Who's winning here, exactly?

This year we made good progress. You know, Linux gaming becoming better, Reddit fucking up, Metaverse failing etc. But on the other hand Big Tech has or are planning to make some moves. Such as, Google’s Web Enviroment Integrity API (EDIT: they backed off), UK’s encryption bill, etc.

So what do you think of the future? I’m currently optimistic. I think the best recent event was Reddit fucking up. Obviously one of the biggest information sources going down that path isn’t something to celebrate. But it was bound to happen. I believe decentralized social networks becoming more popular is what Aaron Swartz would have wanted if he saw how Reddit was being managed.

mojo,

Privacy is unironcally getting better, it’s only bad because of the vulnerability in our current web design we’re hardening against. Https and hello encrypt go a long way to hide our traffic, definitely not anonymous though. E2ee has never been as prevalent as it is now.

Corporations spying are obviously bad, but if it’s possible, then it’s inevitable that it was going to happen regardless and it’s a good thing we’re hardening our protocols against what was fundamentally a design flaw that would inevitably be exploited eventually.

Decentralization has never been nearly as popular or robust as it is now. I spend 90% of my social media on decentralized apps, which I could never say that before. My phone is as private as it has ever been with GrapheneOS.

Laws are getting more robust for privacy, some of the time anyways. Fascist laws in the name of “think of the children!” are trying to break encryption and privacy and are constantly a battlefield we need to be extremely vigilant over.

danhab99,
@danhab99@programming.dev avatar

Devil’s advocate:

Have you guys ever considered that the information these companies are making off of you just isn’t that valuable? Your phone number, email, house address, skin color, sexuality, height, gender, fashion, job, and friends are not secrets. Anybody can know these things about you. We’re on the Internet and web-based companies want to interact with people, if you don’t like that go to a different website. But you’ll never have a privacy agnostic internet experience because PEOPLE KNOW THINGS ABOUT EACHOTHER. That’s one of the things about being people.

I remember reading somewhere (years ago, too lazy to find a source) that Google might take in $30/year off of a single Google user. That’s absolutely pennies, that’s not worth anything. Google only works because of their scale, and I bet a tiny drop in user activity of like 10% would destroy them. Most tech companies are just trying to make up more things to base promises on for their investors, those companies have no real value, they’re all basically theoretical. So who cares? Just use them while you need it and if they fizzle out then all the data they had on us is worthless if not gone and the opensource community will step up like it always does.

glasgitarrewelt,

The devil’s advocate forgets why the data has a value in the first place. It is used to control and manipulate to the point where elections can be won by the party that has a better understanding of advertisement and the value of the data of their costumers/voters. Thinking you are immune to manipulation because you know you are manipulated sadly doesn’t work. Don’t use free services if you know they act in bad faith.

random65837,

Except Reddit didn’t fuck up, they pissed off a very vocal minority of people who couldn’t give a shit less about privacy, the widespread pushback was about not using 3rd party apps, and not wanting to pay, it wasn’t about privacy. It’s never about privacy, and thats why we’re in the spot we’re in. We are less than the 1%. Most not only don’t grasp privacy, but even when it’s explained or shown to them what’s happening, the tradeoff for “free” and convenience is well worth it to them.

I’m jealous of your optimism, but we had ONE mainstream breakthrough thanks to Cambridge Analytica that very briefly made the whole planet aware of what was going on regardless of the type of person they were, tech, non tech, teen, etc. Look how that ended, people don’t care. Sadly, that being that way and us being the extreme minority may actually be in our favor though.

pinkdrunkenelephants,

Then those of us who at least try to care need to break away from the ones that don’t and go form a separate society. We can’t allow sheep and rabble to continue to hold unchecked power over the rest of us through their sheer numbers.

And we have to be willing to accept they’ll never change and should not have the power they do.

We have to be willing to move on from them.

Secret300,

People are retarded and like being controlled. It’s a bleak future

diaphanous,

I disagree. People just have bigger things to worry about, like their livelihoods. If you don’t know where your next paycheck comes from, you don’t have the capacity to care about such abstract issues like the current privacy struggles. I think this is why we need better social policies first and foremost

pinkdrunkenelephants, (edited )

They do, they just willingly choose not to or they support the oligarchs. We have bills to pay yet we’re willing to take the time to understand how things work, so they have no excuse

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

Zerush, Stantana and Xavier said the things I wanted to say in this thread. But they missed the biggest point – localised data storage, combined with learning data archival and compression.

Avoiding non-selfhosted or unencrypted cloud storage is not just the most ultimate form of metadata reduction, but also the biggest guarantee of preserving your data. Of course, minimised (or no) dependence on Big Tech SaaS is a progression after that in terms of metadata reduction.

Remember, freedom is the most important aspect, then privacy, then anonymity and below all that is security. Why? Because security is always a moving goalpost, the others are not. Freedom, privacy and anonymity will continue to mean the same throughout time.

Zerush,
@Zerush@lemmy.ml avatar

I2P

Xavier,

The future I want to foresee is one where everybody runs and keeps their data locally (or their dedicated VPS):

  • where everyone has access to at least 10Gbps symmetric fiber optic connection to the internet at their home/apartment at affordable price (doesn’t have to be unlimited, but pricing per TB of bandwith usage needs to be less than USD $1 as it is the actual cost of operating & peerage)
  • whereas net neutrality is a prerequisite to any corporation/organization/government/municipality getting network backbone peerage with other network operators
  • whereas registering to a website or service actually creates a local secure database/bucket/pod where that website/service organizes/sort/manipulates our data and stores all generated modified data/metadata within our local personnal server, every time we interact with that same external website/service it gets access to the database/bucket previously created. Look into the Solid protocol specification to get a better idea (it doesn’t have to be that specific protocol)
  • whereas FIDO2 or WebAuth or their successor is widely accepted for passkey implementation or just multifactor authentication
  • whereas all communications are direct peer-to-peer without transiting third party servers (as in not managed by either communicating party)

Moreover, even better would be to teach everyone from elementary school various concepts (from simpler to more complex gradually) of science, programming, critical thinking and empathy.

If I may dare to push even further, with technology (secure authentication, work from home familiarity, collaborative softwares, digital signing, distributed version control), give every citizen (from the age of 12 or earlier; because one has to start learning early to make mistakes, understand and form good habits) the ability to vote/abstain on every proposition, motion, new/modified law and decision regarding their own country. Have a publicly accessible historical account of every vote by everyone (excluding secret ballots obviously). Most importantly, every year end, 4 years, 10 years, 25 years, 60 years have a collective review/retrospective of past motions/decisions that were implemented and let everyone vote on if those were overall beneficial or harmful for the country/state/municipality. Empower those who tend to regularly vote and tend to historically vote beneficially (at least 70% of their votes after they reached 25 years old) for the country/state/municipality to become a local representative.

I know it’s getting wordy and perhaps a bit complicated but keep up with me. Give accredited/qualified individual in very specific fields the retractable/overridable power to have their votes on certain very specific motion/law/decision be inherited by active delegation by any other citizens up to a limit of ~290 (Bernard–Killworth number) per qualified inviduals. For example, a citizen could separetely delegate his/her votes:

  • relating to healthcare to their own family doctor if they like/respect their judgment or even a familly member who is licensed for medical practice, it doesn’t matter who as long as they are qualified for the subject matter
  • relating to renovating a specific bridge to their neighbor who is a general contractor or their nephew who is a civil engineer
  • relating to military procurement to their veteran uncle still with a sharp mind and keenly informed with world event or even their weekly indoor hockey teammate who is a unstoppable adventurer exploring every part if the world but also a office worker and a reservist

All while always preserving the option to change their vote anytime for any reason; by delegating to someone else for specific issue/concerns or voting on their own (always takes priority over delegation).

Well… I am being too hopeful and probably pushed things far beyond what is realistic, but it is nice to make thought experiments on what may be possible with technology.

AtmaJnana, (edited )

I can’t believe I’m seeing someone mention Solid in the wild on Lemmy. That’s awesome. It’s an idea that really could change the world. And I hope it really does.

Smokeydope,
@Smokeydope@lemmy.world avatar

No way to predict the future but I have some hopes that people will be pushed to find decentralized open alternatives as companies squeeze harder and harder. It ultimately comes down to just how much the average person is willing to take.

Some people have philosophies and limits to just how how much they take from corporate overlords treating them as cattle, some just want their convinent entertainment/escapism and will tolerate just about anything. We will see just how many people still have standards and how many will continue to suck corporate cock for sweet sweet convinence until the end of time. It’s also time for the tech nerds to scream to the heavens. A big issue with decentralized social services is that nobody knows about them. Those of us in the know need to do our part to shill and shill and shill. Everyone needs to know about searxng, peertube, Lemmy, the fediverse, public Access Unix servers, the Gemini protocol, the lot. The average person NEEDS to know that there are community run free services that they can turn to in the face of corpos squeezing harder and harder to take your money and reduce your rights.

In the worst case scenario and google fucks the whole internet, we can start again.

Huge advances in radio communication technology and cryptographic blockchains allow the ideas of a mesh based decentralized internet to be really possible.

Imagine a world where everyone has their own slice of the internet in the form of a mesh router that also host their personal homepage, and everyone has a continually updated copy of the whole internet locally. All built on open technology and protocols. The ISPs cut out. Once and done payment for the router box. A truly free internet unshackled from companies.

01189998819991197253,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

Google didn’t back off. They’re going forward with it, but in smaller pieces. Their first piece is going after streamed and stored media, instead of the web as a whole.

How do you control a population? You take away their rights, one little piece at a time, so they don’t notice the change. Same concept as how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

This time next year, the internet will be unrecognizable and massively corporate (more so than it is now), unless we, the internet population, fight back and win.

notenoughbutter,

we will lose until big tech gets broken

money begets money is the cancer of the world

Outtatime,
@Outtatime@sh.itjust.works avatar

The future? Integrating AI in a way that spies on us even more than we’ve ever imagined.

Damaskox,
@Damaskox@lemmy.world avatar

I do hope you are wrong on that 😅

WashedOver,
@WashedOver@lemmy.ca avatar

I think the TV series Upload is nailing a lot of the future we will all be in store for and how everything will be pay as we go and for those that can’t pay, the fee free life is going to be pretty limited and full of ads for the little we can do.

ExLisper,

On a Operating system/free software level we’re doing fine. Not great (still no true open source phone OS, Firefox has like 3% market share, lots of closed/unfixable hardware) but you can work and have fun using OSS and it’s not going anywhere. On a global economy level we’re as fucked as always. Big tech isn’t going anywhere and 99% of people will choose convenience over ethics every single time. We’re a minority here and always will be.

melooone,

Aren’t custom ROM’s open source? It would be nice if you could buy a phone from big brands with it preinstalled already. That would make it so much more accesible.

ExLisper,

Even custom ROMs depend heavily on googles services. If you disable all of it you’re loosing some basic features, some apps won’t work and you have problems installing new apps. There are solutions but in the end you’re relaying in googles closes source services.

melooone,

I know that many people still rely on Google’s services, but speaking from my own experience, it’s not hard to ditch them entirely.

I installed LineageOS 2 months ago, and was only missing my banking app, which I installed using the Aurora store and it works without any issues. For everything else I found alternatives which are, admittedly not as good/users friendly as Google’s. But I wouldn’t say there’s no true FOSS phone OS.

random65837,

Most of the phone OSs are FOSS, the complaint there is the blobs for the drivers, which is nearly impossible to get around.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

The blobs are a similar issue on traditional computers as well. This is something we are far from resolving until OpenISA like RISC-V become practically usable and purchasable for commoners.

Scolding7300,

For example, getting a ride through Lyft is now impossible without GPS, their app won’t start. Knly option is Uber through a website.

You also don’t get notifications for some apps because of that. So I had to make some sacrifices to not have GPS installed

ExLisper,

There are also normal taxis. I never had to use uber in my life.

Scolding7300,

Might be better to just use taxis if their price is reasonable

ExLisper,

So aurora is OS but it’s pulling apps from play store. Each time you update your apps the updates will come from google. Unless you will manually download apk files from the web… It works for now but aurora already had issues accessing play store and it may stop working one day.

I have an app for public EV chargers that requires google device registration to work. It’s the best network around so sometimes I have to use it. I have device registration disabled normally but that’s another example where google services are needed for crucial functionality.

And I’ve recently installed another app that would not let me authenticate on LOS. Google is doing this on purpose and more and more apps will not work on custom ROMs.

And we are really far away from creating mobile app ecosystem that’s not relaying on google. You can install mobian or something but currently absolutely no one supports it. I need android to use my bike GPS, my car charger, connect to my car, access my bank and even to use my climbing wall. None of this has native mobile Linux client. It will take decades before companies start supporting Linux on mobile the way they support it on desktop.

melooone,

Yes, Aurora is not the ideal solution and Google might be cracking down on it soon. But as long as it works I don’t really mind it going through Google, at least I don’t need an account for it.

And sadly many Apps are just made with Google in mind because it’s so popular, but my hope is that in the future more and more Apps will have at least a Google free option.

Mobian sounds cool, but doesn’t seem so promising to me as well. I agree that custom ROM’s are not in a good spot right now, but I think it’s gonna get better in the future.

JubilantJaguar,

Surely the objective is not to get companies to “support” yet another platform, it is to use a single platform that is open at the level of protocols and file types.

And surely that platform is already here and is called the Web.

ExLisper,

Web is a shitty platform. Since it started gaining in popularity as the way to do apps and not just deliver HTML it has been constant nightmare when it comes to privacy and security. It still is. On top of that your putting another sandbox on top of everything which doesn’t make much sense on mobile and is bad for performance. It makes sense for some multi platform apps but web apps can’t even access the file system in a normal way. Giving browsers a way to do this will be another security nightmare. Same with Bluetooth. Basically with web you have two choices: keep it all sandboxed limiting functionality while struggling with performance the way electron does or open it app and let random scripts execute with full access to your user space. Neither is a good option for a platform. You can reuse tools like js, CSS and HTML in some new platform but web will not make it’s way to desktops and mobiles.

JubilantJaguar,

This strikes me as a best-vs-better situation. What is your solution to this problem that is actually plausible in the real-world this century?

ExLisper,

Simple, we just have to force google to allow manufacturers to offer degoogled android on their phones which is what EU is doing: theguardian.com/…/eu-fine-google-android-anti-com…

“Google is also ordered to stop blocking manufacturers from using so-called forked or modified versions of Android, such as Amazon’s Fire OS, if they want to use Google services on their other devices.”

Next they have to force google to allow alternative app stores preinstalled on devices and give them the same permissions play store has. With this you will be able to see truly open android actually available in stores. Companies like Mozilla (more probably some consortium like Mozilla/duckduckgo/Sony/LG/whatever) will be able to establish alternative app store that will actually compete with play store and offer same apps. We where close to this years ago buy google offered discounts to phone manufacturers that did not include other stores, made the system depend on their services and then punished companies that tried to compete by locking them out of those services. If EU manages to revert it and open up the platform we will have viable alternative that’s way better than the web. And it can happen real soon. That’s our best option at the moment.

JubilantJaguar,

This does indeed sound like the best approach. We’re not there yet and EU citizens need to push for this or it might not happen.

Mio,

It is extreme hard to find a phone with Lineage OS preinstalled in the stores. Very hard to install it by my self, we can’t assume everybody can do this.

adam_b,

Convenience over ethics that’s one way to put it…

I have noticed that the people I preach to about privacy, or at least try, they’re like : yeah, we know we being spied on, but it is how it is…

And I’m like: No, it’s just a matter of what tools you use…

Them : such as ?

Me : you can use Signal instead of WhatsApp, as a start

Them : in a mocking and condescending manner and that doesn’t spy on you ?

Me : proceeds to explain what Foss means, and the war that’s going on to harvest user data for the next psychological war and creating a dystopia , the war they’re totally sleeping on

ExLisper,

By ethics I don’t mean using signal over spying WhatsApp. I mean local shop instead of employee exploiting amazon or mastodon over right wing extremist supporting Twitter. People do understand what amazon and twitter do but not using them is just to much effort for them. Even if it’s not that much effort at all…

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

AOSP is fully open source (LineageOS fork as well), and is not compromised or license/usage restricted by some developer/maintainer’s personal whims or crybully behaviour.

ExLisper,

As I explained in other post, AOSP may be open sourced but it still depends on android services owned by google. I have degoogled android and some apps don’t work and other apps require device registration. And of course most apps are still only in play store. We’re not that far for properly open platform and hopefully EU will get as there but we’re not there just yet.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

You can get by without Google services, it is a bit inconvenient though, but you gain far more autonomy and independence, and are able to do things IRL without being a slave to their services. The best compromise IMHO is having that shitty $100 Googled (without account) Android for apps that need it and Safetynet DRM, that you never carry with you (Michael Bazzell recommends the same), while you have your degoogled/deBigTech’d phone with you as your sole primary phone. The only problem can be GMaps but OSM is equally or even better than GMaps in most instances except for the traffic nav feature.

ExLisper,

That’s exactly what I’m doing. One degoogled phone to carry with me and googled one for android auto and stuff. But that’s exactly the issue, you don’t have to do it with Linux.

Scary_le_Poo,
@Scary_le_Poo@beehaw.org avatar

Windows 12 is not going subscription. This was a bad take by a worse source (who apologized).

Stop spreading this shit!

Quintus,
@Quintus@lemmy.ml avatar

Oops. Sorry mate. I’ll edit that out now.

1984,
@1984@lemmy.today avatar

They want to and it’s coming in the future.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

We are far from it, as enticing it sounds from Microsoft’s perspective. Microsoft will lose quite a bit (easily 20-50%) of marketshare the moment they go that way, from readymade offshelf machines’ preinstalls. The reason is simple – people no longer use computers, and do 95% of the computer stuff on their smartphones. And nobody will continue to pay for subscriptions for a computer that collects dust, unlike Netflix or Disney+ where people atleast use them twice a week actively. (And even streaming services becoming expensive is decreasing subscriptions and increasing piracy now.)

TheDarkKnight,

Currently it certainly feels like OS is kicking the crap out of big tech in the AI space. Tech might have the money, but they don’t have enough brains to win the intelligence battle against the collective weight of nerds worldwide lol.

ganymede,

Could you give some examples for us please?

TheDarkKnight,

TBH your best bet to check out what is trending on Github everyday for a little bit, it’s roughly 90% OS AI projects of varying states of maturity. One of the more refined ones is taking the form in phind.com, which is a pretty great programming site, supposedly beating GPT-4’s capabilities!

ganymede, (edited )

Thanks, do you know if/where we can download the full phind source including the full models, training data etc? To run 100% offline?

edit: for anyone reading this thread, YOU CAN’T. it’s not currently opensource. and afaik there is no concrete timeline for it to be opened, other than sometime “down the road”.

to be clear, i definitely agree we have the creative nerd factor the corporations lack, but unfortunately there’s been a bit of trading on ‘open’ while still being very closed in the “AI” world, really hope this doesn’t turn out to be another example of that.

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