Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm | Hacker News Reader

Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm

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There is no war on general purpose computers. If you want one, you can get one.

Some people need one, some people don't. What we are finding is that very few people wanted a general purpose computer in the first place. They wanted to do a thing, and a general purpose computers did that thing(also many other things they didn't want to do or understood).

You could buy a dvd player that was region unlocked. You can purchase unlocked phones. You don't have to buy an iphone, or stick to the Google play store but it's nice to know that you could live in the garden if you wanted to.

Is the NSA a problem? absolutely. Could requirements like cell-phone termination be used for nefarious means? yes. But we built strong democratic institutions for a reason, and we should be turning to them, not some ideology that helps only the technologically gifted. Mr. Doctrow needs to argue against policy on it's individual merits, not claim it violates some FSF ideology he loves and fearmonger luddites.

He did argue against the policy on its merits, providing several concrete examples where applying the law enables malefactors to do bad things to you. And nothing in the article refers to the FSF or the concept of free or open source software.

The policies he specifically mentioned:

-Region-locked DVD's - never really enforced, and DVD's were irrelevant years ago anyways.

-App Store - decision by a private company that many like! Not policy.

-Sony Rootkit. Happened in 2005, never happened again. Not a policy.

-prohibiting printing gun.stl on your 3-D printer. If you think that's the future in the US, you are flat out retarded.

-Self-Driving cars that are self-disabling. Too far in the future to really hammer out a policy framework for yet. Unclear why the government would demand that law enforcement be able to control remotely.

-California. The only policy that's actually real and is pretty minor. Only can be used as theft deterrent.

Even if he doesn't directly mention free software, it's intellectual inheritance is so clearly from RMS that I don't think it really needs to go without saying.

The belief that somehow private companies make decisions “just fine” highlights the socio-cultural side.

It doesn't take much introspection to cite bleak moments from our collective North American histories that were socially acceptable, while being rather dubious ethically.

Smoking was once a “free choice” and desired, and came with it willful years of of ignorance of the influence of second hand smoke. If we dig deeper, we could spend much time discussing slavery and sufferage other such messes that, while abhorrent by today's standards, were perfect cultural fits during their respective reigns. And implicitly bound to private enterprise.

Private enterprise doesn't make any of his opinions dissolve, nor less relevant. On the contrary, as those cultural and ideological vantages are precisely why his points are relevant.

I think we can only evaluate things on their present merits. One can't go back in time and indict previous cultures for their norms. So, perhaps one day in the future people will look at us and find it repugnant. That may very well be the case, but that's how it has to be. You evaluate by your current standards not by an undetermined future enlightened state (or who knows, things could all go backwards some day just the same.)

About the region locked DVD's:

a) It was always very real for the stuff bought in a store. Jailbraking is hard for normal people.

b) The fact that it's a crime chills some jailbreakers, even if never enforced.

c) Once it's a crime, it could start to be enforced anytime and even selectively. Presumably with no shortage of reasonable-sounding people pointing out that guilt is evident and punishment as described by the law.

Regarding decisions made by private companies: you might be familiar with the various noises the US government made when Apple recently announced a possible future "no backdoor" policy. If they cancel those plans, is it really a private decision?

I'd actually wonder (and somewhat worry) what effect that has from a social perspective on future generations of programmers.

Certainly not all programmers start as kids, but it seems like a huge number of them do, and it seems like almost all of the really, really excellent ones I've met and worked with started programming before the second half of high school (I can think of one notable exception who started in his second year of college). However: many, perhaps most, of them did not start on their own general purpose computer: they all seem to have been exposed to a general purpose computer through their parents and picked it up from there.

If many, or most, people do not actually /need/ a general purpose computer (as you argue, and as I kind of agree), then that kind of access would be greatly hampered. I worry about the potential educational effect that would have for people who come into programming the way I and multiple people I know did, without any outside prodding and long before anyone sane starts thinking about their child's future career in some industry.

I know that the main advance that computers gave my parents, professionally, over typewriters was the ability to google and the backspace key, followed shortly by .mp3s and the ability to burn CDs (one is a professor of music). If those things were divorced from general purpose computing, I wouldn't have had access to a general purpose computer until easily 5 years after I made my first website, 4 years after I started to learn a Turing complete language, and two years after I started programming in earnest/doing more than snippets of javascript as part of web design (Java, followed shortly after by scheme). I'm not sure I would have actually gone into computer science/programming as a field if I hadn't fallen into it early on: there are a lot of other fields that people were genuinely telling me I should pay attention to or get good at (math, physics, science in general), and I worry that din would have shut out my own interests if I hadn't stumbled into them as early as I did.

This is why devices like the iPad worried me from when they were released (when I was in high school) onward: what would I have done if my parents owned an iPad instead of a Mac? If that walled garden was my only exposure to computing at a young age? (I certainly wouldn't have been given the keys to the Apple store to buy educational games about programming, my parents didn't trust me as a child with their money.) I'm not sure I'd be in this field (which I enjoy very much), as there were almost no examples of 'other programmers' in my life until I was in high school, and that was only because I sought them out.

Plenty of great programmers exist that did not have computers as children.(Someone had to invent them, and were very expensive for a long time). I myself never had a computer. The myth that you had to be exposed as a kid is mostly propagated by people who have an interest in shutting people out of the industry, or trying to tout themselves as prodigies. I was actively discouraged in university from taking a CS class because I had no experience.

And even if general purpose computers encourage programming by themselves, a Rasberry Pi is $25. You could buy a computer with your allowance if you really wanted it, and I think the people we need are the people who sought computers on their own, not spoiled children whose parents had the foresight to own a PC.

> if the state of California continues to insist that cell phones have kill switches allowing remote instructions to be executed on your phone that you can't countermand or even know about

California cannot "continue" to insist on this, because it never started to insist on it.

The California kill switch law does not mandate that you cannot cannot countermand it, and it certainly does not mandate that you cannot know about it. In fact, it would be pretty hard for a consumer to not know about it since the law requires that you be asked to set the kill switch up when you initially set up the device. You can refuse if you do not wish to have the kill switch.

I hate to say it but I think there is no way to prevent this.

If the human experience shows us anything it is that those with power will use any instrument to exert its will. The internet and computing generally was not born from anarchy and does not exist free from powerful influence from the start.

There is no man-made system that is not corrupted by powerful interests.

Url changed from http://boingboing.net/2014/12/26/war-on-general-purpose-comp..., which points to this.

Discussion of related talk from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805039.

thx dang, I usually do this (pt to most authoritative source) - notice how the articles cluster & some have more worth than others.

No idea on other stuff, but immobilizer for auto, which is like kill switch for phones, reduced car theft multiple times (3+) since it was introduced.

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