7 ms·

Whatever happened to interoperability?

98 points by fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago

bluedays 3y ago
[flagged]
sylware 3y ago
Big Tech happened
- smoldesu 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - severine 3y ago
    I'd read your blog! Do you have one?
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      If I did, I'd risk turning into Doctorow myself :p This is just about my most formal outlet discussing stuff. I do have a Mastodon account where I avoid politics and tech to post memes about video games and gay sex instead, though: https://mastodon.social/@smoldesu https://mastodon.social/@smoldesu
  - greenyoda 3y ago
    > The most profitable companies make it their goal to quash free usage of their intellectual property. The content that a user posts to Facebook, Twitter, etc. is the user's intellectual property, not the company's intellectual property.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      Yes, and by agreeing to Twitter/Facebook's EULA you are generally giving those first-parties a limited license of your IP. Those companies will often then re-encode or otherwise manipulate your data to be less open or generally available. Like how Twitter and Reddit use their user's content as the main driver to sell API access. Moreover, I think the IP I'm referring to are the things Doctorow takes for granted in the article. These things should be interoperable, but the reductive capitalist mechanisms that stop them from doing so should be obvious. Unless you force Apple, Google and Microsoft to work together at gunpoint, all three of them are going to find unique ways to gouge customers. I think we're going to see this cemented as regulatory legislation like Europe's Digital Market Act comes into play.
      - nonrandomstring 3y ago
        > Unless you force Apple, Google and Microsoft to work together at gunpoint, all three of them are going to find unique ways to gouge customers. I think we're going to see this cemented as regulatory legislation like Europe's Digital Market Act comes into play. Mandated interoperability is a horrible stick, it's a pity we come to this, though the Digital Markets Act is only really attempting it at the policy level, thou shalt/not, which is a high leverage point. We'll see whether that changes anyone's values. But we must rather ask What would be the _incentive_ (from markets or culture) that would make everyone all happy families again? Ergo, what was the thing that made standards and interoperability such wonderful things in the first place that we created them?
        smoldesu 3y ago
        > But we must rather ask What would be the _incentive_ (from markets or culture) that would make everyone all happy families again? Given a timespan of about half-a-century to make it's own decisions, apparently government regulation is the only thing that can compel them. Look at the largest companies in the world and tell me I'm wrong. No matter how slow you boil the frog, successful businesses will never step up and do the right thing. > Ergo, what was the thing that made standards and interoperability such wonderful things in the first place that we created them? See, this is backwards thinking. Order is not native to the world; nobody invents a new CPU architecture and magically has standards get drafted into thin-air. Standardization is the alternative to chaotic iteration. When too much changes for too few reasons, an agreeable framework is standardized and used as the basis for future iterations. The incentive to change things is the fact that the status quo sucks. That alone is enough; nobody is naive for expecting better out of the most successful businesses in the world. Leaving them to write their own playbook ends in asinine power-moves like proprietary serial connectors and user exploitation. It's not realistic or amicable; that's why the government has to step in.
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    > Compared to the market-destroying power of Linux This whole post is wild & short, but this in particular I find extra hilariously over the top. "Market destroying power?" What about all the other markets that were created by having a baseline of capability they could rely on? What about all the benefit & efficiency of having a place open anyone can contribute to make the world better, all the new applications & improved operations we get? > Everyone knows what happened to interoperability; it's not profitable. This is almost right. It's profitable to block the interoperability we just get. It's profitable to use contract law to eliminate people's property rights (citing a Mark Lemley point that goes back two decades on this). It might not be profitable for companies, maybe, but it creates a more flourishing open world where new things happen. And that lost value matters a lot. Society being stuck & unable to explore possibilities, being trapped in a single autocratic technocratic regime, eliminates lots of other value & amazingnwss that can happen. Cory consistently has the right outlook & strikes to the root for the issues that keep the world so stuck in bad places & under the thumb of limited zero-sum-ny-design profiteering. Society does better by everyone when we have the possibility to find non-zero-sum modes of operation, and Linux is an example of how much more the world gets and how much more vitality we have when we can find these non-zero-sum modes.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      > What about all the other markets that were created by having a baseline of capability they could rely on? Remember what the software industry was like in the 80s and 90s? Get a good image in your head, and then compare it to the landscape of modern Linux offerings. Entire software empires died with the ascendance of Linux, and it was arguably the right move. The existence of commercial UNIX was a glorified support contract at best, and an exploitative relationship based on an imbalance of documentation at worst. It was bound to die, it just took one good blow. If it wasn't Linux, it would have been BSD - the market was fragile enough to get disrupted by any high-quality Free software. > It might not be profitable for companies, maybe, but it creates a more flourishing open world where new things happen I'm not against Cory's core point. I'm an Open Source idealist at heart, but I'm also not plainly ignorant of mechanisms that prevent change from happening. Realizing those problems and working with those limitations is what has driven the most powerful software movements to-date. Using Copyright to protect Free Software is unequivocally one of the most important software developments of the Internet age. Similarly, releasing a common and accessible platform like Linux entirely undermined the business of a-la-carte accessibility contracts. Doctorow can certainly make powerful points and counterarguments to our plainly wrong way of living. Anyone who's paid for HBO probably has strong opinions vis-a-vis shitty subscription services. Nothing he has said or done really feels like a refutation on the level of Stallman or Torvalds, though. Maybe that's a high bar to hold him to, but a lot of his arguments feel plainly "said and done". I struggle to imagine an audience that doesn't know how services degrade in quality when rights-holders are given nigh-unlimited control over their property.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    > Everyone knows what happened to interoperability; it's not profitable. It was profitable, early on, when it held commons value. But (tragedy of the commons [0]) this is why we can't have nice things... forever. Sorry that I keep harping on about Dana Meadows, but I do think some of her farming allegories to generalise and summarise systems theory (as a healing activity) ... like soil depletion... are gold to us in the digital realm. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- sylware 3y ago
  Oh? And the web? Big Tech engines (including their pesky SDK: that c++ what a mistake, world scale mistake), are beyond grotesque and absurd, securing nearly full control for those toxic for human beings network of companies? The only way out is interop, and interop with Small Tech, and for the web it means noscript/basic (x)html, IRC, etc. Modularity is key, but without one bazillions mandatory modules: it has to grow as layers until a good enough result is produced, and it must be frugal in module usage. I expect the worst from Big Tech: "shadow hiring" of hacker teams to destroy Small Tech alternatives. You cannot defend yourself on economic grounds: vanguard and blackrock are tens of thousands of billions of $, and itself does manage hundred of billions in cash. There are only strategic and ethical interests left, don't expect anything, even though you may be lucky for some time, that would be anecdotal.
skybrian 3y ago
It seems like an odd place for a socialist like Doctorow to publish. I wonder how that happened?
- vertis 3y ago
  Very strange. I mean this is a publication that has Tucker Carlson on the Advisory Board.
- yankput 3y ago
  I was as shocked as you, but then I remember, the paleo-conservative right doesn’t like big tech as they are seeing them as censors.
  - catlover76 3y ago
    Which is of course really weird given the history of big tech, Facebook in particular, serving as a distribution channel for right-wing bullshit. The internet in general served as an incubator for all sorts of right-wing stuff that found it difficult to find purchase in broader society. Being down-voted by people who deny the reality of fake news about Hillary Clinton even though many of us saw it with our own eyes, and who deny the existence of places like 4Chan. Deny the existence of reporting about Facebook's role in propagating content that led to genocide in Burma (their right-wingers do what ours can only dream of), etc.
- yankput 3y ago
  Funnily enough, literally the previous article from the same series praises Margaret Thatcher. Lol. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-the-ownership-revolution-saved-britain/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-the-ownership-re...
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Specifically in the context of privatization. I see that as orthogonal to this article
- 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rubymancer 3y ago
> So, Facebook used interoperable tools to let ex-MySpace users eat their cake and have it too. Facebook provided those MySpace users with a “bot,” an automated program that used the user’s login and password to impersonate that user to MySpace, scraping the user’s waiting messages and putting them in their Facebook inbox. I had completely forgotten about this! It's unthinkable today. As the piece says, if the tech giants feel the least bit threatened by a competitor they will just buy them up without any sort of regulatory hassle.
- ilyt 3y ago
  There was a point in history where both facebook and google offered XMPP with federation to their chats You could just join any XMPP server and chat with your google/facebook contacts directly from that. Imagine that now...
  - peteradio 3y ago
    MBA has entered the chat.
  - singpolyma3 3y ago
    Facebook never offered federated XMPP. They did offer federated email for a short while.
    - severak_cz 3y ago
      They provided XMPP gate - it did not federated with other servers but you were able to use multi-account client (e.g. Pidgin) and have it everything in one window. I did exactly that.
    - sseagull 3y ago
      I seem to remember being able to chat with Facebook users from my personal server, but it doesn’t look like it was possible [1]. Actually, searching for this stuff made me sad :( There are blog posts from Facebook still up about how they are using XMPP [2]. There are still notes out there on setting it up in Pidgin [3]. The internet has become a walled-off mess, and it makes me depressed to see such a powerful and wonderful technology abused like this. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5052780/integrating-facebook-chat#5056915 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5052780/integrating-face... [2] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/110/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/110/ [3] https://m.facebook.com/notes/socialblogr/how-to-setup-facebook-chat-in-pidgin-with-jabberxmpp/371950911048/ https://m.facebook.com/notes/socialblogr/how-to-setup-facebo... PS: looking through the other posts on the fb developer blog (just changing the number in the url) is interesting.
taeric 3y ago
He lost me when claiming entertainment is smaller than tech. That is a clearly self serving view that is laughably difficult to defend. To be clear, the other direction would also be hard to defend. And when was this magic period of interop? Even the cited examples are notable for how exceptional they are. This is almost literally an exception proving the rule. Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game? Remember when you actually did have to know the signal capabilities of your video card? Ever buy a keyboard that didn't connect to your computer? Try watching that dvd your friend brought from Japan? Get sent a 8trak? Have a record, but not a variable speed turntable? For that matter, have a grandparent buy you sonic, but you only have a NES? Super Mario World, but again, you only have a NES? Then have you ever actually had fun replacing a car tire, only to find no store in town has any to fit? Heaven help if you were missing transmission parts. Or you thought you'd be forward looking and buy metric tools, and now none fit any of your mechanical parts at home anymore... Really, the list is rather impressive on how hard working together is.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  I agree with your criticism overall. In defense of interoperability though, I think everything you mentioned is a great example of interoperability working as it should. Everyone started with the same serial capabilities, and tried their own solutions to various degrees of success. Eventually, the industry settles on a particularly attractive and agreeable implementation and standardizes it for everyone. This happened with sound cards, video cards, keyboards and pretty much everything else. As the Bleem! lawsuits proved, even interoperability between game consoles was a legal concept. The incentive to engineer solutions for it just didn't really exist until we standardized computer architectures.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  > Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game? No, I don't remember that. If anything, I remember most games supporting nothing but adlib and practically every other device having either a literal OPL/adlib chip or some other type of hardware/software adlib emulation. There was no impediment whatsoever to creating an adlib-compatible card *, and in fact, many manufacturers did create clones. It perfectly illustrates Doctorow's point. * Patents being the glaring exception, which forced "creative" solutions (e.g. later Creative cards).
brigadier132 3y ago
This really died after Cambridge Analytica. I was working at a social media company at the time and all public access and development of public APIs was halted. Things like Gen AI are the nails in the coffin.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  I was occasionally working on Facebook applications around 2008–2010 and even back then Facebook had clauses in their terms and conditions forbidding using a person’s social graph to build them a new social graph or mirror their data elsewhere. LinkedIn had the same. The restrictions started coming in a long time before the Cambridge Analytic scandal. They stopped it because they didn’t want the competition, not because of privacy issues.
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    Cambridge analytica was the "casus belli" if you will. It was an overnight shift, I worked on the public api team and all our work was deprioritized and I was eventually moved to a different project. I'm sure there were competing factions, even in in Facebook, some advocating for open apis and other advocating for locking everything down.
xor25519 3y ago
And here you see that "interoperability" is not a very progressive demand, but a conservative one. At least is it not progressive in itself - then, paleoconservatives wouldn't endorse it.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Interoperability requires conservatism in general if you want to avoid breaking a ton of APIs that third parties rely on.
- jayd16 3y ago
  Probably just made the cut because it checks the "liberal tech elites are bad" box.
dusted 3y ago
Pretty sure it went the same place as native apps and reasonable graphical user interfaces.
faeriechangling 3y ago
Speaking of Google specifically, my experience with third parties, even ones who are modestly well known is them not keeping up to date with the latest versions of Google’s software and APIs and whatnot and things breaking and becoming less stable. Nobody is as committed to long term support of Google’s technology than Google themselves. Standards which should be interoperable in theory like Bluetooth have ambiguous specifications and the best way to ensure you don’t get bugs is to buy everything from the same company where even if they didn’t QA their own products you at least avoid the problem of Google and a third party pointing fingers at eachother. Interoperability is a great way to add functionality to your product you would never be able to add otherwise. It’s nice for customization. Yet from the consumer perspective I’m increasingly finding I prefer with dealing with as few different companies as I can get away with. This lets me get away with a greater amount of complexity without it biting me in the rear. From a business perspective, the focus on your own products over interoperability has an obvious appeal.
- gumby 3y ago
  > Speaking of Google specifically, my experience with third parties, even ones who are modestly well known is them not keeping up to date with the latest versions of Google’s software and APIs and whatnot and things breaking and becoming less stable. Nobody is as committed to long term support of Google’s technology than Google themselves. I assume that last sentence is sarcastic. API stability is pretty important in the real world (look at the system call interfaces of modern OSes for example); Google stepping their APIs (and then abandoning their products) is the opposite of commitment to long term support.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    Nah I meant it straight, compared to some of the vendors in the smarthome market Google themselves are a dream when it comes to support. Same goes for Android OEMs and Qualcomm. Notice how Google only offered 7 years of support on the Pixel after they stopped using Qualcomm’s chips? Google’s third parties are even worse than Google in terms of support and Google’s support is bad. It’s such a mess that I’m happy to pay more to avoid Google products nowadays.
armchairhacker 3y ago
I'm not sure this article proves its point. Companies certainly want to prevent interopability and create walled gardens, but that's not what's stopping competition. What is stopping them is that we live in a different world, where much more people use the internet and do so much more casually, expect everything to be of the popularity and quality only the big companies can create. Take Reddit: there are a lot of bots on Lemmy which simply copy and re-post from Reddit. There are tools to freely export all of your Reddit posts and comments. And Reddit at least up to July has been 100% archived. If people had enough motivation, we could all migrate from Reddit to Lemmy almost instantly; Reddit wouldn't even have a legal leg to stand on because the posts and comments belong to those who posted/commented them. But most people really don't care, and much more don't care enough to actually transfer their data or refuse to stop using Reddit; as a result, Lemmy has <1/100th of Reddit's user base and isn't a threat anytime soon. The same take could probably by applied to Twitter and Mastadon as well. > A worker can’t reverse-engineer the Uber app to compare wages with other workers and algorithmically determine when a job offer is a lowball. A consumer can’t install an ad-blocker in an app without risking felony prosecution for violating the DMCA. An entrepreneur can’t mod the Amazon app to remove all the paid results and display comparison prices from rivals. An investigative journalist can’t scrape grocers’ websites to build the case that large firms are colluding to raise prices while blaming inflation. This is funny because the second thing (ad-blocking) is something which possibly the majority of Internet users do and nobody absolutely gets prosecuted for. Blocking in-game ads? Pi-hole. Nowadays, people don't even get prosecuted for cheating and piracy unless they're distributing it (and though individuals could theoretically be prosecuted, the likelihood is low to the point of it being stupid to worry about). Also, there are multiple sites which do the third thing (scraping comparison prices) though none of them are really popular and I doubt any use the Amazon app. The first thing (scraping Uber rates) I haven't seen, but I'm sure if someone really cared they could make a website for that as well. And the fourth thing (price collusion) has been alleged by many with evidence that didn't need to be collected from the apps, people just reported the prices themselves.
- 20after4 3y ago
  You are missing the point about the DMCA. Ad blocking with a pi-hole conveniently sidesteps the DMCA but modding a mobile app absolutely would violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules, because you'd have to defeat the DRM in order to do so.
jgalt212 3y ago
> Then they discovered they could simply buy them. Now that ZIRP is over, and FTC has some swagger, this strategy should have less teeth than under Obama and Trump.

bluedays 3y ago

[flagged]

sylware 3y ago

Big Tech happened

smoldesu 3y ago
[flagged]
- severine 3y ago
  I'd read your blog! Do you have one?
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    If I did, I'd risk turning into Doctorow myself :p This is just about my most formal outlet discussing stuff. I do have a Mastodon account where I avoid politics and tech to post memes about video games and gay sex instead, though: https://mastodon.social/@smoldesu https://mastodon.social/@smoldesu
- greenyoda 3y ago
  > The most profitable companies make it their goal to quash free usage of their intellectual property. The content that a user posts to Facebook, Twitter, etc. is the user's intellectual property, not the company's intellectual property.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Yes, and by agreeing to Twitter/Facebook's EULA you are generally giving those first-parties a limited license of your IP. Those companies will often then re-encode or otherwise manipulate your data to be less open or generally available. Like how Twitter and Reddit use their user's content as the main driver to sell API access. Moreover, I think the IP I'm referring to are the things Doctorow takes for granted in the article. These things should be interoperable, but the reductive capitalist mechanisms that stop them from doing so should be obvious. Unless you force Apple, Google and Microsoft to work together at gunpoint, all three of them are going to find unique ways to gouge customers. I think we're going to see this cemented as regulatory legislation like Europe's Digital Market Act comes into play.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      > Unless you force Apple, Google and Microsoft to work together at gunpoint, all three of them are going to find unique ways to gouge customers. I think we're going to see this cemented as regulatory legislation like Europe's Digital Market Act comes into play. Mandated interoperability is a horrible stick, it's a pity we come to this, though the Digital Markets Act is only really attempting it at the policy level, thou shalt/not, which is a high leverage point. We'll see whether that changes anyone's values. But we must rather ask What would be the _incentive_ (from markets or culture) that would make everyone all happy families again? Ergo, what was the thing that made standards and interoperability such wonderful things in the first place that we created them?
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        > But we must rather ask What would be the _incentive_ (from markets or culture) that would make everyone all happy families again? Given a timespan of about half-a-century to make it's own decisions, apparently government regulation is the only thing that can compel them. Look at the largest companies in the world and tell me I'm wrong. No matter how slow you boil the frog, successful businesses will never step up and do the right thing. > Ergo, what was the thing that made standards and interoperability such wonderful things in the first place that we created them? See, this is backwards thinking. Order is not native to the world; nobody invents a new CPU architecture and magically has standards get drafted into thin-air. Standardization is the alternative to chaotic iteration. When too much changes for too few reasons, an agreeable framework is standardized and used as the basis for future iterations. The incentive to change things is the fact that the status quo sucks. That alone is enough; nobody is naive for expecting better out of the most successful businesses in the world. Leaving them to write their own playbook ends in asinine power-moves like proprietary serial connectors and user exploitation. It's not realistic or amicable; that's why the government has to step in.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  > Compared to the market-destroying power of Linux This whole post is wild & short, but this in particular I find extra hilariously over the top. "Market destroying power?" What about all the other markets that were created by having a baseline of capability they could rely on? What about all the benefit & efficiency of having a place open anyone can contribute to make the world better, all the new applications & improved operations we get? > Everyone knows what happened to interoperability; it's not profitable. This is almost right. It's profitable to block the interoperability we just get. It's profitable to use contract law to eliminate people's property rights (citing a Mark Lemley point that goes back two decades on this). It might not be profitable for companies, maybe, but it creates a more flourishing open world where new things happen. And that lost value matters a lot. Society being stuck & unable to explore possibilities, being trapped in a single autocratic technocratic regime, eliminates lots of other value & amazingnwss that can happen. Cory consistently has the right outlook & strikes to the root for the issues that keep the world so stuck in bad places & under the thumb of limited zero-sum-ny-design profiteering. Society does better by everyone when we have the possibility to find non-zero-sum modes of operation, and Linux is an example of how much more the world gets and how much more vitality we have when we can find these non-zero-sum modes.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > What about all the other markets that were created by having a baseline of capability they could rely on? Remember what the software industry was like in the 80s and 90s? Get a good image in your head, and then compare it to the landscape of modern Linux offerings. Entire software empires died with the ascendance of Linux, and it was arguably the right move. The existence of commercial UNIX was a glorified support contract at best, and an exploitative relationship based on an imbalance of documentation at worst. It was bound to die, it just took one good blow. If it wasn't Linux, it would have been BSD - the market was fragile enough to get disrupted by any high-quality Free software. > It might not be profitable for companies, maybe, but it creates a more flourishing open world where new things happen I'm not against Cory's core point. I'm an Open Source idealist at heart, but I'm also not plainly ignorant of mechanisms that prevent change from happening. Realizing those problems and working with those limitations is what has driven the most powerful software movements to-date. Using Copyright to protect Free Software is unequivocally one of the most important software developments of the Internet age. Similarly, releasing a common and accessible platform like Linux entirely undermined the business of a-la-carte accessibility contracts. Doctorow can certainly make powerful points and counterarguments to our plainly wrong way of living. Anyone who's paid for HBO probably has strong opinions vis-a-vis shitty subscription services. Nothing he has said or done really feels like a refutation on the level of Stallman or Torvalds, though. Maybe that's a high bar to hold him to, but a lot of his arguments feel plainly "said and done". I struggle to imagine an audience that doesn't know how services degrade in quality when rights-holders are given nigh-unlimited control over their property.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > Everyone knows what happened to interoperability; it's not profitable. It was profitable, early on, when it held commons value. But (tragedy of the commons [0]) this is why we can't have nice things... forever. Sorry that I keep harping on about Dana Meadows, but I do think some of her farming allegories to generalise and summarise systems theory (as a healing activity) ... like soil depletion... are gold to us in the digital realm. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
sylware 3y ago
Oh? And the web? Big Tech engines (including their pesky SDK: that c++ what a mistake, world scale mistake), are beyond grotesque and absurd, securing nearly full control for those toxic for human beings network of companies? The only way out is interop, and interop with Small Tech, and for the web it means noscript/basic (x)html, IRC, etc. Modularity is key, but without one bazillions mandatory modules: it has to grow as layers until a good enough result is produced, and it must be frugal in module usage. I expect the worst from Big Tech: "shadow hiring" of hacker teams to destroy Small Tech alternatives. You cannot defend yourself on economic grounds: vanguard and blackrock are tens of thousands of billions of $, and itself does manage hundred of billions in cash. There are only strategic and ethical interests left, don't expect anything, even though you may be lucky for some time, that would be anecdotal.

skybrian 3y ago

It seems like an odd place for a socialist like Doctorow to publish. I wonder how that happened?

vertis 3y ago
Very strange. I mean this is a publication that has Tucker Carlson on the Advisory Board.
yankput 3y ago
I was as shocked as you, but then I remember, the paleo-conservative right doesn’t like big tech as they are seeing them as censors.
- catlover76 3y ago
  Which is of course really weird given the history of big tech, Facebook in particular, serving as a distribution channel for right-wing bullshit. The internet in general served as an incubator for all sorts of right-wing stuff that found it difficult to find purchase in broader society. Being down-voted by people who deny the reality of fake news about Hillary Clinton even though many of us saw it with our own eyes, and who deny the existence of places like 4Chan. Deny the existence of reporting about Facebook's role in propagating content that led to genocide in Burma (their right-wingers do what ours can only dream of), etc.
yankput 3y ago
Funnily enough, literally the previous article from the same series praises Margaret Thatcher. Lol. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-the-ownership-revolution-saved-britain/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-the-ownership-re...
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Specifically in the context of privatization. I see that as orthogonal to this article
3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rubymancer 3y ago

> So, Facebook used interoperable tools to let ex-MySpace users eat their cake and have it too. Facebook provided those MySpace users with a “bot,” an automated program that used the user’s login and password to impersonate that user to MySpace, scraping the user’s waiting messages and putting them in their Facebook inbox. I had completely forgotten about this! It's unthinkable today. As the piece says, if the tech giants feel the least bit threatened by a competitor they will just buy them up without any sort of regulatory hassle.

ilyt 3y ago
There was a point in history where both facebook and google offered XMPP with federation to their chats You could just join any XMPP server and chat with your google/facebook contacts directly from that. Imagine that now...
- peteradio 3y ago
  MBA has entered the chat.
- singpolyma3 3y ago
  Facebook never offered federated XMPP. They did offer federated email for a short while.
  - severak_cz 3y ago
    They provided XMPP gate - it did not federated with other servers but you were able to use multi-account client (e.g. Pidgin) and have it everything in one window. I did exactly that.
  - sseagull 3y ago
    I seem to remember being able to chat with Facebook users from my personal server, but it doesn’t look like it was possible [1]. Actually, searching for this stuff made me sad :( There are blog posts from Facebook still up about how they are using XMPP [2]. There are still notes out there on setting it up in Pidgin [3]. The internet has become a walled-off mess, and it makes me depressed to see such a powerful and wonderful technology abused like this. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5052780/integrating-facebook-chat#5056915 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5052780/integrating-face... [2] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/110/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/110/ [3] https://m.facebook.com/notes/socialblogr/how-to-setup-facebook-chat-in-pidgin-with-jabberxmpp/371950911048/ https://m.facebook.com/notes/socialblogr/how-to-setup-facebo... PS: looking through the other posts on the fb developer blog (just changing the number in the url) is interesting.

taeric 3y ago

He lost me when claiming entertainment is smaller than tech. That is a clearly self serving view that is laughably difficult to defend. To be clear, the other direction would also be hard to defend. And when was this magic period of interop? Even the cited examples are notable for how exceptional they are. This is almost literally an exception proving the rule. Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game? Remember when you actually did have to know the signal capabilities of your video card? Ever buy a keyboard that didn't connect to your computer? Try watching that dvd your friend brought from Japan? Get sent a 8trak? Have a record, but not a variable speed turntable? For that matter, have a grandparent buy you sonic, but you only have a NES? Super Mario World, but again, you only have a NES? Then have you ever actually had fun replacing a car tire, only to find no store in town has any to fit? Heaven help if you were missing transmission parts. Or you thought you'd be forward looking and buy metric tools, and now none fit any of your mechanical parts at home anymore... Really, the list is rather impressive on how hard working together is.

smoldesu 3y ago
I agree with your criticism overall. In defense of interoperability though, I think everything you mentioned is a great example of interoperability working as it should. Everyone started with the same serial capabilities, and tried their own solutions to various degrees of success. Eventually, the industry settles on a particularly attractive and agreeable implementation and standardizes it for everyone. This happened with sound cards, video cards, keyboards and pretty much everything else. As the Bleem! lawsuits proved, even interoperability between game consoles was a legal concept. The incentive to engineer solutions for it just didn't really exist until we standardized computer architectures.
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game? No, I don't remember that. If anything, I remember most games supporting nothing but adlib and practically every other device having either a literal OPL/adlib chip or some other type of hardware/software adlib emulation. There was no impediment whatsoever to creating an adlib-compatible card *, and in fact, many manufacturers did create clones. It perfectly illustrates Doctorow's point. * Patents being the glaring exception, which forced "creative" solutions (e.g. later Creative cards).

brigadier132 3y ago

This really died after Cambridge Analytica. I was working at a social media company at the time and all public access and development of public APIs was halted. Things like Gen AI are the nails in the coffin.

JimDabell 3y ago
I was occasionally working on Facebook applications around 2008–2010 and even back then Facebook had clauses in their terms and conditions forbidding using a person’s social graph to build them a new social graph or mirror their data elsewhere. LinkedIn had the same. The restrictions started coming in a long time before the Cambridge Analytic scandal. They stopped it because they didn’t want the competition, not because of privacy issues.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  Cambridge analytica was the "casus belli" if you will. It was an overnight shift, I worked on the public api team and all our work was deprioritized and I was eventually moved to a different project. I'm sure there were competing factions, even in in Facebook, some advocating for open apis and other advocating for locking everything down.

xor25519 3y ago

And here you see that "interoperability" is not a very progressive demand, but a conservative one. At least is it not progressive in itself - then, paleoconservatives wouldn't endorse it.

faeriechangling 3y ago
Interoperability requires conservatism in general if you want to avoid breaking a ton of APIs that third parties rely on.
jayd16 3y ago
Probably just made the cut because it checks the "liberal tech elites are bad" box.

dusted 3y ago

Pretty sure it went the same place as native apps and reasonable graphical user interfaces.

faeriechangling 3y ago

Speaking of Google specifically, my experience with third parties, even ones who are modestly well known is them not keeping up to date with the latest versions of Google’s software and APIs and whatnot and things breaking and becoming less stable. Nobody is as committed to long term support of Google’s technology than Google themselves. Standards which should be interoperable in theory like Bluetooth have ambiguous specifications and the best way to ensure you don’t get bugs is to buy everything from the same company where even if they didn’t QA their own products you at least avoid the problem of Google and a third party pointing fingers at eachother. Interoperability is a great way to add functionality to your product you would never be able to add otherwise. It’s nice for customization. Yet from the consumer perspective I’m increasingly finding I prefer with dealing with as few different companies as I can get away with. This lets me get away with a greater amount of complexity without it biting me in the rear. From a business perspective, the focus on your own products over interoperability has an obvious appeal.

gumby 3y ago
> Speaking of Google specifically, my experience with third parties, even ones who are modestly well known is them not keeping up to date with the latest versions of Google’s software and APIs and whatnot and things breaking and becoming less stable. Nobody is as committed to long term support of Google’s technology than Google themselves. I assume that last sentence is sarcastic. API stability is pretty important in the real world (look at the system call interfaces of modern OSes for example); Google stepping their APIs (and then abandoning their products) is the opposite of commitment to long term support.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Nah I meant it straight, compared to some of the vendors in the smarthome market Google themselves are a dream when it comes to support. Same goes for Android OEMs and Qualcomm. Notice how Google only offered 7 years of support on the Pixel after they stopped using Qualcomm’s chips? Google’s third parties are even worse than Google in terms of support and Google’s support is bad. It’s such a mess that I’m happy to pay more to avoid Google products nowadays.

armchairhacker 3y ago

I'm not sure this article proves its point. Companies certainly want to prevent interopability and create walled gardens, but that's not what's stopping competition. What is stopping them is that we live in a different world, where much more people use the internet and do so much more casually, expect everything to be of the popularity and quality only the big companies can create. Take Reddit: there are a lot of bots on Lemmy which simply copy and re-post from Reddit. There are tools to freely export all of your Reddit posts and comments. And Reddit at least up to July has been 100% archived. If people had enough motivation, we could all migrate from Reddit to Lemmy almost instantly; Reddit wouldn't even have a legal leg to stand on because the posts and comments belong to those who posted/commented them. But most people really don't care, and much more don't care enough to actually transfer their data or refuse to stop using Reddit; as a result, Lemmy has <1/100th of Reddit's user base and isn't a threat anytime soon. The same take could probably by applied to Twitter and Mastadon as well. > A worker can’t reverse-engineer the Uber app to compare wages with other workers and algorithmically determine when a job offer is a lowball. A consumer can’t install an ad-blocker in an app without risking felony prosecution for violating the DMCA. An entrepreneur can’t mod the Amazon app to remove all the paid results and display comparison prices from rivals. An investigative journalist can’t scrape grocers’ websites to build the case that large firms are colluding to raise prices while blaming inflation. This is funny because the second thing (ad-blocking) is something which possibly the majority of Internet users do and nobody absolutely gets prosecuted for. Blocking in-game ads? Pi-hole. Nowadays, people don't even get prosecuted for cheating and piracy unless they're distributing it (and though individuals could theoretically be prosecuted, the likelihood is low to the point of it being stupid to worry about). Also, there are multiple sites which do the third thing (scraping comparison prices) though none of them are really popular and I doubt any use the Amazon app. The first thing (scraping Uber rates) I haven't seen, but I'm sure if someone really cared they could make a website for that as well. And the fourth thing (price collusion) has been alleged by many with evidence that didn't need to be collected from the apps, people just reported the prices themselves.

20after4 3y ago
You are missing the point about the DMCA. Ad blocking with a pi-hole conveniently sidesteps the DMCA but modding a mobile app absolutely would violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules, because you'd have to defeat the DRM in order to do so.

jgalt212 3y ago

> Then they discovered they could simply buy them. Now that ZIRP is over, and FTC has some swagger, this strategy should have less teeth than under Obama and Trump.