On Sun, Feb 02, 2025 at 02:45:08PM -0500, Paul Kosinski via bind-users wrote: ! On Sat, 1 Feb 2025 14:47:35 +0000 ! Marc <m...@f1-outsourcing.eu> wrote: ! ! "You have to get the bigger picture. Everything requires regulation otherwise big tech is going to fuck you. There are enough examples out there." ! ! The even bigger picture is that the regulators are sometimes even worse than Big Tech.
Finally got back to this one. Thank You, both of You! What immediately came to my mind after reading Marc's stance, that there are two other option (and I'll stay with the wording for now): * big tech can just fuck the government, which is usually easier to achieve, or * big tech can team up with the government in order to fuck you. A mixture of both is very much what we already have. In Brussels, for instance, 90% of the personel are not politicians, but lobbyists. They are the vast majority, and their job is to make sure that the government does what big tech wants. We must consider that government people, i.e. politicians, are not engineers. Unlike most of us here, they are just as overwhelmed by the vast amount of technological innovation as ordinary people nowadays are. Then, what makes things worse is: the ordinary people, being overwhelmed by all the new things, look up to the governments with the expectation that these should make things "somehow safe" for the people. And the politicians, having no more clue than the ordinary people, now have to /pose/ as being competent in order to get elected and stay in power. So the only chance they have is to listen to their consultants - and these consist almost entirely of lobbyists who have their own agenda; for the simple reason that even if you are competent, there is no way to get into these circles unless you are backed by a powerful sponsor. The sad thing is: we knew all this before. In the aftermath of the 1968 student revolts and due to the rising popularity of social sciences, we had excellent analysis of the inherent problems of /power/. Only, nowadays nobody seems to care for these materials anymore. :( So, while I am not strictly against regulation, the bottomline question appears to be: how do we manage to get /unbiased skill/ into the decision making process? Now having a look at Michael's comment: On Sat, Feb 01, 2025 at 08:54:32PM +0100, Michael De Roover wrote: ! Now, to be fair, when actual safety is involved, that's perhaps a case where ! regulation is justified. Certainly. Now, with more and more things moved to the Internet, it will be not far into the future that safety-critical material ends up there - probably unnoticed until some accident happens. And after the accident the outcry for regulations will be imminent. ! It's more or less like that with the radios in mobile ! devices too. Not sure if that firmware should be proprietary, but allowing ! everyone to have an SDR in their pockets might not be a great idea either. That's funny, because that is what originally brought me onto this train of thought: two years ago I got myself a new laptop. And I put FreeBSD onto it. It's a Fujitsu laptop (and it works fine, btw), and what came as a surprize; it does /not/ have a radio kill switch. Instead, for cost-saving, the radio-kill function was put onto a certain keyboard-key. So effectively there is no such function, unless you install the manufacturer's specific device driver (which certainly does not exist for unix). We can see where this leads: FreeBSD provides ready-to-install OS packages - they even have a funded initiative to simplify installation on laptops for non-technical people. In the end, the user may not even know whether the OS has found and powered on the radio (unless they read the debug logs) - and anyway, they cannot switch it off. Then, if you want to make a case that this is unsafe, it shouldn't be too difficult. Compare this to the situation for mobile-phones. No such problem does exist with these: there is only one provider for the OS, and it is (officially) impossible to modify it, therefore the hardware manufacturer can be held responsible to properly design the device. >From here onwards you can easily argue to politicians that there are safety issues, and private people should only be allowed to use computer OS software as provided by Google or Apple, on those devices that are designed for such software (as most of the people do already, anyway). And, closing the circle: from there onwards the governments will make sure that big tech indeed has the authority to fuck you, thanks to regulation. cheerio, PMc -- Visit https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users to unsubscribe from this list ISC funds the development of this software with paid support subscriptions. Contact us at https://www.isc.org/contact/ for more information. bind-users mailing list bind-users@lists.isc.org https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users
