NaibofTabr

Now you do what they told ya… now you’re under control

OK, but I’m not arguing for the sake of argument. What I take issue with is the overly negative point of view that isn’t justified by the reality of the current technology market. It’s limited, depressive and ultimately self-destructive.

Perspective matters. Money isn’t the only measure of success. Internet infrastructure is basically Linux, nginx and Apache - seriously, apart from user endpoints it’s pretty much all open source - and the most common endpoint OS is Android so also open source. The idea that open systems aren’t as successful as proprietary ones doesn’t reflect reality, it’s a projection of a limited point of view onto reality (it only seems true if large portions of the current technology market are ignored).

The economic model we’re in has been around for hundreds, arguably thousands of years in most ways. What about it?

And open source came into being inside of that model, and has grown and thrived since. So obviously, it’s not impossible.

The norms we are discussing here is that under capitalism, the norm tends to be trending away from free and open systems.

Right, this isn’t true. While certainly there are some businesses that try to restrict it, open systems grow and spread anyway. Open source is bigger and stronger than ever today. Open source software is so widespread that it’s a security concern for governments (look at the log4j fiasco). You interact with open platforms every day, even if you don’t see their names in commercials or on billboards (many of them don’t have to advertise).

IBM tried that in the 60s, 70s and 80s with their business mainframe systems, along with HP and several other manufacturers. Before IP gained prominence every major manufacturer had its own proprietary connection system they tried to sell, and the competition in the market was just as fierce then as it is now.

It didn’t work, the open model made all of the proprietary network systems obsolete.

Think of the Facebook internet access schemes that tried to make everything go through facebook.

You’re right that they’ve tried to do this and it’s ugly. But they’ve only been able to do it in places where they didn’t have to compete with an existing service, so I would argue that it’s successful only in a vacuum.

There are a lot of very successful businesses based around open source software. Open models are perfectly functional in the present. Their potential for success isn’t some relic of past idealism.

the current economic model we live under.

The internet isn’t exactly ancient technology. Do you think the ‘current economic model’ is significantly different from the 1970s? (and can you back up that conclusion?)

I think what the author meant was that it’s impossible in the capitalist marketplace.

Nonsense, the marketplace was also capitalist when the internet protocol was developed in 1974. It wasn’t that long ago.

Also, I’ll point out that open source software is very successful today and there are a lot of businesses based around open systems. Linux is the most widely used OS, particularly for embedded devices. Apache is the most widely used web server. You’re using an open source platform right now. You probably interact with open source systems every day, you’re surrounded by them, and they were developed in and thrive in the ‘capitalist marketplace’.

…exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company…

Who is suggesting that such technology is impossible? The internet is literally exactly this, based on an open standard (Internet Protocol) which is not controlled by any proprietary group.

IP wasn’t the first computer networking standard to be developed, but its open nature made it accessible to any interested manufacturers and that made it the most successful standard.

Anyone suggesting that this “kind of technology” is “supposed to be impossible” is either ignorant or stupid, or both.

First developed in the US, the initiative known as Housing First […]

And even if the cooperation doesn’t last, it’s an opportunity for the open source developers to work with the product engineers and get direct information from them right now. There’s nothing as valuable as talking to the guy that actually designed the thing, or the guy who can make changes to the product code.

Even if that relationship doesn’t hold long term, the information gathered in the short term will be useful.

If I were part of this project this is what I’d be going for. Push the company to give you direct contact with the relevant engineers, right now while the negative public opinion is fresh and they’re most willing to make concessions, and then get as much out of that contact as you can. Take them at their word, make them actually back it up, take advantage of the offer to cooperate. Sort the rest of it out later.

Yes, it is damage control. That’s OK.

The whole point of spreading the word about an incident like this is to get public attention on it, and make the company realize that the way they’ve handled things was bad.

A letter like this indicates that they’ve realized they fucked up and they want to do things differently going forward. That doesn’t mean they’re suddenly trustworthy, but it does mean they can be negotiated with.

The correct response is to accept the offer of working together. We want to encourage companies to be cooperative and discourage insular, proprietary behavior. If you slap away the offered hand then you discourage future cooperation, and now you’re the roadblock to developing an open system.

When you start getting the results that you want, don’t respond with further hostility.

Hooray for IoT! The worst thing to happen to network security since… ever

I was referring to OP’s use of IPQuick. This isn’t a service I’m familiar with and it doesn’t seem to be affiliated with any organization that I’m familiar with either.

1. Assuming that you mean that you are using the domain name to point to services which are at a residential, dynamic IP address, you will need to set up a Dynamic DNS service.

2. If a product is free, you’re the product.

Graphene is an amazing material. It can do anything and everything… except leave the lab.

Realistically, the more accessible the internet becomes the more it reflects the behavior of humanity at large.

These things exist because they’re part of us. The internet probably makes them more visible, but I doubt it makes them more extant.

I think this puts consciousness on too high of a mystic pedestal. It may be impossible for an individual to experience reality outside of their own consciousness, but that does not preclude studying how it works. What makes you think that it is impossible to observe someone else’s consciousness? and more importantly, what evidence do you have to substantiate that claim?

After all, we research many aspects of reality obliquely. Our understanding of subatomic particles comes mostly from smashing larger particles into each other and seeing what pops out - not by observing subatomic interactions directly. We can do effective research by inference.

Personally I don’t believe that there is anything in our existence that is beyond our understanding, given enough time and study.

But… there also has to be room for us to change our understanding of reality. An overly dogmatic approach to science keeps us in the dark. The germ theory of disease was dismissed as pseudoscience for a long time, in favor of the widely accepted miasma theory.

Obviously, science requires a rigorous approach to examining reality. If an idea cannot be tested, it is not scientific and therefore exists only as speculation. But we can’t just assume that our current models of reality are fundamentally correct and unassailable - we know that they’re not, we know that the standard model is limited and fundamentally incomplete.

Check out this lecture: Consciousness and the Physics of the Brain. This idea is absolutely not science yet because we don’t really have the tools to test it. But consciousness as we experience it must be the product of physical processes at some level, and therefore it should be possible to study it scientifically.

Trying to make a place popular for the sake of popularity is putting the cart before the horse, and will always be a losing battle.

Make your Lemmy instance a place worth spending time. Don’t worry about user counts or popularity.

No one is going to do video hosting. Several instances are removing image hosting due to CP issues.