This is Depressing

Does anyone else feel as if it’s over when it comes to really owning your own things?

As of now:

  • You don’t have the option of having a phone with decent specs and replaceable parts
  • You have to have really good knowledge in tech to have private services that are on par with what the big companies offer
  • You have to put up with annoying compatibility issues if you install a custom ROM on your android phone
  • You cannot escape apps preventing you from using them if you root your device
  • Cars are becoming SaaS bullcrap
  • Everything is going for a subscription model in general

And now Google is attempting to implement DRM on websites. If that goes through, Firefox is going to be relegated to privacy conscious websites (there aren’t many of those). At this point, why even bother? Why do I go to great lengths at protecting my privacy if it means that I can’t use most services I want?

It sucks because the obvious solution is for people to move away from these bullshit companies and show that they actually care about their privacy. Even more important is to actually PAY for services they like instead of relying on free stuff. I’m not optimistic not just because the non privacy conscious side is lazy, but because my side is greedy. I mean one of the most popular communities on lemmy is “piracy” which makes it all the more reasonable for companies not to listen to privacy conscious people.

I wouldn’t say that this is the endgame but in this trajectory, privacy is gone before 2030.

itchy_lizard,

Yes, we need to pass laws that prevent companies from blocking access to their services on the basis of using privacy tools. Basically apps should be able to run on any customised client device and they should only legally able to say “no” if my session is clearly demonstrating malicious interactions.

We need better consumer protection laws.

itchy_lizard,

Dunno, I don’t use shitty apps that aren’t available in F-Droid and I’m all the better for it.

hobs,

It’s the of everything. I listened to an interview with SAG-AFTRA by a new podcaster trying to survive and just when they start talking about the investors and products admitting to trying to build out till October when actors and writers start getting evicted… then some Amazon streaming services ad. And it happened again towards the end. And no warning or apology or mindfulness from the podcaster. So so depressing. The interview was great and happy to have heard it. Wish I could get access to information unpolluted by advertisement and capitalism. Thank goodness for the fediverse.

off_brand_,

Not that it contradicts your comment, but it’s worth noting those ads could well have been inserted by the platform or the podcast publisher.

skullgiver, (edited )
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    Lemminary,

    Let me just spare a few dollars for privacy after paying for rent & groceries in my third world country currency.

    skullgiver,
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    What’s the alternative? Lemmy is run by the community and pretty much a labour of love, but everything fro phones to search engines is made by companies, not charities.

    You can rely on open source, volunteer products if you want affordable privacy. That’ll deprive you of luxuries and it’ll require you to put in more work yourself, but it’s not the end of the world.

    Lemminary,

    The alternative is putting pressure on companies to not succumb to greed and to go as far as enacting regulation to protect consumer interests. Paying some other companies to mitigate the harms of these companies while pretending that it’s a sensible solution to everyone is not my idea of solving a problem. You’re just sequestering privacy behind a paywall and pretending it’s all fine. It’s not; it’s elitist and plays into the pay-for-privilege that toxic capitalism breeds. Because let’s keep in mind that privacy–unlike the continuous stream of manufactured goods–is a choice that only needs to be made once.

    rglullis,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar

    Fairphone exists

    As someone who has a Fairphone 3: they destroyed any trust I had in them the moment the FP4 came without headphone jack and with a different form factor. I thought that their idea would be that each module could be upgraded independently. That’s what would make their offering truly innovative and eco-friendly. By departing from that, they simply became a manufacturer of overpriced phones with slightly better ethics.

    ROM quality depends on your make and model,

    I am using /e/OS since when I got the FP (what, 3 years ago?) and to this day the applications that need GPS are completely unreliable. I gave up on using bikesharing systems here because their apps simply fail all the time to get my location.

    but they give you a ton of hardware for free

    It’s not free. There is no marginal cost in what they are doing. This is all a cash grab and an attempt to further segment the market.

    Everyone wants music, nobody wants to buy CDs, nobody wants to buy MP3s, and all that’s left is subscriptions.

    If the lion share of music revenue went to artists, you can bet that more people would pay for it. But we know for years that this is not the case. Same for movies.

    skullgiver,
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    I don’t know anything about Fair phone’s modules and uogradeability, all I know is that you can buy replacement parts which is better than most other brands.

    I know /e/ is far from perfect (they’ve lagged behind for years) but I don’t believe that’s the OS FF themselves support either. I just know it comes closest in terms of integration compared to stock Android. How well it works differs strongly per device, some work perfectly out of the box while others have nonfunctional hardware.

    The cost of most car features is either upfront anyway (software stuff) or very minor (seat warmers). Sure, they sell you seat warmers for a couple grand or a major monthly fee, but resistive heaters really don’t cost all that much. There’s maybe $50 of hardware in a car that they will charge you ten times as much for if you buy the feature. I’m pretty sure they’re actually saving money by simplifying their supply lines and factory processes to just make a single type of chair.

    I don’t think most people care all that much about artists. Most people I know just go to Youtube or Spotify because it’s free and easy. However, if you think artists get little money for CDs, you’ll be shocked to see the streaming situation. Streaming pays out MUCH less compared to physical media. If you want to support artists, go to their concerts, that’s where they rack in their cash.

    rglullis,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar

    I’m pretty sure they’re actually saving money by simplifying their supply lines and factory processes to just make a single type of chair.

    My point is that if these types of features are so cheap to add, then why not just make it part of the standard package?If it costs $50 to make, add $100 to the price of the car and make a standard feature. This extreme segmentation just to squeeze more money is counterproductive.

    if you think artists get little money for CDs, you’ll be shocked to see the streaming situation. Streaming pays out MUCH less compared to physical media. If you want to support artists, go to their concerts, that’s where they rack in their cash.

    Yeah, I know. This is not a defense of streaming services.

    spookedbyroaches,
    • I know about Fairphone but the specs are a bit limited IMO.
    • I do have a Pixel with the stock (I know bad idea) ROM but I rooted it. I do have the kdrag0n Safetynet fix, but there is one app that somehow finds out about it. I guess one app out of however many I have is not too bad now that I think about it.
    • I haven’t really looked too far into this, but I assume that they build some tamper detection in the seat warmers (unless they’re incompetent or lazy). But the good news is that the seat warming subscription is no longer there.
    • For this one I was just looking for things to complain about. I have no subscriptions for media and just buy the physical stuff (or digital from Bandcamp).

    I guess it’s not a guarantee that DRM would be that proliferated and I can avoid it. I was being way to pessimistic at the time.

    Thanks for uplifting words mate!

    theneverfox,
    @theneverfox@pawb.social avatar

    It was outlawed out of concerns it would make us less productive

    theneverfox,
    @theneverfox@pawb.social avatar

    If it’s a physical object, how can you turn one into 1000? How can it be both the alignment of magnetic domains on a spinning disk, or an area containing more or less electrons than normal, or a sequence of letters printed on a page? It can even be stored in meat if you memorize a sequence, or separated in space and time then reunited

    Data isn’t a physical object, it’s any pattern that can be decoded to result in the same useful sequence. It’s information.

    At best, you can call it a property of a physical object

    eruchitanda,
    @eruchitanda@lemmy.world avatar

    1. I’m guessing that Google apps would be problematic. Except those apps, I didn’t have any compatibility issues, on Custom ROMs. Especially GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, LineageOS, and /e/OS.

    2. On a different user, I installed banking app that would usually prevent you from using it. No problems to use the app whatsoever.

    uriel238,
    @uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    If the companies and our government have their way, then yes, they will be able to monitor our every move and make sure we rent everything and own nothing.

    This runs against the grain of the Constitution of the United States, but our Federalist Society SCOTUS jurists have been gutting the fourth and fifth amendments long before the Dobbs decision triggered a public hue and cry.

    And it’s going to be up to us to regard censorship as damage and route around it. Essentially, there are repair shops that can fix your iPhone for you even if they’re not authorized and will even replace proprietary bolts with standard ones. Eventually right-to-repair will be established by courts if not legislators, state-by-state if not federally.

    There are too many complexities in the system to lock us down permanently into their walled gardens, but they will try until we respond with [redacted] until ashes cloud the skys.

    b1ab,
    @b1ab@lem.monster avatar

    God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.

    Deathcrow,

    God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.

    That’s delusional. As soon as more and more parts of software are run remotely on proprietary hard- & software there will be nothing to hack or crack. Sure, someone could reverse engineer it, but there aren’t enough hobbyists in the world to rewrite all this software.

    We see this more and more in gaming… it used to be the case that they just gave you the software to run your own game in multiplayer setups, nowadays, if they shut off the servers, the game is dead (unless, someone releases a very wonky, extremely buggy, barely usable, reverse engineered server with 10% of the features some time down the line)

    lunaticneko,

    They consider revenue streams more important than one-off payment.

    So everything becomes service and we are left in this non-ownership economy where we own nothing.

    dukethorion,
    @dukethorion@lemmy.one avatar

    Why would they sell you something for $50 one time, when they can charge you $9.99 / month forever?

    Daisyifyoudo, (edited )

    🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥everything is fine🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

    doggoloko,

    Here where I live is very hard privacy, school apps and governments are very intrusive and doesnt care for linux, custom roms for my model is so rare and to unlock oem is everything manual and mostly local sites are paywalled or useless, really thinking stop using html protocol lol

    JubilantJaguar,

    Completely agree in substance and spirit, but not on this framing of everything as about ownership. Personally I don’t want to “own” data any more than I want to own a car. What I want is control, rights, privacy and personal freedom. The ownership obsession seems to me a red herring that just proves how much we’ve been taken in by consumer capitalism.

    Forgive the rant. I agree with you on the substance.

    hobs,

    Me too. I just want people (and the businesses they run) to deal with me honestly and fairly. If C-suite execs and investors were named and shamed over and over again, even for the little things, they might grow a heart and learn to build humane companies. Co-Ops give me hope. Free Geek in the Pacific Northwest. Independent book shops and restaurants. Qwant, MetaGer and Brave search and ublock origin and Mozilla and the fediverse give me some hope.

    pseudo,
    @pseudo@lemmy.world avatar

    It comes in cycles. 20 years ago, it was a struggle to maintain your digital freedom. 10 years ago, when everyone was basking in free software and low interest rates, it was quite easy. The industry is contracting again, so it’s going to be harder to do so while using commercial offerings. But we will find ways and the cycle will repeat.

    Persist.

    spookedbyroaches,

    What was the struggle 20 years ago?

    matthew28845,
    @matthew28845@lemmy.world avatar

    Microsoft’s total web browser monopoly.

    pseudo,
    @pseudo@lemmy.world avatar

    Ughhh long story…

    It was the height of the Desktop era. Everything ran locally, and that meant Windows. OS X just got started. Everyone was predicting smartphones, but they were a decade out (note time travellers: drop the fucking stylus). Linux was unbelievably shit. Very few drivers, you had to carefully pick your hardware. External devices were a luxury. Printing mostly didn’t work, USB printing was bragging rights. You had to buy modems with a hardware DAC, else it was done in the driver which worked only on Windows. GTK kinda just went from v1 to v2, everything looked 10 years outdated, and even Firefox had glitchy UI on Linux. If you could insert a CD and get it to show up without manually mounting, you were staring into the future.

    The Web was on hold, Microsoft having won the browsers wars pt. 1, and proceeding to stall with Internet Explorer 6, correctly predicting that browsers would compete with their hegemony in the client space. There were no services: GMail and Youtube were just getting started. You ran local programs, and there were barely any for Linux. The choice was between booting Windows and dicking with cracks from Astalavista, and booting Linux to rice your E16, then staring at it. General productivity software was almost non-existent — you had a dozen compilers and interpreters instead. Where I’m from, banking required desktop software which required windows, not to mention smart cards, which also required windows.

    This was made worse by the proprietary formats, which were the key to maintaining stranglehold. Everyone was emailing .docs around, which you could sometimes open with Abiword or maybe dump just the text and Antiword. Even the PDF viewers were a bit crap. Had to submit a report? You probably booted Windows in a virtual machine to use Office, and the CPU was yet to add instructions helping with that. Media was even worse; everything was MPEG and required royalties. LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder because it wasn’t allowed to be. RIAA/MPAA were fighting hard to keep you buying physical shit. Meanwhile, you could only play Tux Racer and Nethack.

    Around that time, Microsoft was about to introduce Palladium, an attestation chain rooted in hardware. Everyone was despairing about the same future: in 3-5 years, Microsoft would use it to pull in and segregate an increasing portion of the Internet, until the whole became their walled garden. Hope that sounds familiar.

    Meanwhile, older penguins just didn’t give a fuck. They simply didn’t use the shit they couldn’t use, and missed none of it. They worked to extend what they had, the digital commons.

    No one could stand TVs, so as an act of disobedience, we invented p2p piracy. Napster, DC, torrents — which are alive and kicking. Xiph gave no fucks and started working on free media codecs. Vorbis became CELT became OPUS. Tarkin became Daala became (merged into) AV1. Youtube is now serving OPUS and VP9 or AV1; our best codecs trace their lineage to DIY stuff done to avoid proprietary formats. H.266 can, and will, fuck off. PDF is everywhere. Jimbo started Wikipedia. Flash went away. The modern web happened. Linux grew up and I don’t even notice I’m using it. Free software ate nonfree in most domains; the gardens are now walled through access, not by being built on proprietary stacks. Massive progress happened.

    Now that the digital world runs on services — which were a clever ruse to subvert old free software (Google runs on Linux, remember?) — someone is threatening to close a few pipes. So what? Just look at the fucking size of those commons that we have created. Someone will claw back some of that… and? Worst case, we lose a few ways to waste our time, of which we have hundreds. Retract from the mainstream a little, again. Have some difficulties using a few services. Be careful which hardware we buy. Oh noez.

    Shit changes constantly. Companies battle relentlessly to undercut one another. We invent workarounds and grow our knowledge. Relax, get yourself LineageOS+MicroG or GrapheneOS or even a Fairphone; get a Framework; use Fediverse; get off those services and sail the high seas where needed; use Linux+Firefox if you aren’t already; touch grass; and if someone tries to force you into extracting rent — refuse it.

    Persist.

    tsuica,
    @tsuica@lemmy.ml avatar

    Amazing trip back into time, thank you for the nostalgia trip.

    pseudo,
    @pseudo@lemmy.world avatar

    ;)

    Jamie,
    @Jamie@jamie.moe avatar

    Fantastic write up. I first got a real taste of the Internet around 2003 when my parents finally relented and got dial-up from a local power company. We had dialup with the associated drawbacks for around 3 years until we got DSL in around 06. The ability to use the net when I wanted let me start learning how things worked, very slowly.

    I do wish I’d had Internet access earlier and been a little bit older to experience the height of BBSes and the like, but I got to see the tail end of a different time in internet history, which I appreciate in itself.

    arvere,

    great post

    hiire,
    @hiire@lemmy.world avatar

    Amazing post. As someone born in the 2000s, this is definitely an unknown story for me (I grew up with WinXP), and I didn’t get to live this virtual freedom revolution. I do remember that MS owned everything though, they were the big promise, the big company that made computers and the internet work. Microsoft was everywhere.

    Definitely an interesting story, I will definitely continue supporting open standards and free software, possibly even contributing once I get better at programming ;)

    Tick_Dracy,
    @Tick_Dracy@lemmy.world avatar

    This brings up so many memories 🏴‍☠️

    lenathaw,

    Amazing writeup, thanks for the nostalgia trip. Albeit I’m a Linux user since 2008, I did grew up with the internet since the mid90s. Things come and go, but perseverance must stay forever.

    Anticorp,

    It sucks because the obvious solution is for people to move away from these bullshit companies and show that they actually care about their privacy.

    They don’t. People don’t care, don’t understand, and don’t care that they don’t understand. The average person is oblivious of the way the world around them works, and they’re okay with that. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

    JubilantJaguar,

    The truth makes for tough reading. Now for the good news: imagine all the free software you use every day, and all the people who built it with passion and countless hours of hard work, and - not least! - how much more powerful that software is than it was even a decade ago.

    It seems that the ignorant masses are not entirely in the driving seat, right?

    Vinnyboiler,
    @Vinnyboiler@feddit.uk avatar

    Ignorance goes both sides though, free and open source has dark aspects to it. The assumed security has no one to hold to account, and for profit companies has real leverage over projects and can hurt the ecosystem if given a chance. Add to that how lax the wider community attitude is to breaking licences and you have a ecosystem that can fail if all you do is assume good faith.

    Remember to keep an open mind to everything and not just the things in life you have a particular issue with. Everyone is ignorant to something.

    JubilantJaguar,

    Remember to keep an open mind to everything and not just the things in life you have a particular issue with.

    FYI this presumptuous and gratuitously patronizing remark undermines the rest of your comment.

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