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I love Warren but I hope she and others in power make wise distinctions about what's important and where technological monopolies can be reined in by technology

I love Warren but I hope she and others in power make wise distinctions about what's important and where technological monopolies can be reined in by technology and where the market needs help. Subscription music services with interchangeable catalogs are the least of my worries about the direction of technology. Likewise e-books aren't really a market that needed immediate intervention when Apple and the publishers tried to work around Amazon's abuse of their position. Monopolies at the ISP level where literally no competition exists is a major problem. Near permanent copyright monopolies granting extraordinary power for a century or more is a major problem. Patent trolls are a huge problem. Privacy and fairness are major problems. Buggy OS upgrades, popular search engines, and built in music programs are not.

cmurf 10y ago
Buggy upgrades? I think it depends. If there's an updated iteration of a surgical tool or drug, it goes through a 3rd party vetting process, a significant portion of which is publicly transparent. There's a lot of shenanigans going on in OS upgrades under the disguise of, it's proprietary and no one has the right to see the code, as well as the EULA, as well as DMCA that'll prevent some forms of reverse engineering to find out what the changes entail. That doesn't necessarily mean open sourcing all software. But it does mean having some kind of transparent testability of inputs vs outputs, a statement of expected behavior, tolerances, and so on. But what we seem to tolerate in software these days is, "oh fuck that upgrade just fucked up everything" with very heavy weight recourse like rollbacks or reverting to backups. The problem with such regulation isn't the concept of regulating minimum quality standards in software, but rather the competency and delays in getting effective coherent legislation produced. It basically requires many people getting pissed to get a law passed, and that's not really the best way to set a standard is it?

cmurf 10y ago

Buggy upgrades? I think it depends. If there's an updated iteration of a surgical tool or drug, it goes through a 3rd party vetting process, a significant portion of which is publicly transparent. There's a lot of shenanigans going on in OS upgrades under the disguise of, it's proprietary and no one has the right to see the code, as well as the EULA, as well as DMCA that'll prevent some forms of reverse engineering to find out what the changes entail. That doesn't necessarily mean open sourcing all software. But it does mean having some kind of transparent testability of inputs vs outputs, a statement of expected behavior, tolerances, and so on. But what we seem to tolerate in software these days is, "oh fuck that upgrade just fucked up everything" with very heavy weight recourse like rollbacks or reverting to backups. The problem with such regulation isn't the concept of regulating minimum quality standards in software, but rather the competency and delays in getting effective coherent legislation produced. It basically requires many people getting pissed to get a law passed, and that's not really the best way to set a standard is it?