RonanTheGrey

I'm curious -- what are you hoping that argument will accomplish?

Freedom of ANY kind allows bad things to happen. The most secure world is one in which we are all locked up, nobody ever interacts, and are only fed via tube from their government provided feeder in their government provided cube.

Since I'm fairly sure that isn't what you're advocating, please, explain what you're hoping to accomplish by stating that a free and open internet is a problem.

I keep asking people to explain why they downvote posts like yours and nobody wants to. I guess they know the reasons aren't good, they just can't help giving in to the desire for control.

Beautiful list though and well said. I've been trying to think of a succinct way to summarize some of those concepts and I think you've broken them up well.

I explicitly added the disclaimer to preempt your attempt to ignore my question, which you did anyway. Fantastic.

You know exactly what I was trying to say. ONE counter example to a statistic doesn't invalidate the statistic and you were trying to say that just because very very very rarely someone makes productive use of their phone (one out of millions), that therefore there's no problem with how people use phones. Even you have to see how that argument misses the mark.

At the risk of a reddit-style comment: "Yes please."

Honestly just reverse the drug bans, treat them life public health problems, and disband agencies like this. Nothing good has ever come out of giving government agencies this kind of power and this kind of mandate.

How the hell did you manage this. Honestly what's your secret. I need to make sure my kids turn out this way.

I want tech to augment their lives, not replace them (or destroy them).

You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)

I was 100% convinced my kids won't get these devices until their very late teens, when I saw how my less than 1 year old reacted to the phones my wife and I use. Because his reaction is pure instinct, the dopamine response just to the colors and brightness was shocking.

We now have to work HARD to keep these devices away from him. Part of it, of course, is he observes how much attention we pay them but his eyes definitely light up differently when they are turned on. And that's without the manipulative, 1000-engineers-optimizing-for-your-addiction software built into them.

I honestly find it harder and harder to believe these things do anything positive for us. I 100% believe they can I just think we've turned them into something ugly, right now.

This is how these things always go isn't it? We invent this incredible technology that augments what we do, what we can be, what we can learn, and what we can believe...

and then we turn it into an almost-exclusively advertising tool designed to convert a human being into a money making machine.

It's one of the reasons I'm not enthusiastic about technology anymore. I see what we do with it. Every. Single. Time.

It makes me sad. All the lost potential.

You haven't answered the question and I was interested in the answer too.

What would one or both of these stores need to do, to qualify as 'anti-competitive' to you?

I have a rather large project that is in a stage where asking "where do we host it?" is appropriate.

I was >< this close to choosing Gitlab over Github due to this - I stopped all efforts to make the decision until I saw how this plays out.

Happy to push to Github now.

It's a data point of one, but there you go..

There's now a bulwark between developers and bad actors attempting to use Github and the legal framework against them. It is very probably that outside actual, valid legal justification, what the RIAA tried will never be tried again, thanks to the presence of that fund.

Put a price on that.

Yeah, came here to say that. Wit.ai looks interesting but I won't touch it with a 100ft pole as long as they require Facebook login. Unfortunate they have to promote the walled garden.

But also agree it was offtopic for the Github issue. Keep that focused on the naming and IP issue.

I guess a super obvious question is, why do they do this instead of having a robust antivirus ecosystem?

I mean I guess I already know the answer, "marketing". "Look, macOS doesn't require antivirus!"

Personally I don't want Apple verifying or revoking anything. I bought the computer, it's mine. You don't get to tell me what I can run, period. Inform me, sure, give me links to go learn why you don't want me to run something, sure. Don't prevent me from choosing to do with my machine what I want.

You're making the assumption the "average buyer" knows anything about this issue, which is incredibly unlikely. Therefore, their buying decisions are not made based on it.

I think a good goal would be to scream it as loud as possible and make sure people are buying it based on this dimension as well.

Yeah, I absolutely loved my Lumia... best phone I ever had. Crushed when it stopped working after... 5 years?

There's a companion setting, "Configured Connected User Experiences and Telemetry" that if you give it a valid hostname:port, it will send telemetry to that host instead of to Microsoft. Kind of a larf but spin up a basic Node server on some port, use a fake domain via C:\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and point the GP setting to that domain+port and it'll blackhole the network requests (you do need the local server running because if the request fails, it will be sent to Microsoft).

Overall I agree it's silly we even need to do this.

Whoa. This looks exactly like what I've been looking for.

Taking a serious look

"It's technically possible for you 30 Spartans to defeat 100,000 Persians so go ahead, good luck" doesn't sound like a winning strategy.

I think the overall point here is to have the support of law that says they DO have a duty to you, by benefit of their hosting your account and authenticating you elsewhere.

Then, WHEN someone goes to sue them, the person has much stronger legs in court rather than lone Peggy Sue trying to defeat Google's 300-strong team of lawyers who exist just to eat little guys for breakfast.

Yeah, I don't think there's any meaningful way to "port" a "gmail.com" email address away from Google. The entire internet infrastructure is set up so that can't happen, based on the meaning of "domain".

Seems like there's an opportunity there though. If someone could create a platform that would take your address, create you a custom domain, set it up, get your email flowing there (including porting over all your existing email out of gmail), and then helping you move your sign ins to that new address..

That'd be huge. It would also be very, very hard, the amount of infrastructure it would touch.. but doable.

I'm 100% certain that a number of opportunities I've been offered have been because I proved a certain level of competence by maintaining my own email and domain; this certainty is largely due to the incidence of comments like the ones you note. It's definitely a way to stand out.

I worked at Microsoft for several years about a decade after they lost those famous lawsuits and I can tell you that the company culture around monopoly power and user rights was incredibly well defined. The company was absolutely paranoid about doing anything ever again that would create that set of lawsuits and from what I can tell, in the 8 years since I left MS, that culture is still alive and well. It's probably why MS is the only company I still feel comfortable doing with, among the "tech" companies.

The hard slap they got from the government was enough to apparently permanently change the company culture around treatment of users and other businesses.

I see a lot of the excesses we see coming out of Google, Twitter, FB, to be a consequence of there being, well, zero consequences for their behavior. They're like petulant children who never learned limits and think it's ok to do whatever they want, no matter who they hurt. That's exactly how you teach children -- give them limits. Ironically, the same rule applies to adults.

> The odds of these things happening are to be weighted against each other

Mmmmm not quite -- they have to be weighed against the consequences if they happen. For people who have had a Gmail account for over a decade (almost 2), they've probably got most of their life connected to it -- losing the account then is tantamount to a huge chunk of your life being erased. Photos. Conversations. Access to dozens or hundreds of other websites.

Basically all that'd be left is your physical ID, your bank account and you get to start over from scratch.

And while all of the above can happen, many things on that list are under your control: losing access to your Google account (usually) isn't.

You're quite correct there are no absolutes but the problem is, when the consequence of something happening is extreme, the level of effort you put in to protect yourself from it must be equally extreme: to the point that it's generally good advice simply not to use 3rd party auth at all.

I no longer do. I use email/password or OTP whenever possible. Sites that insist I use social login are sites I don't sign up with.

Honestly it'd be hard for any 3rd party accounts to make that claim except Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and maybe? Twitter and github?

At one point I was signed up in over 300 places using my Google account. Eventually the thought occurred to me, "what happens if I get locked out of this account?" And I don't really mean shutting it down. I lost a Microsoft account with over $3000 worth of purchases and 10 years of history, because I lost access to the recovery email address it used. So since then I've made sure to "spread the risk" so to speak.

Through 2 years of effort it is now only a handful. Some of them remain because either a) there's no other way to sign up or b) there's no way to convert it to an email based account.

But still - that's 2 years. 2 years of weekly, sometimes daily, moving yet another thing off that login (but it still uses the email! that's the next step -- kill the email).

The level of effort has been gargantuan. For some people, it would simply never ever happen. To lose a Google account would not only be damaging, it would be like your entire life being erased.

The level of damage here is enormous and Google has to take responsibility for the power it has amassed.

If they want to terminate all free accounts, it'd be a wonderful thing. Either people would finally be free of the behemoth, or Google's incentives would change to finally care about users (well.... hopefully).

I mean, the simple answer is because they're trying to spread the use of Google login, make it ubiquitous, so they can own all authentication mechanisms too as if owning everything else isn't enough.

We meet again zepto!

Nobody wants to take away their right to do so (ok well maybe some do; I'm not one of them). Just that there should be rules we all agree to when we do.

We accept this in other venues. Seatbelts. Stoplights. Nutrition labeling on packaging. etc..

No such rules exist for software, which is odd. It does seem to suggest the industry is ripe for regulation. It's always disappointing to me that we only accept limits when the law places them, as though ethics and morals are somehow not good things to pursue for their own reasons.

Which goes back to OP's point: just because a company CAN be as dystopian as they can imagine, doesn't mean they should be.

> They don’t have any significant advertising business. They don’t need to collect any personally identifiable information. They’ve promoted their brand by putting their customers privacy first.

Yes... now. Can you say that with certainty 10 years from now? 15? 20? Would you want an evil Apple 10 years from now having that? Or one that a 3-letter agency forced to collect it and they could never tell anyone because National Security Letter? Is that a bet you want to take? One you NEED to take? Is it truly unavoidable, sufficient to justify such a thing?

The best bulwark against overreach is to not create the capacity for it in the first place. Power will only ever do 1 thing, and that's amass more power.

Dude they'll just sell them to someone else. It doesn't change anything, the material and resource cost has already been paid. Stop making this about something it absolutely is not.

Companies DO care when people return something, because that is pure signal. "I got it because I thought I would like it and I don't" is a much different signal than "I have no idea what you think because I never interacted with you". That is likely one of the most effective ways to make a company sit up and take notice, the return rate of a product is a key indicator of its success.

I really don't see that there's anything to disagree with there. Loving Apple, as you may, doesn't make the above point wrong.

> I was very angry at the time since all my my music got deleted, but these days I'm just sad. Things like this have little by little destroyed all of my enthusiasm for technology. I want to be a carpenter now.

When I was a kid, I watched with wonder and delight at all the amazing things we were doing and inventing. We were poor so I didn't get much tech, but I always marveled at it. I saved up for ages to buy one of those personal organizers that were all the rage in the mid 90's. I saw myself as part of a world working together to build a brighter future for all of us, and I think I wasn't alone in that.

It is true that the seeds of many issues we face today were already firmly planted in those days and that it was unrealistic. But there is value in dreams because dreams tell us who we want to be and give us the engine to get there.

Today, I couldn't care less about tech, actively see it as a negative influence on human life, and understand the Amish and Luddites alot better.

I'm currently planning to build a farm out in the middle of nowhere and then Apple can have its fiefdom, Google can own everyone's data and control what people think, they all can tell people what they're allowed to say as our new overlords and I just won't care at all.

More and more I perceive Apple to be relieving themselves a #2 on their customers' heads while telling them that they should be thankful and enjoy it.

"How do we get these companies to stop behaving like this?"

"Vote with your wallet!"

<votes with wallet by doing as OP suggests above. Mind you, NOT buying is noise - buying and returning is signal>

"Not like that!!"