Maybe it's not a great idea to allow a company to decide what software users can run, and I am inclined to believe that Murphy's Law will apply. Ultimately, software is freedom of speech.
I get that point as a person who frequents HN, but for many regular people that’s probably a net positive. People would install random apps or browser extensions just to gain an advantage in some Facebook click came.
Having some kind of hidden “I know what I’m doing” mode would make sense, but would probably defeated the same way as “I’ll teach you how to open browser console” to paste some command exploits.
Just as a thought experiment: Governments could mandate banks to prevent their customers from spending beyond what'll go to rent/mortgage. It'd certainly prevent overdue or missed payments. Would that be a net positive, or would that prevent or slow people from learning fiscal responsibility and the benefits that go along with that?
Overdraft limits restrict how much into the negative your bank account can go. Credit ratings are designed to help paint a story about risk, for lenders to consider when deciding how much money you can be loaned, and at what interest rate.
Both of those things existed in the early 2000s, but if the risk of a loan can (appear to) be shifted onto someone else, banks can and will issue bigger and riskier loans to people, and will reward the individual people selling the loans personally.
I don't think it's a compelling example, because fiscal responsibility requires very little education. Detecting malware by comparison requires literal experts. I think a better comparison might be requiring regulation around investment vehicles to eg root out ponzi schemes. Whatever our success there is definite buy in for that.
I think the change has been the general user doing many aspects of their real-life interactions (money, government, housing, travel, work, etc) easily and at speed via computing device compared to slower offline or face-to-face, and there's huge consequences if that gets screwed up if it can't be isolated from interference.
What I find interesting is that there's been little interesting making something like QubesOS for as many consumer devices (portables as well as desktop) as possible with an interface as painless as possible so people actually use it, and then the blast radius from any problem is smaller. There's also the hosted services side of computing where isolation on the same host is an expected feature and vulnerabilities like meltdown/spectre are such a big deal over the past 8 years, but it only gets seen as a curiosity on consumer devices.
> What I find interesting is that there's been little interesting making something like QubesOS for as many consumer devices
I know it's on a much, much smaller scale, but I'd say the move to sandboxing apps / browser tabs / profiles is aiming for precisely that and in a way that's invisible to most users, which is probably for the better.
This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of options in between "one company has total dictatorial control over an app store" and "it's a free for all of downloading software willy nilly off the internet".
The DMA in EU has alternate app stores being created, for example. That's some kind of point in between these two. But it still feels like if that's your only option, you'll get ICEBlock blocked in those markets too in many cases.
I know several non-technical people who use F-Droid to get reliable, free software. This is the only option to get updates after the phone is no longer supported. Ideally, it should be possible to install a different, supported OS for that.
iPhones become e-waste at that point, due to the discussed restrictions.
If you are not smart enough and need a big tech company to lead your life you can do it by yourself without thinking it's okay to subject the whole world to this duopoly.
You can very easily turn that argument around and say: if you are smart enough, use an operating system that doesn't babysit you and switch to Linux which is a very valid option.
The fact of the matter is that most people are stupid and a company that protects its customers from themselves will be more successful and outcompete a "moral" company.
Except people usually try to find ways around moral problems. For now, the pressure isn't too big but I think at some point the buildup will be too much and the fall for Apple will be very harsh.
It seems we expect the government to step in and fix this. But it’s not a neutral party. Even before Trump collusion between moneyed interests and politicians was high. Those who hold the money hold the power. And those with the money have decided that even free speech has worn out its welcome. To the point of using its military to invade its own cities.
I just don’t see us righting ourselves through the electoral process. If we are ever going to fix our government it will need to happen through mass strikes. That’s the most credible alternative. In the meantime our state of affairs will likely continue to decay. Climate change, authoritarianism, debt and austerity. These are only going to get worse. Eventually we will be forced to get our collective act together.
(It was later partly rejected by other courts in the DMCA anticircumvention context.)
This argument doesn't imply that companies have to help you publish your software, because they might be entitled to some kind of editorial control over which speech they do or don't distribute. But it does at least imply that the stakes of such control are very high and that free speech norms may be implicated by them!
