> If we allow companies to use our software to restrict us, this “open source DRM” could help them restrict us more powerfully and reliably. Those who wield the power could benefit by sharing and improving the source code of the software they use to do so. We too could read that source code—read it and weep, if we can't make a changed version run. For the goals of freedom and community—the goals of the free software movement—this concession would amount to failure.
I don't, because I care about security updates, and I don't want to have to choose between a highly degraded battery and giving up waterproofing.
> an 11 year old car
Crash safety has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. I suspect you're more likely to be killed in a car accident that you wouldn't be in a new car, than to be killed by one of the industries that California bans.
> think the US Navy could function just fine with a lot less budget and warships
If a powerful adversary goes to war with us, then we'd want a lot more, and only increasing then would be too late, because we'd lose the war first.
Vote out every single politician who supports this. If you can't successfully primary them, that means you might have to vote for someone of your non-preferred political party in the general.
except there are only two parties and both want this (when they are in power, otherwise they’ll use it to try and get elected and then proceed with implementing it)
How is that a bad thing? Our goal should be to maximize the amount of collateral damage that any censorship causes, with the ideal case being that the only two choices available to the censors are "no censorship at all" or "completely air gap yourself like North Korea".
That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.
I agree with you on the technical premise, but I think the point made was that the bigger the disruption, the greater the backlash and swift reversal, in ideal theory at least.
I'd hardly call decentralization a "hypothetical" issue: we've already seen governments are willing to issue gag orders so that we can't even find out what they're doing inside major companies. That's clearly a lot easier to do when there's a single central point of control.
If there's a single central point of control, then that also means an outage takes everything offline, instead of just 1-2 tools. That also makes it a bigger target for attackers.
It doesn't even need to be an attacker - CloudFlare themselves have managed to take down impressive portions of the internet more times than should be accepted just this year.
So do you apply the same logic for measures gov/Apple/etc put out about on-device scanning and e2e messaging stuff? It's always "hypothetical" until it hits the fan.
Sure, I agree there are bad things about extreme centralization. I'm just saying that the increased collateral damage of censorship is a silver lining of it, not one of the bad things about it.
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