Comment by baq

I'm not the person you replied to, but I am in their shoes. I'm tired, too. Trust me, I used to champion your sentiment, keep fighting/keep moving and all that jazz, but...at my age, this War of Attrition that is the fight for user data rights and privacy has gone on so long, against a foe that has a much large reach and seemingly infinite resources.

Many of us are not only exhausted, but exasperated at the fact that the good majority of the consumer market continues to give permission to the very activities we are all supposed to be denying. In the end, we vote with our dollars, so we, the vocal minority can be as loud as we want but if the majority continues to buy, use and comply with the product, it's really just a lot of yelling for no reason, isn't it? That's how it feels, anyway.

I know, I know; can't start a fire without a spark. But I've been at it for two decades, since the first smartphone dropped, something I resist adopting for nearly a decade. I'm seeing my kid's generation growing up in this world, condition by it from the start despite our best efforts and they simply don't seem to care. From where I'm standing, I feel old, brittle and tired from all this, but there's nobody to pass the torch to.

So understand that when one of us comments "I'm so tired and disillusioned," we do so after years of resisting, and those words are not uttered lightly.

They have trillions of dollars to burn. They have expensive lobbyists which they use to essentially buy laws. Governments want them to succeed because they also want to control people's computers.

It's just a matter of time until we lose everything. It's not really a struggle. Look at what just happened. We made sacrifices for years by using Android because it was open and Google just rendered it all moot by introducing hardware remote attestation to discriminate against anyone who's actually enjoying that openness. What's the point?

> only use old devices and old OSes. Things that have been cracked and/or are easy to root.

> "But it's not secure!" -- yeah, that really is the point.

Well, no.

The point isn't just to rail against impositions from someone else wanting what they see as essential for their security, but also to keep things secure and⁰ free¹ for you, the user.

Holding your devices back constrains both your security and your freedom rather than helping you in either manner. Security because you will be missing important updates in that regard, and freedom because your device won't be able to negotiate connections with external services² that you want to use³.

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[0] And where these two conflict, you should be free to chose your threat model and therefore which compromises to make, except where that could negatively affect others.

[1] The freedom of reasonable action form of free, not monetarily free etc.

[2] We hit this a short while ago with some legacy code+infra using SOCKS via OpenSSH to make unauthenticated HTTPS calls from source addresses we can't fix (authentication is done with SSH, control is by the other end having the fixed address of the SOCKS host in the whitelist) - upgrading the VM running the SOCKS proxy upgraded OpenSSH which deprecated a number of encryption and negotiation options, the old client library used didn't support enough new ones to be able to negotiate a link, newer versions required a later .Net version that is supported inside SSIS, so we had to rearrange how those calls were made (obviously the long term fix is to kill all that legacy SSIS stuff, all SSIS stuff including the people that made it, with fire). The same will happen with parts of what you use your device for, if you keep it back in the way you are suggesting.

[3] Banking facilities being a key area that you'll likely hit problems with first, after that other online commerce flows, and so forth.

I've been largely doing this for other reasons.

It is not a good long term solution, however, because older phones do not support newer versions of the operating systems and gradually you'll notice that fewer and fewer applications work on your phone, because they require a newer operating system.

Utterly pointless. We'll be systematically discriminated against at every turn. We'll lose access to finances, services, communities and even simple sites because our computers aren't corporate owned. We'll become so marginalized we'll only be able to visit places like HN, places that at least try to pay some lip service to everything the word "hacker" stands for.

And then they will make it so our devices need to pass hardware remote attestation to connect to the internet and even that will be taken away from us.

I don't know what to do anymore. The future is bleak. The free computing we love is being destroyed by forces outside our control, forces that cannot be stopped no matter what we do because they have trillions of dollars and their interests are aligned with those of governments the world over.

I've been using an old OS as my daily driver for five years now[1]. You absolutely can do it, but it's a lot of work!

1: https://mavericksforever.com/

This is not enough. Things like banking apps are virtually necessary for many people's daily lives, yet they often require a non-rooted phone with Google Play Services spyware installed at the OS level, or they will simply refuse to open. Never mind the fact that we're so into late capitalist consumerism that it's routine to deprecate support for 2 year old OSes.

This needs law/regulation forcing the duopoly to open up, unfortunately even in the EU we're moving in the opposite direction.

This is not going to be successful once they demand strong authentication of clients on the server side - the banking apps already do this, you can't have your phone rooted or compromised.

Wait until the authorities will require strong client side authentication for social media sites, news sites, and everywhere user generated content is accepted, tied to official ID issued by the government

I maintain a software to aid in installation of Windows 7 to new PCs (FlashBoot Pro): https://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/ . Recently there was a reduction in sales. You are welcome.

Y'know what's troubling to me, freedom as a struggle is indirectly related to other people/ social-political issue.

Like, the people if they decide, they want freedom, are almost guaranteed to get it. But nobody demands it in the truest sense and it feels like the govt. isn't controlled by the people but rather almost by lobbying and that social media etc. have made people complacent in the sense that either we think that others will fight for us or that social media has become a propaganda machine.

I almost broke last night realizing that nuclear can be completely green energy but it isn't the issue of technology but rather political. To me, it felt like a lot of really quality of life changes (like water access, clean cities, good air quality index, atleast where I live) are all almost political issues at this point.

But I am not hopeful towards people, I am hopeful towards tech though. It feels like people have free will, so they might actually pick a net negative option for everybody (trump?), so I am not an optimist because I feel like I have to trust people in the process and I feel like people can do both good and bad, so I wonder how much better our lives have been compared to our ancestors. Maybe trade-offs?

I genuinely felt so weird realizing this, its hard to explain. Like it felt like I can do nothing but watch. And to me I feel like I am being a pessimistic because a lot of people in power feel stupid/inefficient man.

We just don't have a choice. WE have a choice b/w 2 parties and call it freedom.

Of course, freedom will be a constant struggle. People have made it as such. Its on all of us, we all need to take accountability. I get it, accountability is hard, but its much better than waiting for a hero to save us all. We can do it if we realize this.

How will you install Linux when all the hardware manufacturers are forced to enforce Secure Boot? All for security, of course.

They can, but if service providers start requiring client attestation, it won't help at all.

Not when vendors you count on require you to use a provably locked down version and when the government makes it a crime to circumvent. At first u It'll be the banks who are pushing for it now, but why not Amazon and Netflix abd everyone else eventually?

And you can do that, but your bank and all government services will use Web Environment Integrity API to refuse to service you unless you are using a Google-approved flavor of Linux (e.g. ChromeOS) or Windows.