You used to get full schematics along with the electronics you bought.
And by "get", I do NOT mean that you'd have to ask for them.
They'd be shipped WITH the products, on paper. It was a normal part of your purchase, just like the manual.
https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manua... ("BBC Microcomputer Model B +")
There is a circuit block diagram, a PCB layout diagram with all the components' part numbers that I guess you can replace broken ones (?), and circuit diagrams for the power supply and for the keyboard circuit. (starts on page 97) Skimming the text, the manual seems to assume an owner has access to a multimeter, an oscilloscope, and a soldering iron.
(Edit: with the help of the circuit diagram we did make a simple mod to one of the output ports of the device)
Planned obsolescence was one natural outcome that we ended up with. An electrical engineers I know told me how designing a CPU that would last a lifetime is relatively easy compared to designing an equipment that will fail only 5 years from now, but not earlier.
I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also being financially sound. Right now economy, to me, seems like a thing of perpetual growth, but in a cancer-like way.
Regulation.
Fun fact: this is still possible! It's a little harder – it'll have to be steadily introduced, in multiple countries at once (so we don't break international trade), starting in the areas where it's cheapest to produce lasting equipment (so enforcement doesn't take out entire sectors), and I don't yet know what the regulations would look like, but if it's possible to make lasting things, it's possible to require manufacturers to make things last.
We need to do this, sooner or later, anyway: we simply don't have the raw resources to continue as we are.
What runs out, and when does it run out? Are there alternatives? And can we source it from asteroids?
Easy to nay-say, though. To me, a solution starts with spreading those values that make it possible for _consumers_ to stop sliding down the growth-over-everything slope. Mittelstands, shinise, Patagonia, yada yada. Can you as an entrepreneur make a sustainable business that isn’t just for well-off conscious consumers? What’s the product where longevity is inextricable from the core feature set, not just a trade-off with cost?
Right-to-repair is a decent example of where regulation has enough support across the ideological spectrum to get a foot in the door. It would be cool if a company who made profit on service now decides it doesn’t want to compete on service and instead takes more profit upfront with a higher-quality product. Forcing USB-C on phones feels like a small thing to me, but if it sets a precedent where interfaces are standardized for sustainability, that could be amazing. (No, I’m not worried about governments slowing progress. Locked ecosystems are doing just fine at that.)
I've seen a product like this, yes, but I wasn't the one buying it
(got the schematic for some later products, for a fee)
#1 reason I hack on vintage computers: top to bottom documentation and source, and still small enough to fit in one human's head.
Right now the NSA just has all the 0days instead.
I also hack and repair modern stuff, and it is so common to open up a product just to end up staring at an epoxy blob. User manuals hold no mention of service tips, but instead are near-useless "quick start" guides that might review functionality, if the manufacturer is feeling generous.
Modern tech seems so remarkably spiteful toward the consumer and consumers themselves just seem to roll with it. Sometimes I hear them use arguments like "Company X doesn't want Company Z making knock-offs" as though these knock-off manufacturers aren't already expert reverse engineers. I feel the locking down of consumer tech is more about forcing the consumer into a state of dependancy on the manufacturer than it is about protecting any intellectual properties. They conflate "repeate business" with customers being forced to return for repairs or replacements instead of willfully returning because they trust the quality and brand.
Every device/vehicle/system now needs to be connected to the internet and needs you to download an app.
Is that for the consumer? No. That's for the manufacturer.
For milking be reselling your data and/or spying on you and/or charging extra because they can and/or the capability to turn any device into literal trash by not providing updates or bug fixes to a half-baked alpha software that it shipped with.
Blame your government. There could and should be laws against that or at the very least incentives to prevent it.
In a democracy the government is a proxy for the people. I blame the people. If the majority was conscious of their rights (or at least what these rights should be) the governments would have no choice and they'd bring laws that protect these rights. Yes, no democracy is perfect, there are lobbyists, corruption etc, but if the large majority of the population wants something all these lobbying and corruption can only delay it.
The issue with the government(s) is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is that the majority of people have no spine. They'll sell their privacy and rights gladly for a tiny bit of perceived convenience, entertainment or status. It's like this famous saying "people that are willing to sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither". Substitute privacy/ownership for freedom and convenience/entertainment for safety and it will still be true.
Neither me nor my partner own a smartwatch/health band. Why? Because we literally found no brand that could be used without setting up silly "online accounts" and having our personal details (including health) harvested. The pine watch is an exception, but last time I checked the software was not ready for daily use.
Personally, despite the above, I'm a "long term optimist". I think people eventually will learn to value their privacy, their right to ownership/repair and they will stop buying and using devices and software that infringe on these rights. But not before a generation or two come and go.
Consider other revolutions in human condition. For example the industrial revolution. It brought magnificent benefits, but also (especially initially) it was horrible for many people including children. Eventually the masses started paying attention and worker rights were established, but not a second before the majority was ready to sacrifice a lot to fight for it. It will. Be like this with our "digital revolution".
Psychology is a science that studies human behavior, and like all sciences it works mostly. As a result, human minds can be easily hacked by those with the motivation to do so. Psychological science can be employed, things like A/B testing are very effective with enough data, which our digital systems easily provide. Ads are the wholesome version of that, because they are overt. We know the ads are trying to change the way we think and act. Corporate news is an example of the less wholesome side of using psychological science against humans. The humans aren’t to blame. Humans are animals and easy to hack, and our economy is largely, mostly I’d say, based on people hacking/behavioral engineering.
Which boils majority democracy down to the median level of education.
How does that mean they have no spine? It sounds like they made a decision on what was more valuable to them. You could argue that they might not have been fully informed. But I think the reality is that they just don't care that much because they don't feel harmed by it.
I could easily see things going the other way, where the lack of digital privacy becomes even more of an unquestioned norm. These things can hold in a kind of equilibrium as long as the entities that hold the power don't use it to cause perceived harm above a threshold. We have the technology to do a lot more scanning of license plates, facial recognition, automated speeding tickets, etc. I'm kind of an optimist in that I think people will generally maintain this balance.
And greed starts to become an issue when managers think they need a raise.
But to be fair, if you're not an engineer is there much else you can take pride in other than driving up profits by whatever means?
What about the incalculable environmental factor for all of this? Nobody cares.
Schematics for things sold, are never trade secrets.
e.g. Apple's fixed glass trackpads
Also by definition they cannot be 'invalidated' since trade secrets are never 'validated' in the first place, unlike patents, copyrights, or trademarks.
That's not how trade secrets work. If you give me a device, and I figure out how that part of it goes together, the trade secret dies. There is no protection except an attempt at secrecy, and once someone is retail sold hardware, they may do anything they choose with it, thus the idea of trying to maintain a secret, when it is in someone else's hands, is silly.
Also by definition they cannot be 'invalidated' since trade secrets are never 'validated' in the first place, unlike patents, copyrights, or trademarks.
Trade secrets are valid, until they no longer are. Copyright (in many jurisdictions) require no validation either, they're merely valid upon creation.
You can't dodge this point, which you appear to be doing as I never claimed copyright law is the same in all jurisdictions worldwide, nor was it implied.
If you don't understand how these things work, it's better to not make bizarre claims.
What on earth are you even talking about?
Regardless, you can invalidate anything. EG, one can make a claim "Hey, that manufacturing process is my trade secret!", and that claim can most certainly be invalided. It can also be validated.
This:
> Trade secrets are valid, until they no longer are. Copyright (in many jurisdictions) require no validation either, they're merely valid upon creation.
Some types of copyright requires approval via some organized entity in many jurisdictions, that is easily discoverable via a quick Google search by any passing reader. The prior comment appears like a deflection from the main point, since the fact that some jurisdictions operate differently is simply irrelevant as I never claimed otherwise, nor was that implied anywhere in the preceding comment chain.
Like I said you can't avoid the fact that 'invalidating' trade secrets makes no sense. They can be revealed, they can become so widely known that the label no longer applies, and so on.
But 'validity' whether legal, logical, etc., can not apply to them.
And in any case there are many real world products which so far have not been reverse engineered to a sufficient degree to recreate, such as the fixed glass trackpad previously mentioned. If you can prove otherwise then I would welcome a link.
In terms of validation, I have no idea why you think one cannot invalidate someone claiming to have a trade secret. You can literally invalidate anything, someone is trying to assert as valid.
A bottle blonde could claim that is their original hair colour, and one could invalidate that claim too.
You seem stuck on an internal definition of 'validate'. Your internal definition seems wrong.
Anyways I agree this is a tangent from the main comment chain, if that's what your implying. I included the last paragraph for that reason:
> And in any case there are many real world products which so far have not been reverse engineered to a sufficient degree to recreate, such as the fixed glass trackpad previously mentioned. If you can prove otherwise then I would welcome a link.
The classic example was during the 90s. A company was building a new factory, and as a result, it was open to the air. A competitor, wanting to legally discover how the manufacturing process of the company was orchestrated, flew over the construction site, taking photos, pictures.
The competitor claimed, that they obtained such information without trickery. The company said that they had taken reasonable precautions, to conceal their manufacturing process, with employee NDAs, and security around the construction site, yet ... that there was absolutely no precaution which could be taken to protect from plane or satellite, and thus, the took all reasonable precautions. That the plane + photos were akin to someone sneaking into the factory, and taking photos as well.
The company won, their trade secret was protected.
The point of this illustrative story, is that reasonable attempts at secrecy of things such as manufacturing processes must be attempted.
A key part of a trade secret is in its name, secret. You cannot keep a secret in public, and even if you do, for a brief period of time, you are not attempting to conceal it if everyone and their dog may look at it. Nothing you sell to a consumer is a trade secret. Nothing. Not a single thing.
You may have a trade secret in how that product was made, but you do not have a trade secret in how that product fits together. At all. A schematic of a circuit board is not a trade secret, and this is the context you started this conversation on.
To speak to this, if anyone, ever, discovers how to take apart and repair this glass trackpad you discuss, there is no trade secret, and no judge will ever ever help anyone enforce protections on the same.
To put it another way, and going back to the example at start of this message, if you hold tours of your factory with trade secret manufacturing processes in it, you no longer have trade secret manufacturing processes. Your competitors may tour it at whim, as part of the tour group, and use such information to derive and copy your no longer enforceable trade secrets.
That's simply how it works.
And there's nothing more public than selling something to the public.
I think you are confused, because Apple may claim it's a 'trade secret', in how they manufacturer said glass trackpad. But the part in consumer hands is not a trade secret. You can put the blasted thing under an x-ray, an electron microscope, and yes these are valid ways to examine things, and there's literally even remotely a trade secret to enforce from this angle.
This, any schematics provides are not going to invalidate what already exists.
I won't bother looking back at this any more, for two reasons. First, it's falling off the first page of my comments I look at, for replies. And second, your over the top, absurd attack on a correct use of the word 'valid' is quite odd, and smacks of a lack of good faith.
You've said your part, I've said mine, and I don't see much value beyond my extended attempt to discuss my reasoning re: trade secrets, how I believe they work, etc. above.
Oh, one final note. I've noticed some larger corporations, and some dark corners of the legal profession attempt to shift the line in terms of rights. We've seen absurd attempts at this in the last 20 years, and we've seen industry practices which are in effect for 10 to 20 years, in terms of IP shot down again and again.
Part of me suspects you may have fallen into a trap, where perhaps Apple claims something they cannot claim, such as extending trade secrets to devices held in people's hands. If they are, they will fail in this, unless there is a deep legislative change, and even then I doubt it won't be kicked, and you should not listen to such absurd claims.
They don't, at least not for modern products of some intricacy.
Going back to the example of Apple's glass trackpad, there's a decent chance that literally every Macbook ever sold with it has a unique trackpad, because some transistor(s) were slightly off, due to manufacturing tolerances, requiring slightly different resistor(s) to compensate, etc..., and so on.
And there are hundreds of components just in the trackpad.
So even in the literal sense of examining it under various microscopes and so on, I think it's pretty fair to say that it's secret enough for it to be very very difficult to recreate.
But this all seems like arguing at windmills, because in practice, Apple's shareholders, board, management, employees, suppliers, customers, and competitors behave as if it was a trade secret. Which is more then sufficient for all practical purposes most HN readers are concerned with.
People have a right to know what they're buying. Companies are testing legal and cultural boundaries, silently changing functionality and usability by altering software or access to required services after sale.
It's not "too complex", it'd just be a hassle if people knew.
If you don't Microsoft, one of the wealthiest corporations in existence, will steal your copy of minecraft that you purchased elsewhere.
Sorry if this isn't on topic, I'm very salty over the migration.
A valve radio had ~50 discrete components[1]. The first semiconductors had triple that number of components in a square millimeter in 1971[2], a modern CPU is in the tens or hundreds of millions of transistors per square millimetre. That's more components than the Encyclopedia Britannica had words in 29 volumes[3]. How are you going to 'know what you're buying' if you don't know anything about the bit which makes up most of the complexity and does most of the work? How are 'people' going to know anything about the CPU by getting lumbered a dozen bookshelves worth of schematics?
[1] One 1960s valve radio schematic found from Google: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Is9qxCCu2S8/VmZ44qHP1nI/AAAAAAABQ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Transistor_co...
[3] https://patricktreardon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Encyc...
Even a fairly old ARM based CPU such as in the Pi 4, has billions of transistors. And miles of wiring.
But that's still a different argument to the one I was responding to which was "People have a right to know what they're buying" - and the claim that products are "not too complex" for that. At the point we turn it to a diagram which says "fuse connects to System-on-Chip blob ground pin 0 and data pin 7. Button board connects to blob ground pin 0 data pin 8" are we any closer to "knowing what we're buying" in a meaningful way?
My Commodore64 had full motherboard schematics in the manual, and I had a 90s tube TV with schematics inside the back of the case.
This change, lack of docs/schematics has happened over a mere 20 years.
And if I remember correctly, the tech. manual was something like $20.00 (in circa 1984 dollars, roughly $58 today, and you got about 400 pages of paper, printed on both sides.
So while schematics did not "come with the product in the retail packaging" one could obtain them with only the trouble of ordering a ~$20 (at the time) "book".
As someone who found computing in general through the joy of taking broken electronic things apart and trying to fix them, it does sadden me too when I see a black blob over a circuit board but most people are just happy they're cheap and easy to replace and toss em away. Most developers I know today can't understand basic electrical circuits, even though they are the very foundation of everything we do. But like my previous analogy, most would rather just see the magic happen when they install something, write a little bit of code, and see results.
Some of us do value privacy, security, and even the underlying things that make stuff work. We're in the minority. The vast majority of people simply don't even care. I've tried explaining it to my wife, or my mother, that some piece of software might track them, know about them, restrict them, whatever, and the opinion I usually get back is "Oh, it doesn't already do that?" People joke about Facebook ads being something they just talked about all the time and it doesn't even phase them that the reality is very near to that.
People simply don't care enough to make a change in the laws that would prevent things like this.
A sneak peek may be coming with what some states are doing to police travel for abortion. Does the algorithm think you might be pregnant? Congratulations, you may now be stopped on state lines and charged with a crime because you are driving someone one state over. Even if you have no intent of getting an abortion you may have to prove that in court if a prosecutor is feeling particularly self righteous today.
People in the US are not accustomed to totalitarian politics. We have rights. But loss of those rights are one populist demagogue away.
When that happens all that surveillance and remote control will suddenly become as relevant as Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier would become if it fell in the ocean.
(Left wing populist demagoguery and authoritarianism are possible too. I’m just picking on the right wing sort because it’s the kind that has traction most recently. But that too can change.)
I'm turning to the opinion that if we really want to fix this, we need to have government mandates that "takeout" style exports are provided by every company/service, in a standard machine-readable format.
If you collect and store any personal data about a user, there needs to be a standard way for them to request a usable copy.
Then allow third parties to build tools that work with those to educate users, which is why standard and usable format are key criteria. E.g. "visualize what X knows about you"
It's the details that would motivate people, but the details are precisely what's invisible right now.
(Disclaimer: talking from a US-centric viewpoint, for the majority of states that don't have digital privacy rights)
That’s the neat thing! For most people, you don’t! Until it breaks and you need to fix it, and the manufacturer is out-of-business. But then you can present that strange schematic to your local electronics repairer who can fix it up with a few spare commodity components.
Today? Everything is cheap, you can fedex something across continents in a matter of a few days. When the TV is broken, fuck it, a new one is a click and a day of waiting time away, free delivery included. Computers? Phones? Just the same.
Building products that last or are repairable just isn't competitive enough any more. Yes, there are niches like Fairphone, Framework and Pine, but that's the point: they are niches for nerds who care and are able and willing to spend the money.
On top of that, technology has gotten ever smaller and smaller. Up until a decade or two ago, most electronics was through-hole stuff that even a complete dunderhead could repair with a soldering iron, a bit of solder and some tweezers. Modern SMT? That needs highly specialized machines and an awful lot of knowledge about stuff like temperature ramps, not to mention passive components being as small as a tiny piece of sand. And if you want to verify signal integrity, some random scope won't cut it either at modern high speed buses.
> Before the introduction of VLSI technology, most ICs had a limited set of functions they could perform. An electronic circuit might consist of a CPU, ROM, RAM and other glue logic. VLSI enables IC designers to add all of these into one chip.
I remember in the late 2000s hating everything about the mobile revolution and predicting where it would go. I was mostly right but wow did people ever think I was nuts. Tech groupthink back then was the literal phrase “mobile is the future” repeated like something out of a political talking points memo.
What I got wrong was underestimating how evil social media would become. I never imagined how addictive it could be made or how toxic the content would get, or how it would help re-mainstream a whole raft of horrible ideologies. The addiction factor and brain dead content machine really hit with mobile too, so it’s not unrelated. Something about that little screen that is always there and swiping to scroll seems to facilitate addiction better than a PC or laptop screen.
So for at least Atari, and at least with the 400/800 computers, they did release the information. For an extra cost, but it was released.
Also the "driver" installation for IBM PC is just instructions on how to manually patch wordstar to work with it.
If you’re talking about manufacturers making their devices more difficult to repair or voiding warranties based on minor modifications, that doesn’t mean you can’t do what you want with the item. It just means you can’t force the company to fix or replace it free of charge when you do.
This just isn’t true. You don’t have to give Apple another dime to use an iPhone perpetually. Any paid Apple subscriptions are optional for cloud or streaming services.
[0] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS16_iPadOS16.pdf (the iOS ToS)
(And I think it's noteworthy how that ToS' language bounces freely between "hardware" and "software"; how it fluctuates between "software license agreement" and "by using your iPhone (device)", you are agreeing to...". Apple hardware and software are fused together: there is no practical difference).
The reason why it remains property of the brewery, is so that they can re-use it when you recycle it. It might be something that's specific for my country, though.
I would call iCloud locking an embodiment of this. It's probably an unpopular example because people seem to broadly like it, but it does demonstrate the principal that the seller retains full control of the hardware and can "repossess" the device. The original purchaser does not receive a master unlock code.
Even if locking yourself out of your device is "your fault", it doesn't alter the fact that at that point only Apple retains control of the device.
Same with bios locks and management engines on PCs.
The idea that possession = ownership is gone. And we're almost all ok with that especially since it makes us a little safer and more "secure". At least until we can't trust Apple, Intel, etc. anymore.
One could argue that the black market value for your locked phone compared to unlocked phone is a proxy for how much you actually own the phone.
Activation locks were required by law to deter armed theft.
> A new report from Reuters found that iPhone theft dropped by 50 percent in London, 40 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in New York. The drops represent theft activity as measured during the 12 months following Apple’s introduction of the remote locking feature in September 2013 as part of iOS 7.
With iOS 8, Apple made its so-called said “kill switch” active by default, in accordance with California regulation, and that should help the rates of theft continue to trend downwards.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...
Balancing these goals is not easy, but we don't get to avoid it just because we want "freedom" as an abstraction. It's an important consideration but only one when you put a lot of people with conflicting goals together.
Laws take freedom (as in do whatever you want) from people and give it to other people so the total expected gains are bigger than without the law, pretending that dishonest lawmakers don’t exist (false obviously). Also, all laws are bets on their outcomes and sometimes they go south.
Universal safety and security is pushed almost ubiquitously. Like it's a holy truth. Trumping all other concerns. And anybody who argues for anything else is just selfish or whatever.
Google just decreed that, starting 2 days ago, nobody may distribute software for my phone...
If you don’t have access to the source code, you can’t fork it. And ALL the Web 2.0 platforms of today (on which we have our public forums) won’t give you their back-end software. Not even HN. Nor Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram or even Signal. They need to retain control because of the capitalism system in which they were conceived (Facebook, LinkedIn) or sold (WhatsApp, Instagram), and the shareholder class which the corporations must serve and extract rents from their ecosystem forever. It starts with venture capitalists and it ends with wall street ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
If you look at my posts for the last decade, I have been openly saying this. Those of you who saw the movie iRobot back in 2004 may remember the tagline: “One Man Saw it Coming”. I feel like Will Smith’s character. Except that I have been doing something about it.
1. From Digital Feudalism to a Free Market
We are living in Digital Feudalism, and like serfs, we have very little say. And all of this is because we don’t have a viable open source alternative. The first step is to have this software be available to everyone.
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
There were attempts with diaspora* and Mastodon has so far been the most successful. We’ve quietly been building something far, far beyond Mastodon and attracted 10 million people in over 100+ countries. But you probably haven‘t heard of it. It’s a web-based, open source, general-purpose Community Operating System, on which anyone is free to develop just as they are on Linux or Wordpress.
While an app like Telegram or Signal could be easily banned from app stores by governments, something like this is much harder to censor. If millions of websites use https and some may be hosting Qbix widgets, then how will governments and corporations ban it? They may have to insist on having a backdoor to the https certificates, which means enough people would have to fork Chromium / Blink (open source on the front end). But until then, it’s a way for We the People to continue building an innovating in the face of corporate and government crackdowns.
Back in 2019 I wrote this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
Ans just two days ago LA Weekly wrote about the project and the difference it can make: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
2. From a Free Market to Autonomous Networks
In a free market you have a choice of landlord (eg who will host your Wordpress or Qbix instance). But you still have a landlord.
This is the part that some on HN are allergic to. I’m going to extol the virtues of automomous networks, because they’re the most benign “Landlords”, who can be trusted to uphold the rules and never change them (if enough of the community doesn’t like the changes, they can fork and continue the old rules).
Blockchains and smart contracts are JUST THE MOST POPULAR VERSION of this at the moment. There are many other architectures, including Hashgraph, IOTA DAG, and more generally, networks based around Distributed Hash Tables / Kademlia, such as BitTorrent, IPFS, and the ultimate in safety, safenet (I am not affiliated with them, but am a big admirer, see https://safenetforum.org if you want to participate, they have been active since 2004 and are still going strong.. that’s dedication!!)
I don’t just build things, but I seek out and connect with people who design, administer and build all these open source platforms and distributed systems. Back in 2014 I met Tim Berners-Lee. I corresponded with Leslie Lamport over the years. In 2018 I met up with the inventor of Kademlia, Petar Maymounkov, who went to my school (NYU). I also hung out with Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame) although I didn’t keep in touch w him. I also try to invite them onto our community forum and publicly interview them on our YouTube channel. Here is my discussion with Ian Clarke, inventor of arguably the first decentralized autonomous file sharing network, FreeNet.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
If you want to understand why Web3 is important, or at least the type of distributed software it represents, here is my rebuttal to Moxie Marlinspike, as he had the most substantive critique of it:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...
3. Economics
Closed software and intellectual property is a product of a private ownership without limit embedded within a capitalist system. “I built it, I own it”. You end up with Zuck controlling Facebook and no one can vote him out. Or Elon controlling Twitter. Oh, I mean “Meta” and “X”. And if they want to, they’ll gradually boil the frogs until they all spend their lives in the virtual reality metaverse, or inside X.com’s “everything app”.
On the other hand, open source software is either a pure gift economy, or since 2014 can be a socialist economy where people collectively own the means of production and eliminate the shareholder class (just as they do in various cooperatives, credit unions, etc). Software produced in this way doesn’t end up with central control (Linux, MySQL, PHP, etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE
To me, utility tokens represent a “libertarian socialist” alternative to the “capitalist” system in which our current infrastructure has been developed. Stallman’s Free Software Movement is more like a gift economy, or perhaps “distributism” (a 19th-century Christian economic system). Those are actually really good, but to pay for resource use in the ecosystem we need an accounting system, and that’s utility tokens.
Utility tokens represent a way to monetize it in a way that happens to fit the dictionary definition of libertarian socialism: “collective ownership of the means of production.” Note that it doesn’t require a central government, but collective ownership.
When you sell utility tokens to finance your startup, the buyers only have a claim to the goods and services of your eventual network. They don’t start to demand that your company extract rents forever (eg Uber taking 50% of all the money that goes from riders to drivers). Instead it becomes a giant socialist cooperative (like eg a driver’s cooperative, or FileCoin for IPFS). Vitalik Buterin and Juan Benet simply don’t exercise the kind of total control over their platforms as Zuck and Elon do.
When you sell shares to finance your startup, you introduce an ever-growing shareholder class which will exercise more and more control over the ecosystem you build, and at every steps will insist that you retain control and extract rents so they can profit.
It can sometimes be as overt as Peter Thiel saying “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and together with Sean Parker killing all Mark Zuckerberg’s open source tendencies (such as when he eventually gave away Synapse as open source instead of giving it to Microsoft for $1 million https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artific...) and dreams of decentralized file sharing software: (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/amp/) but he always retained a soft spot for open source when he personally funded diaspora* (a decentralized facebook competitor) and now, you should be thanking his open source sympathies as he is literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI woukd belong to only a select few, just as Web2 and all our public forums do today.
When a few at the top of a corporate ladder hold all the power, then they can boil any frog. And if they don’t want to, they’ll be replaced by those who will. That’s how the system works.
Opt out. Embrace open source and distributed systems. Take a few hours a week. It’s out there, it’s free to try. Contribute, get certified, serve your local communities, and make money doing it!
I believe that decentralized movements need to be named properly. If Stallman named it “Liberating Software” instead of “Free Software”, his movement could have attracted a lot more devotees from the wider open source movement.
Similarly, I believe (my personal viewe) thay if BLM had simply called themselves BLAM (Black Lives Also Matter) their message would have been crystal clear and would have attracted far less controversy and much more support across the political spectrum, avoiding such rejoinders as “All Lives Matter.” In fact it rolls off the tongue better and stronger: BLAM!
When starting a decentralized movement, the naming is crucial as it affects positioning long after it has become bigger than those who began it.
Like your Qbix? https://qbix.com
I started Intercoin and Intercloud later. Our apps are named Groups and Calendars.
Also Meta these days is open sourcing more ML tools than any other corp, so I'm not sure the claim that "killing ... all open-source tendencies" is supportable.
People naturally tend to give things away in a gift economy when the marginal cost of making a copy is zero. Dan Pink explains it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Consider science: it is a privilege in most scientific disciplines to publish one’s discoveries openly for everyone to build on. Except in the bio and pharma departments — there, the intellectual property system has made generically engineered crops trap farmers and has made drugs extremely expensive in the very country that enforces this system. I wrote about Open Source Drugs a whopping 12 years ago: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93
Newton said, “if I saw further, it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants”. He didn’t pay rent to the giants for those shoulders.
Thomas Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Albert Wenger, a friend of mine who is a venture capitalist, general partner at Union Square Ventures here in NY and who raised their climate fund, wrote an entire book called World After Capital about this very thing, and is giving it away: https://worldaftercapital.org
Back then, USV and other VCs were really bullish on Utility Tokens as a way for the participants to own the network, and to incentivize open source voluntarily, without government force:
https://avc.com/category/blockchain/
I also mentioned Meta open sourcing ML, and said you should be thankful to Zuck’s tendencies, which he can exercise in an area that isn’t a core business proposition of facebook. The capitalists have stranged Mark Z’s tendencies in every area where Facebook could extract rents and profits from its ecosystem. And in this, it could have easily gone another way had an IP-loving Steve Jobs type been at the helm. Had FB chosen to branch out into it, like Apple did into, say, banking or cars, then you would see FAR LESS open source competition in AI. Maybe Bloom model?
> ... you should be thanking [Zuckerberg’s] open source sympathies as he is literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI [would] belong to only a select few ...
You’re right that such sympathies weren’t exactly “killed” (instead “discouraged”) by advisors but pressing this mistake in phrasing is certainly a bit of a straw man argument.
There are obviously some specifics there, like if the camera on my phone has a firmware blob, does that need to be able to have the firmware updated? A lot of little caveats like that make such a law difficult, but I think with hardware access the open source community can flourish on devices like smart TVs, etc.
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THe thing that gets me is that people seem pretty much content with things. E.g. they'll complain about Amazon and then in the next breath admit that they still shop there. Etc.
Some of it is complacency. (A friend of mine, an academic, was talking about "the pain" of switching from Twitter to Mastodon. I had to stop him. You just click some buttons? You don't even have to get out of your chair.)
A lot of it seems to be apathy.
And then there's contentment with ignorance.
People say that this is just "human nature" but I feel that's a cop out.
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FWIW I think of Capitalism as a kind of economic API. It's very useful, but you have to run it within certain resource limits and policies. (E.g. don't "eat the rich", just tax them at the rate that we did fifty years ago, eh?)
Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth, we won history. We just haven't really noticed yet.
We have to stop fighting each other and take care of each other.
That's why Twitter software engineers were making fun of people wanting to release the Twitter algorithm... They were well aware of what a complex mess it was and how unrealistic that was. People have the right intuition though; it doesn't need to be so complex. It is complex by design.
The only thing shitcoin made "better" was how to pay the ransomware industry.
Where did anyone mention climate-destroying proof-of-work? Last I checked, only Bitcoin uses that amount of energy — every other decentralized system does not.
Shitcoin is a term bitcoiners use for every other coin so your own diatribe is incoherent.
Most people on HN are techbros
Blockchains are not the most efficient distributed systems architecture. But if you think you can do better, please do it!
For instance, I am. I think we can do better than BlockChain. That’s why I designed InterCloud, and putting together a team to build it.
I care about open and free technologies. Dat/Hypercore. IPFS. Maidsafe/Safenet. Matrix. Nostr. Literally none of them fit anything you’re bitching about.
In every case, people like you prefer bitching while the frog is being boiled, and actively spreading FUD about any open, free, permissionless alternatives. You’d do better by doing nothing, getting out of the way and let innovation happen. You seem to have no solution.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
> Where did anyone mention climate-destroying proof-of-work? Last I checked, only Bitcoin uses that amount of energy — every other decentralized system does not.
All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing. Bitcoin chews through massive amounts of power. Ethereum chews through GPUs and lowers expected lifetimes. CHIA chews through SSDs in weeks of massive amounts of writes.
> Shitcoin is a term bitcoiners use for every other coin so your own diatribe is incoherent.
I include all of them. But how quaint that you invalidate me as some round-about defense of your own shitcoin.
> Most people on HN are techbros
Most != all. Some of us are actual socialists. You know, "know thy enemy" and all that.
> Blockchains are not the most efficient distributed systems architecture. But if you think you can do better, please do it!
Its already been made. Its called Hawala ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala ). And its an easy way to send money across areas and even currency changes. And its based on reputation, not some silly climate-destroying math, so you shitcoiners cant make money pre-mining the chain before opening it up to the public.
> For instance, I am. I think we can do better than BlockChain. That’s why I designed InterCloud, and putting together a team to build it.
I repeat: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
> I care about open and free technologies. Dat/Hypercore. IPFS. Maidsafe/Safenet. Matrix. Nostr. Literally none of them fit anything you’re bitching about....In every case, people like you prefer bitching while the frog is being boiled, and actively spreading FUD about any open, free, permissionless alternatives. You’d do better by doing nothing, getting out of the way and let innovation happen. You seem to have no solution.
And in every case, the whole network is actually run by a quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of "decentralized" arent even defensible. And the other scam here is that all these with shitcoins attached have been heavily pre-mined to "pay the upfront investment cost". But again, with you being a shitcoin founder, you're well aware how this grift works.
I used to run the blockchain meetup here locally. Some of my contributions are still used by a lot of folks. But after a hard deep dive into dozens of blockchain systems, the only real benefit is to the ransomware industry. Well, that, and a whole bunch more decomissioned power plants being spun back up for shitcoin of various types. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
But again, I know what I'm arguing against. And frankly, you're wrong and deluded that anti-government hyper-capitalism money is the way to accomplish this. It aint.
I know that Upton Sinclair quote. Who pays my salary?
I could say the same about you. I realize who pays the salary of many of the startups that go through YC. The venture CAPITALISTS do. The Web2 ecosystem that banks at the same bank (Silicon Valley) and had a bank run on that bank kicked off by Peter “build a monopoly” Thiel. You support that ecosystem, and therefore are against any decentralized alternatives. Do you support Palantir and precrime as well?
Perhaps the above doesn’t describe you, only a bunch of tech bros like you in the very shareholder-based ecosystem that has led to the Big Tech oligopoly and is the subject of “boiling the frog” we are talking about. But then again, you are doing the same to me, assuming things based on whatever “Web3” means to you.
First you trot out incoherent strawmen about proof of work and shitcoins. Then, when I point out the issues with what you say, you do an adhominem.
You continue to be deluded. I just got through criticizinf hyper-capitalism like Thiel’s that would make many capitalists blush. Then I proceeded to advocate alternatives that fit the dictionary definition of “libertarian socialism”. You turn around and call that hyper-capitalism.
Well, how about this… in your system, you have monopolies and hardly any competition. It’s digital Feudalism. You are like the slaves supporting the system because the slavemasters were kinda good to you. In the system I advocate, everyone is competing to provide better infrastructure (hosting, security, storage etc) and you are not locked in. There is redundancy, no single point of failure. And no one can usurp power easily.
>All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing.
Sigh. You sound like you’re in 2013. Are you talking about Bitcoin? Because I had the same criticisms of it since before you were in crypto. I made them publicly in ArsTechnica and was covered in the BBC, Newsweek, etc back in 2018. We actually experimented with allowing people to do Monero mining as a way to pay for our apps, and the whole thing went bad pretty quickly and we removed it for precisely this reason. I called out the incentives publicly 5 years ago:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there...
You seem to ignore that every other coin besides Bitcoin and Monero doesnt fit your description, let alone the other distributed systems…
> And in every case, the whole network is actually run by a quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of "decentralized" arent even defensible.
Really? “The whole network” of Dat/Hypercore and Bittorrent and IPFS and safenet are run “by a quorum”? You should read up a bit more on what distributed hash tables are before spouting such nonsense.
Your response is to throw shade and FUD it without engaging in anything approaching substantive, intellectually honest discussion. I back up everything I say with myriad examples that illustrate general patterns. I have arrived at this position by battle-testing my ideas and being open to changing my mind. Are you?
Saying “you’re wrong and deluded” and declaring “it aint” unilaterally isn’t actual substantive argument. It’s just asserting bias.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6xfyfg/an_update... 2. https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Owning something should include that you can cut all ties with the original vendor, and still be able to use the device as advertised.
Similar to the concept in medicine that it's bad for business to cure vs good for business to treat something. From the consumer side, clearly you want cures but markets don't seem to function that way. Treating kidney disease is far less lucrative than providing a cure (if possible). Your only option as a business to find this appealing is to somehow look at the treatment option, roll all expected profit and revenue up, and tuck that into a "cure" option. If altruism in medicine isn't there, I don't know why we'd hope for it in something as artificial as electronics and software. I don't know what the solution is here if we want to continue to pretend markets self regulate.
So the question is just, is this a market failure in the sense that the market outcome is undesirable to society such that there's a strong case for regulation? Or is it a market success in that most people are getting what they prefer (cheaper products)?
If we were to get regulation passed on this, and prices for digital products and services were to rise, would people broadly cheer or jeer us? I think it's pretty clear that most people would be unhappy with this, at least above some level of price increase (which may be zero).
So to me the question is (like with all regulation) whether this can be regulated without increasing costs to people beyond the value of the regulation to society. Maybe so, but unfortunately I'm pretty skeptical that's the case.
Unless of course you want to argue that without financial incentive nobody would ever do such a thing, and open source is a fairy tale that can't really exist ...
But outside that niche, nobody really values this capability, and it's not a mystery why not. What good does open source do an accountant? Any given work-a-day accountant is never going to read or modify the source of their software. They just have no interest in that. They may have a computer enthusiast friend who has made a compelling case to them for why this stuff matters, so they may agree in theory, but they aren't going to do extra work or pay extra for this. It just isn't a direct enough impact for them.
(I completely agree with you however.)
This seems a lot like the same business model you're saying didn't exist before.
In fact, AT&T was more draconian. People can pay off their cell phones today. The old wall-tethered units had a monthly rental fee in perpituity.
I hate that the system has it where you don't own anything and you are supposed to be happy with it. But from a market perspective what else can they do? They need to make a regular income to pay for the development and such, but they also need to deal with the fact that a competitor who offers a freemium or product at a loss but where they can at some point in the future hide future costs will just naturally win.
In the US, at least, it literally took an act of Congress for customers to be allowed to port their numbers between wireless providers.
The difference is, culturally that didn't go too well with people so hating in MaBell was a thing. Enough so that it forced politicians to enforce anti-trust laws and break it up, eliminating all these restrictions.
I fear there is no political backbone today to do anything to the monopolists that own the hardware we "buy" from them.
The same thing happened to TVs. There are nearly no 'dumb' TVs that doesn't do anything more than just display the video signal. All the 'smart' ('over-smart' is more appropriate) TVs out there take too long to start and they almost always phone home to their overlords. The really worrying part is how normalized it is. I remember someone here on HN contemptuously dismissing my concern, saying that dumb-TVs are called 'computer monitors'. How many affordable 'computer monitors' above 30 inch do you know? And give it enough time - even computer monitors will become 'smart monitors', unless something is done now.
A large dumb TV is called a digital signage display. Those even come with remotes!
Do kids even own their school work done on Chromebooks / Apple Tablets / online learning platforms?
Have their parents assigned the rights to the IP?
I wonder how much kids feel ownership of their work done electronically
Around this point, same school but not necessarily the same year, someone else in the class thought I'd ripped off their idea in the classroom and that this was a copyright violation.
Now?
Now I understand that the work done at school is not a product, it's at most an extended pre-interview test much like a code challenge (not that literal code challenges were really possible when I was 10, given a decent C compiler would've cost something like 2 week's pre-tax income).
Most people always had poor memories, George Orwell make that observation. It's unfortunately one of the human conditions.
Tell other people.
Contribute. If you work long hours, give a little money to FOSS. If you have spare time, spend a bit of it contributing, doesn't need to be a lot.
The timeline in the link is not set. The tech world has been disrupted many times, if it hadn't been, we'd all be on IBM mainframes and typewriters or something. There is no fate but what we make. Very few people are aware enough to show up on this website and read this thread, so it's on you to do something. If you're reading this you are the resistance.
The seller/person getting money gets to set whatever terms they want. It cited Mark Lemley as having made the connection two decades ago. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970
It's abhorrent in extreme to strip away the rights of the citizens like so. Our ability to experiment with the world & explore the things about is fundamental to maintaining the human spirit, to keeping us homo sapiens.
and also, all responsibility for it. in the more recent "before times" that you're probably talking about, most things you bought came with a warranty, and if you did unapproved things with that product you would void your warranty. that's what the "warranty void if removed" stickers mean. and yes, when you buy consumer PC hardware there's all kinds of stuff that you can't do with it if you want to keep your warranty.
This hasn't really changed, we just expect more continuing service from our products now, so the list of conditions to recieve those ongoing services from the seller has increased. if you want to buy something and receive no warranty, no software updates, no bugfixes, no cloud sync, no remote access, or all the other modern conveniences, then yeah, you get to do whatever the fuck you want with it.
...
> Stallman was right: if you erode the norm that you control your own software, you lose the hardware, too. Free software is sort of a consumer right that enshrines what ownership of computing hardware means.
The teeming masses praising Steam for cutting out the middleman seem unacquainted with the first-sale doctrine.
In the before-times, when you bought something, the seller relinquished all claims to it, as an established legal principle (and a social norm and a moral obvious-ity). You can do whatever the fuck you want to your own PC, in your own house! Who would step into your home and tell you "no"?
Stallman was right: if you erode the norm that you control your own software, you lose the hardware, too. Free software is sort of a consumer right that enshrines what ownership of computing hardware means.