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by PaulsWallet
1308 days ago
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This still assumes the person in question has the time or desire to tinker around with stuff. Not everyone is a tech geek who wants to tinker around with stuff. What the parent post is saying is these things are off-limits to those people. |
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> “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew. The story covers the history of phones, radio, television, movies and, finally, the Internet. All of these businesses are susceptible to the cycle because all depend on networks..
On a positive note, the current U.S. FTC has been making antitrust noises about tech companies and platforms, after years of relative inaction. There's a nascent global effort to enshrine "right to repair" in consumer hardware regulations, which aligns with circular economy initiatives and hardware shortages.
On a negative note, humans have deployed IoT "slave helmets" for realtime geofencing and control of construction workers with few legal rights, i.e. restricting not just the computing hardware, but the human body of the user, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675370
On a cage match note, banks and tech companies are at a 2023 global regulatory crossroads on the future of digital currencies, including crypto and CBDCs. The music/film industries led to DRM restrictions on consumer hardware. Now we have bank-vs-tech competition to be legal and physical custodian of private keys for digital currency wallets. How will that change computing hardware and supply chain security regulation?