This is what we get when we embrace closed platforms. Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services and closed platforms will always manipulate you for their needs.
This is why I want to make a Free Hardware cell phone. I have made one wireless product already and wrote the frequency hopping stack myself, but something like a phone needs better data rates and a more advanced protocol.
Still, I dream of a simple cell phone that runs vanilla linux and has apps for IRC, XMPP, and the other functions you would want. The key component would be that the protocol would be designed from the ground up to respect user privacy, including a "broadcast" mode for towers where certain low data rate data channels are streamed without requiring any transmission from the handset. Then you could follow IRC or twitter during a protest without any risk of being probed for your location.
The protocol would also be built with anonymity in mind as much as possible, so phones would route data using rolling anonymous ID numbers and spoofing location could perhaps be trivial for plausible deniability (unless that opens up a vector for DoS).
I met the "Game of Drones" guys last night and they seemed interested in my wireless. I can only do 1km at 20kbps with current boards and 10km at 20kbps with amplified boards, but I think they might be interested in a solution that would work for FPV and that could be a good excuse to develop something that would also work for a cell phone.
I am 100% Free Hardware all the way, so maybe your dreams can come true eventually. :)
Hacker News is not proprietary software. It's open source under the Perl Foundation Artistic License 2.0 (FSF compatible). It's even written in Arc Lisp, which is nifty.
But free software can do things proprietary can't, like maintain trust with the user and provide maximum good. Think about all the good things people could do with facebook but have been blocked because facebook wants to protect their one narrow use case. Social Networks won't reach their full potential until they're totally free software, because facebook has such narrow interests.
So sure, you're happy for now, but billions of people are getting spied on and getting sick of it, and out of work programmers are increasing for number every year. As users get more fed up with proprietary companies jerking them around, I feel like people will start to demand Free Software. However this may be what all engineers who fall for Free Software think... I make Free Hardware so my plan is to prove why Free is better to people. We'll see if I succeed! I just recently realized that was the issue so I am working on that now.
This is why I want to make a Free Hardware cell phone. I have made one wireless product already and wrote the frequency hopping stack myself, but something like a phone needs better data rates and a more advanced protocol.
Still, I dream of a simple cell phone that runs vanilla linux and has apps for IRC, XMPP, and the other functions you would want. The key component would be that the protocol would be designed from the ground up to respect user privacy, including a "broadcast" mode for towers where certain low data rate data channels are streamed without requiring any transmission from the handset. Then you could follow IRC or twitter during a protest without any risk of being probed for your location.
The protocol would also be built with anonymity in mind as much as possible, so phones would route data using rolling anonymous ID numbers and spoofing location could perhaps be trivial for plausible deniability (unless that opens up a vector for DoS).
I met the "Game of Drones" guys last night and they seemed interested in my wireless. I can only do 1km at 20kbps with current boards and 10km at 20kbps with amplified boards, but I think they might be interested in a solution that would work for FPV and that could be a good excuse to develop something that would also work for a cell phone.
I am 100% Free Hardware all the way, so maybe your dreams can come true eventually. :)