25 ms·

The boiling frog of digital freedom

686 points by Gazoche 3y ago

pacifika 3y ago
It’s similar on the console gaming market. The first initial of PC stands for Corporate. Luckily the single point of failure is the store, so it requires one law to fix.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom. The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change. If we are worried that digital freedom will be taken from us, without anyone noticing, we should be worried about all our freedoms - and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours. " Let governments be governments"
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  It’s an important question because “digital freedom” tends to be code for “I want the Internet like how it was when I was younger”, and then throw in some stuff about jailbreaking iPhones or whatever for good measure.
  - orwin 3y ago
    I want to be able to use the Os I want on the computer I want, with the browser I want to be able to connect to my bank and my government websites. As banks and governments move critical parts of their working online, it becomes harder to not use their online tools. If I'm not free to use the tools I want to do so, my freedoms were infringed.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    I want to not have to worry about a government 30 years from now being able to quickly and quietly make unmonitored person-to-person communication illegal. There should be a whole bunch of difficult and complicated steps involved if they don't want to just shut down half their IT.
- dools 3y ago
  > This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- attah_ 3y ago
  To expand on your idea to compare with the "real offline life"... While anonymity should not need to be a top-priority goal in and of itself, you also don't see people running around with their id-cards taped to their foreheads for easy access.
  - landemva 3y ago
    I see plenty of people enthusiastically volunteering for the TSA facial recognition roll-out. People seem to love easy access government surveillance.
  - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
    The thing is, we will. And do. I mean my face is of course my fortune, but it is also my username. A frankly it's a username I have been using a lot longer than 'lifeisstillgood'. my analogy is that one upon a time we were all walking dow the street in Victoria London during one of Sherlock Holmes "peasoupers". Only people who got up close to you could see what you were doing and even reognise you. But technology has cleaned up the air. Now anyone can see from who knows how far away. The privacy we thought we had because of the peasouper is revealed to be a mirage, we were always walking around naked, it just was harder to see. We can simply accept this, or far more likely find a cultural consensus. Privacy can be violated for the public good (hunting offenders, medical epidemiologists etc), but otherwise you are not allowed to use the knowledge you have to exploit or influence. No adverts based on prior activity, no Cambridge Analytica creating ads just for you. We are heading there. That Facebook and amazon more or less publish every ad campaign is incredible - imagine trying to persuade parliaments in 50 countries to pass that sort of legislation. We are a long way from that "cultural consensus". We will probably get halfway there in the grey areas - like facebook deciding to publish all ads. The British politician Nick Clegg is likely able to make more influence globally at Facebook than if he became PM. But we are in the culture wars, and we need to fight. The law, the application of the law - these matter online and offline. So vote. And vote in primaries too because that shapes so much. (Weird idea - Oz has compulsory voting to ensure votes reflect "everyone". What if we had compulsory political party membership so that parties and primaries reflected the population ...)
- fnord123 3y ago
  There's a huge burden on individuals to prove that another organization is using data to persecute them and the definitions or persecution. Before GDPR did you know how vast the network of 3rd parties handling your data was? I didn't! Without this, the next best thing is anonymity which is simpler to enforce and covers future eventualities. >The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change. The real offline life where people can be punished in the US for aiding abortions? Or where homosexuality is illegal in many countries? Or where people conflate a mental disorder (paedophilia) with a criminal act (child sex abuse) (intentionally edgy example to highlight the edge of what's acceptable). >and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours. This is good advice for the Belarusians with bloodied faces and no change. Or the million people who marched against the Invasion of Iraq.
  - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
    We have many offline problems - yes abortion is now more or less illegal in the US. You know what chnaged that? voting. You know what can change it back. Democracy. A VPN won't. Democracy will. Double down on democracy. It's hard complicated and messy. But there are no silver bullets.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like Facebook.
      - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
        No. Just No. Look Brexit was shit. But it was democratic shit. 20 million people did not get tricked by their Facebook feeds. Hell 20 million people did not get mind controlled by Nigel Farage's "I'm just sayin" approach. 20 million people were asked "the country is run by thousands of highly educated, slightly patronising, articulate, over-achieving technocrats who want the best for everyone and frequently find the laws of unintended consequences bite and have not yet worked out that not everyone lives in leafy surrey. Do these people annoy you? vote now" Oh hell I don't know why 20 million people voted for economic and cultural self harm. Because we aren't sharing out the wealth properly I guess. But it was not because "we were tricked". It's because "we refuse to accept the model of how the world works thet you are operating on and want to use ours. The democratic version of Adam Savages "I reject your reality and substitute my own" The problem is without an agreed reality to substitute everyone put in their favourite untested political world view.
- verisimi 3y ago
  > We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom. So, if I openly state that I do not acquiesce to any government (all external force is immoral imo) - does that mean I am now free, and no longer subject to its laws, pay taxes, etc? So, I don't think your definition of freedom cuts it. Any answer that assumes 'government' as part of the answer, and justifies acting with force against others, has to be wrong (immoral). Far better to follow the golden rule: Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated I think that does it.
  - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
    I'm sorry but I maybe feeling "off" today, but we should all be beyond kindergarten political philosophy. Anarchy is what it sounds like - awful and not some middle class libertarian utopia. Yes we need government. And these days we need government to roll up its sleeves and be government. We know you cannot arrange the bread delivery for London through one department but you can force privatised water companies to invest before dividends over periods of decades.
    - verisimi 3y ago
      You're not feeling off. You simply don't understand that basic morality means that you cannot force others to do what you think is right for them to do. You want to find a way to get others to do what you want. This is immoral - you do not want others to have or exercise their freewill. And you want to use other people to force your opinions via police, legal system, etc on others. Put simply you think anarchy is a political philosophy. Whereas anarchy is a moral position - it advocates for free association with others - ie no force. The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do, if they are not harming you. You wouldn't force your neighbour/friends/family to do what you say, if they are not harming you. But you consent to government using immoral force to get others to do what you want (steal money, enforce certain behaviour, etc, etc). In fact you think we need something like a dictatorship to wield even more force even more overtly. I think you will get your desire, unfortunately, as most people agree with you.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  > This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? Freedom is what 'the bad guys' want, so good people must do everything they can to destroy it.
- mindslight 3y ago
  No, we most certainly do mean anonymity is a basic part of digital freedom. The only way you could consistently argue that it's not necessary is to advocate prohibiting anyone, including individuals, treating you differently for anything you've said. Which is clearly impossible. Your framing is really just right in line with the bog standard authoritarian pattern of redefining "true" freedom as something that can be comfortably tolerated and/or further chipped away at down the line.
  - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
    Wait what? Of course what you say (and do) affects how others perceive you. Just as Uncle Jim drunkenly announcing over Xmas dinner how that Hitler guy had a good plan will affect how everyone sees him in the morning, your twitter feed will have an effect on how your neighbours talk to you. That's a good thing 99% of the time. Social strictures have been how humans managed society for thousands of years. It can lead to terrible things of course - but we like to think we have built systems of justice and governance to overcome them. But suddenly making everyone invisible and able to speak and act without consequences seems a bad idea in the real world - i am not sure why it's a good idea online.
    - mindslight 3y ago
      Well yes of course, your first paragraph was exactly my subpoint - declaring otherwise would be impossible. From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is privy to that communication, including limiting what can be attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a baseless assertion. While this may appear similar to how social strictures have been managed for thousands of years - that's thousands of years of oppression of individuality and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call progress. Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the concept of hearsay - where party B claims that party A has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge party A for it, but modulo B's reputation. Digital communications render hearsay moot - the default result of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A said something, is that party B can also prove to anyone that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the cryptographic property of repudiation, as the physics of digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.
jiofj 3y ago
I understand the thermometer analogy but it would read much better if the post was reversed. >2030: The market share of ARM-based Windows machines overtakes x86_64. Yeah, they wish...
- Gazoche 3y ago
  That's how I wrote it originally, but thought an upside-down thermometer would look strange. Oh well.
- tartrate 3y ago
  I like the order of starting with preposterous things and finally arriving at present day just to realize it's just as bad.
sunbum 3y ago
> 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from outside the Play store, citing security concerns. Yeah no, would be a direct violation of DMA at that point[1] [1] - https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en
- dijit 3y ago
  I mean, all you need to do is make it so that it violates some kind of “integrity” protection on the device, after which banking apps, android wallet etc stop functioning. Its enough incentive to kill third party app stores for the vast majority of people. Staying within the letter of the law is pretty easy.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    Have you read the text of the DMA? It addresses this exact point in section 50, and is nowhere near as easy to wiggle around as you suggest.
- nullifidian 3y ago
  Knowing EU it could be altered to "Google removes the ability to install non-sanctioned alternative stores which don't have strict content filtering and anti-piracy policies, as per the EU directive" while preserving the (high) level of plausibility.
- tempodox 3y ago
  And yet you can only install through the AppStore on iOS.
  - Vogtinator 3y ago
    Not much longer.
  - imiric 3y ago
    Not in the EU soon, thankfully: https://www.techradar.com/news/ios-17-app-sideloading-might-only-be-available-in-europe https://www.techradar.com/news/ios-17-app-sideloading-might-...
mildmotive 3y ago
And it will keep getting worse as long as the majority of the population lack proper core values to oppose it.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  I don't think it's a values problem. The technical issues here are complex. Can you explain bootloader locking or remote attestation to your grandmother? Personally I think a better approach is to push the phrase "right to recycle and repurpose" as much as possible. People get that. Everybody personally has seen the unsettling amount of e-waste that passes through their ownership and into a landfill somewhere. Right to repair isn't enough, because these restrictions don't block you from keeping things working the way they did when you bought the device. Recycling and repurposing is something everybody can understand. It answers the question of "wait don't only evil hackers care about that?"
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    How does it follow though. Bootloader locking and remote attestation don't stop you recycling devices or even repurposing them. They stop you changing the OS stack to an unknown one and then using them for the exact same purposes as before. That's much harder to explain and it boils down to in most cases, people still in love with the idea that one day a hacker/grassroots OS may become popular. Which is fun for developers to imagine but has no relevance to any end users.
    - flangola7 3y ago
      >Bootloader locking and remote attestation don't stop you recycling devices or even repurposing them. Not even close to true. https://www.vice.com/en/article/43jywd/why-tens-of-thousands-of-perfectly-good-donated-iphones-are-shredded-every-year https://www.vice.com/en/article/43jywd/why-tens-of-thousands...
      - nvm0n2 3y ago
        Anti-theft features aren't anything to do with remote attestation, and this feature does not stop recycling the devices, it just means that only Apple can recycle them. Which would likely be true anyway due to how integrated the components are.
kstenerud 3y ago
[flagged]
- totetsu 3y ago
  Which begs the question, what would a good investigation look like here? Why is this important? Who are the actors? How can we know their end goals and strategies? What things have happened in the past that we can predict will be attempted again in the future?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kstenerud 3y ago
    It would look like the familiar investigative journalism, studies, surveys, and actual source materials from the companies involved. And it's important because without due diligence, you get snake oil, Rush Limbaugh, anti-vaxx, and other such bullshit from some rando's wild ravings that people just latch onto out of laziness and familiarity. Could you imagine if court cases were held by such standards? Or if elections could be overturned simply by a president's unsubstantiated assertions?
- debesyla 3y ago
  I agree. This website seems like a campaign to show that "apocalypse" is coming.
KirillPanov 3y ago
> Chrome drops official support for Linux, citing the impossibility to satisfy Web Environment Integrity (WEI) checks Nah, the whole point of kernel_lockdown and uefi attestation is so they can roll out WEI without having to do this. Of course compiling your own kernel, or doing anything else interesting, will break the WEI checks as well as break most of the web...
m2f2 3y ago
Sad but true. Same thing as millennial/genZ authored websites who check for Chrome, and throw a tantrum/refuse to work otherwise. I'm looking at you, vivaticket, booking, and many others I can't keep count of
bjornsing 3y ago
I’m more concerned with the EUs assault on private communication than I am with this WEI stuff.
- mordae 3y ago
  Private comms will stay private as long as you can install an illegal decentralized chat app that won't spy on you. Once you can't do that without losing bank account access on the device, most people simply won't install it and stick to monitored comms.
attah_ 3y ago
There is one interesting force acting against that though (or it would probably already have happened). It is the simple fact that most people that are competent enough to actually implement these things also understand the problems with doing so. For the most part anyway. If we could just agree to not do that... well, what are "they" going to do? And of course: we owe it to the web to use Firefox. The Chrome clones are only stalling; not counteracting the impending monoculture even one bit. It doesn't matter how fancy their marketing is.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  This never stopped Facebook from being Facebook.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Yeah, chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems. There are many browsers, many apps, many everything... you can switch whenever... but the DRM and attestation pushes with browsers (and mobile devices) means, that sure, you can use a different browser, but your bank, your streaming service, your newssite might not work unless you're using chrome with drm and hardware attestation. This is already true with many banking apps, where you cannot even start the app on a rooted phone, a phone with an unlocked bootloader or even just a phone that's "not on the list". So yeah... google is the silent killer of the "free interet" and te world happily follows... sadly.
  - attah_ 3y ago
    Then switch from these services while they are still only a few. Revenue is a language they understand. I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. The browser war can at least still be won or settled; mainstream apps are a lost cause outside the legal arena. Edit: and by switching i don't mean going to some tinfoil grayweb nonsense. Go to their direct competitor.
    - KirillPanov 3y ago
max_ 3y ago
We need a new philosophical movement for computer technology. The Stallman movement failed because it was not practical for business applications. At the end of the day, coders & hardware manufacturers need to eat just like accountants, plumbers and doctors. Technology can't rely 100% on altruism. What we need is something close to the Ethical standards of the Stallman movement, but also compatable with business owners. These philosophical ethical standards should also be ingrained into VC culture & corporate culture. The reason why Apple can propose to have something like CSAM, or Google banning someone account forever (Gmail, YouTube et al) because they had images of their naked daughter suffering from a skin disease (to be sent to the doctor). The reason is that there is no ethical-philosophical compass guiding computer technology. Tech Corporate MBAs only care about "playing it safe". I find them disgustingly spinless. Until we have this ethical-philosophy developed, I only expect technology to used as a tool for manipulation and control.
- dools 3y ago
  > The Stallman movement failed Citation needed
  - max_ 3y ago
    How many applications, phones, computers do people use that are Stallman compliant?
    - version_five 3y ago
      Ideological(ish) movements don't succeed by converting everyone absolutely, they do it by changing the narrative in their direction. Stallman has absolutely done that.
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      The Linux Kernel. But answering the “it failed”. Not really. It exists and is a choice on most license dropdowns and is a famous one. People should really default to GPL rather than more permissive licenses and hot take… should also default to closed source. And make open source or non GPL a conscious choice. The reason is GPL gives you more ability to commercialise since it gives you the copyright holder more of an edge over let’s say Amazon Inc who has decided to accept your license to bundle it with a cloud service and extend it. They are obliged to release their source code to their customers. That Ballmer called it a cancer is a great accolade. Close source as a default because it is a one way door publishing the code on the open web. So you are protecting your own interests. You owe the “open source community” nothing and should exploit your IP as much as anyone else, and use GPL to allow people to “fix the printer” if they need to.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
[flagged]
Zetobal 3y ago
Important topic, absolute garbage article. It's more fiction than facts and 1. on hn ofc because the headline sounded nice. I get the intention of exaggerated fiction and landing on what is happening now or before but that's propaganda 101...FUD at its best. Disgusting.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  Obviously everything that's in the future is not a fact - or "wildly speculative and hypothetical" as the article itself puts it. See it as a call to action to ensure that it remains fiction.
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    Call to action? The author did nothing to encourage engagement on the topics only on his article. No information about how you could get active yourself or how you could approach the topic politically just FUD.
    - Vinnl 3y ago
      They were calling attention to the problem, not proposing a solution. But calling out a problem is a call to action for people to try to come up with a (or multiple) solution. Just because there isn't certainty that it would happen like this, doesn't mean there's not a possible future that looks somewhat like this. Nothing that was listed here seems particularly far-fetched to me, I don't think.
      - Zetobal 3y ago
        Think about your last two sentences in regards to the discussion we are having.
        Vinnl 3y ago
        Done. So they're calling out things that could happen, driving the point home by placing them in a timeline. That makes the issue top of mind again for people, potentially spurring them into action - even if just by e.g. making it one of people's considerations in their next election.
Towaway69 3y ago
It's an urban myth that the frog will stay in the water to be boiled, it actually jumps out. Unless of course there's a lid on the pot. Humans have a lot to learn from the frog. And it's not about putting lids on pots.
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  Even though it is a myth, the message of it is still good!
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    The irony is that we invent a myth to explain our own fallacies, pointing to the frog and claiming we're not alone. Yet the truth is that we are alone!
    - Alifatisk 3y ago
      That’s mind blowing actually
- brightlancer 3y ago
  The "boiling pot" is rubbish as a literal claim but quite apt as a metaphorical one: the Overton Window moves over time, particularly as people misremember history ("rose colored glasses") and as folks are born or grow up after major shifts. There are folks on HN today who weren't alive on Sept 11th, or were in the US but were too young to remember it -- their idea of "normal" is very different from folks who were 20 or 40 or 60 years old on the day of the attacks. That's an example of the "boiling pot". I remember talking with a college student in the mid 2000s about music and he was excited that he didn't own physical media, and instead had DRM copies and subscriber access to more. He was a "tech savvy" exception then, but the window has shifted and college students don't buy physical copies of music. In another decade, I doubt they'll buy physical copies of movies. Not all changes are good.
perihelions 3y ago
The other day I read an HN comment that thought that when you buy consumer PC hardware, it comes with a ToS that limits your property rights as the owner. It's the kind of uncanny experience I run into more and more often lately: talking with people so immersed in our new normal of cyberpunk dystopia, they seem not to remember how things were in the before-times. So accustomed to exploitative corporate gaslighting, we're forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are ownership rights? In the before-times, when you bought something, the seller relinquished all claims to it, as an established legal principle (and a social norm and a moral obvious-ity). You can do whatever the fuck you want to your own PC, in your own house! Who would step into your home and tell you "no"? Stallman was right: if you erode the norm that you control your own software, you lose the hardware, too. Free software is sort of a consumer right that enshrines what ownership of computing hardware means.
- mhb 3y ago
  Wickard v. Filburn (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37370108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37370108) should fuel a similar sense of outrage.
  - salawat 3y ago
    But how else will the enlightened Federal Government use it's reach to micromanage everyone's lives? (I completely agree with you however.)
- mypastself 3y ago
  Which ownership rights do the sellers retain now that they didn’t previously? I’m not familiar with any ToS that permits a company to repossess your PC or parts of it. If you’re talking about manufacturers making their devices more difficult to repair or voiding warranties based on minor modifications, that doesn’t mean you can’t do what you want with the item. It just means you can’t force the company to fix or replace it free of charge when you do.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
roenxi 3y ago
I think it is notable that all the stuff that happened is fairly minor and all the stuff that is going to happen is going to economically devastate anyone who brings it in. Freedom does amazing things for an economy.
tjpnz 3y ago
Needs a prediction on when censorship of legal content by network infrastructure companies like Hurricane Electric becomes normal.
quickthrower2 3y ago
VPNs wont be outlawed. But they will be KYC and backdoored encryption - so like an typical internet service provider. VPNs are used all the time in the cloud for legitimate reasons so outlawing is impractical (like outlawing a kitchen knife)
- sneak 3y ago
  VPNs requiring KYC is the same as outlawing non-KYC VPNs.
- developer93 3y ago
  Dunno UK seems to be pretty far through outlawing e2e encryption... Dumb gets through sometimes, they only need to be lucky once
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
markus_zhang 3y ago
The freedom is already dead when something goes from a hobby to an industry and to the most important strategy.
ekianjo 3y ago
Hardly realistic. You dont need to outlaw anything to make it steer in one direction. All you need is friction and incentives.
jacooper 3y ago
> 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from outside the Play store, citing security concerns. This is not happening for sure. Look how apple is being sued from everywhere because of it.
pelorat 3y ago
Not a single one of those points will come true.
b3orn 3y ago
> 2027: Non-WEI compliant websites are marked as "insecure" by Chrome and Safari. Accessing them requires confirmation through a "yes, I accept the risk" dialog box. Did I misunderstand WEI? It's an API a website can use to confirm that a client is "authentic", so shouldn't this rather be "Goodle/Apple/Facebook/... drops support for Non-WEI compliant browsers".
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  You are correct, the author doesn't understand that which he attacks.
- msm_ 3y ago
  You could argue for "Websites that don't validate client's WEI compliance are marked as insecure by Chrome". But that's a stretch, your version makes much more sense. The real fear is that if WEI happens, in 10 years banks and major websites will reject non-blessed browsers and OSes. All for the user benefit, of course.
- devsda 3y ago
  Think of it as a way for Google coercing websites into implementing WEI. Any site can be marked as insecure if it doesn't block non wei compliant devices. You may ask why does that make a website insecure? They can give any number of reasons that can be silly, made up or outright lies as long as they are able to convince larger public. For example, they can claim that a site that allows shady(read wei non-compliant) clients is more susceptible to hacking and can be a threat to your data and your devices as well. Therefore it is insecure. This may come across as silly to techies, but it can sound reasonable to people who don't understand the web in general.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    > Think of it as a way for Google coercing websites into implementing WEI. And why exactly do you think they'd want to do that? What do they gain from it? What do you even think the WEI is that you think this motivation makes the tiniest bit of sense?
tomp 3y ago
> Youtube, Gmail, Spotify, banks and a few other major websites start using Google's WEI API for internal user reputation scoring, forcing non-compliant browsers through more captchas. You forgot the biggest threat: CloudFlare
- stavros 3y ago
  I have a much easier time getting my sites off of Cloudflare than my content off YouTube.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    I can't even read scientific journal articles (on their journal sites) anymore because the big publishers are putting themselves behind cloudflare walls that just don't work in any browser I try. Pretty much my only access these days is waiting years for it to get on sci-hub or in some of the sciences, finding it on arxiv.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  It's ironic: four years ago, everyone was cheering and wooing for CloudFlare. And now four years later we have rebuttal. Strange that. Well, not really. But still. I dislike being the "told you so" guy.
grishka 3y ago
One factor this ignores is that there already exist tens of billions of general-purpose computing devices capable of running arbitrary code. They aren't going to magically disappear. They've already been made and they can't be unmade. Given enough nuisance, people would just stop upgrading. We've already seen this with Windows itself — I know people who are still, in 2023, using Windows 7 daily for the simple reason of hating everything that came after it.
- layer8 3y ago
  Mozilla has ended support for Firefox on Windows 7 (and 8). In a couple of years, less and less websites will work on that last-supported Firefox version. Other cloud-related software like Dropbox will also remove support sooner or later. The more difficult it gets to use online services and the web on Windows 7, the more people will switch. It will end up in a small hobbyist niche like people who run Haiku or Serenity.
  - grishka 3y ago
    Unlike between XP and Vista, there isn't that much win32 API difference between Windows 7 and later versions. I'm sure in due time people will come up with DLLs to shim the few missing functions.
- no_time 3y ago
  The requirement of a TPM in w11 will make companies throw millions PCs into shredders in 2025 with the EOL of w10. Of course there will be enough PCs to go around for practically forever, but the march of time is not going in a direction that you and me will probably like.
  - grishka 3y ago
    That TPM requirement is artificial and is easily bypassed though. But then big corporations would probably not do that for the fear of angering Microsoft. It just makes me angry that Microsoft seems to have no clue what they're doing now. They seem to put their own agenda above all else. They base their system requirements on their misguided vision, not on the actual technical requirements of their software. And ReactOS is still unfortunately as far from being usable as it's ever been.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
While I share the author's fear, the timeline they created doesn't really work. 1. Windows 10 S has mostly been a failure. 2. Web Environment Integrity, while horrifying, has not been rolled into Chrome! It's an early proposal. We should work to ensure it goes nowhere. 3. The above greatly pushes out the plausible timeline for events currently listed next to 2024, 2027, 2028, 2029, 2031, and 2032. An aside, I don't find "Apple enforces notarization" to be significant, since it only applies to code-signed applications. It would be better to list "2012 – Apple blocks unsigned apps by default on Mac" and "2016 – Apple hides option to allow unsigned apps from the Mac GUI." The rollout of System Integrity Protection should be in there too. I'm personally not against any of these changes in isolation, but they are absolutely part of the slippery slope the author is trying to highlight. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I think the article would be more powerful if the content was more plausible. If you already agree this is a problem, the specifics don't matter, but if you're trying to show the pattern to someone new, the facts you present are important.
- lapcat 3y ago
  Agreed. (Except for the part where you're not actually against of these changes in isolation. I was against all of them.) Notarization is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Mac lockdown. It was just another annoying layer atop the preexisting system of Gatekeeper and Developer ID. Also missing on the Apple side are crucial dates such as 2007, the introduction of the locked down iPhone, and 2008, the introduction of the crApp Store. Apple did a bait and switch with iPhone lockdown. Many people seem to forget that it wasn't initially justified in terms of protecting the end user. Rather, it was justified in terms of protecting the cell phone carriers, i.e., "Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." Which we knew was total B.S. at the time, but that was the initial story. The Orwellian move was later made to change the story, and now it has always been about protecting the end user (from themselves).
  - cachvico 3y ago
    > Rather, it was justified in terms of protecting the cell phone carriers I don't remember that at all. I do remember Jobs resisting the app store because he wanted everything to be a web app though (despite resisting the move to responsive web design). Can you provide a source for your claim?
0dayz 3y ago
There are I think certain issues with this timeline, for starters I've yet to hear a counter proposal to drm to protect the artists work (the real issue is not even usually piracy but instead parasitic piracy and forgery, hence why copyright exist originally). Instead you'll hear anecdotes or idealistic arguments for why an artist have to gamble with getting money for their work. Similarly there are most likely valid reasons for certain other implementations on this list, to combat spam or bots. In other words it's the unscrupulous and lazy uses of these tools that is I think the issue and also the fact that the passion and energy we project so often gets caught up in an absolutist crusades agenda instead of using said energy and passion to learn and listen to understand why these things develop so we can either politically change or create better alternatives. Look at FSF as an example, it has lost a lot of relevance because it's been pushed and guided to only hiss and screech at anything that moves that isn't pure free software based on its own definition, what FSF could instead use to fund gnu projects that are better alternatives to the proprietary one (like gcc) or they could create a new middle of the road license that better competes with permissive licenses. Another example is the right to repair lobbying, this is an excellent case of how you make actual change happen. So I'm personally is not a fan of these actions and tools on the list but you have to understand the nuances of why they exist to properly work against it.
- brandonmenc 3y ago
  > I've yet to hear a counter proposal to drm to protect the artists work > Instead you'll hear anecdotes or idealistic arguments for why an artist have to gamble with getting money for their work. This is the current state for nearly every single artist even with DRM, because things like DRM seem to almost exclusively benefit a handful of people at the rest of the world’s expense.
  - 0dayz 3y ago
    Yes, but those are factors that does not involve piracy/forgery. My point is that no drm doesn't give any advantage to the artist from a monetary pov. Drm at least makes it less likely an artist will lose out on potential sales. Hence why I make the point that if we want a drm free world, we should focus on coming up with better alternatives to what we have.
0xDEF 3y ago
That is a very Western-centric timeline. No mention of Russia, China and Iran.
dalbasal 3y ago
I like timelines and other formalisations as of thinking/discussing about digital freedom... and I agree that this is a key freedom battleground in the coming decades (maybe centuries). Alongside this, I think it's worth keeping in mind gradual changes without discreet dates. For example, online copyright enforcement/existence has been on a complex, but directional journey over the 20 years. Same for "safety" and other "content policies," both euphemistic and literal. For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a major musical genre. Years later, walking by a speaker playing music triggers automatic "demonetisation" on youtube. Meanwhile, social media became much more centralised and inoffensive. Nudity, politics and such are strongly discouraged unless explicitly encouraged. There are landmarks in the China-touching part of this timeline that are critical to understanding where we are. At one point, the great firewall was derided. Violating digital freedom with comprehensive censorship meant opting out the digital revolution. Google "walked away" from China when they got too insistent about "getting the message" and independently censoring search in line with unwritten, but well understood censorship rules. Google regretted this and their subsequents did not repeat the error. Since then, most major tech companies have learned the lesson. Telsa, Apple, Disney, Microsoft, etc. In June 2021, a bug on Bing accidentally applied a chinese censorship setting worldwide. "Tank Man" no longer existed on Bing. A demonstration of what flipping a switch in local content settings can do.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  > For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a major musical genre I listen to remixes all the time. Not sure what you listen to but they're massive in electronic music.
  - dalbasal 3y ago
    Sure. Hiphop also still exists. However, both genres have origin stories that's deeply intertwined with copyright litigation, enforcement and their development.
heisenbit 3y ago
I wonder why the gauge is closed at the top. There is no reason you can't fry the frog after reaching boiling temperator.
noduerme 3y ago
VPNs will never disappear, they'll just get more expensive. Privacy isn't for the masses, you see. But it'll always be necessary for senators who drop trou in the men's room with their underlings. In shifts toward totalitarianism, it's normal for slime to rise to the top and to enjoy all the freedoms they stole or killed to deprive from others. Which, of course, leaves the opportunity for hackers to use the holes that they have to leave in their systems. Then just give it a generation or so for the dictators and their spawn to fully decay. 2056: Revolution
dzogchen 3y ago
> 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from outside the Play store, citing security concerns. Ehm... This will be illegal in the EU very soon. A bit alarmist. Also not very fair to only include anti-piracy and anti-freedom legislation while ignoring milestones such as GDPR.
pard68 3y ago
Interesting aside, looking forwards, slipper slopes are a fallacy. Looking backwards, slippery slopes are a no-brainer.
ftxbro 3y ago
lol it starts only as far back as 2011
night-rider 3y ago
> 2034: VPNs are mostly outlawed worldwide We're veering towards Chinaesque authoritative regimes if that's the case. A social credit score could be down the line for the West, unless we fight for the future we want. And by fight, I don't mean lurking on Internet chat-rooms complaining, I mean literal protests in the streets and donating half your income to the EFF and other freedom fighting initiatives.
- abwizz 3y ago
  certainly not that far fetched. > other freedom fighting initiatives "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist"
  - salawat 3y ago
    ...call me what you will, but I know what I am, and why I do what I do. What you call me changes not what I fight for. If behaving is defined as kowtowing to authoritarian control mechanisms, and furthering the goals and reach of tyrants, then I unabashedly aim to misbehave.
smitty1e 3y ago
The more tightly the control freaks seek to grip public communication, the more likely a rebirth of hard-copy pamphleteering, codes, and physical post amongst those not interested in living in "1984". Mankind is not meant for some ersatz technocratic utopia.
- graemep 3y ago
  The UK is putting bar codes on stamps, which will make physical post a lot more yraceable.
jongjong 3y ago
So glad I started using Linux years ago. Last time I logged into Windows 1 year ago, I found it completely unusable (as a developer). I also don't like Apple through it is more usable than Windows.
dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
The headline can be rewritten/generalized as : "The boiling frog of freedom"
M95D 3y ago
Why do so many people care about banking apps and that "pay with the phone" thing?
MC68328 3y ago
It needs to go back further: 2002: Microsoft proposes Palladium, everyone loses their minds. 2007: Apple effectively implements Palladium, nobody panics, because it's all 'part of the plan'.
WorldPeas 3y ago
>Chrome drops official support for Linux and then all the world's E2E testing pipelines break
- teddyh 3y ago
  Google could keep supporting a headless-only version of Chrome for Linux. And maybe slowly start charging for it.
berniedurfee 3y ago
2007 - Apple releases the iPhone and begins the age of the gilded cage of mobile devices.
dsign 3y ago
Good as this is, it's missing the parts which lie outside browsers and it doesn't have much regarding mobile devices. In a matter of decades or shorter, I expect the following to happen as well: * Governments will give themselves new, expanded legal rights for mass-surveillance on their citizens through their electronic devices. * AIs will be plugged to surveillance data-streams to search for "criminal behavior," whatever that be for each country. * As part of the above, a signal-processing mechanism similar to the Chinese social score, but way more sophisticated and comprehensive, will be implemented, by almost every nation with the resources to do so. One nation, China, already started. In the decades to come, other major nations will lean on threat of XYZ to follow suit. (In case you need some examples of XYZ: ordinary terrorism, bioterrorism, avoidance of laws limiting AI, child pornography, access by children to pornography, minor solicitation, parent abuse, sexual harassment of nature X, lax morals regarding Y, information warfare by foreign powers). Even if those things seem unimaginable to us now, it is a slow slope to roll down through a year at a time. Public perception will gradually change enough to tolerate the privacy invasions. And who knows, for certain category of threats, it may be that the general public of the time enthusiastically supports the surveillance. (For example, I would love to see a study where people with children are asked if they believe that the government should have access to the telephones of people who are statistically likely to engage in CP, like men who are single and under a certain age, in order to prevent CP).
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
This isn't a boiling frog situation, because people lack a sense of temperature for technical freedom. The whole tech universe is opaque & unobservable. Free software exists, but a user using kde desktop isn't really that much more likely (beyond their higher likelihood to self selecting in & find out) to get good at computing over time. There's been so few efforts to make computing visible, to make it real. HyperCard is still nearly the only famous example of a technical environment where you could "turn the object over" and see what it did. I adore open source, but its not enough. Live code environments, with strong modularization sandboxing and snapshotting are required baselines for users to exercise freedom. Making computing accessible - making it easy to see what's happening - and making it safe/fun to muck around in are the frontier past opening the source that we - the citizens of planet earth - need to begin to experience digital freedom. We need a bolder way for the computing environment to be Augmenting (computer) Intellect. Freedom expands itself if folks can exercise it, and the barrier to really using your will is - even with open source - too high, too many barriers. Those positive cycles are missing today, so we don't notice a lack of freedom. The best base I know of today for this realization & the effort to open up computing to the rest of the world is https://malleable.systems https://malleable.systems . > The user wants open software, software that can be modified, and that can participate in a progressive improvement process. - J.C.R. Licklider
tim333 3y ago
This misses a wider context of increasing freedom: Prehistory: We lived is small groups. No privacy. About 1/3 or males die by being killed by their own species. Say something against the alphas and risk death. 1600s. trials for heresy etc. Brits sail for the new world to get free speech and freedom of religion. Their colonies do ok. 1960s computers coming but things still pretty locked down in much of the world, secret police, much of the world like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others 2020s mobile computing everywhere. Free exchange of information largely possible everywhere even if you have to use VPNs in China, Russia etc. 2030s - optimistically totalitarianism crumbles a bit more (https://ourworldindata.org/democracy https://ourworldindata.org/democracy) especially if Russia collapses some after it's recent adventure - it's been one of the strongest forces on the Big Brother side of things. So even if our devices get a bit locked down against malware I think the trend's positive. Our instincts evolved in the prehistory stage and so are perhaps a bit out of adjustment for the present day.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nologic01 3y ago
Why isnt the frog jumping out of boiling water? For that to happen you need just two things: 1) somewhere to land where it is not boiling and 2) a trigger. Today there is nowhere to land where it is not boiling. So triggers do nothing but further desensitise the frog. People have tried with FOSS in its various strands but its not working. You cant built a platform for society to land while ignoring how that society works. Principally the money it uses to keep count and the organizational patterns it uses to mobilize resources. There is nothing predetermimed about the architecture of digital society and it certainly not axiomatic that it must be a dystopia. Excessive focus on personal freedoms misses the fact that society is not organized around individuals, but rather around coalitions, clans, corporations, collectives etc. An alternative digital philosophy or platform needs to educate and entice these bigger 'frogs' to act in their own best interest. The rest will be history.
nforgerit 3y ago
Takes a lot these days to keep this timeline from popping up in one's head and follow some conspiracy theories about total governmental control through perverted usage of language and weird (incompetent?) regulations on things digital (speaking as a German here, pointing at EU regulations). I mean, the only thing we (as "the informed people") can do about it, is to keep open and working alternatives for "the masses" to step in on an instant when things are going south with commercial or governmental controlled products. An example that comes up is Mastodon. It's weird, not necessarily bug-free and has a steep learning curve, compared with commercial alternatives. Still, it manages to attract those people that you want to talk with and every time I'm skimming through the timeline, I'm seeing something remarkable. We do already (Fairphone, Firefox, etc.) but should work more on keeping up the good tradition of providing free alternatives. When we're too powerful, we'll be getting criminalized but that would just add some more fun to it.
vinay_ys 3y ago
There are huge economic interests driving the tremendous advancements in mobile computing hardware and software. The same economic interests are leading to creation of things like private-access-tokens and web env integrity as a way to differentiate themselves and to protect their business models from external existential attacks on them. The alternative economic business models have been applied to build open-source hardware and software stacks that preserve this sense of digital freedom. But the result is a stack with vastly inferior capabilities and experiences. Now, someone can demand I want the capabilities and experience of the former with my notion of digital freedom. But unfortunately there's no economic model that would make that work and there aren't enough users who care deeply enough about this to create the economic motivation needed to force the change. Most voluminous usage of Internet by most number of humans is not via web browser anymore. It is via mobile apps. This means more restrictive and intrusive things than WEI have already happened and they haven't noticed or didn't care. In the late 2000s, we built a strong cryptography based privacy preserving secure mesh network and node software for organizing and sharing your personal digital collections (photos, videos, emails, documents, messages etc) and got no traction in the market. Nobody cared about the privacy and security aspects. A few years later unencrypted cloud backups and cloud hosted personal data services became not only normal and accepted but actually preferred and so we gave up on our vision. (We also got a nice and tidy exit via acquisition). Many years later, after many data breaches, Snowden revelations etc, some of us thought people would care now, but alas no, they still don't. Without this basic economic motive force, any such attempt to fight against this will miserably fail.
- nologic01 3y ago
  > Nobody cared about the privacy and security aspects Do people care about the privacy and security of their homes? They obviously do. Now why would the same people not care about the digital privacy and security of their homes? Maybe they are incoherent idiots. That is certainly part of the explanation. But maybe, just maybe, nobody credible and on a high enough podium ever warned them their digital homes are being pilfered with gusto. That, indeed, all sorts of valuables are taken from them, except they are intangible. Your arguments about economic model viability are right, except they are not. Economic models follow laws and regulations. If you mandate that digital privacy is a right and its violation is theft, then there will be a viable industry built around that. The shape of the tech industry is increasingly determined by political views rather than economic or technical constraints.
Daril 3y ago
There is hope: - 20 years ago it was impossible to buy a PC, especially a laptop, without MS Windows : today there are several suppliers: System76, LaptopWithLinux, TuxedoComputers, to name but a few. - It is only in the last few years (less than 10) that Linux is perfectly usable on the desktop, so I don't care what decision MS will take for Windows, it is irrelevant if you have other options. For office suites we have: LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, FreeOffice - FreeBSD has come a long way as a desktop too,in the long run will be usable as Linux - There are now many alternatives (free or paid) to all the Google services. What Google decides to do with its own services is irrelevant to me, there are alternatives: ProtonMail, Tutanota, Infomaniak, OpenStreetmap, MagicEarth, OrganicMaps, ... - There are several open source alternatives to Google Android, solid, complete and usable: Iodè, e/OS, to name a few, and we already have an open source app store: F-Droid. - Linux is also making huge improvements on mobile phones (see PinePhone). It will take a few years, but I'm sure we'll have a viable alternative to Android in the near future. - There are many messaging apps and protocols that are decentralised and resistant to censorship. What is really in danger, in my opinion, is net neutrality and the clamps that Google and other big tech companies and governments will try to impose, but in the recent years we have seen a rise of decentralised protocols and services. My humble suggestions: - don't use the services of the big tech companies : look for and use only open source alternatives, if possible - use an open source version of Android on your phone, without the Google services - prefer decentralised solutions whenever possible
- LesZedCB 3y ago
  just like living the hermit life, leaving all of these services behind is surprisingly alienating. I say this as somebody who has done several of these and is trying to continue to expand. but damn, the is a lot of stuff that you miss out on and I'm starting to be squeezed by the losses to move back. I guess I'm saying, even though I feel driven by a massive moral imperative to engage with technology in that fashion, I find it absurdly difficult to the point of failure. I'm not ready to be a hermit.
  - salawat 3y ago
    Just rebuild what you're missing, and share. In the journey to do so you will discover some of the most interesting primitives out there, and everyone gains, instead of a few unrepentant Gatekeepers.
geniium 3y ago
2036: Virtual Reality Social Distancing becomes a thing, where people attend virtual parties by sending holographic avatars, ensuring they’re “virtually” present without the need to physically mingle. Emoji dance-offs are all the rage! 2037: The “Mind-Meets-Code” era begins, allowing developers to write code directly with their thoughts. Unfortunately, this leads to a surge in “accidental” code commits when programmers have random thoughts about pizza while coding. 2040: The “Everything-as-a-Service” (EaaS) model reaches its peak, where even physical activities like jogging or cooking are offered as subscription services. People realize they miss the old days of doing things for free and embark on a global “DIY Renaissance.”
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  > 2040 You mean year 3100? This isn't going to happen for a long time and people happily slurp up subscription plans in part because it makes them feel good.
  - geniium 3y ago
    Nah things are going fast, 2040-2050
mtnygard 3y ago
I don’t think the main point is that these are exactly the increments. Rather, that it _is_ a series of increments where each step builds on the ones before and enables the next ones. It’s also illustrating the iterative loop from tech vendor to government and the increase from “recommended” to “mandatory.” We are well along this process already. Larry Lessig wrote “Code and other laws of cyberspace” back in the 90s (I think). It’s scary how much of what he wrote now looks _optimistic_.
Tokkemon 3y ago
"VPNs are mostly outlawed worldwide." Lol yeah. Good luck with that.
latexr 3y ago
> 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from outside the Play store, citing security concerns. Considering Apple is being forced to do the opposite, this seems way off the mark. https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/13/apple-europe-alternate-app-store-support/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/13/apple-europe-alternate-...
Blackstrat 3y ago
The world is headed toward a dystopian nightmare, much as science fiction has envisioned throughout the years. The evidence of worldwide government malfeasance is unambiguous. The collusion between government and Big Tech is equally self evident. China and their social scoring system has been in place for a while and it's popping up in the Europe and the States. The proliferation and reliance on "AI" accelerates the decline. It's probably too late to stop it. And the author of the piece is probably more optimistic than is warranted -- it's not just digital freedom.

686 points by Gazoche 3y ago

It’s similar on the console gaming market. The first initial of PC stands for Corporate. Luckily the single point of failure is the store, so it requires one law to fix.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom. The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change. If we are worried that digital freedom will be taken from us, without anyone noticing, we should be worried about all our freedoms - and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours. " Let governments be governments"

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
It’s an important question because “digital freedom” tends to be code for “I want the Internet like how it was when I was younger”, and then throw in some stuff about jailbreaking iPhones or whatever for good measure.
- orwin 3y ago
  I want to be able to use the Os I want on the computer I want, with the browser I want to be able to connect to my bank and my government websites. As banks and governments move critical parts of their working online, it becomes harder to not use their online tools. If I'm not free to use the tools I want to do so, my freedoms were infringed.
- concordDance 3y ago
  I want to not have to worry about a government 30 years from now being able to quickly and quietly make unmonitored person-to-person communication illegal. There should be a whole bunch of difficult and complicated steps involved if they don't want to just shut down half their IT.
dools 3y ago
> This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
attah_ 3y ago
To expand on your idea to compare with the "real offline life"... While anonymity should not need to be a top-priority goal in and of itself, you also don't see people running around with their id-cards taped to their foreheads for easy access.
- landemva 3y ago
  I see plenty of people enthusiastically volunteering for the TSA facial recognition roll-out. People seem to love easy access government surveillance.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  The thing is, we will. And do. I mean my face is of course my fortune, but it is also my username. A frankly it's a username I have been using a lot longer than 'lifeisstillgood'. my analogy is that one upon a time we were all walking dow the street in Victoria London during one of Sherlock Holmes "peasoupers". Only people who got up close to you could see what you were doing and even reognise you. But technology has cleaned up the air. Now anyone can see from who knows how far away. The privacy we thought we had because of the peasouper is revealed to be a mirage, we were always walking around naked, it just was harder to see. We can simply accept this, or far more likely find a cultural consensus. Privacy can be violated for the public good (hunting offenders, medical epidemiologists etc), but otherwise you are not allowed to use the knowledge you have to exploit or influence. No adverts based on prior activity, no Cambridge Analytica creating ads just for you. We are heading there. That Facebook and amazon more or less publish every ad campaign is incredible - imagine trying to persuade parliaments in 50 countries to pass that sort of legislation. We are a long way from that "cultural consensus". We will probably get halfway there in the grey areas - like facebook deciding to publish all ads. The British politician Nick Clegg is likely able to make more influence globally at Facebook than if he became PM. But we are in the culture wars, and we need to fight. The law, the application of the law - these matter online and offline. So vote. And vote in primaries too because that shapes so much. (Weird idea - Oz has compulsory voting to ensure votes reflect "everyone". What if we had compulsory political party membership so that parties and primaries reflected the population ...)
fnord123 3y ago
There's a huge burden on individuals to prove that another organization is using data to persecute them and the definitions or persecution. Before GDPR did you know how vast the network of 3rd parties handling your data was? I didn't! Without this, the next best thing is anonymity which is simpler to enforce and covers future eventualities. >The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change. The real offline life where people can be punished in the US for aiding abortions? Or where homosexuality is illegal in many countries? Or where people conflate a mental disorder (paedophilia) with a criminal act (child sex abuse) (intentionally edgy example to highlight the edge of what's acceptable). >and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours. This is good advice for the Belarusians with bloodied faces and no change. Or the million people who marched against the Invasion of Iraq.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  We have many offline problems - yes abortion is now more or less illegal in the US. You know what chnaged that? voting. You know what can change it back. Democracy. A VPN won't. Democracy will. Double down on democracy. It's hard complicated and messy. But there are no silver bullets.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like Facebook.
    - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
      No. Just No. Look Brexit was shit. But it was democratic shit. 20 million people did not get tricked by their Facebook feeds. Hell 20 million people did not get mind controlled by Nigel Farage's "I'm just sayin" approach. 20 million people were asked "the country is run by thousands of highly educated, slightly patronising, articulate, over-achieving technocrats who want the best for everyone and frequently find the laws of unintended consequences bite and have not yet worked out that not everyone lives in leafy surrey. Do these people annoy you? vote now" Oh hell I don't know why 20 million people voted for economic and cultural self harm. Because we aren't sharing out the wealth properly I guess. But it was not because "we were tricked". It's because "we refuse to accept the model of how the world works thet you are operating on and want to use ours. The democratic version of Adam Savages "I reject your reality and substitute my own" The problem is without an agreed reality to substitute everyone put in their favourite untested political world view.
verisimi 3y ago
> We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom. So, if I openly state that I do not acquiesce to any government (all external force is immoral imo) - does that mean I am now free, and no longer subject to its laws, pay taxes, etc? So, I don't think your definition of freedom cuts it. Any answer that assumes 'government' as part of the answer, and justifies acting with force against others, has to be wrong (immoral). Far better to follow the golden rule: Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated I think that does it.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  I'm sorry but I maybe feeling "off" today, but we should all be beyond kindergarten political philosophy. Anarchy is what it sounds like - awful and not some middle class libertarian utopia. Yes we need government. And these days we need government to roll up its sleeves and be government. We know you cannot arrange the bread delivery for London through one department but you can force privatised water companies to invest before dividends over periods of decades.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    You're not feeling off. You simply don't understand that basic morality means that you cannot force others to do what you think is right for them to do. You want to find a way to get others to do what you want. This is immoral - you do not want others to have or exercise their freewill. And you want to use other people to force your opinions via police, legal system, etc on others. Put simply you think anarchy is a political philosophy. Whereas anarchy is a moral position - it advocates for free association with others - ie no force. The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do, if they are not harming you. You wouldn't force your neighbour/friends/family to do what you say, if they are not harming you. But you consent to government using immoral force to get others to do what you want (steal money, enforce certain behaviour, etc, etc). In fact you think we need something like a dictatorship to wield even more force even more overtly. I think you will get your desire, unfortunately, as most people agree with you.
bluescrn 3y ago
> This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? Freedom is what 'the bad guys' want, so good people must do everything they can to destroy it.
mindslight 3y ago
No, we most certainly do mean anonymity is a basic part of digital freedom. The only way you could consistently argue that it's not necessary is to advocate prohibiting anyone, including individuals, treating you differently for anything you've said. Which is clearly impossible. Your framing is really just right in line with the bog standard authoritarian pattern of redefining "true" freedom as something that can be comfortably tolerated and/or further chipped away at down the line.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  Wait what? Of course what you say (and do) affects how others perceive you. Just as Uncle Jim drunkenly announcing over Xmas dinner how that Hitler guy had a good plan will affect how everyone sees him in the morning, your twitter feed will have an effect on how your neighbours talk to you. That's a good thing 99% of the time. Social strictures have been how humans managed society for thousands of years. It can lead to terrible things of course - but we like to think we have built systems of justice and governance to overcome them. But suddenly making everyone invisible and able to speak and act without consequences seems a bad idea in the real world - i am not sure why it's a good idea online.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    Well yes of course, your first paragraph was exactly my subpoint - declaring otherwise would be impossible. From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is privy to that communication, including limiting what can be attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a baseless assertion. While this may appear similar to how social strictures have been managed for thousands of years - that's thousands of years of oppression of individuality and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call progress. Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the concept of hearsay - where party B claims that party A has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge party A for it, but modulo B's reputation. Digital communications render hearsay moot - the default result of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A said something, is that party B can also prove to anyone that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the cryptographic property of repudiation, as the physics of digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.

jiofj 3y ago

I understand the thermometer analogy but it would read much better if the post was reversed. >2030: The market share of ARM-based Windows machines overtakes x86_64. Yeah, they wish...

Gazoche 3y ago
That's how I wrote it originally, but thought an upside-down thermometer would look strange. Oh well.
tartrate 3y ago
I like the order of starting with preposterous things and finally arriving at present day just to realize it's just as bad.

sunbum 3y ago

> 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from outside the Play store, citing security concerns. Yeah no, would be a direct violation of DMA at that point[1] [1] - https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en

dijit 3y ago
I mean, all you need to do is make it so that it violates some kind of “integrity” protection on the device, after which banking apps, android wallet etc stop functioning. Its enough incentive to kill third party app stores for the vast majority of people. Staying within the letter of the law is pretty easy.
- jsnell 3y ago
  Have you read the text of the DMA? It addresses this exact point in section 50, and is nowhere near as easy to wiggle around as you suggest.
nullifidian 3y ago
Knowing EU it could be altered to "Google removes the ability to install non-sanctioned alternative stores which don't have strict content filtering and anti-piracy policies, as per the EU directive" while preserving the (high) level of plausibility.
tempodox 3y ago
And yet you can only install through the AppStore on iOS.
- Vogtinator 3y ago
  Not much longer.
- imiric 3y ago
  Not in the EU soon, thankfully: https://www.techradar.com/news/ios-17-app-sideloading-might-only-be-available-in-europe https://www.techradar.com/news/ios-17-app-sideloading-might-...

mildmotive 3y ago

And it will keep getting worse as long as the majority of the population lack proper core values to oppose it.

KirillPanov 3y ago
I don't think it's a values problem. The technical issues here are complex. Can you explain bootloader locking or remote attestation to your grandmother? Personally I think a better approach is to push the phrase "right to recycle and repurpose" as much as possible. People get that. Everybody personally has seen the unsettling amount of e-waste that passes through their ownership and into a landfill somewhere. Right to repair isn't enough, because these restrictions don't block you from keeping things working the way they did when you bought the device. Recycling and repurposing is something everybody can understand. It answers the question of "wait don't only evil hackers care about that?"
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  How does it follow though. Bootloader locking and remote attestation don't stop you recycling devices or even repurposing them. They stop you changing the OS stack to an unknown one and then using them for the exact same purposes as before. That's much harder to explain and it boils down to in most cases, people still in love with the idea that one day a hacker/grassroots OS may become popular. Which is fun for developers to imagine but has no relevance to any end users.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    >Bootloader locking and remote attestation don't stop you recycling devices or even repurposing them. Not even close to true. https://www.vice.com/en/article/43jywd/why-tens-of-thousands-of-perfectly-good-donated-iphones-are-shredded-every-year https://www.vice.com/en/article/43jywd/why-tens-of-thousands...
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      Anti-theft features aren't anything to do with remote attestation, and this feature does not stop recycling the devices, it just means that only Apple can recycle them. Which would likely be true anyway due to how integrated the components are.

kstenerud 3y ago

[flagged]

totetsu 3y ago
Which begs the question, what would a good investigation look like here? Why is this important? Who are the actors? How can we know their end goals and strategies? What things have happened in the past that we can predict will be attempted again in the future?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kstenerud 3y ago
  It would look like the familiar investigative journalism, studies, surveys, and actual source materials from the companies involved. And it's important because without due diligence, you get snake oil, Rush Limbaugh, anti-vaxx, and other such bullshit from some rando's wild ravings that people just latch onto out of laziness and familiarity. Could you imagine if court cases were held by such standards? Or if elections could be overturned simply by a president's unsubstantiated assertions?
debesyla 3y ago
I agree. This website seems like a campaign to show that "apocalypse" is coming.

KirillPanov 3y ago

> Chrome drops official support for Linux, citing the impossibility to satisfy Web Environment Integrity (WEI) checks Nah, the whole point of kernel_lockdown and uefi attestation is so they can roll out WEI without having to do this. Of course compiling your own kernel, or doing anything else interesting, will break the WEI checks as well as break most of the web...

m2f2 3y ago

Sad but true. Same thing as millennial/genZ authored websites who check for Chrome, and throw a tantrum/refuse to work otherwise. I'm looking at you, vivaticket, booking, and many others I can't keep count of

bjornsing 3y ago

I’m more concerned with the EUs assault on private communication than I am with this WEI stuff.

mordae 3y ago
Private comms will stay private as long as you can install an illegal decentralized chat app that won't spy on you. Once you can't do that without losing bank account access on the device, most people simply won't install it and stick to monitored comms.

attah_ 3y ago

There is one interesting force acting against that though (or it would probably already have happened). It is the simple fact that most people that are competent enough to actually implement these things also understand the problems with doing so. For the most part anyway. If we could just agree to not do that... well, what are "they" going to do? And of course: we owe it to the web to use Firefox. The Chrome clones are only stalling; not counteracting the impending monoculture even one bit. It doesn't matter how fancy their marketing is.

thriftwy 3y ago
This never stopped Facebook from being Facebook.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Yeah, chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems. There are many browsers, many apps, many everything... you can switch whenever... but the DRM and attestation pushes with browsers (and mobile devices) means, that sure, you can use a different browser, but your bank, your streaming service, your newssite might not work unless you're using chrome with drm and hardware attestation. This is already true with many banking apps, where you cannot even start the app on a rooted phone, a phone with an unlocked bootloader or even just a phone that's "not on the list". So yeah... google is the silent killer of the "free interet" and te world happily follows... sadly.
- attah_ 3y ago
  Then switch from these services while they are still only a few. Revenue is a language they understand. I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. The browser war can at least still be won or settled; mainstream apps are a lost cause outside the legal arena. Edit: and by switching i don't mean going to some tinfoil grayweb nonsense. Go to their direct competitor.
  - KirillPanov 3y ago

max_ 3y ago

We need a new philosophical movement for computer technology. The Stallman movement failed because it was not practical for business applications. At the end of the day, coders & hardware manufacturers need to eat just like accountants, plumbers and doctors. Technology can't rely 100% on altruism. What we need is something close to the Ethical standards of the Stallman movement, but also compatable with business owners. These philosophical ethical standards should also be ingrained into VC culture & corporate culture. The reason why Apple can propose to have something like CSAM, or Google banning someone account forever (Gmail, YouTube et al) because they had images of their naked daughter suffering from a skin disease (to be sent to the doctor). The reason is that there is no ethical-philosophical compass guiding computer technology. Tech Corporate MBAs only care about "playing it safe". I find them disgustingly spinless. Until we have this ethical-philosophy developed, I only expect technology to used as a tool for manipulation and control.

dools 3y ago
> The Stallman movement failed Citation needed
- max_ 3y ago
  How many applications, phones, computers do people use that are Stallman compliant?
  - version_five 3y ago
    Ideological(ish) movements don't succeed by converting everyone absolutely, they do it by changing the narrative in their direction. Stallman has absolutely done that.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    The Linux Kernel. But answering the “it failed”. Not really. It exists and is a choice on most license dropdowns and is a famous one. People should really default to GPL rather than more permissive licenses and hot take… should also default to closed source. And make open source or non GPL a conscious choice. The reason is GPL gives you more ability to commercialise since it gives you the copyright holder more of an edge over let’s say Amazon Inc who has decided to accept your license to bundle it with a cloud service and extend it. They are obliged to release their source code to their customers. That Ballmer called it a cancer is a great accolade. Close source as a default because it is a one way door publishing the code on the open web. So you are protecting your own interests. You owe the “open source community” nothing and should exploit your IP as much as anyone else, and use GPL to allow people to “fix the printer” if they need to.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

[flagged]

Zetobal 3y ago

Important topic, absolute garbage article. It's more fiction than facts and 1. on hn ofc because the headline sounded nice. I get the intention of exaggerated fiction and landing on what is happening now or before but that's propaganda 101...FUD at its best. Disgusting.

Vinnl 3y ago
Obviously everything that's in the future is not a fact - or "wildly speculative and hypothetical" as the article itself puts it. See it as a call to action to ensure that it remains fiction.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  Call to action? The author did nothing to encourage engagement on the topics only on his article. No information about how you could get active yourself or how you could approach the topic politically just FUD.
  - Vinnl 3y ago
    They were calling attention to the problem, not proposing a solution. But calling out a problem is a call to action for people to try to come up with a (or multiple) solution. Just because there isn't certainty that it would happen like this, doesn't mean there's not a possible future that looks somewhat like this. Nothing that was listed here seems particularly far-fetched to me, I don't think.
    - Zetobal 3y ago
      Think about your last two sentences in regards to the discussion we are having.
      - Vinnl 3y ago
        Done. So they're calling out things that could happen, driving the point home by placing them in a timeline. That makes the issue top of mind again for people, potentially spurring them into action - even if just by e.g. making it one of people's considerations in their next election.

Towaway69 3y ago

It's an urban myth that the frog will stay in the water to be boiled, it actually jumps out. Unless of course there's a lid on the pot. Humans have a lot to learn from the frog. And it's not about putting lids on pots.

Alifatisk 3y ago
Even though it is a myth, the message of it is still good!
- Towaway69 3y ago
  The irony is that we invent a myth to explain our own fallacies, pointing to the frog and claiming we're not alone. Yet the truth is that we are alone!
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    That’s mind blowing actually
brightlancer 3y ago
The "boiling pot" is rubbish as a literal claim but quite apt as a metaphorical one: the Overton Window moves over time, particularly as people misremember history ("rose colored glasses") and as folks are born or grow up after major shifts. There are folks on HN today who weren't alive on Sept 11th, or were in the US but were too young to remember it -- their idea of "normal" is very different from folks who were 20 or 40 or 60 years old on the day of the attacks. That's an example of the "boiling pot". I remember talking with a college student in the mid 2000s about music and he was excited that he didn't own physical media, and instead had DRM copies and subscriber access to more. He was a "tech savvy" exception then, but the window has shifted and college students don't buy physical copies of music. In another decade, I doubt they'll buy physical copies of movies. Not all changes are good.

perihelions 3y ago

The other day I read an HN comment that thought that when you buy consumer PC hardware, it comes with a ToS that limits your property rights as the owner. It's the kind of uncanny experience I run into more and more often lately: talking with people so immersed in our new normal of cyberpunk dystopia, they seem not to remember how things were in the before-times. So accustomed to exploitative corporate gaslighting, we're forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are ownership rights? In the before-times, when you bought something, the seller relinquished all claims to it, as an established legal principle (and a social norm and a moral obvious-ity). You can do whatever the fuck you want to your own PC, in your own house! Who would step into your home and tell you "no"? Stallman was right: if you erode the norm that you control your own software, you lose the hardware, too. Free software is sort of a consumer right that enshrines what ownership of computing hardware means.

mhb 3y ago
Wickard v. Filburn (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37370108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37370108) should fuel a similar sense of outrage.
- salawat 3y ago
  But how else will the enlightened Federal Government use it's reach to micromanage everyone's lives? (I completely agree with you however.)
mypastself 3y ago
Which ownership rights do the sellers retain now that they didn’t previously? I’m not familiar with any ToS that permits a company to repossess your PC or parts of it. If you’re talking about manufacturers making their devices more difficult to repair or voiding warranties based on minor modifications, that doesn’t mean you can’t do what you want with the item. It just means you can’t force the company to fix or replace it free of charge when you do.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago

I think it is notable that all the stuff that happened is fairly minor and all the stuff that is going to happen is going to economically devastate anyone who brings it in. Freedom does amazing things for an economy.

tjpnz 3y ago

Needs a prediction on when censorship of legal content by network infrastructure companies like Hurricane Electric becomes normal.

quickthrower2 3y ago

VPNs wont be outlawed. But they will be KYC and backdoored encryption - so like an typical internet service provider. VPNs are used all the time in the cloud for legitimate reasons so outlawing is impractical (like outlawing a kitchen knife)

sneak 3y ago
VPNs requiring KYC is the same as outlawing non-KYC VPNs.
developer93 3y ago
Dunno UK seems to be pretty far through outlawing e2e encryption... Dumb gets through sometimes, they only need to be lucky once

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

markus_zhang 3y ago

The freedom is already dead when something goes from a hobby to an industry and to the most important strategy.

ekianjo 3y ago

Hardly realistic. You dont need to outlaw anything to make it steer in one direction. All you need is friction and incentives.

jacooper 3y ago

> 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from outside the Play store, citing security concerns. This is not happening for sure. Look how apple is being sued from everywhere because of it.

pelorat 3y ago

Not a single one of those points will come true.

b3orn 3y ago

> 2027: Non-WEI compliant websites are marked as "insecure" by Chrome and Safari. Accessing them requires confirmation through a "yes, I accept the risk" dialog box. Did I misunderstand WEI? It's an API a website can use to confirm that a client is "authentic", so shouldn't this rather be "Goodle/Apple/Facebook/... drops support for Non-WEI compliant browsers".

nvm0n2 3y ago
You are correct, the author doesn't understand that which he attacks.
msm_ 3y ago
You could argue for "Websites that don't validate client's WEI compliance are marked as insecure by Chrome". But that's a stretch, your version makes much more sense. The real fear is that if WEI happens, in 10 years banks and major websites will reject non-blessed browsers and OSes. All for the user benefit, of course.
devsda 3y ago
Think of it as a way for Google coercing websites into implementing WEI. Any site can be marked as insecure if it doesn't block non wei compliant devices. You may ask why does that make a website insecure? They can give any number of reasons that can be silly, made up or outright lies as long as they are able to convince larger public. For example, they can claim that a site that allows shady(read wei non-compliant) clients is more susceptible to hacking and can be a threat to your data and your devices as well. Therefore it is insecure. This may come across as silly to techies, but it can sound reasonable to people who don't understand the web in general.
- jsnell 3y ago
  > Think of it as a way for Google coercing websites into implementing WEI. And why exactly do you think they'd want to do that? What do they gain from it? What do you even think the WEI is that you think this motivation makes the tiniest bit of sense?

tomp 3y ago

> Youtube, Gmail, Spotify, banks and a few other major websites start using Google's WEI API for internal user reputation scoring, forcing non-compliant browsers through more captchas. You forgot the biggest threat: CloudFlare

stavros 3y ago
I have a much easier time getting my sites off of Cloudflare than my content off YouTube.
- superkuh 3y ago
  I can't even read scientific journal articles (on their journal sites) anymore because the big publishers are putting themselves behind cloudflare walls that just don't work in any browser I try. Pretty much my only access these days is waiting years for it to get on sci-hub or in some of the sciences, finding it on arxiv.
doublerabbit 3y ago
It's ironic: four years ago, everyone was cheering and wooing for CloudFlare. And now four years later we have rebuttal. Strange that. Well, not really. But still. I dislike being the "told you so" guy.

grishka 3y ago

One factor this ignores is that there already exist tens of billions of general-purpose computing devices capable of running arbitrary code. They aren't going to magically disappear. They've already been made and they can't be unmade. Given enough nuisance, people would just stop upgrading. We've already seen this with Windows itself — I know people who are still, in 2023, using Windows 7 daily for the simple reason of hating everything that came after it.

layer8 3y ago
Mozilla has ended support for Firefox on Windows 7 (and 8). In a couple of years, less and less websites will work on that last-supported Firefox version. Other cloud-related software like Dropbox will also remove support sooner or later. The more difficult it gets to use online services and the web on Windows 7, the more people will switch. It will end up in a small hobbyist niche like people who run Haiku or Serenity.
- grishka 3y ago
  Unlike between XP and Vista, there isn't that much win32 API difference between Windows 7 and later versions. I'm sure in due time people will come up with DLLs to shim the few missing functions.
no_time 3y ago
The requirement of a TPM in w11 will make companies throw millions PCs into shredders in 2025 with the EOL of w10. Of course there will be enough PCs to go around for practically forever, but the march of time is not going in a direction that you and me will probably like.
- grishka 3y ago
  That TPM requirement is artificial and is easily bypassed though. But then big corporations would probably not do that for the fear of angering Microsoft. It just makes me angry that Microsoft seems to have no clue what they're doing now. They seem to put their own agenda above all else. They base their system requirements on their misguided vision, not on the actual technical requirements of their software. And ReactOS is still unfortunately as far from being usable as it's ever been.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

While I share the author's fear, the timeline they created doesn't really work. 1. Windows 10 S has mostly been a failure. 2. Web Environment Integrity, while horrifying, has not been rolled into Chrome! It's an early proposal. We should work to ensure it goes nowhere. 3. The above greatly pushes out the plausible timeline for events currently listed next to 2024, 2027, 2028, 2029, 2031, and 2032. An aside, I don't find "Apple enforces notarization" to be significant, since it only applies to code-signed applications. It would be better to list "2012 – Apple blocks unsigned apps by default on Mac" and "2016 – Apple hides option to allow unsigned apps from the Mac GUI." The rollout of System Integrity Protection should be in there too. I'm personally not against any of these changes in isolation, but they are absolutely part of the slippery slope the author is trying to highlight. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I think the article would be more powerful if the content was more plausible. If you already agree this is a problem, the specifics don't matter, but if you're trying to show the pattern to someone new, the facts you present are important.

lapcat 3y ago
Agreed. (Except for the part where you're not actually against of these changes in isolation. I was against all of them.) Notarization is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Mac lockdown. It was just another annoying layer atop the preexisting system of Gatekeeper and Developer ID. Also missing on the Apple side are crucial dates such as 2007, the introduction of the locked down iPhone, and 2008, the introduction of the crApp Store. Apple did a bait and switch with iPhone lockdown. Many people seem to forget that it wasn't initially justified in terms of protecting the end user. Rather, it was justified in terms of protecting the cell phone carriers, i.e., "Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." Which we knew was total B.S. at the time, but that was the initial story. The Orwellian move was later made to change the story, and now it has always been about protecting the end user (from themselves).
- cachvico 3y ago
  > Rather, it was justified in terms of protecting the cell phone carriers I don't remember that at all. I do remember Jobs resisting the app store because he wanted everything to be a web app though (despite resisting the move to responsive web design). Can you provide a source for your claim?

0dayz 3y ago

There are I think certain issues with this timeline, for starters I've yet to hear a counter proposal to drm to protect the artists work (the real issue is not even usually piracy but instead parasitic piracy and forgery, hence why copyright exist originally). Instead you'll hear anecdotes or idealistic arguments for why an artist have to gamble with getting money for their work. Similarly there are most likely valid reasons for certain other implementations on this list, to combat spam or bots. In other words it's the unscrupulous and lazy uses of these tools that is I think the issue and also the fact that the passion and energy we project so often gets caught up in an absolutist crusades agenda instead of using said energy and passion to learn and listen to understand why these things develop so we can either politically change or create better alternatives. Look at FSF as an example, it has lost a lot of relevance because it's been pushed and guided to only hiss and screech at anything that moves that isn't pure free software based on its own definition, what FSF could instead use to fund gnu projects that are better alternatives to the proprietary one (like gcc) or they could create a new middle of the road license that better competes with permissive licenses. Another example is the right to repair lobbying, this is an excellent case of how you make actual change happen. So I'm personally is not a fan of these actions and tools on the list but you have to understand the nuances of why they exist to properly work against it.

brandonmenc 3y ago
> I've yet to hear a counter proposal to drm to protect the artists work > Instead you'll hear anecdotes or idealistic arguments for why an artist have to gamble with getting money for their work. This is the current state for nearly every single artist even with DRM, because things like DRM seem to almost exclusively benefit a handful of people at the rest of the world’s expense.
- 0dayz 3y ago
  Yes, but those are factors that does not involve piracy/forgery. My point is that no drm doesn't give any advantage to the artist from a monetary pov. Drm at least makes it less likely an artist will lose out on potential sales. Hence why I make the point that if we want a drm free world, we should focus on coming up with better alternatives to what we have.

0xDEF 3y ago

That is a very Western-centric timeline. No mention of Russia, China and Iran.

dalbasal 3y ago

I like timelines and other formalisations as of thinking/discussing about digital freedom... and I agree that this is a key freedom battleground in the coming decades (maybe centuries). Alongside this, I think it's worth keeping in mind gradual changes without discreet dates. For example, online copyright enforcement/existence has been on a complex, but directional journey over the 20 years. Same for "safety" and other "content policies," both euphemistic and literal. For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a major musical genre. Years later, walking by a speaker playing music triggers automatic "demonetisation" on youtube. Meanwhile, social media became much more centralised and inoffensive. Nudity, politics and such are strongly discouraged unless explicitly encouraged. There are landmarks in the China-touching part of this timeline that are critical to understanding where we are. At one point, the great firewall was derided. Violating digital freedom with comprehensive censorship meant opting out the digital revolution. Google "walked away" from China when they got too insistent about "getting the message" and independently censoring search in line with unwritten, but well understood censorship rules. Google regretted this and their subsequents did not repeat the error. Since then, most major tech companies have learned the lesson. Telsa, Apple, Disney, Microsoft, etc. In June 2021, a bug on Bing accidentally applied a chinese censorship setting worldwide. "Tank Man" no longer existed on Bing. A demonstration of what flipping a switch in local content settings can do.

nvm0n2 3y ago
> For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a major musical genre I listen to remixes all the time. Not sure what you listen to but they're massive in electronic music.
- dalbasal 3y ago
  Sure. Hiphop also still exists. However, both genres have origin stories that's deeply intertwined with copyright litigation, enforcement and their development.

heisenbit 3y ago

I wonder why the gauge is closed at the top. There is no reason you can't fry the frog after reaching boiling temperator.

noduerme 3y ago

VPNs will never disappear, they'll just get more expensive. Privacy isn't for the masses, you see. But it'll always be necessary for senators who drop trou in the men's room with their underlings. In shifts toward totalitarianism, it's normal for slime to rise to the top and to enjoy all the freedoms they stole or killed to deprive from others. Which, of course, leaves the opportunity for hackers to use the holes that they have to leave in their systems. Then just give it a generation or so for the dictators and their spawn to fully decay. 2056: Revolution

dzogchen 3y ago

> 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from outside the Play store, citing security concerns. Ehm... This will be illegal in the EU very soon. A bit alarmist. Also not very fair to only include anti-piracy and anti-freedom legislation while ignoring milestones such as GDPR.

pard68 3y ago

Interesting aside, looking forwards, slipper slopes are a fallacy. Looking backwards, slippery slopes are a no-brainer.

ftxbro 3y ago

lol it starts only as far back as 2011

night-rider 3y ago

> 2034: VPNs are mostly outlawed worldwide We're veering towards Chinaesque authoritative regimes if that's the case. A social credit score could be down the line for the West, unless we fight for the future we want. And by fight, I don't mean lurking on Internet chat-rooms complaining, I mean literal protests in the streets and donating half your income to the EFF and other freedom fighting initiatives.

abwizz 3y ago
certainly not that far fetched. > other freedom fighting initiatives "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist"
- salawat 3y ago
  ...call me what you will, but I know what I am, and why I do what I do. What you call me changes not what I fight for. If behaving is defined as kowtowing to authoritarian control mechanisms, and furthering the goals and reach of tyrants, then I unabashedly aim to misbehave.

smitty1e 3y ago

The more tightly the control freaks seek to grip public communication, the more likely a rebirth of hard-copy pamphleteering, codes, and physical post amongst those not interested in living in "1984". Mankind is not meant for some ersatz technocratic utopia.

graemep 3y ago
The UK is putting bar codes on stamps, which will make physical post a lot more yraceable.

jongjong 3y ago

So glad I started using Linux years ago. Last time I logged into Windows 1 year ago, I found it completely unusable (as a developer). I also don't like Apple through it is more usable than Windows.

dennis_jeeves1 3y ago

The headline can be rewritten/generalized as : "The boiling frog of freedom"

M95D 3y ago

Why do so many people care about banking apps and that "pay with the phone" thing?

MC68328 3y ago

It needs to go back further: 2002: Microsoft proposes Palladium, everyone loses their minds. 2007: Apple effectively implements Palladium, nobody panics, because it's all 'part of the plan'.

WorldPeas 3y ago

>Chrome drops official support for Linux and then all the world's E2E testing pipelines break

teddyh 3y ago
Google could keep supporting a headless-only version of Chrome for Linux. And maybe slowly start charging for it.

berniedurfee 3y ago

2007 - Apple releases the iPhone and begins the age of the gilded cage of mobile devices.

dsign 3y ago

Good as this is, it's missing the parts which lie outside browsers and it doesn't have much regarding mobile devices. In a matter of decades or shorter, I expect the following to happen as well: * Governments will give themselves new, expanded legal rights for mass-surveillance on their citizens through their electronic devices. * AIs will be plugged to surveillance data-streams to search for "criminal behavior," whatever that be for each country. * As part of the above, a signal-processing mechanism similar to the Chinese social score, but way more sophisticated and comprehensive, will be implemented, by almost every nation with the resources to do so. One nation, China, already started. In the decades to come, other major nations will lean on threat of XYZ to follow suit. (In case you need some examples of XYZ: ordinary terrorism, bioterrorism, avoidance of laws limiting AI, child pornography, access by children to pornography, minor solicitation, parent abuse, sexual harassment of nature X, lax morals regarding Y, information warfare by foreign powers). Even if those things seem unimaginable to us now, it is a slow slope to roll down through a year at a time. Public perception will gradually change enough to tolerate the privacy invasions. And who knows, for certain category of threats, it may be that the general public of the time enthusiastically supports the surveillance. (For example, I would love to see a study where people with children are asked if they believe that the government should have access to the telephones of people who are statistically likely to engage in CP, like men who are single and under a certain age, in order to prevent CP).

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

This isn't a boiling frog situation, because people lack a sense of temperature for technical freedom. The whole tech universe is opaque & unobservable. Free software exists, but a user using kde desktop isn't really that much more likely (beyond their higher likelihood to self selecting in & find out) to get good at computing over time. There's been so few efforts to make computing visible, to make it real. HyperCard is still nearly the only famous example of a technical environment where you could "turn the object over" and see what it did. I adore open source, but its not enough. Live code environments, with strong modularization sandboxing and snapshotting are required baselines for users to exercise freedom. Making computing accessible - making it easy to see what's happening - and making it safe/fun to muck around in are the frontier past opening the source that we - the citizens of planet earth - need to begin to experience digital freedom. We need a bolder way for the computing environment to be Augmenting (computer) Intellect. Freedom expands itself if folks can exercise it, and the barrier to really using your will is - even with open source - too high, too many barriers. Those positive cycles are missing today, so we don't notice a lack of freedom. The best base I know of today for this realization & the effort to open up computing to the rest of the world is https://malleable.systems https://malleable.systems . > The user wants open software, software that can be modified, and that can participate in a progressive improvement process. - J.C.R. Licklider

tim333 3y ago

This misses a wider context of increasing freedom: Prehistory: We lived is small groups. No privacy. About 1/3 or males die by being killed by their own species. Say something against the alphas and risk death. 1600s. trials for heresy etc. Brits sail for the new world to get free speech and freedom of religion. Their colonies do ok. 1960s computers coming but things still pretty locked down in much of the world, secret police, much of the world like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others 2020s mobile computing everywhere. Free exchange of information largely possible everywhere even if you have to use VPNs in China, Russia etc. 2030s - optimistically totalitarianism crumbles a bit more (https://ourworldindata.org/democracy https://ourworldindata.org/democracy) especially if Russia collapses some after it's recent adventure - it's been one of the strongest forces on the Big Brother side of things. So even if our devices get a bit locked down against malware I think the trend's positive. Our instincts evolved in the prehistory stage and so are perhaps a bit out of adjustment for the present day.

deleted 3y ago
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nologic01 3y ago

Why isnt the frog jumping out of boiling water? For that to happen you need just two things: 1) somewhere to land where it is not boiling and 2) a trigger. Today there is nowhere to land where it is not boiling. So triggers do nothing but further desensitise the frog. People have tried with FOSS in its various strands but its not working. You cant built a platform for society to land while ignoring how that society works. Principally the money it uses to keep count and the organizational patterns it uses to mobilize resources. There is nothing predetermimed about the architecture of digital society and it certainly not axiomatic that it must be a dystopia. Excessive focus on personal freedoms misses the fact that society is not organized around individuals, but rather around coalitions, clans, corporations, collectives etc. An alternative digital philosophy or platform needs to educate and entice these bigger 'frogs' to act in their own best interest. The rest will be history.

nforgerit 3y ago

Takes a lot these days to keep this timeline from popping up in one's head and follow some conspiracy theories about total governmental control through perverted usage of language and weird (incompetent?) regulations on things digital (speaking as a German here, pointing at EU regulations). I mean, the only thing we (as "the informed people") can do about it, is to keep open and working alternatives for "the masses" to step in on an instant when things are going south with commercial or governmental controlled products. An example that comes up is Mastodon. It's weird, not necessarily bug-free and has a steep learning curve, compared with commercial alternatives. Still, it manages to attract those people that you want to talk with and every time I'm skimming through the timeline, I'm seeing something remarkable. We do already (Fairphone, Firefox, etc.) but should work more on keeping up the good tradition of providing free alternatives. When we're too powerful, we'll be getting criminalized but that would just add some more fun to it.

vinay_ys 3y ago

There are huge economic interests driving the tremendous advancements in mobile computing hardware and software. The same economic interests are leading to creation of things like private-access-tokens and web env integrity as a way to differentiate themselves and to protect their business models from external existential attacks on them. The alternative economic business models have been applied to build open-source hardware and software stacks that preserve this sense of digital freedom. But the result is a stack with vastly inferior capabilities and experiences. Now, someone can demand I want the capabilities and experience of the former with my notion of digital freedom. But unfortunately there's no economic model that would make that work and there aren't enough users who care deeply enough about this to create the economic motivation needed to force the change. Most voluminous usage of Internet by most number of humans is not via web browser anymore. It is via mobile apps. This means more restrictive and intrusive things than WEI have already happened and they haven't noticed or didn't care. In the late 2000s, we built a strong cryptography based privacy preserving secure mesh network and node software for organizing and sharing your personal digital collections (photos, videos, emails, documents, messages etc) and got no traction in the market. Nobody cared about the privacy and security aspects. A few years later unencrypted cloud backups and cloud hosted personal data services became not only normal and accepted but actually preferred and so we gave up on our vision. (We also got a nice and tidy exit via acquisition). Many years later, after many data breaches, Snowden revelations etc, some of us thought people would care now, but alas no, they still don't. Without this basic economic motive force, any such attempt to fight against this will miserably fail.

nologic01 3y ago
> Nobody cared about the privacy and security aspects Do people care about the privacy and security of their homes? They obviously do. Now why would the same people not care about the digital privacy and security of their homes? Maybe they are incoherent idiots. That is certainly part of the explanation. But maybe, just maybe, nobody credible and on a high enough podium ever warned them their digital homes are being pilfered with gusto. That, indeed, all sorts of valuables are taken from them, except they are intangible. Your arguments about economic model viability are right, except they are not. Economic models follow laws and regulations. If you mandate that digital privacy is a right and its violation is theft, then there will be a viable industry built around that. The shape of the tech industry is increasingly determined by political views rather than economic or technical constraints.

Daril 3y ago

There is hope: - 20 years ago it was impossible to buy a PC, especially a laptop, without MS Windows : today there are several suppliers: System76, LaptopWithLinux, TuxedoComputers, to name but a few. - It is only in the last few years (less than 10) that Linux is perfectly usable on the desktop, so I don't care what decision MS will take for Windows, it is irrelevant if you have other options. For office suites we have: LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, FreeOffice - FreeBSD has come a long way as a desktop too,in the long run will be usable as Linux - There are now many alternatives (free or paid) to all the Google services. What Google decides to do with its own services is irrelevant to me, there are alternatives: ProtonMail, Tutanota, Infomaniak, OpenStreetmap, MagicEarth, OrganicMaps, ... - There are several open source alternatives to Google Android, solid, complete and usable: Iodè, e/OS, to name a few, and we already have an open source app store: F-Droid. - Linux is also making huge improvements on mobile phones (see PinePhone). It will take a few years, but I'm sure we'll have a viable alternative to Android in the near future. - There are many messaging apps and protocols that are decentralised and resistant to censorship. What is really in danger, in my opinion, is net neutrality and the clamps that Google and other big tech companies and governments will try to impose, but in the recent years we have seen a rise of decentralised protocols and services. My humble suggestions: - don't use the services of the big tech companies : look for and use only open source alternatives, if possible - use an open source version of Android on your phone, without the Google services - prefer decentralised solutions whenever possible

LesZedCB 3y ago
just like living the hermit life, leaving all of these services behind is surprisingly alienating. I say this as somebody who has done several of these and is trying to continue to expand. but damn, the is a lot of stuff that you miss out on and I'm starting to be squeezed by the losses to move back. I guess I'm saying, even though I feel driven by a massive moral imperative to engage with technology in that fashion, I find it absurdly difficult to the point of failure. I'm not ready to be a hermit.
- salawat 3y ago
  Just rebuild what you're missing, and share. In the journey to do so you will discover some of the most interesting primitives out there, and everyone gains, instead of a few unrepentant Gatekeepers.

geniium 3y ago

2036: Virtual Reality Social Distancing becomes a thing, where people attend virtual parties by sending holographic avatars, ensuring they’re “virtually” present without the need to physically mingle. Emoji dance-offs are all the rage! 2037: The “Mind-Meets-Code” era begins, allowing developers to write code directly with their thoughts. Unfortunately, this leads to a surge in “accidental” code commits when programmers have random thoughts about pizza while coding. 2040: The “Everything-as-a-Service” (EaaS) model reaches its peak, where even physical activities like jogging or cooking are offered as subscription services. People realize they miss the old days of doing things for free and embark on a global “DIY Renaissance.”

deafpolygon 3y ago
> 2040 You mean year 3100? This isn't going to happen for a long time and people happily slurp up subscription plans in part because it makes them feel good.
- geniium 3y ago
  Nah things are going fast, 2040-2050

mtnygard 3y ago

I don’t think the main point is that these are exactly the increments. Rather, that it _is_ a series of increments where each step builds on the ones before and enables the next ones. It’s also illustrating the iterative loop from tech vendor to government and the increase from “recommended” to “mandatory.” We are well along this process already. Larry Lessig wrote “Code and other laws of cyberspace” back in the 90s (I think). It’s scary how much of what he wrote now looks _optimistic_.

Tokkemon 3y ago

"VPNs are mostly outlawed worldwide." Lol yeah. Good luck with that.

latexr 3y ago

> 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from outside the Play store, citing security concerns. Considering Apple is being forced to do the opposite, this seems way off the mark. https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/13/apple-europe-alternate-app-store-support/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/13/apple-europe-alternate-...

Blackstrat 3y ago

The world is headed toward a dystopian nightmare, much as science fiction has envisioned throughout the years. The evidence of worldwide government malfeasance is unambiguous. The collusion between government and Big Tech is equally self evident. China and their social scoring system has been in place for a while and it's popping up in the Europe and the States. The proliferation and reliance on "AI" accelerates the decline. It's probably too late to stop it. And the author of the piece is probably more optimistic than is warranted -- it's not just digital freedom.