The question of how private property, intellectual property and posession/ownership should work is indeed something humanity hasn't properly figured out yet.
But if anything, regular people should have more of the cake.
We have! The only problem is a very limited amount of legal decisions accidentally paved the way for a massive dystopia. In particular, the first sale doctrine [1] solves everything immediately.
The courts assumed good faith with a licensing exception, and maybe it was. But that opened the door to essentially completely dismantle the first-sale doctrine. Get rid of that loophole and all this stupidity ends, immediately. Well that and the DMCA. Once you buy something, it's yours to do whatever you want to do with it short of replicating it for commercial benefit.
We also need regulation to prevent unbreakable hardware locks. Integrating the locks deep into VLSI makes removing them unrealistic.
As a more specific way to do this, I'd like to see any software that hardware companies make for their own hardware designated (at the choice of the company) as either part of the hardware or a separate product. In the former case, it must be made available under GPLv3 with full anti-tivoization provisions. In the latter case, it must use only public and documented interfaces and must be completely realistic for another company to make a competing product on a level playing field. Ideally the separate products would also need to be highly cross platform if technically feasible where the burden of showing that it isn't is on the developer.
Most users don't understand the higher order effects of lack of ownership, if they care at all when it doesn't impact convenience in an obvious way. This information already exists before purchase, but it doesn't move sales among the masses where the money is made. The result is zero viable ownership respecting products for those of us who care: all modern CPUs have IME or equivalent, all modern cars are infested with proprietary spyware, all phones at reasonable prices¹ don't fully embrace user ownership in various ways. This also has higher order effects that affect everyone, such as car insurance having an involuntary data mine on anyone who drives a modern car.
1: the exception that I'm thinking of here is fair phone, and it isn't much of an exception.
I just don't see a problem with customers ignoring or not caring about the details as long as its clear. If a car manufacturer makes clear, for example, that you aren't allowed to work on the car you are buying yourself and the person still buys it that's their choice.
A practical one is that many industries have extreme barriers to entry and are dominated by a small number of players, with minimal chance of an upstart competitor showing up.
And if it so happens that engaging in some sort of anti-customer behavior is profitable, then it's entirely viable that all major players adopt it, even if they don't necessarily overtly collude.
The problem is that if 95% of people don't care and do this then the 5% who do care are completely fucked and can't work on their cars. This is because no manufacturer will make more money selling to the 5% who care.
Well I'm in that 5%, and I own older cars mainly so I can still work on them myself.
My argument was that manufacturers should have to be clear up front with what they're selling. If 95% of the population doesn't care, and that means the market for maintainable cars isn't viable, why should I impose my will on everyone else? I'd like to buy a new car and be able to work on it but no company should be obligated to serve that desire.
You're being illogical. You'd only be 'imposing your will' on people if somebody preferred it being impossible to work on their car, which is obviously absurd. It's outright anti-customer behavior with no benefit to the customer whatsoever. It's akin to arguing that e.g. price fixing should be legal so long as a business informs the customer that prices are being rigged against them.
You might be right. We're seeing a paradox of more and more exclusive ownership of property for commercial interests (land, water, airwaves, orbits) and fewer and fewer exclusive ownership for individuals (rented homes, licensed software, subscriptions etc). I too think we're still in a transition stage and humanity has yet to figure this thing out.
Well, I think it was both. He saw the problem (of capital accumulation in capitalism), and predicted a failure of it (due to people wisening up and taking action to fix the problem). Of course he wanted corrective action to happen - he didn't want people to suffer.
And the people did rise up and successfully tried to fix the problem - there was a big socialdemocratic movement that culminated between the world wars.
What he underestimated was the ingenuity with which the capitalism reinvents itself (and creates new forms of private property to gobble up - free computing in RMS's sense just one example). He also overestimated ability of most people to understand the problem (it's lot more lack of emotional rather than intellectual capacity). I would say alienation is central to Marx, unfortunately alienated people can be so indoctrinated to fail to consider the alternatives. Most people seem to prefer to suffer through hardship rather than demand an alternative solution.
> Of course he wanted corrective action to happen - he didn't want people to suffer
That's interesting, this is a pretty generous representation of him in my opinion. Its been a while since I read some of his writings and went down the rabbit hole listening to long form interviews of historians that studied him though, my memory could he failing me!
My understanding what that Marx envisioned a future utopia and saw two revolutions, both presumably violent, as necessary to get to the end goal. At best I could see him being indifferent to the suffering and deaths required in his model, but I never got the feeling that he would regret or would want to avoid the suffering. If I'm not mistaken, one of the revolutions he expected and wanted to see happen would have leaned heavily on the poor and working class turning on the rich and powerful to the point of killing most or all of them.
Again, I hope my representation is accurate here. I don't have time to dig back in to fact check this right now, just sharing my recollection.
Can you be more specific where Marx advocates for a violent revolution in his writings? I don't think word "revolution" (or even his usage of "dictatorship of proletariat") by itself implies violence (cf. "scientific revolution").
But I think there are people who consider forceful redistribution of ownership to be violence, even if no human is actually physically harmed in the process. I don't and I think there is a distinction to be made.
Edit: Nevermind, there's a lot of interesting debate about this on the Internet.
The solution certainly won't be through legislative or judicative powers as they have failed predictably and repeatedly. Sometimes reality must be molded a bit of fait accompli.
What are you proposing if not legislative or judicial means?
Those are the only checks of power on the executive built into our system. Are you expecting we would have to throw out our political system all together, get rid of the top by force, and start over?
The question that hasn't fully been worked is how to allow people to think/feel they own something, while having no actual legal rights to it. But, as we see, this is being worked on.
And the answer is we don't. If we can't run our own software, then we do not own the computer. To run software of our choosing we need the cryptographic keys to the machine and we sure as hell don't own those keys.
Not always. There have been car manufacturers that sold vehicles with features only enabled by a subscription. You may buy a car with heated seats, but the heated seats only work if the manufacturer enables them.
Considering the same law is used to strike a 3 hour GPU documentary over a ~30 second clip, I think it serves to corporate pretty well.
GamersNexus' 3 hour documentary about GPU smuggling (which is way more than a vlog as HN commenters like to portray) is struck down by Bloomberg because they didn't want their 30 second clip, which is squarely fair use BTW, of POTUS speaking to be in that. GamersNexus repealed successfully, but Bloomberg tried to bully them [0].
I don't understand why people think this is something corporations desperately want. It's something they'll abuse if you leave it sitting around for that, but that's just the argument for getting rid of it. How does the ability to be a petulant grouch benefit them? It has negligible monetary value and causes PR damage. It's a footgun that nobody needs and only fools want.
And if they're actually the cartoon villains it would imply, rather than just banal petty autocrats carelessly fooling around with a toy they deserve to have taken away from them, then we should maybe less be saying "it makes sense that they would want it this way" and more be sticking their heads in a guillotine so we can show the children the proper way to resolve a dispute with a tyrant.
In neither case should a law like that remain on the books.
Looks like it's complicated. The video has some theories.
- Bloomberg has a similar investigation which is deeply undercut by GamersNexus video. GN seen the labs, Bloomberg got their access revoked, so theirs is an empty video, and they want the views.
- The video holds no punches back about anyone, and Bloomberg has an NVIDIA sponsored section dedicated to them.
- There's no other source which recorded POTUS' words, and maybe they don't want these words to be widely available, video argues.
- Lastly, they wanted a licensing fee for that 30 seconds to leave their videos alone.
So, when you're a beancounting billionaire corporation, you can have the reasons to go after a bearded guy who manages to do a better job and make you look bad.
That's precisely the "petty autocrats carelessly abusing a footgun" scenario. They've made themselves look bad for negligible benefit while harming innocent people. It's the argument for taking it away from them.
The heated seat is an edge case, but there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car (e.g. replace the breaks with some home-grown solution), as it can put yourself and others in danger, and I see no evil in that being enforced by the government. A more IT-related example might be what radio frequencies can we use - if anyone could spam the whole spectrum, we would lose more than from the "freedom" of being able to do that.
You are permitted to change whatever you like on your car, subject to a roadworthiness inspection by the relevant transit authority.
Cargo van -> Camper van conversions go through this all the time - you add/remove seats, add a lot of weight in the form of beds, water tanks, etc. add/remove windows, put solar panels on the roof... After those changes you have to take it down to the vehicle inspection, and they tell you whether or not your changes have been deemed acceptable to drive on public roads.
> there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car
In at least two european countries that I know of (but probably in all of them) cars need to pass periodic technical inspection to be allowed on the road. Breaks are tested, among other things.
On top of that, you totally can modify your car (even the brakes) provided that you use some certified part that's good enough for your type of car. And you should pass the inspection that tests everything.
I understand that GP point was about home-made brakes (like the software counterpart), but software on a smartphone is not (yet) deadly for others if it doesn't work as expected.
Technical inspections are mandatory across the board in all of the European Union, although the rules (such as the interval between inspections), may differ between countries. The minimum is every two years, some countries do yearly. This is actually governed by a European mandate.
In much of the EU you are also required to request an additional technical inspection if you have made major changes to the car - for example, I had to take mine in when I had a tow hitch installed, and a friend had to take their camper in when they installed an additional seat.
> replace the br[ake]s with some home-grown solution
Funny you mention the brakes, because a friend of mine told me just days ago that he used to change his own brakes consumables (pads) until the new car, which "throws an error" if you replace the part - you have to go to an official service office for the computer configuration.
Now, do not forget that the need for the intervention of third parties lowers the car reliability ("far away", "too expensive", "device too old", "operation failure", "inexperienced operator" etc.).
This should show that your argument has difficult sides. Of course you should be able to act on your critical possessions. It should be within a good framework, but it should be fully, practically possible.
John Deere tractors have been terrible about this for years now. Not just for brakes, effectively any problem with the tractor requires specific software to diagnose and the tractor electronics are designed to keep the tractor immobilized until a Deere technician plugs the right software in and then repairs whatever broke in the first place.
Vanishingly few people want to crash their car due to sub-par breaks. If someone is malicious, the physical access to the car is going to be enough to not stop them and murder is already illegal. So, is this a real issue? If it is, is regulating this the most effective choice for what to regulate to increase safety or are other things more hazardous? Removing freedom and creating mandatory bureaucracy shouldn't be done over imaginary issues.
It's trivially easy to draw the line. If it's to be illegal to make some modification to your car then that law is to be enforced by the government rather than the manufacturer.
> but there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car (e.g. replace the breaks with some home-grown solution), as it can put yourself and others in danger,
That is a nonsensical argument.
"You shouldn't be able to put anyone else in danger" - agreed.
"You shouldn't be able to modify your car" - wtf does that have to do with danger?
"Modifying brakes (not breaks)" is not the same thing as "Putting people in danger". Sometimes we modify them to have better braking than the standard.
What countries actually do is test the end-result, i.e. Does the car conform to the legally mandated required braking performance?
Rather than campaign to stop people from owning property anymore, maybe just enforce the existing laws (which, as far as I know, are enforced already anyway).
This campaign to divide people into an owning class and a servile class is pretty damn repugnant, and "Because someone can be harmed if we allow people to own things" is just the new "But think of the children" nonsense.
I just tried to come up with a feasible example - maybe gas pipe installation would have been a better one?
But even for cars, it's quite clear that a modify-test cycle there is on the order of months/years (also, has a money burden that probably the owner has to pay). But this would 100% fail to scale to IT - like should I go to the government on each commit? Do I get a signature from them for releases?
> I just tried to come up with a feasible example - maybe gas pipe installation would have been a better one?
The problem is any feasible example you come up with are already regulated, for the same reason you came up with it - there's danger to others!
Where I am, gas pipes, even inside your own house, can only be legally installed and maintained by a certified technician. You also have to get an annual clearance certificate done.
Just about everything dangerous is already regulated; further restrictions "just in case" are not warranted.
It should be up to the individual to decide whether they want to modify their car.
Say you put aftermarket brakes on your car and they fail, causing an accident that harms someone else. The person who changed their brakes should be held liable legally, its as simple as that. Owners that choose to change their car and do a piss poor job of it are held accountable for their actions and others considering similar modifications can choose to learn the lesson.
Yes that means people could be harmed in the process, but regulations themselves harm people too. There's no way around the fact that one way or another people may get harmed during their lifetime. In the long run regulations just guarantee that, should the wrong people take power, the regulations and authority that originally allowed regulations will be abused.
I'm actually surprised I haven't seen more push back on government authority given everything Trump is either doing or claiming he will do. The president should be largely an anemic office acting more as a figurehead than anything else. We've given them the power to effectively legislate with no oversight, that why he may be able to do so much harm.
This is the same argument people make between Apple and Android.
Can I use an Android phone without using Google? Yes, of course you can. There are plenty of secure OS's like Graphen, Lineage, Calyx and many others. Do people really care enough to use them? Hardly any, which proves my point.
Same thing here. Most people will just pay the fee to get the seats. Some might just opt out and not get them. Others will shop around and find some legacy cars that are older that have them but don't require a subscription.
At the end of the day? There's ALWAYS a choice. How hard do you want to look to avoid the subscription? Is it really worth your time and effort? Some would say yes, the vast majority really DGAF. People have been lulled into not caring about stuff like personal privacy and having a say in what's being peddled to you.
There's always a choice… unless you want to access your bank account that is. In which case there is no choice but to use the official unrooted android OS.
You can still find banks that have physical buildings for retail customers as well as online portals to login and manage your account. Mobile apps aren't absolutely a must.
Am I the only one that found that to be a reasonable edge case?
The seat heating was apparently shortening the life of the leather seats. Its cheaper to include heated seats in all cars, than it is to maintain 2 different sets of production. The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled.
Likewise, if you manually enabled the seat heaters, then complained that the seats were falling apart quickly, having given you a legal out to get that feature enabled in warranty, would not have to replace your seats for free.
Not to mention, they apparently already ditched the subscription over backlash.
> The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled
I never heard of car-manufacturers periodically replacing seats within warranty because of the wear of the material, regardless of being "more frequently" or not. This sounds like a massive oversight in product-design.
Of all the cases I know, the customer had to bear the cost of such "wear and tear" cases.
That tracks. Dodge seats from the 90s and early 00s were absolutely terrible. I swear half of them came from the factory torn on the outside of the drivers seat just from the delivery driver getting in to drop the truck off at the dealership.
I would want the ability to change that. I actually think I can mess with that on my car.
>enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default?
Big topic for me. My car has a DPF, and appears to have been geared such that despite containing an automatic DPF burn process, the engine never quite reaches the required temperature, so I need to perform manual burns.
I have straight up asked the dealer for a method to enable the auto burn process, manually. And have asked if theres a retune available, to make the gearing just a little bit less efficient, giving me more power and more engine heat.
The issue, pretty much verbatim from their head regional diesel mechanic is that any modifications of that nature would fuck the emissions standards they had to limbo under. So its categorically denied. They also issued me with stern official warnings that anything I do to make the car more reliable may also void my warranty. And the unofficial advice I have received is that the DPF is "f*cked mate" and to "get the petrol hybrid before the government forces it to wear a similar PPF"
The car also very suspiciously moderates the engine output unrelated to gearing/tune. Just sometimes underperforms at random. I believe its computational again, like you say, handicapping it for emissions reasons.
These things are largely optional for me, but I wont mess with them too much until I am out of warranty.
> I would want the ability to change that. I actually think I can mess with that on my car.
Yes, generally you can disable on demand, but Volkswagen now sells the feature as a subscription. So you need to pay to enable. Maybe this is because it reduces the lifespan of the LEDs. Who knows.
> handicapping it for emissions reasons.
Volkswagen sells you another subscription for that now, at least for their electric vehicles. You can buy the option if you want your EV to perform as it's designed.
Emissions is a completely different beast. However their 140HP and 170HP TFSI engines had no different parts rather than the mapping.
Manipulating engines in a way which alters their carbon footprint is a sensitive topic, and while I was positive towards diesel systems, the particulate matter they emit, the fog they cause (see Paris photos, it's eye opening) and German engineering at its finest (i.e. Dieselgate scandal) soured me from diesel's automotive applications, big time, permanently.
> Volkswagen sells you another subscription for that now, at least for their electric vehicles. You can buy the option if you want your EV to perform as it's designed.
You can also buy "for life" subscription (around £600, if I remember the news about it correctly), so you could also say that the stronger engine costs 600 pounds more when you purchase the car. Not too different to buying the cars in the past: more powerful engine adds to the price tag.
Instead, you can sell the cars at increased (nominal, actually) power and remove the lower tier altogether while keeping the cost savings of removing another production line and logistics for the lower powered motor. Moreover you can allow users to have a choice of power from get go (i.e. Reduce to 150KW for more range). It's a couple of variables at most. Will changing the variables too much will wear down storage that faster?
Same is true for the internal combustion engines. Since they already developed the ability to store multiple maps and change the mapping when required. :)
But, where's the value in that, I mean for shareholders, innit?
FWIW, the traditional engineering argument in this case is:
By selling the same hardware with multiple tiers of functionality artificially locked behind increased prices, it becomes profitable to develop and manufacture products that would otherwise not make economic sense. This occurs when there aren't enough potential buyers of the full-featured version at a price that makes the full-featured version on its own profitable, but the sum of all customers at all price/functionality tiers is profitable. i.e. this model results in products that would otherwise not exist.
I have mixed feelings about that argument. The main one being that it's not much of a stretch to go from that to "the full-featured version sold at price X would be profitable, but because most customers are willing do do without the higher tiers of functionality, we can make even more money by selling a reduced-functionality version at price X, and charge a premium for the extra features", and it sure seems like that's what a lot of American businesses do. But I assume at least some of the time, it really is the former and not the latter.
The thing is most people do not want to mess with computers. They are terrified they are going to break them. Frankly they are not wrong. I spent yesterday just trying to get a div tag to flow correctly with all the objects around it, a whole day down the drain. I have a pretty good idea what I am doing. However, for others these things we call computers are inscrutable devices that just 'decide' to do something wrong. We have built this https://xkcd.com/2347/ and expect everyone to be cool with it. Most people most certainly are not, and are willing to give away whatever just to make it easier to use, and not randomly screw up. Apple and Google can take whatever they gave away now because well most people really do not care. The rest of us can pound sand for all they care. We effectively have a duopoly and they are acting exactly in the manor of that.
