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by rd108 3129 days ago
When companies centralized and controlled app downloads, they did it primarily to make more money. Now their greed ends in the loss of real human rights. When America was founded, the fourth pillar of government was the free press, i.e. the gatekeepers of information. Today, capitalism and naked avarice have broken the back of this key democratic institution, and the effects on society in the U.S. and abroad will be continue to ripple for years to come.

It's like Obama was fond of reminding tech CEO's when they'd start pontificating on leadership... “Government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

“Sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences … then I think those suggestions are terrific."

12 comments

> Today, capitalism and naked avarice have broken the back of this key democratic institution, and the effects on society in the U.S. and abroad will be continue to ripple for years to come.

How do you interpret that China, a pseudo-capitalist country, bans skype and its because of the greed and avarice of private capital.

This is textbook china. It was before and there is no reason it won't be this way for decades to come.

Because if iOS didn't prohibit installation of apps from anywhere but it's app store then this would be much less problematic.

But Apple does, because it decided at the start of the platform that being able to take a 30% cut and defend it's own weak services applications from competition was worth more than the inevitable human rights problems a closed app platform presents.

Clearly the ability to take a cut of all app sales was a huge part of that decision, but was far from the only one. Security and easy of use are also very important. My grandma can install apps on her tablet no problem. But telling her to go to {domain}.com => downloads => download the 64bit windows executable and then find the file and run it, is a totally different story. Not to mention how many people will just google the name of the app, click the first link, and look for any link that says download and click next, next, next until they've succesfully added a bunch of spyware and 7 more IE tool bars.
Clearly Apple's decision is based on paternalism, which most people don't appreciate when it's combined with government power. Compare:

"Clearly the ability to eliminate opposing viewpoints was a huge part of the Chinese government's decision, but was far from the only one. Stability and economic prosperity are also very important. My grandma can obey simple laws. But telling her to go to research contradictory political perspectives and decide the correct course of action is a completely different story. Not to mention how many people will just vote for the candidate that pushes their emotional buttons, and read whatever crap on Facebook and click next, next, next until they've elected Donald Trump."

The core problem with trusted computing is that users are never allowed to install their own root certificate. My grandmother should be able to install a root that someone she trusts controls, which will include but not be limited to the OS vendor.
"What is a root certificate?" - All grandmothers everywhere
"Hey grandma, run this and click Ok. Nevermind, just let me see it for a minute." Don't be a ridiculous strawman, everyone has friends or family they trust that are better aligned to their cause than multinational hardware vendors.
How would that accomplish anything? Are you going to sign the latest Firefox for her yourself?
In the world of Linux distribution, they can have multiple independent repositories. When adding another one, you usually import their PGP key to establish trust. When you install Google Chrome on Linux, you will add another repository that will be responsible for further Google Chrome updates.

In the Android world, multiple app stores exist. There are stores by Amazon, Yandex, Baidu, etc.

If Apple wanted, similar mechanism could be made for iOS too.

"My grandmother should be able to install a root"

She can, it just yields plants, not apps.

In all seriousness, this was an unintentionally hilarious comment. You can be against walled gardens, but one of best arguments for their existence is because grandmas in general can't be trusted to install root certs.

Google pretty much solved this issue with sideloaded apps.

Nobody is stopping you from downloading only from the store. But if you want, you can also download from outside of the store. As a bonus, Google even checks those apps for malware (but like any antivirus, it's mostly based on signatures + some relatively weak machine learning that won't stop original new malware until it gets reported by someone).

The Play Store may also be slightly less secure than the App Store, but that's mainly a factor of Google not doing any manual reviews. But this is a different issue. My point is that there's no reason why Apple couldn't allow sideloading, too.

Apple has allowed sideloading for a long time now. You just need to jump through more hoops. How do you think large MNCs like IBM deploy their apps?
Yes, like Gab that is banned from the app store.
Trading some freedom (to run whatever code/apps. you want) for the security afforded by a centrally run repository is definitely a reasonable one to make, but the same mechanisms can be co-opted and used in ways that aren't in the users' interests.

It's a difficult line to draw IMO - providing _any_ way to bypass it opens the non-technical user up to malicious software (to varying degrees), but if all platforms (or even just all the major ones) become so locked down, IMO that's a big loss in itself.

That's because Windows does not have any sandboxing, although that seems to be changing with Windows 10 version 1709.

iOS apps are still sandboxed just like apps from the App Store when you sideload them using Xcode. That's all you would need to install Skype, and sandboxing is what keeps iOS secure, not the App Store. The App Store review is mostly about weeding out obvious junk and enforcing Apple's business model.

You are explaining the reason why having an app store is a good thing for the user, not why having nothing else than an app store.
> Because if iOS didn't prohibit installation of apps from anywhere but it's app store then this would be much less problematic.

I love Android and I love the fact that I can sideload apps from f-droid or elsewhere. But I've seen firsthand that (by children, e.g.) sideloading apps can result in a cascade of horrible device security problems.

We can blame the user or we can save them from themselves. shrug this seems like a genuinely hard problem and I wish there was an android-but-requires-several-command-line-adb-steps-to-permit-sideloading.

In any case, I don't think Apple's decision is strictly motivated by "being able to take a 30% cut". Apple has shown a commitment to security in their public statements and their devices' design. However, I'll grant that profit was certainly part of the motivation.

> We can blame the user or we can save them from themselves. shrug this seems like a genuinely hard problem and I wish there was an android-but-requires-several-command-line-adb-steps-to-permit-sideloading.

Or we could just take the time tested solution from the desktop world and you could give your kids non-admin accounts that doesn't let them install random stuff. The android security model is nothing but security theater in practice.

> We can blame the user or we can save them from themselves. shrug this seems like a genuinely hard problem and I wish there was an android-but-requires-several-command-line-adb-steps-to-permit-sideloading.

I don't. It should be available to non-technical users. It needs to be available to non-technical users. If anything, Android is too complex already.

>I don't. It should be available to non-technical users. It needs to be available to non-technical users.

Why should it be available to non-technical users? What will they possibly gain from being able to be tricked into installing a keylogger on their phone?

Are you seriously asking why should users have access to run their device in the way that they want?
How do you convince yourself that one of the(if not the) biggest government in the world forces a company's hand by force is not to blame, but the company who is the victim of such force is actually at fault.

Its an honest question.

> take a 30% cut

30% of $0 is $0.

So tell me again about how Apple hosts literally billions of free app downloads for $99/year per dev as a money making scheme.

So can we finally purchase books from iOS Kindle?

No, of course not.

Of all the cases to try and make a "oh big bad apple making a profit" point, you chose Amazon as the "little guy"?
No, as "well known example".
There's a workaround, use mobile Safari.
Revenue.

Super Mario Run is a 220mb app, and it was downloaded 40 million times in 4 days. That's 8.8 petabytes of data transferred, for one app in 4 days.

A lot of apps don't go the in-app-purchase route, they rely on advertising, and if using e.g. Google's ad network, Apple gets just the $99/year to host who knows how many millions of downloads of the app.

No one claimed Apple doesn't make money on the App Store, but to claim that it's some massive profit machine for Apple is ignoring the reality of what it costs to host all the apps Apple makes just $99/year from.

Well if you ever want to pay me 30% of 28 billion for an 8.8 petabyte transfer in 4 days, call me.

I'll buy you a bay area house from the spare change. Hell, I'll buy you 10 of them. Complimentary.

But democracy isn't the only alternative, or the best one.

What we are really discussing is totalitarian regimes. One is Apple, a top down secretive corporation with policies, dictating what will happen. The other is China, which like many Communist countries uses the "will of the people" as a surrogate for its own desires.

Representative democracy can have same issues. Take for example Prohibition, or the current war on drugs. And many other things.

I think that when it comes to PLATFORMS, there should be no barrier to entry. I would go further and say that I want there to be CENTRALIZED COLLABORATION on a platform, and not competition (eg of browser makers). But the platform must implement every extension that becomes popular enough. In other words when an app or extension becomes popular enough, it should be incorporated into the platform as one standard.

Think of how much headache would be solved and how much more could have been done if there were no browser quirks, and only one major browser.

The difference is that ANYONE should be able to build their own browser extension or website. ANYONE should be able to host it on the internet accessible to all. And if it gets popular enough it gets added to the feature list for EVERYONE.

However, this is a different form of governance - nothing is RESTRICTED from people and they are free to try new things.

>I want there to be CENTRALIZED COLLABORATION on a platform, and not competition (eg of browser makers)

>only one major browser

>nothing is RESTRICTED from people and they are free to try new things

What happens when one does a new attempt at a browser, that cannot be merged into the original major browser when it gets big enough?

For a simple example, suppose Google Chrome was the only major browser in such a model. One day, someone decides that C++ is too prone to vulnerabilities, and creates a new browser, called Firefox, based on Rust (on an entirely new codebase). What will happen when Firefox becomes sufficiently large to be considered major?

If it can't get merged due to something fundamental, then it can be a competitor. But that's a very rare case. The vasy majority of extensions are eminently able to be incorporated into the core.
When does an application become a platform?
> How do you interpret that China, a pseudo-capitalist country, bans skype and its because of the greed and avarice of private capital.

I didn't understand it to be an explainer of China's actions, but of Apple's.

Baloney. Pre-AppStore, you could only download a Windows binary version of Skype, and it was not the official Skype version. I didn't have Windows, but the download looked pretty sketchy. You can bet your last dollar that the Chinese government could listen in on your conversation. When Microsoft bought Skype, they de-P2P'ed it. You can bet all the dollars you wisely didn't bet earlier that a condition of Microsoft continuing to operate in China was that they enable the government to listen in. So now you just can't Skype at all. Doesn't have anything to do centralized app stores, and everything to do with a paranoid Chinese government.
I don't know if it's true but it was always said that the government could listen in on your Skype calls if you downloaded Skype in China.
> When America was founded, the fourth pillar of government was the free press, i.e. the gatekeepers of information. Today, capitalism and naked avarice have broken the back of this key democratic institution

It sounds like you're not at all familiar with the prior 230 years of American history as it pertains to Capitalism and the free press. Just as one example era, see 1880 to 1930. The market economy in the US was very lightly regulated, today it's extremely regulated. There were hardly any restrictions on press ownership during that time. There were few means to know who owned or influenced which entities, including the newspapers. Literal direct bribery was legal in most regards politically.

Today, the US is barely clinging to being a Capitalist nation. This is an era of innocence compared to when the US was a full-blown Capitalist nation. A better title now is mixed economy. Nearly all industry is extremely regulated. Taxation is extremely high compared to the first 150 years of US history. Government intervention into the economy is the highest it has ever been. At a time in which the US is the least Capitalistic it has been in its entire history, you're choosing to start blaming Capitalism for the weakness of the free press. You're missing a comically large error in the premise.

>When companies centralized and controlled app downloads, they did it primarily to make more money. Now their greed ends in the loss of real human rights.

Well, the Chinese get the right their chats to be surveilled by their own state (in their own platforms) - as opposed to being surveilled by the US (on Skype and such platforms).

Which sounds like a win.

The problem in this case isn’t centralized App Stores. It’s software that relies on a centralized server. If Skype we’re still P2P, then maybe it could evade the Great Firewall a bit easier. But it’s not, and China will just ban the Skype servers and render the app useless, even if you’re able to side load it.
P2P doesn't really help there. Hardly anyone gets a routable IP address so everyone needs some rendezvous service anyway.
Centralized control has made things a lot more secure. The fact that centralization also makes government interference easier is definitely a big negative. However, you can always go compile the app from source and install it that way, or sideload the app onto your device on iOS. It's not 2009, there are official ways to do this from Apple including for free.
On one hand you blame capitalism when corporations are just following government mandates.

On the other hand you’d rather a different economic system, I presume, where the government has even more say, such as socialism.

Please try to reconcile your conflicting opinions because they don’t make sense.

> When America was founded, the fourth pillar of government was the free press, i.e. the gatekeepers of information. Today, capitalism and naked avarice have broken the back of this key democratic institution,

What makes you say this? I seriously don't follow.

It’s been a while since the founding of the USA. Read about Pulitzer and yellow journalism. Nothing new really! Just scaled up and ubiquitous now.
Crazy how Obama said that and then immediately did the bidding of those same CEOs. Almost like he was playing both sides or something.
But how would this be solved if they allowed side-loading but you’d have to go to a website that is mostly like behind a firewall.
> When America was founded, the fourth pillar of government was the free press, i.e. the gatekeepers of information.

The free press wasn't a pillar of government. When America was founded, the "free press" was pretty much propaganda outlets owned by and used by the wealthy to attack each other.

One of our oldest newspapers ( NY Post ) was founded by Alexander Hamilton purely to attack Thomas Jefferson.

https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/alexander-hamilton-at...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_American_newspapers

And following that, we had decades of yellow journalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

The press was never gatekeepers of information. The free press was "fake news" straight from the get-go. Even before the founding of the US, during the colonial period, they were political propaganda tools. If you are interested, go read about what Benjamin Franklin's colonial printing history.