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He's absolutely right and it is a very bad place to end up, despite the supposed convenience for consumers. There are a number of problems that create a bit of

He's absolutely right and it is a very bad place to end up, despite the supposed convenience for consumers. There are a number of problems that create a bit of rock-and-hard place. We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism, and various other centralized exercises of power that align with personal political whims. We want convenience and constant new features. We want things to work smoothly. We sorta care about security, as long as its not inconvenient. And we don't want to pay up front for any of it. Better still for it to be free with some ads. Governments are legitimately concerned with terrorism, nation-state influence campaigns, industrial espionage, and law enforcement. They have to solve these problems, with constrained resources, in a technology environment that moves far faster than they can. They will push the regulation tools they have, as hard as they can, to solve these problems, if we let them. There are almost zero short-term consumer/voter/elected-offical incentives for free, open, secure, interoperable systems. In fact consumer, political, and financial incentives are all aligned, currently, towards centralization of power and walled gardens. And the Silicon Valley model really is eating the world. This is why open source has become so incredibly important. Open source hardware and networks doubly so.

dbspin 4y ago
One minor correction - no one 'wants' ads. People are reluctant / unable to pay for the hundreds of daily services they use, given the death by a thousand cuts nature of subscriptions, and the failure of microtransactions to ever become a reality. So we tolerate ads (to a point). But no one actively wants ads. This isn't a social contract that was agreed to. In fact, enormous numbers of people go out of their way to avoid them, online and off - using ad blockers, arriving late to the cinema, 'pirating' media they already have 'legal' add riddled access to. Completely agree with you in relation to the bad incentives at work, but adverts are not a desires outcome either.
- em3rgent0rdr 4y ago
  I want ads to a certain extent. Particularly when they are informing me of something that I likely want but wasn't aware of and which I wouldn't have stumbled upon without the ad.
  - drdeca 4y ago
    I agree, but also ads which are repetitive and which I can clearly communicate why I am not a potential customer, can be quite annoying. It would be nice, I think, if people who are shown ads could add tags to the adds for the type of product/service the ad is for, or other aspects of the ad (e.g. “this ad is horny”), and indicate classes of ads which they claim they would not be interested in, which, hopefully, advertisers would prefer to show ads for their products to people who would be potentially receptive. For example, I do not watch horror movies, and I don’t think this will ever change. I find video ads for horror movies a little stressful (not like, in a way that is an actual problem for me, just unpleasant), and I think it would be to the advertiser’s benefit and my own for their ads to be shown to someone else instead of me. Similarly with ads for fashion, or at the very least for women’s fashion. I can imagine the possibility that there could be some kind of clothing item where I’d be interested in buying due to an ad, though probably not anything advertised using the word “fashion”. If ads are supposed to have the benefit of introducing potential consumers to goods/services that they might be interested in buying, why don’t they allow users to provide more information about what they aren’t interested in? It seems like it would be beneficial to all parties.
    - est31 4y ago
      > if people who are shown ads could add tags to the adds for the type of product/service the ad is for, or other aspects of the ad (e.g. “this ad is horny”), and indicate classes of ads which they claim they would not be interested in, which, hopefully, advertisers would prefer to show ads for their products to people who would be potentially receptive. This exists already (at least to some extent): https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451?hl=en https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...
      - drdeca 4y ago
        I’ve seen this, or at least parts of it, yes, but it doesn’t resolve my issue. The thing it lets you tell it “don’t show me these” is limited to a list of 5 things, none of which are “this is for a horror movie” or “this is horny”. The other section about interests and brands, uh, well they seem to just not work for me? Like it keeps saying “we will populate this section once you’ve been shown more brands/ads”. I don’t have an ad blocker installed. This is both on my phone and on my laptop, and is the case for all my google accounts? I know it at least used to have an “interests” section that I could update, but that didn’t really solve my problem either. The reason I specified a viewer-tagged system is because it would, I would think, avoid the problem of [the categories that one can mark oneself as dis/interested in] being largely useless?
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  I agree with you almost entirely with one tiny caveat. The only time I am receptive to advertisements is when I am actively and intentionally looking for a product, service, or solution. But I share your assessment that the vast majority of the time advertisements and the tracking infrastructure around them are unwelcome.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    That's a terrible time to be receptive to advertisements! The ads are trying to get you to pick their particular product over their competitors, for reasons that have nothing to do with quality or suitability for your needs.
- emptybits 4y ago
  > One minor correction - no one 'wants' ads. Yes, in 2022. I have ad fatigue. PTSD, even, from the onslaught and effort to avoid them. But I recall a time when I enjoyed ads and actually looked forward to them and paid good money for magazines, and to a lesser degree TV, full of ads that somehow seemed informative and civilized and entertaining. Byte Magazine, The Computer Shopper (all ads! yet I paid for it!), Car & Driver, Popular Mechanics, Bicycling, you name it. I don't think this is nostalgia; I was informed and entertained. Never again, I suppose...
- narrator 4y ago
  When ads are hyper-targeted to niche products offered by small businesses that I am a fan of, they are actually not bad. I like the ads on Facebook, but not as much on other platforms like TV since TV ads are just random pray and spray ads, usually by megacorps for things I'd never buy. Look at Dollar Shave Club. A tiny little company that was able to get to an insane valuation chipping away at the consumer mega corps because of targeted advertising and some good ads. I've heard that small consumer packaged goods vendors are having a tough time now that Facebook got their tracking shut down. The only people who can effectively market mass market stuff like that now are the megacorps like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble who can do multi-million dollar poorly targeted campaigns.
  - dbspin 4y ago
    Disagree - even if 'dollar shave club' happen to be the ideal razor company for you, once you purchase their product you are still subjected to their advertisements ad nauseam. Frankly I have zero sympathy for companies who can no longer track my data without my explicit consent.
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  I have a personal holy war against internet ads and its industry, as a reprisal the destruction of the better internet of the bygone era. I use everything in my power to remove internet ads from my attention - ublock origin, sponsorblock for youtube. Adaway for Android phones. Now I rarely ever see ads on my computer/phone. Real life ads, while also occasionally annoying, is not nearly as harmful as it does not track you or gatekeep information.
none8 4y ago
He’s absolutely right engineers should censor their outputs and work under the demands of allegiance to social norms? Religiosity. The past is not shackles on the future.
TexanFeller 4y ago
> We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism There's still a large minority of us that sincerely don't.
- hfbff 4y ago
  Agreed. I don't want either (in general, there might be exception s). I obviously want to hold people (the people that actually have the kiddie porn, that are actually posting the hate speech) accountably for kiddie porn, inciting terrorism and even hate speech, but I don't generally want vendors to be accountable.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    Why should they be held responsible for inciting terrorism? They're not injuring anybody.
    - Hackbraten 4y ago
      One could argue that they are indeed injuring people, by stochastic terrorism [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_attack#Stochastic_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_attack#Stochastic_te...
    - brazzy 4y ago
      Because it still ends up with people killed. Free speech absolutism is poison for actual freedom.
      - jfengel 4y ago
        I agree. I think it needs a lot more thought than the OP was giving it, though of course that kind of sarcasm reads poorly on the Internet.
  - throwup 4y ago
    Throughout history vendors have generally not been responsible for the actions of their users. Nobody blames Sharpie if someone uses their markers to make a giant poster with hate speech. Nobody blames the USPS if someone mails a letter with a death threat. Nobody blames Verizon if somebody makes a phone call to bully their kid. Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech. This is a dangerous direction for the world to be moving in.
eternalban 4y ago
This is fundamentally a political issue and any organized effort to counter the establishment's chosen path can and likely will meet with a political/legal response. The issue is central enough. I was musing to a friend the other day (in context of AI actually, not general access to computing) that Marx apparently missed a fork in the road in his linear idea of 'historic necessity' regarding the deterministic nature of social system transitions. Since technology, now cognitive technology, is such a huge amplifier of wealth, it now seems the Capitalist class can chart a way in the future that decouples from labor and assumes control over advanced technology. This path of the fork in the road will not end in a workers paradise ..
- tetris11 4y ago
  Here's a fun website that follows that train of thought to its natural conclusion: https://exterminism.com/ https://exterminism.com/
  - eternalban 4y ago
    What seems naturally conclusive can be held to be reflective of one's own predispositions unless it is accompanied by a compelling train of thought. So all we need now are the missing tracks of this train (and all the charming must-see stops along the way).
svnpenn 4y ago
did you watch the video? Its about DRM, not really anything your comment is covering.
serverholic 4y ago
The end goal should be open-source everything. Imagine a world where, for example, the schematics for farming tools are open-source and anyone can improve them and download them. Everything becomes a global collaborative effort.
bitwize 4y ago
> We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism, and various other centralized exercises of power that align with personal political whims. Autres temps, autres moeurs. We live in a culture today where if you are not active in the fight against X, then you condone X, ipso facto. Back in the day, companies could legitimately claim that they were in the business of delivering a product, and others had the responsibility of policing against social ills. In today's era of corporate responsibility and ESG, that is no longer the case. Open source will be affected too, as open source cannot be sustained in a vacuum; it needs institutions, foundations, and corporate backers, all of which will be pressured to comply with "ethical source" guidelines.
Xelynega 4y ago
I think you're putting the cart before the horse with the consumer-vendor relationship. Consumers don't want vendors to police content, vendors want to be a hub of content and policing content is the only way they can appease the diverse group of people they want to continue to grow. Consumers are perfectly happy to self-police content, the problem is that the models that allow for that make it a lot harder to discover content. With your comment of incentives I think youre placing the blame wrong again. The reason there's no incentives to create free, open, secure, interoperable systems is becausese capitalism places importance on prior ownership. There's a lot more money in being the standard that everyone has to pay a royalty to in the future than there is in giving out the standard for free and just being a user of it(see: meta and the metaverse).
shadowgovt 4y ago
It's not the source that's the problem; we're drowning in open source. It's that power has shifted to centralized clouds and nobody has stepped up to make self-hosting as turnkey as open source is. We need an open source movement and ethos for DIY cloud hosting, if not shared resource fabrics.
- cinquemb 4y ago
  Sadly the only thing that I can think that would make self hosting easy is if operated like a botnet/virus.
yakubin 4y ago
> They will push the regulation tools they have, as hard as they can, to solve these problems, if we let them. And after the party you don't like is elected, they will use that same power you gave them for going after say... women who underwent abortions. Be careful what you wish for.
userbinator 4y ago
This is why open source has become so incredibly important. Open source hardware and networks doubly so. Open source is nowhere near as important as the right and ability to read and modify. The most popular browser is (mostly) open-source, and so is the most widely-used operating system. The megacorps are really happy to advertise the fact that they're contributing to and using OSS. Yet the situation is such that while you can see the source, it doesn't necessarily mean you have any power to do anything other than read it. What good is having the source if you're prevented from actually using it, due to various "security" features? Contrast that with the rise of the PC in the 80s and 90s through the early 2000s and the slowly-dying culture that came with it. The majority of software was closed source, but it didn't stop people with a disassembler and a hex editor from analysing and modifying it. Thus I think focusing on OSS is merely a distraction.

dbspin 4y ago

One minor correction - no one 'wants' ads. People are reluctant / unable to pay for the hundreds of daily services they use, given the death by a thousand cuts nature of subscriptions, and the failure of microtransactions to ever become a reality. So we tolerate ads (to a point). But no one actively wants ads. This isn't a social contract that was agreed to. In fact, enormous numbers of people go out of their way to avoid them, online and off - using ad blockers, arriving late to the cinema, 'pirating' media they already have 'legal' add riddled access to. Completely agree with you in relation to the bad incentives at work, but adverts are not a desires outcome either.

em3rgent0rdr 4y ago
I want ads to a certain extent. Particularly when they are informing me of something that I likely want but wasn't aware of and which I wouldn't have stumbled upon without the ad.
- drdeca 4y ago
  I agree, but also ads which are repetitive and which I can clearly communicate why I am not a potential customer, can be quite annoying. It would be nice, I think, if people who are shown ads could add tags to the adds for the type of product/service the ad is for, or other aspects of the ad (e.g. “this ad is horny”), and indicate classes of ads which they claim they would not be interested in, which, hopefully, advertisers would prefer to show ads for their products to people who would be potentially receptive. For example, I do not watch horror movies, and I don’t think this will ever change. I find video ads for horror movies a little stressful (not like, in a way that is an actual problem for me, just unpleasant), and I think it would be to the advertiser’s benefit and my own for their ads to be shown to someone else instead of me. Similarly with ads for fashion, or at the very least for women’s fashion. I can imagine the possibility that there could be some kind of clothing item where I’d be interested in buying due to an ad, though probably not anything advertised using the word “fashion”. If ads are supposed to have the benefit of introducing potential consumers to goods/services that they might be interested in buying, why don’t they allow users to provide more information about what they aren’t interested in? It seems like it would be beneficial to all parties.
  - est31 4y ago
    > if people who are shown ads could add tags to the adds for the type of product/service the ad is for, or other aspects of the ad (e.g. “this ad is horny”), and indicate classes of ads which they claim they would not be interested in, which, hopefully, advertisers would prefer to show ads for their products to people who would be potentially receptive. This exists already (at least to some extent): https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451?hl=en https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...
    - drdeca 4y ago
      I’ve seen this, or at least parts of it, yes, but it doesn’t resolve my issue. The thing it lets you tell it “don’t show me these” is limited to a list of 5 things, none of which are “this is for a horror movie” or “this is horny”. The other section about interests and brands, uh, well they seem to just not work for me? Like it keeps saying “we will populate this section once you’ve been shown more brands/ads”. I don’t have an ad blocker installed. This is both on my phone and on my laptop, and is the case for all my google accounts? I know it at least used to have an “interests” section that I could update, but that didn’t really solve my problem either. The reason I specified a viewer-tagged system is because it would, I would think, avoid the problem of [the categories that one can mark oneself as dis/interested in] being largely useless?
BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
I agree with you almost entirely with one tiny caveat. The only time I am receptive to advertisements is when I am actively and intentionally looking for a product, service, or solution. But I share your assessment that the vast majority of the time advertisements and the tracking infrastructure around them are unwelcome.
- kelnos 4y ago
  That's a terrible time to be receptive to advertisements! The ads are trying to get you to pick their particular product over their competitors, for reasons that have nothing to do with quality or suitability for your needs.
emptybits 4y ago
> One minor correction - no one 'wants' ads. Yes, in 2022. I have ad fatigue. PTSD, even, from the onslaught and effort to avoid them. But I recall a time when I enjoyed ads and actually looked forward to them and paid good money for magazines, and to a lesser degree TV, full of ads that somehow seemed informative and civilized and entertaining. Byte Magazine, The Computer Shopper (all ads! yet I paid for it!), Car & Driver, Popular Mechanics, Bicycling, you name it. I don't think this is nostalgia; I was informed and entertained. Never again, I suppose...
narrator 4y ago
When ads are hyper-targeted to niche products offered by small businesses that I am a fan of, they are actually not bad. I like the ads on Facebook, but not as much on other platforms like TV since TV ads are just random pray and spray ads, usually by megacorps for things I'd never buy. Look at Dollar Shave Club. A tiny little company that was able to get to an insane valuation chipping away at the consumer mega corps because of targeted advertising and some good ads. I've heard that small consumer packaged goods vendors are having a tough time now that Facebook got their tracking shut down. The only people who can effectively market mass market stuff like that now are the megacorps like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble who can do multi-million dollar poorly targeted campaigns.
- dbspin 4y ago
  Disagree - even if 'dollar shave club' happen to be the ideal razor company for you, once you purchase their product you are still subjected to their advertisements ad nauseam. Frankly I have zero sympathy for companies who can no longer track my data without my explicit consent.
alwayslikethis 4y ago
I have a personal holy war against internet ads and its industry, as a reprisal the destruction of the better internet of the bygone era. I use everything in my power to remove internet ads from my attention - ublock origin, sponsorblock for youtube. Adaway for Android phones. Now I rarely ever see ads on my computer/phone. Real life ads, while also occasionally annoying, is not nearly as harmful as it does not track you or gatekeep information.

none8 4y ago

He’s absolutely right engineers should censor their outputs and work under the demands of allegiance to social norms? Religiosity. The past is not shackles on the future.

TexanFeller 4y ago

> We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism There's still a large minority of us that sincerely don't.

hfbff 4y ago
Agreed. I don't want either (in general, there might be exception s). I obviously want to hold people (the people that actually have the kiddie porn, that are actually posting the hate speech) accountably for kiddie porn, inciting terrorism and even hate speech, but I don't generally want vendors to be accountable.
- jfengel 4y ago
  Why should they be held responsible for inciting terrorism? They're not injuring anybody.
  - Hackbraten 4y ago
    One could argue that they are indeed injuring people, by stochastic terrorism [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_attack#Stochastic_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_attack#Stochastic_te...
  - brazzy 4y ago
    Because it still ends up with people killed. Free speech absolutism is poison for actual freedom.
    - jfengel 4y ago
      I agree. I think it needs a lot more thought than the OP was giving it, though of course that kind of sarcasm reads poorly on the Internet.
- throwup 4y ago
  Throughout history vendors have generally not been responsible for the actions of their users. Nobody blames Sharpie if someone uses their markers to make a giant poster with hate speech. Nobody blames the USPS if someone mails a letter with a death threat. Nobody blames Verizon if somebody makes a phone call to bully their kid. Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech. This is a dangerous direction for the world to be moving in.

eternalban 4y ago

This is fundamentally a political issue and any organized effort to counter the establishment's chosen path can and likely will meet with a political/legal response. The issue is central enough. I was musing to a friend the other day (in context of AI actually, not general access to computing) that Marx apparently missed a fork in the road in his linear idea of 'historic necessity' regarding the deterministic nature of social system transitions. Since technology, now cognitive technology, is such a huge amplifier of wealth, it now seems the Capitalist class can chart a way in the future that decouples from labor and assumes control over advanced technology. This path of the fork in the road will not end in a workers paradise ..

tetris11 4y ago
Here's a fun website that follows that train of thought to its natural conclusion: https://exterminism.com/ https://exterminism.com/
- eternalban 4y ago
  What seems naturally conclusive can be held to be reflective of one's own predispositions unless it is accompanied by a compelling train of thought. So all we need now are the missing tracks of this train (and all the charming must-see stops along the way).

svnpenn 4y ago

did you watch the video? Its about DRM, not really anything your comment is covering.

serverholic 4y ago

The end goal should be open-source everything. Imagine a world where, for example, the schematics for farming tools are open-source and anyone can improve them and download them. Everything becomes a global collaborative effort.

bitwize 4y ago

> We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism, and various other centralized exercises of power that align with personal political whims. Autres temps, autres moeurs. We live in a culture today where if you are not active in the fight against X, then you condone X, ipso facto. Back in the day, companies could legitimately claim that they were in the business of delivering a product, and others had the responsibility of policing against social ills. In today's era of corporate responsibility and ESG, that is no longer the case. Open source will be affected too, as open source cannot be sustained in a vacuum; it needs institutions, foundations, and corporate backers, all of which will be pressured to comply with "ethical source" guidelines.

Xelynega 4y ago

I think you're putting the cart before the horse with the consumer-vendor relationship. Consumers don't want vendors to police content, vendors want to be a hub of content and policing content is the only way they can appease the diverse group of people they want to continue to grow. Consumers are perfectly happy to self-police content, the problem is that the models that allow for that make it a lot harder to discover content. With your comment of incentives I think youre placing the blame wrong again. The reason there's no incentives to create free, open, secure, interoperable systems is becausese capitalism places importance on prior ownership. There's a lot more money in being the standard that everyone has to pay a royalty to in the future than there is in giving out the standard for free and just being a user of it(see: meta and the metaverse).

shadowgovt 4y ago

It's not the source that's the problem; we're drowning in open source. It's that power has shifted to centralized clouds and nobody has stepped up to make self-hosting as turnkey as open source is. We need an open source movement and ethos for DIY cloud hosting, if not shared resource fabrics.

cinquemb 4y ago
Sadly the only thing that I can think that would make self hosting easy is if operated like a botnet/virus.

yakubin 4y ago

> They will push the regulation tools they have, as hard as they can, to solve these problems, if we let them. And after the party you don't like is elected, they will use that same power you gave them for going after say... women who underwent abortions. Be careful what you wish for.

userbinator 4y ago

This is why open source has become so incredibly important. Open source hardware and networks doubly so. Open source is nowhere near as important as the right and ability to read and modify. The most popular browser is (mostly) open-source, and so is the most widely-used operating system. The megacorps are really happy to advertise the fact that they're contributing to and using OSS. Yet the situation is such that while you can see the source, it doesn't necessarily mean you have any power to do anything other than read it. What good is having the source if you're prevented from actually using it, due to various "security" features? Contrast that with the rise of the PC in the 80s and 90s through the early 2000s and the slowly-dying culture that came with it. The majority of software was closed source, but it didn't stop people with a disassembler and a hex editor from analysing and modifying it. Thus I think focusing on OSS is merely a distraction.