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> I think this is exactly what _most_ people want. Like seven people replied to say this, but they're all missing the trick. Most people want this because the

> I think this is exactly what _most_ people want. Like seven people replied to say this, but they're all missing the trick. Most people want this because they're guided to want it. If you show people the convenience but not the risk, of course they want something with an advantage and no apparent disadvantage. But the disadvantage exists, it's just not immediately obvious. Then some corporate machine learning algorithm decides that it's your day to have a bad year, or the screws only get tightened after you're already locked in, and the regret comes some time after the decision is made. Whereas the nerds who can see the inside of the machine are aware that this sort of thing happens and their response is no thank you. A starkly different preference from the people paying the most attention is a troubling sign. It's the early stages of this: https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/ The thing that gets me is that people then defend the practice because it's likely to be successful. Lots of unsophisticated people are going to put all their eggs in one basket and then have a bad time, which is a result we should be trying to prevent, not defend the people causing it because they're likely to turn a profit. Companies making money on information asymmetries and the misfortune of others is a flaw we should be looking for ways to optimize out.

bandyaboot 2y ago
I’m curious to know what you’re thinking as far as what bad outcome(s) will or may result from people choosing this over some other password manager.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It's putting password management into the same basket as the device. Suppose your Apple ID gets compromised. The attacker is a jerk and decides to remote erase your device. Then they use your account for black hat stuff and get it permanently banned, or just erase everything on iCloud too. If the password manager was a different service then you'd still have the password for that service and could get in and recover your accounts on everything else. If it isn't, where's your stuff? The device and the cloud backups are both gone because they were both tied to the same compromised account. Or you just break your phone and then realize you don't know your password. You can reset your password with your email, so now you just need your email password, which is iCloud, which is the same password. Uh oh. Whereas if your eggs aren't all in the same basket, you can get a foothold somewhere. If you use a third party email service and haven't forgotten that password, you can still get your email on another device. If your password manager backs up to a third party service or your very own Raspberry Pi, you have access using a different set of credentials than the ones you forgot.
  - jesseendahl 2y ago
    I think you might be making some assumptions about how this stuff works without looking into it. - A lot (most?) people’s Apple Account name is actually their main email address (e.g. Gmail), so they would still control their email address even if their Apple Account was compromised. - You can still recover your Apple Account and iCloud Keychain without any devices (e.g. if phone broke like in your scenario). - Your passkeys stored in iCloud Keychain are still protected even if your Apple Account has been compromised. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102195 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102195
    - nottorp 2y ago
      > - A lot (most?) people’s Apple Account name is actually their main email address (e.g. Gmail), so they would still control their email address even if their Apple Account was compromised. But the login for the Gmail address is a passkey that's on the Apple account... > - You can still recover your Apple Account and iCloud Keychain without any devices (e.g. if phone broke like in your scenario). So what's the point of passkeys if you can get access to them without passkeys? > - Your passkeys stored in iCloud Keychain are still protected even if your Apple Account has been compromised. How can something be protected when the thing that controls access to it has been compromised?
      - jesseendahl 2y ago
        > But the login for the Gmail address is a passkey that's on the Apple account... A passkey is just a replacement for a password. Google (and other apps/websites) have account recovery processes for users who get locked out of their accounts. The way you get back into your Google account doesn’t change much just because you’re signing in with a passkey vs. a password. Account recovery is a problem that service providers have to solve (and do solve) regardless of whether a user authenticates to their account with a password or a passkey. > So what's the point of passkeys if you can get access to them without passkeys? Some huge benefits are: 1. They are highly phishing resistant. Unlike passwords and popular forms of 2FA (TOTP and SMS), users can’t be tricked into sending their credential to a fake/malicious server. A passkey is bound to the server domain at the time the credential is created, and your OS/browser will simply not send it to the wrong place. 2. There is no credential for attackers to steal from servers in the case of server breach. This is because only a public key is stored on the server, instead of password hashes (or worse, plaintext, if the app/website developers don’t know what they’re doing). 3. Passkeys are guaranteed to be unique and secure. The same cannot be said for passwords. Even a password manager cannot guarantee that every single credential stored in the password manager is both unique and secure. And password complexity requirements often make it a painful game of trial and error to create a secure password, even when using a password manager. 4. Because of annoying password complexity requirements, the process of creating a new password can be annoying and take up to a minute or two of fiddling around, even when using a password manager. With a passkey, the process takes as long as Face ID or Touch ID (or equivalent on other platforms) every time. Every single credential creation and authentication is a fantastic user experience (both fast and easy). I suggest watching Apple’s WWDC videos. There you will find a very very in-depth answer to this question. All of the points I’ve made above (and more) are covered in the linked videos. Move beyond passwords: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10106/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10106/ Meet passkeys: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10092/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10092/ Deploy passkeys at work: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10263/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10263/ If you won’t watch any of the above then you should at least read the FAQ on passkeys on the FIDO website here, which should answer many of your questions: https://fidoalliance.org/faqs/#PasskeysFAQs https://fidoalliance.org/faqs/#PasskeysFAQs > How can something be protected when the thing that controls access to it has been compromised? This is answered in the article I already linked above. Here is the link again. About the security of passkeys: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102195 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102195 Specifically, carefully read the following sections titled “Synchronization security” and “Recovery security”. The short answer is that gaining access to the user’s iCloud Keychain contents requires more than just having access to the Apple Account.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  The most basic scenario: Someone use their phone as their only computing device (e.g. only other device is their school or work computer). Their phone dies and the shop convinces them to go for a Pixel 9. How screwed are they if everything was in iCloud, vs they were using 1Password ?
  - lloeki 2y ago
    What about any or all among of their contacts, messages, docs, notes, schedules, photos, apps, app contents...? > How screwed are they if everything was in iCloud, vs they were using 1Password/{own,next}Cloud/Evernote/Meta/Dropbox/web apps...? That would be a more appropriate picture. > How screwed are they Not much. Annoyed maybe but as long as they have access to their email and phone number they can reset their passwords. What about the other way around? If a person broke their Android phone and a friend convinces them to move to Apple? You could argue that then they may have everything in Google and that they could log in on an Apple device with their Google account and use Chrome and Gmail and whatnot, but then they'd be storing everything in Google. What if Google sunsets a product? Or Google unilaterally decides to close their account overnight with no human in reach for support? I'm all for interoperability. I do get the risks at hand. But the hodgepodge of separate solutions forming a duct-tape held system is hardly usable for the "mere mortal", let alone integrating the together in reliable ways. People want technology to disappear so they can go on with their lives and do stuff that matters to them (which integrating platform-independent third party solutions is not). So "all eggs in same basket" is an extremely valuable feature for most.
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      > as long as they have access to their email and phone number they can reset their passwords. At best they spend hours and hours up to days resetting the passwords for all the account they ever had. Looking at my password list, there's 700 or them, it would take me a week of my life, if I ever get to do it at all. At worst they actually can't access their email and it's the end (or a week or two of back and forth sending official documents to get it back ?) > Google As a first point: they don't have to go all Google. They can have a Google account solely for their phone, and have everything elsewhere. That's a nobrainer as long as they have a solid password manager. You call it hodgepodge, but that's just what we've doing for the last centuries. The issue of a service unilaterally killing an account isn't limited to Google. Apple will also kill your account if they assume you misbehave, and you might get someone on the phone, while not getting any resolution. Do we hear it more about Google ? sure. But Google is also in the biggest service provider on earth at this point.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kcplate 2y ago
People are driven away from open standards to vendors like Apple because so much open stuff just sucks so goddamn bad. So will Apple one day fuck me over? Perhaps, but in the meantime their shit just works and I am going to use it because I don’t have time to spend hours troubleshooting why manufacturer A doesn’t work with free publisher B when free driver C is loaded.
- dhosek 2y ago
  That was a bit part of my move to Mac from Windows back 24 years ago. It was such a pain trying to get all the bits and pieces working together and with the Mac, yes it was more expensive (although honestly, not that much more expensive) but stuff just worked out of the box and I didn’t have regular crashes. I’m sure things have improved in Wintel land since 2000–2001, but my Apple experience has been remarkably stress-free.
  - kcplate 2y ago
    More expensive up front but in my experience the hardware lasts longer and is usable for longer. I just recently retired a 15 year old MBP due to a battery swell. I’d still probably have it on my desk and occasionally using it if i wasn’t concerned about it exploding and burning my house down.
- pydry 2y ago
  Ive watched people who swear that Apple "just works" struggle when it doesnt. The difference is just that because of the halo effect they dont blame Apple for the shit that doesnt work. If there is a 3rd party tangentially involved they blame them instead.
  - rahoulb 2y ago
    The difference (in my experience) is if it works with Apple, it "just works". If it doesn't work, it will never work. It's a binary and you generally know the answer straight away. Some people dislike it because they enjoy looking for answers and the freedom to change how things work. Others like it because they don't want to spend their time searching and mucking about with configurations.
zer0zzz 2y ago
"The people want the thing that they want because they are wrong" I never understood how this argument even makes sense. It sounds a whole lot like you're upset that most normal people don't care about and don't want what you want.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  I feel like I explained it above. People often want things because they don't have all the information and people who are uninformed, especially when they're intentionally uninformed, make poor decisions. And maybe there are some people who, faced with the risk of losing all their stuff, conclude that maybe all their stuff isn't that important to them and they don't have time for this YOLO! But there are even more people who never even consider the risk, and it seems like somebody should be looking out for them instead of people just saying "shut up nerd, normal people don't care about whatever you're worried about." Uh yeah, that's the problem, they're not made aware of it until it bites them on the ass and anybody who tries to express the concern on their behalf is told to keep their foot away from the hose of the money vacuum.
  - zer0zzz 2y ago
    This is the bell curve meme. People just want the things that work for them, people that know what they are doing want things that work easily and know their way around a little better too. You're overblowing the harmfulness, I'm not even sure what the argument is. Prove to me you deserve to be called a "nerd."
    - chuckadams 2y ago
      GP’s smug superior attitude over non-technical people and general lack of perspective is enough nerd cred for me.
      - zer0zzz 2y ago
        Word
- 2y ago
4death4 2y ago
You should read this piece in the NYT titled “The Tyranny of Convenience” [1]. It asserts that your entire worldview is essentially flawed. En masse, people do what is most convenient, which is completely orthogonal to what is right / wrong / best / worst. For instance, it’s an empirical fact that eating healthy and getting exercise is better than eating poorly and living a sedentary life. Yet, most people live sedentary lives. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-convenience.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-co...
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  But this is precisely the problem. If you want the right thing to happen, you can't allow the wrong thing to be more convenient. "The wrong thing is more convenient so STFU" is the flawed worldview, because it's what causes the wrong thing to continue happening. Now consider what happens if people do the opposite. Instead of defending convenience as an end unto itself as Moloch would have it, you create friction against bad choices. Complain about them, refuse to assist your allies in making a mistake. Do things that make bad options less convenient and redirect people to better choices. People will still do what's convenient, but now the more convenient thing is the better thing.
  - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    > Now consider what happens if people do the opposite. Instead of defending convenience as an end unto itself as Moloch would have it, you create friction against bad choices. Complain about them, refuse to assist your allies in making a mistake. Do things that make bad options less convenient and redirect people to better choices. What about making "the right option" better instead of making the "the wrong option" worse?
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      These things are related. If people don't use the right option then it's starved of resources with which to improve. Of course, you can also improve the right option independently of that, e.g. by making contributions. But now we're back to "Apple interferes with this by making it harder to tinker."
015a 2y ago
This point of view essentially reduces to the same place libertarians are at: Institutions are bad, Apple is bad, Google is bad, we should refuse to support institutions, or maybe even institutions should not exist, depending on how severe the FOSSism is. And look, I don't feel that libertarians (or, let's kill the analogy, FOSSers) are always wrong. Of course they're right about some things; they're just wrong about so much more than they're right about, its like a 90/10 split, its not close. I think the cognitive dissonance is something similar to chesterton's fence: FOSSers don't respect the massive profit-motivated and closed-source companies and systems which, at best, make pockets of productive, awesome open source possible; but more realistically and worse those pockets are just the software version of "buy a Subaru because we donate money to cancer research", they're free labor/recruiting/tax writeoff/community goodwill campaigns by gigacorps, and its all just profit at the end of the day. Nerds who can see the inside of the machine and are aware that this sort of thing happens is literally just stating in different terms the stereotype type-As assign to nerds: that they don't understand anything but the technology [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Apple and Google aren't institutions. They're for-profit corporations with a long track records of behaving like amoral artificial minds that they are. In this sense, corporations are beasts - society can benefit from putting them to work, but they will also occasionally maul someone because that's what they do.
hurril 2y ago
Guided to want it. Sure. Everyone else, all those other folks with other lives, opinions and preferences, they are brain washed by my enemies. Come on, man :) I just wanted Passwords to be its own app because the Settings applet(?) is obnoxious to interact with in some scenarios. My passwords are already all in there. Now, I use a Windows laptop too and would love for Apple to make the Passwords thing work there too. It probably won't :)
jb1991 2y ago
> Most people want this because they're guided to want it. If you show people the convenience but not the risk I think that what is convenient to you, or to fellow engineers, is not what is convenient to the mass public or non-technical people. Very simple solutions, which are often platform-specific, tend to be a lot easier in many cases -- not necessarily all cases, but when something is built-in to a device or OS, this does remove some burdens from users.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  No part of that is intrinsic. Example: Everybody is constantly using Internet Protocol, a standard implemented by vendors the world over, many of which having never encountered one another and yet their devices and programs can still interact with each other. From the perspective of the ordinary user it "just works", but it is in no way vendor or platform-specific. Indeed, this generally works better than vendor-specific technologies as soon as you encounter the real world where different people have different stuff. Safari works just fine with Linux webservers because they're interacting using open standards. Then you want to get your Mac to work with Active Directory and it's a frustrating mess because it's not open standards and neither vendor wants to facilitate the use of the other's proprietary technology.

bandyaboot 2y ago

I’m curious to know what you’re thinking as far as what bad outcome(s) will or may result from people choosing this over some other password manager.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
It's putting password management into the same basket as the device. Suppose your Apple ID gets compromised. The attacker is a jerk and decides to remote erase your device. Then they use your account for black hat stuff and get it permanently banned, or just erase everything on iCloud too. If the password manager was a different service then you'd still have the password for that service and could get in and recover your accounts on everything else. If it isn't, where's your stuff? The device and the cloud backups are both gone because they were both tied to the same compromised account. Or you just break your phone and then realize you don't know your password. You can reset your password with your email, so now you just need your email password, which is iCloud, which is the same password. Uh oh. Whereas if your eggs aren't all in the same basket, you can get a foothold somewhere. If you use a third party email service and haven't forgotten that password, you can still get your email on another device. If your password manager backs up to a third party service or your very own Raspberry Pi, you have access using a different set of credentials than the ones you forgot.
- jesseendahl 2y ago
  I think you might be making some assumptions about how this stuff works without looking into it. - A lot (most?) people’s Apple Account name is actually their main email address (e.g. Gmail), so they would still control their email address even if their Apple Account was compromised. - You can still recover your Apple Account and iCloud Keychain without any devices (e.g. if phone broke like in your scenario). - Your passkeys stored in iCloud Keychain are still protected even if your Apple Account has been compromised. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102195 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102195
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > - A lot (most?) people’s Apple Account name is actually their main email address (e.g. Gmail), so they would still control their email address even if their Apple Account was compromised. But the login for the Gmail address is a passkey that's on the Apple account... > - You can still recover your Apple Account and iCloud Keychain without any devices (e.g. if phone broke like in your scenario). So what's the point of passkeys if you can get access to them without passkeys? > - Your passkeys stored in iCloud Keychain are still protected even if your Apple Account has been compromised. How can something be protected when the thing that controls access to it has been compromised?
    - jesseendahl 2y ago
      > But the login for the Gmail address is a passkey that's on the Apple account... A passkey is just a replacement for a password. Google (and other apps/websites) have account recovery processes for users who get locked out of their accounts. The way you get back into your Google account doesn’t change much just because you’re signing in with a passkey vs. a password. Account recovery is a problem that service providers have to solve (and do solve) regardless of whether a user authenticates to their account with a password or a passkey. > So what's the point of passkeys if you can get access to them without passkeys? Some huge benefits are: 1. They are highly phishing resistant. Unlike passwords and popular forms of 2FA (TOTP and SMS), users can’t be tricked into sending their credential to a fake/malicious server. A passkey is bound to the server domain at the time the credential is created, and your OS/browser will simply not send it to the wrong place. 2. There is no credential for attackers to steal from servers in the case of server breach. This is because only a public key is stored on the server, instead of password hashes (or worse, plaintext, if the app/website developers don’t know what they’re doing). 3. Passkeys are guaranteed to be unique and secure. The same cannot be said for passwords. Even a password manager cannot guarantee that every single credential stored in the password manager is both unique and secure. And password complexity requirements often make it a painful game of trial and error to create a secure password, even when using a password manager. 4. Because of annoying password complexity requirements, the process of creating a new password can be annoying and take up to a minute or two of fiddling around, even when using a password manager. With a passkey, the process takes as long as Face ID or Touch ID (or equivalent on other platforms) every time. Every single credential creation and authentication is a fantastic user experience (both fast and easy). I suggest watching Apple’s WWDC videos. There you will find a very very in-depth answer to this question. All of the points I’ve made above (and more) are covered in the linked videos. Move beyond passwords: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10106/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10106/ Meet passkeys: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10092/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10092/ Deploy passkeys at work: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10263/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10263/ If you won’t watch any of the above then you should at least read the FAQ on passkeys on the FIDO website here, which should answer many of your questions: https://fidoalliance.org/faqs/#PasskeysFAQs https://fidoalliance.org/faqs/#PasskeysFAQs > How can something be protected when the thing that controls access to it has been compromised? This is answered in the article I already linked above. Here is the link again. About the security of passkeys: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102195 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102195 Specifically, carefully read the following sections titled “Synchronization security” and “Recovery security”. The short answer is that gaining access to the user’s iCloud Keychain contents requires more than just having access to the Apple Account.
makeitdouble 2y ago
The most basic scenario: Someone use their phone as their only computing device (e.g. only other device is their school or work computer). Their phone dies and the shop convinces them to go for a Pixel 9. How screwed are they if everything was in iCloud, vs they were using 1Password ?
- lloeki 2y ago
  What about any or all among of their contacts, messages, docs, notes, schedules, photos, apps, app contents...? > How screwed are they if everything was in iCloud, vs they were using 1Password/{own,next}Cloud/Evernote/Meta/Dropbox/web apps...? That would be a more appropriate picture. > How screwed are they Not much. Annoyed maybe but as long as they have access to their email and phone number they can reset their passwords. What about the other way around? If a person broke their Android phone and a friend convinces them to move to Apple? You could argue that then they may have everything in Google and that they could log in on an Apple device with their Google account and use Chrome and Gmail and whatnot, but then they'd be storing everything in Google. What if Google sunsets a product? Or Google unilaterally decides to close their account overnight with no human in reach for support? I'm all for interoperability. I do get the risks at hand. But the hodgepodge of separate solutions forming a duct-tape held system is hardly usable for the "mere mortal", let alone integrating the together in reliable ways. People want technology to disappear so they can go on with their lives and do stuff that matters to them (which integrating platform-independent third party solutions is not). So "all eggs in same basket" is an extremely valuable feature for most.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    > as long as they have access to their email and phone number they can reset their passwords. At best they spend hours and hours up to days resetting the passwords for all the account they ever had. Looking at my password list, there's 700 or them, it would take me a week of my life, if I ever get to do it at all. At worst they actually can't access their email and it's the end (or a week or two of back and forth sending official documents to get it back ?) > Google As a first point: they don't have to go all Google. They can have a Google account solely for their phone, and have everything elsewhere. That's a nobrainer as long as they have a solid password manager. You call it hodgepodge, but that's just what we've doing for the last centuries. The issue of a service unilaterally killing an account isn't limited to Google. Apple will also kill your account if they assume you misbehave, and you might get someone on the phone, while not getting any resolution. Do we hear it more about Google ? sure. But Google is also in the biggest service provider on earth at this point.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kcplate 2y ago

People are driven away from open standards to vendors like Apple because so much open stuff just sucks so goddamn bad. So will Apple one day fuck me over? Perhaps, but in the meantime their shit just works and I am going to use it because I don’t have time to spend hours troubleshooting why manufacturer A doesn’t work with free publisher B when free driver C is loaded.

dhosek 2y ago
That was a bit part of my move to Mac from Windows back 24 years ago. It was such a pain trying to get all the bits and pieces working together and with the Mac, yes it was more expensive (although honestly, not that much more expensive) but stuff just worked out of the box and I didn’t have regular crashes. I’m sure things have improved in Wintel land since 2000–2001, but my Apple experience has been remarkably stress-free.
- kcplate 2y ago
  More expensive up front but in my experience the hardware lasts longer and is usable for longer. I just recently retired a 15 year old MBP due to a battery swell. I’d still probably have it on my desk and occasionally using it if i wasn’t concerned about it exploding and burning my house down.
pydry 2y ago
Ive watched people who swear that Apple "just works" struggle when it doesnt. The difference is just that because of the halo effect they dont blame Apple for the shit that doesnt work. If there is a 3rd party tangentially involved they blame them instead.
- rahoulb 2y ago
  The difference (in my experience) is if it works with Apple, it "just works". If it doesn't work, it will never work. It's a binary and you generally know the answer straight away. Some people dislike it because they enjoy looking for answers and the freedom to change how things work. Others like it because they don't want to spend their time searching and mucking about with configurations.

zer0zzz 2y ago

"The people want the thing that they want because they are wrong" I never understood how this argument even makes sense. It sounds a whole lot like you're upset that most normal people don't care about and don't want what you want.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
I feel like I explained it above. People often want things because they don't have all the information and people who are uninformed, especially when they're intentionally uninformed, make poor decisions. And maybe there are some people who, faced with the risk of losing all their stuff, conclude that maybe all their stuff isn't that important to them and they don't have time for this YOLO! But there are even more people who never even consider the risk, and it seems like somebody should be looking out for them instead of people just saying "shut up nerd, normal people don't care about whatever you're worried about." Uh yeah, that's the problem, they're not made aware of it until it bites them on the ass and anybody who tries to express the concern on their behalf is told to keep their foot away from the hose of the money vacuum.
- zer0zzz 2y ago
  This is the bell curve meme. People just want the things that work for them, people that know what they are doing want things that work easily and know their way around a little better too. You're overblowing the harmfulness, I'm not even sure what the argument is. Prove to me you deserve to be called a "nerd."
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    GP’s smug superior attitude over non-technical people and general lack of perspective is enough nerd cred for me.
    - zer0zzz 2y ago
      Word
2y ago

4death4 2y ago

You should read this piece in the NYT titled “The Tyranny of Convenience” [1]. It asserts that your entire worldview is essentially flawed. En masse, people do what is most convenient, which is completely orthogonal to what is right / wrong / best / worst. For instance, it’s an empirical fact that eating healthy and getting exercise is better than eating poorly and living a sedentary life. Yet, most people live sedentary lives. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-convenience.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-co...

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
But this is precisely the problem. If you want the right thing to happen, you can't allow the wrong thing to be more convenient. "The wrong thing is more convenient so STFU" is the flawed worldview, because it's what causes the wrong thing to continue happening. Now consider what happens if people do the opposite. Instead of defending convenience as an end unto itself as Moloch would have it, you create friction against bad choices. Complain about them, refuse to assist your allies in making a mistake. Do things that make bad options less convenient and redirect people to better choices. People will still do what's convenient, but now the more convenient thing is the better thing.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  > Now consider what happens if people do the opposite. Instead of defending convenience as an end unto itself as Moloch would have it, you create friction against bad choices. Complain about them, refuse to assist your allies in making a mistake. Do things that make bad options less convenient and redirect people to better choices. What about making "the right option" better instead of making the "the wrong option" worse?
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    These things are related. If people don't use the right option then it's starved of resources with which to improve. Of course, you can also improve the right option independently of that, e.g. by making contributions. But now we're back to "Apple interferes with this by making it harder to tinker."

015a 2y ago

This point of view essentially reduces to the same place libertarians are at: Institutions are bad, Apple is bad, Google is bad, we should refuse to support institutions, or maybe even institutions should not exist, depending on how severe the FOSSism is. And look, I don't feel that libertarians (or, let's kill the analogy, FOSSers) are always wrong. Of course they're right about some things; they're just wrong about so much more than they're right about, its like a 90/10 split, its not close. I think the cognitive dissonance is something similar to chesterton's fence: FOSSers don't respect the massive profit-motivated and closed-source companies and systems which, at best, make pockets of productive, awesome open source possible; but more realistically and worse those pockets are just the software version of "buy a Subaru because we donate money to cancer research", they're free labor/recruiting/tax writeoff/community goodwill campaigns by gigacorps, and its all just profit at the end of the day. Nerds who can see the inside of the machine and are aware that this sort of thing happens is literally just stating in different terms the stereotype type-As assign to nerds: that they don't understand anything but the technology [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Apple and Google aren't institutions. They're for-profit corporations with a long track records of behaving like amoral artificial minds that they are. In this sense, corporations are beasts - society can benefit from putting them to work, but they will also occasionally maul someone because that's what they do.

hurril 2y ago

Guided to want it. Sure. Everyone else, all those other folks with other lives, opinions and preferences, they are brain washed by my enemies. Come on, man :) I just wanted Passwords to be its own app because the Settings applet(?) is obnoxious to interact with in some scenarios. My passwords are already all in there. Now, I use a Windows laptop too and would love for Apple to make the Passwords thing work there too. It probably won't :)

jb1991 2y ago

> Most people want this because they're guided to want it. If you show people the convenience but not the risk I think that what is convenient to you, or to fellow engineers, is not what is convenient to the mass public or non-technical people. Very simple solutions, which are often platform-specific, tend to be a lot easier in many cases -- not necessarily all cases, but when something is built-in to a device or OS, this does remove some burdens from users.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
No part of that is intrinsic. Example: Everybody is constantly using Internet Protocol, a standard implemented by vendors the world over, many of which having never encountered one another and yet their devices and programs can still interact with each other. From the perspective of the ordinary user it "just works", but it is in no way vendor or platform-specific. Indeed, this generally works better than vendor-specific technologies as soon as you encounter the real world where different people have different stuff. Safari works just fine with Linux webservers because they're interacting using open standards. Then you want to get your Mac to work with Active Directory and it's a frustrating mess because it's not open standards and neither vendor wants to facilitate the use of the other's proprietary technology.