I'm gonna ask around if they have any Google Glass knockoffs or components handy.

[0] - built on the backs of abused and impoverished people, but that's a topic for another day.

This is how Silicon Valley worked, back when the silicon was actually made there. My impression is that Google's obsessive culture of secrecy (necessary because it grew up in an environment where loose lips really did sink ships) is the strongest influence in destroying that culture of information-sharing, although of course NDAs, interface copyright lawsuits, DRM, and software patents have also taken their toll.

California's century-old legal limitations on what rights employees can sign away to employers have also been very helpful.

So it's not surprising that technological development is happening today in a place where employers' ability to own their employees' minds is more limited — the innovation is done by the engineers, after all, not the investors, so shifting the power balance in favor of the investors will damage your region's competitiveness.

I'm interested to hear about the abuse and impoverishment.

Disclaimer: I've only been in China for a week so far, so what I can tell is just what I see (besides what everyone hears in Western media, that is) and it may be biased.

Shenzhen is a city of many contrasts. I work in a relatively modern office building and live in a not-totally-crap hotel. I travel to work via taxis which seem to be staffed by poor people trying to make a living. Forget about Uber here.

When I get out of the hotel, I can turn left and find myself next to KFC, Starbucks and a big shopping mall full of expensive-looking clothes. Everything is plastered with ads like you wouldn't believe. Or I can turn right and find myself on a poor street that is flooded with trash and occupied by tons of people selling absolutely everything - meat, fruits, phones, barber services. Those people look impoverished and from what I can tell, pretty much sit there 24h/day 7 days a week trying to sell something to someone. They are all incredibly friendly, but you can feel the lack of perspective for a better life; it's heartbreaking. There's a family of street food vendors making fried pasta with various meats; a father, a mother and a son. I'm buying food from them pretty much every day. They're extremely proficient at what they do (and they use up scary amounts of propane for that), but you can see that they'll be doing it for the rest of their lives.

There's a big construction zone next to a metro station nearby. They'll probably be building skyscrapers, like a lot of others that are currently in progress. The zone is fenced off with 2m high concrete walls. I managed to take a look through a crack, and what I saw was something akin to a labour camp. Some metal sheds, minimum sanitation, lots of people cramped together. I've been told they're workers from local villages. They looked hungry and impoverished. They don't seem to have any safety equipment.

There's a fucking Starbucks and a KFC and lots of people with smartphones few hundred meters downstreet. And a modern, high-tech metro station on the other side of the wall.

Then there are electronics markets. Tons of fancy stuff. Everything you could imagine. Sold by people cramped together in small spaces that look like they couldn't afford what they're selling. Basically third world selling first-world products.

It's really unnerving that you can have a place that is so amazing and yet so sad at the same time, with nothing but an occasional concrete wall separating the two pictures.

Why is there only trash on the poor street? Do people not throw trash on the ground on the rich street, or is there a municipal street sweeping service that takes care of that? If so, why doesn't it clean the poor street? What's up with the lack of safety equipment? I'm happy to live in a country where I can still enjoy fast merry-go-rounds, but safety equipment in construction work is super important for preventing accidental death.

The derivative and the causality are more important than the current state.

My Polish co-worker who is here with me and has been here before tells me of a girl working here who somehow escaped the poor villages far away from the metropolis and ended up working as a software tester. He says that he tried to talk with her about life, but that her English proficiency is limited to the technical matters; she can't express herself in English if asked about non-work topics, probably due to lack of general vocabulary.

I'll be happy to post something if I learn the answers to those questions.

(I guess I should confess that my objectivity can probably be called into question here: I have lots of friends who work or have worked at Apple, Google, or both, and as far as I know, none who have worked at a company that either of them crushed. Unless you count OLPC.)

Eventually the organization was mismanaged into oblivion; there is currently some while-label vulture in possession of the commercial brand, and the non-profit arm has progressed rapidly into irrelevance.

As bad as things got (and are), OLPC never shipped a single machine running Windows -- if there are any out there, the participating school program installed it. As for FLOSS fans, mostly they made a lot of noise on blogs without ever having actually been involved with the program. If they had, they would have known that OLPC didn't spend a dime on Microsoft support; MS was allowed to send engineers to develop support within OpenFirmware for loading Windows, should the recipient nation desire it.

It was mismanaged, absolutely, and the proposed MS partnership wasn't the only nail in the coffin. But with my own eyes I've seen a lot more interest than "noise on blogs". With that silly move, OLPC lost a pool of enthusiastic, free developers and media buzz. It also caused the OLPC chief of software to resign.

Given that you disparage the FLOSS complaints as just "noise on blogs", it's clear you didn't read the complaints. It had little to do with dimes moving from OLPC to MS. The issue was OLPC letting MS use them as a conduit to train new users in 'the windows way' - that MS was effectively going to co-opt OLPC as a loss-leader program. How far would OLPC go with MS? Why bother developing when they're so intent on providing XP on a clearly underspecced machine for it? And how could a sluggish OS actually be a decision 'for the kids'? How else would OLPC break their previously loud promises? The license fees really had nothing to do with the FLOSS community largely abandoning interest in the project.

[1] You're wrong about Windows never shipping. Windows-only machines never shipped, but dual-boot Windows machines did.

I not only read the complaints, I made many of them myself. I disparaged noise on blogs as noise on blogs; the FLOSS community as a whole is fine but was not a major factor in the development of the project. This was not because they were unwilling; it was because the senior leadership made an executive decision not to engage with that community.

I understand that many people in the world confused OLPC's mission with that of free software. But the cold hard fact is that nobody really ever gave a shit about software licensing; the goal was to get computers to kids, and then try to set up a sustainable pedagogical practice around them. I'm not really interested in the completely tangential issue of whether you think Windows XP is sufficiently performant for this task -- the point is that FLOSS was never the point. It was an era where anyone's use of GNU software was considered to be some kind of philosophical statement on the validity of GNU, sure, but this was never the intention at the executive level. It was gratis software that was easy to customize. The decisions involved were primarily pragmatic. Any 'loud promises' you felt betrayed by are merely further examples of the wildly terrible expectations mismanagement perpetrated by the leadership.

I remember when the FLOSS community abandoned OLPC. It didn't make a damn bit of difference. But I'd be interested in which countries received Windows loadouts -- I don't recall ever seeing a single support issue regarding it, which makes me think you may be mistaken.

Uruguay. This blog article clearly states that every OLPC runs linux, and also clearly states that some shipped with windows. Not many - they went to pilot programs and they weren't taken up largely because of that non-performance you hand-wave away - but they were shipped.

> Nobody 'partnered with' Microsoft.

Getting super-cheap licenses and Microsoft to customise their OS for your hardware is 'partnering with' Microsoft.

> the point is that FLOSS was never the point

I knew this, as did a lot of the FLOSS advocates. The point was that MS was still seen as the Evil Empire at the time. The geeks were interested both in the low-cost laptop and the idea of spreading FLOSS instead of MS's stranglehold. And they were naturally excited about OLPC's strong promises. And when OLPC went back on their promises... as I say above, why bother continuing to work on the machine? What other promises will they break?

While you characterise the FLOSS argument by the more frothy fringe's statements of betrayal, what I saw was more "what's the point?". What's the point of doing work we believe in if they're not going to stick to their statements? Especially for the people who were far more interested in the machine than the kids - the concern that if OLPC switched to MS, hardware might be used that wasn't supported by linux.

> Any 'loud promises' you felt betrayed by are merely further examples of the wildly terrible expectations mismanagement perpetrated by the leadership.

What a strange argument. You chide me for having a particular opinion, and then state the same thing that I'm arguing. You should be a spin doctor.

By the way, I was a Windows guy then, working in Windows support until 2009. I wasn't a FLOSS advocate, though I am now. Colleagues were into FLOSS, and I went along to conferences to hang out with them. I personally didn't feel betrayed, I just thought it was a stupid thing to do, and I noticed the buzz in both the tech and mainstream media evaporate with the FLOSS movement's disillusionment (which is a better description of the overall feeling than 'betrayal', I think).

However, it appears that we both agree that from the GP's original comment, it wasn't Apple or Google that crushed OLPC - OLPC crushed itself.

So, the $100 laptop is real. It just isn't very FLOSS-friendly or made by OLPC. Instead, the mainstream $100 laptop is an Android tablet or cellphone, or maybe an iPad or iPhone. It's Apple and Google's fault that those machines are so user-hostile and dangerous, but it's not their fault that OLPC failed to provide a user-friendly, safe alternative.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang coined the term gongkai to explain this concept, as differentiated from the Western-originated idea of open source (kaiyuan)[1]. It was based entirely on his observations of the semi-open hacking culture that is hopefully still flourishing in Shenzhen.[2]

[1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3040

[2] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=gongkai

EDIT: [0] was the post that introduced the term to me.

[0] - http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

haha, I used to live in Dongguan.. Well, actually, Changping Town, Dongguan. It was impossible to get software that wasn't pirated.

True. Poland market was so small (and so far away, relatively - that was before fast Internet connections) that no one gave a "flying fuck" what was happening here. I remember buying pirated CDs in broad daylight at the mall circa '95, no one cared. A few years later I wanted to buy Visual C++ 6.0 (standard edition) and it took me half a year to finally get it - nobody had it for sale at all. You theoretically could buy software abroad, but then it was so expensive no one really did this. The only software distribution platform was sneakernet.

Actually, I was on the phone with Microsoft once, applying for internship. I was asked what is my favourite dev software; I answered something along the way of "VS C++ 6.0, because the 200x editions kind of suck", just little more politely. I didn't get the internship eventually, but I want to believe this was for unrelated reasons.

Shanzhai?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai

I'm going to have to disagree here. The vast majority of stuff is designed or thought up elsewhere. Things might get assembled or manufactured in Shenzhen (it is after all, the manufacturing capital of the world) but the innovations aren't coming from China. In fact, China doesn't even rate that high on manufacturing innovation (they rank 41st place). While they may manufacturer more than anyone else, the bulk of their manufacturing is low tech stuff (Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-innovative-countries/). - Scroll down to manufacturing.

I don't see how that's relevant. If they're designed elsewhere, then who is going to be tweaking and re-purposing? The Chinese slave labor? Anyone who matters will be back in their home country, doing the work there. Anyone overseeing manufacturing operations in China literally doesn't matter from a design or innovation standpoint.

And honestly, who "matters" is a matter of a point of view. Big tech companies try to lock you in to maximize their profits out of devices they sell. Meanwhile in Shenzhen, nobody gives a fuck and you can get any permutation of electronics you can imagine for fraction of the western price, and it's often user-servicable. This is the place where actual innovation happens - selling overpriced gadgets that do 5% of features everyone saw in Star Trek 30 years ago is not innovation. I want to live in the world with more gongkai[0] and less attempts at locking people in unneccessary, wasteful, idiotic cloud platforms.

I want the Western tech giants to lose the war on general-purpose computing.

[0] - Check out the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138; you'll see where the innovation really happens.

And this is exactly why China is on the road to nowhere. With a lack of IP protection, blatant IP theft and rampant piracy, nobody (big businesses) will invest the time and money into China. In fact, those that have, have pulled out (see: Microsoft, Google, etc). It's why despite having over a billion people, nobody really seriously considers China a potential client.

And yet, despite having over a billion citizens, their innovation and technological breakthroughs are non-existent. They are simply not a technological innovative country. Nearly every article you find on google will back this up. Just do a quick google search. Again, see the link I included above.

> Check out the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138; you'll see where the innovation really happens.

I'm sorry, but the data and reality shows otherwise. You're not going to find anyone saying "innovation happens in China". Quite the opposite in fact. The only way they've been keeping up with the rest of the world has been through theft and buying the technology from those who created it.

And that's the problem. Since they're so used to stealing and buying their technology, they don't have a foundation in which to create their own. That's what China hasn't grasped yet -- the process of creating new technology and being innovative (the discovery) is itself just as important as the end result because it's a foundation that allows you to move forward onto the next breakthrough. China doesn't have that. And they're getting left further and further behind.

I think we will end up losing a lot in this process, not least of which the ensuing moral crisis as system software research becomes increasingly dead in favor of having our machines just be whatever black box the vendor has crafted, indeed our very mental model of a computing environment being whatever is presented to us obliquely.

And all of this happening while many beat their chests demanding that programming be made a compulsory subject in public schools. What a sickening irony.

Indeed. Also note how the typical curriculum offered by proponents is geared towards teaching people to create things that will be ad-supported or will be providing ads.

I wish to know if there's a way to fight back somehow. Maybe not to reverse the trend, but to separate ourselves from it? Let the masses have their appliances if they really like them, but let us keep our tools.

The thing I fear is professionalization of programming, when we become a legitimate engineering discipline and thus will have to work for an expensive license to legally use a turing-complete language, and compilers is something you can go to jail for if they see you trying to run it without credentials.

The SSSCA as introduced would have prohibited, with criminal penalties, the possession without a license of a compiler capable of producing programs that could process, copy, or decrypt data in media files. Every Turing-complete programming language in the country would have required a special federal license to use. Finally, only licensed, bonded, qualified, and tracked professionals taking responsibility for their actions could violate our precious copyrights.

But Hollings wasn't as spry as his senior colleague from South Carolina and retired before he could finish his final good work for the corporations that made him. Even that business so famously unashamed that its own mascot is a rodent would have to settle for waiting a little longer to achieve its aims.

I'm a little skeptical this will happen with software, but it is well underway in the case of hardware[1].

[1] https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Save_WiFi

The arguments aren't actually that bad (of course we know that currently the strongest side supporting them is media companies trying to kill general-purpose computing to make unbreakable DRMs, but in principle they sort of have a point...) - it's the cost that is too high.

Well, the baking industry is certainly more productive of human comfort and happiness than certain other industries demanding protection from the laws the rest of us live by -- such as finance.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139679

Yeah, it's only signed by cryptographic keys that nobody else is likely to ever possess.

You "only" need to put in a new Boot ROM with your own key ("When an iOS device is turned on, its application processor immediately executes code from read-only memory known as the Boot ROM. [...] The Boot ROM code contains the Apple Root CA public key, which is used to verify that the Low-Level Bootloader (LLB) is signed by Apple before allowing it to load." https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf) AFAICT this ROM is probably deeply integrated into the CPU, so hopefully you have some really precise tools and/or plan to make your own replacement CPU as well.

Apple's probably isn't susceptible, especially with the PS3 failure in recent memory.

Android device makers from China maybe haven't been told about their own inability to pump out clones. Somebody should let them know.

A VM instance from Digital Ocean costs $5/month. Go buy a dozen, and install Xenix on all of them.

All your platforms up to about 1995 have emulators that run on your phone, completely opensource, and gratis.

The devices are locked down, because the cost of unreliability can easily exceed the cost of the device, many times over, and the single biggest point of failure are trojan horses & operator errors.

Oh they know about it. They just don't give a fuck. What is the US going to do, sue them?

(Actually, the Chinese government started cracking down on that industry, because it pisses off the West too much and thus "hurts economy".)

As for the rest of your comment, this is the golden age we're having, but we're seeing more and more signs that the big companies - both technology and media ones - are trying to put an end to it. One reason is that "cost of unreliability can easily exceed the cost of the device, many times over, and the single biggest point of failure are trojan horses & operator errors." The other is that it's easier to make money off people if you lock them down behind dumbed down devices and your own propertiary ecosystem. Yet another is that people like media but don't like to pay MAFIAA for it. Surveillance is also a an issue. This all adds up in a way that threatens the future hackability of stuff.

I also acknowledge that if you're willing and able to (find|build|buy) hardware that skates around patent law and the like, then you have more options. And as long as that's a possibility, that's a Good Thing. But I still argue that it's a Bad Thing when major computing platforms become "lock down by default".

OTOH, I don't mean to be all "gloom and doom". Clearly there have been some positive developments over the past few years. The resurgence of the burgeoning DIY/hacker/maker movement, the advent of cheap single-board-computers like Arduino, rPi, BeagleBone, etc., are all good signs. But as they say "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty".

The hard part of course will be the software, with the motivation of making it an increasingly realistic companion. The Dark Matter series placed an interesting spin on it, where the "entertainment android", in addition to sex, is also specialized for cooking, backrubs, songs, etc.

That's very true.

> I think the same people who wore glass around in public and didn't get why people called them assholes would be the same people who buy sexbots and don't get why people call them perverts. A few dorks with calf-high white socks with birkenstocks would go nuts for them, and most of the rest of the world would look on with a mixture of disdain, amusement and repulsion.

It's interesting how this polarizes people. Because you see, I consider everyone who called Google glass wearer 'glasshole' to be a total dick. I understand the reason for their hate and I think they're stupid and they should get over themselves and their jealousy and fear of technology. It doesn't warrant hostile behaviour to another human being.

The interesting thing here is that sexbots can come in both genders, which might mitigate the stigma. There are probably a lot more women with vibrators than men with various appliances, yet no one calls a woman a pervert for owning one. If it becomes common for women dorks to own sexbots, then the path might be clear for men dorks.

Not that I'm cynical about tech or anything...

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr

Of course, at least on android devices, it's not at all uncommon to install custom variants of the OS (CyanogenMod, etc.), so it does happen.

Of course, I recognize that most people aren't going to want to install a different OS anyway. And that's OK. Most people didn't install a new OS on their PC's either. But some do, and some want to tinker, create, invent, hack, and innovate. And if we slip into a world where that's not possible, or where it's incredibly difficult, I posit that that is a bad situation for everybody (except, I suppose, Google, Samsung, Apple, etc. stockholders).

I don't know, I think there will always be people who will drift towards areas where they feel/embody this, and where the field is so niche that most people just don't care about what you are doing at that moment in time or it's so far removed from what most people engage with on a daily basis.

Fields where the current "monied" players are all running like chickens with their heads cut off, peddling snake oil (too many times have friends heard about some device and asking me if it can really do xyz, and I just facepalm to myself only to realize that things are just so new and most people have the faintest idea of what is actually possible now and what will be possible in the near future), and things like laws/incentives restricting xyz aren't even talked about because people are still trying to figure out what the hell is going on (at least from my perception working in a research lab on the outer tech world).

And even if it is not bad for Google, Samsung, Apple, et al today, years from now, they'll be where ibm is, peddling their watson equivalents to everybody that will listen fighting off their own obsolescence.

I get your concern but I don't think the analogy holds up.

For instance, hacking a gaming console in the 80's is pretty much as hard as it is today, except that people who does this share it more efficiently.

Smartphones? You can jailbreak pretty much every platform and in some cases you don't even need to.

The thing that is changing in my opinion, is the easyness of access for locked-in software and digital content. For instance, I could spend an hour chasing an ebook and download it to my kindle. Or I can pay a few bucks to license the ebook in the Amazon Kindle Store in less than a minute.

Depending of the price tag I will be doing the second option most of the time, even if I don't control the copy. Just because I'm lazy ...

That assumes that "we collectively" were ever in control.

The reality is that these breakthrough technologies, no matter what the century, took massive amounts of money and time to become adopted and by and large they were built by the bigs in some fashion - either through license deals or direct investment from IBM, US Government etc...

Sure there have been FOSS wins, but if you look at the major technologies, basically since forever they were funded and owned by big corporations.