7 ms·

Great, so what's the solution? What are you doing to fix it? Do you roll your own silicon? Do you grow your own food (we have no idea what someone could be putt

Great, so what's the solution? What are you doing to fix it? Do you roll your own silicon? Do you grow your own food (we have no idea what someone could be putting in it)? Are you completely off-grid? Or are you as completely dependent on society writ large as everyone else? Making holier than thou comments about everyone else being sheep isn't helpful or thought provoking. Offer an alternative if it is a bad one (looking at you Mastodon). So here's mine: we need to change the power of digital advertising. Most of the most rent seeking companies generate revenue primarily selling ads to get more people to buy more crap. I want a VAT on all revenue passing through the digital advertising pipeline. My hope is that if these things are less profitable, it will reduce the over-sized impact these companies (social, infotainment [there is no news anymore], search, etc.) have on our economy and life. People are addicted to to fomo and outrage (faux?), I don't that that will ever change but we can try to make it less profitable.

regnull 5y ago
The solution is to go back to the original spirit of the Internet, when it was a set of open standards connecting people and organizations. Somehow it got forgotten and now we have a bunch of commercial companies giving you the same stuff in exchange for your privacy and who increasingly control everything you do.
- OOPMan 5y ago
  Indeed. And, amusingly enough, most of the open standards stuff still exists too.
- zepto 5y ago
  The spirit of the internet won’t generate secure hardware or a transparent software stack. Also, that spirit existed only in an adversary free environment. You may as well say the solution is for everyone to be nice to each other. The solution is to build new technologies that are privacy preserving, transparent, don’t place trust in a central authority but are resistant to attack. This is possible but nobody has built it yet.
  - relax88 5y ago
    You could run Mobian or similar on a phone from Purism/Pine/etc. Problem is you end up with a vastly inferior hardware device that costs nearly as much as an iPhone. I’m still waiting for my Librem 5 preorder. Would love to hear if anyone is actually using a Linux phone and enjoying it.
    - zepto 5y ago
      This is clearly a good thing to do and supporting those projects is great. So far though, they do nothing to solve the problems we are talking about. The software is not anywhere near audited, and even if it were, you are still interacting with people and services who are using unaudited software.
      - kop316 5y ago
        > The software is not anywhere near audited Many of the projects leverage a well known OS as their base (e.g. pmOS uses Alpine Linux, Mobian uses Debian), and actively ensure that anything that can be upstreamed is upstreamed. So it's not like you're downloading some random ROM off of XDA.
        zepto 5y ago
        That doesn’t make the system audited. The obvious reason we don’t hear more about the weaknesses is that no high value targets are using these systems, so it’s not worth exploiting them.
        m4rtink 5y ago
        Um, these distros are normally used to run like half the Internet, they are very valuable targets today and I don't think putting them on a phone changes the threat environment so much.
        zepto 5y ago
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  It's when we substituted corporate mobile transmission for the "internet". It became, "Sorry, AT&T carrier, AT&T rules."
raxxorrax 5y ago
> Great, so what's the solution? Seriously? Perhaps heed the warnings? Whenever Apple tightened the reigns, thousand of apologists came to their defense. I wouldn't even have minded if they kept their obedience to personal decisions. But they extended their enlightenment to others.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  > Perhaps heed the warnings? And then take what actions, exactly? “Guys this is trouble” is …fine, but without “and we should therefore do”, it’s just kind of spitting into the wind.
  - williamscales 5y ago
    > And then take what actions, exactly? Don’t buy or use their products.
    - setpatchaddress 5y ago
      Unrealistic. My non-tech family and friends don’t care about this, and I can’t make them care. They don’t understand why it’s a problem; they agree with the motive and don’t understand that it’s not actually a solvable problem. It’s not totally dissimilar to the crypto backdoor problem. Normies think it’s great for only the feds to break encryption. Doesn’t work that way, but you can’t explain why to someone who doesn’t want to know. The only progress for things like this comes at the political level, through pressure on politicians or corporations. That’s where you should be spending effort if this sort of thing matters to you. A few Linux nerds buying some fantasy spook-free glibertarian phone will not make a dent in the problem.
      - raxxorrax 5y ago
        I have a different experience. My normie family and friends don't want a private company to access private media at all. Tech-illiteracy is no question of education and intelligence. This is a topic that is comparable to home searches. Still good to keep up the pressure on public officials. That any interior minister is very happy about that doesn't have to be excused. Anyone else should be more like French people.
nimbius 5y ago
https://prism-break.org/en/ https://prism-break.org/en/ is a great start. in the absence of strong regulatory oversight, personal defense is a good measure.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
What we have been doing would have worked if the majority would have followed. Chose open standards, use and contribute to FOSS, avoid social networks, get involved in your local community, etc. No need to go to extreems or complicated plans, corporations follow the customers. But nobody did listen. Quite the opposite. I never had a facebook account, and now today people are boasting when they leave FB. But 10 years ago ? Oh we were the paranoid extremists . Even today my friends regularly pressure me to get whatsapp.
stackedinserter 5y ago
The solution won't be technological, it will be in realm of laws and regulations. We are weak peasants and don't have any power over big tech, but we can change legal environment for them. IANAL but we (via our elected representatives) can push a law that prohibit restrictions on execution of users' code on their own devices. Or we can split app stores from vendors and obligate them to provide access to third-party stores, like we do with IE and windows. Also, it's completely doable to stop NSA/Prism totalitarian nonsense. What we can do as tech people? - raise awareness - help people to switch from big tech vendor locks - help people harming BT by installing adblockers, pihole etc - participate in opensource (with donations or work) - probably something else
- browningstreet 5y ago
  Lawmakers are more likely to enforce the direction this discussion is objecting to.
  - stackedinserter 5y ago
    I agree, but we can elect different lawmakers. Let's push Louis Rossman to congress for example. I checked, his congressional district is represented by someone named Jerry Nadler, who's been sitting there since 1992 and (I'm pretty sure) is out of touch of his constituents since late 1990's.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      The problem is you have to convince a large crowd for that. Spreading the information about free software and GNU/Linux phones is the same work explaining the people why we need to vote differently.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  This. You can't change mass behavior by individual pleas. Especially when the behavior generates outsized profits that can be used to advertise and lobby in its support. The most pressing things that should be supported, to have the world I think we want: 1. Mandate open app stores. Your device, your choice. * 2. Mandate open browsers. Your device, your choice. The internet is fundamentally an extension of the OS at this point, so an free (as in speech) connection choice is a requirement for an open OS. * 3. Mandate open apps. Your device, your choice. Installing unsigned apps can be warned, but not prohibited (outside of enterprise devices). 4. Mandate configurable tracking. Your device, your choice. There must be a clear option to disable all tracking, along with an API / payment ecosystem for apps to detect this and request alternative payment. I.e. "free if advertising on + $5.99 if advertising off". 5. Mandate right to repair. The manufacturer must provide necessary technical specifications (hard or soft) for a base level of modification and repair. If the manufacturer no longer supports the device, everything must be released to the public. * Selection must be offered at time of device setup. Installing alternatives can be warned, but not prohibited (outside of enterprise devices).
emptysongglass 5y ago
Dumping Facebook and its products as I and others have done is one strong step forward but people can't even manage this. It's deeply disappointing. Techno bears its seeds in rebellion but everybody throwing techno parties is coordinating on what is essentially an Orwellian state. Punks too, they're cozied up to this framework of oppression and can't see it for what it is. I think people have a hard time seeing the ethics in the technology they choose to use. Maybe the next wave of net-natives will be able to rediscover that common thread of rebellion and resist. It's insidious, I'll give you that. It's not obvious what is being surrendered with every participation on these platforms but it doesn't take a genius to see clearly.
- gjulianm 5y ago
  > Dumping Facebook and its products as I and others have done is one strong step forward A strong step forward that gets nullified when Facebook buys the alternative app you're using, or when the app you're using does things as Facebook does. You can propose all individual options you want, this is a collective issue that won't get fixed just by calls to individual action.
  - goatmeal 5y ago
    facebook is not going to buy my fediverse instance or my XMPP server. "they will just buy whatever gets used" gets thrown around too much as a sort of impotent defeatism. I don't see them buying instances on federated networks running open source software, and these networks are growing. we have to stop having this 2007 mindset that it is still okay to try to dump millions of people into a large centralized microblogging site.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  Tech(or more specifically, cloud technology and social media) is the modern "opium of the masses".
johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
I bought a pinephone recently, that's one fairly simple way to prevent corporations from scanning your life. Pretty cheap, too.
kop316 5y ago
> Great, so what's the solution? I'd argue: avoid using proprietary networks, avoid vendor lock-in with software and hardware, and use hardware that one is allowed to use their own software on. Champion using open and federated protocols for social tools. I think solutions exist, but honestly, it isn't easy. > Making holier than thou comments about everyone else being sheep isn't helpful I would offer the GP comment isn't necessarily a holier than thou comment, it's a comment of frustration. Frankly, I feel the same frustration. It's tiring to hear snide remarks of "ohh yeah, we can include you for something because you don't have an iPhone". Hell, I have openly heard, even on this forum, that people don't include folks on social conversations with EVEN THEIR OWN FAMILY because of the dreaded "green bubble". (FYI, MMS is entirely done over HTTP and SMS! How is Apple's MMS client so bad that it can't handle HTTP and SMS?). Or there is the "why don't you have WhatsApp/Facebook/Instagram/etc." and people think your some sort of weirdo because you don't want to use those networks. So to be honest, when I see something like that, I think "Well I'm not surprised, this is what happens when you are locked out of your own hardware". > What are you doing to fix it? While GP may not be doing anything, others are helping and actively working for alternatives. For example, I have been working to get the Pinephone to have MMS and Visual Voicemail support so I can use it daily. I an very fortunate to work with a lot of very talented and motivated folks who want to see it succeed.
amadeuspagel 5y ago
It's incredible how people are going to blame absolutely everything on ads. We're talking about a company for which ads are only a small part of their revenue doing something following government pressure, and somehow ads are the problem.
slumdev 5y ago
Do ANYTHING. Buy a feature phone or a phone from a vendor who doesn't have this power. Switch to Linux. Stop buying from companies that abuse you. Elect politicians who care about your rights. You know what's not helpful? Attacking the messenger, regardless of how sanctimonious you think he is.
FeepingCreature 5y ago
> Great, so what's the solution? What are you doing to fix it? Nothing, because my phone is rooted Android.
- fsflover 5y ago
  With outdated Linux kernel, non-updatable and closed.
hncurious 5y ago
How about not supporting it as a start? Approximately half the country, and a majority of tech workers, were happy with #4 and in fact encouraging it.
keyme 5y ago
What am I doing to fix it? Nothing! I'm dependent, just as you say, and have no illusions about that. Getting into this situation wasn't my decision (it was a collective "decision" of our society), and getting out of this won't be due to anything I'll personally do either. The only difference between me and the average joe is having understood that we have a problem earlier than most.

regnull 5y ago

The solution is to go back to the original spirit of the Internet, when it was a set of open standards connecting people and organizations. Somehow it got forgotten and now we have a bunch of commercial companies giving you the same stuff in exchange for your privacy and who increasingly control everything you do.

OOPMan 5y ago
Indeed. And, amusingly enough, most of the open standards stuff still exists too.
zepto 5y ago
The spirit of the internet won’t generate secure hardware or a transparent software stack. Also, that spirit existed only in an adversary free environment. You may as well say the solution is for everyone to be nice to each other. The solution is to build new technologies that are privacy preserving, transparent, don’t place trust in a central authority but are resistant to attack. This is possible but nobody has built it yet.
- relax88 5y ago
  You could run Mobian or similar on a phone from Purism/Pine/etc. Problem is you end up with a vastly inferior hardware device that costs nearly as much as an iPhone. I’m still waiting for my Librem 5 preorder. Would love to hear if anyone is actually using a Linux phone and enjoying it.
  - zepto 5y ago
    This is clearly a good thing to do and supporting those projects is great. So far though, they do nothing to solve the problems we are talking about. The software is not anywhere near audited, and even if it were, you are still interacting with people and services who are using unaudited software.
    - kop316 5y ago
      > The software is not anywhere near audited Many of the projects leverage a well known OS as their base (e.g. pmOS uses Alpine Linux, Mobian uses Debian), and actively ensure that anything that can be upstreamed is upstreamed. So it's not like you're downloading some random ROM off of XDA.
      - zepto 5y ago
        That doesn’t make the system audited. The obvious reason we don’t hear more about the weaknesses is that no high value targets are using these systems, so it’s not worth exploiting them.
        m4rtink 5y ago
        Um, these distros are normally used to run like half the Internet, they are very valuable targets today and I don't think putting them on a phone changes the threat environment so much.
        zepto 5y ago
JKCalhoun 5y ago
It's when we substituted corporate mobile transmission for the "internet". It became, "Sorry, AT&T carrier, AT&T rules."

raxxorrax 5y ago

> Great, so what's the solution? Seriously? Perhaps heed the warnings? Whenever Apple tightened the reigns, thousand of apologists came to their defense. I wouldn't even have minded if they kept their obedience to personal decisions. But they extended their enlightenment to others.

hprotagonist 5y ago
> Perhaps heed the warnings? And then take what actions, exactly? “Guys this is trouble” is …fine, but without “and we should therefore do”, it’s just kind of spitting into the wind.
- williamscales 5y ago
  > And then take what actions, exactly? Don’t buy or use their products.
  - setpatchaddress 5y ago
    Unrealistic. My non-tech family and friends don’t care about this, and I can’t make them care. They don’t understand why it’s a problem; they agree with the motive and don’t understand that it’s not actually a solvable problem. It’s not totally dissimilar to the crypto backdoor problem. Normies think it’s great for only the feds to break encryption. Doesn’t work that way, but you can’t explain why to someone who doesn’t want to know. The only progress for things like this comes at the political level, through pressure on politicians or corporations. That’s where you should be spending effort if this sort of thing matters to you. A few Linux nerds buying some fantasy spook-free glibertarian phone will not make a dent in the problem.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      I have a different experience. My normie family and friends don't want a private company to access private media at all. Tech-illiteracy is no question of education and intelligence. This is a topic that is comparable to home searches. Still good to keep up the pressure on public officials. That any interior minister is very happy about that doesn't have to be excused. Anyone else should be more like French people.

nimbius 5y ago

https://prism-break.org/en/ https://prism-break.org/en/ is a great start. in the absence of strong regulatory oversight, personal defense is a good measure.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

What we have been doing would have worked if the majority would have followed. Chose open standards, use and contribute to FOSS, avoid social networks, get involved in your local community, etc. No need to go to extreems or complicated plans, corporations follow the customers. But nobody did listen. Quite the opposite. I never had a facebook account, and now today people are boasting when they leave FB. But 10 years ago ? Oh we were the paranoid extremists . Even today my friends regularly pressure me to get whatsapp.

stackedinserter 5y ago

The solution won't be technological, it will be in realm of laws and regulations. We are weak peasants and don't have any power over big tech, but we can change legal environment for them. IANAL but we (via our elected representatives) can push a law that prohibit restrictions on execution of users' code on their own devices. Or we can split app stores from vendors and obligate them to provide access to third-party stores, like we do with IE and windows. Also, it's completely doable to stop NSA/Prism totalitarian nonsense. What we can do as tech people? - raise awareness - help people to switch from big tech vendor locks - help people harming BT by installing adblockers, pihole etc - participate in opensource (with donations or work) - probably something else

browningstreet 5y ago
Lawmakers are more likely to enforce the direction this discussion is objecting to.
- stackedinserter 5y ago
  I agree, but we can elect different lawmakers. Let's push Louis Rossman to congress for example. I checked, his congressional district is represented by someone named Jerry Nadler, who's been sitting there since 1992 and (I'm pretty sure) is out of touch of his constituents since late 1990's.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    The problem is you have to convince a large crowd for that. Spreading the information about free software and GNU/Linux phones is the same work explaining the people why we need to vote differently.
ethbr0 5y ago
This. You can't change mass behavior by individual pleas. Especially when the behavior generates outsized profits that can be used to advertise and lobby in its support. The most pressing things that should be supported, to have the world I think we want: 1. Mandate open app stores. Your device, your choice. * 2. Mandate open browsers. Your device, your choice. The internet is fundamentally an extension of the OS at this point, so an free (as in speech) connection choice is a requirement for an open OS. * 3. Mandate open apps. Your device, your choice. Installing unsigned apps can be warned, but not prohibited (outside of enterprise devices). 4. Mandate configurable tracking. Your device, your choice. There must be a clear option to disable all tracking, along with an API / payment ecosystem for apps to detect this and request alternative payment. I.e. "free if advertising on + $5.99 if advertising off". 5. Mandate right to repair. The manufacturer must provide necessary technical specifications (hard or soft) for a base level of modification and repair. If the manufacturer no longer supports the device, everything must be released to the public. * Selection must be offered at time of device setup. Installing alternatives can be warned, but not prohibited (outside of enterprise devices).

emptysongglass 5y ago

Dumping Facebook and its products as I and others have done is one strong step forward but people can't even manage this. It's deeply disappointing. Techno bears its seeds in rebellion but everybody throwing techno parties is coordinating on what is essentially an Orwellian state. Punks too, they're cozied up to this framework of oppression and can't see it for what it is. I think people have a hard time seeing the ethics in the technology they choose to use. Maybe the next wave of net-natives will be able to rediscover that common thread of rebellion and resist. It's insidious, I'll give you that. It's not obvious what is being surrendered with every participation on these platforms but it doesn't take a genius to see clearly.

gjulianm 5y ago
> Dumping Facebook and its products as I and others have done is one strong step forward A strong step forward that gets nullified when Facebook buys the alternative app you're using, or when the app you're using does things as Facebook does. You can propose all individual options you want, this is a collective issue that won't get fixed just by calls to individual action.
- goatmeal 5y ago
  facebook is not going to buy my fediverse instance or my XMPP server. "they will just buy whatever gets used" gets thrown around too much as a sort of impotent defeatism. I don't see them buying instances on federated networks running open source software, and these networks are growing. we have to stop having this 2007 mindset that it is still okay to try to dump millions of people into a large centralized microblogging site.
arvinsim 5y ago
Tech(or more specifically, cloud technology and social media) is the modern "opium of the masses".

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago

I bought a pinephone recently, that's one fairly simple way to prevent corporations from scanning your life. Pretty cheap, too.

kop316 5y ago

> Great, so what's the solution? I'd argue: avoid using proprietary networks, avoid vendor lock-in with software and hardware, and use hardware that one is allowed to use their own software on. Champion using open and federated protocols for social tools. I think solutions exist, but honestly, it isn't easy. > Making holier than thou comments about everyone else being sheep isn't helpful I would offer the GP comment isn't necessarily a holier than thou comment, it's a comment of frustration. Frankly, I feel the same frustration. It's tiring to hear snide remarks of "ohh yeah, we can include you for something because you don't have an iPhone". Hell, I have openly heard, even on this forum, that people don't include folks on social conversations with EVEN THEIR OWN FAMILY because of the dreaded "green bubble". (FYI, MMS is entirely done over HTTP and SMS! How is Apple's MMS client so bad that it can't handle HTTP and SMS?). Or there is the "why don't you have WhatsApp/Facebook/Instagram/etc." and people think your some sort of weirdo because you don't want to use those networks. So to be honest, when I see something like that, I think "Well I'm not surprised, this is what happens when you are locked out of your own hardware". > What are you doing to fix it? While GP may not be doing anything, others are helping and actively working for alternatives. For example, I have been working to get the Pinephone to have MMS and Visual Voicemail support so I can use it daily. I an very fortunate to work with a lot of very talented and motivated folks who want to see it succeed.

amadeuspagel 5y ago

It's incredible how people are going to blame absolutely everything on ads. We're talking about a company for which ads are only a small part of their revenue doing something following government pressure, and somehow ads are the problem.

slumdev 5y ago

Do ANYTHING. Buy a feature phone or a phone from a vendor who doesn't have this power. Switch to Linux. Stop buying from companies that abuse you. Elect politicians who care about your rights. You know what's not helpful? Attacking the messenger, regardless of how sanctimonious you think he is.

FeepingCreature 5y ago

> Great, so what's the solution? What are you doing to fix it? Nothing, because my phone is rooted Android.

fsflover 5y ago
With outdated Linux kernel, non-updatable and closed.

hncurious 5y ago

How about not supporting it as a start? Approximately half the country, and a majority of tech workers, were happy with #4 and in fact encouraging it.

keyme 5y ago

What am I doing to fix it? Nothing! I'm dependent, just as you say, and have no illusions about that. Getting into this situation wasn't my decision (it was a collective "decision" of our society), and getting out of this won't be due to anything I'll personally do either. The only difference between me and the average joe is having understood that we have a problem earlier than most.