We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

https://hugotunius.se/2025/08/31/what-every-argument-about-sideloading-gets-wrong.html

by K0nserv • 11 months ago

2071 1172 11 months ago

hugotunius.se

DrillShopper• 11 months ago

No, says the man in Hollywood - those cycles belong to the MPAA

No, says the car manufacturers, those cycles belong to us

No, says the nerds in Redmond, your computer belongs to us

add-sub-mul-div2• 11 months ago

Weird last example, Windows is freer than Apple/Google. There's no path to locking down Windows like Android or iOS, half the world would break. Apple originated and normalized this, Google is following.

Krutonium• 11 months ago

Windows 10/11 S is that path. Microsoft has walked it already; They just have to push the net wider over time.

rogerrogerr• 11 months ago

A few weeks ago someone was posting links to a thing MS is trying to push, which would require signed code for local execution. It had a weird name but seemed like they’re trying.

Spooky23• 11 months ago

Microsoft will absolutely go down this path, they just have longer commitments and product cycles.

I’d guess in 5 years you’ll start getting friction for using AD, and heavy push towards cloud services first. You’ll probably have to subscribe to legacy features or migrate to Azure to use them.

Their legacy systems management tool is a zombie product, and the replacement is Intune, which and an MDM solution which locks you out of your computer similar to Android or iOS.

I’ll be retired, so IDNGAF, but in 15 years, Microsoft will be capturing all of the value they give you for free in windows. The future will look like a 1980s mainframe.

hereme888• 11 months ago

I'm two days into switching my Pixel 6 from Android to GrapheneOS. No issues so far. I haven't set up my banking app, but it's supposed to be supported.

idle_zealot• 11 months ago

This makes the point that the real battle we should be fighting is not for control of Android/iOS, but the ability to run other operating systems on phones. That would be great, but as the author acknowledges, building those alternatives is basically impossible. Even assuming that building a solid alternative is feasible, though, I don't think their point stands. Generally I'm not keen on legislatively forcing a developer to alter their software, but let's be real: Google and Apple have more power than most nations. I'm all for mandating that they change their code to be less user-hostile, for the same reason I prefer democracy to autocracy. Any party with power enough to impact millions of lives needs to be accountable to those it affects. I don't see the point of distinguishing between government and private corporation when that corporation is on the same scale of power and influence.

hnuser123456• 11 months ago

GrapheneOS?

jetbalsa• 11 months ago

Only runs on a handful of hardware, and still uses the binblobs from google for the hardware devices.

fsflover26• 11 months ago

Forces users to directly give money to Google and to rely on Google's OS underneath.

jijijijij• 11 months ago

I think GrapheneOS focuses on privacy and security, not liberation. I think their pragmatic and narrow-minded approach is valid, it's important not to conflate their scope with related issues they are unable/unwilling to tackle.

Personally, I think a usable pure Linux phone is required to weaken the desktop vs. mobile distinction and break the lock-in. This would additionally empower the desktop platform, confirm it as baseline.

bsder3• 11 months ago

The primary problem is that we can't build a phone and run it on a cellular carrier network. This is where legislation is needed.

Apple and Google are still a problem, but they are a secondary problem.

dwattttt• 11 months ago

You'll run into a variant of the tragedy of the commons; without any kind of regulation or provable assertions from people taking part in common communication infrastructure, it'd be quite easy to ruin it for everyone.

ACCount375• 11 months ago

You kind of can? The carrier network has no way to verify that your cellular modem is a real modem made by a real modem company, and not 3 SDRs in a trench coat standing on the top of each other.

The sheer technical difficulty is what makes this kind of thing impractical.

The network does validate that a SIM card is a real SIM card, but you can put a "real SIM card" in anything.

SilverElfin3• 11 months ago

But how do we start a movement for these ideas? I feel like there isn’t awareness outside of niche circles and the public may not see the short term benefit. Meanwhile politicians are lobbied by the same corporations and won’t listen.

immibis5• 11 months ago

I don't think the cellular network is the problem at all - everything except SMS and PSTN calls works on wifi. The problem is the apps. Netflix only runs on a verified bona fide electrified six car Google- or Apple-approved device; so do most financial apps (EU law requires them to) and basically everything else where the app developers are trying to get money off you (which is most apps). Some apps will refuse to play ads on a non-genuine device and then refuse to function because you aren't watching ads. Play Store does its best to stop you installing its apps on a nongenuine device, but it has to support older devices without TPMs so it's not fully locked down yet. Even YouTube has some level of attestation.

AtlasBarfed3• 11 months ago

This is one of the real canaries I watch on "real AI" for programming.

It should be able to make an OS. It should be able to write drivers. It should be able to port code to new platforms. It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures.

Sure seems we are very far from that, but really these are breadth-based knowledge with extensive examples / training sources. It SHOULD be something LLMs are good at, not new/novel/deep/difficult problems. What I described are labor-intensive and complicated, but not "difficult".

And would any corporate AI allow that?

We should be pretty paranoid about centralized control attempts, especially in tech. This is a ... fragile ... time.

ACCount375• 11 months ago

AI kicks ass at a lot of "routine reverse engineering" tasks already.

You can feed it assembly listings, or bytecode that the decompiler couldn't handle, and get back solid results.

And corporate AIs don't really have a fuck to give, at least not yet. You can sic Claude on obvious decompiler outputs, or a repo of questionable sources with a "VERY BIG CORPO - PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL" in every single file, and it'll sift through it - no complaints, no questions asked. And if that data somehow circles back into the training eventually, then all the funnier.

beeflet12• 11 months ago

It should be able to make an OS. It should be able to write drivers.

How is it going to do that without testing (and potentially bricking) hardware in real life?

It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures

I don't know why you would use an LLM to do that. Couldn't you just distribute the binaries in some intermediate format, or decompile them to a comprehensible source format first?

wisty• 11 months ago

Remember, the law provides patent, copyright, trade mark, and NDA protection.

While it would be a burden to require a degree of openness, it's not like companies are all rugged individualists who would never want to see legal restrictions in the field.

It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest.

Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation, and it's innovation that in the ling run makes things improve IMO.

ranyume3• 11 months ago

Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation

I'm not sure innovation is really impacted when restricting the private sector. Traditionally, innovation happens in public (e.g, universities) or military spaces.

ethersteeds• 11 months ago

It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest.

If only it were so. But it's not just that. It's also a question of which section of society has the power to demand or prevent the creation of such a system.

Whether enacting labor protections or the Magna Carta, these beneficial restrictions require some leverage. Otherwise what is overall beat and fairest won't be coming up.

jacquesm7• 11 months ago

Google and Apple have more power than most nations.

And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation. But corporations are now more powerful than most nations, including some really big ones. So the only way to solve this is to for an umbrella for nations that offsets the power that these corporations have.

The first thing you notice when you arrive at Brussels airport is the absolute barrage of Google advertising that tries to convince you that Google is doing everything they can to play by the rules. When it is of course doing the exact opposite. So at least Google seems to realize that smaller nations banding together wield power. But they will never wield it as effectively as a company can, so we still have many problems.

lukan5• 11 months ago

"And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation"

Since nations can be really small, I don't agree.

BrenBarn2• 11 months ago

Well, an umbrella for nations or a sledgehammer for companies. I'd say just start shredding large companies left and right.

vbezhenar4• 11 months ago

These are basics of capitalism.

Company aims for profit.

Bigger scale allows for better efficiency.

So companies naturally grow big. The bigger they are, the easier for them to compete.

Big companies have access to tremendous resources, so they can push laws by bribing law makers, advertising their agenda to the masses.

There's no way around it, not without dismantling capitalism. Nations will serve to the corporations, no other way around.

There are natural boundaries of the growth scale, which are related to the inherent efficiency of communications between people and overall human capability. Corporations are controlled by people and people have limited brains and mouths. I feel that with AI development, those boundaries will move apart and allow for even greater growth eventually.

SilverElfin3• 11 months ago

Google and Apple have more power than most nations.

Yep. They control our information - how we make it, what we are allowed to find, and what we can say. And they are large enough to not face real competition. So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations they are and regulate heavily. Smaller companies can be left unregulated. But not companies worth 500 billion or more.

the_other4• 11 months ago

So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations

If they were state owned, we could vote for how the profits get used and we would have larger budgets for healthcare and education.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 11 months ago

"This makes the point that the real battle we should be fighting is not for control of Android/iOS, but the ability to run other operating systems on phones."

Sometimes owner control, cf. corporate control, can be had by sacrificing hardware functionality, i.e., features, closed source drivers. Choice between particular hardware feature(s) working and control over the hardware in general.

colordrops• 11 months ago

Yes but in the phone space the sacrifice is too much. You often times forgo the ability to even participate in many aspects of society, e.g. banking. It's not your typical "rough around the edges open source alternative", it's just not even a comparison.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 11 months ago

Have at least two phones. One with corporate OS for banking, commerce. Another with user-chosen OS for experimentation, able to boot from external media.

makeitdouble5• 11 months ago

Google and Apple have more power than most nations.

To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US.

The UK going after Apple, only to get rebutted by the US is the most simple instance of it. International treaties pushed by the US strongly protecting it's top corporations is the more standard behavior.

Any entity fighting the duopoly is effectively getting into a fight with the US.

throwaway311314• 11 months ago

To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US.

If this is true then why is Tim Cook visiting Trump? Shouldn’t it be the other way around.

narrator• 11 months ago

Well there's Huawei's Harmony OS. Can someone who knows what's going on with that report in? Is it anything close to an open platform?

blackoil• 11 months ago

It is also equally closed, so not the champion you are looking for. It could still be a major player breaking the duopoly.

GeekyBear4• 11 months ago

The real battle is over Google selling the public on the notion that Android would be the "open" platform that allowed people to run anything they liked on their device, and then deciding to use anticompetitive means to take that freedom away.

Without that fraudulent marketing, Android never would have crowded out other options so quickly in the marketplace.

The solution is to either have Google back down on breaking its promise that Android would be open or to have an antitrust lawsuit strip Android from Google's control.

Aachen10• 11 months ago

What worries me is that Google has a fairly legit argument to say "then Apple should as well". But we've accepted Apple's status for so long now, a lot of consumers are stockholmed into thinking giving away control is the only way to have a good phone (evidence: see any thread discussing that maybe Apple should allow other vendors to also use their smartwatch hardware to offer services in non-smartwatch-hardware markets that Apple also offers services in. Half the users seem like they're brainwashed by the marketing material they put out). I don't know that we can convince the general public anymore that 1984 is bad (thinking of Apple's own 1984 ad, specifically) and, without general public, there can theoretically also not be political will

I was part of this problem. I've accepted what Apple is doing because I had Android. I didn't think they'd come for me next so I didn't speak up

protocolture3• 11 months ago

let's be real: Google and Apple have more power than most nations.

Lets be real, they do not have more power than any nations. They have a lot of power in a few tiny silos that happen to make up like 90% of the mental space of a lot of terminally online folk.

Heck they probably have less power than Coca Cola or Pepsi did during the Cola wars, or United Fruit Company at its height.

Wake me up when Apple rolls a tank into red square or Google does anything but complain about national security legislation it then goes and assertively complies with.

nialse2• 11 months ago

There are power rankings where these top companies are considered more influential than many nations.

https://www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-wo... https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchme... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesl...

vbezhenar4• 11 months ago

ability to run other operating systems on phones
building those alternatives is basically impossible

For smart people it is not impossible. Just few years ago, few folks wrote complicated drivers for completely closed hardware, and I'm talking about M1 Macbook.

Google Pixel, on the other hand, was pretty open until very recently. I might be wrong about specifics, but I'm pretty sure that most of software was open, so you could just look at the kernel sources in the readable C to look for anything. You can literally build this kernel and run linux userspace and go from there to any lengths of development. Or you can build alternative systems, looking at driver sources.

I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.

yardstick4• 11 months ago

I’m fairly sure the modem firmware on the Pixels was never open. There’s some hardware that will never have open firmware to it. Especially when that firmware deals with regulated airwaves like cell signals.

fluoridation7• 11 months ago

I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.

My guess would be that it's a continuously moving target. There's no point in spending years working to support some weird integrated wifi adapter+battery controller when by the time you're done the hardware is already obsolete and no longer being manufactured. Repeat that for every device on the phone. The only ones who can keep up with that pace are the manufacturers themselves. It'd be different if there was some kind of standardization that would make the effort worthwhile, though.

bee_rider4• 11 months ago

I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.

Cellphones are not very useful as programming tools (too small), which is what Open Source excels at.

Also, cellphones need to handle some annoying things, like it should always be possible and easy to call emergency services. Which is to say, the UI work seems stressful.

beeflet12• 11 months ago

With the right trusted computing modules, it will be impossible. As far as I am concerned, the asahi developers are building on a foundation of sand because Apple could just lock down the bootloader for the iMac laptops or whatever next generation

mike_hearn7• 11 months ago

I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.

They're graphical consumer devices, the quality bar is so high nobody can reach it except huge well funded teams. It's like asking why desktop Linux doesn't still attract OS builders, or for that matter, why the PC platform doesn't attract OS builders. Occasionally someone makes an OS that boots to a simple windowed GUI as a hobby, that's as far as it gets now.

A lot of these HN discussions dance around or ignore this point. When people demand the freedom to run whatever they want, they never give use cases that motivate this. Which OS do they want to dual boot? Some minor respin of Android with a few tweaks that doesn't disagree with Google on anything substantial (Google accepted a lot of PRs from GrapheneOS people).

Nobody is building a compelling new OS even on platforms that have fully documented drivers. There's no point. There are no new ideas, operating systems are mature, it's done, there's nothing to do there. Even Meta gave up on their XROS and that was at least for a new hardware profile. Google did bend over backwards to let people treat phones like they were PCs but it seems regular Android is in practice open enough for what people want to do.

fsflover26• 11 months ago

as the author acknowledges, building those alternatives is basically impossible

I don't understand why everybody is ignoring existing, working GNU/Linux phones: Librem 5 and Pinephone. The former is my daily driver btw.

msgodel• 11 months ago

Apparently they just can't live without Netflix and its even worth their freedom.

kylecazar2• 11 months ago

It's a matter of ownership vs. licensing. You own the hardware you buy, but you license the software. I agree with the author that as long as you use that software, you should be subject to the constraints of the license.

The key is that if you choose not to run that software, your hardware should not be constrained. You own the hardware, it's a tangible thing that is your property.

Boils down to a consumer rights issue that I fall on the same side of as the author.

EvanAnderson• 11 months ago

The hardware should not be equipped with undefeatable digital locks. Put a physical switch on the hardware (like Chromebooks have-- had?) to allow the owner to opt out of the walled garden.

Also worrisome are e-fuses, which allow software to make irrevocable physical changes to your hardware. They shouldn't be allowed to be modified except by the owner. (See Nintendo Switch updates blowing e-fuses to prevent downgrades.)

charcircuit5• 11 months ago

E fuses are needed so people can't downgrade the device to old insecure software to exploit it. Without it or an equivalent like a secure monotonic counter how do you think such attacks be protected?

hibikir• 11 months ago

When the hardware is complicated enough that the software required to run it al all would take many millions of dollars to replicate, hardware freedom alone doesn't cut it. Just like a modern processor needs mountains of microcode to do anything you'd actually want. And that's without companies needing to obfuscate their hardware to avoid interoperability they don't want.

In practice, a whole lot software would have to be open source too so that the hardware is reasonably usable. The layers you'd need to let an iPhone run android well, or a Pixel phone to run iOS are not small.

glitchc2• 11 months ago

First, we had bespoke computer systems where the hardware and software were tailored to solve specific problems. Then, as computers became commoditized, the hardware was more standardized and software interacted with it through an abstraction layer. Now, we're circling back to heterogeneous hardware where software and hardware are tightly coupled for the best performance and power efficiency. Of course there's always a trade-off. In this case, it's flexibility.

The smartphone does not consist of just one processor, it's a collection of dedicated processors, each running custom algorithms locally. Sure, there's software running in the application layer, but it's playing more of a coordination role than actually doing the work. Just think of sending a packet over the internet and how different it is between a smartphone and a computer, how much more complex a cellular modem is compared to a network card.

It's less about software now and more about hardware accelerated modules. Even CPUs run primarily on microcode which can be patched after the fact.

These patterns are cyclical. It will take a number of years before we return to standardized compute again, but return we will. Eventually.

bccdee5• 11 months ago

That's an oddly legalistic line to draw. What if they start licensing the hardware too? Surely if we care about users being respected by technology, the line between software and hardware or between ownership and licensing is immaterial. These are all excuses to deny users the opportunity to do things they should be entitled to do, like installing arbitrary applications.

kylecazar2• 11 months ago

Well, the line is drawn by the fact that hardware and software have intrinsic differences. It sounds like we're on the same page about hardware -- with the software, should we not be bound by licenses in client/server services (phones, consoles)? You are using someone else's service with others, for some collective benefit like playing a game, and being bound to constraints on that software doesn't seem that offensive. Modified clients can piss in the pool for others using the services and affect the network's quality.

Again, if you want to run purely OSS software with permissive licenses, that should be your prerogative. But you might miss out on the Play store. If you want to mess with Valve anti-cheat, you can't connect to Steam games online. Etc. I think these companies do have a right to dictate software requirements for client code accessing their servers.

But, you should be able to wipe those clients if you don't care about them and play tux racer on Arch.

htrp• 11 months ago

You don't own the hardware, it's now a license just like the software..... problem solved.

anothernewdude• 11 months ago

If sideloading goes, so does their OS.

surajrmal• 11 months ago

What are you planning to use instead?

andy99• 11 months ago

I don't think government should be involved here, but what they can do is (a) always provide alternatives where interacting with government doesn't require a smartphone or apps, and (b) mandate the same for regulated or essential industries like banks and airlines etc.

I'm not convinced there is some inalienable right to load an OS onto any hardware but said hardware/OS should never be on the critical path to anything a citizen needs to do.

yesbut2• 11 months ago

If left to the generosity of companies to allow us to control the hardware we purchase then we will never be able to modify the hardware we purchase again. There are no inalienable rights that we, as humans, do not define and legislate ourselves. If we want unfettered control of the hardware that we purchase then we need to codify it into law.

Tempest1981• 11 months ago

Including cars, TVs, and home appliances -- those are the items I really want to hack.

nicce• 11 months ago

And tractors

hennell• 11 months ago

Conversely those are some of the devices that make me question the principle “I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own”.

Cars are increasingly controlled more via code than driver, but that (hopefully) goes through certification and oversight processes. Lane control, collision detection, self parking, self driving features - should people be able to hack these systems? Do we want people running their own collision detection routines that are less sensitive, because the stock option keeps slowing them down so much everyday when they drive past a school?

I imagine many of us here have encountered a computer that's broken because the user installed a programe to "make their machine faster" which deleted important windows files or removed everything from the startup folder that the user needs to use. I'm sure I could make a lot of money with a programme that decreases the time it takes to recharge your EV. Might remove heat protections, run at your own risk! (And the risk of passengers, neighbours, pedestrians and anyone your share a road with...)

I don't care if you want to run code that can allow more nuances to the seat heating, but do I think that's an important enough principle to also allow drivers to watch netflix on the in car display?

TVs and home appliances are less concerning, but I'm sure there's users out there who'd like to disable the annoying "don't run the dryer when it's full of lint" lock out or stop their garage door from beeping at their car everyday, not realising that setting also keeps it from closing on top of neighbourhood kids or cats.

I don't know if there's anyway to balance a reasonable right to tinker with a general right to live in a safe environment. I also suspect EU and US readers will have quite different takes on it - in part because of the current culture, in part because I think a lot of it is quite effected by geography. Live in dense housing and your neighbours ability to burn their house down is much more of your concern!)

Perz1val3• 11 months ago

People have been running modded firmware and custom computers in their cars for a long time and it seems you haven't even noticed.

yesbut2• 11 months ago

Anyone who doesn't agree with this is a collaborator and should be publicly shamed.

Ferret7446• 11 months ago

I think we really need to discuss whether IP/copyright protections were a mistake. A LOT of our "modern" problems stem from IP protections. Whether that be not being able to own media, right to repair, DRM, censorship, a lot of monopolistic behavior, medicine prices, etc. And no wonder, IP protection is government sanctioned monopoly, and it is generally recognized that monopolies are bad; is it such a surprise that government enforced monopolies are bad?

throwaway13337• 11 months ago

Agreed. Monopoly is the killer of the market engine that powers the positive sum society we all benefit from.

Actually enforcing the anti-monopoly rules on the books would help, too.

And while we're making wishes, we could kill the VC-backed tech play by enforcing a digital version of anti-dumping laws.

With those rules in place, we'd see our market engine quite a bit more aligned with the social good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

crazygringo2• 11 months ago

Not really sure what this has to do with running your own code, though.

If a manufacturer makes a device locked down, it's the technological protections preventing you from running your own code. Not IP/copyright. Sometimes they get jailbroken but sometimes not.

jacquesm7• 11 months ago

Plenty of barriers around circumventing such obstacles hinge on IP legislation.

pishpash5• 11 months ago

The protection period simply needs to be adjusted downward to reflect the faster pace of change. Rewarding 1700's technology pace today is asinine.

themafia• 11 months ago

The original copyright from the 1700s was 14 years. You could file for an additional 14 years after that. It was extended starting in 1909 until the monstrosity it is today.

We're far from the promotion of useful arts and sciences and instead guarding the likeness of a cartoon mouse.

GuB-422• 11 months ago

A lot of us get to live thanks to IP protections too. >90% of Hacker News readers I'd say, including myself. Software development is all about IP, most of art too, and medicine, and chemistry in general. Who wants to pay people to develop software, or even design new hardware or medicine if competitors can take all that hard work for free?

There may be alternatives to copyright and IP in general, but that would require dramatic changes to society, and maybe not in a good way. What you would get is essentially communism. Rejection of intellectual property is a form of rejection of private property, which is at the core of communism. Problem is, looking at past examples, it didn't work great.

immibis5• 10 months ago

You can ignore laws on the dark web, but we still don't have dark web alternative phone OSes.

Except GrapheneOS, I suppose, but it's still riding the coattails of Android. Police in some places assume you're a drug dealer and arrest you if you have it, so it does qualify as "dark web".

divan9• 11 months ago

It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make the development of new operating systems possible

As someone who enjoyed Linux phones like the Nokia N900/950 and would love to see those hacker-spirited devices again, statements like this sound more than naïve to me. I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here.

I also don’t see Apple or Google as merely companies that assemble parts and selling us "hardware". The decades when hardware and software were two disconnected worlds are gone.

Reading technical documentation on things like secure enclaves, UWB chips, computational photography stack, HRTF tuning, unified memory, TrueDepth cameras, AWDL, etc., it feels very wrong to support claims like the OP makes. “Hardware I own” sounds like you bought a pan and demand the right to cook any food you want. But we’re not buying pans anymore — we’re buying airplanes that also happen to serve food.

saurik• 11 months ago

It being difficult is different from it being possible. If a company wants to raise $50m to read all the documentation and build an alternative OS to run on this crazy piece of hardware, as the consumer I still benefit. If you'd prefer, let's stick with repair? I also need all of that information to be able to repair my phone, but again, it wouldn't necessarily be ME who repairs my own phone: I take it to a third-party expert who has built out their own expertise and tools.

(Hell: I'd personally be OK without "documentation"... it should simply be illegal to actively go out of your way to prevent people from doing this. This way you also aren't mandating anyone go to extra effort they otherwise wouldn't bother with: the status quo is that, because they can, they thrown down an incredible amount of effort trying to prevent people from figuring things out themselves, and that really sucks.)

fastball10• 11 months ago

$50m to build a modern OS from scratch

heh.

jhatemyjob2• 11 months ago

I feel like adding more laws for this kind of stuff won't really stick. Like a pie-in-the-sky sort of thing. We can hem and haw about what the government should do all we want but like... I mean, the Digital Markets Act certainly made a HUGE impact. And the GDPR is definitely a net positive for society.

I think the thing you brought up at the beginning is the most practical path forward, someone with the technical know-how and business acumen needs to start a company. Apple and Google are quite weak now, and there are lessons to be learned from the Librem 5 and PinePhone. If enough people try, someone will eventually break through.

wkat42422• 11 months ago

I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here.

However the interests you mention aren't collective at all but very singularly the ones of the manufacturer only

HDThoreaun2• 11 months ago

Its only the manufacturers interests because they dont want people to brick their phone on accident. Really theyre only a secondary party of interest, the real interested party is grandma/anyone who can fall victim to malware. Apples decision to ban sideloading is a huge part of how they became the most popular phone maker in the us

sudosysgen• 11 months ago

There is already open source software for UWB, computational photography, various depth cameras, direct link WiFi, etc...

Will it be as good as the iOS implementation? Probably not. But it's hardly an impossible fact and not one that has to be done entirely over and over for every device. The Asahi folks showed it could be done despite hostile conditions.

tern5• 11 months ago

Not to mention, it's an authoritarian attitude, talking about forcing companies to support arbitrary software stacks

jacquesm7• 11 months ago

That's not what they wrote at all.

immibis5• 11 months ago

Is it authoritarian to stop other people from being authoritarians?

K0nserv3• 11 months ago

Op here: The point I'm trying to make in the piece is that this is less authoritarian than the common suggestion that Apple and Google be forced to change how iOS and Android works. The piece is meant to be a juxtaposition to that idea.

Aerroon• 11 months ago

“Hardware I own” sounds like you bought a pan and demand the right to cook any food you want.

Because I did. How come I can do what I want with my computer, but not my phone? Why are phones so inferior in this area?

My phone is more powerful than many of the computers I've had in the past, yet I need to jump through a million hoops to use it as a software development platform. Why?

beeflet12• 11 months ago

A very profitable instance of market segmentation

divan9• 11 months ago

Your smartwatch is probably more powerful than some of your past computers too. Same with your DSLR camera. Even your smart fridge. These are specialized hardware+software gadgets designed to a particular purpose, which is very different from being a development platform. Same with a phone.

mayama• 11 months ago

Because I did. How come I can do what I want with my computer, but not my phone? Why are phones so inferior in this area?

Apple and Microsoft are constantly working on fixing the issue with their appstores and requiring app signing in more places. The way industry going is to lock down more of laptops, than allowing phones to be like computers.

tim333• 11 months ago

How come I can do what I want with my computer, but not my phone?

It kind of started because phones interact with phone networks and the network companies didn't want hacked software mucking up their networks. I realise the baseband part is separate from the rest of the phone but it's always been that way with every cell phone I've had over 30 years, that they are part locked down.

Whereas none of the regular computers and laptops have been especially locked down.

It would be cool if you could just connect your laptop to a radio and connect to cell networks but I don't think any of them allow that?

pishpash5• 11 months ago

That argues for opening up the hardware more, not closing down the software.

In fact it further argues that the degree of vertical integration is monopolistic. Why should a Sony CMOS camera be tied to some Apple computational photography code only available in Apple firmware or iOS? What if I do not like that it makes up images that don't exist? What if someone has a better method but now cannot bring it to market?

Break it up and open it up. I assure you it can be done.

fluoridation7• 11 months ago

I also don’t see Apple or Google as merely companies that assemble parts and selling us "hardware". The decades when hardware and software were two disconnected worlds are gone.

That when you buy a phone you're also buying software components doesn't change the fact that the phone is owned entirely by you. You're not entering into a partnership to co-own the phone with anyone else, it's entirely yours. No one should get to decide how you use it but you.

But we’re not buying pans anymore — we’re buying airplanes that also happen to serve food.

So the argument is that by taking a piece of electronics I paid for that is running on electricity I pay for, and making it run some arbitrary piece of software, I'm putting people's lives at risk?

arccy• 11 months ago

that has never been true, your phone contains a radio, governed by the relevant laws of your locale.

elric• 11 months ago

As someone who enjoyed Linux phones like the Nokia N900/950 and would love to see those hacker-spirited devices again

Why haven't we seen a spiritual successor to the N900? It's a little strange to me that it's cheaper than ever to produce hardware, even in relatively small quantities, but no one (AFAIK) is producing any geek-oriented phones like the N900. Linux hardware support gets better every year. It shouldn't be terribly hard to have a factory produce a small number of open phones that can run Linux. They wouldn't be any good without significant investment in phone-specific usability, but still.

arto• 11 months ago

https://righttocompute.ai

micromacrofoot• 11 months ago

tbh I don't even care about support, just give me the keys

but ultimately it doesn't matter, if the market could bear the additional cost a competitor could emerge... but they barely do anywhere

honestly at this point in life I think it would be easier to change society to be structured in a way to make the people running these companies want to give it to you

sciencesama• 11 months ago

Cuda disagrees with you !

fareesh• 11 months ago

the Android change doesn't impact your ability to plug in your own device and run your own code or someone else's code

the change impacts closed source software distributed without verification which is by definition unknown so the "want" is not possible - i.e. you can't know if you want to run it.

marcus_holmes2• 11 months ago

I know I'm going to get downvoted to hell for this, but I genuinely think it's OK for a device manufacturer to say: "we are building this device to run this software. If you don't want to run this software, then don't buy this device. There are plenty of other devices out there that will run other software, you can buy one of those if you want to run other software - our devices are designed to only run our software, and we're only going to support that".

I think that's a huge difference from the sideloading issue, though. Which is effectively saying "you must purchase all your software for this device from us, even if it's not our software, and even if it's available elsewhere for less".

I get how one statement creates the monopoly that allows the other statement, but I think they are still two separate statements.

serf• 11 months ago

There are plenty of other devices out there that will run other software, you can buy one of those if you want to run other software - our devices are designed to only run our software, and we're only going to support tha

except in about a hundred million examples where the niche software that is running on the niche hardware has no viable alternative.

In The Real World when you have a component that breaks somewhere, and the manufacturer of the thing either fails to help or no longer exists you contract a third party to retrofit a repair module of some sort, or you do the work yourself to get the thing working.

How does this principle apply when the producer of the thing booby traps it with encryption and circuit breakers?

Software is special, comparing it to other industries never works well.

marcus_holmes2• 11 months ago

I agree that there's a difference between just not supporting the device running other software, and actively preventing the device from running other software. The latter doesn't serve anyone.

mixmastamyk8• 11 months ago

There are plenty of other devices out there...

No there isn't, and one of the main problems.

SchemaLoad4• 11 months ago

There are if you are willing to have two devices. One secure phone for banking, phone calls, etc. And a portable linux device for installing whatever you want on. Where installing malware doesn't risk losing all of your money.

scosman4• 11 months ago

+1. Smartphones aren't a monopoly. GrapheneOS is a thing. More companies can build hardware for it if there's demand. Not every piece of hardware needs to be general purpose computer.

I've been delighted to get my parents on iPhone+iPad for simplicity (and they have too). It feels this crowd sometimes assumes every barrier put in place is anti-consumer, but it's not. Blocking access to sensors, limiting background runtime, blocking access to other app's data, limiting it to reviewed apps... are all great things for most people. Most people don't have the technical literacy to have "informed consent" prompts popping up every 5 minutes, and most of them know it too. Most folks don't mind trusting Apple to make the tougher technical calls for them, and actually appreciate it.

Make cool hacker centric hardware. Make cool easy to use, locked down, and foolproof hardware. Both can and should exist.

const_cast28• 11 months ago

There is exactly one device produced in the entire US that can legitimately run graphene is in a usable way.

Not a monopoly my ass.

Make cool hacker centric hardware. Make cool easy to use, locked down, and foolproof hardware. Both can and should exist.

Yes, what a splendid idea! Let me just invest a few billion I have lying around here. And maybe after that we can all take a spaceship to Mars and colonize it!

Get real.

Also, doesn't even fucking matter. Guess what, let's say I do invest the 10 billion dollars to make said device.

Will my bank allow it? No. Why? Because Google says so. Google says "no, that's not attested"

It doesn't matter if I make one device, two devices, or one trillion devices. Its still ALL Google. They decide everything.

mullingitover• 11 months ago

Command+F 'drivers'

0 results

These things are never thought through. Sure, Apple could unlock the whole thing, tell everyone to go nuts. Who's writing the damn drivers? Apple's certainly not obligated to open source theirs, I also can't imagine them signing someone else's. So we end up with a bunch of homebrew drivers, devices crashing, getting pwned, and the dozens of people who install a third party OS on their iPhone write furious articles that get voted up to the front page of HN.

Almondsetat3• 11 months ago

Open source drivers are the overlooked heroes that make everything work. If linux hadn't had all these drivers written or ported to it (think of your intel NICs) the OS would be dead in the water

SlowTao4• 11 months ago

Bingo. They may not be as fast or feature complete but they do work.

bluesign3• 11 months ago

Yeah but those times were easy. Now drivers are binary blobs and firmwares basically.

daft_pink4• 11 months ago

There’s something weird about it. My phone needs to be hyper secure, and a lot of companies went to monetize that and introduce insecurities with their software.

That’s why I love my iPhone, but I’m not super happy about what happens with my Mac.

There’s something in the reality that it’s the app developers not the user that are being restricted by Apple. Apple keeps the app developers from doing things I don’t like for the most part. I don’t feel very restricted.

But I don’t want my computer to become a walled garden. It’s only OK for my phone.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 11 months ago

What does this have to do with the article?

pparanoidd• 11 months ago

Flexibility is usually inverse of security

daft_pink4• 11 months ago

The article is a discussion about google‘s android app processes becoming more strict and the authors opinion that that’s terrible.

My comment is an argument against sideloading for phone devices because there’s a lot of nefarious behavior in these types of apps by comparing apples process because Apple is the other operator in this duopoly of phone operating systems. Sorry that was not clear.

Aachen10• 11 months ago

There’s something in the reality that it’s the app developers not the user that are being restricted by Apple.

Reading this comment as a user and developer in one person, it's so weird to see this disjointed picture of developers and users. You should have rights and feel unrestricted as a user but I shouldn't? Have you considered that being a developer is about the same as being a writer instead of a reader? We're the same...

I don’t want my computer to become a walled garden

Why not? I don't think I can articulate an answer to the "I don't feel restricted" remark earlier better than you can probably do yourself by seeking what it is that rebels against these walls

daft_pink4• 11 months ago

The fact that I go to McDonald’s and they play a recording every time asking me for an app code. Or I go to Petsmart and they give me all kinds of discounts for installing their app. Or Reddit barely works unless you install their stupid app. There is clearly some invasive behavior happening with apps on phones that doesn’t seem to happen on computers the companies are so insanely motivated to get you to install their freaking app

The difference is I bought the device so I don’t care if you feel restricted as a developer. I’m just saying as a user I feel protected by having someone review the apps that are going on my phone and denying ones they feel suck.

I’m also a developer however I don’t write phone apps

betaby2• 11 months ago

EU is dropping the ball here. Instead of mandating open hardware they trying to force companies to comply with random stuff, mostly censorship and spying. In theory EU can mandate open bootloaders like EU mandates USB-C charging, but they won't. Open hardware is the enemy of the EU, since that means everyone would be able to bypass the chatcontrol of the day.

hoppp3• 11 months ago

Eu has the Digital Markets Act and what google is doing is illegal in Eu. Gatekeepers must allow people to side-load software by regulation.

Makes me think that google did this now since trump has been criticizing the DMA, so now they feel empowered by their leader to break the law

SchemaLoad4• 11 months ago

Google does still let you sideload though. The publisher has to submit ID but other than that, there are no restrictions.

betaby2• 11 months ago

Side loading is absolutely not equal open bootloader!

rickdeckard3• 11 months ago

In theory EU can mandate open bootloaders like EU mandates USB-C charging, but they won't.

The EU cannot simply mandate random stuff, it needs to make a strong case and prove an economic benefit considering also the possible negative consequences.

Noone is forced to do business in the EU, so it always has to consider the cost and risk for a company vs. the overall benefit for a company of doing business in the EU.

Defining a mandate for "open hardware" is a MASSIVE undertaking, creating investment risks for innovators, potential security-risks for the entire EU, additional costs for development, maintenance, support for all manufacturers selling in that market.

What is the economic, technology-agnostic case in favor of open bootloaders which would make EU member-countries support such a regulation?

How much would a manufacturer be required to provide to be compliant? Continued operation even when the trust-chain is broken? Developer Documentation? compilable source-code? Hardware-warranty?

Should a car still be allowed to operate after it's unlocked? Should it behave somehow differently to ensure safety for its owner as well as others? How about an elevator? How about a Microwave?

What would be the tangible economic benefit of such a mandate to companies and citizens in the EU sector?

For a regulatory action, all of this needs to be described in an agnostic way, providing a clear path for a manufacturer to be compliant without creating too much burden on any party in the process.

Nursie8• 11 months ago

I want my less tech savvy family members to be able to buy locked-to-the-company-store hardware, that they can’t run other things on, as it protects them from one avenue of scams and hacks. This protection can and will be worked around if it can be easily disabled.

Fully open phone systems consistently fail to sell enough to make a difference, which is a bit of a shame, but honestly at this point the market has spoken.

hoppp3• 11 months ago

That is understandable, most people are not technical but the few who has a need for it should have an option for it.

As a developer I write apps for myself and I side-load them. Why take away my right to do so, just because other people can't then nobody should?

Nursie8• 11 months ago

Because you’re in a tiny minority and it’s more important that more people be protected from malware.

Buy a specifically open phone, and support that market segment.

greatgib• 11 months ago

Nothing prevents that the device is locked by you instead of the "store" or even that the device has a "safe" mode that has to be explicitly disabled by the user in a non obvious way like connecting the device to a computer and running a command or so.

The only important thing is for the bank, Netflix and co to not be able to discriminate. But again nothing would provide the bank to offer a setting for the user to restrict where it can use it's banking app if it was not discriminatory. But we know well where this goes, in the end if you don't enable it

Nursie8• 11 months ago

I think the bank should be able to discriminate, they should be allowed to say they only work on locked devices, surely.

It’s a security measure, particularly as we place more responsibility on banks to prevent their customers being defrauded.

zigzag3123• 11 months ago

You provided an alterative solution yourself. Make protection harder to disable, so non-tech savvy users can't disable it easily, always inform them of the consequences of disabling it and make it that it's only needed in exceptional cases (there a lot of room for improvement here).

If they want to climb over the protection fence, they should be able to do it as they clearly WANT to do it. Why should you have control what they can or cannot do? (Unless they are your kids.) Should experts in other fields also be able to control over what their layman family members are allowed to do?

Nursie8• 11 months ago

always inform them of the consequences

This would be about as useful as telling the cat why he can’t go out right now. The words would not be understood, as they won’t be by probably 90% of humanity.

If they want to…

They don’t. Categorically. The only reason they would try is because they are being scammed with offers of getting something or cajolement entreating them to allow it.

Why should you have control what they can or cannot do?

Me? I’m not asking for control. I’m saying that most people aren’t equipped to understand the threats they face, even in the face of explanation or warning, and their use-cases are comprehensively covered without it. My parents are old. My brother ends up with any PC he owns full of malware and viruses. The current status quo serves them and many millions of other people very well, and we need to be very cautious when arguing to rip this away in the name of our freedom - to them it only represents freedom to be exploited.

Should experts in other fields also be able to control over what their layman family member…

Experts in other fields determine the extent of what all laypeople may do legally all the time. Or do you live somewhere that there are zero restrictions on (for example) gas plumbing or work on electrical systems?

add-sub-mul-div2• 11 months ago

As for the new Android restrictions I assume my Galaxy S20 will be immune to them because it's not getting (major) updates anymore. I'll continue using it as long as I can to avoid this. Does anyone know the most recent Galaxy phone that will be safe from this? I want to get a backup.

odo12422• 11 months ago

It likely won't be safe - they're probably going to enforce it through a Google Play Services update rather than an Android update, which means all previous Android OS versions after 5.0 (Lollipop, released in 2014) will be hit with the changes. In order to bypass that you'd need to install a Custom ROM or stop using and uninstall the Google Play Store entirely (since it's not possible to selectively disable just this).

Android uses Google Play Services updates to update some features or security without relying on manufacturers to update the OS and drivers.

seviu2• 11 months ago

I seriously doubt they can restrict sideloading through Google play services.

But if they do then it’s worse than what I thought.

glitchc2• 11 months ago

Why not launch a new startup focused on building an open smartphone? This is HN after all, with the right pitch someone will throw money at it.

Biganon• 11 months ago

Because only a bunch of nerds would use it, your bank wouldn't support running its shitty app on it, and it's back to square 1.

Liftyee4• 11 months ago

As other comments have pointed out, this statement (one I 100% support, BTW) is a little naive. I can see how it might be unreasonable to expect companies to publish documentation, build infrastructure, etc. to support running your own code on the hardware you own (which 99% of people will never need to do).

However, I strongly believe that - should one choose to do so - you should not be stopped from jailbreaking, cracking, etc. manufacturer restrictions on the hardware you own. Companies aren't obligated to support me doing this - but why should legislation stop me if I want to try? (You can easily guess my thoughts on the DMCA.)

danpalmer2• 11 months ago

Companies aren't obligated to support me doing this

Where does one draw the line on support? If I jailbreak an iPhone, should I still get Apple customer support for the apps on it, even though they may have been manipulated by some aspect of the jailbreak? (Very real problem, easy to cause crashes in other apps when you mess around with root access) Should I still get a battery replacement within warranty from Apple even though I've used software that runs the battery hotter and faster than it would on average on a non-jailbroken iPhone?

I feel like changing the software shouldn't void your warranty, but I can see arguments against that. I probably fall on the side of losing all software support if you make changes like this, but even then it's not clear cut.

crazygringo2• 11 months ago

The line is definitely crossed if you jailbreak your phone. It seems pretty clear. Either you're using the device as the manufacturer intended or not. If I take a device rated for 2m of water down scuba diving to 25m, it voids my warranty too.

seany• 11 months ago

It's up to the manufacturer to prove that the software modification had a material impact on the issue being covered. Yes that's expensive, yes that's the point.

mordae2• 11 months ago

Imagine Lenovo refusing to service your ThinkPad because you've compiled your own kernel.

Charging IC has NTC thermistor and battery absolutely must withstand the system running on 100% and then some.

As for battery lifetime, batteries are cheap, unless you glue them to an expensive assembly and force people to replace whole assembly as phone vendors do.

Liftyee4• 11 months ago

As you said, this might be a complex one to figure out. I am biased because I tend not to use customer support services (with more of a "figure it out" approach) and am confident I could replace parts myself, though the latter might be harder with parts pairing today.

Can see how people more interested in the software side of things would care about support from [parent company] though. "Lose all support if you bypass our restrictions" is the relatively straightforward approach, but the collateral damage might be quite high. In an ideal world, perhaps the network of third party repair services could take up the slack?

inetknght6• 11 months ago

I can see how it might be unreasonable to expect companies to publish documentation, build infrastructure, etc. to support running your own code on the hardware you own (which 99% of people will never need to do).

Did you know that television schematics used to come with the documentation for the TV? Discussed not-too-recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26996413

tamimio• 11 months ago

Not defending Apple, but when they restrict sideloading it's because they made both the software and the hardware. They didn't exploit thousands of open source developers who basically worked for free making Android what it is right now, only to be hijacked by Google. I used to use Android but I did notice a huge decline around 2015, which was around the time when the Android creator left Google.

agentultra2• 11 months ago

100 percent agree.

I’ve given talks on how various jailbreak exploits work in order to teach people how to protect their own software but also with the suggestion that we should be able to do this.

It’s nuts that personal computers aren’t personal anymore. Devices you might not think of as PC’s… just are. They’re sold in slick hardware. And the software ecosystem tries to prevent tampering in the name of security… but it’s not security for the end user most of the time. It’s security for the investors to ensure you have to keep paying them.

e_i_pi_22• 11 months ago

It’s nuts that personal computers aren’t personal anymore

I think the core driver here is that most people don't want a "personal" computer, they want a device that's able to reliably accomplish tasks. Early computers gave users much more power and control but that also came with the responsibility to set up and maintain the system, which limited the userbase a lot. I'd argue a lot of the security is security from the user against themself - there is definitely some value in trying your best to make sure a user is unable to brick their phone no matter how much they try, because they're likely going to blame you and ask you to fix it afterwards

agentultra2• 11 months ago

We can have both worlds.

Just because there are some users that prefer such devices doesn't mean that a technical user who can repurpose that device shouldn't be allowed to.

notatoad• 11 months ago

The inevitable conclusion of this battle is an acknowledgment that you never really own an iPhone or android in the first place, and the companies stop selling the hardware at all. You’ll only be able to rent a device as part of your service plan.

xandrius6• 11 months ago

Or stop treating Android as Linux for mobile but rather Windows for mobile and finally start pushing and supporting a 3rd major alternative like we have on desktop/laptops.

I would personally love to start contributing to a truly open alternative which doesn't rely on Google being not evil anymore.

fastball10• 11 months ago

Much harder to make a secure device that is resistant to getting pwn'd if you can run any code you want. I personally prefer my iPhone to be more secure than to be more open.

Buy a more open phone if you want one, but stop trying to use legal means to force the software on my phone to be worse for my use-case just because you want to have your cake and eat it too.

gdulli• 11 months ago

Once you decide to trade your liberty for security, it becomes the norm and then no one has liberty.

SlowTao4• 11 months ago

Completely agree. This is a general issue with technology in general, if someone uses a new technology to their advantage and at your disadvantage, you are essentially forced to adopt said technology just to keep up. In that sense a lot of technological change isn't voluntary. This also explains why a lot of open source/proprietary software is always chasing each other to keep up.

fastball10• 11 months ago

Apple is a company, not a government. I haven't traded my liberty for anything. Again, you can buy a different phone – that is where liberty comes into this equation.

If the USG decides to pass a law saying you can only buy iPhones, then we will have more to talk about w.r.t. liberty.

Nothing actually prevents you from modifying your iPhone however you see fit, btw. If you are incapable of breaking Apple's security without bricking the phone, that's a "you" problem.

srcreigh• 11 months ago

Closed devices are secure, yes. Apps can use pinned https certs. Apple signs the binary. This ensures that when your personal data is exfiltrated, it will go undetected by malicious third parties such as yourself.

Aachen10• 11 months ago

Nobody said that...

You can keep your device enslaved to Apple all you want. You don't have to use the administrator permissions on Windows if you don't want them. Some of us do want freedom

You've got it completely backwards that having the option to control your hardware means you, as an individual, are impacted by anything at all if you don't want to administrate your own device

fastball10• 11 months ago

How do you enable administrator permissions on your Windows computer?

otikik• 11 months ago

That doesn’t benefit the corporations, so it’s communism.

tzury• 11 months ago

We need both options to coexist:

1. Open, hackable hardware for those who want full control and for driving innovation

2. Locked-down, managed devices for vulnerable users who benefit from protection

This concept of "I should run any code on hardware I own" is completely wrong as a universal principle. Yes, we absolutely should be able to run any code we want on open hardware we own - that option must exist. But we should not expect manufacturers of phones and tablets to allow anyone to run any code on every device, since this will cause harm to many users.

There should be more open and hackable products available in the market. The DIY mindset at the junction of hardware and software is crucial for tech innovation - we wouldn't be where we are today without it. However, I also want regulations and restrictions on the phones I buy for my kids and grandparents. They need protection from themselves and from bad actors.

The market should serve both groups: those who want to tinker and innovate, and those who need a safe, managed experience. The problem isn't that locked-down devices exist - it's that we don't have enough truly open alternatives for those who want them.

paulryanrogers• 11 months ago

I'd argue that even the 'safe' devices should at least be open enough to delegate trust to someone besides the original manufacturer. Otherwise it just becomes ewaste once the manufacturer stops support. (Too often they ship vulnerable and outdated software then never fix it.)

Almondsetat3• 11 months ago

If the user cannot be trusted to maintain the hardware and software, then the only responsible thing is to rely on the manufacturer to do so. In those cases, if the support is dropped you buy the newest device.

fellowmartian2• 11 months ago

I think this is a false dichotomy. Open hardware with open source software would be more protected simply by being more stress tested and vetted by more people. If you need even more protection you can employ zero-knowledge proofs and other trustless technologies. I have long been dreaming about some kind of hardware/software co-op creating non-enshittifying versions of thermostats, electric kettles, EV chargers, solar inverters, etc, etc. Hackable for people who want it, simply non-rent-seeking for everyone else.

positron266• 11 months ago

more stress tested and vetted by more people

Grandma and grandpa aren't reading the source code and certainly not up at a professional level. This is one of the core misconceptions of the "free/libre" formulation of OSS.

johncolanduoni2• 11 months ago

The issue here is rarely whether the security features themselves are circumventable. It’s that at some point this turns into trusting users not to give malware apps permissions (whether that’s a dialog, a system wide setting, adding a third-party app store, etc.). Almost no users can usefully evaluate whether a particular bit of digital trust is a good or bad idea, so people will constantly get scammed in practice. If you’re thinking about ZNP as a solution, you’re not trying to solve the actual security problems of normal users.

mjevans• 11 months ago

Incorrect.

Choice 2. Empowered user. The end user is free to CHOOSE to delegate the hardware's approved signing solutions to a third party. Possibly even a third party that is already included in the base firmware such as Microsoft, Apple, OEM, 'Open Source' (sub menu: List of several reputable distros and a choice which might have a big scary message and involved confirmation process to trust the inserted boot media or the URL the user typed in...)

There should also be a reset option, which might involve a jumper or physical key (E.G. clear CMOS) that factory resets any TPM / persistent storage. Yes it'd nuke everything in the enclave but it would release the hardware.

flomo5• 11 months ago

Keep in mind one of these third parties would almost certainly be Meta (because users want their stuff), and that would almost certainly be a privacy downgrade.

Barbing4• 11 months ago

big scary message

Open question:

Any idea on making it so difficult that grandma isn't even able to follow a phisher’s instructions over the phone but yet nearly trivial for anyone who knows what they’re doing?

judge20204• 11 months ago

Consider the possibility of an evil maid type attack before a device is setup for the first time, e.g. running near identical iOS or macOS but with spyware preloaded, or even just adware.

echelon5• 11 months ago

This.

We need a mobile bill of rights for this stuff.

- The devices all of society has standardized upon should not be owned by companies after purchase.

- The devices all of society has standardized upon should not have transactions be taxed by the companies that make them, nor have their activities monitored by the companies that make them. (Gaming consoles are very different than devices we use to do banking and read menus at restaurants.)

- The devices all of society has standardized upon should not enforce rules for downstream software apart from heuristic scanning for viruses/abuse and strong security/permissions sandboxing that the user themselves controls.

- The devices all of society has standardized upon should be strictly regulated by governments all around the world to ensure citizens and businesses cannot be strong-armed.

- The devices all of society has standardized upon should be a burden for the limited few companies that gate keep them.

maxwelljxyz• 11 months ago

I like the way Chromebooks do things, initially locking down the hardware but allowing you to do whatever if you intentionally know what you're doing (after wiping the device for security reasons). It's a pity that there's all the Google tracking in them that's near impossible to delete (unless you remove Chrome OS).

moi23882• 11 months ago

Incorrect. For us as tech people this is an option. My older family members will definitely install malware and send all their data to China.

Please don’t let me go back to the early days of the internet where my mother had 50 toolbars and malware installed

stale2002• 11 months ago

Locked-down, managed devices for vulnerable users who benefit from protection

Thats fine! Just make sure it is possible for someone to take the same device and remove the locked down protections.

Make it require a difficult/obvious factory reset to enable, if you are concerned about someone being "tricked" into turning off the lockdown.

If someone wants baby mode on, all power too them! Thats their choice. Just like it should be everyone else's choice to own the same hardware and turn it off.

judge20204• 11 months ago

Make it require a difficult/obvious factory reset to enable, if you are concerned about someone being "tricked" into turning off the lockdown.

Is there also a way to make it obvious to the user that a device is running non-OEM software? For example, imagine someone intercepts a new device parcel, flashes spyware on it, then delivers it in similar/the same packaging unbeknownst to the end user. The same could be said for second-hand/used devices.

It's potentially possible the bootrom/uefi/etc bootup process shows some warning for x seconds on each boot that non-OEM software is loaded, but for that to happen you need to be locked out of being able to flash your own bootrom to the device.

throwaway22032• 11 months ago

The issue with this is that inevitably the locked down devices, which will end up being 98%+ of the market, become required for ordinary living, because no-one will develop for the 2%.

Open hardware is essentially useless if I need to carry both an open phone and a phone with the parking app, the banking app, messenger app to contact friends, etc.

charcircuit5• 11 months ago

For security reasons it makes sense for them to be different devices. People and services may not want to allow insecure devices to communicate with them.

koolala• 11 months ago

On Steam Deck, you never even have to set a 'sudo' password. You can have a safe managed experience and still allow a device to be open. Option 2 is ridiculous because it will just be exploited by companies and governments that want to control what you do or what content you see.

AnthonyMouse5• 11 months ago

The problem isn't that locked-down devices exist - it's that we don't have enough truly open alternatives for those who want them.

The problems is that vendors use "locked down devices" as an excuse to limit competition.

Suppose you have a "locked down" device that can only install apps from official sources, but "official sources" means Apple, Google, Samsung or Amazon. Moreover, you can disable any of these if you want to (requiring a factory reset to re-enable), but Google or Apple can't unilaterally insist that you can't use Amazon, or for that matter F-Droid etc.

Let the owner of the device lock it down as much as they want. Do not let the vendor do this when the owner doesn't want it.

qmr• 11 months ago

You're wrong.

My hardware. My decision.

makeitdouble5• 11 months ago

I don't think it will convince you in any way, but the whole point is/will be that it's not your hardware, you're paying for a perpetual license to use a terminal bound to someone else's service.

throwaway311314• 11 months ago

The problem isn't that locked-down devices exist - it's that we don't have enough truly open alternatives for those who want them.

Not for lack of trying. See for yourself

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_p...

The list is not short.

Plenty of companies have attempted this over the years but it’s not obvious that a big enough customer base exists to support the tremendous number of engineering hours it takes to make a phone. Making a decent smart phone is really hard. And the operations needed to support production isn’t cheap either.

llukas• 11 months ago

Government maybe rather than legislating big companies stores could not back up smaller open HW/SW vendors? It seems we gave up increasing competition on HW and what is left is app store level...

josephcsible• 11 months ago

No, we need to only have option 1, because if option 2 exists, things like banking apps will all only run on it and will refuse to work on option 1.

johncolanduoni2• 11 months ago

Open and hackable products have a niche user base, so these users get a niche set of options. The only way to get mainstream products to play to this tiny user base is to demand that all products be open and hackable by fiat. Otherwise, there’s no incentive from anybody involved (manufacturers, app developers, etc.) to give them something that can run both their banking app and some open source app they compiled themselves. There’s a lot of dancing around the security effects this will have on “normies”, and although there are plenty of armchair proposals I haven’t heard one that doesn’t obviously degrade into some sort of alarm fatigue as both legitimate apps and malware tell you to click though a dialog or flip a setting.

beeflet12• 11 months ago

Do we need the second option to exist? The world is dangerous place. If you can't figure out a computer perhaps you're just unfit to participate in the modern economy.

The existence of locked-down hardware eliminates the feasibility of open hardware through network effects. That is what is happening now.

Jolter4• 11 months ago

You realize you’re discounting 98% of the world’s population, right?

Liftyee4• 11 months ago

Regardless of whether we expect manufacturers to let us run any code on the device, we should not restrict people from attempting to bypass the manufacturers limitations. That gives the manufacturer freedom to try and lock the device down but also the owner freedom to break those locks. Otherwise it worsens situations like the FutureHome scandal.

liampulles2• 11 months ago

I was a kid once. The hackability of the devices I owned is what led me to this career. Let's give our young ones a little more credibility.

enether• 11 months ago

If there is a big enough market for 1), shouldn't it exist?

The problem in my eyes seems to be that there isn't enough capital interested to sufficiently fund 1) to compete and create a comparable product. Thus, at best, we end up with much inferior products which even people semi-interested in 1) are not willing to adopt due to the extreme trade offs in usability.

stavros2• 11 months ago

This is just insane. Lock the devices down by default, and allow the user to unlock them if they want. Why do we have to have Big Brother devices that "benevolently" restrict what you can run "for your own good"? Why can't all phones have unlockable bootloaders? My phone has a big, scary "DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU'RE A COMPUTER EXPERT" warning screen to unlock the bootloader, and that's fine.

Why do we need devices we can't unlock? Who is harmed by unlocking? This is the major point nobody has ever been able to explain to me. Who exactly does the big scary unlocked bootloader hurt? My parents have unlockable devices and they haven't had all their money stolen, because they haven't unlocked them.

tpoacher• 11 months ago

I know you weren't using it in this way, but I do appreciate the double meaning of the word "protection" here.

A.k.a, "nice google account you've got there, holding all your memories, emails, contacts, and interface to modern living; would be a shame if something happened to it because you decided to sideload an app ..."

ozgrakkurt3• 11 months ago

You can have somr option burried in the settings, a 10yo kid would be able to think of this

mathiaspoint2• 11 months ago

People too stupid to use computers safely should be kept away from computers for their own safety. Giving that kind of person any kind of computer would be immoral by definition. They shouldn't have phones at all, they're just going to fall for corporate approved scams from Meta, Applovin, and Indian call centers.

carra• 11 months ago

In theory these 2 options seem like a sensible way to have a choice. But the average user is not going to own and carry 2 devices. We want to have all we need in a single device, and things like paying with your phone have become way too common by now to not have them.

rr808• 11 months ago

Agreed and I think we're already here. Hardware is so cheap now its trivial to have both multiple streaming devices and multiple open computer platforms. There are advantages to both and no way to compromise to have one device for everything.

const_cast28• 11 months ago

Option 1 is a superset of option 2 - meaning, any hackable device can also be a locked down device because hackability means the power to do whatever.

We don't need option 2, period, and it shouldn't exist.

Just put the hackability behind a switch or something. If people turn it on, that's on them.

hedora• 11 months ago

I think fighting for the ability to write a custom OS for a phone misses the point.

It should be possible to participate in the modern economy using standard technology.

To this end, I think there should be a mandate that all govt and commercial infrastructure apps offer a progressive web app with at least feature parity with proprietary phone apps.

Want me to use a phone to pay for lunch, EV charging, parking or a toll? Great. It needs to be doable with anything running firefox, safari or chrome.

mixmastamyk8• 11 months ago

Should be one of the top comments.

mikewarot2• 11 months ago

A gentle reminder to the readers here at HN that it doesn't have to be this way. Computer Security is a solved problem[1], and has been so since the 1980s[2]. It's my strong opinion that the only methods you've seen to this point[3-7] were deliberately chosen to be ones that don't work, and make things worse in the long run.

There's no reason we shouldn't be able to run what we want on our hardware, without having to trust anything other than the microkernel inside the operating systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_operating_sys...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppArmor

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_permissions

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module

carlosjobim4• 11 months ago

Your opinion is not "a gentle reminder", "a friendly reminder" or "a public service announcement". It's just your opinion and nothing more.

73737373732• 11 months ago

It's obvious you don't understand what is written in those links. The capability security architecture breaks the false dichotomy of either having to have a fully locked down or open operating system, it provides the technical foundation to grant individual programs, and even parts of these programs, recursively, only the (data, filesystem, network) access and resource consumption (cpu, memory) rights that they need. This is not an opinion, this is a decades old technical solution that humanity ignores at its own peril. While I wouldn't argue that it completely solves computer security, it allows programmers and users to minimize the attack surface of their systems.

mikewarot2• 11 months ago

Ok, so I've trigged quite a reaction with my phrasing. I'm very sorry about that.

Put yourself in my place... Computer Security is a solved problem, and has been for decades, yet we find ourselves in an infinite loop of crises that result in ignorance of solutions. Maybe 5% of all discourse here on HN is about a problem we don't have to have.

How would you push the world to resolution?

kogasa240p• 11 months ago

Interesting perspective but unfortunately with smartphones you'll have cellular carriers lock down their bootloaders because of bogus "security" reasons.

SilverElfin3• 11 months ago

Absolutely must have the right to run any software on hardware we own. It should be mandated for hardware built by large companies, who are soaking up the capital and labor that’s available. It’s sensible regulation.

fijiaarone3• 11 months ago

We’ve got a solution to that.

What makes you think you can own hardware, you fascist capitalist pig dog!

jerbearito• 11 months ago

This feels like an arbitrary level of abstraction for how much control a user should have. When you buy a phone, you're buying a combination of components designed and paired for that manufacturer's software. Can the user potentially replace that software? Sure, but should they be expected to?

If they just wanted hardware, they could buy their own and piece something together, if we're exploring those kinds of hypotheticals. But buying an Apple or Android device is a different choice and I think, within that context, a user should be able to run the software they want.

SlowTao4• 11 months ago

I think it is more a case of, at least provide the option to have another OS. Chances are that nobody else will be able to make it work but having it closed off before even getting a chance to try feels a little unfair to those that buy the hardware.

skeltoac• 11 months ago

The situation we have is fine. You can make hardware with features these people want, or you can make hardware with features those people want.

mensetmanusman• 11 months ago

Run doom on my Air conditioner?

bandie91• 11 months ago

just turn it off in summer. it'll be doom level 30 shortly.

b_e_n_t_o_n4• 11 months ago

You already have that ability, afaik there is nothing stopping you or your friends from loading and running whatever software you want except your own technical ability.

If you want the government to force other people to do the work to let you have your cake and eat it too, I can't support that.

umanwizard2• 11 months ago

iPhones have a locked bootloader; it is impossible to run an OS not signed by Apple unless you find an exploit.

b_e_n_t_o_n4• 11 months ago

So what? Should security features be illegal so people can more easily run their own OS's on phones?

zmmmmm• 11 months ago

In this context this would mean having the ability and documentation to build or install alternative operating systems on this hardware

It doesn't work. Everything from banks to Netflix and others are slowly edging out anything where they can't fully verify the chain of control to an entity they can have a legal or contractual relationship with. To be clear, this is fundamental, not incidental. You can't run your own operating system because it's not in Netflix's financial interest for you to do so. Or your banks, or your government. They all benefit from you not having control, so you can't.

This is why it's so important to defend the real principles here not just the technical artefacts of them. Netflix shouldn't be able to insist on a particular type of DRM for me to receive their service. Governments shouldn't be able to prevent me from end to end encrypting things. I should be able to opt into all this if I want more security, but it can't be mandatory. However all of these things are not technical, they are principles and rights that we have to argue for.

ls612• 11 months ago

I mean you’re right but it seems like the equilibrium we’re heading towards is one where the opposite is true and our internet and society looks more like China’s. Principles unfortunately mean little in the face of societal and technological change, the only thing that matters is the resulting incentives.

fastaguy88• 11 months ago

Really not a libertarian, but why shouldn’t Netflix have the right to choose who they distribute content to? They negotiated conditions with the creators, why shouldn’t they be able to specify the DRM? No one is forcing you to subscribe to Netflix. Or even to buy an iPad.

ranyume3• 11 months ago

why shouldn’t Netflix have the right to choose who they distribute content to?

power asymmetry

pishpash5• 11 months ago

It's sort of antitrust adjacent. They are big enough to set market rules on the manner of distribution, like DRM and hardware-software lock-in, which doesn't directly stifle competition in their field (only a little) but in another field, and the results are arguably anti-consumer. That sort of power should not be in the hands of a single company.

chairmansteve• 11 months ago

A non libertarian might ask: Is it good for society?

bfdm• 11 months ago

Because it's bad for consumers to lose choices, even if they don't normally exercise those choices. The choice is the distributed power we have against the consolidated corporate power. We can choose not to let them restrict those choices, for example with interoperability regulations.

jonahx• 11 months ago

The issue is the means of enforcement requires taking away other rights they shouldn't be able to.

What if I want to require (for anti-piracy reasons) that to use my software you must also give me complete access to your computer, all the data on it, and all your communications. You might say, "Well, if anyone is stupid enough to make that deal, let them." But it's easy to sugar coat what you're doing, especially with less technical users. I think it's better to say, "That's just not something you are allowed to do. It's trampling on rights more important than your anti-piracy rights."

In the same way, you cannot murder someone even if they agree to be murdered (an actual case in Germany).

ekianjo2• 11 months ago

For Netflix sure. I don't care. But when it comes to banking and you are forced to use between two OS or this means no access to your bank digitally, this is a massive problem and restriction to citizens' freedom. Everyone needs a bank to operate, and they need to maximize the options available to use them.

JeremyNT• 11 months ago

This is the crux of the matter.

Maybe conceptually you will be able to run some kind of open operating system with your own code, but it will be unable to access software or services provided by corporate or governmental entities.

This has been obvious for some time, and as soon as passkeys started popping up the endgame became clear.

Pleading to the government definitely can't save us now though, because they want the control just as much as the corporations do.

pishpash5• 11 months ago

Should have made open-source components in some key nodes of the ecosystem popular and profitable. But that was a tall order.

kibwen• 11 months ago

Maybe conceptually you will be able to run some kind of open operating system with your own code

Why do you think they would even allow this? If you think that governments don't have the incentives or the means to criminalize running non-approved OSes, or the unauthorized use of non-approved hardware, you're insufficiently cynical.

reddalo5• 11 months ago

as soon as passkeys started popping up the endgame became clear

That's why I'm 100% against passkeys. I'll never use them and I'll make sure nobody I know does.

They're just a lock-in mechanism.

acac10• 11 months ago

passkeys started popping up the endgame became clear.

This logical leap puzzles me, as it is completely unrelated to HW lock-in and a rather generic medium.

This is more of a case of OP diverting a topic to shove in his pet peeve on technology they don’t like or understand.

tadfisher6• 11 months ago

Ironically, if everyone adopted passkeys (the real deal tied to secure enclaves or TPMs), then Android malware could not steal your credentials through any kind of social engineering.

markus_zhang• 11 months ago

Arguing doesn’t work for principles.

BrenBarn2• 11 months ago

I think you're right but I'd say it even more generally: we just can't let companies get so big that they can do these things without facing pushback and competition from other entities.

redviperpt• 11 months ago

You'll find that a lot of 'normal', for lack of better word, support this.

nradov• 11 months ago

You could just not watch Netflix. Most of the content is kind of crap anyway, low effort filler. And the streaming services have trouble even licensing third-party content at all unless they have robust copy protection. That may be stupid because it drives more consumers to privacy but copyright holders are free to negotiate any licensing terms they want.

rblatz2• 11 months ago

Netflix is right in its prime right now, K-Pop Demon Hunters is a smash hit and probably the biggest cultural thing going on right now, it has like 4 songs from it in the top 10. Wednesday is coming back this weekfor the end of season 2. Stranger Things is wrapping up in November,

Silhouette2• 11 months ago

You could just not watch Netflix.

The digital hermit argument is not going to resonate with 99.9% of users. People buy devices because they want to do stuff. Telling them they shouldn't do what they want to do is never going to convince anyone.

The real question is where are the representatives who are supposed to be acting in the interests of their people while all this is happening? We seem to have regulatory capture on a global scale now where there isn't really anyone in government even making the case that all these consumer-hostile practices should be disrupted. They apparently recognize the economic argument that big business makes big bucks but completely ignore the eroding value of technology to our quality of life.

thrance• 11 months ago

You could also not bother with any of it and return to a dumb phone. That's not a solution though.

josephg21• 11 months ago

My parents are getting old and they aren't tech savvy. The missing piece here is that I want my parents to have a computer they can safely do their banking on, without leaving them vulnerable to scams and viruses and the like. I like that they have iphones. Doing internet banking on their phone is safer than doing it on their desktop computer. Why is that?

The reason is that the desktop PC security model is deeply flawed. In modern desktop operating systems, we protect user A from user B. But any program running on my computer is - for some reason - completely trusted with my data. Any program I run is allowed to silently edit, delete or steal anything I own. Unless you install special software, you can't even tell if any of this is happening. This makes every transitive dependency of every program on your computer a potential attack vector.

I want computers to be hackable. But I don't also want my computer to be able to be hacked so easily. Right now, I have to choose between doing banking on my (maybe - hopefully - safe) computer. Or doing banking on my definitely safe iphone. What a horrible choice.

Personally I think we need to start making computers that provide the best of both worlds. I want much more control over what code can do on my computer. I also want programs to be able to run in a safe, sandboxed way. But I should be the one in charge of that sandbox. Not Google. Definitely not Apple. But there's currently no desktop environment that provides that ability.

I think the argument against locked down computers (like iphones and androids) would be a lot stronger if linux & friends provided a real alternative that was both safe and secure. If big companies are the only ones which provide a safe computing experience, we're asking for trouble.

nuker3• 11 months ago

My parents are getting old and they aren't tech savvy. The missing piece here is that I want my parents to have a computer they can safely do their banking on, without leaving them vulnerable to scams and viruses and the like.

Purists always forget this point :) What is best for 99% of people.

And dumb Euro bureaucrats.

ozgrakkurt3• 11 months ago

What are the stats here, this sounds like pure bs to be honest.

Main way people around me get scammed by far like 90% is social engineering

spaqin• 11 months ago

Your parents are more likely to be a victim of a phone call scam than malware, even on PC. There is also no guarantee that malware will not slip through cracks of official stores or signatures.

You can also choose to do your banking at the physical branch.

We already had "best of both worlds", especially on mobile OSes - granular permissions per-app were quite good, and on Android until few years ago root was widely available if you needed it as well; these permissions could be locked or frozen if there is concern about users, just like work devices are provisioned with limitations. It all depends on your threat model.

extraisland20• 11 months ago

Everything in life is about trade-offs. Certain trade-offs people aren't going to make.

- If you want to run an alternative operating system, you got to learn how it works. That is a trade off not even many tech savvy people want to make.

- There is a trade-off with a desktop OS. I actually like the fact that it isn't super sand-boxed and locked down. I am willing to trade security & safety for control.

Personally I think we need to start making computers that provide the best of both worlds. I want much more control over what code can do on my computer. I also want programs to be able to run in a safe, sandboxed way. But I should be the one in charge of that sandbox. Not Google. Definitely not Apple. But there's currently no desktop environment that provides that ability.

The market and demand for that is low.

BTW. This does exist with Qubes OS already. However there are a bunch of trade-offs that most people are unlikely to want to make.

https://www.qubes-os.org/

sim7c00• 11 months ago

most reason OSes are insecure is bexause they are designed badly regarding security. they are from a time it wasnt important and most ways of building them also from that same era. its hardly modernized -_-. sure its not the same OS as 20 years back,... it has a lot of layers of junk ontop.

again, no incentive to improve it. its either unpaid work or the OS vendor has a stake in it being insecure. (both exists)

matheusmoreira3• 11 months ago

think of the elderly

This stuff is not just for the elderly and computer illiterate. It's for you as well. You think they're going to stop?

You're giving up freedom for safety. You will have neither.

999900000999• 11 months ago

As is Android has support for multi user more.

Get some real sandboxing, let me install whatever I want in my sandbox.

That's a bare minimum.

I also want "I am an adult" mode where I get to do what I want. If Google wants to flag secure net, fine. Not every thing is going to work.

realusername5• 11 months ago

Well no, if your parents truly are tech illiterate, I would give them Ubuntu and not an iPhone.

With the iPhone they get the risk of answering to a scam call or scam sms and giving them the access of their bank account.

Ubuntu is almost bullet proof for beginners.

In fact, that's what I've done for my parents and I had to retire the computer and get another one because it's the hardware which became too old after 15 years of running Ubuntu without any problem.

Security for users isn't just about bootloader expoits.

lentil_soup• 11 months ago

But you can choose, your parents can have a phone with the "lockdown" setting turned on and I can have it off if I want. How we expose and handle that setting is a UX problem we can solve.

What's wrong with that?

vrighter2• 11 months ago

All this will do is ensure that if malware does get through the official channels (which it can and regularly does) it will be more widely distributed

AndyMcConachie2• 11 months ago

The answer to this is a physical switch on the machine that enables/disables hackability.

KoolKat23• 11 months ago

This is where Linux and Apple's centralized repository method shines.

Social engineering is really where the threat is at these days.

mike_hearn7• 11 months ago

Any program I run is allowed to silently edit, delete or steal anything I own ... there's currently no desktop environment that provides that ability

Putting aside the philosophical issues, that statement isn't true for a few years now. It's not well known, even in very technical circles like HN, but macOS actually sandboxes every app:

• All apps from outside the app store are always sandboxed to a lesser degree, even if they are old and don't opt-in.

• All apps from outside the app store may opt in to stricter sandboxing for security hardening purposes.

• All apps from the app store are forced to opt-in, must declare their permissions in a fine grained way, and Apple reviews them to make sure they make sense.

To see this is true try downloading a terminal emulator you haven't used before, and then use it to navigate into your Downloads, Photos, Documents etc folders and run "ls". You'll get a permission prompt from the OS telling you the app is requesting access to that folder. If you click deny, ls will return a permission error.

Now try using vim to edit the Info.plist file of something in /Applications. ls will tell you that you have UNIX write permissions, but you'll find you can't actually edit the file. The kernel blocks apps from tampering with each other's files.

Finally, go into the settings and privacy/security area. You can now enable full disk access for the terminal emulator, or a finer grained permission like managing apps. Restart the terminal and permissions work like you'd expect for UNIX again.

Note that you won't see any permission popup in a GUI app if you open the file via the file picker dialog box. That's because the dialog box is a "powerbox" controlled by the OS, so the act of picking the file grants the app permission implicitly. Same for drag and drop, opening via the finder, etc. The permission prompt only appears when an app directly uses syscalls to open a file without some OS-controlled GUI interaction taking place.

So, if you want a desktop OS with a strong sandbox that you actually control, and which has good usability, and a high level of security too, then you should be using macOS. It's the only OS that has managed this transition to all-sandboxed-all-the-time.

m4rtink2• 11 months ago

Is it really safer on a phone ? Don't banking apps reject latest community Androids builds with all the CVE fixes or Graphene OS yet work totally fine on years old, full of vulnerabilities yet signed official Android ROMs ?

GoblinSlayer11• 11 months ago

In this case I install Linux Mint. No virus problem. This is a popularity problem: you are more likely to have a sandbox escape on iphone than a virus on PC, because iphone gets more attention.

fsflover26• 11 months ago

I want my parents to have a computer they can safely do their banking on, without leaving them vulnerable to scams and viruses and the like

So you need to install Qubes OS for them?

mcv4• 11 months ago

Good point. The current security model of desktop OSs sucks. I was recently reminded of this by an issue at work. I'm used to devs having admin rights on their laptops, but here they closed that down: you have to request admin rights for a specific purpose, and then you get them for a week.

I recently requested those rights again because I needed to install something new for a PoC I was working on, and that wasn't allowed anymore. But during onboarding I had those rights and installed homebrew to more easily install dev tools, and homebrew keeps its admin rights to install stuff in a directory owned by admin. So that circumvents this whole security model (and I did, for my PoC).

The problem is that it's all or nothing. Homebrew should have the right only to install in a specific directory. Apps shouldn't automatically get access to potentially sensitive data. Mobile OSs handle that sort of thing more granularly. Desktop OSs should too.

Because the overly restrictive security rules at my work are little more than security theatre when it's so easy to circumvent.

komali24• 11 months ago

This argument doesn't contradict the article.

An expensive iPhone ships with iOS and a rigid security model.

If you tap the `about` button 16 times and click a confirmation dialog, you disable certain security mechanisms against arbitrary software installation. Do something else easy but impossible to do accidentally, and you unlock the bootloader. You progressively lose portions of your warranty in doing so.

This is the path I think we should be going down.

raxxorraxor6• 11 months ago

It is the other way around. The security model of mobile devices seriously inhibits innovation and we end up with ever the same crappy apps we don't really need.

I also don't believe more people get scammed on PC compared to mobile platforms. Scammers go where the most naive people congregate.

A sensibly configured Linux system is very secure compared to your mobile device. No security model can really shield against user stupidity. The people would need completely different devices as they simply aren't fit to use a computer. My parents are the same, but I won't accept a bad compromise of an OS just because they essentially need other devices.

At some point a user will be asked to allow execution of code they got through some fishy mail. There is no defense against that other than for the user sticking to books.

pixelmonkey• 11 months ago

What do you mean by "locked down computer." Maybe something like ChromiumOS?

Might be a tough sell for the volunteer open source community ("linux & friends") to work on such an alternative "locked down" computing experience. Free and open source software is usually more focused on unlocking use cases, not locking them up.

That all said, I basically consider macOS to be a locked down computing experience. So that's my solution for older people.

It's not a perfect solution but the Apple closed ecosystem is better designed for the limited use cases of the elderly. Rely on iCloud and built-in Apple approaches to data security as much as possible.

For example, an iMac and an iPhone can get all "adulting" use cases done, including typing/receiving emails, printing documents, online banking, government services, and so on. Apple Passwords plus Face ID helps to simplify password-based security. My biggest issue is getting TOTP-based two-factor adopted. Apple Passwords supports this but I usually have to do remote tech support to get it set up initially. It's also annoying that right now, the current generation of iMacs don't support FaceID, because that would simplify authentication across the two primary platforms (desktop/mobile).

I would never use this setup myself since I like to run F/OSS everywhere as much as possible. But I am realistic about tech expectations for the elderly who just want to live their life with minimal investment in learning about data/software security.

But you're right, along with other commenters, that it's dangerous for society to rely on a monopolist technocorporate overlord (or a pair of overlords forming a de facto duopoly) for the basic administrative tasks of adult living and lawful citizenship.

BlueTemplar12• 11 months ago

KISS : Have a separate device to do banking, and ONLY banking on.

(More tech savvy users could instead boot into a different partition.)

enos_feedler• 11 months ago

This is a sad reality. I see 2 paths forward 1) we somehow build the right layers into the internet that we can withstand open hardware. 2) open hardware running any software becomes an education use and hobbyist market only. I could see an edu slice to every corporate entity deploying open and free stuff just as onboarding to paid. Hackable hardware with kiddyflix.

protocolture3• 11 months ago

It doesn't work. Everything from banks to Netflix and others are slowly edging out anything where they can't fully verify the chain of control to an entity they can have a legal or contractual relationship with.

Theres nothing stopping a hardware vendor from being able to delete the system installed keys/certificates, breaking trust to allow you to install your own. Sure netflix might not like it but you still have the right to run your own code and netflix has the right not to trust your OS.

Governments shouldn't be able to prevent me from end to end encrypting things.

Agreed.

matheusmoreira3• 11 months ago

Everything from banks to Netflix and others are slowly edging out anything where they can't fully verify the chain of control to an entity they can have a legal or contractual relationship with.

We need to make that illegal. Classify it as discrimination. They should be obligated to treat any client that tries to connect the same as they would treat their own software. Anything else is illegal discrimination against users, a crime comparable to racial discrimination.

Anything short of this means they've won. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for will be destroyed. Throw all FOSS into the trash. None of it matters anymore. What's the point of free software that we can't run? That can't actually do anything useful because it fails remote attestation? Completely useless.

altairprime3• 11 months ago

There’s a scenario where this does work: you can install any operating system on the hardware you own, if you complete a “erase all content and settings” dire scary confirmation screen.

- If you want to run something other than iPadOS or Google TV, go for it. (Smart TVs are just tablets with a don’t-touch screen.)

- If you want to install spyware on someone’s phone, you can’t; the HSM keys held by their OS are lost when you try to install a patched version and restore from a backup, and their backup doesn’t restore properly because half of it depends on the HSM or the cloud and everything is tagged with the old OS’s signature.

- If you want to patch macOS and then deploy it to your fleet, you can; it won’t be Signed By Apple but you’re an enterprise and don’t care about the small losses of functionality from that.

- If you want to dual boot, go ahead; the issues with the HSMs not permitting you to host two OSes worth of partitioned keystones can be resolved by regulatory pressure.

This satisfies all the terms of “let me install whatever I want”, while allowing the OG App Store to continue operating in Safe Mode for everyday users in a way that can’t be entrapped without the scammer on the phone telling them to delete everything, which destroys the data the scammer wants.

My car already allows me to do this. My phone should too.

Rohansi2• 11 months ago

My car already allows me to do this. My phone should too.

If you're referring to CarPlay and/or Android Auto you should know that it's not actually running on your car. It's basically RDPing your phone onto your car screen. You can already install RDP apps on your phone and connect to systems that provide more freedom, of course.

mike_hearn7• 11 months ago

Your phone can allow that. Many Android devices allow exactly that. Google Pixel devices do, for instance, exactly because Google's Android team has always agreed with you.

beeflet12• 11 months ago

Maybe we must find individual solutions to each controlling application? Replace netflix with bittorrent, replace banks with bitcoin, etc?

p0w3n3d• 11 months ago

I agree with your point. And meanwhile in Korea (according to article I've read) to use any bank's website you have to install a spy software in your PC. It looks like every major service vendor is organising a crawling subversion against their users and they really count we won't notice.

One of the articles: https://palant.info/2023/01/02/south-koreas-online-security-...

cryptonector• 11 months ago

There is also the possibility that without a [paid] curator (the vendor, like Google or Apple) we can't have security for how do we ascertain provenance? You might not buy that argument, but the vendor will make it, and it will resonate with the public and/or the politicians.

Establishing trust with hardware, firmware, and operating system software is currently an intractable problem. Besides the halting problem and the reflections on trusting trust problem (i.e., supply chain problems) the sheer size of these codebases and object code (since you'll need to confirm that the object code is not altered as in the reflections on trusting trust paper) is just too big for the public to be able to understand it. Sure, maybe we could use AI to review all of this, but... that's expensive if every person has to do it, and... that's got a bootstrapping problem.

Basically the walled garden is unlikely to go away anytime soon. It would be easier to change the rules politically to do things like reduce transaction fees, but truly allowing the wide public to run anything they want seems difficult not just politically but technically, because the technical problems will lead to political ones.

estebarb2• 11 months ago

Not really. Many countries emit digital signatures that could be used to prove that someone signed something. We would just need to convince countries to use that same infra for companies. So it may be possible to require everything to be properly signed, without requiring everyone to be bound to certain company wishes.

StopDisinfo910• 11 months ago

The digital sovereignty angle will end up quilling the platform lockdown.

There is no way countries agree to have American companies getting so much control on key infrastructures especially in the current context.

bee_rider4• 11 months ago

I wouldn’t be totally opposed to having some sort of totally locked down device that I was just used for banking. The bank could even sell them or give them away with the account (doesn’t need high performance).

Another though; if we were actually able to pass laws that helped people, one that I’d like to see would be: for a totally locked down proprietary device, everything done with it should be the legal liability of the vendor. If your bank account gets broken into via the device, you can’t audit what happened, you couldn’t have have broken it, so it ought to be their responsibility.

akvadrako• 11 months ago

That's basically how it used to work. Before the app my bank required the use of a card and QR reader with a screen that could authorize transactions

Silhouette2• 11 months ago

This is ultimately a form of collusion and anti-competitive behaviour - practices that we prohibit in other scenarios because we consider them harmful to our society. It's obvious why some large organisations would like more control over our lives. It's not obvious why we should let them have it.

Unfortunately for now it seems our representatives are letting them have it so personally I'm rooting for a snake-eating-its-tail moment as a result of Windows 10 losing support. There will inevitably be erosion of security and support for applications on Windows 10 once Microsoft declares it yesterday's OS - as we've seen with past versions of Windows. This time there is the added complication that a lot of perfectly good hardware can't run Windows 11 - largely because of the TPM/verification issue we're discussing.

So probably a lot of people who haven't moved to 11 yet aren't going to unless their current computer breaks and they get 11 by default when they buy a replacement. If the charts are correct then 11 only recently overtook 10 in user numbers. After all this time and despite all the pressure from Microsoft and the imminent EOL of Windows 10 over 40% of Windows users are still running that version. (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d...) So how exactly do the big organisations that want to control the client plan to deal with that over the next few years?

Unfortunately unless there is also some sort of intervention to deal with the collusion and market manipulation by vested interests I doubt enough Windows 10 refugees will jump to open platforms when their current devices fail for those open platforms to reach a critical mass of users. If five years from now Windows 10 user levels are negligible and almost all of the former users are now on Windows 11+ by default then the controlled client side probably wins effectively forever. I think it would take something dramatic happening that increased the desktop market share of open alternatives like Linux to say 10+% to avoid this fate. The only likely source of that drama I can see is if Valve's support for gaming on Linux encourages significant numbers of home users to switch and then general public awareness that you don't have to run Windows or macOS increases.

safety1st10• 11 months ago

I'm going to get wild-eyed now but you can blame Google for that as they're the ones who just announced they'll retroactively ban me from installing software on the computer I bought and own.

I don't think you can really solve this problem as long as there's an operating system monopoly, or even duopoly/triopoly. The lure of total control is just too great. Every operating system vendor, hell every intellectual property vendor will always dream of it. A company that becomes powerful enough to put chains on its users will do so.

From the British Raj to Standard Oil to IBM and Microsoft, monopolies are some of the most powerful forces in history. There is a case to be made that we were on a similar path with Microsoft until a combination of the Internet and a half-assed but not completely ineffective anti-trust campaign made them hit the brakes, for a while.

I think that the solution is to highlight the abuses perpetrated by the biggest tech giants specifically, and advocate for radical government action on multiple levels. #1 to break up these companies. #2, to shackle them and anyone who gets as large as them so that they can't do anything like this again. #3, publicly fund the development of competing, open operating systems.

If you are a US citizen then #1 and #2 are the more realistic paths and you should be watching the various anti-trust cases against Big Tech like a hawk, the celebrity du jour is really Amit Mehta who is scheduled to release his Google remedies any day now. You need to make it clear to your representatives that this is your top issue at the ballot box. We need a second American Progressive Era that's seasoned with digital rights and anti-megacorp sentiment and with "doomscroll" and "Luigi" having entered the vernacular I think we could be closer than many here believe.

If you are an EU or Chinese citizen you should support the development and adoption in those polities of alternative, Linux-based operating systems. In the way the South Korean government specifically encouraged the growth of Samsung into a company with a global footprint, you should do that for local companies which develop OSes that compete with Apple and Google's. These geographies fundamentally can't do much to influence the American legal system so they should instead lean into public sentiment around nationalism and sovereignty and tie these to software freedom because that is likely the only elemental, emotional force that will capture enough public attention and support. Use state-scale resources to create competition for the American tech giants and establish a balance of power, because they are assuredly your enemies at this point.

And lastly for the ten millionth time I'll say it - Stallman predicted this. He saw it all coming. He warned us. He told us what would happen and what we needed to do. It's time to listen and to think big.

edg50002• 11 months ago

Well said!

pjmlp2• 11 months ago

Meanwhile FOSDEM and similar conferences are full of people carrying Apple devices, and most folks keep picking non-copyleft licenses instead of dual licensing.

The Stallman generation is slowly leaving this realm, the opportunity has been lost already.

jjani2• 11 months ago

It is no coincidence whatsoever that the control accelerated at a pace seen never before just as those two words entered the vernacular. Censorship of such topics on places like Reddit and Youtube tenfolded. It scared them. It's the only thing that works.

cess11• 11 months ago

Right, so "defend" does a lot of lifting in there.

What are you prepared to do to reverse the contemporary tide of tyranny? What have you done to make those in power afraid to move forward with policy founded in loathing of humanity?

euLh7SM5HDFY• 11 months ago

Everything from banks to Netflix and others

I have unlocked bootloader. That's it, I don't even have enabled root account. One app refuses to work anyway: McDonald’s. I actually can't decide if it is more funny or scary.

touristtam• 11 months ago

I'll be "funny" to publish findings about apps on a very public page and see it being brought to the forefront of the news cycle. A bit of a name and shame type of things, since Corps don't seem to understand any other language.

wolvesechoes3• 11 months ago

However all of these things are not technical

You understand it, but even in this thread you have people proposing solutions like switching from traditional banking to bitcoin, stoping using Netflix and starting torrenting again etc.

Tech crowd always tries to solve non-technical problems through technical means, and this is why I don't have much hope.

staplers• 11 months ago

Technical solutions and alternatives can provide enough leverage for the common citizen to force the hand of those in power. It might not fully "solve" the issue, but making it easier to route around will always force those in power to bend somewhat.

GoblinSlayer11• 11 months ago

Netflix isn't worth to use or pirate even if it was free as in freedom.

winter_blue• 11 months ago

We need legislation mandating that all hardware[a] have at least one fully-functional[b] open source driver for any operating system[c]. And that any device with a microprocessor with writable memory permit custom software to be run on it.

[a] whether that's a single device like a fingerprint scanner, or a device like a phone or tablet

[b] no crippled or low-performance open source driver

[c] any OS, including Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, or some obscure minor OS as long as such OS is readily available for free or for a reasonable price

benrutter2• 11 months ago

Joining all the other comments agreeing completely with this take.

I think it's worth adding that this is fundamental enough to not just be a tech issue. There's a strong legal framework in almost all developed companies for regulating companies where acting in their self interest harms the consumer interest. Without which, lots of things we take for granted (electrical safety certification, usb c, splits between serviceand investment banking).

I think the key thing that's missing at the moment is that the types of restrictions OP is mentioning (DRM, blocking encryption) harm both consumer rights and economic development.

That's an argument that needs to come from people knowledgable about both the indistry, and the technology. Like a lot of the people reading this post.

mike_hearn7• 11 months ago

Most politicians would find that argument confusing and not agree with you. I don't think the outcomes of running to government would be what you expect. It could easily backfire.

Politics is a spectrum. Some claim that model is oversimplified but it's not. Here you're making a left wing argument that individual bad actors must be regulated for the good of the collective. However, left politicians would look at the situation and see the opposite. They prioritize an authoritarian safety-first victim-first mindset, in which individual freedoms are sacrificed to help the weakest. But companies like Google and Apple are already doing that. And whilst you're trying to hammer this situation into a left wing framing, the number of individuals who care about the freedom to install apps from anonymous developers is very small. Trivial, on the scale of a country. They do not represent the "consumer interest" in any meaningful way.

So if you lobbied politicians this way, Google/Apple would lobby back and they'd say, we are exactly what you always demand! We're acting proactively to protect the victims by limiting the freedoms of bad guys for the greater good. And the left would be not only highly receptive to that message, but having suddenly become aware of what is technically possible would likely demand they go much further! We already see this with left wing governments banning VPNs and DNS resolutions so they can better control the internet in order to keep this or that group safe.

Which sort of politicians care about the rights of freedom-loving minorities over the safety of the collective? Libertarian politicians do. But they are themselves in a minority, and would not be receptive to an argument framed as "we must regulate the big evil corporations for the greater good", because regulation is always about removing freedoms: in this case, the freedom to design a computing device as you see fit. They probably would be receptive to an argument of the form "it is important to be able to distribute code and communicate anonymously", but prioritizing something so few people care about is exactly why they don't tend to win elections.

So there's no direct solution in politics, but the closest approximation is to support politicians who are more libertarian than average. They won't solve the problem but they will at least not make it worse, and might be open to very targeted regulations that can be framed as protecting market competition e.g. requiring unlockable bootloaders can be framed as protecting competition in the operating systems market. Meanwhile you can try and increase the popularity of platforms that prioritize freedom over safety. In practice that means demonstrating some sort of use case that the big vendors disallow, which is valuable, morally positive and requires anonymous app distribution.

kdmtctl• 11 months ago

They do not benefit from having control, they risk if they don't. This is fundamental.

I do love freedom but such freedom will come with a disclaimer. You do want to use a bank app unsigned and you do not want the bank to check your latest SIM card replacement. You understand and assess the risk and will not discriminate the bank for any loss occurred. Same with Netflix and piracy.

This is fair.

wvh• 11 months ago

What I like about your comment is that it points out that all technical work-arounds are moot if people as a whole are not willing to stand up with pitchforks and torches to defend their freedoms. It will always come down to that. A handful of tech-savvy users with rooted devices and open-source software will not make a difference to the giant crushing machine that is the system.

And I'm afraid most of us are part of the system, rage-clicking away most of our days, distracted, jaded perhaps, like it historically has always been.

safety1st10• 11 months ago

Only competition can provide a solution. We have lost sight of this principle even though all Western democracies are built on the idea of separation of powers, and making it hard for any one faction of elites to gain full control and ruin things for everyone else. Make them fight with each other, let them get a piece of the pie, but never all of it. That's why we have multiple branches of government, multiple parties etc. That's why we have markets with many firms instead of monopolies.

There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future. The past was riddled with despotism and many things that the average man or woman today would consider horrific. The basic principle of democratic society is to prevent those things from recurring by pitting elite factions against each other. Similarly business elites who wield high technology to gain their wealth must also compete and if there is any sign of them cooperating too closely for too long, we need to break them up or shut them down.

When Apple and Google agree, cooperate, and adopt the same policies - we are all doomed. It must never happen and we must furthermore break them up if they try, which they are now doing.

whizzter• 11 months ago

The problem is that tech-savvy users are like bikers, most of us are law-abiding and want the best for society.

Then there's the 1%'ers, people causing trouble, be it by being biker thugs or malware authors or toplevel pirates, actually disrupting the system but often not in a way that's good for the masses and when clashing authoritans the authoritans win due to the masses good.

And yes, the "good" for the masses is more about malware whilst DRM is more of powergrab by media industries that were unwilling to adapt.

lotsofpulp2• 11 months ago

Most people don't want to have to learn multiple operating systems or ways of doing things.

Quarrelsome2• 11 months ago

A handful of tech-savvy users with rooted devices and open-source software will not make a difference to the giant crushing machine that is the system.

Agreed, although I don't think that's entirely true, its just that post-smartphones we no longer have any political agency over a significant volume of the new traffic. Much of the new traffic represents that faction of people who initially mocked the internet as "nerd shit". But we don't have to get discouraged by our smallness here.

Rather we can offer a sub-system that satisifes our demands and is an open door to those willing to find it. We could try to fight our corner, but unless we're incredibly organised, its unlikely they'll listen due to how less relevant we are, now that all the normies transitioned online.

So we either jump ship to other, more permissive platforms and help make them good by developing software that closes the gap, or we counter by attacking the systems that prevent people from installing software on the device they have bought.

We just shouldn't expect the general population to care about our problems en-masse because they never have and never will. We will make a difference by creating an alternative sub-system that is poised to grow when the giant crushing machine stumbles at some point in the future.

We can't hate people for picking the parental wing of Apple because for most normies they don't enjoy the freedoms of technology, its the choice and difficulty that they conversely find oppressive.

3abiton• 11 months ago

I am looking forward for the day I remote ssh into a <insert kvm solution> controlling my iPhone/Android so I can login to my bank app because they stopped allowing web access, and I don't want to compromise on privacy. Shit is nuts.

camgunz• 11 months ago

What I like about your comment is that it points out that all technical work-arounds are moot if people as a whole are not willing to stand up with pitchforks and torches to defend their freedoms.

If your system requires extraordinary political efforts from large numbers of people, your system will fail. We are the elites, we have to oppose this. If Netflix asks us to implement this kind of DRM, we have to resign. If Facebook asks us to implement sophisticated surveillance, we have to resign. Etc. etc. We can't keep cashing the checks and then point to the body politic like "I beg you to stop me".

tiahura2• 11 months ago

Telling people how they have to design their systems is the opposite of freedom.

raxxorraxor6• 11 months ago

It is of high financial interest of Netflix. I killed my subscription because they couldn't support my sensibly configured browser.

I often recommend people to kill their subscription as well because of this fact. Netflix just isn't oriented to improve their service for their users and it shows.

It won't hit any of their KPI or metrics, but their shitty behavior has a real effect. That said, most other alternatives suck as well. Killed Paramount almost immediately, can't remember why I left Disney. I think there were similar issues.

deadbabe• 11 months ago

Let’s say we do all that. How do you explain to a common layperson exactly what has been achieved? What is the ultimate benefit?

anonzzzies3• 11 months ago

How feasible is it currently (I never tried as I don't want or need it yet) to run Android under Linux for your banking/gov apps? I can accessibility tooling to control them, so only in those cases, I could communicate with the android layer. I don't care about Netflix etc (I know many people do) but I must he able to login to banking and gov.

sharperguy• 11 months ago

While you have a point there is another aspect to this: If our current situation were already different, netflix and banks would not be able to pull these things in the first place.

E.g. if using open free platforms was already the norm, netflix requiring a verified OS would just result in netflix becoming unusable for most people rather than just killing a couple edgecases used by a relatively small number of people. And so it would no longer be in their financial interest. It's why we've had desktops for so long without this happening, although the pieces are finally being put in place to make it a reality.

JustExAWS3• 11 months ago

So you want the “freedom” of being able to run the hardware you want. But you don’t think Netflix should have the “freedom” to decide where there software should run?

You don’t have the right to other people’s content - especially for rental content in the case of Netflix.

Even if you don’t agree with that, do you really think that Google should allow Google Wallet run on hardware where they can’t verify the security? No one in the payment chain would trust Android devices. Credit card terminals and every one else has to fall under compliance regulations.

The banks are liable for fraud. Are you okay to say if use unverified hardware to use banking services they aren’t liable for any losses?

pontifier• 11 months ago

I'm attempting to revive/create a streaming service to compete with Netflix et al. without any DRM. This would leverage physical media to eliminate requirements from copyright holders about how you might access something you actually own. There are challenges, and I'm almost certain to be sued, but it's a fight I believe is needed.

fsflover26• 11 months ago

This is why it's so important to defend the real principles here not just the technical artefacts of them.

You're not wrong, but technical artefacts can be an important step in the right direction. I came to my bank, showed them my Librem 5 phone and asked where I can download an app for it. It was a much clearer message than "but Android isn't free!" (which is of course true). I do the same with governmental services. It also makes it much easier to explain to ordinary people that the choice must not be artificially restricted to just two megacorps.

lwhi18• 11 months ago

We need an open web, with open principles and to prevent any commercial enterprise from dominating our social / tech sphere via monopolisation or methods of proprietary control.

This isn't a surprise. A vocal minority have been saying the same ad infinitum.

The need hasn't changed, and won't change; however there's a strong likelihood we'll get to a point where action isn't possible because we've passed the point of no return.

arcbyte• 11 months ago

Perhaps we should pick a page from the example of radio and force all video content to be openly reproducible for a forced flat fee.

thunfischtoast• 11 months ago

I agree, but your points becomes stronger when you leave Netflix away. Netflix is a private entertainment company, and when I don't like their conditions I can always quit.

Banks on the other hand have so much more control over my life. With their apps being locked to the two major mobile OS I have many hoops to go through when I want to use an alternative one. It's not impossible yet, but it becomes very cumbersome to do so.

tiahura2• 11 months ago

I prefer to live in a society where adults are free to come to their own arrangements with other adults. Not one where those with a penchant for authoritarianism set terms for others.

Sometimes this system may have warts like not getting to watch Netflix on your Switch, but that seems like a small price to pay for respecting individual autonomy.

james_marks• 11 months ago

Netflix shouldn't be able to insist on a particular type of DRM for me to receive their service.

Maybe it’s just a bad example, but why would this be true? As a private company delivering entertainment, they can have any restrictions they want as a condition to selling to you.

d_sem• 11 months ago

It has never been easier to realize your own open source hardware platform. Those dedicated to freedom can chose to offer alternatives. The challenge is we don't live in a post job society and people need to make money to survive. Until that changes, practical professionals will gravitate towards non-ideal systems that optimize for short term value over freedom.

beambot• 11 months ago

The only way this happens is if people & organizations vote with their $$.

My immediate follow-up to people who take this position: Are you using Framework laptops, pinephone or other OSS devices already? If not, then it's just empty air -- vote with your $$.

trinsic2• 11 months ago

When Google restricts your ability to install certain applications they aren’t constraining what you can do with the hardware you own, they are constraining what you can do using the software they provide with said hardware.

No. Incorrect. Because the argument that we should be focusing on software is a distraction. They use restricting the OS as an argument to restrict the Hardware. Their is pressure put on on hardware devs to toe this line.

You can see this with secure enclaves. If they didn't care about what software was running on their hardware, they wouldn't be designing hardware to restrict the kind of OS you can run on the hardware. Secure Boot/UEFI is going in that direction and Mobile devices are already there to some extent.

This whole argument is a distraction designed to lure people away from the real problem. That all technology (Hardware and Software) is being designed to restrict freedoms. If you are focus on this distraction, you are missing the point.

bccdee5• 11 months ago

Forcing Apple to change core tenets of iOS by legislative means would undermine what made the iPhone successful.

Even if this is true… so what? Perhaps the App Store monopoly has helped make the iPhone successful, but that doesn't make it a good thing.

If you want to play Playstation games on your PS5 you must suffer Sony’s restrictions, but if you want to convert your PS5 into an emulator running Linux that should be possible.

Why? What if Sony's restrictions are bad? Why are we ceding corporations the right to treat us however they want, so long as we're using their software?

You shouldn't have to flash a new OS onto your hardware in order for it to respect you as its user & owner. You shouldn't need to be tech-savvy, either. The happy path for the median user should be privacy and freedom.

Free/libre alternatives to consumer software are always going to be second-class, because respecting users is at odds with making money off them. If we people to be treated well by tech, it's not enough to provide an alternative ecosystem. We have to deny corporations the option to treat users badly in the first place.

Meneth• 11 months ago

The word "badly" means different things to different people, so I believe you could not get a majority to agree that any law to such effect is perfectly good.

bccdee5• 11 months ago

I don't expect a single monolithic law could work, but I see no reason why a constellation of specific laws couldn't work.

For instance, the "stop killing games" proposal¹ is by far one of the most demanding laws I can imagine in this vein, but I've (anecdotally) seen massive support for it in gaming communities.

[1] https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

sirjaz• 11 months ago

We as tech enthusiasts killed a viable 3rd option. For all its warts Microsoft created a great mobile os, but we killed it. If we could convince them to bring it back to be the true alternative to the existing duopoly in might fix these issues.

ACCount375• 11 months ago

I wouldn't expect Microsoft, of all people, to be a "viable third option". They weren't exactly keen on user freedom either - they aren't now, and they weren't in Windows Phone 7 days.

akimbostrawman2• 11 months ago

You mean the Microsoft that now requires a online microsoft account to use there desktop OS?

A viable 3rd option has existed for a very long time, AOSP and its forks.

jrm4• 11 months ago

Technically true, the worst kind of true.

The original phrase is good as is and much better than this nitpicking if we'd like to see actual movement on the issue.

“I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own”

breve2• 11 months ago

Start with buying the right hardware. Fairphone offers more control over the hardware:

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/104924762388...

https://www.fairphone.com/

noisy_boy• 11 months ago

I feel like such initiatives miss one obvious target - the well heeled tech savvy user (who quite often is also privacy minded) and wants the latest. At the price point they are selling a Snapdragon 7 device, I can get a Snapdragon 8 Elite phone from the market quite easily. Now I am happy to pay more because of what they stand for but I don't see them selling a model that features the latest and greatest + the privacy focus. Surely the latest hardware and privacy/environmental responsibility are not mutually exclusive. I change my phone every 4-5 years on average so I try to not contribute to the landfills but I do want the latest when I buy.

detaro• 11 months ago

Surely the latest hardware and privacy/environmental responsibility are not mutually exclusive.

It pretty much is. The engineering for bringing out a latest-and-greatest device and opening it up is something a small independent outfit can't afford, and the big companies capable of it are not interested in doing it.

Aachen10• 11 months ago

They said with the latest device release (like 2 months ago) that they're shifting their focus towards what you're saying (good quality without paying a huge premium), but it's still hard because what's good for you isn't good for me. I find the device too large and not fast enough; my partner would find the device already quite expensive as well as on the small side. The device won't work for everyone, even if they'd make it cost twice as much (and very few people are willing to pay even a 50% premium). Instead, they're trying to now please more people while making somewhat more compromises in the ethics department as compared to being more strict there and having it work for even fewer people

None of their previous phones were (at release) as close to competitive as the Fairphone 6 is today

We could have both an ethical/privacy device and many models at competitive price points, but that requires economies of scale to the same extent as non-fair competitors are doing. It sounded for a short time (like ten years ago) as though more vendors would go this route when incontrovertibly shown that it is possible and they merely need to tell FP's vendors "give some of that fairly mined Cobalt to us, too", but FP is here and history hasn't played out that way so this is what we've got. I assume this is the best that they were able to achieve with the resources they could muster. All we can do to help it grow is buy the device, or start a competitor or collaboration

Aachen10• 11 months ago

The OS they ship has Google services on it. They've previously chosen not to give you root access by default because Google wouldn't allow it: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fairphone-s-approach-to-root-o...

They'll make the same choice again because it's not really a choice. Nobody would buy the device, or could make much use of it, without Google services on it. They'd be out of business

Edit, to be clear: that is not to say I disagree with what they do. They allow you to unlock the bootloader and they even supply an open and degoogled version of the OS! That is more than any other vendor I'm aware of. Every time I need a new phone, I check if the latest Fairphone fits my needs, and even though it's a compromise, I've tried it out in the past for several weeks. It's really worth supporting. But Google's new restriction will almost certainly affect Fairphone users, too

breve2• 11 months ago

They also offer a Google-free Android:

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/997915455681...

https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-s...

You can also run Ubuntu Touch on the Fair Phones.

Cyclone_• 11 months ago

The first thing that came to mind when I heard hardware we own was vehicles like a Rivian where they do run a lot of software. I can understand why they'd not want people to run software in order to avoid bad press. If someone writes something and things go wrong, it will look bad for the manufacturer, even if they're not at fault.

dbg31415• 11 months ago

Some things shouldn't be left to amateurs to repair. Just because you "own" the hardware doesn't mean you're equipped to fix it safely or securely. Modern devices are tightly integrated systems -- tinkering with them can make them less reliable, less secure, and sometimes outright dangerous. Manufacturers lock down certain layers not just out of greed, but because risk management protects both users and the people around those users.

If you agree with this article, do you also agree with these statements?

* "We should be able to repair our firearms with freely available full-auto conversions kits."

* "We should be able to repair our own cars, and add software like Volkswagen did to bypass EPA and state inspection testing."

* "We should be able to repair our own homes and offices, and ignore building codes and ADA guidelines."

wiredpancake• 11 months ago

We are talking about software.

jamesnorden2• 11 months ago

Non-sequitur. Full-auto conversion kits are illegal. If you're not repairing the house for the intent of selling it, there's no reason for it to be inspected, so that is already possible. Not even gonna comment on the car example, because it's hilariously out of touch.

halfi2• 11 months ago

Termux

halfi2• 11 months ago

apt Pkg install nmap

shermantanktop• 11 months ago

These arguments always suggest that the hardware/software divide is rigid. A cell phone does not have a single OS, it has many.

hellisothers• 11 months ago

Realistically there would be a non-zero cost to allowing this, tech support, or compliance issues, or even PR issues when somebody’s modified hardware does something bad. So few people actually care or want this, it doesn’t feel like a fight worth having as a unilateral mission.

Aurornis• 11 months ago

I worked on a product where we tried to keep it open for end users to modify what they wanted.

To be honest, it was way more of a problem than I ever imagined. The average user who tries to mod their system isn’t as proficient as you imagine they would be. As an engineer you imagine other engineers approaching the system as you would. In practice, it’s a lot of people with a lot of free time who copy and paste things into terminal sessions from forum posts and YouTube video comments. When it doesn’t work, they try to get your customer support team to fix it. They will deny, deny, deny when asked if they’ve modified the system because they want to trick support into debugging it anyway. When customer support refuses to handle their modified system, they try to RMA or return it for a refund in protest.

Over time, it drains you. You see the customer support request statistics and realize that a massive support burden could be avoided by locking it down. You see the RMA analysis and realize a lot of perfectly good devices are being returned with weird hacks applied. Every time you change an API or improve the system you have to deal with a vocal minority of angry modders who don’t want you to change anything, ever, because they expect the latest updates to work perfectly with all of their customer software.

It’s tiresome. I think the only way this works is if customers have to log in to a system and agree to surrender all customer support and warranty service for a device to enable the free-for-all mode for them. That doesn’t work, though, because warranty laws require that you service the device regardless unless you can prove it was the modification that caused the RMA, which is a model that works with vehicle service but not the $100 consumer hardware device.

So I get. I wish every device could be totally open, but doing that with normal customer service and support is a huge burden. The only place it really works is devices like Raspberry Pi where it’s sold as something where you’re on your own, not something where customer support agents have to deal with what the product was supposed to do before all of the different mods were applied.

b3ing• 11 months ago

Right to repair and right to modify

skybrian• 11 months ago

For a technical user, being able to install any software you like means you have full control. But another perspective is that if someone else installs the wrong software (such as if a housemate installs spyware), your phone could betray you.

Security-conscious people might actually prefer to own hardware-limited devices. An example of this is having a camera with a physical shutter, or a light that shows camera activity that can't be disabled by software.

Similarly, some people might prefer to own devices that don't allow side-loading at all, since it disables a potential vulnerability. Maybe it would be best if Google allowed this to be a configurable option when buying an Android phone. (I suppose they could buy an iPhone, though.)

zkmon• 11 months ago

Where do you draw the boundary between code and hardware? System code has become more like a firmware. Vendor sees it as device, not as code + hardware. It's like a TV or a cassette player. There is no code. You can bring your content and "play" it. Any additional ability that you build on your own (you want the cassette player to play DVDs?), would void the warranty. But you can buy a DVD module from the vendor that is made to fit into your cassette player.

In reality, what you are expecting is, to be able to use your common tools to modify the device. But the vendor uses some weirdly shaped screws for which you don't have tools to work with. That is the real complaint.

kelnos• 11 months ago

I don't really agree with this take.

I do think that it should be easier for people to build and install alternative OSes on their phones.

However, building your own mobile OS is just really hard. And on top of the technical challenges, the UX challenges, the overall polish challenges, there are non-technical challenges that are often impossible for alternative OSes.

* Industry connections problems. As an example, no open source mobile OS has a contactless payments app, at least not one that is generic and can support more or less any credit card out there. That is, you can't build an Apple/Google Wallet analogue and have it work.

* As much as I wish Jobs had stuck to his guns on the "no iPhone SDK" thing, and had instead developed and improved the mobile web stack, that's not the reality today. There are many things you just cannot do current mobile OSes through its web browser. Native apps are required there. And so that means companies need to choose the platforms they build for. Today that's easy: iOS and Android. But getting governments and banks and various companies to build apps for your niche mobile OS is going to be essentially impossible. And with closed-source kitchen-sink libraries like Google Play Services, it's incredibly difficult even to get a lot of Android apps running properly (and consistently reliably) on "de-Googled" Android phones.

Ultimately the real problem is that there's no capable, standardized, OS-agnostic platform for building mobile apps. The web platform could have been it, but it's not, and now Apple and Google have a vested interest in ensuring that it never can be, because building native iOS and Android apps locks people and companies into those ecosystems.

Ultimately^2 the real problem is that free markets are a myth, and don't work. Companies want to become monopolies, and want to bar new entrants. I would absolutely love some mandate/legislation/whatever that made it mandatory that we have a fully open source mobile OS, and that all the players involved need to be allowed to build equivalent functionality into it that Android and iOS have. I know that sounds radical and like government overreach (and current governments wouldn't go for it anyway). But the alternative is what we have today: monopolists that don't care about the rights of their customers. There's really no "free-market" way out of this.

WhereIsTheTruth• 11 months ago

no, however, bootloader muck be unlocked and software must be open sourced when device reaches EOL

seviu2• 11 months ago

Genuine question and some random thoughts please downvote if you think I am ranting too much: one argument played by Google on this is that they want to protect users from malware, specially for banking apps, etc. However my queations/two cents regarding this:

Banks offer web frontends and many make you use 2FA and even hardware keys, which work on phones. We have been doing e-banking even before smartphone phones existed. We still do. On our full of malware and virus windows desktops.

These mobile apps are in reality web frontends disguised as mobile apps with biometrics on top of it. Nothing else really. I develop an iOS app for a bank. It’s really like that.

Despite that I have to obfuscate the binaries, check for cydia, make sure I am not jaibtoken and all kinds of useless stuff.

When you buy a PlayStation you are buying a piece of hardware that Sony sells you at a break even or a loss so that you can buy their games. You are not buying your hardware. You are buying means to run video games on a piece of hardware Sony is selling to you.

When I buy an iPhone I am paying a lot of money for my pocket computer, my internet communicator. The margins are so big, it doesn’t even make sense to squeeze more out of them.

When I buy an Android phone I fail to see the end game except that Google wants to have absolute control over everything I do in my life.

I cannot really deny them their right to do whatever they want.

Still I can’t see really how they want to protect users by having full control. That’s a big lie.

tonyhart74• 11 months ago

isn't that google just make the android reach parity with iOS???

this is happening with apple ecosystem since forever and people fine with it, so what is the issue here???

oh I know, people mad because someone take what they been able used to

not because they cant sideload. you can (just need an developer account for that)

keepamovin2• 11 months ago

The context of "ownership" is more nuanced when it comes to hardware devices - and even software.

What do you think when you say ownership?

I think - "this is totally mine. Nobody else's. I can do with this what I want. It is entirely up to me."

Do you own your passport? In fact, you probably do not. Most passports have a page stating to the effect that "this passport remains the property of <relevant authority>".

DO you own your device? I feel like I own my devices. I will defend them from theft, or loss. Because they are "mine". But ownership in a broader or legal context implies more rights that I don't think I have. I don't own the IP to the hardware and software on the device. These components have licenses to which I agree and am bound simply because I possess and use the device. These contracts restrict the things I am allowed to do. So my "ownership" also comes with certain "responsibilities" - which I personally don't believe I ever think about. But they exist.

For instance, probably somewhere in these contracts something is said to the effect that I cannot reverse engineer, reproduce and resell components or plans for these components. And myriad other things. Designed to protect the business and investment and people who invented and built them.

"Ownership" in the age of complex "finished products" that result from trillions dollar global supply changes of incomprehensible complexity is more nuanced than the idea that I found a log in the forest, and now the log is mine.

fainpul• 11 months ago

You try to make an analogy with the passport, but you achieve exactly the opposite: you make it obvious that they are not the same.

I don't "own" my passport. I'm not allowed to alter it in any way. I have to report it to the authorities if it gets lost or stolen. I'm not allowed to sell it or give it away. It's an official government document.

I do own my smartphone. I can put stickers on it. I can open it and modify the hardware (if I can work around the various roadblocks by the manufacturer). I don't have to tell anybody if I lose it. I can destroy it on purpose if I like. I can sell it, give it away, share it etc.

You mention IP. That has nothing to do with my use of the device. That concerns (as you mention) reverse engineering with the purpose to make money from it.

keepamovin2• 11 months ago

You certainly picked some phrases in there that could be combined and interpreted to imply something different. You have a good skill at finding what could be improved. You'd be great at music or maths I think - is that your passion?

soonc• 11 months ago

It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make the development of new operating systems possible.

Why?

The author doesn't explain why and I've yet to see any justification for this other than, essentially, "because I want to" - usually evoking supposed freedoms and rights that exist only in the realm of wishful thinking.

liendolucas3• 11 months ago

One of the biggest problems (if not the biggest) is that this desire is still a niche desire. If non-techie people would somehow be convinced that indeed hardware/software freedom is a basic right no matter the device we would be in a different position to pressure governments.

How can people be convinced about it is the hardest part. How do you convince people that have no idea about how technology and corporation interests work that the little device that you carry is bascially a brick at the mercy of its vendors?

zwnow2• 11 months ago

Talk to people. I know many of us are socially awkward but if you never talk to people they will never learn. Big tech is not combating hate on their platforms because they know it divides people. Combat that by being social and talk to people.

liendolucas3• 11 months ago

Is not that easy and is not a matter of being awkward or not, being social or not. People get tired very easily when talking about things they don't understand, especially technology.

And when they kind of get you, they don't see the point that you are trying to make, easily dismissing you on why would you want to do something like that when you have "all the apps for free" with a few taps and that there is not such need for what you are trying to explain to them.

People don't even get it when you explain that FB, Google, etc are not free products and so on. Is kind of a rabbit hole and people don't want to dive on such topics because is an endless talk and they lose patience very quickly.

Is very hard to make them see the problem. People are happy with new phones, apps and entertainment every day, they don't care if they are unable to run custom software that may benefit their very own interests. As long as they can do the things that they usually do, to them there's no problem at all. Is as simple as that.

edg50002• 11 months ago

I do think there is growing discontent with MS and Google, and you see Linux sentiment changing and the userbase growing. But it's still a small fraction of the populus even though it's grown a lot in the last decade probably

SirHumphrey• 11 months ago

One should not forget the reason for this growth though - the issues with privacy and users' control of devices on windows go back at least a decade, but most of this time nobody cared. It was only when Microsoft locked a lot of old computers out of Windows 11, Windows 11 proved a buggy slow mess, the google search results went down the toilet and the amount of adds on YouTube increased several times did people start to talk about "de-googling" and moving to Linux.

People are switching to Linux now because it works better. The privacy is still a nice-to-have bonus.

VagabundoP• 11 months ago

The first step is legally mandated unlocking of bootloaders.

More and more phones are locking them down until exploits are found to unlock them.

klamann• 11 months ago

This ist what the four essential freedoms are all about.

The hardware aspect is quite irrelevant to the whole point: the hardware only runs with software that does not respect your freedom and there's no feasible way to make the hardware run software that does respect our freedom. And of course our banks and streaming services and whatever else we need also don't offer us any software that respect our freedoms. So no, it's not about hardware, it's about free software. Always has been.

bubblebeard• 11 months ago

The author makes a good point but for the wrong reason I think. The fact that companies lock down their software, and hardware (looking at you Apple), is their choice just like it is yours to give them the finger.

However, at least in Sweden, a smart phone is practically mandatory since it has become a means of identification used by banks, police, our IRS counterpart etc. Even our physical mail is slowly being digitalised, and these services practically require you to own a smart phone. You can get by without one, but it’s a real struggle.

Therefore there should be laws requiring more transparency of these devices, in my opinion.

reddalo5• 11 months ago

Not only transparency, but freedom.

Freedom to use something you bought the way you want, without having a private foreign company decide for you.

jjani2• 11 months ago

I reckon a whole lot of these things wouldn't hold up in court. Either Swedish court or EU court. If not, then German court, or Australian court.

Here in this very thread I'm quite sure there's dozens of people who have pretty much made millions off of the back of this exact thing, i.e. working as developers at the likes of Google, Meta and Apple, part of the machine.

We need those people to atone and start funding lawyers out of pocket and bringing such cases, rather than just chatting about woe is me. In Europe that is, where the judiciary is still much less captured - the US is a lost cause. Such lawsuits are also much cheaper than going up against MegaCorp in US court.

notepad0x90• 11 months ago

I agree with this take, but my view is that it is one step detached from the root cause. The right to property is fundamental and inalienable. A person who can't own things isn't free, they have no claim on liberty.

That said, service providers, corporations and the like should be allowed one remedy: They can refuse future services and business to anyone if that person violates whatever b.s. rule they came up with.

However, the government (any government) has no authority to police post-ownership activity in a manner that deprives the owner of their property rights. In other words, they can say "You can't own an AK-47" or "You can't generate sound over certain dB" , but they can't say "You can't shoot your AK-47 on your property, even if it pauses no risk of harm to others, but you can own it", and they can't say "You can't use your speaker at maximum volume" (they can police the sound you generate but not the usage of your property, if the speaker passes the legal threshold then the speaker isn't relevant, the sound generated is).

This also applies to free (not commercial) sharing of property (copyright laws are fundamentally invalid).

The problem is, I am talking logic and reason which doesn't translate well into real-world scenarios. In the real world, the guys with the biggest guns make up random rules and pretend it is just and valid.

The reason I'm stating all this, is in the hopes that I can convince anyone who reads this and maybe if enough of us agree, some day democracy might work and laws can change.

The government can prevent ownership of things. It cannot however pass laws that dicate you can come into possesion of things and by all reason it is your property, but as a matter of technicality it can't be considered property and is subject to arbitrary usage laws by the government or rules by third-parties.

That said (I promise, my last one!), access to network services is special. If someone made some software where to function it requires some network service, and they came up with random rules on the network service side, then that is also their right, since that service is on their property. The remedy people have for this is to avoid that service. And if that service is the only one of its kind and using it is required, then the government has a natural obligation to protect the public against monopolies.

I had a hole other post/thread that got negative feedback and some interesting discussion about Google, Android and their sideloading policies. If you glean anything from this post of mine, please let it be that I am advocating for solving of the root causes of these problems. It is all too easy to be reactionary and fall into these rage-baiting events. Solving root causes is never easy, but good solutions are often simple. If reasonable minds can have a healthy discourse to find these solutions then many problems are solved, instead of playing whack-a-mole forever.

YmiYugy• 11 months ago

I like the idea of course, but such legislation would also be very disruptive, because it affects the entire supply chain. Every maker of any gadget, be it random white label android smartphone, set top box or smart home camera would have to negotiate with all their component suppliers to obtain full documentation instead of just driver and firmware blob. So would these suppliers with their suppliers. For mor niche components it seems plausible that no proper hardware spec exists and it’s instead through a combination of hardware descriptor languages, the driver code and good old tribal knowledge. Forcing Google and Apple to allow side loading on their OSs just requires them to flip a switch. I think there are also compelling reasons why smartphones are special. It’s a duopoly and most people have got to have one to properly participate in modern society.

upbeat_general• 11 months ago

This seems like the perfect case for legislation that starts out targeting higher volume devices/larger companies and lower over time.

I don’t see why the industry couldn’t move to providing this documentation/full source over a few years.

mordae2• 11 months ago

Good. It only needs to be done once and the datasheets are already written and often circulate underground.

Component supplier should not be allowed to only provide datasheet upon signing an NDA and only to some customers while providing chips to the resellers. If you put it on the open market, cough up the FULL datasheet, period.

nazgu1• 11 months ago

It is interesting, that when Apple, with small steps, slowly disallowed any kind of sideloading merely nobody took notice of it... and now Google is doing the same, and whole internet protest. Who knows, maybe fact that now there is no alternative for tech-savy, and people are angry now it is good thing in longer perspective for both platforms.

Aachen10• 11 months ago

Because I used to have a choice. Since dipping my toes in Android, I remember distinctly in 2012 or maybe 2013 the feeling when I got Xorg and Wireshark running on a Galaxy Note device within the first days. Dead simple! Heck, VirtualBox let me emulate Windows. I could play Rollercoaster Tycoon by attaching a USB keyboard and mouse over this little OTG dongle! Coming from Symbian and having recently started to run Linux on my desktop, and now all that being compatible on my phone, it felt like a miracle

Ahem, where was I

Ah yes: ever since dipping my toes in Android, I've always said I'd never buy an Apple device where I can't run my own software or control what proprietary software does. Now that the freedom is being taken away, the world is changing and I care about it. Until now, it was just a matter of buying any brand except one closed one. Not that hard to avoid

Aachen10• 11 months ago

The author doesn't seem to understand that you don't need your PlayStation 5 to travel, pay your rent, or authenticate to government services. That's the fundamental difference and why it is valuable that Android is open

I agree that there is currently no expectation for Sony to open up their OS to run just any software (such as pirated games). Nobody said that. There should be an open widely supported mobile OS because that's fast becoming about as fundamental to modern life (in my country at least) as roads and electricity are

Android being so easy to make software for is what hooked me as a teenager, after failing to develop for my previous Symbian phone. Taking that away is possible now because the alternatives are all gone. Where are you going to migrate to without making major concessions in your life? You'll have to forfeit popular messengers that your family, friends, landlord, etc. are on; no more mobile banking; extra fees to use online banking at all; extra fees to legally use public transport; no downloading of episodes or music from streaming services for offline use; no phone calls depending on your country's 2G status; etc.

BlueTemplar12• 11 months ago

You'll have to forfeit popular messengers that your family, friends, landlord, etc. are on; no more mobile banking; extra fees to use online banking at all; extra fees to legally use public transport; no downloading of episodes or music from streaming services for offline use; no phone calls depending on your country's 2G status; etc.

Some of these issues are overblown (depending on your situation), and we better take a stand on all of them now, or it will indeed be too late.

can16358p• 11 months ago

Or:

One (a big entity with enough resources) should take this as an opportunity and create a new, third truly open alternative to iOS and Android (no, I'm not talking about an AOSP fork, I'm saying something totally new) and let iOS/Android have their thing as they want, letting consumers decide between the three instead of forcing vendors into ridiculous business decisions like forcefully opening their own platforms for others.

Perz1val3• 11 months ago

There's SailfishOS being cooked

freefaler• 11 months ago

13 years ago, Cory Doctorow warned us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI

So basically market forces and profit optimization is at work here as always.

However, if we can still unlock the boot loader and install Lineage OS or something like that and have a way to pay for developers to release their apps on stores like f-droid we can use the hardware.

The biggest problem with having freedom to use our devices is that the model is broken for the developers who support them. You "can donate", but from the numbers I've seen it's like 1 in 1000 donate. No pay == developers can't invest their time to improve the software.

So if there is "really" a substantial number of enthusiasts that are ready to pay for the freedom they crave, then companies like Librem will have enough customers to create decent and usable products for this audience. Want digital freedom - prepare to support the people who provide it.

Yes, that might mean that we'll need to have 2 devices, 1 for "banking/government services" that is "certified" and one for our own usage. Shitty but we'll be forced to do that sooner on later. The efficiencies for the government to enforce the policies is so strong that they can't helps themselves. And corporations like to have more data to squeeze every cent from the customer.

So if there is a working business model for "freedom" we might have a partial freedom. If there isn't we'd be just a digital farm animals to be optimized for max profits and max compliance.

zb3• 11 months ago

However, if we can still unlock the boot loader and install Lineage OS or something like that

This is based on hacks and unsustainable, because now even Pixels do not release their device trees. Expect them to drop support for this entirely in a few years.

BlueTemplar12• 11 months ago

Here's a non-Google link : https://archive.org/details/TheComingCivilWarOverGeneral-pur...

taran_narat• 11 months ago

We need a Linux like OS for mobile devices!

fsflover26• 11 months ago

PureOS?

lugu• 11 months ago

In order to create a new type of right, we need a term that can be promoted. For exemple "The Right to Digital Autonomy".

HacklesRaised• 11 months ago

This seems counter intuitive.

All nflix da should require is the interfaces outer needs.

Network stack CODECS CRYPTO stack (DRM)

The OS seems irrelevant.

I mean sure you worked be limited to whatever interface a browser could provide.

It's not as if certification of a certain operating system means anything other than the certificate.

Netflix used play4sure beck in my days at Apple, and literally t out was a tick box for them to assure the content owners they had DRM.

Nobody certified apple's netflix app for ATV back then, I know, Ben Lee and I wrote it...

We desperately need OS research, exokernels should be a thing by now, at least then the question becomes moot.

Windows, (alphabet)OS, Linux and BSD all provide operating systems that enable productive work but there's a lot of cruft

retrocog• 11 months ago

Once we have a decentralized trust protocol that has been widely adopted, it will hopefully solve most of these problems. As it stands right now, we can validate control, but not actual ownership. As such, ownership has to be proven via KYC and other centralized methods that rest on state authority. Not a good solution for those who care about privacy and individual freedom!

avodonosov• 11 months ago

Ha-ha.

Android doesn't even let you access your files. It has famously blocked acess to the subfolders of /Android/data - every app has a subfolder there where it sfores files. And you can not visit these subfolders since Android 11.

A buggy app accumulates gigabytes (literaly, i am not exagregating) of temp files there, but i cant visit the folder to delete them.

Google explains that "it's for you safety".

I have to call it with the strong word "idiotic".

There are apps now where storing files in a shared, accessible folder is a payed option.

And in this world you want to own your hardware.

karol• 11 months ago

Is this your human right?

wolvesechoes3• 11 months ago

In my country two groups most hated by educated, civilized and self-labeled liberal people are miners and farmers. There are good reasons to not like them, especially miners (they have lot of privilege and cost a lot of money, whereas our (coal) mining industry is useless), but I came to the conclusion that the actual reason behind the hate is the fact that those two groups are able to force government to do their will, even though they are a small minority in the overall population. They achieve this by blocking streets, burning tires and causing overall mayhem, and are very consistent about it. At the same time those educated, civilized and liberal people can helplessly complain between each other, and maybe write some hateful article in the newspaper.

Forgive me this seemingly unrelated introduction, but when I read such threads I don't have much hope something will change, for similar reasons. People that care about computer user's freedom and agency will write blog posts and create hundreds of comments about how things should look like, how government and corporations want to enslave them etc. And then do nothing to give those adversaries even a smallest inconvenience. Some will create a new "privacy-oriented" and "freedom-focused" project on GitHub, naively thinking it will solve problem that is not technical at all.

Those without power always become victims. If it is all bark but no bite, no one is going to back down.

Turlututu• 11 months ago

Have you heard about transversality of the fight? Do you have common ground with those farmers and coal miners? Do they have some with you. They are humans, after all. They feel and fear and hope.

I come from a place famous for social unrest. A successful protest is one uniting the student to the truckers, to the miner to the teachers.

Punching up. Not sideways or down. Their is a greater enemy than the farmers.

wolvesechoes3• 11 months ago

But I have nothing against miners or farmers, I just diagnosed why they are so resented - they succeed.

cluckindan• 11 months ago

As long as the hardware vendor and teleoperator are able to run arbitrary, closed-source code on baseband processors without the user even knowing that it’s happening, no mobile device is truly free (libre).

”In March 2014, makers of the free Android derivative Replicant announced they had found a backdoor in the baseband software of Samsung Galaxy phones that allows remote access to the user data stored on the phone.”

zoobab• 11 months ago

We need a law to have mandatory storage of precise and complete technical specification to be able to write drivers for hardware peripherals. With heavy fines if they are incomplete.

fedeb95• 11 months ago

If you share the post opinion, it means you believe there is value in an hardware that provides enough details in order to run any software we want on it. If that is the case, go build a company that builds such an hardware.

choeger• 11 months ago

The question is: What's ownership? How do I ascertain that I own a device and not, say, the guy who just robbed it from me at knifepoint?

From a government perspective, I think the issue is anonymity. In the long run, governments cannot accept ownership of a thing without being able to attribute usage of that thing. From that perspective, as much as you cannot anonymously own a warehouse, you cannot anonymously own a programmable radio device.

From the corporate perspective, it's even worse: They cannot accept you using a device freely if they license you software or data. They would probably be fine if you could prove to them that you were not violating the terms (or vice versa, they could prove when you did), but that probably has a massive impact on privacy.

j1000• 11 months ago

Sorry, but I was thinking that Apple was forced to allow side load? And now you're telling me that Good Guy Google is disallowing this? How this is legally possible?

charles_f• 11 months ago

Forcing Apple to change core tenets of iOS by legislative means would undermine what made the iPhone successful.

Successful for whom? If you're talking about the commercial success of apple through lock down behaviour, sure. But there is *nothing* that would prevent them from providing the exact same experience while adding a toggle in settings "allow sideloading". You want the "crisp" experience that comes from apple's strict review process, just use the official app store.

Looking at android till now, it is still possible to offer a "certified" os that is flexible enough for you to use foss stores. The argument pretending that removing sideloading is customer centric are borderline fallacious. I don't think that playing on semantics between hardware and OS changes any of that

ozim• 11 months ago

Going to be contrarian.

Why not build your own hardware and run your own software on it, instead of screaming at clouds of big tech.

There is Fairphone as an example so it is possible to build/buy hardware directly.

Liftyee4• 11 months ago

Why not build your own hardware

Haven't looked at this in depth, but designing and manufacturing a phone with a similar miniaturization level and performance to commercial models is a huge electronics/firmware/design engineering challenge. Additionally, often the datasheets for processors, etc. are difficult to obtain and/or under NDA.

Nothing a group of determined engineers with the funding and connections couldn't achieve, but it's no easy task. Fairphone required a few million $ to develop the first model.

Either way, developing software is hard enough - having to build hardware too moves the project toward "pipe dream" territory IMO.

const_cast28• 11 months ago

Yes, let me just invest 100 billion dollars into creating my own device so that I'm not censored by one of the biggest companies on Earth.

Jesus fucking Christ. We're asking for a drop here from a mega corporation, and still there will be people bending over backwards and spreading their cheeks and actually begging for it. Its not enough to get fucked, we actually have to want to get fucked, and not wanting it is weird or something.

liampulles2• 11 months ago

IBM didn't want their PCs and OS APIs to be open and for IBM compatible clones to exist either, they were just bad competitors. I think the relative user freedom we have on PCs is quite exceptional in the truest sense of the word.

I want there to be the same openness on devices too, don't get me wrong.

anyg• 11 months ago

Relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/86/

TriangleEdge• 11 months ago

building new operating systems to run on mobile hardware is impossible, or at least much harder than it should be.

Why isn't there a linux flavor for phones with an app store?

littlecranky67• 11 months ago

The same reason why linux isn't broadly used on PCs: Lack of hardware support and drivers.

m4rtink2• 11 months ago

There is Sailfish os Ubuntu Touch, you can run Fedora and Debian rebuilds on phones. I think it is finally getting there & all this Google and Apple bullshit will hopefully make it move faster and be more attractive to people. :)

fsflover26• 11 months ago

Yes, PureOS, Mobian, postmarketOS and more.

1000units• 11 months ago

Can't you with enough effort?

florieger• 11 months ago

If you want to play Playstation games on your PS5 you must suffer Sony’s restrictions, but if you want to convert your PS5 into an emulator running Linux that should be possible.

This is what Sony did with the PS3, but afaik Linux was then used as a backdoor to jailbreak the "PS3 OS" and sideload games.

I guess, this is why Sony abandoned the idea of allowing Linux on their consoles. Kind of sad, but understandable.

rickdeckard3• 11 months ago

The overarching issue is that this feature of the PS3 not only created cost in development/maintenance, but then negatively affected the core revenue-stream. So it was shut down, and Sony will never do this again.

Now we're at a point where there is no justification even for the cost of development/maintenance of such "open compute" features. Why even create a path for parts of your product to be "without rails" when there is no (legal) requirement for it and no significant commercial market, but just increased cost and complexity as well as security-risks.

I would like to see more devices being unlockable and provide the freedom to run "any code we want". But as there is no visible critical mass willing to pay for this, there is no market, and this means the current economic system doesn't support a company walking such a path.

So the only path I can see is to introduce an incentive for this into the system via a legal mandate, or change the system.

thw_9a83c• 11 months ago

Perhaps we should stop viewing iOS/Android devices as true general-purpose computing devices. They are merely gadgets, like Walkmans, portable CD players, game consoles, blood pressure meters, car infotainment systems, etc. They contain CPUs with enough power and RAM to act as general-purpose computers, but Apple and Google did not design them for that purpose. However, Windows and macOS were designed as operating systems for general-purpose personal computers, and restrictions on the software you can run are also happening there. To me, this is more worrisome than the openness of mobile OSs.

jokoon• 11 months ago

Easier said than done. The main reason companies don't allow it is sadly for security reasons, it's a cost/benefit.

If the government would enforce laws about computer security, tech companies would not have to restrict user freedom.

Obviously this situation benefits those tech companies, but honestly the solution is not as easy as it seems.

Of course it's a different story for the right to repair and DRM.

AdamN• 11 months ago

Here's the deal for you young'ns. Richard Stallman (rms) had it right on this topic and alot of people had to fight to have the limited stack we have.

It's not enough though.

All we can do is make all the decisions possible to keep an open stack as viable as possible - even though what we have now is woefully incomplete. We need to push for this within our teams, within our companies, within our governments, in civil society, and everywhere else that we can because the corporate crowding out of a free technology stack will crowd out everything else if it's allowed to.

rollcat3• 11 months ago

It's not the devices, or the operating systems. RMS didn't see TiVo coming, but TiVo was never the problem: by the time GPL3 was ready, the industry (e.g. AOSP) has mostly moved to MIT/BSD. In the end, none of this mattered.

The real problem is that @gmail.com or @icloud.com are now required to participate in society. I'm happy to use an iPhone, it's in my subjective opinion the best device on the market. My concern is that I need an iCloud account to talk to my bank. It's become nearly as powerful as my ID card.

toasterlovin3• 11 months ago

The real problem is that @gmail.com or @icloud.com are now required to participate in society

They absolutely are not, though. I've been fully bought into the Apple ecosystem for nearly 2 decades and have used a Fastmail email address with it for the last decade (when I ditched my MobileMe email address). Similarly, I have never had an @gmail.com email address, though I've used various Google products.

daniel_iversen• 11 months ago

This might be controversial but I'm not sure you should be able to install whatever you want on "hardware you own". Reason being (and I was trying hard to explore an "other side of the argument" and whether there was/is one) examples like Kindles, where I think originally Amazon had it as a loss leader to sell ebooks. I reckon they brought a great product into the market and established a new category (mass market ebooks and ebook readers) and if they want to restrict us from rooting it then so be it (they could not sell it at a loss if it was super easy to root and not even use it as a Kindle initially) as long as they're clear about the restrictions up-front. Thoughts? :)

dangus2• 11 months ago

Some other examples of why this could be bad:

- Running code on your car that compromises safety, like modifying/disabling legally-required safety features.

- Modifying code on health devices, like pacemakers

- Protective code involving things like overheating protections (e.g., firmware preventing you from disabling cooling fans in your laptop or running your 3D printer so that it catches fire)

- Running devices with parameters known by the manufacturer to damage them (e.g., processor manufacturers will let you overclock their chips but will keep some parameters limited/locked that the designers know will not work)

It’s notable that Google is implementing this change first specifically in countries that are impacted by a specific style of fake app scam. They seem to be responding to a legitimate consumer safety issue.

Should we be able to run our own code on our own devices? Generally, yes, and it’s also already legal to do so even if the manufacturer doesn’t want you to. But it’s also legal for manufacturers to set their own parameters.

Like you said, examples like Kindles and game consoles exist where the business needs to have some level of freedom in defining their business model. Would you be able to buy a $150 4K TV at Walmart if the included Roku software wasn’t subsidizing it?

The issues surrounding anticompetitive lock-down only occur in markets with a lack of competition and I think those issues can be balanced agains the manufacturer’s desires to sell a specific experience.

Palomides• 11 months ago

I should be able to modify the software on all of those things, if I want to toast my CPU, my car, or my heart, that's entirely reasonable and there are tons of other ways to do them anyway

mariusor• 11 months ago

Is it necessary to establish the difference between "firmware" and "software"?

Most of the use-cases you listed are about modifying devices which do not run "software" per se.

Phones, more and more like computers, are becoming general purpose computing devices, which require software to be useful. I think there's a distinction that we need to be aware of.

mcv4• 11 months ago

It’s through this control of the operating system that Google is exerting control, not at the hardware layer.

True, but many phones use the hardware layer to prevent you from installing a different OS. It's all part of the same system designed to deny us real ownership of the computer we paid for.

xkcd1963• 11 months ago

Why are folks so worried about this. If necessary we build a new generation of phones.

qiine• 11 months ago

no, we must.

casey2• 11 months ago

It is depressing having a government that facilitates and support the mass rape of the populace. I thought the entire point was to lift people up

tnvmadhav• 11 months ago

alternatively, we should have the ability to run [doom] on hardware we own.

Ms-J• 11 months ago

We have always had the ability to make or run any application.

If we allow this, then we will never be able to make or run apps again.

Do your part in any way to stop this.

Talk about this with your family and make them aware.

maxlin• 11 months ago

I can't recall a post staying at the top this long. I hope this is a sign of how hard we're going to reject Google's stance.

scotty79• 11 months ago

Governments should be protecting consumers not companies. Every time that company tries to limit consumers in any way, government should step it and forbid it.

That's the whole benefit of having strong central government, that it can curb ambitions of smaller local tyrants.

baby• 11 months ago

I think there are two issues, that maybe we should point out to help the debate:

- As a user sometimes I want to sideload legitimate applications (the question now is why can't these apps get approved on the appstore?)

- As a user sometimes I want to be able to use different devices from different vendors, I don't want to be forced to stay on Apple because airdrop or the keychain or login with Apple or my airpods pro don't work on Android anymore.

nautilus12• 11 months ago

This is a relatively obvious universal sentiment with no suggestion as to how to make it happen.

kristov• 11 months ago

I think the conversation needs to change from "can't run software of our choice" to "can't participate in society without an apple or google account". I have been living with a de-googled android phone for a number of years, and it is getting harder and harder, while at the same time operating without certain "apps" is becoming more difficult.

For example, by bank (abn amro) still allows online banking on desktop via a physical auth device, but they are actively pushing for login only via their app. I called their support line for a lost card, and had to go through to second level support because I didn't have the app. If they get their way, eventually an apple or google account will be mandatory to have a bank account with them.

My kid goes to a school that outsourced all communication via an app. They have a web version, but it's barely usable. The app doesn't run without certain google libs installed. Again, to participate in school communication about my kid effectively requires an apple or google account.

I feel like the conversation we should be having is that we are sleepwalking into a world where to participate in society you must have an account with either apple or google. If you decide you don't want a relationship with either of those companies you will be extremely disadvantaged.

shawabawa32• 11 months ago

If you decide you don't want a relationship with either of those companies you will be extremely disadvantaged.

Even more worrying is the inverse of this - if Google and/or Apple decide for whatever reason they don't want a relationship with you (aka they ban you for no reason) - you are completely screwed

abustamam4• 11 months ago

Even if they ban you for a reason, you're screwed. Granted, the ban may have been warranted, but you're essentially put into a societal prison with no due process or recourse.

vannevar2• 11 months ago

Say, if you're blacklisted by a fascist government, for example. Tim Cook's pledge of loyalty was disturbing on many levels.

owlbite• 11 months ago

I think this is the thing we need to change most. These big companies effectively have as much power as courts to break your life, but no transparency, oversight, appeals process or even a clear process in some cases. They can destroy a person or a small business without even noticing.

petre2• 11 months ago

It's esentially boolean social scoring, just think about it.

8f2ab37a-ed6c• 11 months ago

This happens already in dating apps. https://www.vice.com/en/article/banned-from-dating-apps/

Date didn't go as well as the other person was hoping? They can report you to the app, some tired and overworked support person in an emerging market bans you, they keep whatever cash you already spent on bonus likes and your multi-month subscription, no refunds.

And you can never sign up from the same Google/Apple account, the same phone, and with the same face, because of course now you have to verify your biometric information with some of these apps (Bumble is introducing submitting your id or taking verification photos).

Or their AI misfires and deems you as having said something inappropriate, again, off you go. You have no recourse, hope you know someone who works at that company who can flip the bit in their database.

Want to know the reason why they banned you? Sorry, that's sensitive information, you will never know, only that you "violated the terms of service". Which one? Sorry, we can't tell you, goodbye.

Oh, now 60% of society meets through datings apps? Too bad, you don't get to anymore, shouldn't have violated our terms of service. Oh, and most of these apps are run by the same company, so you get banned on one, you likely get banned from all on them at once. Have fun.

m463• 11 months ago

I have to unlock my apple id on a daily basis "To continue to use facetime"

jpfromlondon• 11 months ago

from an incredibly trivial perspective I was thinking about this recently when I discovered all games operate as saas products now, if for whatever reason you're banned then you can no longer play the product you purchased, what happened to third party mplayer servers?

athrowaway3z• 11 months ago

Even more worrying

This is untrue.

It's a case of A leads to B and B requires A.

The most common antidote to anti-consumer behavior like this, is for the established parties to pull a dumb stunt and for competitor to eat their lunch.

If you can't bank without Google or Apple, all competition is dead on arrival.

If we have to politik the deplatforming rules of companies because they've taken complete control of the gates, we're doing the wrong politiking at the wrong place.

j4102_• 11 months ago

The only solution I see is some decentralized way of governing. And even if this gains mass support, I still forsee some centralized way of how rules are enforced that can also cut off your relationship as well. Efficiency v.s privacy tradeoff I guess.

dataflow• 11 months ago

Can you make an argument as to how this is different from having to have an account with, say, your ISP?

Nextgrid• 11 months ago

You have many ISPs to choose from. There are not many "Googles" nor "Apples" to choose from.

rickdeckard3• 11 months ago

Your ISP is an utility, it doesn't hold your de-facto identity.

Google and Apple increasingly become the entity required to identify yourself, either directly ("login with Google/Apple to participate") or indirectly ("use our App on iOS/Android to confirm your identity and participate")

anymouse123456• 11 months ago

This question is a non sequitur.

No one is arguing for using ISP-hosted accounts as an alternative.

The core problem isn't even rooted in identity per se, it's about platform owners actively working to limit access to essential information from platforms they cannot profit from.

Even granting the most cherubic motives, this ongoing behavior is atrocious on it's face and should be prevented by any means, including competition, rule making and legislation.

hansvm• 11 months ago

A few points:

1. It's not necessarily different. Your ISP has monopolistic power over you, and it should be regulated more aggressively.

2. A non-mobile ISP is currently much less important than an Apple/Google account for interacting with modern society, and less important than it was even a decade ago. If all 1.5 of my available home ISPs turned evil I could manage just fine without them.

3. Given the relative public perceptions this feels weird to say, but Comcast and their ilk are much less problematic than the Apple/Google monopolies. You can largely just pay for internet (plus an extra 10-40% from scammy business practices) and do whatever you want to do, with the analytics they're selling about you being less invasive than those which Apple/Google use.

MetaWhirledPeas• 11 months ago

If ISPs pose a similar problem, that still doesn't minimize the Apple/Google problem.

sokoloff6• 11 months ago

I called their support line for a lost card, and had to go through to second level support because I didn't have the app.

What’s the alternative? The bank sending out a debit card to anyone who calls up and says “I’m @kristov, trust me…”

You were not able to served by the standard path, because you couldn’t authenticate yourself via the standard mechanism. You still got service by an alternate path. No different from opting out of the airport scanner; it takes longer and is a little less convenient, but you still get service.

reaperducer• 11 months ago

What’s the alternative? The bank sending out a debit card to anyone who calls up and says “I’m @kristov, trust me…”

Are you under the impression that this wasn't a solved problem for the half-century before "apps?"

Yes, there was some tiny fraction of fraud, but it's not like adding all these layers upon layers of technology has fixed anything. The difference is that instead of getting ripped off by one of the people in your own town, anyone anywhere on the planet can rip you off now.

xandrius6• 11 months ago

Not sure if you're genuinely asking because there are a dozen proven ways to verify identity or residency either digitally and physically without being locked down to 2 mobile OSes owned and controlled by 2 American companies.

humodz• 11 months ago

Off the top of my head: going in-person to the bank, email, phone call or sms to a number that you previously informed to the bank (say when opening the account), otp a la authy or aegis. None of these require you to be on google or apple's walled garden.

richrichardsson• 11 months ago

opting out of the airport scanner

slightly OT, but where can you opt out of the scanner?

Every time I've tried they told me I won't be allowed through security unless I subject myself to the scanner, despite me protesting that they can search me however else they please.

patates2• 11 months ago

Wait, how you being on the Google/Apple ecosystem help the identification process?

guerrilla3• 11 months ago

I think the conversation needs to change from "can't run software of our choice" to "can't participate in society without an apple or google account".

This won't work out for you. It just turns into technically being able to, but it being practically impossible. In Sweden (i.e. basically your future), we're already there.

0xfaded• 11 months ago

What's it like in Sweden? When I lived in Denmark the government had its own e-boks system for mail. I only ever accessed it via web, but I'm sure there's an app as well. Back then everything was authenticated via NemID which defaulted to the option of using codes printed on physical cards sent in the mail. I know they've moved to MitID now. Does anyone know if MitID can be installed on a de-googled device? Apparently there are a couple other options https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/how-to-use...

rkagerer• 11 months ago

Add "can't participate in society without agreeing to user-hostile Terms of Service clauses, such as indemnities, behavior profiling, and opted-in marketing subscriptions."

It's amazing where those dark patterns are cropping up (government services, SPCA, etc).

amluto2• 11 months ago

I sometimes contemplate that this sort of incidental ToS should be 100% unenforceable.

Here’s what I mean: suppose I want to order a cup of coffee at a cafe. I’ve made a choice to go to that cafe, and it’s at least generally reasonable that the cafe and I should agree to some terms under which they sell me coffee, and those terms should be enforceable.

But if the cafe requires me to use an app, and the app requires me to use a Google account, then using the app and the Google account is not actually a choice I made — it’s incidental to my patronage of the cafe. And I think it’s at least interesting to imagine a world in which this usage categorically cannot bind me to any contract with the app vendor or Google. Sure, I should have to obey the law, and Google should have to obey the law, but maybe that should be it. If Google cannot find a way to participate without a contract, then they shouldn't participate.

I might even go farther: Google and the app’s participation should be non discriminatory. If the cafe doesn’t want to sell me coffee, fine. But Google should have no right to tell the cafe not to serve me coffee.

(For any of this to work well, Google should not be able to incorporate its terms into the terms of the cafe. One way to address this might be to have a rule that third parties like Google cannot assert any sort of claim against an end user arising from that end user’s terms of service with the cafe. If Google thinks I did something wrong (civilly, not criminally) in my use of the app, they would possibly have a claim against the cafe, but neither Google nor the cafe would have a claim against me.)

bluesign3• 11 months ago

I think it is kind of levels:

"can't participate in society without a mobile phone" "can't participate in society without internet" "can't participate in society without google"

not sure where is the logical correct threshold making it wrong. because we all accept maybe people not participating without internet.

fsflover26• 11 months ago

not sure where is the logical correct threshold making it wrong

This can't be more clear: Forcing to use the duopoly is against the competition and is totally wrong.

jackothy• 11 months ago

Clearly the logical threshold is when a single private corporation becomes the gatekeeper to your life. The internet itself is decentralized so that's fine. Mobile phones as a concept is also fine.

eloisant2• 11 months ago

I don't think it's an issue to require Internet to participate in society, just like it wouldn't be an issue to require a mobile phone if you can use any phone (including a Linux phone or degoogled Android).

The problem is that now you need a phone with Apple or Google software running it.

ivanmontillam• 11 months ago

If you live outside the US, it's even worse with WhatsApp.

If for whatever reason you dislike WhatsApp, you just can't also be a society's functioning member.

Some companies have decided to deprecate email and phone support and only have a WhatsApp chat, potentially with AI slop. I've had to discontinue my services with some of these companies because of that.

Even some government services are going through WhatsApp; I've had to be there in person, among senior citizens just because of their tech choices.

I pretty much vouch for "vote with your wallet," but I am running out of alternatives.

carlosjobim4• 11 months ago

I never do business with those kind of companies, and it's not any problem in my life. If you can't reach them by email or phone, then they don't get any money.

ahdanggit• 11 months ago

In the Philippines everyone uses Facebook because you can use Messenger for free without data charges.

mothballed9• 11 months ago

I don't own a phone, but the most shocking revelation came when my child's school required us to use an app to specify how our children will be picked up or ride the bus.

So far I've been able to avoid using apps for pretty much anything, but when the school says "use an app or you won't get your kids" and then also say they will call CPS and have your kids seized if you don't get them in time, that puts you in a real fucked up situation.

W3zzy• 11 months ago

I work for some local governments in Belgium and with every system they put in place I keep insisting on a analogous version. Online forms? Great but if anyone chooses the should be able to send in a paper form or get assisted by someone who fills in the online form for them.

rhines• 11 months ago

We've reached the point where people without devices or common online services are so rare that society no longer accommodates them. It's similar to how we need legislation to ensure that disabled people have accessible infrastructure, except I doubt there will ever be legislation mandating offline/off-app accessibility.

etherealG2• 11 months ago

I think I might enjoy the CPS scenario... let them call CPS, and wait for CPS to arrive, and then discuss with CPS who is endangering the child, the parent or the school. I'm pretty sure a judge will quickly decide whether their rule makes sense or not, and I think judges in child protection cases are going to quickly side with what's important for the child.

I HATE this kind of nonsense, and threatening you as a parent is only making things worse. Why not offer a way to handle this on a simple website? It would have lower cost to the school and be more accessible to anyone with any device able to access websites. Nonsense.

bigstrat2003• 11 months ago

That's pretty fucked. It should be utterly illegal to put parents in a triple bind like that. You have my sympathies.

1over137• 11 months ago

What country is that in?!??

stock_toaster• 11 months ago

I'm sure the app is perfectly ADA complaint too. /sarcasm

phowat• 11 months ago

Frankly I think it's a lost cause and sadly doesn't make sense to waste energy on it anymore. I eventually abandoned my de-googled phone exactly because I couldn't use my bank with it.

mixmastamyk8• 11 months ago

I don’t use a bank with a phone. What do you do with it?

(One exception, I used to scan checks five years ago, but thankfully that finally ended.)

__MatrixMan__• 11 months ago

If you think it's bad now, just wait until passkeys are ubiquitous and best practice is to only trust a small list of providers. The only way to prove you're human will be to prove that you're Google's human.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2• 11 months ago

To an extent, I already saw ads on various fora effectively asking for pretend humans ( you sign up to a list with your info and 'they' use it in your name ). It is going to be another cat and mouse game to track and I am getting tired.

mycall• 11 months ago

Being disadvantage and not able to own multiple phones for different purposes is a problem.

nilslindemann• 11 months ago

This is one of the things I wish the EU would intervene. Requiring a smartphone and an app should be illegal for corps of a specific size and for public entities (see school example above/below).

boerseth• 11 months ago

The danger is when solutions that are convenient, but require giving up some sort of freedom, are made mandatory even for those who would like to stay free. I hope this is a lesson we avoid having to learn the hard way.

I have done some backpacking these past two years, and it is worrying how easy it is to get into big trouble if you lose your phone or payment cards.

As an example, my debit card got eaten by an ATM on my way to Argentina, and after my 6 month travel, the backup credit card I had brought was about to expire.

Despite my card working as a means of payment, I was starting to feel the effects of this corner case in every aspect of modern life. I could not use our equivalent of cashapp, I assume because my card was about to expire. I could not ride public transit, or trains, or do things like book a yoga class with my friends, all because all these institutions basically only let you interact with their service through their apps, where I had no way to pay.

I spent some time visiting friends in the capitol on my way home, and tried to sort the situation out with my bank. They thankfully were able to order some new cards to their office, rather than to my home address. But immediately after my talk with them I found that my one remaining card had been cancelled.

Then I tried bringing my passport to withdraw some cash, but the bank teller almost laughed at me, before explaining that you can't just do that anymore. The bank isn't even allowed to let you get your money in cash and leave. You can get bits of it in bills at the ATM for a fee the price of a coffee, but also that requires a card, of course.

Electronic payment solutions are so convenient, for the public and for institutions, for law enforcement and control, that we've forgotten how much we need to give up in order to use them, and now they're being made mandatory as we trudge along into a cashless society.

Now I couldn't even get food or shelter, if not for my friends. I remember half stumbling out of the bank with my passport in my hand, half dizzy with shock and anger. This, along with lots of other small mishaps like losing my phone and encountering trouble, kind of radicalized me on these topics.

Al-Khwarizmi• 11 months ago

This.

I really liked Huawei phones and I wanted to keep using them after the US forced them to part with Google, but after doing some research and finding out some of the everyday things I wouldn't be able to do due to not having the Google Play Services (I'm not even talking about not having a Google account!), I just gave up.

yupyupyups• 11 months ago

Huawei isn't much better in terms of user freedom.

BlueTemplar12• 11 months ago

Which everyday things ?

At this point we programmers should make our voices heard and make it very clear that people still using platforms, or worse, forcing platforms on others, are collaborating with / are totalitarian extremists.

(Yes, this also means those of you still using GitHub, Discord, Reddit, YouTube...)

cratermoon• 11 months ago

Remember those naive days when everyone was scared about Big Government running their lives? Remember how the Free Market™, unimpeded by government interference, was going to ensure our personal freedoms were never compromised?

Good times.

joquarky• 11 months ago

Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities (FOQNEs)

AKA Peter Thiel's utopia

mixmastamyk8• 11 months ago

Necessary but not sufficient.

webdoodle• 11 months ago

I've been phoneless for 5 years, and I've experienced this too. I do have a google account, but I get occasionally locked out of it because I don't participate in 2FA. I fought my bank for nearly 5 months before they provided a code generating dongle to 2fa into there web portal. I had to stop using Amazon and EvilBay for exactly the same reasons.

pdonis3• 11 months ago

To me the point where the law needs to intervene is the bank or the school. You need a bank to function--that means the bank should be prohibited by law from tying you to an app from a particular company, whether it's Google or Apple or anyone else. You should be able to access their functions using any client that supports the appropriate open standards (such as web browsers).

Similarly, if the school is going to have control over your kids, the school should be prohibited by law from requiring you to use an app that's tied to a particular company. They should be required to provide you functional access using any client that supports the appropriate open standards.

adiabatichottub4• 11 months ago

You mean like if there were a standard (JSON, XML, whatever) format of document that you could cryptographically sign which would order a transaction to take place? Kind of like a digital teller's slip?

bee_rider4• 11 months ago

If it is a public school, the state should “intervene,” but really it isn’t an intervention, it’s the state’s school they should fix their stupid policy.

For the bank, I don’t really see why it would be preferable to intervene with the bank vs the tech company. Either way the state will have to impose on a private company.

You need a bank to function--that means the bank should be prohibited by law from tying you to an app from a particular company, whether it's Google or Apple or anyone else. You should be able to access their functions using any client that supports the appropriate open standards (such as web browsers).

Really this is an interoperability problem, so the government would have to impose on both sides. An OS should be mandated to come with a browser than supports some locked down functionality—a subset of HTML, nothing fancy, no scripting or anything like that. The bank should be required to provide a portal that speaks that language.

throwaway311314• 11 months ago

The main issue is we’re not there today and it’s not obvious what that world looks like.

We all had junk drawers of useless charging cables, everyone agreed it was stupid, hence a universal charging connector standard along with the promise that the charger junk drawers will be freed.

Even if we mandate the “POSIX of smart phones”, for lack of a better term, what problem today, for everyday users, does it solve? It might even make interactions with various government technology worse as that API will likely only be begrudgingly supported, which won’t win any hearts or minds.

Basically until you have a one line slogan that most people can relate to which, and is a problem they have today, movement will be very slow.

Also, in the short term, if these various site are AI coded, and thus follow existing software patterns, expect this to get worse.

ddingus4• 11 months ago

Give Google and Apple anything they want, in exchange for a reasonable life.

liendolucas3• 11 months ago

Having either Google or Apple should not be an obligation to any human being and governments should do whatever is in their power to allow us to continue operating basic services without them. It should be as simple as that. So all companies that choose the "app" way must also offer a possible equal or better webapp solution for their customers.

Nevermark• 11 months ago

"can't participate in society without an apple or google account".

Wow. You nailed it. Thank you.

When desktop operating systems were dominant, the need for the freedom to control your own software installation was beyond obvious.

But now our phones are an even more dominant/necessary computing/communication tool.

Apple and Google's appeal to security is such a fig leaf. They can continue to lock down our phones, add even more security.

BUT, simply provide a way for users to mindfully bypass that. They could make the pass through screen as scary as they feel they need to. That's it.

(If they did that, customer pressure would naturally build over time, for less draconian warnings, as other verifiably/clearly responsible sources became popular.

Another benefit. Apple would soon put its considerable resources competing to delivering the most robust security of a more valuable kind. The kind that enforces the walls between unpermissioned/dark behavior without limiting desired behavior and innovation. That would create healthier quality-loyalty based "lock in" that their vertical integration and high focus DNA already gives them advantages to "win".)

rnaarten2• 11 months ago

+1 on this. This is a privacy tie in sale. You buy product x, but after the buy it turns out it only works when you also accept the terms and conditions of product y.

Normally tie in sales are illigal, but because it happens in the digital world, we/they fail to notice...

Its banks, but also government and health (the dutch digi-d app), food markets, schools, more and more

If there is a EU DMA, where is an independent app store?

rsedgwick• 11 months ago

Thanks. This matters a lot to me. I focus on it from the angle of not owning a smartphone, but it's even more urgent from your perspective. I want businesses to understand that some number of people, in order to avoid toxic behavior patterns involving social media or doom-scrolling, find a dumbphone to be the healthiest choice for themselves. And yet, the places you cannot park your car, the airlines you cannot fly on, the events you cannot attend... all because you don't have an app.

I do think the personal mental health angle matters a lot, but it adds urgency to consider school, banking, etc being dependent on private company memberships.

My local gym did something wonderful. They retained a keyfob-based access system instead of using an app, specifically because the owner knew "someone's going to have a dumbphone and complain they can't get in."

cyanydeez• 11 months ago

The only thing protecting you from this is a strong government.

Bur if you look around theres a lot of money going into defacing democracy and electing morons, by the same business forces.

You aint getting a fundamental freedom by individual contributors, the same way bitcoin is turning into a centralized scam bank.

yibg• 11 months ago

I also don't like the push towards accounts with google / apple etc or using apps to do everything, or the walled gardens that are the apple and google app stores.

To play the devil's advocate though, hasn't this always been the case when new technology gains widespread adoption? e.g. going backwards in time, at some point not having an email address wasn't a big hinderance, nor was not having a phone number etc. Telcos got regulated, maybe that's the next step for google, apple etc.

cnst3• 11 months ago

You can use the majority of the banking apps without a Google Account on an Android through the Aurora Store:

* https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/

I've tried it, it works.

With Apple, it's all far worse. On iOS, I've discovered that even some preinstalled premium apps, like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, iMovie, don't work unless you add an Apple Account to the system.

But with Android, it's relatively easy to set it up without any accounts, through Chrome, F-Droid, Aurora Store. (And I usually uninstall Chrome after installing F-Droid, too.)

degamad2• 11 months ago

For now, but Google wants to take that option away.

epolanski• 11 months ago

Just to point out, while everything you say is true, there are already similar life destroying mechanisms such as getting debanked.

A friend of mine owns a hotel in southern Italy, long story short during an investigation into mafia-related businesses his operation was also checked (and fully cleared as 100% unrelated to any wrong business whatsoever, it just ended in a cross examination).

Since those examinations involved quite a lot of checking/investigating money trails all banks refuse to service him again because he created a massive amount of work for their legal, compliance, etc offices, really massive.

As banks are privately owned entities they can refuse you services, or simply make your life that miserable that even if they comply with law (e.g. open you an account), they can still deny you any services that they aren't mandated by law of offering (payment processing is a simple one: no credit card processing, you can't work as an hotel) or just be as slow as possible when it comes to everything.

There are multiple things that are absolutely life-impacting as of 2025 that go beyond being tied to a handful of operating systems and their rules.

Hackbraten• 11 months ago

all banks refuse to service him again because he created a massive amount of work

I don’t get this line of reasoning. He certainly didn’t create that massive amount of work. The investigators did.

What is this, guilt by association?

anonzzzies3• 11 months ago

We definitely need laws stopping companies from this lock in, especially companies that have no relation with Google/Apple. Countries should demand companies to allow access to their services with a sufficiently modern browser (let's say less than one year old) with a minimum of 3 supported browsers by different providers (so no, not only chrome). Everyone has browsers on laptop, phone etc, so it's the best middle ground.

geokon• 11 months ago

my personal craziest example

in taiwan you can't pay customs dues without a half broken government app

this is necessary for ANY shippment from abroad

no website, no phone number, no office you can drop into. You can technically file a paper form to some office in taipei, but it made clear its for large commercial import shippments and not "normal people"

Ajedi32• 11 months ago

I think that may indeed be a less abstract, more understandable way to frame the problem for the public. But regardless of how you frame it the root cause is the same:

Why can't you participate in society without an Apple or Google account? Because you need an account with them to install apps on your phone. (Or soon will, with the direction Android is now going.) Why do you need an account with them to install apps on your phone? Because you don't control what code runs on your phone, Google/Apple does. Comprehensively solving the latter problem also solves the former, and I think it's best to tackle problems at their root, not just address symptoms.

evanjrowley2• 11 months ago

Have you tried buying a Windows computer recently? Add Microsoft to your list of companies where it's nearly impossible to go without having a registered account. At least in the western world.

It's a different story in other parts of the world. Chinese brands like Beelink and Minisforum still sell Windows 11 PCs that provide you with a local account. That's because their primary market is located in a jurisdiction that has historically allowed PC users to engage in mass piracy without legal consequences, for better or for worse. Old Windows 10 installs are also not going away any time soon.

While you can install whatever software you like on a standard Windows 11 PC, the lack of a software signing certificate from Microsoft require users to fight the built in browser, SmartScreen, and Windows Defender before they can run your software. The end result is closer to Apple and Google than people realize.

amelius• 11 months ago

Maybe the best solution is to get banned by these companies. At least then you have full rights to complain to government websites that require apple/google accounts.

jll29• 11 months ago

Society needs to kill apps (by refusal to install/use) before apps kill the open Web.

Another conversation to be had is the effect of messenger apps to exclude those that do not use them (socially, commercially, and soon politically if governments introduce "ID apps" and force their presence to vote). Each proprietary app creates its own communication silo, and people start not talking over email anymore, which is a fantastic open protocol that excludes no-one.

I have been refusing to use WhatsApp for years and out of all people I know, only one friend sends me "VIP vintage" email invitations when everyone else gets things via a Meta-controlled proprietary channel, everyone else ignores people not on these platforms. (Almost even more worrying is what people talk about on these platforms when you do get on there; when accidentally overlooking what a random person on a bus chats about, then I'm happy to have reduced usage of such proprietary platforms over the last couple of years.)

Parents should not permit their childrens' data to get onto these platforms under any circumstances (in Europe, GDPR helps).

Luker88• 11 months ago

So many people paraphrasing Stallman and GPL, and so few realizing that without legal enforcement these problems will keep happening over and over again.

Yet there is more BSD and MIT code than ever.

Android is full of open source stuff. GPL3 would have prevented this. We've all been bamboozled and we are starting to realize it.

I wonder if any project will start switching license. Unlikely, but one can dream.

trelane3• 11 months ago

Switching licenses on a FOSS project without copyright assignment is almost impossible, unless the license already allows for it. See Linux kernel GPLv3 relicensing discussions of the latter aughts.

Zambyte3• 11 months ago

All software distributed under permissive licenses can be sublicensed under GPLv3 overnight. And all future contributions can only be accepted under GPLv3. Software licensed as exactly GPLv2 (rather than GPLv2 or later) is harder to do this upgrade for because of the reasons you mention, but lots of software can have their license fixed.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 11 months ago

Programmers make the same Faustian bargain with all these "safe" languages.

No, please, don't let me touch memory! It's too dangerous. Give me a nice bubble wrapped playpen to "program" in.

xandrius6• 11 months ago

What a weird take, here we're discussing fighting the duopoly and hegemony of 2 US companies dictating what and how to use our own devices.

Complaining about programming languages which allow me not to think of malloc bugs when making something not critical makes no sense whatsoever.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 11 months ago

It's trading freedom for safety in a different domain no? We deride normies for preferring their closed down operating systems and mobile devices yet make our own freedom/safety trade in our own domain.

akimbostrawman2• 11 months ago

The actual issue would be that much of jailbreak and emulation utilize memory vulnerabilities to work.

ngcc_hk• 11 months ago

Run meant run ok and that meant support if it not running … should have the ability meant we can do it on our own … does it major any sense in general. No.

You can agree on anti-monopoly but to say we (who is we here) can do this without any resource consideration is not thinking but wishful thinking.

Open source is not wishful thinking but until the user pay …

tqwhite2• 11 months ago

You can. You can jailbreak your iPhone. I assume you can do so with Android. Problem solved.

Oh, you want to jailbreak it and use it as an authenticator? No. That doesn't seem like a reasonable requirement.

fsflover26• 11 months ago

Jailbreaking iPhone doesn't let you install GNU/Linux on it.

pabs32• 11 months ago

Maybe not these days, but it used to be possible: https://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/

Zambyte3• 11 months ago

"you can run anything you want as long as it's not what I don't want you to run" seems like an odd argument to make.

trelane3• 11 months ago

You don't have to jailbreak some Android devices, namely the Google devices (provided you didn't buy them from a carrier).[1] They are designed to allow alternate firmware.

Instructions for installing alternate firmware : https://grapheneos.org/install/web

[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

daurentius5233• 11 months ago

For anyone saying otherwise:

There is ONLY ONE valid way to check trust - it is called keyring.

All linux distributions do use it.

Think on how you use SSL certificates on your browser, now remember that you can always import your own Certificate authority.

As simple as that. Unless you have nefarious purposes.

poulpy123• 11 months ago

I would say also that if Google and Apple control what you can install, they are responsible for it if there is a problem.

pbd• 11 months ago

This reminds me of the early days of gaming consoles where modchips were a grey area. The iPhone jailbreaking exemption in DMCA was a rare win for user rights, but we've seen that precedent hasn't extended much beyond phones. The technical capability exists - it's purely policy/business decisions blocking it.

rurban• 11 months ago

If I cannot degoogle my phone or maintain my apps with F-Droid, I'd need to install the Huawei HarmonyOS. Technically superior and already usable. Plus I don't care what China spies on me because they won't share their data with my home country or neighbors.

1970-01-01• 11 months ago

Nope. The masses have voted with their wallets for the walled garden approach. Maybe if the Linux phone wasn't as terrible or worse than bottom contender Android devices the argument could stand. In an era where move fast and break things is business as usual, we've correctly chosen the devices that just work, even when we must sell our privacy to make it so. The days of IBM/PC compatible are ancient history.

smashah• 11 months ago

I think it's time we start revoking our agreements to these terms and conditions or altering them after the fact, taking non-self-destruction of the service providing firm as an explicit acceptance of the new user-defined terms.

trelane3• 11 months ago

18ish years after the 3rd version of the GNU General Public License, and tivoization is now the norm.

aejtaetj• 11 months ago

The editorializing of this article title changes the meaning, please restore it.

But to answer the claim, no, only software that you own or are allowed by the software owner to run, is obviously what should be allowed. And clearly illegal and harmful software should not be allowed at all. It's a no-brainer.

Zambyte3• 11 months ago

Hardware vendors are like creepy ex's that won't let go. You sold the device. Move on. It's not yours anymore.

ironman14782• 11 months ago

I think a different perspective on this is required. This requires taking Google in good faith (for the arguments sake). The requirements are being rolled out first in countries with high amounts of scam apps. Let's assume it's causing a real issue for the people, which then is a bad look for Google because all these apps are hosted on their store. I could imagine in the future a country sueing Google for allowing these apps on the store. So due to image issues and potential future litigation, Google feels like it has to do something so they do this.

I think the real problem is that these countries are abdicating their duty to govern. Why are they not jailing these people running these scams? Or if they are in another country, using political and economic pressure on the other country to crack down?

I don't believe that Google's intentions are actually that great, but there is a real problem in these countries with scams and people's lives being harmed by them.

inetknght6• 11 months ago

I think the real problem is that these countries are abdicating their duty to govern. Why are they not jailing these people running these scams?

I 110% agree with you. I advocate for blocking entire countries from the Internet until they start enforcing criminal liabilities to the scum.

Unfortunately, business loves the scum. I'd argue business wants the scum because it's a playground field for "innovating" locked down hardware.

looneysquash• 11 months ago

I didn't buy a box of transistors, I bought a "smart phone", a pocket sized computer.

The OS and hardware are parts of the whole.

So you're phrasing it wrong.

I should have the ability to run any code I want on my smart phone that I own.

And to my clear, I own my smart phone. You own your smart phone. Any EULA to the contrary should be null and void.

K0nserv3• 11 months ago

Yes, but did you buy a general purpose computer? I don’t think smart phones were ever marketed that way.

Now, if you want to install Linux on that hardware you should be allowed to do so.

junaid1460• 11 months ago

My PS5 is lying around being useless for me now.

renecito• 11 months ago

Personally, I'm not demanding to enable tinkering on everything if that's raising prices, it could be as simple as having some "This unit is serviceable" label, I'd let people to value it and manufacturers to follow it.

TBH, I think most people wouldn't care, specially in USA, it is way easier and cheaper to replace than to repair, workmanship is really expensive here.

But If a manufacturer shuts down a Cloud service that bricks my device they should open the interfaces and protocols to make them functional.

wildredkraut• 11 months ago

Seems like >=2026 will be the year I'll start buying stuff again that has been replaced by mobile phones during all the years (Camera, Mp3Player, etc.) With this coming, buying a flagship mobile phone simply doesn't worth for me anymore. Currently i own a S24Ultra, my next mobile phone will probably be the cheapest Chinese crap I can get, just for the mobile things i "have" to use it.

mixmastamyk8• 11 months ago

I started the desmarting process two years ago with a new camera and protrek casio watch, no more BigTech Pay, etc.

vannevar2• 11 months ago

Capital doesn't want you to own anything, it wants you to rent everything. In the absence of any pressure to the contrary, it will continue to turn everything into a rental or a license. Because it's a feedback loop, the more capital accumulates, the more market (and political) power it exerts and the faster it accumulates.

newsre4der• 11 months ago

But we can't. Not on PS5, not on Iphone..

rnaarten2• 11 months ago

So a broader philosophical take,

Before the middle ages, you'd make your own product. That turned into local production, mass productio, but still devices could be desicected and analyzed how they worked. A car from the 60's as an example.

So for the most part of our society, reverse engineering was possible. It is only the last decades with closed source software that the opposite is occuring. But did 'we' ever made this a consious decision? Or our we sucker punched by progress

mkrishnan• 11 months ago

there are plently of choices for hardware you can buy which freely allow any software you want to run.

ivanjermakov• 11 months ago

I just want to wake one day and install desktop Linux on my iPad.

neya• 11 months ago

An iPhone without iOS is a very different product to what we understand an iPhone to be. Forcing Apple to change core tenets of iOS by legislative means would undermine what made the iPhone successful.

Rules for thee, not for me. Every typical Apple lover's argument.

bethekidyouwant• 11 months ago

You can’t run any code you want on the phone because of the radios.

QuantumNoodle• 11 months ago

These phones are more powerful than my laptop used for engineering in college. And stop calling it side loading, it's installing software on a computer.

Installing software on a computer

pbnjeh• 11 months ago

I recently bought an iPhone (Pro Max, on a secondary number) to have one on-hand to better tutor and troubleshoot for my parents. I just had to provide an instance of that this weekend on a phone call.

My daily driver is a recent Pixel Pro. If Google takes away the already limited additional flexibility it provides me over an iPhone, I don't see the need to provide them my money nor my attention, going forward.

Actually, I've been thinking about carrying some sort of Linux device and relegating the phone to being a hot spot for it, plus traditional calls and texts (and "necessary" apps, I guess). I don't really want to schlep more around with me, but even less so do I want to be squeezed into the box of BigCo corporate approved activities.

cauliturtle• 11 months ago

Truly logical thinking to me :D

masfoobar• 11 months ago

"We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own"

When it comes to my views, this relates to a recent Nintendo Switch 2 post.

At the end of the day, it is up to the purchaser to know if the product they are buying is going to do what they want. If it doesn't... ie do not provide the freedom they want with the hardware (or even software) then you are also free to reject it.

However - we don't normally know what the restrictions are until we get home, generally speaking. The rules in place are not under public scrutiny. It is typical complaining when you reach a certain point. We moan but we try to continue best we can. If we can find a workaround, we will.

Focusing on the Switch 2 (again) who knew about the restrictions until they had purchased it? It is an assumption that whatever Nintendo has done with their previous console (and older ones) would continue the same ruleset. As we all know -- atleast now -- rules change.

Moving away from Nintendo, we also have Google, or Apple... or Microsoft. It is not to any surprise (atleast from me) that these companies will do whatever to claim control. Little by little, a right or freedom is taken away. The older generations are likely to cry the loudest and the cycle repeats itself.

I guess a lot of this boils down to convenience vs freedom.

It is convenient to have a feature easy to use on.. say.. an Android, that starts to make things harder when you stop... or those that never participated but slowly forced to use or go in that direction --- because everyone else is.

As I mentioned in a recent comment -- I am always reminded of Windows 95. The End User License Agreement. It basically reads similar to "You have the rights to use the software" -- You do not own it.

e_i_pi_22• 11 months ago

I know it's not quite the point of the article, but just to push back on the phrase

I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own

There's a few cases where this definitely seems wrong - you can own a radio transmitter but it's super illegal to broadcast in certain frequencies. So while you're "able" to in the sense that's in physically possible, you're not "able" to because it's illegal, and I think most people would want it that way.

In a similar way, it's illegal to modify your car or especially guns in certain ways. I could see a similar argument saying "I own this machine, I should be able to modify it mechanically however I want". Yes you own it, but as soon as you bring it in the world then you also need to account for how it's going to impact everyone else. You can't even manufacture certain hardware on your own without the right approval.

If it's "I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own if I accept the risks of doing so" then that seems more balanced, but also doesn't seem too desirable because you're adding more footguns into the world that average consumers wouldn't want to run into accidentally

K0nserv3• 11 months ago

OP here: Yes I agree that there needs to be limits on this. Classic "your freedom ends where mine begins"

pabs32• 11 months ago

Hardware vendors should be separate from software vendors, hardware vendors should not be allowed to provide an OS, there should be an ecosystem of OS vendors to choose from.

Mentlo• 11 months ago

Where does this stop? Should i be able to run any code i want on my robot vacuum cleaner hardware? How about my washing machine?

I am not disagreeing with the wider point but for a policy suggestion “hardware” should be clearly defined.

lpln3452• 10 months ago

Hardware is fundamentally built at the discretion of the manufacturer. Our only recourse for freedom was to plead for their mercy.

Since manufacturers have decided to openly disregard user freedom, changing the law is the only solution.

We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

Related Stories