Comment by shadowgovt

Comment by shadowgovt a day ago

17 replies

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You can run it, I'm just under no obligation to let your machine send signals to my machine that my machine will respond to if you are running software I do not trust.

And that's the complexity of this era of computing. We just got finished convincing people that it made sense that they should have the right to run whatever software they wanted on hardware they owned... And then immediately the technology shifted so that most things no longer get done using exclusively hardware that you own. The RMS four freedoms approach is only chipping away at the larger problem: capitalism (I mean that literally in that the problem is that the machines that do the work, the capital, are owned by a tiny ownership class).

Dylan16807 a day ago

> You can run it, I'm just under no obligation to let your machine send signals to my machine that my machine will respond to if you are running software I do not trust.

If some piece of software I'm running is the only reason for you to refuse the connection, then you should be obligated.

It's slightly similar to how protected class laws work. You can block me for no reason, but not that reason.

This is especially important when I just want to run my own OS and not have people go out of their way to deliberately break things because of that.

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  • b_e_n_t_o_n a day ago

    > If some piece of software I'm running is the only reason for you to refuse the connection, then you should be obligated.

    Obligated how? Like through violence? What happened to freedom of association?

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    • Dylan16807 a day ago

      The same violence that stops you from running a red light, yeah.

      In my view, it's more important to have freedom of software choice than to have the very narrow freedom of association based on what software someone else chooses.

      Because again I'm fine with you rejecting me for just about any other reason. But that one? No, I think we should all have to interoperate.

      Another way to look at it is that I should be able to keep what software I use private.

      Also the important part is applying this rule to companies with 7+ figures of revenue. Not so much to actual people.

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      • b_e_n_t_o_n a day ago

        I mean, we all have things we'd rather not have people reject us for, that doesn't mean it should be illegal to do so. We already have the (legal) right to keep our software preferences private.

        In general I'd caution against trying to use legalisation to solve problems like this because they usually introduce more problems. At the very least I'd expect banks to no longer carry liability for fraud, so perhaps one intended consequence of this is that if you get defrauded the bank no longer protects you. That would suck imo.

        Perhaps they could make it so you waive all protections by using unauthorised software. That would probably require changes to existing legislation, and then of course people would complain that the banks have too much power etc...

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        • Dylan16807 18 hours ago

          > At the very least I'd expect banks to no longer carry liability for fraud

          Respectfully to you but not to banks, fuck that. You can use your computer under your control to access a bank and it's fine. You don't have to give up fraud protection. Phone apps should be the same way.

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    • kuschku 20 hours ago

      In Germany, the banking system had an open API, so you could even access your bank account from KMyMoney and do transactions. And you still had proper fraud protections.

      How is it that accessing my bank account with KMyMoney is fine, but banks don't even allow me to access my smartphone's root account without blocking me?

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  • shadowgovt a day ago

    > If some piece of software I'm running is the only reason for you to refuse the connection, then you should be obligated.

    In general, the obligation has been soft: "If everything adheres to the protocols, it will interoperate" is how we got the Internet. And the Internet was generally useful and so self-incentivized making software work with it with minimal stumbling blocks; nobody was gating FTP clients on only working with Oracle-branded FTP servers because then you couldn't access all the other FTP servers.

    But that's not the only model, and I don't see an obvious argument for why should enters into it here. How does that "should" work? Is there legal compulsion? On what moral or philosophical grounds?

    > It's slightly similar to how protected class laws work. You can block me for no reason, but not that reason.

    Yes, and instituting those laws was a messy uphill battle over immutable properties of human beings. That is a far philosophical cry from "No thank you; I'd like to use all that Apple cloud tech without buying an Apple computer please." I suppose, unless we break the back of capitalism as a societal structuring model, in which case... Yep. We can make whatever laws we want if we throw out the current system.

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    • matheusmoreira a day ago

      > I don't see an obvious argument for why should enters into it here

      This threatens to destroy everything the word "hacker" stands for. Everything this site is about. Gone.

      I can't even get people on Hacker News to care about this. It's over.

      Reply View 6 replies
      • shadowgovt a day ago

        Hackers will be fine. If anything, this kind of measure-countermeasure foolishness from corporations gives them a really meaty problem to dig into.

        It's just very unclear that the force of law is the right tool for the job to address that problem.

        (Also, people on Hacker News can care about a lot of things simultaneously. One of them can be that adding the government's cudgel to the problem may very well make it worse; do we really want the government having to well-define things like "protocol" and "communication" to craft that law?)

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ThrowawayR2 a day ago

If the future hopes for openness in computing rely on ending capitalism, we're already toast. Nobody's going to be building the next generation of chip fabs without gargantuan amounts of funding.

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  • shadowgovt a day ago

    Capitalism isn't a necessary prerequisite for gargantuan amounts of funding.

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