Add Apple and their walled garden to that list. When Intel first attempted to introduce "Trusted Computing" in the early 2000s, there was a huge outcry. Few years later Apple comes along with something that is much more restrictive, and now people are happy to accept that you can only do with your device whatever the manufacturer allows you to do.

The PC only escaped that model due to Compaq's reverse engineering trick and IBM's failure to take it back.

Something that most OEMs are quite found of having back as per current Android and laptop models.

How many people here have installed Chrome on the computers of their friends and family? Is there anybody here that never did that?

I remember recommending Chrome, even though I was a Firefox user, because Firefox on Windows tended to get infested with crappy toolbars and other extensions. Well not anymore.

And that whole recommendation process can always happen for another browser.

All it takes is for the developers to come back to Firefox. And I've seen a noticeable shift happening among my peers ever since Quantum.

Nah.. They're both losing users.

The problem with "modern" internet is, that there's more and more people using it, and that makes the numbers 'weird'. The number of IRC users is probably higher than it was in the late 1990s/early 2000s. But back then only geeks used internet, and only they were on irc.. and now.. a lot of them are still there, just that now there is a bunch of of other people on facebook.

As we've seen with myspace, digg, etc., and as we're seeing with tumblr and also facebook now, younger, more tech-savy users have no issues with changing platforms.. from facebook to tumblr to snapchat to instagram to SomethingNew(TM).

One "bad" turn of events, one company that doesn't want to sell to facebook, and the "owned by" sentance will be completely different in a couple of years.

This is directly in response to "As we've seen with myspace, digg, etc., and as we're seeing with tumblr and also facebook now, younger, more tech-savy users have no issues with changing platforms.. from facebook to tumblr to snapchat to instagram to SomethingNew(TM)."

Rumors of IRC's death have been disproven fairly frequently, but at least when I was active on IRC everyone I've talked to had the impression that IRC as a whole was losing users throughout the early 00s.

I suspect services such as slack and discord killed off a lot of IRC users as of late as well.

Wouldn't mind being disproven, but at least personally IRC has fallen out of favor except for very specific use cases (like Linux distro support) rather than just chat in general.

Change doesn't happen quickly. If you expect and require it to, then you're going to be guaranteed disappointment.

> The one thing that I've come to realize is that we're losing. The web is now closed. Owned by Facebook and Twitter for the most part.

A big reason why "we're losing" is that kind of defeatist attitude.

A big reason why losses can be so bad is that approach of refusing to accept reality. It robs you of time & resources that would be better spent on a solution for what happens after.

>>> ...[it's] not enough ... to make a difference....we're losing. The web is now closed...

...is more surrender than anything.

Many, many important social changes in the past century happened because some group of people refused to "accept reality" and surrender to the status quo, and instead embarked on a seemly quixotic effort against all odds to change it. They don't all succeed, but many do. Don't smother that success in the crib.

Considering most younger people don't actively use facebook anymore, their (facebooks) only chance is to buy the NewHowApp company every couple of years (khm.. instagram.. khm,... whatsapp..)

And gated by Google, for the most part.

I care about my privacy, but the steps I can take to protect it are inadequate.

I am in the vast majority (97%) according to this survey:

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/security-world/2019/03/labs-su...

Here are some numbers from the article:

An overwhelming majority of respondents (96 percent) feel that online privacy is crucial. And their actions speak for themselves: 97 percent say they take steps to protect their online data, whether they are on a computer or mobile device.

There is a near equal percentage of people who trust (39 percent) and distrust (34 percent) search engines across all generations.

Across the board, there is a universal distrust of social media (95 percent). We can then safely assume that respondents are more likely to trust search engines to protect their data than social media.

When asked to agree or disagree with the statement, “I feel confident about sharing my personal data online,” 87 percent of respondents disagree or strongly disagree.

It's easy to dig up a survey someone did that supports the conclusions you wish were true. It's much harder to find the actual state of reality.

If you click through to their report, you'll realize that there's not much information about their sample, other than this:

From January 14 to February 15, 2019, Malwarebytes Labs conducted a survey on nearly 4,000 participants to measure respondents’ confidence in their own privacy and security practices, as well as their confidence in privacy being maintained by businesses.

There's absolutely no information about the demographic breakdown of the participants and no way to access the dataset itself. In other words, we have no way of establishing that this survey is worth anything more than a blog post on a site that tries to promote its software.