5 ms·

I don’t know. Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we have devices that permit “mucking about” but also when configured appropriately allow us to ignore the low le

I don’t know. Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we have devices that permit “mucking about” but also when configured appropriately allow us to ignore the low level details and muck about with higher level stuff? They don’t have to be mutually exclusive despite “bt whole home wifi app has detected this is a jailbroken device and for your safety will not run”. It’s my wifi, it’s my phone!

khazhoux 5y ago
You literally have both, and more. Right now, I have a nearly uncrackable walled-garden iphone on my desk. And a mac laptop running XCode (learning about Metal programming), and at the same time running an Amiga emulator (tinkering with 68k assembly), and a windows gaming laptop next to it, and a breadboard on the floor with a pile of resistors and capacitors and transistors. So what's the problem again?
- tpm 5y ago
  The problem is the kid will be given the iPhone and not the breadboard.
  - simonh 5y ago
    For a communications device they will take into school, that they rely on for school work, communicating with parents and teachers, and with each other on social media and contains a lot of private information, that is probably the right choice. An open system with zero security and no guard rails is simply not appropriate for that use.
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      How about an open system WITH security and guard rails that can be enabled/disabled by, I dunno, the user who paid for it? It's not either/or. Parents can be the guardians of their children's phone, enabling all the security Apple pretends to enable with a password. The power of Apples marketing is astonishing.
  - mft_ 5y ago
    And most kids given an Amiga or a 286 wouldn’t hack or code it - they’d just load up games.
    - khazhoux 5y ago
      Exactly this. My brother only played games on our C64 and Amiga, while I did nothing but program on it.
      - phillc73 5y ago
        Games were in some way 99% of my use of the Apple IIc we had, which was my first computer. Original Bard's Tale in glorious green screen. Good times. However, I also spent a lot of time painstakingly copying BASIC games, line by line from magazines, then figuring out how to expand upon them for additional features. Gaming was just the gateway drug.
    - tpm 5y ago
      Sure, but the possibility was there. I was given a ZX Spectrum clone and started coding, my brother only played games. I am not sure I would work in IT if that didn't happen. We were pretty much poor by today's standards and probably could not afford another such device, never mind that we would not know what to buy (as nobody in my family had any IT experience and there was no IT shop in our small town).
  - mosselman 5y ago
    Where are the parents? Who is giving kids phone instead of something else? Also, why should kids tinker with computers if they can explore art by painting or music by learning an instrument or literature by reading? What makes it important for them to use Unix rather than something that works fine the way it is while maintaining some standard of UX? If kids show an interest in computers, they can just install unix on some computer like a raspberry pi and tinker on that.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      Kids might not even know they have an interest in engineering (which is not the same as "interest in computers"). Back in 90s, a lot of kids, myself included, found out that we like that stuff because we were inadvertently exposed to it while playing our video games, and, later on, surfing the early Web. My first programming language was MS-DOS batch files, simply because it was readily available.
    - tpm 5y ago
      > Where are the parents? Who is giving kids phone instead of something else? The parents might not know better. > Also, why should kids tinker with computers if they can explore art by painting or music by learning an instrument or literature by reading? They should be given the chance to do so, as they should be given the chance to explore art or craft or a lot of other things. > What makes it important for them to use Unix I don't see how mentioning Unix is relevant here. They should be given the opportunity to play and tinker with the devices, not only the preplanned path with games on the devices, that is all.
      - mosselman 5y ago
        But they DO have the chance. They can boot some VM with Ubuntu or get a raspberry pi or a nodemcu and tinker away. They don't have to be able to tinker on EVERY device. When my kids reach the age that they need a phone, probably sooner than I want to admit right now, I'd rather have them use some restricted device with some level of security checks in place for apps, so an iPhone, than something that is totally open which would make them vulnerable to being phished or persuaded to install viruses, etc. "Best way to play fortnite 10, download here".
- StavrosK 5y ago
  The problem is that there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to disable your iPhone's security and mess around with it if that's what you want. Apple owns the device, not you.
  - vosper 5y ago
    If you open Chrome devtools on Facebook there’s a huge red warning saying “if someone told you to do this they are trying to scam you and steal your account!” So there may be a good reason why Apple don’t want this to happen, given that essentially everything is on your phone these days. There’s still Android
    - StavrosK 5y ago
      > So there may be a good reason why Apple don’t want this to happen Yes, this is why the phones are locked by default. This is not at all why the phones aren't unlockable, though. They can be unlockable and still be secure. Apple just doesn't want to give you the choice.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Yes there is. I don't want Facebook or Google to move all their apps to side loading or an alternate store with lax controls and opaque privacy disclosure. I need to use their apps, but I want them to have to satisfy Apple's app store policies. Side landing and alternate stores would cripple the effectiveness of those policies.
    - StavrosK 5y ago
      So the reasoning is "if you allow my phone to be unlocked, so many people will want alternate stores that Facebook and Google will unlist their apps from the App Store and use the alternative stores only, and then they won't be as rigorously reviewed"? Like how you can't get Facebook on the Play Store because it's only available on F-droid on Android, for example? That's certainly... interesting.
      - 5y ago
- eptcyka 5y ago
  It's not untrackable unless you opt out of "FindMy" services and disable bluetooth (disable, rather than disconnect). Why can't I run Xcode on iOS or iPadOS devices? What's the technical limitation? These devices have the capability to render stuff on larger screens wirelessly, and one can connect keyboards to them. The limitation is purely artificial.
- fauigerzigerk 5y ago
  >You literally have both, and more I guess it depends on who "you" are. A lot of kids get exactly one device. Some have to share it with their siblings as well. So I do think it matters whether our most widely used devices are completely locked down or not. It doesn't just matter for kids either. It also matters for democracy how many people only own devices that governments have complete control over. That said, I do think the problem can be exaggerated. People tend to find ways around restrictions. It can even be a motivation for looking more deeply into how things work. And not all of those workarounds are terribly expensive. Ironically, the most expensive devices are also the most locked down.
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    > I guess it depends on who "you" are. A lot of kids get exactly one device. Some have to share it with their siblings as well. So I do think it matters whether our most widely used devices are completely locked down or not. This is true, but RPi Zeros are so cheap and powerful that I think it's much easier for community organisations (schools, scouts, dedicated groups) to start hacking events. The kid who can't get a 10 USD computer and a phone and access to a shared laptop is the kid who couldn't access to shared desktop in the olden days. In those days entry level could be a month's salary for a professional. For the households where every kid has their own laptop, a Pi is accessible. And for those who only have access to single shared machine, the kid today has access to a VM. That means they have options the rest of us didn't have - I couldn't run Linux until I had a paper round, because installing Linux on the family computer was not going to happen. Perhaps one clear advantage to the old world is that in the 1980s and early 1990s, anyone could write an operating system and eventually get something that could do everything their old computer could do. I mean the idea was tractable. It's not like today where even thinking about creating a web browser filled Microsoft and Opera with such dread they gave up. To be clear: I don't think it's all rosy today. But I don't think it's all bleak either. > It also matters for democracy how many people only own devices that governments have complete control over. You are right that there's social implications here, but I think the social concerns are primary and not a consequence of the technical situation. We arrived at this situation because companies decided they own their customers when we have massive social problems mistrust and distrust. This has come on the back of a generation that learnt abominations like a company's only obligation is to its shareholders. If you want to build trustworthy business, you need to maintain the right culture.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  > You literally have both, and more. Seriously. When I was a kid I would have killed to have had easy access to things like Raspberry Pi's, microcontrollers, SGI workstations (which is what the Mac is these days), and a zillion free programming languages. Instead, while I had full access to the family's PC and could learn C and assembly language programming on it (btw I had to pay for those compilers), and learned all about interrupts and writing to VGA registers, I still couldn't do anything super low-level like muck around with the boot sector because my dad needed it for work, the phone system was so locked down that you'd go to jail for "exploring" it, and I had barely any idea how to get started playing around with logic chips because there was nothing like Sparkfun, Adafruit, Hackaday, etc, and Radio Shack in the mid-90s really wasn't much help. There is still room for improvement - yes it would be nice if all the tech we used was both hackable and secure - but geeks who want to tinker are living in a land of plenty right now.
irrational 5y ago
You can? There are tons of kits and circuit boards and parts and everything electronic imaginable available for quick delivery right now. Back in the day we had Radio Shack, but it couldn’t hold a candle to all the circuit boards and electronic components available today. It’s an embarrassment of riches.

khazhoux 5y ago

You literally have both, and more. Right now, I have a nearly uncrackable walled-garden iphone on my desk. And a mac laptop running XCode (learning about Metal programming), and at the same time running an Amiga emulator (tinkering with 68k assembly), and a windows gaming laptop next to it, and a breadboard on the floor with a pile of resistors and capacitors and transistors. So what's the problem again?

tpm 5y ago
The problem is the kid will be given the iPhone and not the breadboard.
- simonh 5y ago
  For a communications device they will take into school, that they rely on for school work, communicating with parents and teachers, and with each other on social media and contains a lot of private information, that is probably the right choice. An open system with zero security and no guard rails is simply not appropriate for that use.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    How about an open system WITH security and guard rails that can be enabled/disabled by, I dunno, the user who paid for it? It's not either/or. Parents can be the guardians of their children's phone, enabling all the security Apple pretends to enable with a password. The power of Apples marketing is astonishing.
- mft_ 5y ago
  And most kids given an Amiga or a 286 wouldn’t hack or code it - they’d just load up games.
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    Exactly this. My brother only played games on our C64 and Amiga, while I did nothing but program on it.
    - phillc73 5y ago
      Games were in some way 99% of my use of the Apple IIc we had, which was my first computer. Original Bard's Tale in glorious green screen. Good times. However, I also spent a lot of time painstakingly copying BASIC games, line by line from magazines, then figuring out how to expand upon them for additional features. Gaming was just the gateway drug.
  - tpm 5y ago
    Sure, but the possibility was there. I was given a ZX Spectrum clone and started coding, my brother only played games. I am not sure I would work in IT if that didn't happen. We were pretty much poor by today's standards and probably could not afford another such device, never mind that we would not know what to buy (as nobody in my family had any IT experience and there was no IT shop in our small town).
- mosselman 5y ago
  Where are the parents? Who is giving kids phone instead of something else? Also, why should kids tinker with computers if they can explore art by painting or music by learning an instrument or literature by reading? What makes it important for them to use Unix rather than something that works fine the way it is while maintaining some standard of UX? If kids show an interest in computers, they can just install unix on some computer like a raspberry pi and tinker on that.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Kids might not even know they have an interest in engineering (which is not the same as "interest in computers"). Back in 90s, a lot of kids, myself included, found out that we like that stuff because we were inadvertently exposed to it while playing our video games, and, later on, surfing the early Web. My first programming language was MS-DOS batch files, simply because it was readily available.
  - tpm 5y ago
    > Where are the parents? Who is giving kids phone instead of something else? The parents might not know better. > Also, why should kids tinker with computers if they can explore art by painting or music by learning an instrument or literature by reading? They should be given the chance to do so, as they should be given the chance to explore art or craft or a lot of other things. > What makes it important for them to use Unix I don't see how mentioning Unix is relevant here. They should be given the opportunity to play and tinker with the devices, not only the preplanned path with games on the devices, that is all.
    - mosselman 5y ago
      But they DO have the chance. They can boot some VM with Ubuntu or get a raspberry pi or a nodemcu and tinker away. They don't have to be able to tinker on EVERY device. When my kids reach the age that they need a phone, probably sooner than I want to admit right now, I'd rather have them use some restricted device with some level of security checks in place for apps, so an iPhone, than something that is totally open which would make them vulnerable to being phished or persuaded to install viruses, etc. "Best way to play fortnite 10, download here".
StavrosK 5y ago
The problem is that there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to disable your iPhone's security and mess around with it if that's what you want. Apple owns the device, not you.
- vosper 5y ago
  If you open Chrome devtools on Facebook there’s a huge red warning saying “if someone told you to do this they are trying to scam you and steal your account!” So there may be a good reason why Apple don’t want this to happen, given that essentially everything is on your phone these days. There’s still Android
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    > So there may be a good reason why Apple don’t want this to happen Yes, this is why the phones are locked by default. This is not at all why the phones aren't unlockable, though. They can be unlockable and still be secure. Apple just doesn't want to give you the choice.
- simonh 5y ago
  Yes there is. I don't want Facebook or Google to move all their apps to side loading or an alternate store with lax controls and opaque privacy disclosure. I need to use their apps, but I want them to have to satisfy Apple's app store policies. Side landing and alternate stores would cripple the effectiveness of those policies.
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    So the reasoning is "if you allow my phone to be unlocked, so many people will want alternate stores that Facebook and Google will unlist their apps from the App Store and use the alternative stores only, and then they won't be as rigorously reviewed"? Like how you can't get Facebook on the Play Store because it's only available on F-droid on Android, for example? That's certainly... interesting.
    - 5y ago
eptcyka 5y ago
It's not untrackable unless you opt out of "FindMy" services and disable bluetooth (disable, rather than disconnect). Why can't I run Xcode on iOS or iPadOS devices? What's the technical limitation? These devices have the capability to render stuff on larger screens wirelessly, and one can connect keyboards to them. The limitation is purely artificial.
fauigerzigerk 5y ago
>You literally have both, and more I guess it depends on who "you" are. A lot of kids get exactly one device. Some have to share it with their siblings as well. So I do think it matters whether our most widely used devices are completely locked down or not. It doesn't just matter for kids either. It also matters for democracy how many people only own devices that governments have complete control over. That said, I do think the problem can be exaggerated. People tend to find ways around restrictions. It can even be a motivation for looking more deeply into how things work. And not all of those workarounds are terribly expensive. Ironically, the most expensive devices are also the most locked down.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > I guess it depends on who "you" are. A lot of kids get exactly one device. Some have to share it with their siblings as well. So I do think it matters whether our most widely used devices are completely locked down or not. This is true, but RPi Zeros are so cheap and powerful that I think it's much easier for community organisations (schools, scouts, dedicated groups) to start hacking events. The kid who can't get a 10 USD computer and a phone and access to a shared laptop is the kid who couldn't access to shared desktop in the olden days. In those days entry level could be a month's salary for a professional. For the households where every kid has their own laptop, a Pi is accessible. And for those who only have access to single shared machine, the kid today has access to a VM. That means they have options the rest of us didn't have - I couldn't run Linux until I had a paper round, because installing Linux on the family computer was not going to happen. Perhaps one clear advantage to the old world is that in the 1980s and early 1990s, anyone could write an operating system and eventually get something that could do everything their old computer could do. I mean the idea was tractable. It's not like today where even thinking about creating a web browser filled Microsoft and Opera with such dread they gave up. To be clear: I don't think it's all rosy today. But I don't think it's all bleak either. > It also matters for democracy how many people only own devices that governments have complete control over. You are right that there's social implications here, but I think the social concerns are primary and not a consequence of the technical situation. We arrived at this situation because companies decided they own their customers when we have massive social problems mistrust and distrust. This has come on the back of a generation that learnt abominations like a company's only obligation is to its shareholders. If you want to build trustworthy business, you need to maintain the right culture.
brandonmenc 5y ago
> You literally have both, and more. Seriously. When I was a kid I would have killed to have had easy access to things like Raspberry Pi's, microcontrollers, SGI workstations (which is what the Mac is these days), and a zillion free programming languages. Instead, while I had full access to the family's PC and could learn C and assembly language programming on it (btw I had to pay for those compilers), and learned all about interrupts and writing to VGA registers, I still couldn't do anything super low-level like muck around with the boot sector because my dad needed it for work, the phone system was so locked down that you'd go to jail for "exploring" it, and I had barely any idea how to get started playing around with logic chips because there was nothing like Sparkfun, Adafruit, Hackaday, etc, and Radio Shack in the mid-90s really wasn't much help. There is still room for improvement - yes it would be nice if all the tech we used was both hackable and secure - but geeks who want to tinker are living in a land of plenty right now.

irrational 5y ago

You can? There are tons of kits and circuit boards and parts and everything electronic imaginable available for quick delivery right now. Back in the day we had Radio Shack, but it couldn’t hold a candle to all the circuit boards and electronic components available today. It’s an embarrassment of riches.