Tourists on Tech's Toll Roads
puri.sm
puri.sm
There would have been no technological progress we were able to enjoy in the past decade or two without the foundations laid by the open PC platform, and the Internet based on open standards.
These open foundations are now slowly being substituted piece by piece with proprietary walled gardens, and conversely we can now witness the pace of innovation subsiding.
In the current environment, there could not be another Google emerging as a successful contender the same way the original Google did, very much like there could not have been another Disney for quite a while, due to all the regulatory restrictions put in place largely as a result of the lobbying on the part of the original Disney: only this time it's more than Mickey Mouse's future that's at stake.
However, as the situation appears to be largely made possible by regulatory failure, the problem is inherently political, and any lasting solution would also have to be of such nature. Thus, while I wish Purism all the best, expecting them to be able to significantly change the situation is unfortunately not realistic.
I always hate this argument.
The idea that Purism is going to topple Apple overnight is pretty unrealistic. Even if they "succeed" it would be years, maybe decades before they're the dominant platform. That's an unreasonably long time to suffer the status quo and it makes sense to try to solve the problem in other ways before then.
But sometimes the regulatory solutions fail, e.g. because the incumbents pour money into the coffers of politicians. And chipping away at the the problem slowly in the market, over a decade or more, until the incumbents are weaker and a political solution can do them in, is far better than a permanent defeat as a result of long-term regulatory capture.
Microsoft became a software giant, and to sell more copies of its software, it had to drive the price of hardware to zero.
This is "complements" joel talks about here [1]
By the commoditization hardware, people bought more copies of windows, and we all benefitted by the relentless march of faster, better, cheaper that resulted.
(The thing is they caused linux to flourish as software got more expensive)
Then apple did the opposite.
Apple is actually commoditizing software to sell hardware. Before the app store, software - very good apps actually - were frequently $39.95 or more.
Apple drove software to zero. It gives away the OS with it's hardware, and apps on the app store started at a few dollars, then 99 cents, then all the top apps were free.
and now data has become the way these free apps can survive and compete. advertisers and data brokers are the ones who fund things, by monetizing our data.
The thing is - I think hardware vendors can be aligned with free software. it sells hardware. purism can succeed. so can pine. and system76.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Hopefully we'll soon see a new paradigm come along and dethrone the whole, "be annoying but just fun/useful enough to exploit the impatient and impulsive" monetization scheme so many microtransaction-heavy apps have taken up in lieu of just charging $5 up front.
As a result, we're seeing the software industry squashed (and commoditized) to fit the needs of a couple companies that control hardware today.
"Road I have to drive on and pay for" also describes public roads, it's just not as obvious when you're doing the paying. For the most part, I just have to suck it up and drive the places I need to go, and unlike the private road, I have to pay for public roads even if I don't use them at all.
Besides that, "expensive and well-maintained good/service that everyone is forced to use" basically describes the ideal in government provisioned anything, does it not? I mean, cheap and well-maintained would be better, but I'm not sure that exists anywhere...
The only difference is that a poor person could choose to drive an economy car, or an electric vehicle, in order to avoid paying their share of use tax. But so could a rich person.
The other difference is that the usage tax is a hidden cost and tolls are not.
Since the pandemic, I barely use the road network personally, but all the physical goods I buy are transported over the roads, as are all the people who are employed to make them. From a financing perspective, I'm still an indirect road user.
While it's certainly possible to levy pay-per-use charges for roads, so businesses would pass indirect costs onto their customers. However, it's debatable whether the economic costs of doing so much bookkeeping, as opposed to just funding the road network out of general taxes, is worth the trouble.
Further, pay-per-use road pricing would involve serious invasions of privacy, and income equality impacts, for which the social costs arguably exceed any possible economic benefit.
For public goods that literally everyone benefits from, it hardly seems to be worth the trouble to make sure everyone pays only their share down to the cent.
Petrol/Gas taxes are paid at both the federal and state levels as a proxy to usage.
Commercial trucks must pay for a Heavy Vehicle Use Tax, which again has both a federal and state component.
And of course, there are many new highways and a bridges that are financed with tolls.
And in the places like the UK there are congestion taxes for city centers.
a) To those wealthy enough to pay
b) to those the toll road agree to let pass
And you have no choice but to increase the toll road's wealth each time you use the road. Moreover, it's a monopoly, which means that the toll road operator has no incentive to keep the road cheap nor well maintained, as long as there is not enough incentive for the public to open a new road.
A slightly better situation to be in is when there are multiple operators with multiple alternative toll roads, unfortunately:
c) That's a waste of duplicated efforts
d) It only works as long as there is no price collusion occuring
e) It doesn't solve the previous points.
And I think this is the point here. Are there viable paths with no tolls on them? We also need strong regulations for basic public service, and ensure that there is no monopoly.
Arterial roads may be non-rivalrous in the same sense as the internet backbone, but the last mile to your home is definitely a natural monopoly for both roads and ISPs. How would you feel about ubiquitous toll roads that start at the end of your driveway?
That's because they are. The reality is the existence of side-loading and third-party stores on Android contributes directly to the spread of malware on the platform, which is why Google has made it more difficult to do so with each successive release of Android.
According to Nokia's threat intelligence report (https://onestore.nokia.com/asset/205835), Android devices were responsible for 47.15% of malware infections compared to 0.85% from iPhones. (Note that even after scaling for the number of devices there is still an order of magnitude difference.) Windows/PCs at 35.82% and IoT devices at 16.17% make up the rest. That's right, Android has overtaken Windows as the biggest malware vector on the planet.
According to Kaspersky's mobile malware report (https://securelist.com/mobile-malware-evolution-2019/96280/), 13.89% of users in the United States were attacked by mobile malware in 2019. In some other countries the numbers are significantly higher: 21.23% in Brazil, 24.14% in Mexico, 27.36% in Malaysia, 37.98% in India, and 60.64% in Iran. The overwhelming majority of mobile malware targets the Android platform.
If you want to argue that your right to "freedom" over your device is so important to you that you believe the risk of malware is worth the tradeoff, that's one thing, but don't hand-wave away the very real security benefits of strictly controlled devices as "marketing". It's disingenuous.
Uh, well ok unsupported assertion. Apple has always allowed third party calendars, email clients, messaging apps, etc.
It’s always been security, privacy AND battery life. This original iPhone didn’t allow third party apps for a year, and they were only going to be web apps. Eventually they game up with a tight sandbox with strict limits on background processing that protected battery life, privacy and the essential phone functionality from rogue apps.
Being able to buy a tightly managed device that maximizes its battery life and your privacy and security is an important choice for consumers.
Identical situation currently plays out on desktop gaming, where anticheat software does not run in WINE or equivalent and you can't connect, and VMs are blocked and will result in bans from multiplayer games, to the point where if you are running normal Windows, you will be removed from the game for having VMware or Docker or anything similar open or running in the background. If you attempt to block these, you are refused service.
It is also, of course, ridiculous for a bank or food delivery app to refuse to install their app on a device which is actually controlled by the user when they allow the same device to do the same things on its website, and companies doing such things would have a tendency to lose customers to smarter competitors who don't.
> how many games do you think will want the user to have an unlocked device
Many more will rather be able to attest that the user isn't pirating all IAP.
> It is also, of course, ridiculous for a bank or food delivery app to refuse to install their app on a device which is actually controlled by the user when they allow the same device to do the same things on its website
Ridiculous, yes, but it's still done anyway. The same device is also often not allowed to do the same things on the website, or the website implements similar or identical fingerprinting code. Everything from polling tons of "logged in URLs" like facebook's favicon to detect what sites the user is logged into, to port scanning the user's LAN, none of this should be a thing and should be extremely illegal, but in practice it's abused heavily.
Which the developer will have a market incentive to not want to do, because they can't get money from you if you're not using their product, and unlike phone platforms, most app developers have aggressive competition.
> Many more will rather be able to attest that the user isn't pirating all IAP.
Not really. If the user has an unlocked device, turning them away isn't going to turn a profit because then you lose their business regardless. Better to get the users who don't pirate than to lose them all. And it's not as if the user is going to lock the device back up for most of these games -- especially when there will be other apps that only work on an unlocked device.
> Everything from polling tons of "logged in URLs" like facebook's favicon to detect what sites the user is logged into, to port scanning the user's LAN, none of this should be a thing and should be extremely illegal, but in practice it's abused heavily.
The solution there being to stop patronizing anybody who does that, which everybody should already be doing as a general principle.
Moreover, all this is all rather academic when we could get the actual result by allowing the user to do this to their device and seeing what happens, so it can't be an argument for not doing that. Worst case is not very many people do it, and then still what is it hurting?
If only. Every single major US bank and card company does this. It's terrible.
It’s kind of like free speech or privacy. Most people don’t need free speech, since they don’t have anything important to say. And most people don’t really need privacy, since they have no important secrets. However, it is very important for a society that everyone has those things, since otherwise society turns into something very ugly.
Likewise, most people probably wouldn’t sideload apps, manage their security keys, or anything else, but by not allowing those things, our society of computers and networking has turned rather ugly compared to what was originally imagined for it.
for instance apple has removed apps that help you find other apps. It has removed apps trying to use features available only to apple built-in apps (calling them private interfaces)
but really - the eu and the us are scrutinizing apple's store as anti-competitive. That's a pretty big indicator.
And even when apple doesn't outright remove apps, it cherry-picks design features of third-party apps to add it to their own apps.
myself, I would like to be able to compile and add my own apps to my phone. Just like computers used to be. I cannot do that without asking apple for permission.
And apps helping you find other apps linked to the App Store, so wheres the competition?
Even with "free", and accepting terms and conditions, and using your apple id, and all that stuff - I believe you have to renew the certificate weekly.
and testflight is a developer thing - with lots of extra asking permission.
This basically boils down to the old people want the wrong things argument.
I worry most about control: visiting a web site and having political and other ads being based on my browsing history and the treasure trove of my data that gets collected from credit card purchases, web activity, etc. Read Zuboff's surveillance capitalism book.
My Apple Watch and iPhone are mostly stock - I don't generally install 3rd party apps. I feel that the use of these devices is consistent with my dedication to fight back against surveillance capitalism.
I have blogged about this a lot: it is easy to take basic steps like: install the freedom.to app on all your devices and block social media and other time wasting sites for most of the day; use private browsing tabs, and frequently delete all cookies from all browsers you use on all devices; etc.
It would be nice if you could block network connections to the sites you disagree with. Or even find out if they were occurring. But you don't have any control over that - apple prevents it. At least macos has tcpdump and a firewall (for now)