6 ms·

That is not at all the answer to this. Tech people need to respect their craft a little bit more. If some hospitals screw over a patient no doctor would say peo

That is not at all the answer to this. Tech people need to respect their craft a little bit more. If some hospitals screw over a patient no doctor would say people need to learn surgery and self operate on themselves. Self hosting is not something a normal person can just learn overnight and manage.

fivelessminutes 5y ago
It need not mean your own cloud services, although I think the longterm trend is residential routers plus a USB stick will make this more possible. Eg, he doesn't have to make access to all his music so it is contingent on his one credential, which can be revoked at any time by Apple. He can keep local copies of what he has bought, despite the ecosystem tries to make that difficult. Apple Music will delete any local copies it manages when the credential is invalidated. https://www.guidingtech.com/what-happen-when-you-sign-out-apple-id-iphone/ https://www.guidingtech.com/what-happen-when-you-sign-out-ap...
- cunthorpe 5y ago
  > residential routers plus a USB stick will make this more possible. This smells like "let them eat cake" except in the context of technology. Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. There's a vast difference between "Yes, backup my stuff, Apple; Here's my card" and "I know what an IP is" At $12/year you literally cannot get anything like what Apple offers just in terms of backup — not the equipment, not the man hours required to maintain it. Even if I were able to set it all up, it would cost me a huge amount of money in lost revenue just to maintain it safely. It feels like "I could build dropbox in 5 minutes" never stopped.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    Maybe read it a bit more generously, in the vein of: * Maybe we can get to a point where running your own services is easy enough and normalized enough that most people do it. I'm doubtful, but there's at least some small winds in that direction-- disillusionment with FAANG, peaking of the large tech economy, some renewed interest in privacy.
    - calsy 5y ago
      Most people use mobile devices and want the ability to watch content anywhere, anytime at press of a play button. That’s the benchmark. No personal hardware setup will match that convenience and people who are not aware of the security risks shouldn’t be hosting their own content from their personal network online.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    > Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Not everyone is capable of playing MP3s on an PM3 player? Since when? If these new systems that everyone is using is so much more complicated than that that you have to pay a professional service to do it for you, we have royally fucked up somewhere along the way.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      > People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Sounds like you’re trying to generalize from a very small set of people. The percentage of the population that had specialized full sized racks for their torrented stuff and what not was very, very small. For the rest of it, I imagine that “large drawer next to the desk” was the #1 solution, followed up by “in the car somewhere” for music CDs. For the average person, the actual backup procedure from that era was very poor. Frankly, I doubt many did it at all. Even the nerds I knew mostly did a pretty half assed job, all considered. What professional backup software hosted in the cloud today blows even the most thorough technique from any consumer in the 1990s out of the water.
      - betwixthewires 5y ago
        The racks was a reference to entertainment centers, not torrents. That was just about everybody.
    - calsy 5y ago
      Why are we pretending it's the early 2000s? CDs were used because that was the best option at the time obviously. To compare them to services today hosting infinite amounts of LEGAL content streamed over the internet to millions of people on all manner of devices at the touch of a button is rather odd. Likewise, it's weird that you need professionals to build such services? Anything that is so complicated that it requires professionals to create it has fucked up? In other words, every industry that ever existed is fucked up because they require more than a passing knowledge... professionals shouldn't exist.
- calsy 5y ago
  Routers and USB sticks are the long term trend? How exactly will a USB stick handle apps purchased through the App Store or your subscription to Apple Music? The long term trend is the exact opposite. People don't want to the manage hardware and all the issues of configuration, backups and troubleshooting faults that come with that, just to watch a movie. They want to palm off that responsibility to an external entity.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >"Routers and USB sticks are the long term trend? How exactly will a USB stick handle apps purchased through the App Store" I do not buy apps from app stores. I buy my software from vendors and only perpetual licenses. USB stick well replicated hard drives in my case) work just fine. >"People don't want to the manage hardware..." People were doing it for ages with CDs and DVDs just fine. Learning to backup one drive to another? If this is such a huge mental load then spread your buttocks and let the corps have you here and there. You deserved it.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > Apple Music will delete any local copies it manages when the credential is invalidated. No, it doesn't. I literally just tested this. The article you linked to is wrong. (The site looks like a content farm, so this is hardly surprising.) Signing out of an Apple ID will leave any subscription content downloaded from Apple Music present on the device, but unplayable. This is expected -- the user never purchased that music; they only had access to listen to it through their Apple Music subscription. Any other locally stored content belonging to the user remains playable, even if it was downloaded through Apple Music, and the subscription content will become playable if you log back in.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    You just said "belonging to the user".
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      Yes. That isn't a contradiction. Let me give an example. Let's say I have an MP3 file, and I added that to my Apple Music library on my desktop computer. Apple Music will make that file downloadable and playable on my phone, and that downloaded file isn't tied to the subscription in any way -- it's literally the same MP3 file that was uploaded. This functionality is an extension of an older feature which Apple called "iTunes Match". On the other hand, if I download an arbitrary track from Apple Music which I didn't put there myself, that downloaded file will no longer be playable if I log out or cancel my subscription -- because those files don't belong to the user.
      - veidr 5y ago
        Are you sure you aren't still signed up for iTunes Match? (I ask because I just happened to notice a $25 annual charge for that the other day... and I was like, oh yeah, I've been paying them all these years to host those 5 CDs I bought at live shows in the 1990s that aren't available on any streaming service...) Update: Like every time this comes to mind, I almost just canceled it, but then I listened to "Track 03" by the band "djiin", purchased at Jasper O'Farrell's pub in Sebastopol, CA in 2002, and I just can't...
throwawayboise 5y ago
> Self hosting is not something a normal person can just learn overnight and manage. It's not something most tech people can really (properly) manage either.
- bitexploder 5y ago
  It’s so odd. 15-20 years ago we didn’t have this problem. It just takes time and time is very precious. It comes downs to risk and time. Is the risk of this happening worth your time? Some times I think we embrace technology too quickly as technologists without considering the whole picture. At this point you have to ask if you can trust the people behind a technology to dk the right thing for a decade or more. If the answer is no start figuring out how to ditch it. This ignores the philosophical issues emerging with FAANG type companies. Anyhow, it’s much easier to never embrace a technology or vendor than it is to ditch it later.
  - philderbeast 5y ago
    15-20 years ago you could get away with more mistakes without them biting you, but they where none the less mistakes that where bad. These days the bad actors have automated there exploit attempts to the point that its not even really about asking when you will get hit rather then if you will get hit anymore, its almost instant in most cases. with so little leeway its just not viable to self host anything that is exposed to the internet, and then if you still have to deal with things like off-site backups if you care at all about your data.
    - bitexploder 5y ago
      I have thought about this a lot. I think it basically comes down to your domain. It’s okay to let someone else host things for you. To retain control you just have to keep your domain you are using for important things secure.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    That risk includes getting shut down by your ISP, who may be the only ISP in the area. I once got a nasty call from Comcast's net abuse department because I was gasp running a mail server. It was locked down tight, and only accepting mail from an old email provider. They didn't care. I was told that if I had SMTP open or they saw SMTP traffic coming in, I'd be permanently banned from being a Comcast customer because I was "running a server." Internet needs to be declared a utility and internet companies need to concern themselves only with reliably delivery of network packets and to otherwise completely fuck off. My power company, gas company, and water company don't give a fuck what I do with my electricity, gas, or water.
pengaru 5y ago
> If some hospitals screw over a patient no doctor would say people need to learn surgery and self operate on themselves. That's quite a false equivalence you've vomited out right there. If self-hosting is too difficult it's an engineering problem for the folks you're saying need to respect their craft a little bit more to f*cking get off their asses and collectively fix to make more accessible/practical. Nearly everyone already self-hosts a wireless micro-ISP in their home in the form of a WiFi router. The next step is for these little boxes to grow some serious storage and more functionality catering more to everyones data storage and access needs, with first-class standards-based integration in ios/android/$whatever-you-want-because-standards-matter-bring-back-RFCs FreedomBox [0] is a step in this direction, Eben Moglen's conference talks on the subject [1] are worth giving a listen. [0] https://freedomboxfoundation.org/ https://freedomboxfoundation.org/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U8PyukPyGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U8PyukPyGE
ab-dm 5y ago
This is a great analogy, going to steal this one.
betwixthewires 5y ago
Why not? Imagine someone told you "you can't manage your own system on a workstation, you're going to terminal into a mainframe, no normal person has the time or resources to manage their own workstation." You'd say it's absurd, because it is. We are literally talking about doing something as simple as buying a single board computer and a hard drive, putting a pre built system on an SD card and plugging it into an Ethernet cable. It's not surgery.
- maxgashkov 5y ago
  And then you've lost all your data cause an SD card was not rated for extreme write endurance. You repeat all that using better SD card or just a cheap PC with an SSD. You add backups. Then you realize you need to access this setup while away from your home. You add port forwarding. You run an audit to check if the system is secure enough so script-kiddies with a port scanner are not able to access your 'cloud'. Then you realize your router is not so reliable. You add a watchdog which will reboot it once the connection becomes unstable. Then there is a power outage. And if before you could just access all data using 4G on your phone, now you cannot. You add UPS to all critical parts of your home network infrastructure. ... And it goes on and on. It is doable, but doing it well requires a lot of time, planning and resources. It's hardly feasible not only for a lay person but for 'power users' as well.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    Every step here is illustrated as a worst-case scenario, and omitting the time gaps between issues where the system is operational where you are receiving value from it. Yes self-hosting is a PITA. Yes things will go down. Yes it takes time to learn. But owning the means of your production? Priceless. We need to stop teaching people to be cyber-peasants, sharecropping a land they'll never own.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      Why shouldn’t you look at the worst case scenario? Using a hosted service is valuable too, except in its worst case where they kick you off of it.
p2t2p 5y ago
Yes this. All this case (and similar others with other companies) demonstrates is that we're lacking in laws and regulation here. There should be no way that it is legal to just lock a customer like that without paying them all the money invested in virtual "goods". Sure, you want to block me then return all the money I paid for music, apps, etc. There should be channels in every company where they will precisely tell you what happened and why. If they want to just stop dealing with you - they must pay back. There's nothing wrong with using a service, what is wrong is that our laws are not up to the task of dealing with those risks.
ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s not tech people that need to respect their craft, it’s companies that need to respect their customers. Most tech people know this is a shitty practice, many pixels have been spent here about the capriciousness of FAANG companies towards consumers, it’s just that most of us lack the organizational power to do shit about it.
geraneum 5y ago
Exactly. Even if I can manage some self hosted systems, sometimes I prefer to just buy the service to save some time and effort.
YeBanKo 5y ago
The surgery analogy is great! Not only it is not something it easy to learn / manage, but in some cases it is outright not possible. How do you self host an App Store? If you bought an eBook on amazon I am not even sure if you can easily export and read it on non kindle device. Self-hosting is definitely not an answer to this.
NullPrefix 5y ago
Did you just compare self hosting to surgery?
XCSme 5y ago
> Self hosting is not something a normal person can just learn overnight and manage Not self-hosting, as in having their own bare metal server in the basement, but most people can go to a VPS/cloud provider and click a few buttons to get their own instance running whatever software they need. Not only this, but people have always been self-hosting without having any technical knowledge. For a long time, kids ages 14 or less have been running their own websites, forums, game servers, etc. And today it's a lot easier and cheaper than back then.

fivelessminutes 5y ago

It need not mean your own cloud services, although I think the longterm trend is residential routers plus a USB stick will make this more possible. Eg, he doesn't have to make access to all his music so it is contingent on his one credential, which can be revoked at any time by Apple. He can keep local copies of what he has bought, despite the ecosystem tries to make that difficult. Apple Music will delete any local copies it manages when the credential is invalidated. https://www.guidingtech.com/what-happen-when-you-sign-out-apple-id-iphone/ https://www.guidingtech.com/what-happen-when-you-sign-out-ap...

cunthorpe 5y ago
> residential routers plus a USB stick will make this more possible. This smells like "let them eat cake" except in the context of technology. Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. There's a vast difference between "Yes, backup my stuff, Apple; Here's my card" and "I know what an IP is" At $12/year you literally cannot get anything like what Apple offers just in terms of backup — not the equipment, not the man hours required to maintain it. Even if I were able to set it all up, it would cost me a huge amount of money in lost revenue just to maintain it safely. It feels like "I could build dropbox in 5 minutes" never stopped.
- mlyle 5y ago
  Maybe read it a bit more generously, in the vein of: * Maybe we can get to a point where running your own services is easy enough and normalized enough that most people do it. I'm doubtful, but there's at least some small winds in that direction-- disillusionment with FAANG, peaking of the large tech economy, some renewed interest in privacy.
  - calsy 5y ago
    Most people use mobile devices and want the ability to watch content anywhere, anytime at press of a play button. That’s the benchmark. No personal hardware setup will match that convenience and people who are not aware of the security risks shouldn’t be hosting their own content from their personal network online.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  > Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Not everyone is capable of playing MP3s on an PM3 player? Since when? If these new systems that everyone is using is so much more complicated than that that you have to pay a professional service to do it for you, we have royally fucked up somewhere along the way.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    > People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Sounds like you’re trying to generalize from a very small set of people. The percentage of the population that had specialized full sized racks for their torrented stuff and what not was very, very small. For the rest of it, I imagine that “large drawer next to the desk” was the #1 solution, followed up by “in the car somewhere” for music CDs. For the average person, the actual backup procedure from that era was very poor. Frankly, I doubt many did it at all. Even the nerds I knew mostly did a pretty half assed job, all considered. What professional backup software hosted in the cloud today blows even the most thorough technique from any consumer in the 1990s out of the water.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      The racks was a reference to entertainment centers, not torrents. That was just about everybody.
  - calsy 5y ago
    Why are we pretending it's the early 2000s? CDs were used because that was the best option at the time obviously. To compare them to services today hosting infinite amounts of LEGAL content streamed over the internet to millions of people on all manner of devices at the touch of a button is rather odd. Likewise, it's weird that you need professionals to build such services? Anything that is so complicated that it requires professionals to create it has fucked up? In other words, every industry that ever existed is fucked up because they require more than a passing knowledge... professionals shouldn't exist.
calsy 5y ago
Routers and USB sticks are the long term trend? How exactly will a USB stick handle apps purchased through the App Store or your subscription to Apple Music? The long term trend is the exact opposite. People don't want to the manage hardware and all the issues of configuration, backups and troubleshooting faults that come with that, just to watch a movie. They want to palm off that responsibility to an external entity.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"Routers and USB sticks are the long term trend? How exactly will a USB stick handle apps purchased through the App Store" I do not buy apps from app stores. I buy my software from vendors and only perpetual licenses. USB stick well replicated hard drives in my case) work just fine. >"People don't want to the manage hardware..." People were doing it for ages with CDs and DVDs just fine. Learning to backup one drive to another? If this is such a huge mental load then spread your buttocks and let the corps have you here and there. You deserved it.
duskwuff 5y ago
> Apple Music will delete any local copies it manages when the credential is invalidated. No, it doesn't. I literally just tested this. The article you linked to is wrong. (The site looks like a content farm, so this is hardly surprising.) Signing out of an Apple ID will leave any subscription content downloaded from Apple Music present on the device, but unplayable. This is expected -- the user never purchased that music; they only had access to listen to it through their Apple Music subscription. Any other locally stored content belonging to the user remains playable, even if it was downloaded through Apple Music, and the subscription content will become playable if you log back in.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  You just said "belonging to the user".
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Yes. That isn't a contradiction. Let me give an example. Let's say I have an MP3 file, and I added that to my Apple Music library on my desktop computer. Apple Music will make that file downloadable and playable on my phone, and that downloaded file isn't tied to the subscription in any way -- it's literally the same MP3 file that was uploaded. This functionality is an extension of an older feature which Apple called "iTunes Match". On the other hand, if I download an arbitrary track from Apple Music which I didn't put there myself, that downloaded file will no longer be playable if I log out or cancel my subscription -- because those files don't belong to the user.
    - veidr 5y ago
      Are you sure you aren't still signed up for iTunes Match? (I ask because I just happened to notice a $25 annual charge for that the other day... and I was like, oh yeah, I've been paying them all these years to host those 5 CDs I bought at live shows in the 1990s that aren't available on any streaming service...) Update: Like every time this comes to mind, I almost just canceled it, but then I listened to "Track 03" by the band "djiin", purchased at Jasper O'Farrell's pub in Sebastopol, CA in 2002, and I just can't...

throwawayboise 5y ago

> Self hosting is not something a normal person can just learn overnight and manage. It's not something most tech people can really (properly) manage either.

bitexploder 5y ago
It’s so odd. 15-20 years ago we didn’t have this problem. It just takes time and time is very precious. It comes downs to risk and time. Is the risk of this happening worth your time? Some times I think we embrace technology too quickly as technologists without considering the whole picture. At this point you have to ask if you can trust the people behind a technology to dk the right thing for a decade or more. If the answer is no start figuring out how to ditch it. This ignores the philosophical issues emerging with FAANG type companies. Anyhow, it’s much easier to never embrace a technology or vendor than it is to ditch it later.
- philderbeast 5y ago
  15-20 years ago you could get away with more mistakes without them biting you, but they where none the less mistakes that where bad. These days the bad actors have automated there exploit attempts to the point that its not even really about asking when you will get hit rather then if you will get hit anymore, its almost instant in most cases. with so little leeway its just not viable to self host anything that is exposed to the internet, and then if you still have to deal with things like off-site backups if you care at all about your data.
  - bitexploder 5y ago
    I have thought about this a lot. I think it basically comes down to your domain. It’s okay to let someone else host things for you. To retain control you just have to keep your domain you are using for important things secure.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  That risk includes getting shut down by your ISP, who may be the only ISP in the area. I once got a nasty call from Comcast's net abuse department because I was gasp running a mail server. It was locked down tight, and only accepting mail from an old email provider. They didn't care. I was told that if I had SMTP open or they saw SMTP traffic coming in, I'd be permanently banned from being a Comcast customer because I was "running a server." Internet needs to be declared a utility and internet companies need to concern themselves only with reliably delivery of network packets and to otherwise completely fuck off. My power company, gas company, and water company don't give a fuck what I do with my electricity, gas, or water.

pengaru 5y ago

> If some hospitals screw over a patient no doctor would say people need to learn surgery and self operate on themselves. That's quite a false equivalence you've vomited out right there. If self-hosting is too difficult it's an engineering problem for the folks you're saying need to respect their craft a little bit more to f*cking get off their asses and collectively fix to make more accessible/practical. Nearly everyone already self-hosts a wireless micro-ISP in their home in the form of a WiFi router. The next step is for these little boxes to grow some serious storage and more functionality catering more to everyones data storage and access needs, with first-class standards-based integration in ios/android/$whatever-you-want-because-standards-matter-bring-back-RFCs FreedomBox [0] is a step in this direction, Eben Moglen's conference talks on the subject [1] are worth giving a listen. [0] https://freedomboxfoundation.org/ https://freedomboxfoundation.org/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U8PyukPyGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U8PyukPyGE

ab-dm 5y ago

This is a great analogy, going to steal this one.

betwixthewires 5y ago

Why not? Imagine someone told you "you can't manage your own system on a workstation, you're going to terminal into a mainframe, no normal person has the time or resources to manage their own workstation." You'd say it's absurd, because it is. We are literally talking about doing something as simple as buying a single board computer and a hard drive, putting a pre built system on an SD card and plugging it into an Ethernet cable. It's not surgery.

maxgashkov 5y ago
And then you've lost all your data cause an SD card was not rated for extreme write endurance. You repeat all that using better SD card or just a cheap PC with an SSD. You add backups. Then you realize you need to access this setup while away from your home. You add port forwarding. You run an audit to check if the system is secure enough so script-kiddies with a port scanner are not able to access your 'cloud'. Then you realize your router is not so reliable. You add a watchdog which will reboot it once the connection becomes unstable. Then there is a power outage. And if before you could just access all data using 4G on your phone, now you cannot. You add UPS to all critical parts of your home network infrastructure. ... And it goes on and on. It is doable, but doing it well requires a lot of time, planning and resources. It's hardly feasible not only for a lay person but for 'power users' as well.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Every step here is illustrated as a worst-case scenario, and omitting the time gaps between issues where the system is operational where you are receiving value from it. Yes self-hosting is a PITA. Yes things will go down. Yes it takes time to learn. But owning the means of your production? Priceless. We need to stop teaching people to be cyber-peasants, sharecropping a land they'll never own.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Why shouldn’t you look at the worst case scenario? Using a hosted service is valuable too, except in its worst case where they kick you off of it.

p2t2p 5y ago

Yes this. All this case (and similar others with other companies) demonstrates is that we're lacking in laws and regulation here. There should be no way that it is legal to just lock a customer like that without paying them all the money invested in virtual "goods". Sure, you want to block me then return all the money I paid for music, apps, etc. There should be channels in every company where they will precisely tell you what happened and why. If they want to just stop dealing with you - they must pay back. There's nothing wrong with using a service, what is wrong is that our laws are not up to the task of dealing with those risks.

ashtonkem 5y ago

It’s not tech people that need to respect their craft, it’s companies that need to respect their customers. Most tech people know this is a shitty practice, many pixels have been spent here about the capriciousness of FAANG companies towards consumers, it’s just that most of us lack the organizational power to do shit about it.

geraneum 5y ago

Exactly. Even if I can manage some self hosted systems, sometimes I prefer to just buy the service to save some time and effort.

YeBanKo 5y ago

The surgery analogy is great! Not only it is not something it easy to learn / manage, but in some cases it is outright not possible. How do you self host an App Store? If you bought an eBook on amazon I am not even sure if you can easily export and read it on non kindle device. Self-hosting is definitely not an answer to this.

NullPrefix 5y ago

Did you just compare self hosting to surgery?

XCSme 5y ago

> Self hosting is not something a normal person can just learn overnight and manage Not self-hosting, as in having their own bare metal server in the basement, but most people can go to a VPS/cloud provider and click a few buttons to get their own instance running whatever software they need. Not only this, but people have always been self-hosting without having any technical knowledge. For a long time, kids ages 14 or less have been running their own websites, forums, game servers, etc. And today it's a lot easier and cheaper than back then.