Comment by rossy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rossy | Hacker News Reader

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This seems good and bad. The prospect of a new, modern operating system is exciting. The system call interface is sensible and it follows modern security best practices (eg. deny-by-default.)

One practical disadvantage compared to Linux is that it's not GPL, so if Google uses it to make a mainstream mobile phone operating system, other vendors won't be compelled to release their kernel sources like they are with Android today, which means a Fuchsia equivalent to LineageOS might not support as many devices.

Also, capability-based security is fine as long as there's some way for the owner of the device to acquire all capabilities. If there is not, it's fundamentally anti-user, since it's treating the user as an adversary. Since most Android devices require aftermarket modifications to get root access, I'm not too hopeful about Fuchsia. If these bullet points are anything to go by and DRM and verified boot are first-class features, it's likely that Fuchsia will have built-in mechanisms that prevent the user from copying protected video content, so it's unlikely that the average Fuchsia powered device would grant the user full privileges.

>One practical disadvantage compared to Linux is that it's not GPL, so if Google uses it to make a mainstream mobile phone operating system, other vendors won't be compelled to release their kernel sources like they are with Android today, which means a Fuchsia equivalent to LineageOS might not support as many devices.

I would disagree. With the introduction of Android 8 and Project Treble, as long as the userspace OS changes adhere to the HAL contracts, updating to a new OS version should will be considerably easier because there is no need to modify the kernel.

According to the Project Treble lead you can even place AOSP userspace on any Project Treble phone and it would work.

> it's fundamentally anti-user

I don’t get this sentiment at all. The vast majority of users don’t know what root access is, let alone care about it.

Its as simple as imagining any scenario where your interests are at odds with the oem, the government, or literally any interested party with money and time.

If Verizon wants to sell you a device with GPS but rent you the feature for 10 bucks a month.

If the government wants the privilege of censorship unobstructed by the inherent technical impossibility of controlling every aspect of user owned devices.

If you want to avoid planned obsolescence and use your device longer than 18 months.

If you are a keirig owner if you want to buy the coffee of your choosing.

If you want to refill your ink cartridges.

Any obnoxious thing that people would trivially bypass if they had full control of their own stuff.

The fact that you an otherwise intelligent individual could ask such a staggeringly ridiculous question is why the free market is a worthless answer to any of the above.

There is a reason standards are developed by knowledgable parties rather than hoping that buyers will navigate the quagmire of complicated topics to demand sanity from merchants.

"...the free market is a worthless answer to any of the above..."

Nit: it's not a free market if the buyer doesn't understand the transaction.

What we've seen, especially in the latter half of the 20th century and afterwards, is companies using the complexity of the law to create transactions in which the buyer thinks they're getting a good deal, but in fact they're getting screwed over by lawyers. That's not a free market. That's using government complexity as a club to beat senseless consumers when they don't do things the way you expect them to. It's a form of rent-seeking using the regulatory state.

It's important to understand what it is, otherwise you aren't able to propose any reasonable solutions. For example, throwing even more complexity at the problem in an effort to protect consumers would just make matters worse.

I'm in favor of your approach, just wanted to point out that 1) it's incomplete, and 2) without an understanding of root causes we'll still be in the same spot 20 years from now

Whether the user knows it or not, there is still software running on the device that is working in the interests of the vendor and/or the DRMed content creator and against the interests of the user. Yes, most users don't care, but some do. If you were the seller of a hypothetical restricted Fuchsia device, you might not lose any sleep over the users that care. As the potential buyer of the device, I will take user freedom into consideration and I will criticise the device if it's not up to my standards.

Also, users don't care about these restrictions until they do. The user might be completely unaware that there are restrictions on what they can do with the device before they decide to install something like a system-wide ad-blocker (which are becoming more popular) or maybe an app that can download YouTube videos.

> most users don't care

The reason most users don't care is that they don't understand what's going on: They've been programmed to believe that law ≥ morality when there exist so many painfully simple - even modern - examples where this cannot possibly be the case.

People used to buy a car with the expectation it last 20-30 years and would not think about buying a car that they had to take to the manufacturer for repairs or aftermarket upgrades, after all: You need your car to get to work, and everyone knew if there was a malfunction and the manufacturer refused to repair it under warrantee (like a broken windscreen) you could at least get a competitive best-price repair from an open market of repairmen. Without this, how could you possibly trust the purchase of a car?

Now they do, and indeed I know people who rotate cars as often as they exchange their phone for the newest version. If the manufacturer won't repair it for free, they can charge as much as they can get away with - far and above the best price -- and the only reason they can do this is because they have a technical monopoly on some secret keys used to perform updates and upgrades.

If there's a user who, given the choice, would protect a manufacturers' "right" to price-gouge them, then they're a fucking idiot.

> People used to buy a car with the expectation it last 20-30 years

I can't speak about all people, in all time periods, but most people in the 1960s/70s in the USA were thinking about keeping their cars for 10 years maximum. Cars were dizzyingly cheap in those days, and a highschool student could work part-time during a single summer and buy a new sports car.

To me, the only thing that has changed between now and then is the price of vehicles, not the expectation that they're disposable.

Being anti-user isn't about providing an overwhelming value to all users of a product, but to make sure that no user ever gets stuck with no way out.

Opera v12 is a great example of that. There is no browser with its feature-set. In purely objective terms all other browsers are strictly inferior when it comes to usability and range of features outside the web rendering core. It also provides a number of data storage features. Now Opera ASA has given up on it, and because it's closed sourced not even small things like changing SSL ciphers can be fixed.

So millions of users were forced to switched to worse alternatives, and some were forced to manually extract their data.

The kick in the butt about this: There's a leak of the source code on the internet, but collaboration on it is nigh-impossible because any site hosting it is breaking copyright law. This despite Opera v12, with the Presto engine, being 100% and entirely abandoned and with the sale of the "Opera Browser" to a chinese malware company, there not even being any way for the public to know who actually owns the rights to v12.

Why do users have to understand root to benefit?

Users don't understand what a CAN bus is, but open access to CAN buses is better for anyone who needs to maintain a car.

I knew a person that didn't want to understand how a car works. Drove it without an oil change until the engine died fast.

For cars, software and generally living on this planet, the more one doesn't understand, the more they'll pay.

But there're users who do.

Is a minority of users not users? By this logical, we can remove all accessibility features, because disabled users are only a minority.

Most people don't care about lead in paint or asbestos and, yet, we banned both because they were really bad for people's health.

They might not know what it is and as a result of that, they cannot care for it, but there's one thing that root access gives which no user would not want: Ad blocking in apps.

No but they care that they can't do the things they want to with the computer (or rather install software that does - or rather ask a technical friend to make the device do the thing). Most users don't think of a phone like device as a computer unfortunately.

It should be up to the user to decide whether they want root access or not.

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