Hacker News Reader

> nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy phones you can't root

The DMCA (and to a lesser extent, CFAA) is routinely abused by software & hardware manufacturers to prevent people from taking control of their own devices, and if you do it at a large scale then you will eventually end up with a gun to your head.

I mean the Pixel series of phones are built to be unlockable/root-able straight from google..

Even then, terms and conditions apply. See this user's experience here[0], where they report that the repair services locked the phone after purchase.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31166871

Not always, mine's locked.

Is yours from a carrier? Verizon's and others are locked, but I've never heard of a lock stage from giggle.

We need a "Right to Repair Democracy".

Regulations are short term /high friction solutions even if you had good ones, sooner or later big companies will work around them/regulatory capture , change will only come if people show it by what they buy .

Vote with your pocket , there are phones like fairphone [1] which makes right to repair a central part of their design .

Even if people don’t know or care about right to repair a lot of people care about sustainability , you can’t have one sustainable credentials with unrepairable phones like Apple keeps marketing.

Help others in your life make that informed choice .

[1] https://shop.fairphone.com/en/

We need regulations, and more so constitutionalism, to set boundaries for the free market economy in favor of humanitarianism, environmentalism and liberalism, or those who vote with their pocket will vote us all back into feudalism by selling their vote to their oppressors for short term tangible benefits.

And they looked from their windows at the angry masses and asked: "What do they want?" - "Well they are unhappy that Disney only streams to certified firmware, that banking apps don't work on rooted systems, and that their devices report to the secret police" - "I don't understand" - "They say their bread is moldy and rotten" - "Then why don't they eat cake?"

Supporting ethical companies is a good thing and you should totally do that. But i doubt the emergence of surveillance capitalism can be solved by that alone. By no means stop advocating for it, it does bring change, but some business and government practices must be regulated. And some existing regulation must be changed to favor humans instead of corporations and government agencies.

Note the thread is not about a "right to repair" but a "right to repair democracy"

I mean otoh the market only offers so much choice and often established producers work to make it more difficult for up and comers to themselves be established. We are infact often cattle whose choices are limited to merely where we can stand within a tightly controlled field of very limited size, especially when many of these tools we are reliant upon in modern life can no longer be practically made in the home.

> We are infact often cattle whose choices are limited to merely where we can stand within a tightly controlled field of very limited size

We are if we limit ourselves to act only as individual consumers. But if we act as a collective of citizens, we can compel companies to offer the choices we want.

As long as there is mass media the collective's voice is usually drowned out by the companies interests anyhow. Advertising is too effective to sway public opinion on any topic and just throwing more money works too well. Grassroots efforts are stomped before they are allowed to take flight, unfortunately. There is too much intertia to meaningfully change the status quo in a lot of ways. This is why its better to derive your happiness from other things than the state of the world.

Most people can't be experts at most things. That's how specialization works.

It's easy to blame consumerism and people being dumb when you look at a single market, but there are hundreds of markets and in the other 99 we're the dumb ones.

> your choice was to sell your freedom in exchange for shiny baubles.

Actually, my choice was that Apple engineers with teams, budgets, etc. and a mandate to protect my privacy will do a better job initially and certainly a better job with updates, than I would installing a collection of OSS software on a rooted Android phone. I mean, most people, if they care at all, slam umatrix as an add on with the default lists and call it a day. It's the same outsourcing, but to volunteers.

> This is the power you have. It is more democratic than voting.

I don't know about you, but I only stopped by physical keyboard having phones when the stopped selling them. You can look at dumb TVs, dumb cars, and a lot of other examples where they just don't make some options anymore. I mean, sure I can buy ethically, and try to, but I don't convince myself my money is the make and break difference. Hell, if you look at my purchase habits, you'll see I frequently am on the losing side.

Also, it's kinda bizarre to claim that the free market is more democratic than voting, since voting is the gold standard of democracy.

Maybe they, like many others, don’t care one iota about having root on their phone.

> sell your freedom

That’s hyperbolic to the point of killing the discussion.