I think miniaturizing it to fit into a modern cellphone adds a few complexities that make it pretty different from the heat pipes and vapor chambers that existed in the 70s.
Since the right people are here, can anyone explain to me why its so hard to "root" (in reality, obtain basic filesystem / networking etc. control) with that OS?
People keep repeating this defeatist drivel but it's just not true. It's still up in the air whether you can defeat a law using technical measures, but it is a thoroughly settled matter that you cannot legislate away mathematics.
We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal in the 90s as open source encryption code spread rapidly on the internet. "Exporting" encryption software was illegal in many countries like USA and France but it became impossible to enforce those laws. A technical measure defeated the law.
Encryption is just maths. It is the law being unreasonable here, and it will be the law which will ultimately have to concede defeat. UK is the perfect example here - Online Safety Act's anti-E2EE clauses have been basically declared by Ofcom to be impossible to implement and they are not even trying anymore.
"I can still use GPG" isn't a win condition you seem to think it is. Authoritarian governments will be perfectly happy to let you continue using GPG as long as the remaining 99% of society continues using monitored/censored communication apps.
Conversely, as long as the people they actually want to target (dissidents, journalists, ...) use non-compromised E2EE it's not very useful for NSA/GCHQ etc to harvest info about all the cat videos everyone else is watching.
It won't help you with those specific cases no, but Chat Control would be the perfect tool to monitor and stop the spread of information between regular citizens who are trying to organize against the government, just look at China.
It's not your cat videos they're interested in. When people are protesting against the government it's vitally important that they're able to get information out as quickly as possible, to as many people as possible. If the government can slow that momentum down then opposition fizzles out. Chat Control would do a great job in service of that goal, it's large scale crowd control, not a targeted attack.
No disrespect intended, but "it's still technically possible" doesn't matter. We, as enigneers, tend to think in absolutes (after all, something either works or it doesn't). Politicians are perfectly happy with a law that is only 80% effective - they would argue that sometimes people break laws against murder, but that doesn't mean laws against murder should be thrown on the scrapheap.
Most people obey the law most of the time. Doing a technical end-run around the law (a) leaves you with very few people to talk to (b) makes you stick out like a sore thumb, at which point you're vulnerable to the $5 wrench.
Did you know that porn was quite severely censored in Norway up until the 90's? But suddenly, the censorship stopped. Why? Because of the distributed quality of the internet.
While the Norwegian state may still wish to continue censoring porn in Norway, they deemed the task too difficult and too invasive to continue, so they just dropped it entirely (except of course for certain extreme fringe cases).
I was personally shown clips by the Norwegian Board of Film Classification in the early 2000's showing both grey zone depictions, and clearly illegal depictions of film violence per the law. I am still traumatized from seeing some of that s*t. Legally btw, since they are a state authority tasked to categorize and censor such media, and also educate people with the right degrees. Yet in that meeting, when I asked them how they're handling censorship now, they kind of just threw their hands up in the air and told me directly that "We only give advice on cinema films these days. Look, we can't very well censor the entire internet without also using either extremely invasive or unfair strategies. If you really want some violent or pornographic movie, you're probably gonna get it no matter what we try to do."
So, the morale of this story is, make something ubiquitous enough, or hard enough to censor, and some states might just give up. If you build a truly decentralized system, good luck censoring it. And that was pretty much it for Norway. They had given up on the idea of preventing people from seeing violent or pornographic contents on the internet.
Within political science we speak about effective ways to participate politically. Sometimes that's not screaming slogans outside some government buildings. Sometimes that's simply building resilient and forward secure distributed systems.
Btw. as a side note, the bad guys are still taken. Instead of thought policing entire populations, they're now tending to the guys doing actual harm. The anti encryption bills are just smoke and mirrors to get you to give up essential liberties, so they get more control. It has little or nothing to do with protecting children and you know it.
> It is not defeatist drivel to argue for political action rather than trying to hit everything with a technological hammer.
I'd say it's actually worse than defeatist drivel, since it actively discourages an entirely feasible strategy of making bad laws difficult/impossible to enforce, and instead encourages people to squander their efforts and resources on fighting all-or-nothing political battles in the context of utterly dysfunctional institutions riddled with perverse incentives that no one at all in the modern world seems to be able to overcome.
The "political, not technical" argument is equivalent to telling people concerned about possible flooding that instead of building levees, they should focus all their efforts on trying to drain the ocean.
Right, you need an end-to-end ecosystem. Delivery, ease of use, trustable code and audit, good math, community, financial incentives. Still much more enduring solution than an eternal political battle, IMO.
The developers and the FOSS community generally; F-Droid is a good app store for FOSS, but there's no inherent need for app stores in the first place.
Duplicating the tremendous success of the Linux ecosystem is a worthy goal, but even at the outset, the idea is to reach the 1% of users who want such a solution and are willing to invest thought and effort into it, and let it gradually become viable for incrementally wider adoption. Trying to target the 99% who don't care in the first place wouldn't make much sense.
> it is a thoroughly settled matter that you cannot legislate away mathematics.
I don’t think this protects us. I view the “encryption is maths” position as referring to backdoor keys.
But this time they figured out client-side mandated spyware is a viable way of breaking e2e without contradicting mathematics.
I hate to get dystopian but we can all see where this is going; “Trusted Hardware” is mandated to run your Government ID app and Untrusted Hardware is illegal because it’s only for criminals and terrorists. Your Trusted Device performs client-side content scanning, it’s illegal to install an untrusted app, and all app developers are criminally liable to monitor for Harmful Content on their services.
This is what we are fighting against. They keep trying and they are getting closer to succeeding. And none of this is incompatible with mathematics; it’s a pure rubber-hose attack on the populace.
They do and have done for years now. There’s been a files app since 2017. They’ve had Advanced Data Protection available for iOS backups since 2022. Signal has just been lazy and found maintaining the Android backups to be a pain, so they refused to implement it for iOS.
From the point of view of iOS, yes it can (the person you're replying to is wrong, as explained by the other person who replied to them). But no, the Signal iOS app does not currently have that functionality.
They did support it since they released the Files app, as Signal shows. Nothing changed all these years, yet they're now rolling out backups for iOS too, so the technology is already there.
Current methods of cutting pretty much anything including stone are absurdly more precise than what Incas and Egyptians had. We can cut stuff like diamond lenses down to 10-100nm roughness.
We build car/truck bodies, which are much the same --- the family station wagon when I was growing up had a badge in the doorwell, "Body by Fisher" w/ an image of a carriage, that company having been a carriage-maker which transitioned to car/truck manufacture.
...and we're so damn good at it that we can grind a complex shape to micron precision for the purposes of a shitpost -- which then gets automatically blasted to a million algorithmically selected interested parties for the amusement of all.
I have nothing but respect for the skill and professionalism of the ancients, but I find it extremely distasteful when someone tries to express this by putting down their modern counterparts.
Bay of Pigs wasn't a revolution, it was a failed invasion. The others, however, absolutely were instigated by the CIA.
You can compile similar lists for Iran, Russia, France and India. Reflexively dismissing every coup, much less protest, as the product of foreign involvement without evidence isn't thoughtful.
> Brigade 2506 (Brigada Asalto 2506) was a CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles formed in 1960 to attempt the military overthrow of the Cuban government headed by Fidel Castro. It carried out the abortive Bay of Pigs Invasion landings in Cuba on 17 April 1961.
> _impossible_ for your program to transition into an invalid state at runtime
Not the case for scientific computing/HPC. Often HPC codebases will use numerical schemes which are mathematically proven to 'blow up' (produce infs/nans) under certain conditions even with a perfect implementation - see for instance the CFL condition [1].
The solution to that is typically changing to a numerical scheme more suited for your problem or tweaking the current scheme's parameters (temporal step size, mesh, formula coefficients...). It is not trivial to find what the correct settings will be before starting. Encountering situations like a job which runs fine for 2 days and then suddenly blows up is not particularly rare.
In those situations, the functions that contain a singularity should return an Either monad, and in order to bring the resulting data back into the bloodstream of the program, you have to deal with that potential singularity. Unfortunately, scientific computing seems like it's stuck in the age of the dinosaurs with tooling choices and much of the advancements in type systems of the last 40 years are nowhere to be seen. I always found that curious, given its adjacency to academia.
Why? You're just going to unwrap that monad and promptly crash. It's unrecoverable; it doesn't need to go back into "the bloodstream of the program." No amount of static typing will turn this runtime error into a compile-time error, so it doesn't really matter how you express it with types.
> You're just going to unwrap that monad and promptly crash. It's unrecoverable
You handle the error gracefully. It's not "unrecoverable" in the sense of an incorrect memory read that arises from a logic error in the program. It's an anticipatable behavior in a well-defined system of computations that should be treated as such. Simply crashing is extremely sloppy programming in this case, it's not a formal equivalent to discarding an unusable input.
> No amount of static typing will turn this runtime error into a compile-time error
On the contrary. Anything capable of statically checking dependent types can turn any runtime issue into a compile-time issue. Up to and including requiring proof that a function's domain is respected according to all paths that call it as a facet of the type system, and this domain can be inferred by the operations within the function itself.
> Does such a proof exist in this context? Or are we writing fanfiction about the problem domain now?
"Often HPC codebases will use numerical schemes which are mathematically proven to 'blow up' (produce infs/nans) under certain conditions even with a perfect implementation"
Yes? Function domains are trivially enforceable through the type system when you have dependent types. Even the n-dimensional case of the CFL condition is a simple constraint you can express over a type.
Have you ever actually done any work with dependent types? I'm not sure why you would think something so basic as enforcing a function domain (which isn't the same thing as a problem domain, by the way) would be "fanfiction" otherwise. I highly recommend spending a few months actually working with them, there are plenty of good languages floating around these days.
> The correct behaviour in that context is to terminate the program
At worst it's to leave the thread of execution, which is distinct from crashing, as you asserted above and as my core point revolves around.
> Function domains are trivially enforceable through the type system when you have dependent types.
> It is not trivial to find what the correct settings will be before starting. Encountering situations like a job which runs fine for 2 days and then suddenly blows up is not particularly rare.
Somehow I doubt that the "not trivial" problem of finding correct settings before starting suddenly becomes "trivial" when you throw dependent types at it.
> (which isn't the same thing as a problem domain)
yeah bud i'm aware. I meant what I said. You're supposing that it's trivial to determine what the domain of the function in question is when the original post explicitly said otherwise. This is a falsehood about the problem domain.
> At worst it's to leave the thread of execution
Leave the thread and then do what? The stated solution to the problem, according to the original post, is to restart the program with new, manually-tweaked parameters, or to straight-up modify the code:
> The solution to that is typically changing to a numerical scheme more suited for your problem or tweaking the current scheme's parameters
It took the Roman Republic less than 30 years to go from the Gracchi brothers incident (133BC) to the first consulship of Gaius Marius in 107BC, a divisive populist who was elected consul an unprecedented 7 times. From then on, we have the Social war in 91BC (effectively a civil war in Italy), Sulla's civil wars (against Marius) culminating in his dictatorship in 82BC, and ultimately Julius Caesar's civil wars culminating in his dictatorship in 49BC, which marks the end of the Republic.
An incident like the Gracchi brothers' populist power grab, which led to the first significant outbreak of political violence in Rome in centuries, was not immediately transformative but it did sow the seeds of conflict.
I personally think Trump, and especially Jan 6th, is the Gracchi brothers moment of the USA.
I think this tracks pretty well. Even if our Democracy survives this regime the future looks so much more bleak than it did a year ago. Much of the current damage will last for many years and too many norms have been broken.
All of the powerful psycopaths have seen what one aspiring dictator can get away with. Trump will keep pushing over norms and other pillars of society and the next one will be starting much further along.
Answer is yes. But 'safety' is not the reason for the recent Google move.
It is a move taken in lockstep with EU's Chat Control and UK's Online Safety Act, and the proposed Kids Online Safety Act in the US. The common objective of all is total control of digital lives of citizens and allowing the government to snoop on all internet communication while not disabling end to end encryption. They need end to end encryption to lock out external adversaries (Russia China etc) but they need to see the contents of encrypted messages to monitor internal adversaries.
First step is blocking you from running any apps not allowed by Google/Apple.
Second step is putting in the systems to snoop on end to end encrypted communication apps on the endpoints, enabling intel agencies to detect thoughtcrime without exposing everyone's chats to Chinese/Russian intelligence. This will most likely be done by OSes recognizing the apps and extracting private keys on demand.
Last step is locking the bootloaders so you cannot have a phone which lacks the 'features' added in the second step.
We should be asking the opposite question - is it possible to give control over our computers to a handful of corporations and government, and remain safe from tyranny. Try starting a new political party, or even climbing up the ranks of an existing one, when the establishment knows every wrong opinion or indiscretion, of you and your associates, from when you were a toddler onward.
I wish Stallman wasn't so silent. For someone who cares so much about software freedom he hasn't said a damn thing about any of what's been going on these past few months with KOSA, the Online Safety Act, etc.
Last I heard he was battling cancer. We've got plenty of new blood fuelling the public discourse. He's done enough. I'm inclined to give him a break and instead put the pressure on the rest of the community to get themselves organised and do something about it.
Do we need people to stand up and push back? Yes. Stallman? I would rather not. The man doesn’t hold influence outside of some of our community, and is toxic because of things he has said and done to the outside world. Just look up his definition of “child” and read that in context to his statement about sex and he is discredited to most people
I hadn't heard of anything he had said on the subject before your comment, so I did a quick search. I don't know if the following is about but one of many problematic views on the subject, or if after this change of mind his views on sex are all fine, but worth knowing that at least on one issue his opinion has improved:
> "Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
> "Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why."
If you look up his anti-glossary, the definition of child he uses is:
> Children: Humans up to age 12 or 13 are children. After that, they become adolescents or teenagers. Let's resist the practice of infantilizing teenagers, by not calling them "children".
Older than 13 is not a child. Man is using that statement. Even if you want to argue that he didn’t really mean it like that, which I disagree with, opponents would have a field day with that to discredit him
Oof embarrassed I didn't proofread that, but I was saying "That is what the man is saying in that statement".
Stallman is like Humpty Dumpty (""When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less") and that masks some of his terrible beliefs. Also in his clarification (I refuse to call that an apology) why aren't we questioning why he needed to be told that sex with minors is bad? Why did he lack the skills to look up anything about consent and child development before saying that he though sex with >= 13 year olds was ok?
Ah, damn. Thanks for the extra info. I was really hoping I'd be able to leave this comment thread forgetting that he had formerly had problematic views!
(To be clear, I mean I wish he didn't have problematic views any more, not that I wish you hadn't informed me.)
Speaking of typos, I think you mean <=13 not >=? As in, referring to the fact that he previously thought it was ok with kids of any age (vs having now changed his mind about younger children but still thinking it's OK for 13+)? Unless I'm either misunderstanding the situation with him, or am making my own mistake about sentence structure or > vs < logic in some way
Edit: on the subject of why would someone need to be told that it's bad, on that point I actually don't agree with you. Because while I don't think there's an excuse for needing to be told that raping someone is bad, I have known several people who had sexual experiences when they were children, that they considered to be consensual at the time and that as adults they looked back on as not being negative, and therefore their opinion was that if a child "consents"/wants it to happen, then it's morally OK.
Of those people who I've personally discussed it with, 100% have changed their opinion after learning how it can have terrible long term effects on some people regardless of their having believed they wanted it to happen at the time.
But I don't think it's necessarily intuitive that if a 12 year old believes they want to have sex with an adult it must be wrong, especially not if, like these people I've known, they themselves had that experience and were lucky enough not to suffer in the long term (at least I hope they're all still not suffering).
It's the fact that we know from looking at the big picture that it's likely to cause problems in a child's development that teaches us that actually we shouldn't consider a child saying "I want this" to count as consent. If anything it's unintuitive, since as a rule of thumb we should think that people, including children, should have agency over their own bodies - and we make an exception in this case, because enough data has shown that children consenting to sex does, far too often, lead to mental health problems, if not immediately then later in life.
(I think/hope I've been clear enough that nobody would read my comment and get the impression that I'm condoning adults having sex with children. If any of my wording does give that impression it's a mistake. Do not have sex with children, ever.)
I meant >= he currently seems to think that sex with someone 14 is morally acceptable. He now believes that sex with a 12 year old isn’t. He doesn’t understand that there is a reason we say minors cannot legally consent to major things like contracts and sex.
how then? just a rough idea would be nice. because don't see it. as much as it pains me, but i have to admit that i find the article convincing. i see these people around me every day. they have no experience with technology. they didn't even go to school long enough. yet they all have a smartphone with no idea what it is capable of, or what the consequences are. and they are used to the government taking care to protect them.
In the same way Windows and Mac computers can sidel...,ehm sorry, install software: we don't. Stores also sell guns, knives, chainsaws, highly addictive opiates, and 4 ton death machines capable of travelling at 100 mph. We do not restrict ordinary kitchen knives which have been used in terrorist incidents killing dozens, but draw the line at grandma sending $10k to a Nigerian prince?
Even if we are restricting installing apps, there are less heavy handed measures. By enabling .apk installs only via developer options/command line/adb in a way that the average user will never be able to figure out, for example. Sprinkle a few warning pages with scary red lettering and it's fine. Grandma will never figure out how to run adb commands on Gentoo.
There is a tradeoff between liberty and security. You can never guarantee security; the Google rules in the article won't ensure it either, as Google has been shown to simply not care about scam/malware apps published onto its own app store anyway. The whole security angle is a misdirection. The whole move is about control.
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Stores also sell guns, knives, chainsaws, highly addictive opiates, and 4 ton death machines capable of travelling at 100 mph
they don't sell them to people who don't know how to use them. with the exception of knives. but unlike technology, people do know how to use knives without getting hurt. they can easily see that chainsaws are dangerous. they need a drivers license for a car, and they can't get opiates without a prescription.
none of these controls are available for apps, and yet, because they don't know how to use phones/apps safely, because they can't tell the difference between an app that is save, and one that isn't, they risk their livelihood because they fell for a scam. they are not going to install those apps by themselves. they will ask the techshop around the corner to do it for them, and the scammers give the techguy a cut for installing that app that steals your money.
the problem is of course lack of education, but education doesn't have a quick fix. in the meantime many peoples lives will be ruined.
I am pretty sure, in many parts of the United States, an 18 year old can purchase a gun at a store, even if it is the first gun they have ever touched.
they still know that guns are dangerous. and they can tell the difference between a toy gun and a real one. they can't however tell the difference between an app that can be trusted, and an app that will steal their money.
> 4 ton death machines capable of travelling at 100 mph
By contrast, they think the 4 ton death machines are a really cool way to impress girls and that's what they're used for. Similar in Europe, by the way.
Not that there's any shortage of people who think guns are a cool way to impress girls.
Ok, so ignore your goveenment paranoia. Sure theyre out to get you.
But ask yourself, would business do this anyway? The answer is yes. Google needs a growth target and modeling app store lockin and fees is there.
Youre free to live in paranoid government land, but its an unnecessary abstraction. Its actually the EU and US rulings against their monopoly thats driving it.
This is just what you'd expect any government that is either competent or greedy to be doing, given the technologies at play.
Calling it "thought crime" is, of course, a bit glib. But things like "we want to monitor the communications of every pro Palestinian university student so we can take proactive disruptive actions" are very real and not so hidden desires and sentiments of modern Western governments.
Depends on how they implement it and how they seed political support. Id they sell it as "save the kids" and give token authority to the same kind of DCMA region lockin, itll become a government backed utility.
Monopoly enforcement only occurs when theres no natural monopoly.
It sounds like the classic selective enforcement quid-pro-quo mafia state bullshit. The government doesn't really care about antitrust compared to control and snooping, it just makes a convenient excuse to arbitrarily punish for compliance. Just look at the "payment for services rendered" given with unenforced broadband expansion funding that wound up in pockets and every ISP having a room 641A.
> They explicitly don't support installing any software not provided by their "app stores".
Nonsense. You can and run install whatever you want. Tons of closed source commercial software available for Linux like Matlab come as a .tar file which you extract and run.
In Fedora, we don't "support" third-party packages or installation of software because we can't do much about it if something is wrong. You should go to the provider of the software for help.
But we certainly support your _ability_ to install and run whatever you want. It's your computer, and it's your OS.
Regardless of the party line, in practice there's no big distinction between not caring if it works or not and not allowing it. The difference only matters for highly technical people with lots of time on their hands. For everyone else, if it's not a paved road it's not a road they can travel on at all, and so in practice Linux historically did not "support" third party software in any meaningful way.
And although I was making that argument to Fedora decades ago, it's only recently that this point has been accepted with official support by Red Hat for stuff like Flatpak. Of course other distros developed their own thing as always so it's still not really ideal. But at least the principle was now accepted that third party apps should have a properly supported way to thrive. Far too late, but it's done.
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