8 ms·

The mindset that would even produce such an idea is incredibly dangerous. A computer-naive person might think that requiring that all computers be sold with spe

by dTal 10y ago

The mindset that would even produce such an idea is incredibly dangerous. A computer-naive person might think that requiring that all computers be sold with specific software installed is no more burdensome that requiring that all cars be sold with safety belts. But we all know that making the infrastructure to actually enforce such a rule would lead us to Stallman's worst dystopian nightmare: a Central Authority that somehow dictates what must, and what cannot, run on your computer. There's still a real danger that something like this will come to pass, especially when all the popular OSs come from centralised vendors upon whom pressure can be applied.

pjc50 10y ago
It's not the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip (Apparently this is still in production, and therefore presumably in today's modern "Smart TVs". Haven't heard anything about it for years)
- sqeaky 10y ago
  In practice the V-chip didn't dial out and couldn't really accept orders from a central authority. A v-chip owner could set programs of a given rating to not be displayed without a password. I suppose the system could have been suborned to make all tv shows have the most strict rating blocking it on TV with the chip enabled... but if you have that power you can just turn off the TV signal. Anyway the lack of central control prevented it from being meaningful.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>The mindset that would even produce such an idea is incredibly dangerous. To be fair, politicians and computer policy has always been poor and the USA just voted someone in who asked a foreign power to find his opponents emails and uses the term "the cyber" frequently. In other words, I suspect its going to get worse before it gets better. >a Central Authority that somehow dictates what must, and what cannot.... Append "be done" and that's the very definition of government. Typically humans without government is a recipe for failure, so its not the existence of government per-se that's the issue. The larger question is why government in many countries, including the USA, are failing on such an abysmal level for what should be basic tasks like regulating computer issues. The elephant in the room here seems to be a strong anti-intellectual atmosphere and strongman politics taking root and winning elections of late worldwide. Voters are seeking this stuff out. That's the problem.
- pas 10y ago
  Do we have proof of that? I mean Trump asking for Hillary's emails. I know that it's pretty probable that the whole DNC/DCleaks was done by a well known foreign power, but that doesn't mean Trump asked for it or know about it beforehand, right?
  - CocaKoala 10y ago
    Proof of Donald Trump asking Russia to find Hillary's emails? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-clinton-emails.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-r... It's pretty well documented, man.
    - pas 10y ago
      Thanks! I wasn't following the whole sadwagon, but I'm fully aware of how everything is sensationalized, hence I was asking for sources.
      - CocaKoala 10y ago
        You're quite welcome! The election and the aftermath has had the curious result of making The Onion headlines look almost indistinguishable from real news, so if unless you put some serious effort into following what happens it's pretty easy to not be able to tell what things are people joking about terrible events and what actually happened.
  - neiled 10y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ
  - stOneskull 10y ago
    It wasn't Russia, whether Donald asked that or not. Julian Assange has said so.
    - 10y ago
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
I don't believe the politicians either; however, I still don't know why every computing device must have a color screen that plays videos. I'm led to believe that computers of our day serve the vendors' need for profit more than the consumers' need for focus. Also, Alan Kay said we have the same problem with books, and it's not a very important problem, etc.
- Kadin 10y ago
  > I still don't know why every computing device must have a color screen that plays videos. It's mainly because hardware design is more expensive than software design. I've been working for a while on a side project that's going to be a standalone "appliance" of sorts, and it's much easier to basically punt on the hardware -- just toss a general-purpose SoC in there, with a big old touchscreen on top, and then do the entire UI in software -- than it is to iteratively design the UI in hardware, with traditional buttons, switches, LCD multiline displays, etc. Even though I think the overall UX is often much better with traditional hard controls (more tactile feedback, easier to use without looking or with vision impairments... long list). 3D printing is closing this gap a little, but it's still a heck of a lot easier to upload some new files to a touchscreen-based device and plop it in front of your testers than it is to produce a new version of a hard control panel.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
    > with a big old touchscreen on top So a monochrome screen and USB input are actually harder to find I take it? I also noticed snapdragon doesn't do wired ethernet.
    - khedoros1 10y ago
      I know that it's easy to find 16x2 character LCD displays, 7 segment displays, and small monochrome displays (like old phone displays), but at least at the hobbyist level, it seems like you may as well go for the general-purpose color screen. Similar sized screens look like they're around the same price, regardless of if they're color or not.
Fuxy 10y ago
Sigh.. I wish legislators would stop telling us what kind of porn we are or aren't allowed to watch. For one thing default porn filter installed on all laptops doesn't make any kind of sense given most of the population is over 18. Opt in makes a lot more sense than opt out in this case. Plus the fact that they are asking for money from the manufacturer and the customer to opt out makes it look like just another scheme to make money under the theme "it's for the children". Honestly I'm calling BS on this. It's just some greedy politicians trying to squeeze money out of people for stupid reasons.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Kadin 10y ago
  It's more than that. If you have any regular exposure to the right side of the political spectrum in the US, porn basically came out of nowhere as a political issue fairly recently. It's always been there, but it was sort of a fringey thing to get upset about (compared to, say, think-of-the-fetuses, or hating on teh gheys for wanting to get married, etc.). Plus it had a certain whiff of feminism about it, which probably scared off some of the hard-right who can't decide if Andrea Dworkin should be venerated as a conservative or burned as a witch. But, for reasons that are opaque to me, the intellectual tarpit of the hard right seems to have coughed up pornography as their newest social wedge issue. And now we're seeing the next phase in the playbook, which is to push various degrees of insane legislation at the state or sometimes even local level, while at the same time they have an army of pundits working the media, beating the drum about "porn addiction" and generally trying to frame it as the latest "public health crisis". I would not write it off as simply some greedy politicians. That's probably how it was sold to a particular group of self-interested politicians, in this particular instance. But there's a greater strategy at work (whether directed or as a sort of emergent behavior), and it fits together very neatly with other socially-conservative/authoritarian issues.
  - mhurron 10y ago
    > porn basically came out of nowhere as a political issue fairly recently Not everyone would be counting LBJ's anti-porn commission as 'fairly recently.' Even then, it only 'came out of nowhere' if you discount legislating porn as separate from the overall legislating morality platform that everything else you mention is an outgrowth of.
Spooky23 10y ago
This is just grist to keep the religious people fired up and to get some good press hits in that community.
speeder 10y ago
In Brazil the dystopia is reality: 1. The law requires certain amount of Brazillian made bloatware stuff to be shipped with all phones. "Coincidentally" the software never ends being actually useful stuff, and is always the work of some company owned by a politician or by the friends and family of a politician. 2. To sell games in Brazil (physical board games and rpg books included) you must submit paperwork (of the dead tree kind) to the Ministry of Justice asking permission and asking for age rating. The government argues it is not censorship, only regulation, but it CAN legally refuse giving an age rating, de facto banning the game. 3. Possession, storage or even giving away games also fall in the previous point. It don't happened yet, but theoretically anyone can get up to two years in jail for owning a game that isn't rated by the Ministry of Justice. 4. Because of points 2 and 3, Brazil for many years didn't had the games categories in mobile stores (iTunes for example) and still to this day have less content than other countries in digital games platforms (Steam, Xbox Live, PSN...) 5. Brazil constitution banned censorship, and has freedom of expression explicitly protected, yet Brazil has more games judicially banned than China, usually on "morality" grounds, for example EverQuest was banned because it allowed players to do evil quests.
brazzledazzle 10y ago
I would hope computer manufacturers would simply stop selling to SC to set an example. I can imagine the cost involved for them to have a SC-customized sales and build process would be substantial.
- majewsky 10y ago
  It's gonna be the other way around: They ship the censored version anywhere.
- mywittyname 10y ago
  "We are excessively burdened by government regulation."
a3n 10y ago
> Stallman's worst dystopian nightmare: a Central Authority that somehow dictates what must, and what cannot, run on your computer. For some people, that's not a dystopia, it's a feature.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  For some people, totalitarian dictatorship is a feature. Doesn't mean that it wouldn't be terrible for society as a whole.
erentz 10y ago
It would be like passing a law that manufacturers must sell cars that cannot be driven to strip clubs or porn shops.
- trav4225 10y ago
  just wait a few years... ;)
limeyx 10y ago
Funny that he didnt suggest the computer have a blocking function for anything that mentions guns either ... I'm sure there's a big problem with that upstate too...
Fjolsvith 10y ago
And then once they have these controls into place, just defund the office that gives you the key to unlock the filter.

by dTal 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

It's not the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip (Apparently this is still in production, and therefore presumably in today's modern "Smart TVs". Haven't heard anything about it for years)

sqeaky 10y ago
In practice the V-chip didn't dial out and couldn't really accept orders from a central authority. A v-chip owner could set programs of a given rating to not be displayed without a password. I suppose the system could have been suborned to make all tv shows have the most strict rating blocking it on TV with the chip enabled... but if you have that power you can just turn off the TV signal. Anyway the lack of central control prevented it from being meaningful.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

>The mindset that would even produce such an idea is incredibly dangerous. To be fair, politicians and computer policy has always been poor and the USA just voted someone in who asked a foreign power to find his opponents emails and uses the term "the cyber" frequently. In other words, I suspect its going to get worse before it gets better. >a Central Authority that somehow dictates what must, and what cannot.... Append "be done" and that's the very definition of government. Typically humans without government is a recipe for failure, so its not the existence of government per-se that's the issue. The larger question is why government in many countries, including the USA, are failing on such an abysmal level for what should be basic tasks like regulating computer issues. The elephant in the room here seems to be a strong anti-intellectual atmosphere and strongman politics taking root and winning elections of late worldwide. Voters are seeking this stuff out. That's the problem.

pas 10y ago
Do we have proof of that? I mean Trump asking for Hillary's emails. I know that it's pretty probable that the whole DNC/DCleaks was done by a well known foreign power, but that doesn't mean Trump asked for it or know about it beforehand, right?
- CocaKoala 10y ago
  Proof of Donald Trump asking Russia to find Hillary's emails? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-clinton-emails.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-r... It's pretty well documented, man.
  - pas 10y ago
    Thanks! I wasn't following the whole sadwagon, but I'm fully aware of how everything is sensationalized, hence I was asking for sources.
    - CocaKoala 10y ago
      You're quite welcome! The election and the aftermath has had the curious result of making The Onion headlines look almost indistinguishable from real news, so if unless you put some serious effort into following what happens it's pretty easy to not be able to tell what things are people joking about terrible events and what actually happened.
- neiled 10y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ
- stOneskull 10y ago
  It wasn't Russia, whether Donald asked that or not. Julian Assange has said so.
  - 10y ago

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

I don't believe the politicians either; however, I still don't know why every computing device must have a color screen that plays videos. I'm led to believe that computers of our day serve the vendors' need for profit more than the consumers' need for focus. Also, Alan Kay said we have the same problem with books, and it's not a very important problem, etc.

Kadin 10y ago
> I still don't know why every computing device must have a color screen that plays videos. It's mainly because hardware design is more expensive than software design. I've been working for a while on a side project that's going to be a standalone "appliance" of sorts, and it's much easier to basically punt on the hardware -- just toss a general-purpose SoC in there, with a big old touchscreen on top, and then do the entire UI in software -- than it is to iteratively design the UI in hardware, with traditional buttons, switches, LCD multiline displays, etc. Even though I think the overall UX is often much better with traditional hard controls (more tactile feedback, easier to use without looking or with vision impairments... long list). 3D printing is closing this gap a little, but it's still a heck of a lot easier to upload some new files to a touchscreen-based device and plop it in front of your testers than it is to produce a new version of a hard control panel.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  > with a big old touchscreen on top So a monochrome screen and USB input are actually harder to find I take it? I also noticed snapdragon doesn't do wired ethernet.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    I know that it's easy to find 16x2 character LCD displays, 7 segment displays, and small monochrome displays (like old phone displays), but at least at the hobbyist level, it seems like you may as well go for the general-purpose color screen. Similar sized screens look like they're around the same price, regardless of if they're color or not.

Fuxy 10y ago

Sigh.. I wish legislators would stop telling us what kind of porn we are or aren't allowed to watch. For one thing default porn filter installed on all laptops doesn't make any kind of sense given most of the population is over 18. Opt in makes a lot more sense than opt out in this case. Plus the fact that they are asking for money from the manufacturer and the customer to opt out makes it look like just another scheme to make money under the theme "it's for the children". Honestly I'm calling BS on this. It's just some greedy politicians trying to squeeze money out of people for stupid reasons.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Kadin 10y ago
It's more than that. If you have any regular exposure to the right side of the political spectrum in the US, porn basically came out of nowhere as a political issue fairly recently. It's always been there, but it was sort of a fringey thing to get upset about (compared to, say, think-of-the-fetuses, or hating on teh gheys for wanting to get married, etc.). Plus it had a certain whiff of feminism about it, which probably scared off some of the hard-right who can't decide if Andrea Dworkin should be venerated as a conservative or burned as a witch. But, for reasons that are opaque to me, the intellectual tarpit of the hard right seems to have coughed up pornography as their newest social wedge issue. And now we're seeing the next phase in the playbook, which is to push various degrees of insane legislation at the state or sometimes even local level, while at the same time they have an army of pundits working the media, beating the drum about "porn addiction" and generally trying to frame it as the latest "public health crisis". I would not write it off as simply some greedy politicians. That's probably how it was sold to a particular group of self-interested politicians, in this particular instance. But there's a greater strategy at work (whether directed or as a sort of emergent behavior), and it fits together very neatly with other socially-conservative/authoritarian issues.
- mhurron 10y ago
  > porn basically came out of nowhere as a political issue fairly recently Not everyone would be counting LBJ's anti-porn commission as 'fairly recently.' Even then, it only 'came out of nowhere' if you discount legislating porn as separate from the overall legislating morality platform that everything else you mention is an outgrowth of.

Spooky23 10y ago

This is just grist to keep the religious people fired up and to get some good press hits in that community.

speeder 10y ago

In Brazil the dystopia is reality: 1. The law requires certain amount of Brazillian made bloatware stuff to be shipped with all phones. "Coincidentally" the software never ends being actually useful stuff, and is always the work of some company owned by a politician or by the friends and family of a politician. 2. To sell games in Brazil (physical board games and rpg books included) you must submit paperwork (of the dead tree kind) to the Ministry of Justice asking permission and asking for age rating. The government argues it is not censorship, only regulation, but it CAN legally refuse giving an age rating, de facto banning the game. 3. Possession, storage or even giving away games also fall in the previous point. It don't happened yet, but theoretically anyone can get up to two years in jail for owning a game that isn't rated by the Ministry of Justice. 4. Because of points 2 and 3, Brazil for many years didn't had the games categories in mobile stores (iTunes for example) and still to this day have less content than other countries in digital games platforms (Steam, Xbox Live, PSN...) 5. Brazil constitution banned censorship, and has freedom of expression explicitly protected, yet Brazil has more games judicially banned than China, usually on "morality" grounds, for example EverQuest was banned because it allowed players to do evil quests.

brazzledazzle 10y ago

I would hope computer manufacturers would simply stop selling to SC to set an example. I can imagine the cost involved for them to have a SC-customized sales and build process would be substantial.

majewsky 10y ago
It's gonna be the other way around: They ship the censored version anywhere.
mywittyname 10y ago
"We are excessively burdened by government regulation."

a3n 10y ago

> Stallman's worst dystopian nightmare: a Central Authority that somehow dictates what must, and what cannot, run on your computer. For some people, that's not a dystopia, it's a feature.

khedoros1 10y ago
For some people, totalitarian dictatorship is a feature. Doesn't mean that it wouldn't be terrible for society as a whole.

erentz 10y ago

It would be like passing a law that manufacturers must sell cars that cannot be driven to strip clubs or porn shops.

trav4225 10y ago
just wait a few years... ;)

limeyx 10y ago

Funny that he didnt suggest the computer have a blocking function for anything that mentions guns either ... I'm sure there's a big problem with that upstate too...

Fjolsvith 10y ago

And then once they have these controls into place, just defund the office that gives you the key to unlock the filter.