Comment by zmmmmm

Comment by zmmmmm 15 hours ago

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I know this is a tangent but honestly, this is why the Google decision to de-openify Android is insane even from Google's point of view. Who would want to be an iron clad gate keeper when the world is descending into authoritarianism? You just paint a giant target on your back for the authoritarians to come after.

If Apple had supported open iCloud alternatives for backup and other services from day one, it woudn't even be a discussion now. The UK probably wouldn't have thought of the idea of mandating against E2E encryption because it would be self evident it would actually just churn people to alternatives where they have less leverage and visibility. But Apple couldn't resist bricking up the walled garden and now it's hostile to both them and their users, and to be honest, everyone on the planet since it is obvious that once this happens in the UK it will be silly for every government everywhere not to follow suit.

chongli 11 hours ago

Who would want to be an iron clad gate keeper when the world is descending into authoritarianism?

Powerful people don't think this way. They think they can leverage the authoritarian regime to their own advantage. They're biased to ignore risks and seek out opportunities. That's what got them to their position of success!

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  • Atlas667 9 hours ago

    They ARE the authoritarian regime.

    This myth that capitalist perpetuate that the rich are not the government is the best lie out there.

    The rich are the government. They are the national interests, countries' industries' is their property.

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    • AdamN 7 hours ago

      Yeah there was this great cartoon many years back where a guy is on his computer and the FBI is looking over his shoulder at his screen. A character named 'Facebook' is pushing him aside and says "Let me show you how to do it". When you look at the cartoon for a minute or so you see in the shadow in the back of the room this robot labeled 'Google' and he's just quietly observing.

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    • chongli 5 hours ago

      They are until they aren’t. Look at the Russian regime. Even billionaires could find themselves on the outs. All that money and to live in fear of open windows.

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    • Wolfenstein98k 9 hours ago

      [flagged]

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      • amake 8 hours ago

        Your analogy is infinitely more baffling to me than OP's comment.

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      • dontlaugh 9 hours ago

        It’s merely a perspective you’re not used to seeing. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

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        • teiferer 8 hours ago

          Though illustrative of the difference between arguments and mere statements of opinion.

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      • vasco 8 hours ago

        So in your mind megacorps and their owner billionnaires have how much of a say in government? If you had to rate their influence in government policy from zero to a hundred what would that be?

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        • komali2 7 hours ago

          Governments should represent the needs and desires of humans. Corporations are algorithms designed to make their value go up - if not restricted by governments, they will crab-bucket eachother by any means necessary, including slavery. See: factory towns.

          Therefore, corporations should have exactly 0 influence in governments, and billionaires should have the same influence as any citizen: one vote, and whatever influence they can peddle from a soapbox in a park.

          This is obviously impossible because billionaires can buy TV spots. This is why governments under capitalism almost inevitably become extensions of corporations, which is what the OP comment means. In a system where capital = power, then, accumulation of capital means accumulation of power. You accumulate power, you use it to allow you to accumulate more power, you use it to allow you to accumulate more power... and so on.

          I'm skeptical there's any solution to this within capitalism - I don't think highly socialized capitalism will work long term since the profit generating algorithms (corporations) will play within the rules to accumulate just enough of an edge to wedge their foot into government enough to get a smidge of influence, which they will leverage to weaken restrictions on corporations, which will allow them to get more influence, which will lead to them weakening restrictions further, and so on.

          So long as capital can be converted into any power at all, I think the system will inevitably trend towards late stage capitalism / corpotocracy / plutocracy.

          Do you believe billionaires should have more say in government policy than you do? Why? Why wouldn't a billionaire use more say to help themselves even more at your expense? They clearly love hoarding wealth and power, so, would it not be fair to say they'd like to do more of that?

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      • rootlocus 8 hours ago

        I fail to see the point you're trying to make or the argumentative process by which you're trying to make it.

        Consider this: the current administration has received gifts from private corporations in return for more lenient tariffs. Or consider the amount of law projects passed through congress directly from large corporations with their logo still on the paper. And this is just the blatant tip of the iceberg the current administration is brazen enough to show publicly.

        > absolutely baffling to you and which probably makes a hundred obvious counter-arguments pop up in your head.

        I can probably find a hundred obvious examples of conflict of interests, quid-pro-quos, or otherwise pro-corporation anti-consumer for any administration in history. But in the end, the proof is in the pudding. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, while the government is issuing gold cards with the president's face on them for multi-millionaires to bring their business.

        I'd be glad to hear a few of those hundred obvious counter-arguments.

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      • Atlas667 9 hours ago

        Maybe I'm too sleepy for rhetoric.

        But a country needs material resources to exist, right? Some of these are food, shelter, energy, health, entertainment and security.

        These are all private enterprises in a capitalist state. For example, the energy sector is a group of capitalist enterprises. The energy sector is also at the same time something the population needs.

        Therefore it is also crucial to the nation, its a national security.

        They country would go to war in order to secure resources for the energy industry because it is a part of national security.

        Another: walmart is americas veins and its a group of peoples property. Walmart is national security.

        The fact that some of these are publicly traded does not change their relationship to ownership.

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        • AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago

          The mistake is in regarding different organizations as fundamentally different creatures when they're not.

          The theory of markets is that anyone can compete. That keeps people from abusing customers because they would go to someone else. Except that then powerful interests capture the system to have rules inhibiting rather than facilitating competition, and the market consolidates and that stops working.

          The theory of the government is that everyone gets a vote. That keeps people from abusing citizens because they would vote the bums out. Except that then powerful interests capture the system to have rules that create a two party system so people have fewer choices, centralize rule-making power in the areas that were supposed to have local control so people can't vote with their feet and then that stops working.

          It's not fundamentally different problems, it's the same one. Consolidation of power, also known as centralization. People find ways to corrupt the system to take away your alternatives.

          One of the ways they've found is to put half the people on Team Government and the other half on Team Markets and get them to fight each other when they should both instead be working together to fight the autocrats and create systems more resistant to them.

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sethherr 12 hours ago

I think the fact that Apple is having to fight this fight is evidence of why they were right to make a secure walled garden. I don’t know of any other service I would recommend my mother use for securely backing up her phone.

I think the UK is ultimately going to roll back this law. I don’t think this means that iCloud E2E is hostile to Apple or its users. I think Apple is going to win.

The war isn’t won by telling people to use GPG https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html

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  • styanax 2 hours ago

    > The war isn’t won by telling people to use GPG

    Tangent, a friend and I started using Delta Chat with a chatmail relay and it's incredibly friendly to get started, and hides the fact GPG tech is being used from the user; one can export a bundle of the key data as needed and easily copy the key profile to a second device over local wifi (I was impressed at how smooth it was).

    Not that I've kept track, but Delta Chat's UX is probably the first easy, no-nonsense implementation of using GPG tech as a foundation but keeping it away from the user experience I've encountered (and liked). It has it's pain points but I mean it just works and my buddy and I chat all day over it using a public relay.

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  • teiferer 8 hours ago

    > I think the fact that Apple is having to fight this fight is evidence of why they were right to make a secure walled garden

    Would you mind explaining? I don't see how that's evidence.

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  • mistercheph 6 hours ago

    yeah guys, we don’t win by using free and open technologies, we win if we all buy {NAMECORP} devices, that’s true victory right there, backed by a real warranty, that’s what grandma wants

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    • JKCalhoun 2 hours ago

      I've had files in Apple's iCloud for 14 years now (had to look that up) and they're still there. I have no reason to believe that they won't still be there after I am dead. Apple is a big company with a big reputation to protect.

      I can't say the same for the smaller services.

      I don't have any grandmothers still alive but would certainly suggest iCloud for all family members.

      (But, FWIW, I copy down everything from iCloud annually and store on a portable 1TB drive to have my own cloud-backup.)

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    • swiftcoder 4 hours ago

      If you have a free and open technology that is sufficiently user-friendly that grandma isn't going to lose all her photos, I'm all ears

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      • qn9n 4 hours ago

        This is the major issue, most free and open technology is not marketed as well; isn't anywhere near as user friendly and often times takes a lot more time and effort to setup. Most people don't care enough for that.

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      • megous 11 minutes ago

        Plug in a phone, run adb pull /storage/emulated/self/DCIM or wherever that Android garbage OS stores photos these days.

        Local, doesn't need encryption since there's no middle in E2E that you need protection against, and simple.

        Grandma can setup ~/.zshrc `alias bak=cd ~/phonephotos && adb pull ...` to make it even simpler.

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      • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 4 hours ago

        The 35mm film camera, developed by a photo lab, with pictures stored in a show e box

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      • [removed] 13 minutes ago
        [deleted]
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      • port11 3 hours ago

        Okay, secure E2EE backups we've more or less perfected for a while. There's good F/LOSS solutions for that. And if you're willing to pay a bit, thinks like Backblaze come to mind. In other areas it's true that open-source stuff is less polished, but not backups. I mean, a few months back Apple had a regression where they were un-deleting people's photos, that's pretty nasty.

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      • sambeau 2 hours ago

        I turnips were watches, I'd wear one by my side.

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      • realusername 4 hours ago

        Modern devices are so locked down that you couldn't build such software even if you wanted to.

        Those corporations are part of the problem, not the solution.

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whywhywhywhy 4 hours ago

Didn't Apple already open up all their services to a backdoor in China? Was it ever really about privacy or is privacy just a convenient excuse to have a selection of elevated Apple solutions with privileges above 3rd parties.

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shuckles 11 hours ago

> If Apple had supported open iCloud alternatives for backup and other services from day one, it woudn't even be a discussion now.

You think the OS vendor is unable to snoop on data written to 3rd party clouds from their devices?

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  • SXX 10 hours ago

    If they leave backdoors they will eventually be known.

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    • Someone 7 hours ago

      Chances are the UK government would require them to create that backdoor for them, and Apple would publicize that (implicitly, if the UK government would also forbid them to tell it explicitly)

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VerifiedReports 9 hours ago

Android has been a fraud for a long time now. Let's not pretend that the "open-source" mobile OS that was supposed to free us all from vendor and telco tyranny ever approached that promise.

Did they even really try?

As far as iCloud "alternatives" go... Android doesn't offer ANY legitimate syncing infrastructure to compete with iCloud, open or not.

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  • beeflet 8 hours ago

    You can install syncthing-fork or nextcloud

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    • atlintots 7 hours ago

      Neither are legitimate competitors to iCloud

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      • panja 5 hours ago

        In some instances, nextcloud is better than icloud

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  • eptcyka 9 hours ago

    You can sync a backup over webdav on GrapheneOS.

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  • flanked-evergl 6 hours ago

    I switched to Android from iPhone because the sync options for iPhone are garbage.

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egorfine 5 hours ago

> Who would want to be an iron clad gate keeper when the world is descending into authoritarianism

The gatekeepers.

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tombert 14 hours ago

I mean, I think the answer to this is the very simple: they think it will lead to more money.

I'm sure someone in a board meeting saw something about GrapheneOS and LineageOS and Cyanogen and feels like if they de-open Android, some (or most) of those users will move to vanilla Android, and that will lead to profits.

I'm not saying that they're right about this; I think ultimately very few (if any) people actually know how to run businesses and it's all about giving an appearance of maximizing profitability, and as long as it leads to a potential short term stock boost then these executives get their huge bonuses and they can just blame the next guy when things break.

This isn't really theoretical; look at how Jack Welch took one of the most respected companies in the world, more or less integrated ponzinomics to temporarily bump the stock prices, and 20+ years later GE is kind of a joke and isn't even on the S&P500 anymore.

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  • tasn 13 hours ago

    I don't have exact numbers, but I'm sure Graphene, Lineage, and all of the mods combined are much less than 1% of all android users; as well as these customers being less profitable than average as a marketing target.

    Posting this from my lineage phone.

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    • tombert 13 hours ago

      I don't dispute that at all. I don't think it matters, it just needs to look like they're doing something to avoid forks and the like.

      That said, there might be stuff that's actually using open source Android for profit. For example, the Nook Glowlight Plus, which runs a modded version of Android, doesn't appear to have any direct or even indirect references to Android anywhere (and I had to contribute a bit to the discourse to even get the rooting to work [1]). I have no ideas about the inner dealings of Barnes and Noble, but it wouldn't surprise me if they're running a completely forked version of FOSS Android and aren't paying a dime to Google for it.

      I suspect these are the things that Google is trying to crack down on.

      [1] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=360563&pa...

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    • AtlasBarfed 12 hours ago

      Yes. They have 99.9% of the mobile phones.

      The phone was the end of open computing, the tech companies obtained an iron grip on the platform, this time with fully accepted total monitoring and data collection down to everything you say, hear, everywhere you go, and with smartwatch biosensors, everything you feel. The only thing left is to get smart glasses and they will know everything you see. Smell they can probably interpolate.

      It happened over a decade ago, and that might as well be 100 years ago in modern attention spans. All the governments have to do is pay the companies money, or simply force-legislate, or threaten under the table for all that info, and for permanent forever access to active tracking and monitoring.

      AI provides all the analysis they need to watch the firehose. It's all there.

      At this point it doesn't matter if an alternative comes. It'll be such the minority, that the social graph will fill all the holes. And they can simply track your IMEI regardless from the towers, listen in with other nearby microphones/phones. There is no escape.

      All that remains is for the key to be turned for worse-than-1984 authoritarianism. It's right there, ready for the AI-empowered 50% of consumption controlled, 90% of stocks owned oligarchy to use.

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      • harshreality 7 hours ago

        Open computing still exists. It's just overshadowed by the prevalence of locked mobile devices because those are convenient and good enough for the vast majority, who would rather use those than a less convenient desktop, laptop, or even raspberrypi.

        Surveillance on the internet is challenging to avoid, but internet surveillance and tracking doesn't extend to (outside-of-browser) local compute.

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methuselah_in 9 hours ago

simply i will be starting using Linux distributions on the devices which support them. Usually the gsm wcda etc are too much buried in patents and mostly closed source, but eventually how android bloomed initially as it was open source. I believe one day Linux will be there and again google and apple can have something to worry about and they will again open. One major thing is why google allowing people to use Linux apps on their android 16-17 by default i guess is because of this.

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hk1337 5 hours ago

This whole idea of conflating a closed system like Apple has created with authoritarianism is silly. If anything authoritarianism is the UK trying to force Apple to open up (so they exploit it to monitor their citizens).

Apple created a product, not just the iPhone but a whole ecosystem that’s supposed to help the user feel secure. There’s isn’t the only product out there and as long as they’re not preventing new competitors, everyone needs to back off.

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  • ulrikrasmussen an hour ago

    They're not conflating them, they are pointing out that the closedness of the system and the control it gives Apple will be a useful tool to authoritarians who can force Apple to exert their power in certain ways.

    Everyone who is not a public service is just "making a product", but when your product is actually half of all endpoints for digital services and communication and you insist on not handing control to the users, then you effectively control half the infrastructure.

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  • Steve16384 2 hours ago

    Apple do everything in their power to prevent competition: forcing Safari, forcing payments to go through Apple so they can take their cut etc...

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    • NetMageSCW 6 minutes ago

      Apple does everything in their power (as allowed by governments who want to have that power) to protect their customers: forcing Safari, forcing payments through Apple, etc…

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jordanb 12 hours ago

The tech bros are of the opinion that they can ride the rising authoritarianism like a Fremen riding a sandworm.

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re-thc 4 hours ago

> If Apple had supported open iCloud alternatives for backup and other services from day one, it woudn't even be a discussion now

Why does Apple need to do extra work and increase support? The average user really doesn't care and choices just make it more complicated.

> The UK probably wouldn't have thought of the idea of

The UK has lost the plot long ago. It's been drama after drama.

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