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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 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
  It's not that the PCs come with more strings attached than they did before - it's that many people, especially younger generation, are so used to those strings controlling their lives through their mobile devices and everything being a service, that they don't realize the same isn't true with a regular PC. At least isn't yet.
- perihelions 3y ago
  They don't. I think the commenter was guessing by generalizing from software/subscription service ToS's, which are ubiquitous; plus the fusion of hardware/software in inseparable packages, like the iPhone hardware, which is a brick without an ongoing Apple subscription.
  - aficionado87 3y ago
    > a brick without an ongoing Apple subscription This just isn’t true. You don’t have to give Apple another dime to use an iPhone perpetually. Any paid Apple subscriptions are optional for cloud or streaming services.
    - dismalpedigree 3y ago
      Agreed its optional. But Apple will do their best (worst?) to get you to use it. Defaults to the free 5g, resetting preferences after OS upgrades, nagging prompts, etc.
    - perihelions 3y ago
      It may be a free subscription, but it's still an ongoing, no-opt-out commercial software service relationship with Apple, Inc. That's why it has a Terms of Service [0] – which is effectively a ToS for the iPhone hardware itself, as there is no way to use it without Apple's OS. [0] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS16_iPadOS16.pdf https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS16_iPadOS16.pdf (the iOS ToS) (And I think it's noteworthy how that ToS' language bounces freely between "hardware" and "software"; how it fluctuates between "software license agreement" and "by using your iPhone ("device"), you are agreeing to...". Apple hardware and software are fused together: there is no practical difference).
naillo 3y ago
A lot of people were just born into this too. People under 27 or so have never known anything other than this pretty much.
iuhaegpoinqhpoq 3y ago
> In the before-times, [...] You used to get full schematics along with the electronics you bought. And by "get", I do NOT mean that you'd have to ask for them. They'd be shipped WITH the products, on paper. It was a normal part of your purchase, just like the manual.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  My first computer was a BBC B. The schematics were IN the manual!
  - perihelions 3y ago
    Indeed they seem to be: https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manuals/Acorn_BBCSMOct85_Sec2.pdf https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manua... ("BBC Microcomputer Model B +") There is a circuit block diagram, a PCB layout diagram with all the components' part numbers that I guess you can replace broken ones (?), and circuit diagrams for the power supply and for the keyboard circuit. (starts on page 97) Skimming the text, the manual seems to assume an owner has access to a multimeter, an oscilloscope, and a soldering iron.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I have that thing etched into my memory to the point that I probably could still fix a beeb without resorting to looking at the schematic.
- ume 3y ago
  I still have the circuit diagram (paper copy) that shipped with my Acorn Atom in, ahem, 1981. Didn’t ask for it! (Edit: with the help of the circuit diagram we did make a simple mod to one of the output ports of the device)
  - guy4261 3y ago
    Your and others' comments on this thread remind me of a though I had lately. In the "before times", you would buy things that would last. So naturally, the companies that made them could not sell new products. Planned obsolescence was one natural outcome that we ended up with. An electrical engineers I know told me how designing a CPU that would last a lifetime is relatively easy compared to designing an equipment that will fail only 5 years from now, but not earlier. I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also being financially sound. Right now economy, to me, seems like a thing of perpetual growth, but in a cancer-like way.
EGreg 3y ago
Looking at this list, open source software is the only thing that can help save us from this future. Whenever a corporation takes control of a widespread open source software (eg Oracle buying MySQL) it is forked by the community (MariaDB). If you don’t have access to the source code, you can’t fork it. And ALL the Web 2.0 platforms of today (on which we have our public forums) won’t give you their back-end software. Not even HN. Nor Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram or even Signal. They need to retain control because of the capitalism system in which they were conceived (Facebook, LinkedIn) or sold (WhatsApp, Instagram), and the shareholder class which the corporations must serve and extract rents from their ecosystem forever. It starts with venture capitalists and it ends with wall street ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism If you look at my posts for the last decade, I have been openly saying this. Those of you who saw the movie iRobot back in 2004 may remember the tagline: “One Man Saw it Coming”. I feel like Will Smith’s character. Except that I have been doing something about it. 1. From Digital Feudalism to a Free Market We are living in Digital Feudalism, and like serfs, we have very little say. And all of this is because we don’t have a viable open source alternative. The first step is to have this software be available to everyone. https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ There were attempts with diaspora* and Mastodon has so far been the most successful. We’ve quietly been building something far, far beyond Mastodon and attracted 10 million people in over 100+ countries. But you probably haven‘t heard of it. It’s a web-based, open source, general-purpose Community Operating System, on which anyone is free to develop just as they are on Linux or Wordpress. While an app like Telegram or Signal could be easily banned from app stores by governments, something like this is much harder to censor. If millions of websites use https and some may be hosting Qbix widgets, then how will governments and corporations ban it? They may have to insist on having a backdoor to the https certificates, which means enough people would have to fork Chromium / Blink (open source on the front end). But until then, it’s a way for We the People to continue building an innovating in the face of corporate and government crackdowns. Back in 2019 I wrote this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one/amp https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c... Ans just two days ago LA Weekly wrote about the project and the difference it can make: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ 2. From a Free Market to Autonomous Networks In a free market you have a choice of landlord (eg who will host your Wordpress or Qbix instance). But you still have a landlord. This is the part that some on HN are allergic to. I’m going to extol the virtues of automomous networks, because they’re the most benign “Landlords”, who can be trusted to uphold the rules and never change them (if enough of the community doesn’t like the changes, they can fork and continue the old rules). Blockchains and smart contracts are JUST THE MOST POPULAR VERSION of this at the moment. There are many other architectures, including Hashgraph, IOTA DAG, and more generally, networks based around Distributed Hash Tables / Kademlia, such as BitTorrent, IPFS, and the ultimate in safety, safenet (I am not affiliated with them, but am a big admirer, see https://safenetforum.org https://safenetforum.org if you want to participate, they have been active since 2004 and are still going strong.. that’s dedication!!) I don’t just build things, but I seek out and connect with people who design, administer and build all these open source platforms and distributed systems. Back in 2014 I met Tim Berners-Lee. I corresponded with Leslie Lamport over the years. In 2018 I met up with the inventor of Kademlia, Petar Maymounkov, who went to my school (NYU). I also hung out with Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame) although I didn’t keep in touch w him. I also try to invite them onto our community forum and publicly interview them on our YouTube channel. Here is my discussion with Ian Clarke, inventor of arguably the first decentralized autonomous file sharing network, FreeNet. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ If you want to understand why Web3 is important, or at least the type of distributed software it represents, here is my rebuttal to Moxie Marlinspike, as he had the most substantive critique of it: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/2230 https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... 3. Economics Closed software and intellectual property is a product of a private ownership without limit embedded within a capitalist system. “I built it, I own it”. You end up with Zuck controlling Facebook and no one can vote him out. Or Elon controlling Twitter. Oh, I mean “Meta” and “X”. And if they want to, they’ll gradually boil the frogs until they all spend their lives in the virtual reality metaverse, or inside X.com’s “everything app”. On the other hand, open source software is either a pure gift economy, or since 2014 can be a socialist economy where people collectively own the means of production and eliminate the shareholder class (just as they do in various cooperatives, credit unions, etc). Software produced in this way doesn’t end up with central control (Linux, MySQL, PHP, etc.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE To me, utility tokens represent a “libertarian socialist” alternative to the “capitalist” system in which our current infrastructure has been developed. Stallman’s Free Software Movement is more like a gift economy, or perhaps “distributism” (a 19th-century Christian economic system). Those are actually really good, but to pay for resource use in the ecosystem we need an accounting system, and that’s utility tokens. Utility tokens represent a way to monetize it in a way that happens to fit the dictionary definition of libertarian socialism: “collective ownership of the means of production.” Note that it doesn’t require a central government, but collective ownership. When you sell utility tokens to finance your startup, the buyers only have a claim to the goods and services of your eventual network. They don’t start to demand that your company extract rents forever (eg Uber taking 50% of all the money that goes from riders to drivers). Instead it becomes a giant socialist cooperative (like eg a driver’s cooperative, or FileCoin for IPFS). Vitalik Buterin and Juan Benet simply don’t exercise the kind of total control over their platforms as Zuck and Elon do. When you sell shares to finance your startup, you introduce an ever-growing shareholder class which will exercise more and more control over the ecosystem you build, and at every steps will insist that you retain control and extract rents so they can profit. It can sometimes be as overt as Peter Thiel saying “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and together with Sean Parker killing all Mark Zuckerberg’s open source tendencies (such as when he eventually gave away Synapse as open source instead of giving it to Microsoft for $1 million https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artificial-intelligence-for-his-high-school/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artific...) and dreams of decentralized file sharing software: (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/amp/) but he always retained a soft spot for open source when he personally funded diaspora* (a decentralized facebook competitor) and now, you should be thanking his open source sympathies as he is literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI woukd belong to only a select few, just as Web2 and all our public forums do today. When a few at the top of a corporate ladder hold all the power, then they can boil any frog. And if they don’t want to, they’ll be replaced by those who will. That’s how the system works. Opt out. Embrace open source and distributed systems. Take a few hours a week. It’s out there, it’s free to try. Contribute, get certified, serve your local communities, and make money doing it!
amelius 3y ago
There should be a law that says that if you buy something and still don't fully own it, then it is a service, not a product. Owning something should include that you can cut all ties with the original vendor, and still be able to use the device as advertised.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  Then companies will make everything a service. You need to make a downside for dearing that.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    If something is a service then there should not be a "buy" button, but a "lease" button.
  - Frost1x 3y ago
    In theory, markets should regulate and competitors should be able to rise and provide products over never ending services and be successful. That doesn't seem to happen though. Is it because service designs expose real business costs of continued investment in R&D sort of deal, is it because such reliable products are bad for business (you provide something so good, reliable, and cheap you kill your own revenue stream) or what? Similar to the concept in medicine that it's bad for business to cure vs good for business to treat something. From the consumer side, clearly you want cures but markets don't seem to function that way. Treating kidney disease is far less lucrative than providing a cure (if possible). Your only option as a business to find this appealing is to somehow look at the treatment option, roll all expected profit and revenue up, and tuck that into a "cure" option. If altruism in medicine isn't there, I don't know why we'd hope for it in something as artificial as electronics and software. I don't know what the solution is here if we want to continue to pretend markets self regulate in a healthy way for the general population and not for businesses.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      I mean ... the market has spoken on this. It just isn't something that enough people value enough for it to have a positive return on investment. Like pretty much everyone else here, I think that sucks, but I also struggle to begrudge the preferences of people who just don't care about this. So the question is just, is this a market failure in the sense that the market outcome is undesirable to society such that there's a strong case for regulation? Or is it a market success in that most people are getting what they prefer (cheaper products)? If we were to get regulation passed on this, and prices for digital products and services were to rise, would people broadly cheer or jeer us? I think it's pretty clear that most people would be unhappy with this, at least above some level of price increase (which may be zero). So to me the question is (like with all regulation) whether this can be regulated without increasing costs to people beyond the value of the regulation to society. Maybe so, but unfortunately I'm pretty skeptical that's the case.
jacquesm 3y ago
Consumer PC hardware is the exception though. Android and iOS are more or less exactly that: computers that you may have paid for but that you do not actually own. Ditto Chromebooks.
drewcoo 3y ago
In the before times there were phones owned by AT&T attached to landlines in every home and business. Attaching your own phone and repairing the phone company's were not allowed. This seems a lot like the same business model you're saying didn't exist before. In fact, AT&T was more draconian. People can pay off their cell phones today. The old wall-tethered units had a monthly rental fee in perpituity.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  At least they were up front about the fact you were renting it. If it broke they replaced/repaired it.
- kjrose 3y ago
  So many folks don't seem to have remember this. IBM was also the same with the giant mainframes. Even now, if you have a power system, it's pretty much mandatory to pay an ongoing "service agreement" or very quickly you'll discover you have major issues. I hate that the system has it where you don't own anything and you are supposed to be happy with it. But from a market perspective what else can they do? They need to make a regular income to pay for the development and such, but they also need to deal with the fact that a competitor who offers a freemium or product at a loss but where they can at some point in the future hide future costs will just naturally win.
- ThinkingGuy 3y ago
  Also, you didnt use to own your mobile phone number. In the US, at least, it literally took an act of Congress for customers to be allowed to port their numbers between wireless providers.
  - baq 3y ago
    Nobody would willingly give up their moat.
    - salawat 3y ago
      See California and the Colorado River.
goku12 3y ago
General purpose desktop computing isn't dead yet. It's still available - but barely. Now is the time to save it, or it will be gone soon. The same thing happened to TVs. There are nearly no 'dumb' TVs that doesn't do anything more than just display the video signal. All the 'smart' ('over-smart' is more appropriate) TVs out there take too long to start and they almost always phone home to their overlords. The really worrying part is how normalized it is. I remember someone here on HN contemptuously dismissing my concern, saying that dumb-TVs are called 'computer monitors'. How many affordable 'computer monitors' above 30 inch do you know? And give it enough time - even computer monitors will become 'smart monitors', unless something is done now.
- thatfrenchguy 3y ago
  I mean, any smart TV is a dumb tv once you don’t connect it to the internet?
  - baq 3y ago
    Still takes too long to boot to display.
    - goku12 3y ago
      TVs long ago used to take up to 10 seconds to startup because the electron gun at the back of the CRT needed time to heat up. The advent of TFT panels gave us the hope that that wait would be a thing of the past. Now instead we wait minutes for its spyware, adware and bloatware ridden OS to boot up and phone home. We're living is a world that's the opposite of what technology promised us.
  - eps 3y ago
    For now.
  - WorldPeas 3y ago
    wait until a technology like sidewalk(or heck, IOT-scale 5g with sim-less connection to data-herding servers)
switch007 3y ago
This made me think of schools. Do kids even own their school work done on Chromebooks / Apple Tablets / online learning platforms? Have their parents assigned the rights to the IP? I wonder how much kids feel ownership of their work done electronically
- ben_w 3y ago
  I remember, aged 10 or so, my fellow schoolkids thought we should get paid for going to school because it was "work". Around this point, same school but not necessarily the same year, someone else in the class thought I'd ripped off their idea in the classroom and that this was a copyright violation. Now? Now I understand that the work done at school is not a product, it's at most an extended pre-interview test much like a code challenge (not that literal code challenges were really possible when I was 10, given a decent C compiler would've cost something like 2 week's pre-tax income).
dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
>we're forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are ownership rights? Most people always had poor memories, George Orwell make that observation. It's unfortunately one of the human conditions.
safety1st 3y ago
All I can say is that in the modern era you have to lead by example. Run Linux and Firefox. Use the services from the tech giants as little as possible, you won't be able to eliminate them, but you can minimize the amount of money and attention you give them. Tell other people. Contribute. If you work long hours, give a little money to FOSS. If you have spare time, spend a bit of it contributing, doesn't need to be a lot. The timeline in the link is not set. The tech world has been disrupted many times, if it hadn't been, we'd all be on IBM mainframes and typewriters or something. There is no fate but what we make. Very few people are aware enough to show up on this website and read this thread, so it's on you to do something. If you're reading this you are the resistance.
- walteweiss 3y ago
  This is the Way!
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I'm hugely thankful someone highlighted this conflict - that our property law has largely been eroded by contract law - in a nice pull quoting from Web scraping for me but not for thee. The seller/person getting money gets to set whatever terms they want. It cited Mark Lemley as having made the connection two decades ago. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-for-me-but-not-for-thee-guest-blog-post.htm https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 It's abhorrent in extreme to strip away the rights of the citizens like so. Our ability to experiment with the world & explore the things about is fundamental to maintaining the human spirit, to keeping us homo sapiens.
notatoad 3y ago
>In the before-times, when you bought something, the seller relinquished all claims to it and also, all responsibility for it. in the more recent "before times" that you're probably talking about, most things you bought came with a warranty, and if you did unapproved things with that product you would void your warranty. that's what the "warranty void if removed" stickers mean. and yes, when you buy consumer PC hardware there's all kinds of stuff that you can't do with it if you want to keep your warranty. This hasn't really changed, we just expect more continuing service from our products now, so the list of conditions to recieve those ongoing services from the seller has increased. if you want to buy something and receive no warranty, no software updates, no bugfixes, no cloud sync, no remote access, or all the other modern conveniences, then yeah, you get to do whatever the fuck you want with it.
RunSet 3y ago
> So accustomed to exploitative corporate gaslighting, we're forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are ownership rights? ... > 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. The teeming masses praising Steam for cutting out the middleman seem unacquainted with the first-sale doctrine.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

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
It's not that the PCs come with more strings attached than they did before - it's that many people, especially younger generation, are so used to those strings controlling their lives through their mobile devices and everything being a service, that they don't realize the same isn't true with a regular PC. At least isn't yet.
perihelions 3y ago
They don't. I think the commenter was guessing by generalizing from software/subscription service ToS's, which are ubiquitous; plus the fusion of hardware/software in inseparable packages, like the iPhone hardware, which is a brick without an ongoing Apple subscription.
- aficionado87 3y ago
  > a brick without an ongoing Apple subscription This just isn’t true. You don’t have to give Apple another dime to use an iPhone perpetually. Any paid Apple subscriptions are optional for cloud or streaming services.
  - dismalpedigree 3y ago
    Agreed its optional. But Apple will do their best (worst?) to get you to use it. Defaults to the free 5g, resetting preferences after OS upgrades, nagging prompts, etc.
  - perihelions 3y ago
    It may be a free subscription, but it's still an ongoing, no-opt-out commercial software service relationship with Apple, Inc. That's why it has a Terms of Service [0] – which is effectively a ToS for the iPhone hardware itself, as there is no way to use it without Apple's OS. [0] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS16_iPadOS16.pdf https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS16_iPadOS16.pdf (the iOS ToS) (And I think it's noteworthy how that ToS' language bounces freely between "hardware" and "software"; how it fluctuates between "software license agreement" and "by using your iPhone ("device"), you are agreeing to...". Apple hardware and software are fused together: there is no practical difference).

naillo 3y ago

A lot of people were just born into this too. People under 27 or so have never known anything other than this pretty much.

iuhaegpoinqhpoq 3y ago

> In the before-times, [...] You used to get full schematics along with the electronics you bought. And by "get", I do NOT mean that you'd have to ask for them. They'd be shipped WITH the products, on paper. It was a normal part of your purchase, just like the manual.

Kim_Bruning 3y ago
My first computer was a BBC B. The schematics were IN the manual!
- perihelions 3y ago
  Indeed they seem to be: https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manuals/Acorn_BBCSMOct85_Sec2.pdf https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manua... ("BBC Microcomputer Model B +") There is a circuit block diagram, a PCB layout diagram with all the components' part numbers that I guess you can replace broken ones (?), and circuit diagrams for the power supply and for the keyboard circuit. (starts on page 97) Skimming the text, the manual seems to assume an owner has access to a multimeter, an oscilloscope, and a soldering iron.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I have that thing etched into my memory to the point that I probably could still fix a beeb without resorting to looking at the schematic.
ume 3y ago
I still have the circuit diagram (paper copy) that shipped with my Acorn Atom in, ahem, 1981. Didn’t ask for it! (Edit: with the help of the circuit diagram we did make a simple mod to one of the output ports of the device)
- guy4261 3y ago
  Your and others' comments on this thread remind me of a though I had lately. In the "before times", you would buy things that would last. So naturally, the companies that made them could not sell new products. Planned obsolescence was one natural outcome that we ended up with. An electrical engineers I know told me how designing a CPU that would last a lifetime is relatively easy compared to designing an equipment that will fail only 5 years from now, but not earlier. I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also being financially sound. Right now economy, to me, seems like a thing of perpetual growth, but in a cancer-like way.

EGreg 3y ago

Looking at this list, open source software is the only thing that can help save us from this future. Whenever a corporation takes control of a widespread open source software (eg Oracle buying MySQL) it is forked by the community (MariaDB). If you don’t have access to the source code, you can’t fork it. And ALL the Web 2.0 platforms of today (on which we have our public forums) won’t give you their back-end software. Not even HN. Nor Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram or even Signal. They need to retain control because of the capitalism system in which they were conceived (Facebook, LinkedIn) or sold (WhatsApp, Instagram), and the shareholder class which the corporations must serve and extract rents from their ecosystem forever. It starts with venture capitalists and it ends with wall street ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism If you look at my posts for the last decade, I have been openly saying this. Those of you who saw the movie iRobot back in 2004 may remember the tagline: “One Man Saw it Coming”. I feel like Will Smith’s character. Except that I have been doing something about it. 1. From Digital Feudalism to a Free Market We are living in Digital Feudalism, and like serfs, we have very little say. And all of this is because we don’t have a viable open source alternative. The first step is to have this software be available to everyone. https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ There were attempts with diaspora* and Mastodon has so far been the most successful. We’ve quietly been building something far, far beyond Mastodon and attracted 10 million people in over 100+ countries. But you probably haven‘t heard of it. It’s a web-based, open source, general-purpose Community Operating System, on which anyone is free to develop just as they are on Linux or Wordpress. While an app like Telegram or Signal could be easily banned from app stores by governments, something like this is much harder to censor. If millions of websites use https and some may be hosting Qbix widgets, then how will governments and corporations ban it? They may have to insist on having a backdoor to the https certificates, which means enough people would have to fork Chromium / Blink (open source on the front end). But until then, it’s a way for We the People to continue building an innovating in the face of corporate and government crackdowns. Back in 2019 I wrote this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one/amp https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c... Ans just two days ago LA Weekly wrote about the project and the difference it can make: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ 2. From a Free Market to Autonomous Networks In a free market you have a choice of landlord (eg who will host your Wordpress or Qbix instance). But you still have a landlord. This is the part that some on HN are allergic to. I’m going to extol the virtues of automomous networks, because they’re the most benign “Landlords”, who can be trusted to uphold the rules and never change them (if enough of the community doesn’t like the changes, they can fork and continue the old rules). Blockchains and smart contracts are JUST THE MOST POPULAR VERSION of this at the moment. There are many other architectures, including Hashgraph, IOTA DAG, and more generally, networks based around Distributed Hash Tables / Kademlia, such as BitTorrent, IPFS, and the ultimate in safety, safenet (I am not affiliated with them, but am a big admirer, see https://safenetforum.org https://safenetforum.org if you want to participate, they have been active since 2004 and are still going strong.. that’s dedication!!) I don’t just build things, but I seek out and connect with people who design, administer and build all these open source platforms and distributed systems. Back in 2014 I met Tim Berners-Lee. I corresponded with Leslie Lamport over the years. In 2018 I met up with the inventor of Kademlia, Petar Maymounkov, who went to my school (NYU). I also hung out with Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame) although I didn’t keep in touch w him. I also try to invite them onto our community forum and publicly interview them on our YouTube channel. Here is my discussion with Ian Clarke, inventor of arguably the first decentralized autonomous file sharing network, FreeNet. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ If you want to understand why Web3 is important, or at least the type of distributed software it represents, here is my rebuttal to Moxie Marlinspike, as he had the most substantive critique of it: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/2230 https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... 3. Economics Closed software and intellectual property is a product of a private ownership without limit embedded within a capitalist system. “I built it, I own it”. You end up with Zuck controlling Facebook and no one can vote him out. Or Elon controlling Twitter. Oh, I mean “Meta” and “X”. And if they want to, they’ll gradually boil the frogs until they all spend their lives in the virtual reality metaverse, or inside X.com’s “everything app”. On the other hand, open source software is either a pure gift economy, or since 2014 can be a socialist economy where people collectively own the means of production and eliminate the shareholder class (just as they do in various cooperatives, credit unions, etc). Software produced in this way doesn’t end up with central control (Linux, MySQL, PHP, etc.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE To me, utility tokens represent a “libertarian socialist” alternative to the “capitalist” system in which our current infrastructure has been developed. Stallman’s Free Software Movement is more like a gift economy, or perhaps “distributism” (a 19th-century Christian economic system). Those are actually really good, but to pay for resource use in the ecosystem we need an accounting system, and that’s utility tokens. Utility tokens represent a way to monetize it in a way that happens to fit the dictionary definition of libertarian socialism: “collective ownership of the means of production.” Note that it doesn’t require a central government, but collective ownership. When you sell utility tokens to finance your startup, the buyers only have a claim to the goods and services of your eventual network. They don’t start to demand that your company extract rents forever (eg Uber taking 50% of all the money that goes from riders to drivers). Instead it becomes a giant socialist cooperative (like eg a driver’s cooperative, or FileCoin for IPFS). Vitalik Buterin and Juan Benet simply don’t exercise the kind of total control over their platforms as Zuck and Elon do. When you sell shares to finance your startup, you introduce an ever-growing shareholder class which will exercise more and more control over the ecosystem you build, and at every steps will insist that you retain control and extract rents so they can profit. It can sometimes be as overt as Peter Thiel saying “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and together with Sean Parker killing all Mark Zuckerberg’s open source tendencies (such as when he eventually gave away Synapse as open source instead of giving it to Microsoft for $1 million https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artificial-intelligence-for-his-high-school/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artific...) and dreams of decentralized file sharing software: (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/amp/) but he always retained a soft spot for open source when he personally funded diaspora* (a decentralized facebook competitor) and now, you should be thanking his open source sympathies as he is literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI woukd belong to only a select few, just as Web2 and all our public forums do today. When a few at the top of a corporate ladder hold all the power, then they can boil any frog. And if they don’t want to, they’ll be replaced by those who will. That’s how the system works. Opt out. Embrace open source and distributed systems. Take a few hours a week. It’s out there, it’s free to try. Contribute, get certified, serve your local communities, and make money doing it!

amelius 3y ago

There should be a law that says that if you buy something and still don't fully own it, then it is a service, not a product. Owning something should include that you can cut all ties with the original vendor, and still be able to use the device as advertised.

LegitShady 3y ago
Then companies will make everything a service. You need to make a downside for dearing that.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  If something is a service then there should not be a "buy" button, but a "lease" button.
- Frost1x 3y ago
  In theory, markets should regulate and competitors should be able to rise and provide products over never ending services and be successful. That doesn't seem to happen though. Is it because service designs expose real business costs of continued investment in R&D sort of deal, is it because such reliable products are bad for business (you provide something so good, reliable, and cheap you kill your own revenue stream) or what? Similar to the concept in medicine that it's bad for business to cure vs good for business to treat something. From the consumer side, clearly you want cures but markets don't seem to function that way. Treating kidney disease is far less lucrative than providing a cure (if possible). Your only option as a business to find this appealing is to somehow look at the treatment option, roll all expected profit and revenue up, and tuck that into a "cure" option. If altruism in medicine isn't there, I don't know why we'd hope for it in something as artificial as electronics and software. I don't know what the solution is here if we want to continue to pretend markets self regulate in a healthy way for the general population and not for businesses.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I mean ... the market has spoken on this. It just isn't something that enough people value enough for it to have a positive return on investment. Like pretty much everyone else here, I think that sucks, but I also struggle to begrudge the preferences of people who just don't care about this. So the question is just, is this a market failure in the sense that the market outcome is undesirable to society such that there's a strong case for regulation? Or is it a market success in that most people are getting what they prefer (cheaper products)? If we were to get regulation passed on this, and prices for digital products and services were to rise, would people broadly cheer or jeer us? I think it's pretty clear that most people would be unhappy with this, at least above some level of price increase (which may be zero). So to me the question is (like with all regulation) whether this can be regulated without increasing costs to people beyond the value of the regulation to society. Maybe so, but unfortunately I'm pretty skeptical that's the case.

jacquesm 3y ago

Consumer PC hardware is the exception though. Android and iOS are more or less exactly that: computers that you may have paid for but that you do not actually own. Ditto Chromebooks.

drewcoo 3y ago

In the before times there were phones owned by AT&T attached to landlines in every home and business. Attaching your own phone and repairing the phone company's were not allowed. This seems a lot like the same business model you're saying didn't exist before. In fact, AT&T was more draconian. People can pay off their cell phones today. The old wall-tethered units had a monthly rental fee in perpituity.

RobotToaster 3y ago
At least they were up front about the fact you were renting it. If it broke they replaced/repaired it.
kjrose 3y ago
So many folks don't seem to have remember this. IBM was also the same with the giant mainframes. Even now, if you have a power system, it's pretty much mandatory to pay an ongoing "service agreement" or very quickly you'll discover you have major issues. I hate that the system has it where you don't own anything and you are supposed to be happy with it. But from a market perspective what else can they do? They need to make a regular income to pay for the development and such, but they also need to deal with the fact that a competitor who offers a freemium or product at a loss but where they can at some point in the future hide future costs will just naturally win.
ThinkingGuy 3y ago
Also, you didnt use to own your mobile phone number. In the US, at least, it literally took an act of Congress for customers to be allowed to port their numbers between wireless providers.
- baq 3y ago
  Nobody would willingly give up their moat.
  - salawat 3y ago
    See California and the Colorado River.

goku12 3y ago

General purpose desktop computing isn't dead yet. It's still available - but barely. Now is the time to save it, or it will be gone soon. The same thing happened to TVs. There are nearly no 'dumb' TVs that doesn't do anything more than just display the video signal. All the 'smart' ('over-smart' is more appropriate) TVs out there take too long to start and they almost always phone home to their overlords. The really worrying part is how normalized it is. I remember someone here on HN contemptuously dismissing my concern, saying that dumb-TVs are called 'computer monitors'. How many affordable 'computer monitors' above 30 inch do you know? And give it enough time - even computer monitors will become 'smart monitors', unless something is done now.

thatfrenchguy 3y ago
I mean, any smart TV is a dumb tv once you don’t connect it to the internet?
- baq 3y ago
  Still takes too long to boot to display.
  - goku12 3y ago
    TVs long ago used to take up to 10 seconds to startup because the electron gun at the back of the CRT needed time to heat up. The advent of TFT panels gave us the hope that that wait would be a thing of the past. Now instead we wait minutes for its spyware, adware and bloatware ridden OS to boot up and phone home. We're living is a world that's the opposite of what technology promised us.
- eps 3y ago
  For now.
- WorldPeas 3y ago
  wait until a technology like sidewalk(or heck, IOT-scale 5g with sim-less connection to data-herding servers)

switch007 3y ago

This made me think of schools. Do kids even own their school work done on Chromebooks / Apple Tablets / online learning platforms? Have their parents assigned the rights to the IP? I wonder how much kids feel ownership of their work done electronically

ben_w 3y ago
I remember, aged 10 or so, my fellow schoolkids thought we should get paid for going to school because it was "work". Around this point, same school but not necessarily the same year, someone else in the class thought I'd ripped off their idea in the classroom and that this was a copyright violation. Now? Now I understand that the work done at school is not a product, it's at most an extended pre-interview test much like a code challenge (not that literal code challenges were really possible when I was 10, given a decent C compiler would've cost something like 2 week's pre-tax income).

dennis_jeeves1 3y ago

>we're forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are ownership rights? Most people always had poor memories, George Orwell make that observation. It's unfortunately one of the human conditions.

safety1st 3y ago

All I can say is that in the modern era you have to lead by example. Run Linux and Firefox. Use the services from the tech giants as little as possible, you won't be able to eliminate them, but you can minimize the amount of money and attention you give them. Tell other people. Contribute. If you work long hours, give a little money to FOSS. If you have spare time, spend a bit of it contributing, doesn't need to be a lot. The timeline in the link is not set. The tech world has been disrupted many times, if it hadn't been, we'd all be on IBM mainframes and typewriters or something. There is no fate but what we make. Very few people are aware enough to show up on this website and read this thread, so it's on you to do something. If you're reading this you are the resistance.

walteweiss 3y ago
This is the Way!

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

I'm hugely thankful someone highlighted this conflict - that our property law has largely been eroded by contract law - in a nice pull quoting from Web scraping for me but not for thee. The seller/person getting money gets to set whatever terms they want. It cited Mark Lemley as having made the connection two decades ago. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-for-me-but-not-for-thee-guest-blog-post.htm https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 It's abhorrent in extreme to strip away the rights of the citizens like so. Our ability to experiment with the world & explore the things about is fundamental to maintaining the human spirit, to keeping us homo sapiens.

notatoad 3y ago

>In the before-times, when you bought something, the seller relinquished all claims to it and also, all responsibility for it. in the more recent "before times" that you're probably talking about, most things you bought came with a warranty, and if you did unapproved things with that product you would void your warranty. that's what the "warranty void if removed" stickers mean. and yes, when you buy consumer PC hardware there's all kinds of stuff that you can't do with it if you want to keep your warranty. This hasn't really changed, we just expect more continuing service from our products now, so the list of conditions to recieve those ongoing services from the seller has increased. if you want to buy something and receive no warranty, no software updates, no bugfixes, no cloud sync, no remote access, or all the other modern conveniences, then yeah, you get to do whatever the fuck you want with it.

RunSet 3y ago

> So accustomed to exploitative corporate gaslighting, we're forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are ownership rights? ... > 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. The teeming masses praising Steam for cutting out the middleman seem unacquainted with the first-sale doctrine.

deleted 3y ago

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