Is technology becoming more totalitarian?

Amity88

Do you guys feel that stuff around us are increasingly becoming dictated by corporations?

1. When you look at the hardware, most of the common computing devices these days are sealed up both in terms of electronics and software. It's not easy to service a bad tablet or upgrade its OS beyond a limit.
2. Companies like Google & Facebook track us to an infuriating level. Google is trying to disable ad-blockers and with their AMP thingy, I hear that they're heavy handed with it and would add to their data mining abilities linky
3. IoT, if they really take off would probably mean a lot of extra data points to monitor us even further. I'm pretty sure those devices would also be near impossible for use mere consumers to modify.
4. Oh yeah, finally... this whole trend of Red Hat driving Linux as they see fit.
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2019 5:16 pm Post subject:

Amity88,

It just becoming more obvious. Like lots of other things.

OMG this crime rate is up, that crime rate is up ... err nope, its just better reported that it was 50 years ago.

Now we get got onto the Nanny State ... don't get me started.
Its 50 years since the Apollo 11 mission, this year. I stayed up to watch on TV. :)
... and 50 years since the first flight of the 747 and Concorde.

The Apollo program would be impossible today because Health and Safety 'interference' would make sure that it was too big and heavy to lift off.
We no longer teach our children any risk management.

Sorry for the rant but your post points out a small corner of what I perceive to be the decline in our species.
Every generation has said that about its young though. It was 'the wireless' then TV, now the internet rotting their brains ...
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

The technology on its own isn't, but the people who build and profit from it are.

I'm a bit more concerned at how the masses uncritically run straight into these new corporate-propaganda machines. Even though we all know what Google and Facebook are doing, and the long tail of negative externalities all that causes. Facebook/Twitter users, for one, are regularly driven insane from information overload.

I don't think age factors into it, nor did it ever. Anyone with a weak mind is susceptible, and the entire advertising industry is about weakening minds for profit.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2019 6:15 pm Post subject:

Ant P.,

I agree about age not being a factor. Age or experience make one more critical of change is all.

The 4 year old in our family could use an I-Pad before he could read.
He's growing up with it, warts and all.

You don't get to see this in the workplace until you are at least 50 because its about a 30 year cycle.
New management comes in and rolls out some 'new improvements'. The old hands mutter to themselves that 'we did that 30 years ago and it didn't work' ... because ...

Youth is wasted on the young. :)
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Morality124 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Feb 2018 Posts: 102

I think it's also a matter of phases - in the 70/80s thin-client/server setups were dominate, and it took until the 90s for improved computing power to make self-sufficient individual workstations more popular. Now we've entered a period of decades where server-oriented computing is becoming dominate again, and with that is the expected loss of user control. Maybe future computing developments (in combination with de-centralised protocols and software) will tip the balance back to client-oriented computing.

Of course, this is a massive simplification and also probably a bit naive as well.

Jaglover · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2019 7:15 pm Post subject:

One more aspect. In past when you sold something you asked a price and you agreed with buyer before committing. Now they have made you sell your privacy and dignity and you even have no clue for how much or what exactly they are taking from you. Make no mistake, you are the product and they are making profit on you.
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Maybe this belongs here, probably not, but it belongs more here than anywhere else Gentoo, and maybe others would like this.

The regular smartphone is a security horror story. There are things you can do, but you can only go so far. I load my own ROMs, for instance. But one of the holes you have no control over is the baseband, and because the FCC is involved, it's essentially impossible to gain control over that. However there is something that can be done... Phones can implement isolation between the baseband and the user-space that we perceive as Android / IOS. They just don't generally.

I'm not quite ready to take my wife all the way to Librem-5, I don't think. However I would like to find a phone that does have baseband isolation - it's just that I don't know how to find that information out. Does anyone else here?

By the way, John Deere is trying to "weld the hood shut" on their tractors. I used to like Deere tractors in my farming days, but I hope this action HURTS for them. I hope some other farm implement maker has a more enlightened repair policy, and does great based on that. The farmers really care about this, and I believe will vote with their purchases.
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erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

1 only a small minority uses OSs that support older hardware, I mean mainly linux and *BSD, for everybody else is business as usual, updating to Win98 from Win95 means half of your cards will not work anymore ... it's worse now on certain aspects, it took more than 20 minutes for me to replace the battery of my phone and most people probably are not able to perform such a simple task like replace the battery.

2 according to the link the problem with AMP is that without an AMP version of the website the page is out of google search engine and that it is like the page does not exist. The problem here is not AMP but that if the page is not on google search engine it is like it never existed ....... the rest of the problems mentioned will probably disappear as soon as the toolkits used to write web pages will be able to automatically generate an AMP version of the page.

3 The fact that most consumers now cannot replace the battery of their phone it doesn't mean that I can't ;-)

The same goes for customizing IoT devices and LoRa networks
4 Well the problem is that the competition sucks probably, I don't think anybody drives linux actually. We are in the age of microservices and linux is just a middleware OS that runs in a container, MS Windows will soon include an ext4 filesystem driver to complete the inclusion of linux as a Microsoft service ....
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2019 12:17 am Post subject:

pjp,

'The wireless' was how my grandparents referred to Radio :)
I was trying to use the terms in use at the time.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Marcih · Apprentice Joined: 19 Feb 2018 Posts: 213

Dominique_71 · Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2019 12:28 am Post subject:

The technology of our society is industrial. Work into that industrial society is mandatory and very highly hierarchised. That imply than, with the industrial revolution, a new hierarchy get additionned to the old ones based on money and power and reinforced these old hierarchies. The ones which are rich and powerful control the use of the technology, and more they invest into it, the more they get rich and powerful. They get the money and the power, we get mandatory work and walmart salaries and fournitures. It is all about money and power. As the technology level is constantly increasing, the worst is still to come.

Also many peoples, especially the 1%, are completely mind less. They only see the advantages we get with the technology, and the advantages they get from their position, but when scientists are saying than our way of life has already killed 60% of the living, they answer that doesn't matter because the technology will save us. They are like alcoholics which will believe than to drink more will make them to stop drinking. That will eventually do that, after their death.
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