4 ms·

If you sell me a computer and I don't have a shell on it that's false advertising at best. Doing this en mass with the goal of actually changing people's behavi

If you sell me a computer and I don't have a shell on it that's false advertising at best. Doing this en mass with the goal of actually changing people's behavior is even worse IMO. We don't have a word for it because it's not something that could be done before now. Microsoft tried with Windows and IE but the technology at the time meant they couldn't really lock people out of their own devices the way Apple does.

8fingerlouie 1y ago
> If you sell me a computer and I don't have a shell on it that's false advertising at best I believe that's why they're calling it "a phone", or "a tablet". The computer they actually sell has plenty of shells available, and lets you tinker with whatever you like. A phone is not simply a computer, it's a regulated piece of hardware that must comply with local laws and regulations regarding radio transmissions and other stuff. You can't just peek and poke around anywhere you like in the system. Besides that, it must be able to talk to carefully tuned 3G/4G/5G cell towers, which sounds easy in theory, but it's not. When I made mobile phones 20 years ago, we had people driving around all countries where we sold it, with a test setup where the phone connected to every cell tower it could "see", and recorded logs and GPS coordinates, and that work (and that of countless others) is partially what became the beginning of A-GPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS), which allows you to triangulate your phones location purely from the cell towers it can see. Of course that's not how it works today, as most carriers these days register their cell towers in a central database with GPS coordinates, so A-GPS these days is simply a database dump (and a whole lot of math). As a "fun" anecdote, when I wrote software for mobile phones, it was the only place I've ever worked that had a bug category for "potential harm to user". I'm certain companies working in Medicare and other critical industries also has that, but it was the first and only time I ever saw it.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Lol. If phones were actually considered critical devices like this implies Android would have been nuked from orbit. No. They're computers with a modem peripheral. This is like saying once you plugged your e machine into the phone line it could interfere with 911 calls so they need to be regulated by the FCC. We settled that one over 50 years ago.
  - 8fingerlouie 1y ago
    Let me put it another way. Besides the FDA (and similar international counterparts), you're also using your phone for a bunch of other stuff that you probably don't want anyone having root access to. Wallets are one, banking apps, medical data and devices, password managers, and more. If you have root access, that means that the apps can also get it, after all the app providing root access is itself an app.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      Don't tell me what I want. Yes I have my bitcoin-qt wallet, Etrade, my ssh keys, and my password manager on a machine I also have root on. I don't run non-free code on it (and I'm very picky about the open source code I do run.) Also just because I have root access doesn't mean I'm running all my apps as root. That's in insane statement to make. I run administrative tools as root and that's it. The same thing is happening on your phone, you're just not allowed access to those tools, instead various other companies are and when they do things you don't like your options are: throw out your device and data, or bend over and take it. Again at the end of the day a computer is a computer regardless of you being administratively locked out of yours.

8fingerlouie 1y ago

> If you sell me a computer and I don't have a shell on it that's false advertising at best I believe that's why they're calling it "a phone", or "a tablet". The computer they actually sell has plenty of shells available, and lets you tinker with whatever you like. A phone is not simply a computer, it's a regulated piece of hardware that must comply with local laws and regulations regarding radio transmissions and other stuff. You can't just peek and poke around anywhere you like in the system. Besides that, it must be able to talk to carefully tuned 3G/4G/5G cell towers, which sounds easy in theory, but it's not. When I made mobile phones 20 years ago, we had people driving around all countries where we sold it, with a test setup where the phone connected to every cell tower it could "see", and recorded logs and GPS coordinates, and that work (and that of countless others) is partially what became the beginning of A-GPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS), which allows you to triangulate your phones location purely from the cell towers it can see. Of course that's not how it works today, as most carriers these days register their cell towers in a central database with GPS coordinates, so A-GPS these days is simply a database dump (and a whole lot of math). As a "fun" anecdote, when I wrote software for mobile phones, it was the only place I've ever worked that had a bug category for "potential harm to user". I'm certain companies working in Medicare and other critical industries also has that, but it was the first and only time I ever saw it.

msgodel 1y ago
Lol. If phones were actually considered critical devices like this implies Android would have been nuked from orbit. No. They're computers with a modem peripheral. This is like saying once you plugged your e machine into the phone line it could interfere with 911 calls so they need to be regulated by the FCC. We settled that one over 50 years ago.
- 8fingerlouie 1y ago
  Let me put it another way. Besides the FDA (and similar international counterparts), you're also using your phone for a bunch of other stuff that you probably don't want anyone having root access to. Wallets are one, banking apps, medical data and devices, password managers, and more. If you have root access, that means that the apps can also get it, after all the app providing root access is itself an app.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    Don't tell me what I want. Yes I have my bitcoin-qt wallet, Etrade, my ssh keys, and my password manager on a machine I also have root on. I don't run non-free code on it (and I'm very picky about the open source code I do run.) Also just because I have root access doesn't mean I'm running all my apps as root. That's in insane statement to make. I run administrative tools as root and that's it. The same thing is happening on your phone, you're just not allowed access to those tools, instead various other companies are and when they do things you don't like your options are: throw out your device and data, or bend over and take it. Again at the end of the day a computer is a computer regardless of you being administratively locked out of yours.