24 ms·

I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

460 points by mildbyte 9y ago

ohazi 9y ago
You know, you could have even stopped at the car analogy, because modern cars are actually doing this and it's fucking terrifying. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374464
- gnode 9y ago
  I can certainly imagine the dashboard becoming real estate for ads.
  - gcbw2 9y ago
    taxis do that to passengers for some 15years now. and that is only counting the video ads. If you count print you can go back all you want.
    - isostatic 9y ago
      The adverts are why I use uber in New York rather than yellow cabs.
      - macNchz 9y ago
        If you tap three times on the display it puts it in an accessibility mode which has a simplified interface and...no ads!
        keevie 9y ago
        yeah, but then it starts loudly reading to you....and then at the end of the ride when you want to pay with your credit card the whole interface is weird. Better to just get really good at hitting the off button as soon as it allows you to.
  - samfriedman 9y ago
    When your car is fully self-driving, I'm sure you will be able to get a discount on the sticker/rental price by agreeing to view some ads on the in-car screens while you ride.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      Sure, it will start that way. But we all know how that feature will progress: 1. ads play by default, with an option to pay to remove then to: 2. forced ads with no option to remove, and the car won't run unless they're playing
      - tokai 9y ago
        3. dynamic rerouting our your drive to maximize utility of cityscape ads
      - tomrod 9y ago
        I have never, ever purchased anything with online ads. Have you?
    - Faaak 9y ago
      Amazon does it with its kindles. Its ~20 $ cheaper if you opt in for ads when the kindle is idle/off.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    Now you know why Google is so interested in self-driving cars. Driving time is one of the few untapped reservoirs of attention remaining. If the car can do the driving for you, your eyeballs are now free to have ads blasted into them.
- garyrichardson 9y ago
  I thought it was a story about cars and tech when I first started reading it. It wasn't until the article talks about dents and such that I realized this wasn't the focus.
kevin_b_er 9y ago
And the DMCA prevents you from repairing the problem. Ostensibly to protect copyright, but instead used to deny you ownership.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Just like you use software by license and don't "own" it, hardware makers have realized they can bilk with the same business model. It's no coincidence that slime software companies are the ones making the current hardwares that have such "features" -- Apple and Google chiefly among them, along with the ecosystem they created in their own image.
Blinks- 9y ago
Increases in complexity up the barrier of entry to any advanced system, but lately it seems like things are made with the intent to make that barrier impossible to overcome within the lifetime of the hardware. The right to repair and open hardware standards are something we need to organize and push for if we want to see improvements. After all it's been demonstrated time and time again that we can't trust black box hardware.
- 089723645897236 9y ago
  My entire goal in life is to be able to use a full stack open device. Maybe we'll see it with Purism and the like.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything. If you use ebooks like Kindle you don't accumulate a book collection. Same for record collections. Devices become useless once the connected cloud service shuts down. Eventually we'll probably have cars that get obsoleted quickly. I bet the same will happen for household and other robots once they get more powerful. You will have to pay monthly rent to use them.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything. It sure makes law enforcement's job easier if more peoples' entire phones are subject to the Third Party Doctrine, rather than just what passes over the wire.
  - deckard1 9y ago
    https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ Already happening. But everyone called RMS a kook. He looks funny. He talks funny. He's a socialist. He smells. And here we are. People are praising Apple--Apple--for letting people pay money for closed software that, at the very least, lives on their own device. That's a low bar.
  - 9y ago
adreamingsoul 9y ago
So, back to land lines with analog phones? Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user? For a period, I was excited about the Ubuntu phone because of the fact that I could have full control over it. Sad to see that project terminated. I'm also interested in "dumbphones" that can use CDMA or GSM networks.
- baseethrowaway 9y ago
  Look up Librem 5. Doesn't exist yet, but might soon.
  - adreamingsoul 9y ago
    I was just looking at that. I also learned that the Ubuntu OS is still community driven and has ports for several common phones, like the Nexus and OnePlus One phones. https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/devices https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/devices https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
    - alfanick 9y ago
      Except the baseband is still a binary blob, rendering your phone just as closed and unsafe as it was before.
      - Silhouette 9y ago
        It's a relative scale. A binary blob isn't ideal from a security and privacy perspective, though given the nature of radio transmissions used with these devices, there are legitimate arguments in its favour as well. In any case, you're still much better off with a device where that is the only unknown factor than you are with a device where apps routinely spy on you and phone home etc.
        adreamingsoul 9y ago
        Agreed. Unless I build my own telco, I have to rely on them for some aspect of this service.
jimmies 9y ago
>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it blocked the UI with the message: "You haven't updated the app in a month. Uber won't work if you don't update it right now." It really rustled my jimmies. In the next 15 minutes, 3 of us (2 are foreigners with no cell connection) had to stand in the freezing rain when the damn thing was updating with my 2.5G connection. When the Uber arrived, I had 1% left and not long after I got in the car, my phone shut down. I was so worried the phone would die before the car arrived. The other day I talked about how backward-compatible Google Maps is and unfortunately it made the news on Slashdot. Some people were like, oh yeah, Windows is backward compatible with 30 years old apps. Are you a millennial/a shill for praising them for supporting their API for 10 years? Yeah, keep talking about Windows, until you fucking use some of the apps nowadays that wouldn't work when you haven't updated them in a month.
- eksemplar 9y ago
  I've uninstalled around 10 free to play games and apps that Windows 10 installed without asking in the past 6 months, so I'm not sure those slashdot people should be using windows as a good example of having control either despite that 30 years of backward compatibility. :)
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    Technically they're not installed, those are just shortcuts to install them. The issue isn't really one of backward compatibility but software design and function. As far as I know, Android maintains API compatibility all the way back to API v1. A simple app, like the calculator, written in API v1 should run on the latest Oreo device. An app requires a remote service to function must maintain compatibility with that service to function. The trouble is compatibility updates and feature updates aren't delivered separately. So you can't avoid new features if a service compatibility prevents your old version of the app from functioning.
tpaschalis 9y ago
I understand that powers have shifted, and the majority of the people prefer "free" email/chat/spreadsheets/storage, when "free" means "welcome to our own special walled corner of the internet, give us your personal data and watch these ads". But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at scale?
- suprfnk 9y ago
  > But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at scale? Apple seems to follow that plan. For your "email/chat/spreadsheets/storage", they have iCloud mail, iMessage, Numbers and iCloud Drive. You pay once, and get software support quite a lot of years later. They don't seem to be selling or gathering much data. They won't show you ads. Now, it won't be RMS approved, but that's another debate.
  - musage 9y ago
    That's not another debate, that's the debate, and putting users first isn't something I'd associate Apple with. Did people beg apple to remove the headphone jack, for example? I'd say Apple puts Apple first, consumers second, users somewhere.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    With Google you trade your freedom for utility; with Apple you trade your money and your freedom for utility. I'd like to be able to trade only my money for utility, and keep my freedom.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    How is a company that gives you a locked-down device that they drastically control, and refuse to provide source for "putting the user first" ?
bhnmmhmd 9y ago
We were afraid that AI will take over and take away our freedom, but I think some companies have done a great job at ruining their products, and our lives as well.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  We are finally facing the ramifications of short-sighted decisions years ago. In the race to the bottom where a plurality of people opted for "free" or "cheaper" options, not enough people cared about how money is made. Companies like google aren't charities, so profits would have to be extracted irrespective of the dubiousness of the approach. The current situation was predicted by many.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  corporations actually have most of the attributes people fear from AI (lack of concern about human values, optimizing for the values they care about at any cost, paperclip maximizer style, a vast amount of paralell and subversive power), its just that they are slow and inefficent.
bonsai80 9y ago
Agreed. Looking forward to when I get my new phone: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
superasn 9y ago
Also these updates drain the battery all the time and there is no way to tell them to please stop. At least on Android you can install "greenify app" but for that to work properly, you need to have root and for that you have to unlock the bootloader (for which you have to wait 14 days and also void your warranty). I mean wtf, it's my phone but the design is such that a shit ton of crap always needs to run in the background (looking at you google play services) and dozens of useless apps that are always connecting just to show me more push notifications.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  My android phone was configured out-of-the-box to only run autoupdates when plugged in and on wifi. It's easy to see because if I haven't plugged my phone in for a few days, as soon as I do it starts updating like crazy.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    I do this too, and the most annoying thing is just to arrive home at the end of the day and my phone becoming unusable because something, somewhere has to update ASAP on WiFi. I don't even keep that many apps installed, but as sure as eggs, something always needs an update.
  - moftz 9y ago
    You can use your phone for a few days without plugging it in?
Hasknewbie 9y ago
> "Thankfully, running a System Restore worked and the next update didn't have these problems, but since then I stopped allowing automatic updates" It is now possible to disable automatic updates in Windows 10? (Asking because forced updates is what made me switch to Linux in the first place.)
- stordoff 9y ago
  In Windows 10 Pro, you can with Group Policy. My machines are set to "Notify to install" - it's not ideal, as Windows Defender updates use the same path so it's triggered at least once a day, but a small system tray notification of "You need some updates" is an improvement over the more forceful notifications and unexpected reboots.
- qplex 9y ago
  Drop all outgoing traffic by default in Windows firewall. Allow only apps that you need. No more unwanted updates, no more telemetry. Once in a while you might want to download a fresh .iso from Microsoft that has all the updates integrated. Re-install & repeat.
therealmarv 9y ago
Auto Updates without user interaction is the biggest security benefit I can think of for a normal user. Yes you read that right. It's f*cking great that my parents can use an always up to date browser and OS and I don't need to worry if they have updated all their stuff. Update mechanisms like for Java and other stuff which pop-up and require user interaction are a thing most people will not get right. Actually I really like the Chrome OS approach where it's done continuesly in the background. Not all people want to know what's going on under the hood and how the motor of their car works exactly. Some people just want to drive securely from A to B.
- gcbw2 9y ago
  that's the fallacy of people shipping bogus crap and you thinking you are at fault. Thanks google, i guess. Most new features on chrome are not for your security. They disable all referrer control options. Want to only send referrer to the domain you are at now? though lucky, google makes money on cross-domain referrer reporting so they can track conversion from their ads.
- cesarb 9y ago
  That makes me think of xkcd 463: auto updates might be better than the alternative, but we shouldn't be needing a constant stream of updates in the first place.
- robotsonic 9y ago
  I agree that there are certainly benefits to auto-updates, but where I tend to dislike them (especially on the phone), is where I have infrequently used apps. To stick with the Uber example, I don't live in a city with Uber, but have it on my phone for when I am. Why do I need to be burdened with using my data to constantly update an app I use once a year. This applies to a lot of apps (airlines, games, etc.). Games are really the worst offender as they tend to be quite large. Where release notes are provided in the app store, I will update if it is related to a critical security vulnerability, or something legitimate, but find it hard to rationalize constantly downloading 100+MB apps doing this for minor bug fixes that impact 0.001% of an apps user base.
jim_dow_jones 9y ago
Richard Stallman was right. We didn't listen!
- moonbug22 9y ago
  ITYM 'we didn't care', for broad, market-making values of 'we'
- acomjean 9y ago
  I heard Stallman talk at graduate school in the early part of this century. I though he was a bit extreme at the time, but over time I've come to appreciate his position. Having software be open and modifiable is really quite an amazing thing. those open building blocks lets us do amazing things with software quite easily. Its time for an open source desktop os and software to go mainstream. We realize that apple is not reliable making developer grade notebooks and their unix underpinnings show that it is possible. Then onto phones. I feel open source software will keep the hardware from being too weird
  - bittercynic 9y ago
    For those who care about having OSS powered desktop/laptop, I think the situation isn't as bad as it's sometimes made out to be. Both Debian and Arch have worked very well for me, and been my primary OS for years. It is frustrating that we still can't really get full control of the hardware, but at least from the kernel on up we can have pretty complete control of software.
  - wvenable 9y ago
    All the open source software I use on daily basis auto-updates.
    - carapace 9y ago
      > “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Couldn't find anything specific in re: auto-updates though...
lisper 9y ago
I have an iPhone 4S running iOS 7 (jailbroken of course) and an original MBP retina running Mavericks. I don't update them because the risk of updating is higher than the risk of not updating. Right now everything is working, and everything is set up the way I like it. If I don't update, things might break some day, but there is also a greater-than-zero chance that everything will continue to work for quite a while. If I update, those odds drop to zero. Not even a statistical approximation of zero, but actually zero. Updating is just trading one set of risks for a different set of risks. I choose the devil I know.
- thinkythought 9y ago
  As someone also still rocking the original MBPr, the peak for it software wise is actually El Capitan I really, really wish i had never updated from that. It was faster, smoother, and more stable there than it was before and after. Definitely way better than Mavericks. I push this thing hard with premiere/ableton live/etc too.
  - lisper 9y ago
    My main problem with El Cap is that iPhoto won't work any more. I have a huge investment in iPhoto -- tons of curated albums with no way to import them to Photos (what were they thinking?), and no obvious alternative. Also, I absolutely despise the El Cap design. The flat look control widgets and icons, the barely visible grey text, the secret hidden controls that only appear when you mouse over them, it all makes me cringe. (Yes, Mav has a few hidden controls as well, but at least now I know where they all are. If I upgrade, I have to go on the secret control easter egg hunt all over again. Life is too short for that kind of bullshit.)
- badpun 9y ago
  Aren't you afraid of being hacked? In my case, since I use the phone for 2FA access to bank accounts, I bite the bullet and keep up with the phone upgrade threadmill solely for security purposes.
  - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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DannyB2 9y ago
Going through a "Linux phase"? I started my "Linux phase" in 1999 and have never finished going through that phase.
- rconti 9y ago
  Apparently the author went through a "Linux phase", yes.
- zanny 9y ago
  Once you realize how important owning your technology is you never go back!
amelius 9y ago
And the worst part, for me, is that we engineers are inflicting this upon eachother, driven by money and business-types with lock-in business-models. We desperately need a code of conduct for engineers. And/or we need certain types of businessmodel to become outlawed.
isaiahg 9y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with everything except for pocket. I've never had a service like that become so integrated in my life so fast. I don't even use bookmarks anymore, it's just easier to pool it all together and tag it relevantly. The suggested news is astoundingly fine tuned to my interests as well, much more so than other services that claim to do the same thing. It's become my favorite time killer now just to go through my suggested articles. Now if only they can keep from screwing with it and mucking up the great service with updates. They could literally do nothing else to it and I'll be a lifelong user. I'm not optimistic though...
- TheRealPomax 9y ago
  Do you disagree with the fact that it popped up without notice, or do you disagree with the fact that the person who wrote this article didn't like having it get installed without notice? Because the most important part of this writeup is that it's almost devoid of judgement calls on whether what the updates do are actually good or bad, it's about the lack of control and the lack of any ability to beforehand tell whether it's going to be good or bad. If you love pocket, rock on, but maybe you would have also discovered that if you had been suggested to opt in to it for a few days, to see if you'd like it, rather than it suddenly being not just on your computer, but fully and irrevocably integrated into your web browser. And that maybe is literally that: maybe. We'll never know, because you were never given that option.
  - isaiahg 9y ago
    My perception is probably warped by the fact that I used pocket before I moved to firefox. So after I downloaded firefox after years on chrome, it was a very pleasant surprise to see pocket already there. And to me it was an added value. But that makes me wonder, is this just an age old gripe with change in general or does this actually add anything new to the conversation. Will we get articles in the next 10 years about how pocket was better and they don't feel in control of their computers because firefox moved to a new system and changed a menu entry?
enlightenedfool 9y ago
If there are enough people that don't want stuff to happen, it won't happen. Unfortunately you are in a minority. People do have power and choice.
- TheRealPomax 9y ago
  That is a statement I would really love for you to investigate the validity of, because there is nothing in the real world that supports that as a universal claim. If an industry has an established pattern and the only people who want that pattern to change have no influence (for instance, "not buying a cell phone" is not an option, whether you live in the US or rural Vietnam) then it doesn't matter how many people "want" that change, they have no leverage to effect it.
brwsr 9y ago
I have a HP zbook laptop that cost me about 3500 euro's. Recently I changed some trivial settings in the BIOS. After I saved and reboot the laptop hung at the bios stage. There was no way to get back into the bios and the keyboard was blinking a code that I had to contact HP. They had to replace the entire motherboard due to a corrupted BIOS. So it was caused by a bug? The repair cost were about 800 euro's..
scarface74 9y ago
I can choose whether apps auto update on iOS devices but more importantly, when I download something on my computer, I have no control of what the app does. On my iOS device, I can be somewhat assured that it's going to be somewhat trapped in a sandbox and only be allowed to do what I specifically give it permission to do. I wish that Apple would give you an option to not allow an app to access the internet and not just disallow the use of mobile data.
- deleted 9y ago
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jurschreuder 9y ago
First you had the motherboard, processor and ram. Now they are on one board. 3x less control. Plus you want a super slim design so you cannot get a desktop anymore. Actually you've never been more in control of your own hardware. Tiny teams make their own computer like the Raspberry Pi now.
- jrs95 9y ago
  Yeah, it seems like the name is a little misleading. The reason for "I've never felt less in control of my own hardware" is the software for the most part.
batmanbury 9y ago
Apple won't even let me delete auto-downloaded iOS updates anymore. They just download when I'm not paying attention, in the background, and take up anywhere from 500mb to 1gb of hard drive space, forever. Unless of course, I update.
makecheck 9y ago
When obtaining new apps or devices, you can’t tell if it is a worthwhile investment because it could break in any number of ways. For your money, are you buying 2 weeks of functionality or 5 years of it? It’s not even enough to have a reputable seller because good apps are sold to terrible companies that ruin them later, or the developer just decides to add new money-making schemes later. It seems that we need more guarantees (legally enforceable, i.e. you said you wouldn’t update your gizmo to do X but you did so I get compensation).
neves 9y ago
Now I fell that I can't buy a piece of hardware or install a software that doesn't install an server and an update service. My powerful desktop machine has dozens of services, from Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Razer, Logitech, etc. I must turn them all off by hand.
oblib 9y ago
Yeah, I feel that too. After pressing the "later" button every time I picked up my iPhone for a few weeks Apple quit asking and updated the "iOS" this past month. It has "new features" they keep telling me I need and I've been pressing buttons to ignore their "Learn how to use the new..." prompts since then. With the exception of security updates I'd like very much if Apple left my phone alone but it's not really "my phone". I just have a license to use it and it says they can make changes to it. The way that's been working for me does not entice me to buy new phones from Apple.
zanny 9y ago
This is why I go out of my way to only buy phones that are going to be very well supported by LineageOS for a long time. You can go Google-less on such devices if you want. The only real limitation is that you cannot do anything about the super-privileged proprietary modem that simultaneously can spy on you at any time that also prevents you from running newer kernels on your hardware because of how evil every Android vendor is with their proprietary bits. At least there is finally momentum to kill the ME / SP backdoors on desktops. Its going to be much harder to do that on mobile since the only way to use cellular networks is through these proprietary black box modems.
wozer 9y ago
Especially nice when the updates break your computer, as it happened for a lot of people with the Spectre mitigations. I dread the Internet of Things.
codedokode 9y ago
New version of Skype RT and Opera Browser have no option to disable automatic updates. Probably they understand that nobody wants their updates that only bring new bugs and more ads.
seorphates 9y ago
It's an interesting (but mostly depressing) problem. The insistence that "others must be in control of what you own" doesn't really sit well with me, at all. I won't drive a phone without root, for instance. Otherwise the plethora of updates I have sitting around not being updated would do nothing but eat data with garbage updates with naught but a new roll of advertisements and, if you're unlucky, new garbage access requests. Update the os? Yeah, no. Not on your watch, at least. A firewall, for instance, is a basic necessity. Even the crude android flavors. It includes the ability to lock out your "vendors" selectively and accurately. My build is, hm, approaching it's fourth year, I think. No auto updates save for select apps. No complaints. No surprises. But I'm special, I don't do "phone for fun" and so have a fairly limited and hardened short list of requirements. The most annoying thing on android is Google XXANY - by a wide, wide margin. I'll be itching to build a google-go-around on my next handset, for certain. Save all those apps you like, for sure, I still depend on side-loading quite a few that have since gone by the wayside. At this juncture I have to take absolutely every bit of control that I can get my filthy paws wrapped around.
PascLeRasc 9y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I just reactivated my old Android phone yesterday for fun and as soon as I put the sim card in the phone started blowing up with notifications about old voicemails, ones I never saw on my iPhone I had just had it in. There were about a dozen voicemails from the past six months from jobs I had applied to and heard nothing back from, or had a preliminary phone interview with, asking me to call them back to schedule something. I mentioned it to my sister, who moved from Android to iPhone the same time I did, and she did the same thing and found a bunch of voicemails from a college she's recently applied to asking if she can send them some piece of paperwork. It's so frustrating that we didn't know that these voicemails existed. I think the fundamental problem is that to make these technical products like mobile OS's and email apps you need to be so far into tech that you can't really imagine what it's like to be a casual user. This is why I don't consider software engineering to be on the same tier as other disciplines of engineering. Yes, civil engineers make bridges, but they use them in daily life exactly the same as regular people do - the same goes for electrical engineers and power in the home, and mechanical engineers and vacuums/air conditioners/bicycles. When you make software, you look at all software differently and you lose the perspective of a regular person.
v1nc 9y ago
First thing I thought after reading the headline was "another windows user complaining about updates" and i think that's just how it is after reading the whole article. The author shows up some problematic points of the development of handling updates. But if he spend the time thinking about these problems in actively doing something about it, there only would be a few things left to complain about. I'm sure there are some services that are not replaceable and use update methods like mentioned in the article. But this doesn't happens by accident. If the developes of a service choose such update methods, either it's likely that you can see some other problematic decisions the developers made, or the old service you are trying to run is not safe to run and has to be updated before it's safe to run. As i notice such problematic decisions, I avoid these services or search for alternatives before I would complain about it, and this never happend.
rafi_kamal 9y ago
As a developer, it makes sense to break backward-compatibility if only a very small percentage of your user base is using the old version. Supporting old versions often requires extra resources that I can otherwise spend on building new features.
m_fayer 9y ago
The GDPR is going in the right direction by creating a "bill of rights" for your data, so ownership is firmly delineated and all 3rd party use of data revolves around clear revokable granular consent. What we need now is a "bill of rights" defining and preserving the notion of ownership for digital devices. Part of that should be that the device should only do what it's explicitly asked to do. Updates should be opt-in in nearly all cases, and mandatory updates should meet stringent requirements similar to vaccines. That is, only to combat major threats that apply to users as a group.
nofunsir 9y ago
I thought something was fishy at google images today! What a shame.
PricelessValue 9y ago
That's exactly how I feel about software ever since I got acquainted with windows 10. Do you best to remove all the junk. Then they keep reinstalling their "malware" until they finally remove the option of disabling or removing their malware. It feels like we are losing more control and access over tech - both software and hardware. Some companies are trying their best to turn tech into a black box which we aren't allowed to peer into.
true_tuna 9y ago
The real issue is loss of control. “Ask me again later” is dehumanizing because it robs the user of agency. I can’t imagine how a forced windows ten update would have felt. Studies have shown (not to mention common sense) that a feeling of lack of agency is depressing. I recently quit the Mac OS after 20 years of rabid fandom, over the feeling that I wasn’t the one in charge of my Mac. Linux still lets me own my gear and I have to say that a few unpolished areas are worth the renewed sense of agency. Unfortunately there’s no user positive answer for mobile. Android is even worse than iOS. Maybe the black phone will free us from this insanity and put the user first again.

460 points by mildbyte 9y ago

You know, you could have even stopped at the car analogy, because modern cars are actually doing this and it's fucking terrifying. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374464

gnode 9y ago
I can certainly imagine the dashboard becoming real estate for ads.
- gcbw2 9y ago
  taxis do that to passengers for some 15years now. and that is only counting the video ads. If you count print you can go back all you want.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    The adverts are why I use uber in New York rather than yellow cabs.
    - macNchz 9y ago
      If you tap three times on the display it puts it in an accessibility mode which has a simplified interface and...no ads!
      - keevie 9y ago
        yeah, but then it starts loudly reading to you....and then at the end of the ride when you want to pay with your credit card the whole interface is weird. Better to just get really good at hitting the off button as soon as it allows you to.
- samfriedman 9y ago
  When your car is fully self-driving, I'm sure you will be able to get a discount on the sticker/rental price by agreeing to view some ads on the in-car screens while you ride.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Sure, it will start that way. But we all know how that feature will progress: 1. ads play by default, with an option to pay to remove then to: 2. forced ads with no option to remove, and the car won't run unless they're playing
    - tokai 9y ago
      3. dynamic rerouting our your drive to maximize utility of cityscape ads
    - tomrod 9y ago
      I have never, ever purchased anything with online ads. Have you?
  - Faaak 9y ago
    Amazon does it with its kindles. Its ~20 $ cheaper if you opt in for ads when the kindle is idle/off.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  Now you know why Google is so interested in self-driving cars. Driving time is one of the few untapped reservoirs of attention remaining. If the car can do the driving for you, your eyeballs are now free to have ads blasted into them.
garyrichardson 9y ago
I thought it was a story about cars and tech when I first started reading it. It wasn't until the article talks about dents and such that I realized this wasn't the focus.

kevin_b_er 9y ago

And the DMCA prevents you from repairing the problem. Ostensibly to protect copyright, but instead used to deny you ownership.

pishpash 9y ago
Just like you use software by license and don't "own" it, hardware makers have realized they can bilk with the same business model. It's no coincidence that slime software companies are the ones making the current hardwares that have such "features" -- Apple and Google chiefly among them, along with the ecosystem they created in their own image.

Blinks- 9y ago

Increases in complexity up the barrier of entry to any advanced system, but lately it seems like things are made with the intent to make that barrier impossible to overcome within the lifetime of the hardware. The right to repair and open hardware standards are something we need to organize and push for if we want to see improvements. After all it's been demonstrated time and time again that we can't trust black box hardware.

089723645897236 9y ago
My entire goal in life is to be able to use a full stack open device. Maybe we'll see it with Purism and the like.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything. If you use ebooks like Kindle you don't accumulate a book collection. Same for record collections. Devices become useless once the connected cloud service shuts down. Eventually we'll probably have cars that get obsoleted quickly. I bet the same will happen for household and other robots once they get more powerful. You will have to pay monthly rent to use them.
- rhizome 9y ago
  I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything. It sure makes law enforcement's job easier if more peoples' entire phones are subject to the Third Party Doctrine, rather than just what passes over the wire.
- deckard1 9y ago
  https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ Already happening. But everyone called RMS a kook. He looks funny. He talks funny. He's a socialist. He smells. And here we are. People are praising Apple--Apple--for letting people pay money for closed software that, at the very least, lives on their own device. That's a low bar.
- 9y ago

adreamingsoul 9y ago

So, back to land lines with analog phones? Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user? For a period, I was excited about the Ubuntu phone because of the fact that I could have full control over it. Sad to see that project terminated. I'm also interested in "dumbphones" that can use CDMA or GSM networks.

baseethrowaway 9y ago
Look up Librem 5. Doesn't exist yet, but might soon.
- adreamingsoul 9y ago
  I was just looking at that. I also learned that the Ubuntu OS is still community driven and has ports for several common phones, like the Nexus and OnePlus One phones. https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/devices https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/devices https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
  - alfanick 9y ago
    Except the baseband is still a binary blob, rendering your phone just as closed and unsafe as it was before.
    - Silhouette 9y ago
      It's a relative scale. A binary blob isn't ideal from a security and privacy perspective, though given the nature of radio transmissions used with these devices, there are legitimate arguments in its favour as well. In any case, you're still much better off with a device where that is the only unknown factor than you are with a device where apps routinely spy on you and phone home etc.
      - adreamingsoul 9y ago
        Agreed. Unless I build my own telco, I have to rely on them for some aspect of this service.

jimmies 9y ago

>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it blocked the UI with the message: "You haven't updated the app in a month. Uber won't work if you don't update it right now." It really rustled my jimmies. In the next 15 minutes, 3 of us (2 are foreigners with no cell connection) had to stand in the freezing rain when the damn thing was updating with my 2.5G connection. When the Uber arrived, I had 1% left and not long after I got in the car, my phone shut down. I was so worried the phone would die before the car arrived. The other day I talked about how backward-compatible Google Maps is and unfortunately it made the news on Slashdot. Some people were like, oh yeah, Windows is backward compatible with 30 years old apps. Are you a millennial/a shill for praising them for supporting their API for 10 years? Yeah, keep talking about Windows, until you fucking use some of the apps nowadays that wouldn't work when you haven't updated them in a month.

eksemplar 9y ago
I've uninstalled around 10 free to play games and apps that Windows 10 installed without asking in the past 6 months, so I'm not sure those slashdot people should be using windows as a good example of having control either despite that 30 years of backward compatibility. :)
- cptskippy 9y ago
  Technically they're not installed, those are just shortcuts to install them. The issue isn't really one of backward compatibility but software design and function. As far as I know, Android maintains API compatibility all the way back to API v1. A simple app, like the calculator, written in API v1 should run on the latest Oreo device. An app requires a remote service to function must maintain compatibility with that service to function. The trouble is compatibility updates and feature updates aren't delivered separately. So you can't avoid new features if a service compatibility prevents your old version of the app from functioning.

tpaschalis 9y ago

I understand that powers have shifted, and the majority of the people prefer "free" email/chat/spreadsheets/storage, when "free" means "welcome to our own special walled corner of the internet, give us your personal data and watch these ads". But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at scale?

suprfnk 9y ago
> But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at scale? Apple seems to follow that plan. For your "email/chat/spreadsheets/storage", they have iCloud mail, iMessage, Numbers and iCloud Drive. You pay once, and get software support quite a lot of years later. They don't seem to be selling or gathering much data. They won't show you ads. Now, it won't be RMS approved, but that's another debate.
- musage 9y ago
  That's not another debate, that's the debate, and putting users first isn't something I'd associate Apple with. Did people beg apple to remove the headphone jack, for example? I'd say Apple puts Apple first, consumers second, users somewhere.
- zeveb 9y ago
  With Google you trade your freedom for utility; with Apple you trade your money and your freedom for utility. I'd like to be able to trade only my money for utility, and keep my freedom.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  How is a company that gives you a locked-down device that they drastically control, and refuse to provide source for "putting the user first" ?

bhnmmhmd 9y ago

We were afraid that AI will take over and take away our freedom, but I think some companies have done a great job at ruining their products, and our lives as well.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
We are finally facing the ramifications of short-sighted decisions years ago. In the race to the bottom where a plurality of people opted for "free" or "cheaper" options, not enough people cared about how money is made. Companies like google aren't charities, so profits would have to be extracted irrespective of the dubiousness of the approach. The current situation was predicted by many.
throwaway2048 9y ago
corporations actually have most of the attributes people fear from AI (lack of concern about human values, optimizing for the values they care about at any cost, paperclip maximizer style, a vast amount of paralell and subversive power), its just that they are slow and inefficent.

bonsai80 9y ago

Agreed. Looking forward to when I get my new phone: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

superasn 9y ago

Also these updates drain the battery all the time and there is no way to tell them to please stop. At least on Android you can install "greenify app" but for that to work properly, you need to have root and for that you have to unlock the bootloader (for which you have to wait 14 days and also void your warranty). I mean wtf, it's my phone but the design is such that a shit ton of crap always needs to run in the background (looking at you google play services) and dozens of useless apps that are always connecting just to show me more push notifications.

aidenn0 9y ago
My android phone was configured out-of-the-box to only run autoupdates when plugged in and on wifi. It's easy to see because if I haven't plugged my phone in for a few days, as soon as I do it starts updating like crazy.
- rhizome 9y ago
  I do this too, and the most annoying thing is just to arrive home at the end of the day and my phone becoming unusable because something, somewhere has to update ASAP on WiFi. I don't even keep that many apps installed, but as sure as eggs, something always needs an update.
- moftz 9y ago
  You can use your phone for a few days without plugging it in?

Hasknewbie 9y ago

> "Thankfully, running a System Restore worked and the next update didn't have these problems, but since then I stopped allowing automatic updates" It is now possible to disable automatic updates in Windows 10? (Asking because forced updates is what made me switch to Linux in the first place.)

stordoff 9y ago
In Windows 10 Pro, you can with Group Policy. My machines are set to "Notify to install" - it's not ideal, as Windows Defender updates use the same path so it's triggered at least once a day, but a small system tray notification of "You need some updates" is an improvement over the more forceful notifications and unexpected reboots.
qplex 9y ago
Drop all outgoing traffic by default in Windows firewall. Allow only apps that you need. No more unwanted updates, no more telemetry. Once in a while you might want to download a fresh .iso from Microsoft that has all the updates integrated. Re-install & repeat.

therealmarv 9y ago

Auto Updates without user interaction is the biggest security benefit I can think of for a normal user. Yes you read that right. It's f*cking great that my parents can use an always up to date browser and OS and I don't need to worry if they have updated all their stuff. Update mechanisms like for Java and other stuff which pop-up and require user interaction are a thing most people will not get right. Actually I really like the Chrome OS approach where it's done continuesly in the background. Not all people want to know what's going on under the hood and how the motor of their car works exactly. Some people just want to drive securely from A to B.

gcbw2 9y ago
that's the fallacy of people shipping bogus crap and you thinking you are at fault. Thanks google, i guess. Most new features on chrome are not for your security. They disable all referrer control options. Want to only send referrer to the domain you are at now? though lucky, google makes money on cross-domain referrer reporting so they can track conversion from their ads.
cesarb 9y ago
That makes me think of xkcd 463: auto updates might be better than the alternative, but we shouldn't be needing a constant stream of updates in the first place.
robotsonic 9y ago
I agree that there are certainly benefits to auto-updates, but where I tend to dislike them (especially on the phone), is where I have infrequently used apps. To stick with the Uber example, I don't live in a city with Uber, but have it on my phone for when I am. Why do I need to be burdened with using my data to constantly update an app I use once a year. This applies to a lot of apps (airlines, games, etc.). Games are really the worst offender as they tend to be quite large. Where release notes are provided in the app store, I will update if it is related to a critical security vulnerability, or something legitimate, but find it hard to rationalize constantly downloading 100+MB apps doing this for minor bug fixes that impact 0.001% of an apps user base.

jim_dow_jones 9y ago

Richard Stallman was right. We didn't listen!

moonbug22 9y ago
ITYM 'we didn't care', for broad, market-making values of 'we'
acomjean 9y ago
I heard Stallman talk at graduate school in the early part of this century. I though he was a bit extreme at the time, but over time I've come to appreciate his position. Having software be open and modifiable is really quite an amazing thing. those open building blocks lets us do amazing things with software quite easily. Its time for an open source desktop os and software to go mainstream. We realize that apple is not reliable making developer grade notebooks and their unix underpinnings show that it is possible. Then onto phones. I feel open source software will keep the hardware from being too weird
- bittercynic 9y ago
  For those who care about having OSS powered desktop/laptop, I think the situation isn't as bad as it's sometimes made out to be. Both Debian and Arch have worked very well for me, and been my primary OS for years. It is frustrating that we still can't really get full control of the hardware, but at least from the kernel on up we can have pretty complete control of software.
- wvenable 9y ago
  All the open source software I use on daily basis auto-updates.
  - carapace 9y ago
    > “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Couldn't find anything specific in re: auto-updates though...

lisper 9y ago

I have an iPhone 4S running iOS 7 (jailbroken of course) and an original MBP retina running Mavericks. I don't update them because the risk of updating is higher than the risk of not updating. Right now everything is working, and everything is set up the way I like it. If I don't update, things might break some day, but there is also a greater-than-zero chance that everything will continue to work for quite a while. If I update, those odds drop to zero. Not even a statistical approximation of zero, but actually zero. Updating is just trading one set of risks for a different set of risks. I choose the devil I know.

thinkythought 9y ago
As someone also still rocking the original MBPr, the peak for it software wise is actually El Capitan I really, really wish i had never updated from that. It was faster, smoother, and more stable there than it was before and after. Definitely way better than Mavericks. I push this thing hard with premiere/ableton live/etc too.
- lisper 9y ago
  My main problem with El Cap is that iPhoto won't work any more. I have a huge investment in iPhoto -- tons of curated albums with no way to import them to Photos (what were they thinking?), and no obvious alternative. Also, I absolutely despise the El Cap design. The flat look control widgets and icons, the barely visible grey text, the secret hidden controls that only appear when you mouse over them, it all makes me cringe. (Yes, Mav has a few hidden controls as well, but at least now I know where they all are. If I upgrade, I have to go on the secret control easter egg hunt all over again. Life is too short for that kind of bullshit.)
badpun 9y ago
Aren't you afraid of being hacked? In my case, since I use the phone for 2FA access to bank accounts, I bite the bullet and keep up with the phone upgrade threadmill solely for security purposes.
- 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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DannyB2 9y ago

Going through a "Linux phase"? I started my "Linux phase" in 1999 and have never finished going through that phase.

rconti 9y ago
Apparently the author went through a "Linux phase", yes.
zanny 9y ago
Once you realize how important owning your technology is you never go back!

amelius 9y ago

And the worst part, for me, is that we engineers are inflicting this upon eachother, driven by money and business-types with lock-in business-models. We desperately need a code of conduct for engineers. And/or we need certain types of businessmodel to become outlawed.

isaiahg 9y ago

I agree wholeheartedly with everything except for pocket. I've never had a service like that become so integrated in my life so fast. I don't even use bookmarks anymore, it's just easier to pool it all together and tag it relevantly. The suggested news is astoundingly fine tuned to my interests as well, much more so than other services that claim to do the same thing. It's become my favorite time killer now just to go through my suggested articles. Now if only they can keep from screwing with it and mucking up the great service with updates. They could literally do nothing else to it and I'll be a lifelong user. I'm not optimistic though...

TheRealPomax 9y ago
Do you disagree with the fact that it popped up without notice, or do you disagree with the fact that the person who wrote this article didn't like having it get installed without notice? Because the most important part of this writeup is that it's almost devoid of judgement calls on whether what the updates do are actually good or bad, it's about the lack of control and the lack of any ability to beforehand tell whether it's going to be good or bad. If you love pocket, rock on, but maybe you would have also discovered that if you had been suggested to opt in to it for a few days, to see if you'd like it, rather than it suddenly being not just on your computer, but fully and irrevocably integrated into your web browser. And that maybe is literally that: maybe. We'll never know, because you were never given that option.
- isaiahg 9y ago
  My perception is probably warped by the fact that I used pocket before I moved to firefox. So after I downloaded firefox after years on chrome, it was a very pleasant surprise to see pocket already there. And to me it was an added value. But that makes me wonder, is this just an age old gripe with change in general or does this actually add anything new to the conversation. Will we get articles in the next 10 years about how pocket was better and they don't feel in control of their computers because firefox moved to a new system and changed a menu entry?

enlightenedfool 9y ago

If there are enough people that don't want stuff to happen, it won't happen. Unfortunately you are in a minority. People do have power and choice.

TheRealPomax 9y ago
That is a statement I would really love for you to investigate the validity of, because there is nothing in the real world that supports that as a universal claim. If an industry has an established pattern and the only people who want that pattern to change have no influence (for instance, "not buying a cell phone" is not an option, whether you live in the US or rural Vietnam) then it doesn't matter how many people "want" that change, they have no leverage to effect it.

brwsr 9y ago

I have a HP zbook laptop that cost me about 3500 euro's. Recently I changed some trivial settings in the BIOS. After I saved and reboot the laptop hung at the bios stage. There was no way to get back into the bios and the keyboard was blinking a code that I had to contact HP. They had to replace the entire motherboard due to a corrupted BIOS. So it was caused by a bug? The repair cost were about 800 euro's..

scarface74 9y ago

I can choose whether apps auto update on iOS devices but more importantly, when I download something on my computer, I have no control of what the app does. On my iOS device, I can be somewhat assured that it's going to be somewhat trapped in a sandbox and only be allowed to do what I specifically give it permission to do. I wish that Apple would give you an option to not allow an app to access the internet and not just disallow the use of mobile data.

deleted 9y ago
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jurschreuder 9y ago

First you had the motherboard, processor and ram. Now they are on one board. 3x less control. Plus you want a super slim design so you cannot get a desktop anymore. Actually you've never been more in control of your own hardware. Tiny teams make their own computer like the Raspberry Pi now.

jrs95 9y ago
Yeah, it seems like the name is a little misleading. The reason for "I've never felt less in control of my own hardware" is the software for the most part.

batmanbury 9y ago

Apple won't even let me delete auto-downloaded iOS updates anymore. They just download when I'm not paying attention, in the background, and take up anywhere from 500mb to 1gb of hard drive space, forever. Unless of course, I update.

makecheck 9y ago

When obtaining new apps or devices, you can’t tell if it is a worthwhile investment because it could break in any number of ways. For your money, are you buying 2 weeks of functionality or 5 years of it? It’s not even enough to have a reputable seller because good apps are sold to terrible companies that ruin them later, or the developer just decides to add new money-making schemes later. It seems that we need more guarantees (legally enforceable, i.e. you said you wouldn’t update your gizmo to do X but you did so I get compensation).

neves 9y ago

Now I fell that I can't buy a piece of hardware or install a software that doesn't install an server and an update service. My powerful desktop machine has dozens of services, from Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Razer, Logitech, etc. I must turn them all off by hand.

oblib 9y ago

Yeah, I feel that too. After pressing the "later" button every time I picked up my iPhone for a few weeks Apple quit asking and updated the "iOS" this past month. It has "new features" they keep telling me I need and I've been pressing buttons to ignore their "Learn how to use the new..." prompts since then. With the exception of security updates I'd like very much if Apple left my phone alone but it's not really "my phone". I just have a license to use it and it says they can make changes to it. The way that's been working for me does not entice me to buy new phones from Apple.

zanny 9y ago

This is why I go out of my way to only buy phones that are going to be very well supported by LineageOS for a long time. You can go Google-less on such devices if you want. The only real limitation is that you cannot do anything about the super-privileged proprietary modem that simultaneously can spy on you at any time that also prevents you from running newer kernels on your hardware because of how evil every Android vendor is with their proprietary bits. At least there is finally momentum to kill the ME / SP backdoors on desktops. Its going to be much harder to do that on mobile since the only way to use cellular networks is through these proprietary black box modems.

wozer 9y ago

Especially nice when the updates break your computer, as it happened for a lot of people with the Spectre mitigations. I dread the Internet of Things.

codedokode 9y ago

New version of Skype RT and Opera Browser have no option to disable automatic updates. Probably they understand that nobody wants their updates that only bring new bugs and more ads.

seorphates 9y ago

It's an interesting (but mostly depressing) problem. The insistence that "others must be in control of what you own" doesn't really sit well with me, at all. I won't drive a phone without root, for instance. Otherwise the plethora of updates I have sitting around not being updated would do nothing but eat data with garbage updates with naught but a new roll of advertisements and, if you're unlucky, new garbage access requests. Update the os? Yeah, no. Not on your watch, at least. A firewall, for instance, is a basic necessity. Even the crude android flavors. It includes the ability to lock out your "vendors" selectively and accurately. My build is, hm, approaching it's fourth year, I think. No auto updates save for select apps. No complaints. No surprises. But I'm special, I don't do "phone for fun" and so have a fairly limited and hardened short list of requirements. The most annoying thing on android is Google XXANY - by a wide, wide margin. I'll be itching to build a google-go-around on my next handset, for certain. Save all those apps you like, for sure, I still depend on side-loading quite a few that have since gone by the wayside. At this juncture I have to take absolutely every bit of control that I can get my filthy paws wrapped around.

PascLeRasc 9y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I just reactivated my old Android phone yesterday for fun and as soon as I put the sim card in the phone started blowing up with notifications about old voicemails, ones I never saw on my iPhone I had just had it in. There were about a dozen voicemails from the past six months from jobs I had applied to and heard nothing back from, or had a preliminary phone interview with, asking me to call them back to schedule something. I mentioned it to my sister, who moved from Android to iPhone the same time I did, and she did the same thing and found a bunch of voicemails from a college she's recently applied to asking if she can send them some piece of paperwork. It's so frustrating that we didn't know that these voicemails existed. I think the fundamental problem is that to make these technical products like mobile OS's and email apps you need to be so far into tech that you can't really imagine what it's like to be a casual user. This is why I don't consider software engineering to be on the same tier as other disciplines of engineering. Yes, civil engineers make bridges, but they use them in daily life exactly the same as regular people do - the same goes for electrical engineers and power in the home, and mechanical engineers and vacuums/air conditioners/bicycles. When you make software, you look at all software differently and you lose the perspective of a regular person.

v1nc 9y ago

First thing I thought after reading the headline was "another windows user complaining about updates" and i think that's just how it is after reading the whole article. The author shows up some problematic points of the development of handling updates. But if he spend the time thinking about these problems in actively doing something about it, there only would be a few things left to complain about. I'm sure there are some services that are not replaceable and use update methods like mentioned in the article. But this doesn't happens by accident. If the developes of a service choose such update methods, either it's likely that you can see some other problematic decisions the developers made, or the old service you are trying to run is not safe to run and has to be updated before it's safe to run. As i notice such problematic decisions, I avoid these services or search for alternatives before I would complain about it, and this never happend.

rafi_kamal 9y ago

As a developer, it makes sense to break backward-compatibility if only a very small percentage of your user base is using the old version. Supporting old versions often requires extra resources that I can otherwise spend on building new features.

m_fayer 9y ago

The GDPR is going in the right direction by creating a "bill of rights" for your data, so ownership is firmly delineated and all 3rd party use of data revolves around clear revokable granular consent. What we need now is a "bill of rights" defining and preserving the notion of ownership for digital devices. Part of that should be that the device should only do what it's explicitly asked to do. Updates should be opt-in in nearly all cases, and mandatory updates should meet stringent requirements similar to vaccines. That is, only to combat major threats that apply to users as a group.

nofunsir 9y ago

I thought something was fishy at google images today! What a shame.

PricelessValue 9y ago

That's exactly how I feel about software ever since I got acquainted with windows 10. Do you best to remove all the junk. Then they keep reinstalling their "malware" until they finally remove the option of disabling or removing their malware. It feels like we are losing more control and access over tech - both software and hardware. Some companies are trying their best to turn tech into a black box which we aren't allowed to peer into.

true_tuna 9y ago

The real issue is loss of control. “Ask me again later” is dehumanizing because it robs the user of agency. I can’t imagine how a forced windows ten update would have felt. Studies have shown (not to mention common sense) that a feeling of lack of agency is depressing. I recently quit the Mac OS after 20 years of rabid fandom, over the feeling that I wasn’t the one in charge of my Mac. Linux still lets me own my gear and I have to say that a few unpolished areas are worth the renewed sense of agency. Unfortunately there’s no user positive answer for mobile. Android is even worse than iOS. Maybe the black phone will free us from this insanity and put the user first again.