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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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My personal way of squaring that circle is that I'm open to regulation on mass-produced end-user consumer goods, and a more freedom on anything that requires some deliberate action.

I think this is very reasonable, and these regulations pretty much go after just that. Consumer IoT devices, that are being mass-produced and just thrown onto the internet by the billions. What's worse is that they're making the same handful of mistakes over and over and over and over and over again, even though everyone and their dog knows that they can fix these things (at least the worst problems; not every problem) using even just a small number of best practices. A small number of things that every expert technologist has been screaming, "OH MY GOD PEOPLE JUST DO THIS SHIT WHY WON'T YOU DO THIS SHIT IT'S SO EASY AND WOULD PREVENT SO MANY PROBLEMS!" Things that they don't do because they don't have to. There's no law making them. They're Chinese, but their devices are being sold in the US, so fuck the US anyway. And even if they did do them, it would cost them epsilon amount of money, and they'd never be able to market it as anything to make them more money, besides, all their competitors are just churning them out as cheaply as possible without bothering, and they're not suffering for it.

There are many edge cases, and gattsuru brought up a lot of good cases that may be difficult. Things that might legitimately contribute to a regulation-innovation tradeoff. Most of them still seem kind of minor, so while they might produce some small tradeoffs, I think it's unlikely that they're going to wholesale preclude innovation. There's still going to be plenty of innovation, though there may be some edges that are unfortunately trimmed. Is that worth saving the nightmare of having billions of adversarial objects, likely quickly and easily controlled by the Chinese or Russians, literally everywhere on all our networks? Maybe not. But maybe so?

Is that worth saving the nightmare of having billions of adversarial objects, likely quickly and easily controlled by the Chinese or Russians, literally everywhere on all our networks? Maybe not. But maybe so?

I'm in the curious position of not particularly caring about the Russians running botnets on your vacuum cleaner, but hating IoT with a passion, and being prepared to murder anyone that tries to sell me a toaster that connects to the Internet. What do?

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