However I have not heard any reports of anyone running an alternative OS on iPhone or iPad hardware.
With every passing year I continue to think it would be interesting to observe how users would choose if Apple hardware and Apple software were sold separately.
For a long time now—and an astonishing number of posts—you've been using HN basically to post agitprop. The trouble isn't your opinions—whatever they are, I'm sure plenty of other users agree with them, all of whom manage to use HN just fine. The trouble is that you've crossed into being a single-purpose account, which is not cool. HN threads are for conversations, not agendas. One can't have a conversation with a megaphone.
Since we already asked you once to stop and you don't seem interested in changing, I'm going to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Its not a duplicate. @mercer suggested the last paragraph should be removed, so thats what I did. Alas, the edit period had expired.
Edit: Notice that youve toned down your original reply, which had statements like "No one cares about your opinions about Google, Apple or Facebook." It seems I have agitated you. I apologise.
I didn't say "no one cares". Originally I wrote "We really don't care about your opinions of Apple or Facebook or Google". That is true, in the sense that if you flipped the high bit on all your opinions to turn them into the opposite opinions, we'd have the same moderation response.
But I've learned it's better not to word things that way. I can't easily stop myself from typing the first version of a comment more strongly than I know is helpful, so my solution is to sand off the sharp edges by editing, which I do a lot of.
I dont have any issue with editing comments. I use the edit feature constantly myself.
Im just making clear I am not trying to cause agitation. Thats not the intent.
I try to be sparing with opinions. I dislike having to type prefix or postfix statements with "IMO" again and again, but I want to make explicit what is only an opinion versus what are facts or observations because ("IMO") opinions are almost always worthless. I prefer facts and questions.
Most of the volume of posts I made the past few weeks were not opinions but were excerpts and pointers to articles: facts and some journalists opinions.
The truth is I waste too much time "interacting" with this addictive forum. Its a distraction.
If you ban me from ever posting anything ever again on HN, in all honesty, you will probably be doing me a favour.
I don't mean this in a mean way, but you do seem to care a little too intensely (about both fb/apple/etc. and the effects of that on your karma and whatnot). Wouldn't a good alternative be to just tone it down a bit, if possible? Because honestly I don't think you're wrong probably most of the time, so your contributions could be valuable.
I often struggle with my own conduct in social settings, and I've been called 'too intense' more than once, among other things. I don't know your particular story, or if there is a 'story', but I'd really hate the idea that you'd leave entirely instead of finding a way to be you and still fall within the acceptable range of HN commenters. And not get too addicted, of course :). I've been so unsuccessful at the latter that I decided to 'use it for good' and build my own little plugins so at least I'm learning something while being here.
However I have not heard any reports of anyone running an alternative OS on iPhone or iPad hardware.
With every passing year I continue to think it would be interesting to observe how users would choose if Apple hardware and Apple software were sold separately.
Would all users choose Apple software?
Expecting to take a little karma subtraction from the thought police for daring to entertain such a nonpermissible idea. Par for the course here and well worth it.
Comments from me that are skeptical of Apple are always downvoted. Complaining is acceptable but doubting is not. I have tested this over the years and it is remarkably consistent. Its both amusing and sad. The clicks can sometimes take a while to come, sometimes days, but they always come. Whether I add something silly acknowedging this phenomenon makes no difference. They come either way. Its just a small price to pay for being irreverent I guess. I have plenty of karma to spare. Well worth it.
Sometimes it seems like there is an underlying, unspoken presumption that no progress, no innovation making use of the internet could occur unless funding comes from exploiting data gathered from its use.
Sadly it has reached the point where some of that "progress" and "innovation" is simply in the mechanism for gathering more user data, unbeknownst to users. The beast is feeding itself. I have no interest in funding that, either directly or indirectly.
He believes that Facebook's board is susceptible to Silicon Valley groupthink and with Thiel there is clear conflict in interest due to Palantir.
He argues the board is "feeble" because Zuckerberg cant be sacked.
The author thinks Zuckerberg has made some "stupid" and "arrogant" moves.
For example last year as an experiment, he cut professionally produced news from the main newsfeed in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia making those countries "beta-testers" for "a political debate free of facts".
He recalls in 2007 he wrote two news stories about FB for a former employer. One was about some software that "connected to Facebook's then-new "social graph" and siphoned off personal information for resale." The other was about an advertiser, Vodafone, who pulled its ads from Facebook because it had been placed on a page promoting the British National Party.
He suggests that because stories like these could easily have been written as recent as last week, it shows how FB's problems are not new and how Zuckerberg has refused to acknowledge them for the last ten years let alone try to "fix" them.
He thinks FB should not be "fixed"; rather, it should be "broken and remade".
There really is a feeling of "too little, too late".
Not in the sense FB cannot make improvements. Of course they can.
What is too little, too late is reversing the direction that the Zuckerberg story has taken.
The media can build someone up and they can also destroy someone.
As the recent Rolling Stone article suggested in no uncertain terms, there has been great damage done to media and journalism (and arguably to society) by having FB as a "filter" between the reader and the news source.
They have not managed the relationships well enough it seems.
Anecdotally I have heard Zuckerberg discussed in the ways described in this article. I have no doubt he was trying to carefully craft an image for the American public.
But, today, who can trust this young man who has the personal lives of billions of people on his servers... now that they have seen how he reacts in a crisis? (Perhaps we should say "fails to react".)
There is a certain irony I see in the failure of Zuckerbergs PR team. Someone who has been in PR for many years once explained to me the effect of FB on PR. Needless to say, it wasnt positive. PR traditionally relied on the media and its ability to reach the targeted audience. To a large extent, FB controls this now.
Whether any of this will matter long-term, who knows? Ask Wall Street?
But if and when FB assures us that they have everything under control, I will have doubts. This is an evolving story. We are seeing only the tip of the FB iceberg.
I think I would pay $1-2/mo for a custom algorithm that eliminated ads and sorts content the way I want. But Facebook probably makes more money on certain users then that anyways.
It wouldn't be difficult to build a downloadable tool that kept your data on your own machine. RSS/Atom feeds + machine learning based on your own votes. You could integrate things like your email inbox and chats if you wanted to have a private timeline of what was going on in your life.
Destroying Facebook's business model is the red herring that noone brings up. Their ability or need to make money is not sacred and the company has failed its assumed role as a steward over the worlds' intimate details.
What needs to be done cannot be articulated in more unequivocal terms: mass data collection needs to die, starting with Facebook.
there's really only two possible revenue models for a company like facebook: using your data to target their own advertising, like they currently do, or selling your data to other ad networks and other parties who feel they could get some value out of it. Do you really want ads to go away, when the alternative is selling your data directly?
What has been the US legal/regulatory framework governing "privacy" that telecomunications operators have had to work within for the past thirty years?
Has Facebook had to operate within that same framework? As FB grew, has it been subject to the same restrictions?
Has Facebook, with the billions they have made through collecting and monetising user data, and with the competition they have given to the telecommunications providers, played any role in any "shrinking" of past privacy protections afforded telecom subscribers?
I have not lived very long but the big difference I see from past decades is that collecting user data and monetising it is viewed as a "core business".
While I was not yet born at the time, I am confident that the telegraph was not funded by reading peoples telegrams and trying to sell that information to merchants. As far as I know telephone service was not funded by recording peoples conversations and marketing the value of the collected information to advertisers. Even consumer internet service, first appearing in the 1990s, was not funded by collecting user data and trying to "monetise" it.
"Free" communication thanks to the internet has brought us a new type of company. It operates in a legal grey area, free from many of the restrictions that applied to its predecessors. Until proven otherwise, it appears that without collecting data on users and marketing it to third parties, this type of company cannot survive.
Yet, whether these new companies exist or not, as far as I can see communication over the internet is still "free". (The cost being the internet subscription fees.) Of course when a user chooses to utilise the "services" of these companies to "simplify" their internet use (or even their first introduction to the internet), that notion of "free" becomes rather complicated.
sites and isp were excempt of all common carrier laws. then fcc tried to add privacy considerations on isp similar to telcos, but that was shot down recently by republicans. granted, if the proposals also included sites/advertising, democrats would join in shutting it down.
What permission does the user give FB in terms of how FB can use the messages?
The message might "disappear" after a few seconds, but at that point FB may have already extracted the information they want from it, information they will use to further their business.
Assuming users want some sort of privacy, from whom is it that they want their messages to remain "private"?
Will there ever be options in FB "privacy settings" such as:
[ ] Do not share with Facebook
[ ] Do not share with advertisers, political campaigns, etc.
Absurdity aside, the mere feasibilty of this is itself debatable.
Do users want their messages to remain private from companies like Facebook?
How about from FB's clients, e.g., advertisers, political campaigns, hospitals, etc.?
How about from the rest of the general public?
We now know as confirmed by FB that this user data has
been shared for years. Perhaps FB can argue this was "informed consent".
However users can change their minds in light of more information. They should be able to revoke that consent going forward.
Will all that "leaked" user data FB has intentionally shared self-destruct after some period of time? Unfortunately, no.
It seems to me that, in the main, the parties that have the greatest incentive to monitor users messaging are in fact companies like FB and their clients.
They have a financial incentive that is in the aggregate far greater than any individual (petty criminal, etc.). Collecting user data has become their business. "It is literally just what we do." Period.
Finally, thanks to the explosive growth of single websites into vast monopolies like Facebook that extend their reach into nearly every corner of the internet, they, the companies behind these websites, are in the best position to do it.
It should be self-evident but maybe needs to be restated: These companies cannot protect the user from the company itself. The amount of trust required of the user depending on these websites is simply mind-blowing (from the perspective of someone who has lived in times when no such trust was necessary).
Thats only an opinion. I respect any disagreement and welcome karma subtraction as a means to express it.
Your statement on trust cannot be restated enough.
My additional concern is that, I do not use Facebook. I deleted my account like 10 years. Yet they still retain data on me, not only without my consent. They have the opposite of my consent. I explicitly told them to delete everything they had on me and I am opting out of their service.
Yet articles like this pop up time and time again[1]. There is talks about them scanning every picture on facebook for faces and building profiles of everyone, including non-users.
How am I, a person who has no Facebook and does not want anything to do with them supposed to stop them from monitoring and tracking me.
Imagine if in high school you found out some guy in your class was keeping records of the structure of your face, or the websites you visit and you confront them to stop and all they say is other students have allowed me to do this so I keep everyone's records to make it easier for me to track the people who gave me permission.
I assume everyone would not be comfortable with this, especially if they then go to sell that data to the students running for class president so they can manipulate your friends to harass you to vote for their candidate.
https://sivers.org/openbsd
http://www.sacrideo.us/openbsd-on-macbook/
However I have not heard any reports of anyone running an alternative OS on iPhone or iPad hardware.
With every passing year I continue to think it would be interesting to observe how users would choose if Apple hardware and Apple software were sold separately.
Would all users choose Apple software?