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What a strange situation we are in. You may be in a seemingly small minority, but your rejection of "modern software" is a growing and significant movement. I b

What a strange situation we are in. You may be in a seemingly small minority, but your rejection of "modern software" is a growing and significant movement. I believe it has nothing to do with nostalgia. There is a profound failure of the "market values" we believe (ideologically) operate in our world and many rational people see the only way out is regression. Computing is transforming from enabling tools to a means of social control and enforcement. The market has completely turned around from demand/desire driven to a "push" market, where we are told what we are expected to own and use. I call this consumer communism. Cybersecurity is a lost cause. We just can't fix it. And it's getting rapidly worse. The more layers of security we add (whose security?) the less desirable and usable the products become. Stability can only be found in products that are ossified, hard wired and off-network. Software Engineering is basically broken at the consumer level. Exploding complexity has accompanied deskilling and a reckless "move fast and break things" attitude that means working products are no longer shipped (everything happens in the maintenance phase as a long-tail SasS). The "product" itself is just bait. Many products are just about cultivating dependency, lock-in and removing features to squeeze users. When a non-trivial number of users see a 1990s Amiga as a better choice for serious work than the latest silicon, something has gone quite wrong. The problem is that 80s/90s technology will eventually be unservicable. What can we do to take back tech and ensure a supply of stuff that we actually want for the future?

eternityforest 4y ago
Open source. Learn it, use it, develop it, don't try to ruin it by blocking innovation, help answer questions on the forums, annoy people till the try it(But don't try to make them use stuff no regular user wants, like sed scripts and emacs)... FOSS is doing amazingly well. I also think open hardware will probably have it's day eventually. The IoT needs a bit of a push to stop being a pile of SASS poop, and we especially need a free alternative to things like Tile trackers before the EU kills them or something. What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch? The hard work is still to be done on the legal and cultural levels. I don't want to use free software as a marginalised, "not supported" exception and constant "inconvenience" to others who have been deceived or bullied into domesticated monopoly silos. I want a right to choose (or build for myself) software that fits my needs, practical, ethical, technical, financial and cultural, and to have those choices work at least as well as for a big-tech consumer for most common tasks in a modern digital society. Surely the real action is now on the protocol and interoperability level? Things have essentially not improved since the late 80s when you couldn't load a DOS file on a Mac, except now the barriers are on the network. In this regard I am pleased to live in Europe which I think is doing good things to promote software freedom and diversity - though I hear you have reservations. Do you think the dangers (in Europe) are that we simply replace corporations with governments as enemies of freedom? If so, how can a free market (rather than top-down legislation) address the seemingly insoluble problem of forcing giants to open and interoperate?
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    I love right to repair and data portability, and USB C port, and I am a big fan of opening up the Apple platform. But I don't like quite that level of extreme stance on privacy. I do believe it's absolutely a right, but I don't want it to be a duty. Not all personal data is a top level military secret, and there are many legitimate uses(Look at HAM radio) for even plaintext systems. I think I'd rather they just require honest privacy policies in a simple machine readable format with an accompanying human readable version. Something needs to be done, because it's definitely not right to lie to consumers, but I also don't want it to be any harder to log data for debugging and attack mitigation, to use CCTV, or to use technologies that are decentralized and inherently don't support revoking rights to process. I mostly like the GDPR, but there's a few things I don't quite like, and the possibility of even more strict stuff is a bit scary. I'd hate to see AirTags, CCTV, and Amazon Sidewalk outright banned with no chance of even a FOSS version, and I personally know people who would love that to happen. Here in the US most states forbid one person from secretly recording a conversation that they are part of without specific exceptions, and even that has some scary side effects, because a hidden recorder is a powerful self defense tool. Other than that, I'm a fan of 95% of what I've seen from the EU on tech. It's probably not enough to really fix things though. Data portability doesn't fully solve things when so much is in the cloud. Sure you can move to some other provider, but it's gonna be a lot of work, and then you'll just have a different single point of failure. I think what we really need is for a really good open protocol to really take over. Something like WebDav, but extended to support synced redundant accounts, domainless self hosting(With pubkey/DHT based domains that don't require asking a registrar's permission to make one), and so on. It's just way too convenient to make stuff sync in the cloud, without it, FOSS doesn't have full parity. We need something like SOLID, making that cloud sync a separate reusable thing and letting us choose our providers, while making it easy to add to apps, and not involving crypto tokens or 7729 different accounts on a million custom sync systems, some of which may be insecure.
mikewarot 4y ago
>Cybersecurity is a lost cause. We just can't fix it. It's not... it just seems like it because our current way of using computers seems to make sense, when actually it's insane. If we thought of money the same was as compute, image going to buy bread at the store. You make your selection, then hand over your wallet, and sign a power of attorney, have it notarized, and hand it to the clerk. This clerk has been checked to me a good clerk by both your AntiBadClerk service. You get your wallet back, and take your purchase home, confident it has had no bad side effects, and the correct amount has been taken from your wallet. --- Or... you could take $5 from your wallet, and hand it to the cashier, very confident there can't be any larger side effect than the loss of the $5. --- We use the principle of least privilege when we take money from our wallet to pay in a transaction. The largest side effect possible in a normal transaction is not getting the correct change back. --- We use the principle of "don't trust the user, blindly trust the software with the user's rights" with our programs on computers. We hope that our firewalls and antivirus have stopped anything bad from happening. Unfortunately the halting problem is impossible to solve, and you can't enumerate bad software, or limit side effects using this model. --- Every time I bring this up here, objections are made that it's too complicated, wouldn't actually work, etc... Fine, I expect those, and will try to answer them, like always. My main point is, least privilege works. WASM seems to be holding up fine, and it uses it. Virtual Machines and Containers are a way too course model of it. Cybersecurity CAN be solved. Please don't give up hope.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Cybersecurity CAN be solved. Please don't give up hope. Thank god there are people like you who still have the courage to think this way. My comment "Cybersecurity is doooomed" is actually a little more nuanced. Here's a few of the issues, as I see it, in a longer form [1]. Pragmatically, what we now have is a culture aggressively opposed to the USERS's security [2] under the various veils of "convenience", "necessary efficiency" and "security". Yes, included in these "three-little-pigs of broken systems" faux "security" is also key mechanism for undermining _actual_ security). To this end, grotesque negligence and incompetence are rewarded in the name of shipping products, making money, satiating power and exalting convenience uber-alles. To take your analogy of money. Quite literally the opposite is being pushed under the guise of "cashless commerce". Instead of taking $5 from your wallet, you wave a contactless card at an unknown computer and hope it's "temporary power of attorney over your bank account" works out fairly. Yes, cybersecurity can exist. But I don't think it can exist in the digital ecosystem that corporations and governments want to push onto society. [1] http://techrights.org/2021/11/29/teaching-cybersecurity/ http://techrights.org/2021/11/29/teaching-cybersecurity/ [2] I believe, and teach my students, that in the adversarial 21st century context of unfettered state security and surveillance capitalism security is a "fixed sum game". For example, the vendor's security is the user's insecurity, and so on. Any question of security must be qualified with three further questions: Security for who? Security from who? Security to what end?
the_only_law 4y ago
> I believe it has nothing to do with nostalgia. I wasn’t even alive at the time most of the machines I have were manufactured. But I can understand them. I cannot understand modern computers for the life of me and I’ve tried. Nowadays computing feels like a heap of black boxes designed to extract as much as they can from you.

eternityforest 4y ago

Open source. Learn it, use it, develop it, don't try to ruin it by blocking innovation, help answer questions on the forums, annoy people till the try it(But don't try to make them use stuff no regular user wants, like sed scripts and emacs)... FOSS is doing amazingly well. I also think open hardware will probably have it's day eventually. The IoT needs a bit of a push to stop being a pile of SASS poop, and we especially need a free alternative to things like Tile trackers before the EU kills them or something. What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch?

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch? The hard work is still to be done on the legal and cultural levels. I don't want to use free software as a marginalised, "not supported" exception and constant "inconvenience" to others who have been deceived or bullied into domesticated monopoly silos. I want a right to choose (or build for myself) software that fits my needs, practical, ethical, technical, financial and cultural, and to have those choices work at least as well as for a big-tech consumer for most common tasks in a modern digital society. Surely the real action is now on the protocol and interoperability level? Things have essentially not improved since the late 80s when you couldn't load a DOS file on a Mac, except now the barriers are on the network. In this regard I am pleased to live in Europe which I think is doing good things to promote software freedom and diversity - though I hear you have reservations. Do you think the dangers (in Europe) are that we simply replace corporations with governments as enemies of freedom? If so, how can a free market (rather than top-down legislation) address the seemingly insoluble problem of forcing giants to open and interoperate?
- eternityforest 4y ago
  I love right to repair and data portability, and USB C port, and I am a big fan of opening up the Apple platform. But I don't like quite that level of extreme stance on privacy. I do believe it's absolutely a right, but I don't want it to be a duty. Not all personal data is a top level military secret, and there are many legitimate uses(Look at HAM radio) for even plaintext systems. I think I'd rather they just require honest privacy policies in a simple machine readable format with an accompanying human readable version. Something needs to be done, because it's definitely not right to lie to consumers, but I also don't want it to be any harder to log data for debugging and attack mitigation, to use CCTV, or to use technologies that are decentralized and inherently don't support revoking rights to process. I mostly like the GDPR, but there's a few things I don't quite like, and the possibility of even more strict stuff is a bit scary. I'd hate to see AirTags, CCTV, and Amazon Sidewalk outright banned with no chance of even a FOSS version, and I personally know people who would love that to happen. Here in the US most states forbid one person from secretly recording a conversation that they are part of without specific exceptions, and even that has some scary side effects, because a hidden recorder is a powerful self defense tool. Other than that, I'm a fan of 95% of what I've seen from the EU on tech. It's probably not enough to really fix things though. Data portability doesn't fully solve things when so much is in the cloud. Sure you can move to some other provider, but it's gonna be a lot of work, and then you'll just have a different single point of failure. I think what we really need is for a really good open protocol to really take over. Something like WebDav, but extended to support synced redundant accounts, domainless self hosting(With pubkey/DHT based domains that don't require asking a registrar's permission to make one), and so on. It's just way too convenient to make stuff sync in the cloud, without it, FOSS doesn't have full parity. We need something like SOLID, making that cloud sync a separate reusable thing and letting us choose our providers, while making it easy to add to apps, and not involving crypto tokens or 7729 different accounts on a million custom sync systems, some of which may be insecure.

mikewarot 4y ago

>Cybersecurity is a lost cause. We just can't fix it. It's not... it just seems like it because our current way of using computers seems to make sense, when actually it's insane. If we thought of money the same was as compute, image going to buy bread at the store. You make your selection, then hand over your wallet, and sign a power of attorney, have it notarized, and hand it to the clerk. This clerk has been checked to me a good clerk by both your AntiBadClerk service. You get your wallet back, and take your purchase home, confident it has had no bad side effects, and the correct amount has been taken from your wallet. --- Or... you could take $5 from your wallet, and hand it to the cashier, very confident there can't be any larger side effect than the loss of the $5. --- We use the principle of least privilege when we take money from our wallet to pay in a transaction. The largest side effect possible in a normal transaction is not getting the correct change back. --- We use the principle of "don't trust the user, blindly trust the software with the user's rights" with our programs on computers. We hope that our firewalls and antivirus have stopped anything bad from happening. Unfortunately the halting problem is impossible to solve, and you can't enumerate bad software, or limit side effects using this model. --- Every time I bring this up here, objections are made that it's too complicated, wouldn't actually work, etc... Fine, I expect those, and will try to answer them, like always. My main point is, least privilege works. WASM seems to be holding up fine, and it uses it. Virtual Machines and Containers are a way too course model of it. Cybersecurity CAN be solved. Please don't give up hope.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Cybersecurity CAN be solved. Please don't give up hope. Thank god there are people like you who still have the courage to think this way. My comment "Cybersecurity is doooomed" is actually a little more nuanced. Here's a few of the issues, as I see it, in a longer form [1]. Pragmatically, what we now have is a culture aggressively opposed to the USERS's security [2] under the various veils of "convenience", "necessary efficiency" and "security". Yes, included in these "three-little-pigs of broken systems" faux "security" is also key mechanism for undermining _actual_ security). To this end, grotesque negligence and incompetence are rewarded in the name of shipping products, making money, satiating power and exalting convenience uber-alles. To take your analogy of money. Quite literally the opposite is being pushed under the guise of "cashless commerce". Instead of taking $5 from your wallet, you wave a contactless card at an unknown computer and hope it's "temporary power of attorney over your bank account" works out fairly. Yes, cybersecurity can exist. But I don't think it can exist in the digital ecosystem that corporations and governments want to push onto society. [1] http://techrights.org/2021/11/29/teaching-cybersecurity/ http://techrights.org/2021/11/29/teaching-cybersecurity/ [2] I believe, and teach my students, that in the adversarial 21st century context of unfettered state security and surveillance capitalism security is a "fixed sum game". For example, the vendor's security is the user's insecurity, and so on. Any question of security must be qualified with three further questions: Security for who? Security from who? Security to what end?

the_only_law 4y ago

> I believe it has nothing to do with nostalgia. I wasn’t even alive at the time most of the machines I have were manufactured. But I can understand them. I cannot understand modern computers for the life of me and I’ve tried. Nowadays computing feels like a heap of black boxes designed to extract as much as they can from you.