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The point is it doesn't have to be life. We can make things so that you don't need a smartphone, but we choose not to. That's a choice, not some immutable reali
by bigstrat2003 7mo ago
The point is it doesn't have to be life. We can make things so that you don't need a smartphone, but we choose not to. That's a choice, not some immutable reality of the universe.
- xvector 7mo agoWe can, but why should we?
- justonceokay 7mo agoIf your imagination is that anemic then the process is compete.
- whoamii 7mo agoRight? This is no country for old men.
- HotGarbage 7mo agoWhy should we be beholden to the two mega-corporations who control the smartphone market?
- cindyllm 7mo ago[dead]
- xvector 7mo agoYou can certainly get a smartphone from another company and run AOSP. But the problem isn't that this guy didn't want to use a smartphone, it's that he literally has never bothered to learn. Why should society cater to those that literally don't care to learn the essentials?
- duskdozer 7mo agoWhoops! Looks like your device isn't secure. Google Play Protect validation failed.
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoIf you scroll up, there's a link to an example of why at the very top of this page.
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoBecause the future will be very dystopian if we place two tech companies as gatekeepers of everything in life. If Google locks your account and won't help you (which happens!), you don't want that to also take away your ability to bank, go to baseball games, etc.
- xvector 7mo agoIf that is your threat model (it isn't for 99.999% of people), you can set up your own email domain for few bucks a year and it takes 20 minutes. Now no one can debank you and take away your ability to go to baseball games simply by killing your email. But that's not the reason the guy in the video isn't using a smartphone. It's because he literally never bothered to learn or keep up.
- Ucalegon 7mo agoIf you work in an industry that is solely based off of customer delight, stories like these are what you are looking avoid due to brand damage. It is going to cost more time/energy to deal with the backlash than just coming up with a simple solution in the first place.
- sateesh 7mo agoprivacy for one.
- andrewla 7mo agoCan we make things so that you don't need a smartphone? I don't think this is as trivial as you're making it out to be. Having a non-exfiltratable bearer token is really really hard. In order to present a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of a token you need to have some sort of challenge-response protocol. The simplest one, and the one in most common use (such as this) is a time-based method, where the shared knowledge of the current time represents the challenge. The other method is to use civil identity as the challenge, and use government-issued IDs as the bearer token that the ticket is tied to. This doesn't scale well to larger events, and presents real challenges involved centralization of ticket exchange. You can argue whether or not forgery is a significant enough problem to be worth this trouble, but that's a business decision, and as live events like this get more expensive forgery and resale become more and more of a problem, which end up locking out people like this who have legally and legitimately bought tickets but can't gain access to events because someone has stolen and resold their ticket.
- raincole 7mo agoYet, somehow Major League had been selling tickets just fine for more than a century without smartphones.
- andrewla 7mo agoIt's a moving target. Forging tickets has gotten easier and easier, and as tickets get more expensive it becomes more and more lucrative. Law enforcement is generally not helpful for this sort of petty larceny so they are looking for structural ways to prevent it. In past eras they used holograms and watermarks and special papers in an attempt to prevent forgery but these methods keep getting challenged by an ever more sophisticated criminal element. Moving into cryptographically secure methods is the last barrier here. They could also rely on the state to match identities to tickets, but this approach does not scale and is frankly undesirable for the majority of people anyway.
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoWhat? We sold tickets for literally decades upon decades before smartphones came out. Of course you can do it, it's already been done!