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The market only acts fairly when the product is a commodity. The time for the market to react for a product with the complexity of a mac is decades. As the eco

The market only acts fairly when the product is a commodity. The time for the market to react for a product with the complexity of a mac is decades. As the ecosystem grows, the cost of switching increases. Therefore market starts acting more and more inefficiently. This is why countries have state intervention in such cases. And anti trust exists. If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper, I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy. No such choice within the budget exists, and if a company has a monopoly on the ecosystem, then the market cannot react when held hostage. The cost to transition to a different ecosystem is thousands of $'s when you've been using a mac your entire life. It's not like you'd want to relearn many things when you get older, perhaps the sunk cost fallacy as many would define it. It's a bundled deal, it's not like you can pick the parts you like and throw away the ones you don't like it would be in an efficient market. If even someone like me cannot be bothered to move to more privacy friendly platforms, then I don't have hope for other people. It's just not worth it. Until the majority face the consequences of their apathy, any action you take is fruitless. Let them taste the pain, then offer the solution. I know I can be tracked. So what? I can't verify the silicon in my device, can I? Gotta trust someone, maybe blockchain will solve the problem of trust among humans, in a verifiable way.

_puk 6y ago
Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it does occur to me just how many kindles I see with ads. Is there any data released on ads Vs no ads versions? That's the closest comparator I can think of.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  I think its worthwhile trying to test the hypothesys, but i dont think anyone takes privacy on a book reader with the same passion as they do on a mobile phone.
- paublyrne 6y ago
  > Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it does occur to me just how many kindles I see with ads. True, although the price difference for the Kindle is about 20%. If the discount on a Macbook Air was similar, I'm sure it would be well subscribed.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    The discount for what? There are no ads on the Mac.
    - paublyrne 6y ago
      > If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper OP was comparing the Kindle with ads discount to an imaginary Mac without privacy discount.
      - Spooky23 6y ago
        It sounds like one of the weirder "freedom" arguments. Who is going to pay extra for a Mac without key security features?
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  > Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it does occur to me just how many kindles I see with ads. > Is there any data released on ads Vs no ads versions? Do they offer a tracking vs no tracking option too? The absence of adverts does not mean the absence of tracking.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - deleted 6y ago
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  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    For the non-tablet Kindle, I'm not sure if the differentiation between tracking and ads makes a lot of sense. You (well, I at least) already use Amazon to buy the books that are on my Kindle. I guess they could track how fast I read them. But that seems trivial compared to already knowing what I'm reading.
  - derefr 6y ago
    The tracking is somewhat inherent to the software — syncing what page you've read up to in a book between devices (a feature many people find crucial!), cannot really be divorced from having the raw data to create server-side metrics about people's reading habits. Even if you E2E-encrypt each user's data for cloud storage and have devices join a P2P-keybag, ala iMessage, consider the ad-tech department of your same company as if they were an external adversary for a moment. What would an external adversary do in that situation? Traffic analysis of updates to the cloud-side E2E-encrypted bundle. That alone would still be enough to create a useful advertising profile of the customer's reading habits, since your app is single-purpose — the only reason for that encrypted bundle to be updated, is if the user is flipping pages! And, together with the fact that your ad-tech department also knows what books the customer is reading (because your device can only be used to read books you sell, and thus books you have transaction records for selling them), this department can probably guess what the user is reading anyway. No matter how much your hardware-product department tries to hide it.
    - 6y ago
- buckminster 6y ago
  I bought a kindle. It didn't have ads. I did a factory reset. Now it does. This is the first time I've heard about a choice.
- tzs 6y ago
  I've never had a non-eInk Kindle, so maybe it is different for them, but I've had eInk Kindles both with and without ads. My first was without ads. Since you can add the "without ads" option to a "with ads" Kindle later by paying the difference, I bought my second with ads to see how bad it was. Here are the only differences I've noticed: • With ads, the sleep screen displays some artwork from a book Amazon is selling [1] and some text suggesting you come to the store and buy books, • The home screen has an ad at the bottom. Since when I'm not using the Kindle the sleep screen is hidden behind the cover, and when I am using it I'm somewhere other than the home screen 99.9% of the time, I never saw any reason to add the "without ads" option, and when it was time to replace that Kindle I again went with ads. I suspect that the vast majority of people that buy the "no ads" option up front do so because when they see "with ads" they are envisioning a web-like experience where the ads are all over the place and intrusive and animated and distracting. [1] Usually a romance novel for me, even though I've never bought any romance novels from Amazon, nor anything even remotely like a romance novel. In fact, I don't think any book I've bought from them even had any romantic relations between any of its characters.
  - heelix 6y ago
    Heh. With ads, this was always one of the ways I could embarrass my Bride. You are reading '50 Shades of Grey' or whatever trashy novel shows up on the cover of her gadget. Always makes her blush.
  - dunnevens 6y ago
    On the eink kindle, I paid for ad removal just in general principles. I probably could have lived with the lock screen ads, but the home screen ad was unacceptable. Vast majority of my book purchases over the past ten years have been ebooks. I’ve gone a bit sentimental in thinking of the book list as my library. And I didn’t want a billboard of any sort in my library. Real or virtual. Have a feeling there are at least dozens of us who are that allergic to ads. I have also purchased a Fire during a Black Friday sale. Got rid of the ads on that one too, but for free since some nice person over at xda made an automated process for that. On a side note, with Termux it isn’t entirely horrible as a 7 inch laptop when paired with a hinged keyboard case. A portable system at a similar price to a Pi.
- lambda_obrien 6y ago
  I wish i could pay for no ads on everything. If there are only like three ad networks for 99 percent of the internet, and they can track me easily, and they know how much I'm worth to them, can't they just email me every month and say, "if you want a no-Doubleclick ad experience next month, it will cost you $4.65, click here to pay." Not like they aren't already doing the tracking, and this would increase the value to their ad customers since they wouldn't pay for views from people who don't want to see ads.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  They sold a lot of the ad enabled tablets one black friday for like $80 which seemed like a good deal at the time despite not running google apps which most people desire, having ads on the lock screen, and having the worlds shittiest home screen app for android. I bought one for my wife. If you are lazy or not inclined you can actually pay after the fact to remove ads. Alternatively you can deliberately break the ad functionality, install google apps, and android lets you change your home screen. 1 and 2 worked but they broke the ability to set your own home so the fix is a hacky app to hijack the home button to show the right home of your choosing. This worked for over a year then they repeatedly blacklisted such apps, then it worked but with a 2 second delay which is basically horrible and extensions started crashing the gmail app. Worst piece of shit ever.
  - hyperdimension 6y ago
    > having the worlds shittiest home screen app for android...Worst piece of shit ever. > I bought one for my wife. Aww, that's so sweet! ;)
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      Prior experience had led me to believe that crappy default experience was relatively common in Android but easy to rectify. Mea culpa but her replacement is so nice I got one too. Moto g7 powers.
triangleman 6y ago
>maybe blockchain will solve the problem of trust among humans Absolutely not. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...
- hanniabu 6y ago
  There's so much wrong with this post I'm not even sure where to start. Literally almost every paragraph starts something untrue. The whole article is written from a false understanding.
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    If you’re going to claim Schneier is wrong on crypto stuff, you’ll want to bring a suitcase of evidence along if you want people to take your claim seriously.
    - h_anna_h 6y ago
      Well, he does think that one is unable to establish the integrity and authenticity of a message by using DKIM, so... He does seem to have a weird cult of personality around him but I can't really understand why. He has been irrelevant for quite a while now.
    - alwillis 6y ago
      If you’re going to claim Schneier is wrong on crypto stuff, you’ll want to bring a suitcase of evidence along… How about $348 billion dollars that says he's wrong about his take on Bitcoin? Look, I get it. I respect Schneier's knowledge on encryption but he is wrong about blockchains and about Bitcoin in particular. But he wouldn't be the first establishment technologist/economist/politician to be wrong about Bitcoin. As I write this, the market cap of Bitcoin is a little over $348 billion dollars [1]; there's no way it gets to this valuation if its distributed trust model didn't work. He's making social and process arguments, not technical ones. [1]: https://bitbo.io https://bitbo.io
0xWTF 6y ago
> The time for the market to react for a product with the complexity of a mac is decades. This makes me think of the 2 slit experiment as applied to basketballs. There is a period of time that decisions need to be properly considered, presumably simple decisions need little time, and complex decisions need more time. There is also a period of time that is required to make a decision, and a level at which the decision is made. There are lowly software engineers making decisions like this, some of which may not even percolate to daily stand-up, yet will require the Supreme Court to unpack 10 years from now. And no one really knows. It's like trying to pass a basketball through a slit. Yes, there's a theoretical interference pattern, and you can calculate it, but you can't do the experiment because you can't pass the basketball through a slit that small (in the case of basketballs, if I recall, the largest slit is angstroms if not smaller). So in software development, You've got huge uncertainty in the societal implications of some decisions about what information you're going to pass over the network, but you can't even get them all through daily stand-up, let alone to Congress or the Supreme Court. Somewhere along the way, some of them end up on Hacker News with people mis-quoting Eric Hoffer, “Every great security decision starts off as a movement, turns into a business, and ends up as a racket.”
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > It's like trying to pass a basketball through a slit. Yes, there's a theoretical interference pattern, and you can calculate it, but you can't do the experiment because you can't pass the basketball through a slit that small (in the case of basketballs, if I recall, the largest slit is angstroms if not smaller). I know this doesn't have too much to do with the core of your post, but I want to mention it nevertheless: QM does not imply that there is an interference pattern for basketballs. There might or might not exist one, but we would need an answer to the question of measurement to predict one way or the other.
erikpukinskis 6y ago
> The market only acts fairly when the product is a commodity. The market only acts fairly in the window after a product is commoditized and before regulatory capture happens. And in some cases that window is closed before it opens.
specialist 6y ago
"The market only acts fairly when the product is a commodity." Based on context (rest of your comment), did you mean "substitute good" instead of "commodity"?
wkrsz 6y ago
I imagine it more as a tragedy of commons situation. I don't care that much about my privacy right now to sacrifice a lot of convenience. However if enough consumers rejected products that encroach on privacy, we’d get privacy and keep most of convenience.
kelnos 6y ago
> If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper, I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy. I'm curious about this, and there are some ways we could test it if we had access to sales data. Amazon sells a Kindle that displays ads on the screen while the device is asleep, and a more expensive model without ads. How many people buy the one without ads? (I'm assuming the device sends back a record as to what ads were seen or interacted with, which has privacy implications.) Hulu has a plan that shows adverts when you watch a show, and a more expensive plan that doesn't. How many people pay for the more expensive plan? More generally, what's the price spread that would cause most people to flip from buying one version or the other? To use your example, I'm sure most people would pay for a "mac with privacy" if the difference (on a multi-hundred-dollar or $1k+ product) was only $10. But what if the difference was $50? $100? And that's not even the exact same example, since a "mac with privacy" might look, to the average user, to be identical in operation to the "mac without privacy". Paying more to avoid advertisements has a clear impact on the experience of using a device/service. But knowing that your $X-more-expensive mac isn't sending application launch data to Apple doesn't change your day-to-day experience much.
- angry_octet 6y ago
  Apple buyers are in the premium price segment. Kindle Fire or whatever is for the most price sensitive segment. Companies pay lots of money per user to secure their computer work. They could save lots of licencing by running obsolete software. Companies that do that are hacked, and sometimes mortally wounded. I'm not so sure users price privacy so cheaply.
Supermancho 6y ago
> I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy. What "privacy" means here is a huge issue. I would not agree that this would be the case. I think you'll find the majority looking to save 10$, which is almost nothing for many people but a non-trivial amount for most in the US.

_puk 6y ago

Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it does occur to me just how many kindles I see with ads. Is there any data released on ads Vs no ads versions? That's the closest comparator I can think of.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
I think its worthwhile trying to test the hypothesys, but i dont think anyone takes privacy on a book reader with the same passion as they do on a mobile phone.
paublyrne 6y ago
> Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it does occur to me just how many kindles I see with ads. True, although the price difference for the Kindle is about 20%. If the discount on a Macbook Air was similar, I'm sure it would be well subscribed.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  The discount for what? There are no ads on the Mac.
  - paublyrne 6y ago
    > If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper OP was comparing the Kindle with ads discount to an imaginary Mac without privacy discount.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      It sounds like one of the weirder "freedom" arguments. Who is going to pay extra for a Mac without key security features?
oarsinsync 6y ago
> Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it does occur to me just how many kindles I see with ads. > Is there any data released on ads Vs no ads versions? Do they offer a tracking vs no tracking option too? The absence of adverts does not mean the absence of tracking.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  For the non-tablet Kindle, I'm not sure if the differentiation between tracking and ads makes a lot of sense. You (well, I at least) already use Amazon to buy the books that are on my Kindle. I guess they could track how fast I read them. But that seems trivial compared to already knowing what I'm reading.
- derefr 6y ago
  The tracking is somewhat inherent to the software — syncing what page you've read up to in a book between devices (a feature many people find crucial!), cannot really be divorced from having the raw data to create server-side metrics about people's reading habits. Even if you E2E-encrypt each user's data for cloud storage and have devices join a P2P-keybag, ala iMessage, consider the ad-tech department of your same company as if they were an external adversary for a moment. What would an external adversary do in that situation? Traffic analysis of updates to the cloud-side E2E-encrypted bundle. That alone would still be enough to create a useful advertising profile of the customer's reading habits, since your app is single-purpose — the only reason for that encrypted bundle to be updated, is if the user is flipping pages! And, together with the fact that your ad-tech department also knows what books the customer is reading (because your device can only be used to read books you sell, and thus books you have transaction records for selling them), this department can probably guess what the user is reading anyway. No matter how much your hardware-product department tries to hide it.
  - 6y ago
buckminster 6y ago
I bought a kindle. It didn't have ads. I did a factory reset. Now it does. This is the first time I've heard about a choice.
tzs 6y ago
I've never had a non-eInk Kindle, so maybe it is different for them, but I've had eInk Kindles both with and without ads. My first was without ads. Since you can add the "without ads" option to a "with ads" Kindle later by paying the difference, I bought my second with ads to see how bad it was. Here are the only differences I've noticed: • With ads, the sleep screen displays some artwork from a book Amazon is selling [1] and some text suggesting you come to the store and buy books, • The home screen has an ad at the bottom. Since when I'm not using the Kindle the sleep screen is hidden behind the cover, and when I am using it I'm somewhere other than the home screen 99.9% of the time, I never saw any reason to add the "without ads" option, and when it was time to replace that Kindle I again went with ads. I suspect that the vast majority of people that buy the "no ads" option up front do so because when they see "with ads" they are envisioning a web-like experience where the ads are all over the place and intrusive and animated and distracting. [1] Usually a romance novel for me, even though I've never bought any romance novels from Amazon, nor anything even remotely like a romance novel. In fact, I don't think any book I've bought from them even had any romantic relations between any of its characters.
- heelix 6y ago
  Heh. With ads, this was always one of the ways I could embarrass my Bride. You are reading '50 Shades of Grey' or whatever trashy novel shows up on the cover of her gadget. Always makes her blush.
- dunnevens 6y ago
  On the eink kindle, I paid for ad removal just in general principles. I probably could have lived with the lock screen ads, but the home screen ad was unacceptable. Vast majority of my book purchases over the past ten years have been ebooks. I’ve gone a bit sentimental in thinking of the book list as my library. And I didn’t want a billboard of any sort in my library. Real or virtual. Have a feeling there are at least dozens of us who are that allergic to ads. I have also purchased a Fire during a Black Friday sale. Got rid of the ads on that one too, but for free since some nice person over at xda made an automated process for that. On a side note, with Termux it isn’t entirely horrible as a 7 inch laptop when paired with a hinged keyboard case. A portable system at a similar price to a Pi.
lambda_obrien 6y ago
I wish i could pay for no ads on everything. If there are only like three ad networks for 99 percent of the internet, and they can track me easily, and they know how much I'm worth to them, can't they just email me every month and say, "if you want a no-Doubleclick ad experience next month, it will cost you $4.65, click here to pay." Not like they aren't already doing the tracking, and this would increase the value to their ad customers since they wouldn't pay for views from people who don't want to see ads.
michaelmrose 6y ago
They sold a lot of the ad enabled tablets one black friday for like $80 which seemed like a good deal at the time despite not running google apps which most people desire, having ads on the lock screen, and having the worlds shittiest home screen app for android. I bought one for my wife. If you are lazy or not inclined you can actually pay after the fact to remove ads. Alternatively you can deliberately break the ad functionality, install google apps, and android lets you change your home screen. 1 and 2 worked but they broke the ability to set your own home so the fix is a hacky app to hijack the home button to show the right home of your choosing. This worked for over a year then they repeatedly blacklisted such apps, then it worked but with a 2 second delay which is basically horrible and extensions started crashing the gmail app. Worst piece of shit ever.
- hyperdimension 6y ago
  > having the worlds shittiest home screen app for android...Worst piece of shit ever. > I bought one for my wife. Aww, that's so sweet! ;)
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Prior experience had led me to believe that crappy default experience was relatively common in Android but easy to rectify. Mea culpa but her replacement is so nice I got one too. Moto g7 powers.

triangleman 6y ago

>maybe blockchain will solve the problem of trust among humans Absolutely not. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...

hanniabu 6y ago
There's so much wrong with this post I'm not even sure where to start. Literally almost every paragraph starts something untrue. The whole article is written from a false understanding.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  If you’re going to claim Schneier is wrong on crypto stuff, you’ll want to bring a suitcase of evidence along if you want people to take your claim seriously.
  - h_anna_h 6y ago
    Well, he does think that one is unable to establish the integrity and authenticity of a message by using DKIM, so... He does seem to have a weird cult of personality around him but I can't really understand why. He has been irrelevant for quite a while now.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    If you’re going to claim Schneier is wrong on crypto stuff, you’ll want to bring a suitcase of evidence along… How about $348 billion dollars that says he's wrong about his take on Bitcoin? Look, I get it. I respect Schneier's knowledge on encryption but he is wrong about blockchains and about Bitcoin in particular. But he wouldn't be the first establishment technologist/economist/politician to be wrong about Bitcoin. As I write this, the market cap of Bitcoin is a little over $348 billion dollars [1]; there's no way it gets to this valuation if its distributed trust model didn't work. He's making social and process arguments, not technical ones. [1]: https://bitbo.io https://bitbo.io

0xWTF 6y ago

> The time for the market to react for a product with the complexity of a mac is decades. This makes me think of the 2 slit experiment as applied to basketballs. There is a period of time that decisions need to be properly considered, presumably simple decisions need little time, and complex decisions need more time. There is also a period of time that is required to make a decision, and a level at which the decision is made. There are lowly software engineers making decisions like this, some of which may not even percolate to daily stand-up, yet will require the Supreme Court to unpack 10 years from now. And no one really knows. It's like trying to pass a basketball through a slit. Yes, there's a theoretical interference pattern, and you can calculate it, but you can't do the experiment because you can't pass the basketball through a slit that small (in the case of basketballs, if I recall, the largest slit is angstroms if not smaller). So in software development, You've got huge uncertainty in the societal implications of some decisions about what information you're going to pass over the network, but you can't even get them all through daily stand-up, let alone to Congress or the Supreme Court. Somewhere along the way, some of them end up on Hacker News with people mis-quoting Eric Hoffer, “Every great security decision starts off as a movement, turns into a business, and ends up as a racket.”

tsimionescu 6y ago
> It's like trying to pass a basketball through a slit. Yes, there's a theoretical interference pattern, and you can calculate it, but you can't do the experiment because you can't pass the basketball through a slit that small (in the case of basketballs, if I recall, the largest slit is angstroms if not smaller). I know this doesn't have too much to do with the core of your post, but I want to mention it nevertheless: QM does not imply that there is an interference pattern for basketballs. There might or might not exist one, but we would need an answer to the question of measurement to predict one way or the other.

erikpukinskis 6y ago

> The market only acts fairly when the product is a commodity. The market only acts fairly in the window after a product is commoditized and before regulatory capture happens. And in some cases that window is closed before it opens.

specialist 6y ago

"The market only acts fairly when the product is a commodity." Based on context (rest of your comment), did you mean "substitute good" instead of "commodity"?

wkrsz 6y ago

I imagine it more as a tragedy of commons situation. I don't care that much about my privacy right now to sacrifice a lot of convenience. However if enough consumers rejected products that encroach on privacy, we’d get privacy and keep most of convenience.

kelnos 6y ago

> If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper, I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy. I'm curious about this, and there are some ways we could test it if we had access to sales data. Amazon sells a Kindle that displays ads on the screen while the device is asleep, and a more expensive model without ads. How many people buy the one without ads? (I'm assuming the device sends back a record as to what ads were seen or interacted with, which has privacy implications.) Hulu has a plan that shows adverts when you watch a show, and a more expensive plan that doesn't. How many people pay for the more expensive plan? More generally, what's the price spread that would cause most people to flip from buying one version or the other? To use your example, I'm sure most people would pay for a "mac with privacy" if the difference (on a multi-hundred-dollar or $1k+ product) was only $10. But what if the difference was $50? $100? And that's not even the exact same example, since a "mac with privacy" might look, to the average user, to be identical in operation to the "mac without privacy". Paying more to avoid advertisements has a clear impact on the experience of using a device/service. But knowing that your $X-more-expensive mac isn't sending application launch data to Apple doesn't change your day-to-day experience much.

angry_octet 6y ago
Apple buyers are in the premium price segment. Kindle Fire or whatever is for the most price sensitive segment. Companies pay lots of money per user to secure their computer work. They could save lots of licencing by running obsolete software. Companies that do that are hacked, and sometimes mortally wounded. I'm not so sure users price privacy so cheaply.

Supermancho 6y ago

> I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy. What "privacy" means here is a huge issue. I would not agree that this would be the case. I think you'll find the majority looking to save 10$, which is almost nothing for many people but a non-trivial amount for most in the US.