alwaysdownvoted

"But if you're not home, your phone sends the command to a server in China,..."

Do any "smart" devices not try to connect to remote servers, automatically, without asking the user for permission?

Do users care that "smartphones" they carry or other devices they put in their home automatically connect to remote servers so various companies can collect data, ..., turn sockets on/off, etc.?

If we do not like this practice and we want to see change for the better, then maybe we should put our comments in Amazon reviews instead on HN, security blogs, etc.

Maybe it's an homage to Bill Gates who campaigned so hard for using intellectual property laws to protect closed source software.

Could it be that the ability to more fully control a computer, e.g., a router, makes the computer more valuable?

What use are greater feature specifications if the user does not have anything close to full control over the computer?

How about a computer that where the seller makes it deliberately difficult to open, or impossible to add RAM, or threatens repair shops with litigation?

When the user powers on, the computer immediately starts phoning home to various endpoints controlled by the seller and the user cannot turn this off. Are users presumed to be inept?

Does it matter if this computer has a sexier form factor and better specifications, not to mention a higher price tag, than another one without the restrictions on tinkering?

"Who can..." ICANN. Yes it can be whenever they want. No one ever stops them. They added several in 2001. Now they've opened the floodgates.

"At no real cost..." True. Except the cost of running one of the 13 server addresses. And IMO it could be a dog and no one would notice. I think the A server (198.41.0.4) is really all anyone needs. The cost of a new TLD to ICANN is the cost of editing a text file.

"By what authority..." None.

", why are they allowed..." A question I have been asking for over 20 years. Answer: Because we let them?

You can say no to ICANN. Run your own root on 127.x.x.x. You can edit the root.zone to be just as you want it. Want to delete a silly TLD (e.g., .loans)? Edit a text file. Want to add your own new TLD? Edit a text file. The cost? Editing a text file.

I recall a former Board member of ICANN admitting he himself ran his own root for many years.

ICANN's ability to make millions in profit from TLD's relies on an interesting prerequisite. All DNS admins have to use a root.hints file that points to the (13) addresses serving ICANN's root.zone. Often they have no idea this root.hints file even exists, let alone have the guts to edit it. The root server addresses to use are chosen by the authors of the DNS software, e.g., the software automatically downloads root.hints from ICANN to bootstrap itself.

If admins or users choose to use a different list of root server addresses (e.g., 127.x.x.x, 10.x.x.x., etc.), all bets are off.

So how do you stop ICANN from making millions posing as a pseudo licensing authority for registries? One way is to stop using ICANN's root.hints and use a different root.zone that you control. If enough people do this then one day ICANN has no relevance.

Right. Not gonna happen. I'm probably one of only a small number of users who will ever run their own root.

I like to compile and install my own OS images on the hardware I purchase. Of course the smartphone industry does not make that easy, if at all possible.

Hence I am forced to choose other form factors.

It would be nice to flash my own choice of BIOS. As far as I can tell this is still not too common. That is a project to which I am willing to devote large amounts of time should the information needed ever become public.

It seems the newer the hardware the more complicated and difficult this becomes. By my estimation, there is certain value in older hardware because it is not as complicated and can be easier to control.

Here is an idea that stays with me year after year: another open source OS project that chooses a single item of hardware and supports only that item.

Silly fantasy: Perhaps a deal is struck with one or more factories that can produce it. Perhaps the terms could be public. Maybe user-developers become faithful and loyal buyers of the hardware, because they like the control. Perhaps they directly pay the costs of production through donations. I have no idea what would happen. That's the point of trying it.

Building this sort of symbiotic relationship between open source user-developers and a single hardware manufacturer based on a single item, one could reason it is in the best interest of the manufacturer to open the specs to the developers, if not the public.

I leave it to you to list all the many reasons this is not worth doing. Then sit back and enjoy the status quo.

But for those of you who are avid users of an open source OS, I ask you to consider:

Do you ever get tired of watching the project trying to keep pace with new hardware? How do you feel about when the manufacturers will not disclose the specs? Are you OK with binary blobs in your "open" system? How about not knowing whether your OS of choice is going to work with your new hardware? What if there was one item of hardware that you could be absolutely sure was always going to work with your preferred open source OS, and to its maximum capacity?

OK, you may now return to chasing the new (locked-down) hardware. Thank you for your time.

I'll bet a lot of folks would keep paying those prices even if all they did was use email. I'll bet further that is still the main reason many people have a home internet connection. That and internet banking, etc.

Things subsidized by ads like YouTube and myriad other distractions are a bonus. If they were to disappear no one would be dropping their internet connection. Trust me, with bandwdth as it is, free video is not going to disappear.

All things considered I think non-commercial websites like Wikipedia or Internet Archive are actually the most valuable ones. And even without ads they will not disappear because passionate dedicated people create them for non-commercial reasons. And the cost for the individual to store data and publish online keeps decreasing.

The internet has heaps of inherent value that has nothing to do with advertising. Especially with today's computing power and bandwidth. It's like long distance calling anywhere in the world for a set monthly fee. And anyone can write software to send and receive over the network. Sign me up. For life.

Anyone who used the internet in the late 80's early 90's before commercial activity was permitted, when bandwidth was limited and expensive, knows this.

By all means argue for ads if it's your cash cow - try you best to save your golden goose, but spare us the absurd arguments that ads are what give the internet value.

There's a couple of comments showing hostname followed by IP address. Are commenters really putting entries in this format into their HOSTS file? And it works? The correct format, at least on BSD UNIX and Windows, is IP address followed by hostname.

  echo "93.174.95.27  elsevier.com" >> /etc/hosts

It is a known fact that Apple tries the same ideas more than once, sometimes years apart. If at first they fail, they will try again.

I recall an idea from the past where they wanted users to disclose to them all the user's non-itunes music in return for some perceived benefit. At the time I thought of this as a way for someone at some company to assess out how much CD-ripped, Napster-shared, or other indepedently-sourced music was still out there. Needless to day it didn't fly.

I have never in my life used itunes. I can tolerate most of today's "walled-gardens" but not one that seeks to place a surcharge on friends sharing music, which has always been the essence of how my music collection was built (pre-digital). I would give up music before I would sign on to letting Apple control my music collection.

If there were a robust, tiny command-line version of "itunes" that would run on any computer, I might reconsider. But that's not happening either. That's the true reason I have never used itunes. Strong distaste for the proprietary Apple-only graphical software.

You nailed it.

I rarely make use of the BSD scripts provided but I like them as simple examples of how various services are intended to be run.

I find there is a certain amount of uniformity and consistency and arguably coherence to the rc.d system.

"... software bloat almost always comes from smart, often the smartest, devs who are technically the most competent."

I am quite happy with software written by people who who do not view themselves as "devs" who are "smart", "the smartest", or the "most technically competent".

I'm also happy with software written by telephone company employees in the 1970's, a grad student in the 1980's and a university maths teacher in the 1990's. Software written by "security researchers" is usually not bad either.

I like the small programs that win the IOCC; if I were asked to name a test for "competence" (my definition), the IOCC would be high on my list.

I have no reason to question that the "devs" writing the bloat, e.g., at Microsoft in the 2000's or any number of companies today, are _brilliant_.

However I have little interest in that class of software. I think bloat is stupid. Not to mention unnecessary for my purposes. If I cannot pick the code apart and recompile it myself, then the software is nothing but a liability to me, not an asset.

From init/main.c:

"The Bourne shell can be used instead of init..."

An easy way to avoid systemd if the user is more comfortable with using a BSD-style /etc/rc approach to starting services?

"What _every browser_ ..."

How about text-only browsers?

How about homemade "browsers" that are powered by netcat?

As one informal poll appeared to show, many users questioned on the streets of an American city did not even know what a "browser" was.

Most times I only want to retrieve files (download) via some daemon running on some remote computer and then view them on my computer. That includes text, hypertext, or binary. Pretty much the same as in 1993.

I rarely use a graphical browser to do this. It is not needed.

Instead, today, unlike 1993, I am using a graphical "browser" to _play video_ after I download it (no internet connection). But playing a video file is not "browsing". Something is not right.

Seems like the www took a wrong turn.

I still use SUA every day when I'm forced to use Windows. (I also run Linux binaries on BSD.)

SUA is based on an old version of BSD, not GNU. tcsh, csh and sh. The compiler works. There is an old version of lex. For some of the userland, Windows binaries are provided, such as vi. It's better than nothing.

Why did MS remove SUA from Windows 10? What harm would it do to remain an optional add-in as it was in Windows 7?

Why do users have to upgrade to Windows 10 to use Linux binaries? Seems like Microsoft will do _anything_ to get users to upgrade. What are the privacy implications of Windows 10? Microsoft is very untrustworthy.

Will users be able to run their own Linux binaries on Windows?

Windows has never been a "pleasant experience". It's the unpleasantness of it that makes the alternative, UNIX, so appealing.

"I don't know anythng about IPFilter, nor do I know anyone who uses it, so we'll pretend it doesn't exist."

If alternatives exist that would address the author's complaints (and they do), but he doesn't know anything about them or anyone that uses them then does he pretend they don't exist? What do you think?

In 1880 there was no Federal Reserve system.

"Money" was backed by commodities of finite quantity.

One solution is not to use Bash. There are more basic shells that are equally as, or more, POSIX-like.