. If you're a graphics designer who needs Adobe products for your job, but can get away with LibreOffice for administrative tasks, then choose that mixture. Even though your decision won't put any pressure on Adobe, someone else's decision may (e.g. an office worker who uses Office 365 and Inkscape).
The way I see it, there are two big problems with the computer industry today: people don't like to acknowledge competing products that may better serve their needs when there is already a dominant player, and those who are aware of the alternatives are rarely willing to support them. In effect, this problem is partially the making of consumers who have been behaving as passive spectators.
Our error was to assume that the general person had a need for computation, when all they have a need for is information and communication. Sure in the 90's they brought newer faster computers but back then those newer computers were much better, and some people will buy the iPhone Max Pro when they don't need it, because it is the best/biggest and they are buying a status symbol. I am sure some of the upgrades back then where for the same reason.
For information, you can bring your phone with you everywhere but it is hard to do so with a laptop, so a phone wins. Phones are also easy to use for calls/messages and video, where the camera is actually better than anything available on a laptop.
A few people might want to balance their budgets, but it is also pretty easy to do on your phone, as your bank probably has an app that you can use and if not, your phone is plenty fast to do that.
Gamers might be the last who cares about the more powerful computers, but even then dedicated gamer phones exist, so maybe that niche is also slowly aging out as new gamers grew up with phones.
If you want some sort of solution, I think having a really good Linux build that works and which can be deployed on laptops in the moment a person gets too tired of windows is always a solid idea.
The plan is to use technology to make it so you can't own anything anymore.
The tech monopolies want their tithe. That's why you can't buy Photoshop or office anymore.
Soon you won't buy Windows, you will simply rent it forever. One day you won't own your phone or computer either. It's far more profitable to extract rent from your customers indefinitely when you're the only game in town.
The government needs to step in. By a great many metrics were living in another 30's gilded age, robber barons and all.
You are dismissing exactly the strategic move that's within reach.
Windows basically does not exist for home users except a few Western countries, and even there it's just due to inertia.
I've had great success with Ubuntu for non-technical users. For games you get a game console or play something in the browser. For everything else Ubuntu will do just fine.
Same with macOS... Regular folk have no reason to buy macOS. It's pure class signaling at this point.
Of course, there are business tools on each of these OSes, but if you make money with Adobe tools might as well buy the Pro OS.
Windows is particularly prevalent in developing countries actually, outside of tech circles which gravitate more towards MacOS (if it can be afforded) or Linux.
I know that this post is peak HackerNews hipsterism/"old man yells at cloud," so I want to try to make it constructive: what can be done, at this point? What is the strategic move, beyond something like going with Linux or BSD for personal use? Is it too late and we've entered "hope for the best" territory?
Edit: To clarify, I do already use Linux, which wasn't clear from my initial wording. It's just that I worry it isn't "enough."