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Internet of Snitches
- cf100clunk 5y agoPurism's accurate take on Apple's recent CSAM-scanning announcement is preaching to the choir since the typical consumer use-cases for an iPhone versus a Librem phone don't overlap well. Still, I'm glad Purism continues to stake-out and explain its entire reason for existing.
- jcun4128 5y agoThe refund thing is odd... but I benefit from their mobile UI.
- Hackbraten 5y agoWhat do you mean? I’ve owned iPhones for 13 years and ordered a Librem earlier this week. I’m determined to use it as my daily driver, no matter how buggy it turns out to be when it arrives.
- jodrellblank 5y ago> "Still, I'm glad Purism continues to stake-out and explain its entire reason for existing." I'm not convinced that's a good look from this blog post. See the examples they give: "a Catholic priest’s resignation after location data revealed he used the Grindr app and frequented gay bars", "might expand into terrorism, sedition, or similar categories of crime", "[catch] DMCA violations", "Your car could report when you parked illegally or disobeyed the speed limit", "Your smart irrigation system could detect whenever you watered your lawn in violation of water conservation orders". There's more to this whole topic than "you won't be able to break laws and decieve people with casual abandon", right? Like, a presumption that your customers are actually innocent, maybe.
- arpa 5y agoInnocent? INNOCENT? are you not fucking aware how judicial systems are constructed? I swear, it makes feel that to kill myself is the only solution sometimes! It's illegal to be gay in some countries, and you're born that way. By writing this comment I violated laws for profanity (writing "fucking" in a public forum), posting about suicide (see roskomnazors' github block over a repo with humorous description of suicide), claiming that some people are born gay (falls under the law of "protection of children from negative information" that even applies in some EU countries). Innocent! Hah. Give us a name, and we'll find what you're guilty of...
- jodrellblank 5y agoI think you have not understood my comment, and just keyword matched and copy-pasted a tangentially related rant.
- arpa 5y agoi assure you it was a fully original rant.
- dghlsakjg 5y agoI hate slippery slope arguments, but.... How long until media players and display devices are hashing all of our media to check for copyright violations. Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this. CSAM is one thing, and from reports it sounds like checking hashes isn't really that effective. However, this paves the way for hash checks for a variety of scary things. What happens when governments start distributing lists of hashes belonging to "subversive" material (this isn't pipe dream, numerous large countries already block subversive material on the internet).
- majormajor 5y agoDisplay devices do this, but for advertising targeting, not copyright violation right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned. Fortunately that's basically an impossible thing to wrangle currently, but if things like Blu-Rays go away it starts to be more feasible ("Oh, you're watching this show in 8K? Please connect your Netflix account to verify your access.") Once the technical capability is there, how can we best stop it? That's where I don't have good answers. Possibly the only thing unique about what Apple is doing is that they announced it.
- jrumbut 5y ago> Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned. An anti-piracy scheme that respected legitimate use would need this. History suggests that breaking existing media so that you have to buy (or rent) new copies of the same content over and over may be seen as a feature rather than a bug.
- Scaevolus 5y agoThere is a DRM scheme that uses fingerprinting to detect unauthorized play (Cinavia), but it requires the player to implement the detection. In practice this just means you can't play ripped movies using blu-ray players or Sony devices like Playstations.
- swah 5y agoWho are the unlucky ones that will be double-checking the AI-tagged images for child pornography, all day long?
- wizzwizz4 5y agoHopefully people with better conditions than the Facebook moderators.
- turminal 5y agoThe same ones that already do this for everything that gets posted to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter... Underpaid, overstressed and overworked people. Imagine what a job like this does to ones mental health.
- CharlesW 5y agohttps://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/
- notquitehuman 5y agoIt’s the same people who make sure that scamware doesn’t show up in the App Store. Apple does a good job with that, don’t they?
- stalkersyndrome 5y agoThis is a great article. What I’m about to say is a bit controversial and cannot be implemented by majority, or even a large minority. Maybe a subset of HN that isn’t already in this mindset: Treat all devices as adversarial as you possibly can within some sensical reason. Use Tor, for example, but expect that everything you do is being logged and that sometime in the future if a vulnerability, exploit, whatever is discovered that can trace these logs back to you, that you know what you’re in for. Apply this to whatever else you feel like could have a negative impact on you. Obviously this is now coming to light because of Apple but this has been an issue long before. To put it into more morbid terms: assume that the government thinks you’re storing CP and they’re going through your trash, and behave accordingly.
- soco 5y agoDoes this leave anything possible?
- inanutshellus 5y agoKitten videos. That's about it.
- ghoward 5y agoAnd then someone will come along and claim that kitten videos are animal abuse. I wish I was being sarcastic.
- SixDouble5321 5y agoPrivacy and security.
- markenqualitaet 5y agoY tho? Your advice reads like a recipe for a bad time. Mitigation is required, if you actually do have something to hide. Freedom however is endangered, if you personally mitigate this or not. I think for most people the best course of action would be to speak out against this, boycott the companies or get politically active, educate others about the threat to all of us. And evading hostile tech's reach is really not a practical every day thing. I mean look at the shitshow of browser fingerprinting. Behaving vastly different than most will leave a trace of its own, even if it's just the absence of common information. The best personal protection is being part of a healthy, democracy valuing collective not okay with this surveillance. And if you are about to explode the next big story, I would probably advice migrating somewhere hostile to the country you are about to piss off. It's not like they turn on your fridge because you bought LSD for you and your boyfriend; I mean generally buying drugs happens in public Telegram groups these days... Politicians love spending money on surveillance tech, but not law enforcement people. Nothing is gonna happen, if you don't mess with powerful people's egos. The real damage of these trends is the self censorship and permanent premptive self-surveillance you automatically do in the face of it. Like treating every device as hostile! You are killing off the mental freedom more and more, creativity, possibilities. No one is going all to prison, but no one isn't in prison a little bit.
- dgs_sgd 5y ago> This “Internet of Things” has promised people convenience, yet we know that convenience has already come at the cost of personal privacy. I really wonder if the privacy implications of the "internet of things" are so dangerous that the internet of things should never be realized to its full potential. There is the always present temptation for governments to co-opt it as a surveillance apparatus. It really is the perfect tool for Big Brother style rule. The cost may be too high. Edit: grammar
- sumtechguy 5y agoAlso consider most of those devices after 2-3 years as insecure. Many running a decade old version of linux at its core, and the other bits of software usually just as old. Written by someone whos job was outsourced 4 years ago. Never to be updated again. Just assume someone is going to do things with it that you do not want them doing. That the gov wants in on the action is just another in the list of threat actors.
- giantg2 5y agoWhenever I want an IoT type device, I would rather home brew it. Technically my stuff would be more of a local network of things since I rarely expose stuff over the internet, especially due to lack of static IP.
- dotcommand 5y agoThe selling point of IoT is the data. It's the reason for the heavy investment in big data/neural networks/nvidia/etc. Preparing for the IoT world where there isn't much privacy but lots and lots of data.
- fsflover 5y agoIt's the privacy implications of proprietary software that are too dangerous. With free software, you can trust your devices.
- neolog 5y ago"Snitches" makes it sound like I'm doing something wrong that my devices reported me for. In fact, they're spying on everything I do.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zekrioca 5y ago“To snitch” also means “to inform”, whatever it is that you do, right or wrong. So yes, you are both right and wrong :)
- at_a_remove 5y agoWhat will be really painful is that you won't even be able to prevent data egress, since these devices will just hit Amazon Walk, or connect via some hidden 6G modem, or use DNS over HTTPS to hide the network names. And you'll pay for it, too!
- legrande 5y agoGood old fashioned police-work is needed instead of back-doors into our favorite apps. The Internet and app ecosystems can't work properly if they're weakened by LEAs. People would just not use them if they know they're being watched. I'm not saying the majority would switch to Linux phones either (like Librem 5 & Pinephone), simply that the two dominating app-stores (Play & Apple Store) would be phased out and people would probably fund independent FLOSS app stores to replace them. In the end, the people will speak out and respond to back-doors. In-fact we need FLOSS app stores right now (Similar to F-Droid[0], but baked in as the default store), and they need to be funded properly & they need sound economic incentives to continue. No more 'free' apps where you pay for them with your data. It's possible to have FLOSS apps that are not gratis where people pay for them with money, not their data. (The reason I suggest we switch to FLOSS app stores is that the apps can easily be checked for back-doors or malicious code since the code is open source. It makes the apps readily available for audits too) [0] https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/
- sschueller 5y agoCSAM also doesn't prevent children from being exploited. It's an archive of past abuse. The police should focus and finding creators of such abhorrent material and put them in prison.
- md_ 5y agoI think there are a few theories here: 1. CSAM production may be incentivized by consumers (either because they pay for it or because they serve to encourage the producers). 2. CSAM may (as, famously, with Backpage) be an advertisement for real-world meet ups and further abuse. 3. Having pictures of one’s own abuse further disseminated is itself abusive and morally wrong. Obviously producers should also be prosecuted, but while I do think the American approach is in many ways informed by puritanical beliefs, there are perfectly rational reasons to pursue the spread of such material.
- c7DJTLrn 5y agoI don't think the theory that consumption drives production holds true when talking about child pornography because the material can be copied infinitely, it's not a finite resource.
- LanceH 5y agoIt would be criminal to drop spyware onto a product sold by an individual to a company.
- ohiovr 5y ago5,000 page long EULAs make it possible.
- npilk 5y agoSomething the whole Apple kerfluffle has revealed to me is how many services were already scanning for CSAM in the cloud and reporting to authorities. E.g. Google, Facebook, Microsoft. I consider myself tech-literate and had not known about this. Are there other types of material or kinds of activity that cloud services might already be scanning for, but might not have much public awareness?
- judge2020 5y agoI guess you could consider Paypal/Venmo which scan for words: https://slate.com/technology/2020/02/paypal-venmo-iran-syria-sanctions-crime-detection-system.html https://slate.com/technology/2020/02/paypal-venmo-iran-syria... Another is that Google Photos and Facebook both do classification for objects and text within photos - eg. a Kohl's ad in my timeline on Facebook has image alt text of "May be an image of 1 person, standing, footwear and outdoors". I'm sure their detections look for TOS breaking content or other pictures showing illegal activities.
- sunshineforever 5y agoWhat the heck is "little women bootleg dvd" doing on there? CP?
- judge2020 5y agoNot sure why the author thought that would be flagged - it's in the "not flagged" list of phrases. I can't find any other reference to it either.
- bitwize 5y agoA film adaptation of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott was released a few years ago.
- jjgreen 5y agoIt's a porno about Pigmy women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DMrQPc7wfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DMrQPc7wfo
- md_ 5y agoI’m reminded of Moxie Marlinspike’s comment about emails that come with a PGP signature.
- ohiovr 5y agoiDevices = spy devices
- spicybright 5y agoeyeDevices
- masterof0 5y agoWhat is the alternative? Android phones aren't any better. A 2000 dollar phone that barely works? Besides custom open source android ROMs, I don't see any other way.
- ohiovr 5y agoThere is no alternative. Eventually Colossus and Guardian will have full control of everything.
- aarpmcgee 5y agoMy next phone will likely be a dumb phone. Mudita looks interesting to me but haven't looked into it from a privacy/security perspective.
- ohiovr 5y agoLegacy flip phone might be best for paranoia.
- fsflover 5y agoThe alternatives are GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 ($900) and Pinephone ($150).
- jjgreen 5y agoNo phone
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nyx-aiur 5y agoThe only thing I see is everyone giving snooping for "advertising" a free ride while crying about the same technology working against CSAM, scams and malware. I don't get it stop complaining about stuff when you only complain about it when it hurts your bottom line.
- rootusrootus 5y agoI have to give Apple credit for unintentionally making this a well-known topic. Suddenly people are realizing that their content is being scanned constantly. Now they care.
- Popegaf 5y agoHow many do care though? The vast majority has swallowed whichever pills were laid in front of them and fully believe the "I have nothing to hide" message. It's not hopeless, the people with money here should be putting it where their mouth it and actually buying things or donating to projects that make a positive change.
- hypothesis 5y agoThere is hope. Shock to the system is how one disabused of trusting to benevolent companies. Instead of upgrading to next iDevices, I ended up getting a much cheaper de-googled device and will split the different by donating to privacy advocacy organizations. A bit harder for other family members, but I did that before by converting everyone to a Linux laptops.
- blisterpeanuts 5y agoInteresting take on the situation. It's even possible that Apple did this deliberately to get people talking about privacy. Child porn is an odd hill to die on. Of course pedophiles and purveyors of child porn need to be locked away; no one disagrees with that. But to pull this out of seemingly nowhere, and inform all 300m iPhone users (plus however other millions use iCloud on Macs) that they must submit to a search, because we are all suddenly suspects... this is beyond the pale. Like others, I have baby pictures and kid pictures. I'm thinking about a couple of pics my wife took of our 18-month old, in the bathtub with her equally young cousins. I am wondering whether these pictures might get flagged in some way. Apple claims that they are only looking for known pictures already in a particular database, but that is cold comfort. If somehow one of my pictures pops up because of an A.I. decision, and a human decides it qualifies as child porn, my life is ruined. As a side note, I was planning to upgrade later this year from a Samsung to the latest iPhone. That plan is now on hold pending review. In fact I'm suddenly much more interested in the Librem phone, purveyed by the author of the article. As I recall, it's about $2000 USD so I had really not considered it seriously in the past. Now I am considering it seriously. I hope a whole family of new Linux-based smartphones can jump into this market and take advantage of the situation. It'll be interesting to see how things shake out. Will this move by Apple go down in history as a textbook example of shooting oneself in the foot? Or will the masses simply grunt, and accept the inevitable?
- protoman3000 5y agoHow come ubiquitous swarms of camera-equipped private and governmental drones are not a reality yet? I'd assume technology is far enough to make this happen.
- hypothesis 5y agoThere is no need for them to be ubiquitous, just a few large drones will do. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
- sunshineforever 5y ago"You should have control over your own computers. Your phone should be your castle. True control means controlling your hardware and software. It means picking hardware that doesn’t depend on absolute trust in a vendor for its security, but gives you control over your own security so you don’t have to ask the vendor’s permission to use the computer how you wish. It means using a free operating system that lets you install whatever software you want and remove any software you don’t." Has this ever been the case even since the very beginning of smartphones?
- joe_the_user 5y agoNo, smartphones have historically been under the control of the phone operators. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be true. I'm looking forward to getting a Linux I control and which provides strong protections.
- int_19h 5y agoWinMo and Symbian smartphones weren't, back in the day. At least, not outside of US.
- heavyset_go 5y agoYes, this was the case with webOS and Maemo/Meego.
- fsflover 5y ago> Has this ever been the case even since the very beginning of smartphones? Who cares? It can be true now: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5
- linuxhansl 5y agoThat is exactly why: 1. I only run Linux where possible, and I install myself (and I realize I do not control the BIOS, etc). OpenBSD would probably be even better. 2. I assume that Google knows everything that is going on my Android phone, Apple knows everything on any Apple device, and Microsoft know everything going on on my son's gaming PC. This is a dangerous trajectory and we'll hear "But think of the children!" or the good old "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." ad nauseam. We've been over the fallacy of these statements already, so I will just quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Although apparently the original context of that quote was not about Liberty at all.)
- rootusrootus 5y agoIt was never going to be as simple as all or nothing. We have to define where to draw the line, and not everyone will agree on where the line should be. So this is a good conversation to have, and "do nothing" is not an answer most people will actually agree on.
- User23 5y agoAnd, perhaps more to the point, with what exactly will said line be drawn?
- zamalek 5y ago> But think of the children! This also goes both ways: there are children with phones, in terms of reality, not morality. These children are being spied on. That's what people don't get about these backdoors and sidedoors (?). There is no way to guarantee that a malicious actor hasn't gained control or knowledge of them.
- skybrian 5y agoCompare with the current Internet of snitches, where people flag posts and want something to be done about it.
- goatcode 5y agoIt's interesting how much this topic has blown up, especially compared to how it usually does, after pedophiles are targeted. It's also interesting that at least one prepared response will be found to my point above.
- sunshineforever 5y agoSo how are we going to stop this if it becomes a reality for 99% of phones sold? I'm very poor- like on and off homeless poor- and I would be willing to pay up to $200 for a free phone, but I couldn't go higher. I dearly hope that it doesn't become the case that any "free" phone isn't a luxury like current privacy oriented phones.
- fsflover 5y ago> I would be willing to pay up to $200 for a free phone, but I couldn't go higher. https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
- dotcommand 5y agoThe title reminded me of an intro to one of packt's books. "At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy." They want their readers to be the their personal snitches online. What a crazy world we are headed towards.
- renewiltord 5y agoI think I would be content with the panopticon if it were All Can See All. That way I know there is no selective enforcement. That way I know that if a law is overly restrictive I can apply it to the guys making the law too. Actually, no, I’m not okay with that but I’m okayer than with others can watch me and I can’t watch anyone.
- maerF0x0 5y ago> Your voice assistant could use machine learning to ... At least the owner of "Happy birthday" would start to get their rightful royalties each time we sing that god awful song. /s
- blisterpeanuts 5y agoYou make a good point, but your example is out of date; "Happy Birthday To You" melody was recently found to be copied from an earlier composition "Good Morning To You" and the copyright is therefore invalidated. Decades of royalties for a stolen song!
- cortesoft 5y agoI have two issues with automatic surveillance. One is of course false positives. When you scan everything, even a small false positive chance will mean a LOT of people get swept up by false positives. Scan enough things, and soon everyone will be victims of false positives. This is compounded because people don't understand probabilities. Take DNA... if someone says "the chance of this DNA match being wrong is one in a million", people will assume the match is correct, because that seems like a really small chance of a false positive.. however, if you are matching that DNA to everyone in the United States, that one in a million ends up with over 300 matches that are wrong. Second, perfect enforcement of laws is not always ideal. If we catch everyone who breaks the law, how can we ever decide as a society to change the law? For example, if we had 100% effective anti-marijuana laws, no one could have ever tried marijuana and we would not have been able to determine that we actually don't want it outlawed. If no one can ever break a law, we have no way of testing whether a law is good or not.
- seoaeu 5y ago> Scan enough things, and soon everyone will be victims of false positives. If there is a human in the loop checking for false positives, then I don't see how it could get to this point. It surely wouldn't take hundreds of millions of false positives -- each with a non-trivial cost for manual review -- before pulling the plug.
- cortesoft 5y agoYes, humans could help correct false positives... however, that doesn't mean there are no consequences for the people wrongly matched. Investigators might have to look into the person, and question them. Not sure if you have ever had to talk to the police about anything, but the situation is stressful even if you are completely innocent. Also, having your life examined, having to answer questions about why you did things, etc, can be scary.
- DangitBobby 5y agoYou also must trust that it's actually automatic, kind of like police dogs. Turns out their main function is to provide "probable cause" when their handler wants a search. This opens the door to the same thing except now it's a free warrant to access any device, as long as you pay Apple to automatically "detect some CSAM" first.
- jlengrand 5y agoWhat I really wonder is, once virtually everyone has crossed the rubicon to reuse the article's expression, how long it will take for whoever decides NOT to be tracked to look guilty? How long before people without phones, doorbells or smart watches get frowned upon? At the rate we're accelerating, it wouldn't be crazy to see it happen in a couple years.
- dandanua 5y agoNo need for explicit ostracism, you just can't operate in the modern society without using popular technologies.
- sailorganymede 5y agoIt’ll be interesting to see if there’s a market for “dumb” technology. I still use my iPod Shuffle because it doesn’t buzz when I’m listening to music while working. I can imagine regular HD TVs that are not “smart” could become popular again.
- collaborative 5y agoI genuinely was curious about the reasons why the US gov't was looking into enforcing anti trust laws. Why would they do that, now that their entire political careers depend on the unlimited donations they get from these sharks The reason is clear now. They want the sharks on their side
- ramesh31 5y agoI'm ready to go back to 2003 era technology at this point. If I need to take photos, I'll buy a digital camera. If I need directions, I'll get a GPS. If I want to talk to someone, I'll call them on my Nokia or email them from an anonymously registered address. If I want music, I'll download it and use an MP3 player. There's not a single piece of consumer tech in the last 20 years that has made our lives tangibly better in any way.
- bwship 5y agoI wouldn't say none. But I'm with you. I am back to CD's and vinyl for music, flip phone for communication, I drive cars from the early 2000's, we keep our wifi off at the house almost all the time. It is on one hand a shame that tech has become so soured, but on the other hand, the ability to pick and choose technology from any era, and be content with it because of the fact that newer technology is not better, and in some ways is way worse because it is intrusive. On the other points about slippery slopes, we don't even know the full extent of how the powers that be are surveilling us, it could quite possibly be 100x worse than we even realize. Certain cities, like Santa Monica, CA for instance, are almost completely under camera control. I have seen the camera room at the promenade mall, and the camera stations near some of the intersections. The illusion of privacy is evaporating before our eyes.
- mwcampbell 5y ago> There's not a single piece of consumer tech in the last 20 years that has made our lives tangibly better in any way. Tell that to blind people who, for the past decade or so, have had screen readers built into our mainstream smartphones at no extra cost, giving us access to a wide variety of functionality all in one device. And that functionality includes access to on-demand transportation through Uber or the like. Yes, we have to pay for that last part, but for those of us who can, it's still liberating. Edit: And I'm sure there are other counter-examples; I hope others will add their own. I just wrote about the one that has affected me and my friends.
- fsflover 5y agoActually you can use free software instead and enjoy trusted devices which do everything.
- vermilingua 5y ago> It’s not too late to reject technology that’s not on your side. Oh, but it is. I have yet to see any convincing argument for how we get “back” (if we were ever there) to a time when technology was on our sides. Vote with your wallet, they say, but when hostile technology is far cheaper than friendly technology, and the vast majority of the population couldn’t care less, how could we possibly make a dent? And this is before even considering that governments around the world are on the side of hostile technology. Write to your representative, they say, but when our “democratic” representatives couldn’t care less about the needs of their constituents, yet term after term get re-elected regardless, who will hear us? And again, before considering that a) they’re voted in by the same careless majority, and b) that they are empowered by the very hostile technology we want them to combat? I just don’t see a future that isn’t plagued by the overbearing influence of soulless tech companies and the corrupt scumbags that enable them.
- nodomedi 5y ago> Vote with your wallet, they say, but when hostile technology is far cheaper than friendly technology, and the vast majority of the population couldn’t care less, how could we possibly make a dent? I don't see the goal as making a dent. That's too large. I have two goals: * Ensure I have access to free platforms. I use a Librem laptop and a Pinephone. I also use closed platforms as part of living in society. * Ensure the free flame is kept alight. I do that by using the free platforms, buying the products, and improving them with bug reports and patches. The vast majority, for better or worse, do not share those goals. As an advantage to free platforms, those that do care have the capability to improve it. We don't need many. Free platforms/tooling won't be as shiny. So be it.
- vermilingua 5y agoBut that’s my point, sure it works now, but in 10-20 years what’s keeping free, floss, friendly technologies from being bullied out of availability? Google delisting floss alternatives, because they’re from unverified developers and could contain malware; governments mandating ISPs ban “untrusted” protocols like FTP because paedophiles use them to share CSAM; etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- graderjs 5y agoThe cost of these devices and services is offset by the fact that we don't truly "own" nor "control" them. That's the way the economics work. We (the people) are not going to give that up... Cheap Nice/Shiny Private - Pick two
- bitL 5y agoAny VCs willing to invest into pure Linux phones? It should be a gold mine now with Apple destroying its brand and losing its main marketing differentiation for privacy-conscious people (i.e. high IQ, top $).
- YeBanKo 5y agoFully agree with everything, except the last paragraph. > It means using a free operating system that lets you install whatever software you want and remove any software you don’t. I don’t understand, how free can be scalable. I am ok to pay for software and hardware. Even I update phone, only because Apple stops supporting my old one, I am still ok with that. It was part of why I chose Apple as a platform. Yes, they are expensive and unfortunately you have to update to keep up. But because they have revenue stream from hardware sales and integrated services, such as iCloud, they did not have to sell my data and had an incentive to protected. The promise of privacy was aligned with their revenue goals. Free and open source software is amazing, but is not scalable. Very rarely it comes close on terms of usability to paid software. I want to be in environment, where one can pay for product and expect not to get stabbed later by invasion into they privacy.
- fsflover 5y ago> Very rarely it comes close on terms of usability to paid software. Free software is not about price. It can be paid. Why can't a company sell products running free and open-source software? In such case, you pay for the software, too. By the way, this is exactly what Purism is doing, the company behind this article.