alt Hacker NewsI sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as.
Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?
Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30% app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and demonstrating censorship of sites like Tumblr) that politicians wouldn't want that same rule-setting, censoring power?
Did they think their employers were going to prevent that transfer, that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents, running a guerrilla campaign to overthrow the very system that made them trillion-dollar companies?
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I remember piping up about all those things. But the excuses were everywhere.
- Oh but you can turn it off so it's no issue (secure boot). Well yeah but more and more stuff just won't run then (eg iOS apps on Mac). It will become the norm to stay inside the fuzzy walled garden just like it already is on phones. And if you stray you will just be blocked from any app that does something useful.
- But companies need to be sure you are who you say you are (attestation). Yes but they will abuse that power if they can profit from it.
They're ultimately employees. Their employers hire them to write the code that the employers want. If they don't write the code, employers just fire them and move on to hire some other people to write code. As much as how ethically questionable it is, it's still very rare that people would give up their jobs to defend their viewpoint.
That was nicely put.
I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom.
So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.
Oh, the people who work on secure boot, attestation, DRM, and other such features know very well, but don't care. This is because the claimed benefits for them, such as less hackers, less malware, less bot traffic, outweigh any possible downsides for the society.
> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?
Makes me think of the most sobering line I ever saw in a museum (Berlin): The biggest atrocities were committed by people with a spreadsheet and a performance goal.
I often also wonders if ideological zealots ever thinks of this passage while pushing their agenda for control:
...and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.
Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead,
so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.Did they think that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents...
Arguably this plan is mostly working for Apple.
Why do people vote for large, strong governments that are able to take the power you suggest Tech is enabling them to take?
The phrase 'banality of evil' comes to mind.
Meanwhile Signal Corporation keeps trying to connect to updates2.signal.org even when the app is not being used. "Automatic updates", remote code execution by default with no option to disable
Silicon Valley has its own ideas of what "privacy" and "surveillance" mean
To those folks, it does not mean privacy from Silicon Valley companies
The Signal app will keep on trying to connect to the mothership
Because to the people who work on Silicon Valley software, that is not a privacy violation
The battle is over _control_ over software not privacy or surveillance. The later is not possible without the former
Silicon Valley does not want the user to have control any more than they want the government to have control
I guess they think "someone is going to do it anyway, so it might as well be me so I can be the one who gets paid for it". But yeah, I'm sure there is also a good chunk of tech workers who are indeed useful idiots who think they are the last link in the chain.
What defines a bad tech vs a good tech? Similar arguments can be made for most research including nuclear fusion, AI, vaccines, space, polymers, combustion engines, electric motors, semiconductors...
Twitter people expressly started their company with the idea of crowd-friendly semi-anonymous msgs on demand.
The game of GO delivers an idea where a very large construct can be built then in one move the entire thing flips to a different purpose... seems relevant somehow..
> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?
Corporations are already hostile enough that it doesn't really matter:
The report says that between 30 and 40 Rockstar employees working in multiple offices in the UK and Canada were fired on October 30, all of them part of a private trade union chat group on Discord. - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/rockstar-accused-of-...
Leaked Amazon Whole Foods Docs: Workforce Diversity Helps Prevent Unions - https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403 (summarizing https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...)
Microsoft Are Fixated on “Hate Speech” With Lopsided XBOX Live Enforcement Strike System - https://www.techopse.com/microsoft-are-fixated-on-hate-speec...
Online is terrible for kids. Online is terrible for adults! Too many people don't have the agency or social skills to manage themselves. Conspiracy theories, anarchists and libertarians, misinformation and disinformation, weirdos and beardos and creeps of all description. People end up believing all kinds of things that just aren't real.
It'll be best for society if things are a little more regulated, a little safer. And I'm happy to help where I can. Listening to the terminally online about it would be counterproductive.
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My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is."
This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".
People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.