[svenpeter]

hi, and thanks! I'm the author of this post and I'm a little bit conflicted where I stand in this discussion.

In general, I agree that the world would be a better place if corporations would release documentation.

But my life would be much less fun then. Reverse engineering scratches a certain itch like nothing else does! So I'm kinda happy that mysteries like this exist and gladly spend my time on something like this :-)

[beckman466]

> But my life would be much less fun then. Reverse engineering scratches a certain itch like nothing else does!

Totally, yet at the same time I'm worried that knowledge workers aren't aware enough of just how privileged they are to have been able to 'climb the ladder' to be able to do work like that, and how, unless you're 1) well off and 2) living in the global north, gaining such skills has been made nearly impossible because the ladders needed to climb up are often not available, despite humans having been gifted digital technology (and therefore a zero-marginal cost of information reproduction).

As an example: I'm not technically skilled enough to reverse engineer the things I'd like to, and because of the way knowledge is controlled by big companies as trade secrets and patent claims [1], it's near impossible to gain these skills in an affordable way. I also cannot take apart the technology I already own since it is not modular, it voids the warranty or is it is damaged (since I'm not skilled because I didn't realize early enough how important technology is).

So yes, it sounds super fun for you to reverse engineer this stuff, yet when are we going to seriously admit that this IP system has become a massive problem, and that the people who came before are literally 'kicking away the ladder' they used to climb up themselves? That when people say that the only thing people need to do to succeed is to 'work hard', that that is a lie, since information is made artificially scarce by human systems/institutions, and thus only available to a select few [2].

Edit: I just saw on your twitter that you are a console hacker, thanks for the awesome work!

[1] https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-pur...

[2] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

[rjzzleep]

I completely agree with you about the patent system. There are plenty of companies that tried to do medical innovation and failed because the big corps owning these don't even want to license the IP that their half public funded PhD students create.

But I'm not sure realize where the privilege actually is. People aren't "gifted" with technology. Oftentimes it's because they were exposed to it and didn't have other obligations combined with a mixture of curiosity that was triggered by something. I knew people that had to think long and hard if it's worth saving up 150 dollars to buy a laptop or PC to MAYBE learn skills that MAY help them or if they should just continue working as a hostess. If you have to spend 12 hours a day to grind through school and after-school activity and then homework when society has decided that you can't be a productive member of society later AND then have to help you parents on the farm before you collapse of exhaustion then yes, you won't be able to acquire these skills.

I was privileged enough to have my mother sacrifice everything(her property, her life, her family and her homeland) to pull me out of a warzone to provide for me so I would be in a position to be able to build these skills. Just calling the whole thing privilege is such a disservice to all she had to sacrifice for me to be able to be in this position.

If we want to talk about privilege how about the fact that if the garbage worker wouldn't collect our garbage and the farmers wouldn't provide us with food then we wouldn't even be able to do the things we are able to do and while they feed us so we can build the things that replace them, we tell them how they should have just got to school to fill out excel charts, powerpoints and the next world change ai pipeline, or photo sharing app that nobody needs.

[svenpeter]

> People aren't "gifted" with technology. Oftentimes it's because they were exposed to it and didn't have other obligations combined with a mixture of curiosity that was triggered by something.

Pretty much. I learned how to reverse engineer back when I was still in school and was bored with my Wii. I wanted to run my own code on it to e.g. watch movies on my TV. But I couldn't afford to buy another computer connected to my TV. So I just had to figure out how the Wii works and how I could run my own code on it.

The privilege I had was that my parents were well-off enough to allow me to have >8 hours of free time after school and that they bought me a computer and gave me pocket money for my Wii.

[beckman466]

> People aren't "gifted" with technology

I used the words "humans having been gifted digital technology" as I am a marxist and I believe that all the technologies and scientific knowledge that we reverse engineer from nature is gifted to us by a higher power. Others talk about the brilliance of human minds, yet since I see us as a part of nature, there's no distinction in that for me. Another reason I say it that way is because unfortunately the 'great man theory/myth' still reigns supreme in the tech industry [1]. I think though that this 'brilliant mind' story that is commonly told in the west seems to have often justified detrimental and destructive human supremacy/domination over the rest of nature (also leading us to the edge of the cliff now with global warming).

Anyways, I think that we all tell ourselves different stories and this is one of mine. This is another story I tell myself because it is ridiculously beautiful to me: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html or Kurzgesagt version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

> I was privileged enough to have my mother sacrifice everything(her property, her life, her family and her homeland) to pull me out of a warzone to provide for me so I would be in a position to be able to build these skills.

That sounds incredibly difficult and distressing for her (and possibly for you too). Thank you for sharing this personal story here.

> Just calling the whole thing privilege is such a disservice to all she had to sacrifice for me to be able to be in this position.

That isn't what I am referring to as the 'privilege' here though.

I am saying that the property system is the problem. The system makes it so that there are very few knowledge workers. Big capitalist firms, together with the capitalist nation state, control where and when research and development is to be done, and by whom (by enclosing/owning the systems that control the flow of information).

So I have no doubt that your mother/caretaker(s) sacrificed a lot. No doubt about that at all.

Professor Jakob Rigi does a good job of describing what I am trying to explain, maybe I will let him do the talking. Excuse this long quote by him yet I hope the clarity of his message makes it worth it.

“Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others' properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons.

To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time.

This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists, so-called crackers, illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting." [2]

Or as another author puts it:

"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations.3 Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits." [3]

So where does that leave us? I believe that the most powerful leverage point we have available to us is being explored by the http://valueflo.ws project, in tandem with the http://metacurrency.org project. Those projects meet in the middle in a third project called hREA or holoREA [4]. I've written about them in previous comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25845914

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26587791

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...

[2] https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/download/4...

[3] http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...

[4] https://github.com/holo-rea

[saagarjha]

I don’t want to diminish your personal efforts, but gaining reverse engineering skills is something you can largely do on your own for free: it is, after all, a popular hobby of children who have nothing but time on their hands and access to the Internet. You certainly don’t need to buy hardware or have access to special training to get started.

And, to be clear, I do think the current situation of closed systems is not great, and I do think that we do have a lot of engineers who grew up on open systems that they could tinker on going on to design things like iPhone for their children to use. These are real problems, but I just wanted to say that blog posts like these are not the problem; in fact I think they are beneficial as they allow more people to have access to this kind of information.

[svenpeter]

> it is, after all, a popular hobby of children who have nothing but time on their hands and access to the Internet. You certainly don’t need to buy hardware or have access to special training to get started.

yup, that's how I learned all of this!

> And, to be clear, I do think the current situation of closed systems is not great,

Agreed!

> and I do think that we do have a lot of engineers who grew up on open systems that they could tinker on going on to design things like iPhone for their children to use.

These days there are also more open system like, say, the Raspberry Pi. Back in my day (oh god, I'm growing old!) we had to first exploit video game consoles to get something comparable :-)

We made a slightly related argument when we didn't really feel like driving the WiiU homebrew scene almost 8 years ago (stop making me feel old!) [1]

[1] https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2013/espresso/

[saagarjha]

I think the situation is complicated. For hobbyists it certainly seems like the situation has gotten much better: there's lots of well supported, cheap microcontrollers and little boards for people to play with. But I think for the average user, the situation has regressed. I've heard of many an engineer who got into programming because they played around with BASIC and system extensions on their home computer, because those systems were open and easy to get started on doing that sort of stuff. These days, a child's computing device might be an iPad, or a Chromebook; they're certainly fine for getting work done, but they don't feel like they "invite experimentation" in the same way as systems of the past might've.

[photojosh]

My pet theory is that this view fails to recognise that we have moved to a culture of abundance* from the previous culture of scarcity. The lack of 'invitation to experiment' is 100% because there is an overabundance of distraction and lack of constraints.

* for the privileged! The digital divide is very real.

[m4rtink]

I still think there would certainly still be plenty interesting things to reverse engineer even if mainstream computing hardware would be open as it should be.

Some obscure HPC stuff, vintage mainframes, old games with long lost source code, historic military computing harware, CNC controllers & industrial SCADA devices, consumer device MCUs, advanced radio hardware - lot of stuff to dive into without really knowing what to expect. :)

[rowanG077]

Well it's not like you couldn't scratch that itch. Biology and medical sciences are the most hardcore reverse engineering club there is.