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Every day we stray farther from the premise that we should be allowed to install / modify software on the computers we own. Will once again re-up the concept o
by medhir 1y ago
Every day we stray farther from the premise that we should be allowed to install / modify software on the computers we own.
Will once again re-up the concept of a “right to root access”, to prevent big corps from pulling this bs over and over again: https://medhir.com/blog/right-to-root-access https://medhir.com/blog/right-to-root-access
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sepeth 1y agoThis is why I believe GPL v3 is important.
- eru 1y agoRoot access on your phone isn't enough: there's layers below root.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- apitman 1y agoI accidentally read this as "there's lawyers below root" and I'm not sure I'm wrong.
- aspenmayer 1y agoNo matter what runlevel you’re on, judges are lower still. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runlevel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runlevel
- RRWagner 1y agoIt's lawyers all the way down :)
- preisschild 1y agoYep. I don't need/want root access, as it is too much of a security risk IMO. But of course the possibility to install a `su` binary should be there. I primarily want to be able to unlock the bootloader to install a custom de-googled Android Version (such as GrapheneOS) and then lock the bootloader again (using a custom_avb_key). This is currently possible with Google's Pixel devices, but most Android devices don't even offer this...
- ACCount37 1y agoThis. But being able to get root is a very good starting point.
- _heimdall 1y agoThe question really isn't whether we should be able to modify computers we own, its whether we own them at all.
- yesbut 1y agoregardless of what the corporations say we do own the devices we purchase.
- _heimdall 1y agoNot always. There have been car manufacturers that sold vehicles with features only enabled by a subscription. You may buy a car with heated seats, but the heated seats only work if the manufacturer enables them.
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoAnd there should be no law against enabling the heated seats in the car you own without interacting with the manufacturer.
- alexvitkov 1y agoToo bad there is one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoLaws can be interpreted in such a way that invites robber barons to pound sand, or repealed.
- bayindirh 1y agoConsidering the same law is used to strike a 3 hour GPU documentary over a ~30 second clip, I think it serves to corporate pretty well. GamersNexus' 3 hour documentary about GPU smuggling (which is way more than a vlog as HN commenters like to portray) is struck down by Bloomberg because they didn't want their 30 second clip, which is squarely fair use BTW, of POTUS speaking to be in that. GamersNexus repealed successfully, but Bloomberg tried to bully them [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY
- paulcole 1y ago> Every day we stray farther from the premise that we should be allowed to install / modify software on the computers we own. I’ve never agreed with this premise. I buy things that mostly meet my needs and desires in every other walk of life. I’m personally OK with extending this to computers as well.
- garciansmith 1y agoThat doesn't make sense. How do meet your own needs and desires if you can't use your own property the way you want? And isn't the point in this very situation that people simply can't buy what they want because Google and Apple are a duopoly and now Google is going to follow the path of restricting what you can do with your own property?
- nurettin 1y agoIf I were in the 0.01%, savings wouldn't be a thing. I wouldn't even need a home. Just go around staying wherever I like for as long as I like doing whatever I want. I wouldn't really care about what google or apple does with their devices, who attacked or defeated whom and all that bs because I wouldn't be in survival mode. At least this is probably how people in charge of enshittification think like.
- paulcole 1y ago> How do meet your own needs and desires if you can't use your own property the way you want? My needs and desires aren’t that complicated. There’s nothing that I really want or need to do that I can’t do on my phone or iPad.
- rpdillon 1y agoThe logic here seems to be "I don't care about freedom because my jail cell is large enough." What if you wake up one day and it isn't? Your response reminds me of Snowden's quote, which I'll likely butcher because it's from memory, but roughly: "Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say".
- kylebenzle 1y ago[dead]
- quotemstr 1y agoIt's amazing how often we hamper the majority of society by protecting the bottom quintile from the consequences of their own mistakes.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoEveryone makes mistakes Protecting the bottom quintile from consequences of thier mistakes also protects everyone else if they ever make those mistakes in a momentary lapse Maybe society shouldn't be structured in such a way that people have to be constantly hyper vigilant to avoid mistakes with high consequences
- quotemstr 1y agoIt's just not possible to prevent mistakes while letting people color outside the lines. Most brilliant ideas look like stupidity at first. I want to live in a world that biases towards discovery over safety.
- BrenBarn 1y agoYou don't necessarily need to prevent all the mistakes, you can often just make them less costly.
- gf000 1y agoThere is a line, at least a blurry one, though. There is not much to discover from e.g. not using seatbelts. There is absolutely a need to protect a population from itself which should cover certain stuff, while not others.
- quotemstr 1y agoThere's a direct line from mandating seatbelts to mandating developer certificates. If you accept in one domain that it's legitimate for power to reduce freedom to protect people from themselves, you'll accept it in every domain. Look: in order for a mandate to be justifiable, it needs to at least provide superlinear benefit to linear adoption. That is, it has to solve a coordination problem. Do seat belts solve any coordination problem? Do they benefit anyone but those wearing them? No. Therefore, the state has no business mandating them no matter the harm prevented. A certain kind of person thinks differently though. He sees "harm" and relishes the prospect of "protecting" people from that "harm". They don't recognize the legitimacy of individual bad decisions. The self is just another person trying to hurt you. This kind of person would turn the whole world into a rubberized playground if he could.
- aakast 1y agoSure. You will have the right to root, unless on a device with a locked bootloader. /s Lets just call it what it is and what we all want. "The right to modify". It doesn't give you the right to copy, so it will never break any law protecting intellectual property.
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoThere is no chance that we own our computers unless we figure out how to setup chip manufacturing factories at the 10 million dollar price point. Without commoditized hardware, big capital will surely be in control of software.
- noosphr 1y agoWe live in a world where the top chip makers are being shaken down by the US government to keep access to markets because embargoes and tariffs. And where software developers have to have a live feed of what every user is doing to Brussels or be arrested. Too much capitalism isn't our problem.
- melagonster 1y agoSounds like if US citizens hope for that, we can get it.
- rickdeckard 1y ago> And where software developers have to have a live feed of what every user is doing to Brussels or be arrested. Please elaborate, with sources.
- conradev 1y agoLikely referring to EU Chat Control: https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/08/eu-chat-control-law-is-a-step-towards-mass-surveillance/ https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/08/eu-chat-control-law-is-a-s...
- baq 1y agoIn the meantime, corporate is thinking about locking browsers down. Remember this? https://chromestatus.com/feature/5796524191121408 https://chromestatus.com/feature/5796524191121408 They’ll try again, with big business and governments cheering on them.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago> They’ll try again, with big business and governments cheering on them. No doubt. They only have to win once. We have to keep defending our own freedoms against non-stop assault until the end of time. I'm so tired and disillusioned.
- Pentamerous 1y agoFreedom is a constant struggle
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoY'know what's troubling to me, freedom as a struggle is indirectly related to other people/ social-political issue. Like, the people if they decide, they want freedom, are almost guaranteed to get it. But nobody demands it in the truest sense and it feels like the govt. isn't controlled by the people but rather almost by lobbying and that social media etc. have made people complacent in the sense that either we think that others will fight for us or that social media has become a propaganda machine. I almost broke last night realizing that nuclear can be completely green energy but it isn't the issue of technology but rather political. To me, it felt like a lot of really quality of life changes (like water access, clean cities, good air quality index, atleast where I live) are all almost political issues at this point. But I am not hopeful towards people, I am hopeful towards tech though. It feels like people have free will, so they might actually pick a net negative option for everybody (trump?), so I am not an optimist because I feel like I have to trust people in the process and I feel like people can do both good and bad, so I wonder how much better our lives have been compared to our ancestors. Maybe trade-offs? I genuinely felt so weird realizing this, its hard to explain. Like it felt like I can do nothing but watch. And to me I feel like I am being a pessimistic because a lot of people in power feel stupid/inefficient man. We just don't have a choice. WE have a choice b/w 2 parties and call it freedom. Of course, freedom will be a constant struggle. People have made it as such. Its on all of us, we all need to take accountability. I get it, accountability is hard, but its much better than waiting for a hero to save us all. We can do it if we realize this.
- chneu 1y agoYou can't steal something if you can't own it.
- isodev 1y agoI see no other way than regulation to force the two to provide drivers and manuals for alternative OS makers. We should've nipped it with Apple, but there was so much _whatabout_ing that the conversation always go sidetracked with assertions about the free market and what not. It turns out, there is no free market, and we're just living in someone's managed device walled garden.
- wouldbecouldbe 1y agoTo be fair to Google, they got so much cricticism for allowing so many spam apps.
- rickdeckard 1y agoIt's a tricky balance-act to secure their ecosystem. The more measures they take to secure it while allowing the user to decide whether to participate, the more drastic this opt-out user-decision becomes. In order to now preserve that "open ecosystem", they would have to provide the user an option to disable Google Services entirely, which would turns the device almost into a separate product All this is unlikely to happen just for the sake of "pleasing the community", I believe we need a general legally binding definition of what functions the user owns if (and when) a device is stripped of any services on top. If my car loses functions once it loses connection to the manufacturer, this bare set should be communicated as the purchased value ("in exchange for your money"), separately from any on-top "in exchange for your data" business-model
- Gigachad 1y agoThe problem is phones became too important. They get trusted more than desktops for things like banking and ID verification. Feeling like the optimum solution is to just have two devices. Your phone that has all of your banking, ID, etc. and another device that’s completely open, can install whatever you want on, but doesn’t matter too much if it gets hacked.
- rickdeckard 1y agoIf this is a reasonable direction, it could still be achieved on the same device. There would be sufficient security architecture available to completely isolate those two areas. But I feel the issue is less about malware gathering your banking, ID etc, but malware holding your data hostage, using your (social) network for nefarious purposes or tricking you into something you don't want to do. And for all those cases, having that "other" device doesn't help.
- GardenLetter27 1y agoReminds of RMS's The Right To Read - http://mat.puc-rio.br/~nicolau/stallmann/tycho10h.html http://mat.puc-rio.br/~nicolau/stallmann/tycho10h.html
- raxxorraxor 1y agoVery true and this was predictable. That said, I haven't installed any apps for months now since I don't consider Android to be a usable OS anymore. It could be technically, but I have no will to fight Google and manufacturers on their lock down ambitions. Ironically that degraded phones to be just that. Phones with build-in high quality cameras. For everything else there are better alternatives.
- coldtea 1y agoYou'll own nothing (not even your digital assets) and be happy!
- zigzag312 1y agoComputing devices hardware and operating systems should be treated as essential digital infrastructure, with laws in place to ensure that the owner of the device retains full control over it and to prevent manufacturers or developers from over-imposing their control.
- i-use-nixos-btw 1y agoComputing devices hardware and operating systems should be treated as a consumer's choice. If a company offers some benefit at the cost of some restriction, then users should decide if that benefit is worth the cost. For most Android users, it will be - my grandma isn't interested in the freedom of indie devs to develop for her phone, she's interested in not accidentally installing malware. I don't like that as much as you don't - for my own devices. But like anyone else who cares about that, I can root it and get past the digital nanny state.
- zigzag312 1y agoThe Play Store doesn’t protect your grandma from installing malware. Using that as an excuse for transferring control is weak and carries much bigger consequences. Owner having full control over the device does not prevent a company to offer same benefits and restrictions. But these restrictions need to be optional, so the owner can decide whether to enable or disable them.
- summm 1y agoI would agree of there was a choice or actual free market. But there isn't, and your argument is fundamentally flawed. Because there often is no actual choice, the options are artificially restricted. Starting with, many phones cannot be rooted. Then, if you can root, multiple functions are suddenly unavailable, not because of a fundamental technical problem, but because Google, the phone OEM or the app dev decided to not give you the options you wanted.
- username332211 1y agoIf you treat it as a consumer choice, there's a rather uncomfortable marketing question - "What, precisely, is the value proposition of a locked down Android device?" A few years ago "A smartphone so intuitive that grandma can understand it." used to literally be one of the arguments cited for picking iOS over Android. The UX is far more polished and you are far more likely to find an interesting iOS-exclusive app than an Android-exclusive. Further, as a hardware manufacturer, Apple is far more likely to manage its walled garden in the consumer's interest, as compared to Google - an advertising company. If Android gets locked up, all the high-end Android manufacturers, especially Samsung, are going to face a slow, but inevitable death.
- BrenBarn 1y agoConditioning such rights on the device being "owned outright" will just push the same bad actors to rent you the phones instead of buying them, the same as they did with software licenses. The only way to really fix it is to break up the wealth and power of individuals and corporations based on their total effective power, regardless of the source from which that power is derived.
- vorejdajo 1y ago>The only way to really fix it is to break up the wealth and power of individuals and corporations based on their total effective power That simply transfers the power to the one doing the breakup, which in most cases, are the Governments, which are notoriously known to invade user's privacy under the guise of protection of children or whatever.
- BrenBarn 1y agoCorporations are also notorious for doing that, except with governments you can vote them out.
- qiine 1y agoso we are doomed? since people don't even really get why right to repair is important this kind of concepts fly way above the head of most peoples..
- ozim 1y agoTell that to all those assholes that are making malware and scamming society on billions. Most of users are not able to keep themselves safe in the internet - they want to install all kind of crap without thinking too much. All of this is companies making it possible that average Joe could just click links, install any kind of crap and still be somewhat secure.
- fimdomeio 1y agoYou don't have to prevent root access. You just have to inform user of the risks, void warranties if you want but let users do whatever they want with the hardware that they own.
- ZiiS 1y agoYes, very clear warnings; I could live with a small permanent icon in the status bar (via the GPU firmware) etc. But absolutely should not void warranties (overclocking might but never just root).
- perihelions 1y ago> "void warranties if you want " Please don't push the Overton Window any further. Installing my own software on my own PC should never void the hardware vendor's warranty. That delegitimizes the core concept of a PC. (A horrific possible dystopia just flashed through my mind: "I'd love to throw out Chrome and install Firefox so that I could block ads, but, the laptop is expensive, and I can't afford voiding the warranty". I bet Google would *love* that world. Or, a UK version: "I'd love to use a VPN, but, regulation banned them from the approved software markets, and anything else would permanently set the WARRANTY_VIOLATED flag in the TPM").
- apatheticonion 1y agoAlso add "the right to maintain". Too many Android devices have drivers hidden behind kernel forks that will never be updated. I'd love to install OpenWRT on my portable 5g modem currently running Android - . but I can't and likely never will. Same for my IoT automated blinds
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dv_dt 1y agoThis should be a part of right to repair. The grouping would get more people with common cause together.
- medhir 1y ago100% in alignment with this! Direct quote from the end of the post I linked: “In the broader conversation of right to repair regulations, we also need to be thinking about a "right to root access" for computing devices.” :)