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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?

Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.

Probably because it's, at least in part, an attack on my core identity - a hacker, computer programmer and free software advocate. But also, because it's one of the most blatant forms of authoritarian oppression: Not being able to do something with my hardware that I know it's capable of drives me furious, because there's no technical reason for it. It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.

Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.

Same. Especially firmware.

It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.

There's also the thing where, if you root an Android phone, suddenly random bank apps and such try to fight back against it. This Reddit thread is very triggering.

So you reviewed with 5 stars previously, now changed to 1 star because they care about users' safety ... hmm, I see, I see.

Their company, their rules. They should be able to do whatever they want with their company.

That argument works both ways.

Edit: I'm just showing that the argument to freedom here works both ways. the same freedom the redditor is arguing form can be used by the company to do whatever they want as well.

Or this Asus forum thread. Specifically, this response from someone actually working there:

No plans for open source that I know of. Other than the complexity of making such a solution possible (there is already a ton of work required), we are also in a market which has fierce competition - one of the few things remaining outside software where vendors get to stamp their uniqueness is via UEFI and the dedicated hardware we use. We would not want to give away any of the special sauce we use to mitigate platform obstacles for others to freely copy or tinker with for example.

The timelines in which this buisiness operates is also unsuitable to support multiple solutions - it does not make sound business sense to do so in many cases and I believe this would be a similar situation.

This makes me wish for terrorism. Sadly no one is going to bomb a mobo manufacturer for these reasons. I just don't understand why it's not all leaked...

"stamp their uniqueness", lol. Maybe that would be convincing if this wasn't utter garbage. Eh

Is it hypocritical to hold this view while also making a comfortable living writing proprietary software :)

I wish there was a way to thread the needle and have decent open source software in more domains. Like you say there's no technical reason why proprietary software couldn't be made more open but I think realistically the users like yourself who could actually do something productive with it are a tiny minority, and most people will just try to get the software to do what they want, give up if it's not important or fork over cash if they absolutely need to. Presenting them with an SDK or source tree will yield anything useful. So there's probably no economic advantage to be found in opening up, and keeping all possible control over software is probably the safest position to be in. The ethical get outcompeted by the cutthroat.

One thing that really gets me in this vein is when hardware I already own gets worse due to forced updates. For example, I own a PS4 (bought it when they came out). And at the beginning, the "video" section of the UI was great. Just a simple list of all video streaming apps you had installed, pick one and go.

At some point, they overhauled the UI to make it advertising-centric. Now, when you go to the video section of the UI, most of the screen is dedicated to ads "helpfully" telling you about some new show you can go watch. You have to go past those to get to a little strip of icons for "featured" apps, so you can just go into whatever app and watch your content. This strip is also a form of advertising, in that it forces the big name apps (whether you even have them installed or not) to be in the list, prioritized over any apps that haven't gotten Sony's favor (probably haven't paid them enough money). It doesn't matter if you don't have Apple TV installed and never used it, it will always be towards the beginning of that list. And because the screen has space permanently taken up by the "featured" apps, it means that some smaller apps you use simply may not have the space to appear. The old style "just show me all the apps I have" listing is still there, but you have to dig through one or two screens of UI to get to it.

To me, it is completely outrageous that Sony would do this. It should arguably be illegal. As a consumer, I try to make informed decisions and only buy products that have a good experience for me, the user. But what am I supposed to do when corporations can ruin a product I bought after the fact? I don't have a way to determine if some mega corp will decide to screw over its users for profits years down the line. This sort of thing robs me of the one power I had in the marketplace, and it really upsets me.

I have a lot of disagreements with Richard Stallman. I think he's an ideological zealot who is too insistent on purity to an ideal that doesn't actually benefit 99% of users, and I think he has an overinflated sense of the importance of his contributions to open source. Nevertheless, when some shit goes down like what Sony pulled with my PS4, I can't help but sigh and go "fuck... Stallman was right."

+1 to this. I had a similar experience with the PS3 when an "update" added anti-piracy software that made my perfectly-working cloud library impossible to use. It didn't disable playback, it just muted the sound and put up a banner every few minutes if it did not detect the CD in the drive. Absolutely enraging.

I remember having a similar reaction when microsoft started slathering ads all over the xbox home screen.

I can't believe my education on this issue started with John Deere.

I think John Deere was the point at which things had gotten so bad that right-to-repair started to gain real mindshare, so don't feel too bad.

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