> I think it's simplistic to say "there aren't enough people on board because of poverty".
I think that is a part of it, for sure. But even in first world countries like America you see lots of kids with inadequate nutrition, no access to modern education, and no cultural inculcation. And of course, that sort of pretends IQs themselves don't fall along a normal distribution and that there aren't gender and racial issues discouraging a large class of people from pursuing an education in this field.
Even if these issues were addressed socially, I think economic barriers are hard to ignore.
> Also, I'll mention that we should hope some version of your "GNU" future happens, at least where communications over the internet is concerned, as "proprietary" and "encryption" don't really work together if you ever want to trust it.
While this future would be advantageous for me, I am not sure I am onboard with everyone being responsible for their own infrastructure. Not only is it quite wasteful in terms of physical resources (and very sub optimal on energy consumed), but it requires that every individual community have several experts with a high degree of skill (for reasons previously discussed of which I see no actual rebuttals)
> To achieve this, just like how "standard parts" are far more common than proprietary parts in plumbing, having an free and open body of software to draw on makes the equivalent job in software far easier, too. I suspect this will be true with the internet and without.
This is not an impossible future, but people have talked about it over and over, and every time a new language or paradigm comes out that is supposedly the "key" to unlocking truly modular and reusable software. Heck, even Brad Cox thought he was doing it with Objective-C and look at how much code is duplicated between iPhone apps.
> Not sure I am understanding you, but are you implying that it'd be okay for Microsoft to upload all your keystrokes and all your data on your laptop(without letting you know about it) on their servers and show you ads based on them as "long as they do not betray said trust or suffer a security breach" ?
This is a false equivalence. This is not what Google did, nor is it even on the same order of conceptual magnitude as what Google was accused of doing.
> The funny thing is that they're not even obligated to tell you if someone who wasn't supposed to look at your data did so.
We are in agreement that this is wrong.
> It's likely that you wouldn't even know if Schmidt or Nadella read your email this morning and traded stocks based on the information in it and you'd have no legal claims.
I suspect given the current political climate in America and the degree of difficulty Google is having with retention, this is not the case.
The problem with the song and dance of a principled company is that you tend to piss off employees that signed up based on that. And inevitably, that kind of activity will be exposed to employees at some point.
> Half the complexity in the world is because someone decided to re-write unix, "only different" (meaning, poorly). The "GNU" vision shares thoughts with the unix philosophy of do something, do it well. One shouldn't needlessly rewrite and re-create in the hopes that you'll get lucky and pull a zuckerberg before the next crash. Instead, invest in well-done, simple technology. As you said, many talented individuals are already working to this end.
I'm sorry, but the problem is not the talented individuals or their efforts. Its that fundamentally new and different ways of computing and approaching computing problems arise as technology continues to progress.
We can sit here and grouchily state that reimplementing UNIX is the problem, but even within the ebb and flow of Linux we see substantial change and reformation over the arc of 5 years. And that's ignoring the actual GUI toolkits which have been in a constant state of flux and only partial levels of functionality.
These are challenges that the community has been happy to dismiss even as they create increasingly obvious and increasingly difficult barriers to entry in the community. They do so because they do not inherently feel the problem as acutely, they're the beneficiaries of education and opportunity (or more succinctly, privilege) that they are happy to dismiss as something that anyone could have. It is not so, but try telling them that.
It is Google's responsibility to be a positive actor in the Internet ecosystem on behalf of end-consumers. If not because it is the "right" thing to do and also essential to the long term vision and success of the company.
Let me be expository on this for a moment, please.
Right now there are three competing visions for the future of the internet:
1. The GNU vision: the internet becomes decentralized and every individual has the tools to replicate and manage small, individual infrastructural tasks.
2. The Google/Microsoft vision, where a series of non-government economic entities create centralized and competing infrastructure while being supervised by governments in the jurisdictions they operate in.
3. The Centrist vision where the internet is essentially a public utility and operated by a quasi-governmental agency or a series of joint governmental agencies.
Currently our Internet is somewhere between 2 and 3, with a lot of talented individuals trying to write software and doing research to make #1 more feasible.
But #1 is inherently never going to work. Moore's law should tip us off, if not the current state of affairs in the world. As software and computing get better, its rate of improvement (or just change, take your pick) increases. This means that it's progressively harder to stay abreast of security, devops, and software products. With the best of intentions but a quintessentially first-world outlook, #1 simply creates a series of digital under-classes and rewards the people with the huge time investment and economic support structure implied by people who are currently good at computers.
#3 could work, but it assumes that Governments ultimately start to shape up and actually reflect the collective will of their population (as contradictory as that can be). It's possible, but I'm a sceptical.
#2 is the closest to working, providing a tension between government and corporation that resembles the tensions present in the American constitution. What's more, economic and technical concerns reward this approach. It's cheaper to centralize computer infrastructure and when done correctly it's a huge cost and materials savings. Competition between said environments also works to keep Corporations focused on the people abandoned by approach #1, keeping their products approachable and with low overhead for starting up.
But if Google is seen to constantly violate their user trust and not act as a sufficiently strong user advocate, eventually the populace will demand scenario #3 be enacted (or something with so much governmental input that it is indistinguishable from #3) and we'll be in a terrible situation.
The biggest benefit to the current system is that Google, Microsoft, and even Baidu all have so much to lose. They need to be receptive to government arguments while all competing with each other.
So yes. Google needs to be a white knight in shining armour because they benefit from user trust in a big way. The benefit in the short term with better engagement and margins. They benefit in the long term with superior positioning and longevity for their corporate rights.
It's pretty outrageous you'd accuse me of this given that I'm responding to literal, textbook FUD with derision (the preferred mechanism for said things).
E.g., claiming that a google login is required is strictly false and has never been true. Claiming that Linux is not a realistic option when Linus Torvalds himself has a series of trivially searchable articles about why he wants to use a Chromebook Pixel as a dev machine.
Meanwhile, there is a publicly acknowledged and jointly-funded anti-Google ad campaign that's been running for several years. So we factually know that the counter-case (i.e., that there is a very high probability people are paid to write anti-google sentiments here) is actually the one receiving funding.
But again, why inject facts into marvellous diatribes.
I'm not sure if I care about people's surprise as much as I care about the inoffensiveness of it. People are and will continue to be surprised by technology. It's an inevitable consequence of technological acceleration.
Lots of companies have lots of data about me that is sensitive. So long as they do not betray said trust or suffer a security breach then I'm content with that state of affairs.
> A Google sign in is needed even to login and the only native apps are Google's own. How is this different or better than Palladium?
In a technical sense, it's very different from Palladium. Given the machine is sold as a device to better connect to Google's services and you can in fact get things done without a Google sign on, it seems qualitatively different as well.
But why inject fact into a marvellous diatribe?
> They also include the WideVine DRM that they acquired and use for Netflix which is not compatible with desktop Linux which is still forced to use a Silverlight port.
This is Netflix's decision and stipulation. Google has their own suite of technologies they'd surely prefer (or even better, for Netflix to integrate with Google's cloud platform).
As for Firefox's dilemma, I'm not sure anyone cares how they feel or what they do. They've systematically failed the consumer marketplace as a force for openness for years now. Any cred they may have had here was spent long ago.
> The only redeeming feature is that you can jump through hoops and install Linux(while suffering through an annoying prompt at every boot), which can be done on any Windows PC anyway, but >95% of Chromebook buyers are going to be locked in.
Again that's not entirely true, although in this case it depends on the model number. What's more, you can also run ubuntu's environment alongside the chrome OS without requiring a full reinstall.
> And they only recently stopped parsing e-mail in Google Apps for Schools(which they give away for free) and Business(paid) to build ad profiles to show in other Google properties after they couldn't continue telling the lies they were telling to the public in federal court.
That's a curious interpretation of the case. It mostly stems from this interesting legal idea that using the corpus of a text for ad processing is somehow akin to the full violation of privacy that a human scanning the document would have.
I am not sure any of us are entirely comfortable with either interpretation, but ad targeting for gapps has never not happened nor has it ever been anything but an obvious monetization model for an otherwise free service. So... yeah. Death of freedom I guess.
> Which part of this is about the open internet again?
When did we start conflating "the Open Internet" with "using analytics for advertising?" by the way. I don't see a contradiction between the two. The internet can be "open" and vendors can watch their wifi routers for when known device ids try to connect and build profiles and sell that data. They're orthogonal.
I think that is a part of it, for sure. But even in first world countries like America you see lots of kids with inadequate nutrition, no access to modern education, and no cultural inculcation. And of course, that sort of pretends IQs themselves don't fall along a normal distribution and that there aren't gender and racial issues discouraging a large class of people from pursuing an education in this field.
Even if these issues were addressed socially, I think economic barriers are hard to ignore.