The quiet war in tech

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/june/theQuietWarInTech

by pron • 13 years ago

24 31 13 years ago

threads2.scripting.com

amirmc• 13 years ago

"By now it should be obvious that the big tech companies are not our friends. They're more like the government than they are like you and me."

In Europe (at least the UK), it's usually the big companies that are viewed with more suspicion than the governments. I don't think anyone felt that BigCo was ever 'like you and me'.

pron7• 13 years ago

I'd say everywhere in the western world other than the US. People often forget that the whole purpose of government is to protect us from that organization of society that naturally arose in the West (and east Asia, too) before central governments, namely feudalism. When no central authority regulates power, power would always become concentrated in the hands of the few, who would inevitably subjugate the many through economic bonds.

While, like many, I am appalled at the NSA's supposed massive-scale surveillance, I fear surveillance by corporations like Google much more. The fact that people share their most private information with Google voluntarily actually makes it worse. If you want to know where real power lies, look for power that is not only feared, but loved (say, your mother :)). Many people have referred to the book 1984 in the past week, but they've all missed one crucial point: Big Brother is not feared; he is loved. At the end of the book, Winston voluntarily subjugates himself to Big Brother. He loves Big Brother.

As long as the NSA has some form of oversight, however dysfunctional -- as long as government is at least suspect -- we'll be fine. But the much bigger danger is Google itself, the power that people love; that they voluntarily subjugate themselves to. It seems that Americans, perhaps because their government was formed not from feudalism, but as a rebellion against a foreign central government -- are very much aware of the dangers of government, but are blind to the much bigger threat of feudalism.

spindritf• 13 years ago

the whole purpose of government is to protect us from that organization of society that naturally arose in the West (and east Asia, too) before central governments, namely feudalism

Feudal lords were the government. A centralised one, too, with a king or some other emperor at the top.

Democratic governments are not protecting you from the feudal ones any more than your ISP protects you from the telephone company.

mjn2• 13 years ago

In addition to feudalism, significant parts of the world were also de-facto ruled by European trading companies, who were stronger than the local governments, and not meaningfully restrained by their home governments. Stuff like the Dutch East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company.

yummyfajitas2• 13 years ago

Feudal lords subjugated the many through threats of violence, not "economic bonds". "Economic bonds" is just another term for "made the best offer" - that's very far from what feudal lords did.

ippisl• 13 years ago

The reason people use Google is not exactly love. I see it more as a lack of energy or will power.

Every time you choose not to use Google search, you know you're gonna have to work harder to get good results, and use some amount of will power. Since most people search the Web a lot, the totality of it is quite a large effort and will power. Our society is filled with such choices, be it food, consumerism, cigarettes, etc. Since will power is finite, people will always lose on some of this choices.

Also if you really want to stop being tracked, you need some technical understanding and some cooperation from other people and you need will lose some important capabilities in society.

This makes the choice even harder.

noarchy2• 13 years ago

The fact that people share their most private information with Google voluntarily actually makes it worse.

You can choose not to give your information to Google or Facebook. That people have decided to do it anyway, says more about people than it does about those companies.

When you have a central authority (government), you can't opt-out, without being subjected punitive measures. Google can't put you in jail or fine you for failing to use their search engine, or their email service.

yummyfajitas2• 13 years ago

In the US, I don't think anyone ever felt that BigCo was ever 'like you and me'. That's why the term "Big XXX" (for XXX = tobacco, pharma, and recently tech) is generally used to drum up fear and loathing about an industry.

Unlike Europe, the US also has a significant subpopulation that views the government suspiciously. This is not an opposing narrative - this group also tends to be suspicious of corporations, particularly the large corporations that collude with the government.

norswap• 13 years ago

I don't see what RSS has to do with anything, really.

andor3• 13 years ago

It's a technology for exchanging information in a decentralized fashion, in contrast to corporate services like Facebook or Twitter. By centralizing most online communication, these corporations gain control over information flow, which means that everybody else loses this control.

toyg4• 13 years ago

Yes, let's compare RSS and Javascript to international diplomacy and totalitarian government surveillance, they have a lot in common. Look at all those people killed by ambiguous standard specifications! People are starving! GIVE ME YOUR F*ING MONEY!

... why do people keep reading Dave Winer, again? Is it something about age, some sort of rite of passage when you're 21 and naive? "Oh yeah, back then I survived on ramen and read Dave Winer. I know, crazy, right?"

andor3• 13 years ago

Technology is relevant in the discussion, because it is what makes surveillance possible at today's scale. Some technology promotes freedom by enabling free and uncensored communication: neutral networks, encryption, self-hosted servers. Other technology promotes surveillance by centralizing information flow: Facebook, Twitter, Google Mail, etc. RSS and forking Javascript were given as examples, because distributed communications infrastructures rely on open standards.

pron7• 13 years ago

Dave Winer writes about what he knows. Everyone has a rather narrow perspective. You could ridicule him for his narrow perspective, or, you can read the sentiment he's trying to convey and respond to that.

Is being unable to discern between a text's major point and its inessential detail a sign of maturity?

toyg4• 13 years ago

No, Dave Winer writes in order to get attention to what he does. Now he's dabbling in javascript, so he drops javascript in everything he can; if the topic of the day were the cup size of Miss Universe, he'd write that javascript was invented to measure breasts. And of course, since RSS is his main claim to fame, that also must make it in the conversation at some point.

calinet6• 13 years ago

I couldn't help but laugh at this:

"Our tools have been getting more precarious, thanks to bugs introduced by the browser vendors"

Bugs introduced by the browser vendors? What? What?? Wait just second there, you think the global economy and power structure of the world is being affected by bugs in browsers?

This reads like a thinly veiled conspiracy theory. Actually, I'll just be blunt: it reads like crazy talk.

These things are not conspiracies against the stability of human society, they are the random results of a stochastic process of creation. If you want to say something valuable about the impact of tech on society, there are a whole bunch of directions you could go, but this ain't one of 'em.

pron7• 13 years ago

You really should read this text, or any text, more carefully.

Obviously, bugs in Chrome don't affect the power structure of the world. But that is just a trivial example (perhaps not a very good one), experienced by the author, and one that makes him feel a unhealthy concentration of power.

And with regard to conspiracies, a dangerously unbalanced power structure is rarely the result of conspiracy, and is often, just like bugs, the random result of a stochastic process, only one that invariably leads to concentration of power, unless some energy is expended in order to curtail this "natural" phenomenon.

davewiner2• 13 years ago

Actually if they interfere with our ability to get information on our own, without having it fed to us by Facebook and Google Now, then the bugs are political, not just technical.

The browser is our gateway, all our information passes through it.

Thanks for encouraging the OP to read the text, btw.

andor3• 13 years ago

"Our tools have been getting more precarious, thanks to bugs introduced by the browser vendors" Bugs introduced by the browser vendors? What? What?? Wait just second there, you think the global economy and power structure of the world is being affected by bugs in browsers?

There's no need to take everything literally. It's a fact that, for many people, the web browser has grown to a very important communications tool, and "we" have failed in making it a good basis for secure communication.

Also, it depends on what you call a bug. Why do we still rely on the broken CA system for SSL certificates, for example? Not for technical reasons.

kalms• 13 years ago

Wait, what? What did I just read? I think the conspiracy theories has started to run a little wild in here.

Oculus• 13 years ago

This article reads like the author is just crying about the shutdown of Google Reader.

toyg4• 13 years ago

Winer has an axe to grind (actually several of them, tbh): he sees RSS as "his invention", and will never forgive Google for destroying the market for paid feed aggregators with Reader.

Now that Google are shutting down Reader, on one side he's complaining ("they stole it from me and for what?!"), on the other he's hamfistedly trying to revive interest for the technology.

Of course, none of this has anything to fo with the NSA etc, but that's Winer for you, forever clutching at straws.

Pherdnut• 13 years ago

Google doesn't set the standard for JavaScript. The ECMA does. Microsoft tried their damnedest to run things their way on the DOM API for over a decade(which, yes, is set by the w3c since it's not the core language) and it seriously tarnished their image with client-side web devs and designers to the point where people actually started doing something they hadn't done since the browser wars which was put up "Sorry, we don't support IE" on their web pages (no, not major corporations, but there was a bit of it going around spurred on by regular anti-IE rants from the Opera guys).

Not long after it came to that we got IE9. The first !@#$ing IE browser in over a decade to finally support the exact same DOM spec Navigator did in 2001.

So no, as long as there are multiple browsers and platforms no one entity controls JS. Google did create V8 which we all like a lot because it kicks ass and any time we want more performance we can bind to C but it's not the only non-browser option for running JavaScript. We've got Rhino and whatever the hell Gnome Shell runs and god knows how many other platforms I don't know about (just learned Gnome Shell scripts via JS yesterday)

So no, Google has no leverage to force any major changes in JS. They have made several attempts to introduce their own cheesy language paradigms that look/act a lot more like Java (because they are Java whores) and yes the down-compiled languages are all the rage (you are a fucking MORON if you use coffee script professionally is all I'm going to say on that), but Google most certainly does not and never will have more than a little bit of influence on JavaScript's design nor incentive to because it has a vested interest in preserving its core features so that we don't "break the web."

The argument that it needs to be smaller is hilarious. It is miniscule compared to Java or C# and runs with a fraction of the syntax. And why did the author link to an article on Dart in reference to this topic? Dart is nothing more than a butthurt segment of Google devs trying to replace JS because their largest endeavors with JS have demonstrated that they're completely incompetent at it. Their spreadsheet app craps out when rows reach the 10 thousands and they have no clue how to architect. They just write procedural JS when they're not trying to mimic Java with it.

ilaksh• 13 years ago

Power is shaped by technology. So the technology used describes the power structure.

Right now we have a lot of centralization in technology. As more and more people realize what that means in terms of centralization of power, we will see an explosion of distributed democratizing technologies. Of course there will be competition between different schemes for controlling that distributed information, but it will be harder to completely centralize since the information will be distributed in the leaves of the network rather than master hubs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking

https://www.ccnx.org/wiki/CCNx/CCNxProtocolDescription

The quiet war in tech

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