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You raise an interesting point about what our place as software developers is. We continue to deliver solutions that allow people to have their money, identitie

You raise an interesting point about what our place as software developers is. We continue to deliver solutions that allow people to have their money, identities, etc, stolen. It’s not all of us, all the time, but our culture is not about building the most bulletproof of solutions (to put it nicely; some of us build things that actively bad for society). Other engineering cultures are much stricter with their quality control, and restrictions on use are part of that. Is requiring certified electrical wiring that much different from a “walled garden”? Some people tinker at the edges of their home setup, but you’d probably be pretty worried if you found out your average neighbor had rewired their whole house on their own following some lifehack they found online. Computers are connected in a different way than neighboring houses, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t affected by the decisions of your digitally-close acquaintances (from worms and botnets down to simple email/contact harvesting). That’s not to say the world hasn’t benefitted greatly from software choosing velocity over robustness; other technologies have followed similar early arcs, causing damage before they matured. Maybe we’re at the point where limiting choice is simply one of our least-bad strategies for most people? For what it’s worth, I am pretty confident that the vast majority of people want computing appliances and not tools (why would computers be any different from any other consumer good?), so I find it highly unlikely that the pro-tinkering arguments apply outside of a tiny proportion of users. I definitely don’t mean to imply that this is the only way, but it seems like there’s already a spectrum of choices for consumers and sometimes it feels like we’re arguing to narrow the less “open” end of that spectrum because we’re projecting ourselves onto the whole population.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago
>Is requiring certified electrical wiring that much different from a “walled garden”? Yes it is very different, because those certifications are limited to basic safety whereas Apple's restrictions are a wild mix of security protections, paternalism (e.g the porn ban), protecting their business model, and staying in the good graces of authoritarian regimes. If Apple really cares about security they should not blur the lines between security and unrelated issues.
saurik 6y ago
Having regulations around electrical wiring or plumbing or medicine or whatever is a group decision to have a public body that provides such certifications that anyone can join. This is very very different from your architect saying that the only person who can ever provide electrical wiring for your home is them, because they designed your building and having someone else modify the wiring would be an unsafe violation of the terms of service on your home. Like, the argument here is kind of ridiculous as it means that you sometimes can't even get safe software because the one company authorized to provide software decided to lock everyone else out and then just didn't care. FWIW, I am actually very very PRO regulation of the software industry... but I'm very very ANTI companies deciding that they, alone, get to decide what everyone can do, whether it be build new features, fix bugs, or introspect behavior... in fact, I think that's one of the most important things that should be regulated AGAINST: everyone should have a right to repair, maintain, and understand the things they buy, and that right should allow them to outsource that to a third party (so they can hire a repairperson, a developer, or a security researcher).

fauigerzigerk 6y ago

>Is requiring certified electrical wiring that much different from a “walled garden”? Yes it is very different, because those certifications are limited to basic safety whereas Apple's restrictions are a wild mix of security protections, paternalism (e.g the porn ban), protecting their business model, and staying in the good graces of authoritarian regimes. If Apple really cares about security they should not blur the lines between security and unrelated issues.

saurik 6y ago

Having regulations around electrical wiring or plumbing or medicine or whatever is a group decision to have a public body that provides such certifications that anyone can join. This is very very different from your architect saying that the only person who can ever provide electrical wiring for your home is them, because they designed your building and having someone else modify the wiring would be an unsafe violation of the terms of service on your home. Like, the argument here is kind of ridiculous as it means that you sometimes can't even get safe software because the one company authorized to provide software decided to lock everyone else out and then just didn't care. FWIW, I am actually very very PRO regulation of the software industry... but I'm very very ANTI companies deciding that they, alone, get to decide what everyone can do, whether it be build new features, fix bugs, or introspect behavior... in fact, I think that's one of the most important things that should be regulated AGAINST: everyone should have a right to repair, maintain, and understand the things they buy, and that right should allow them to outsource that to a third party (so they can hire a repairperson, a developer, or a security researcher).