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Sergey Brin Says Facebook, Apple and Gov't Biggest Threats To Internet Freedom
An anonymous reader writes "Google co-founder Sergey Brin has listed three threats to Internet freedom: Facebook, Apple, and governments that censor their citizens. Brin's comments were made to The Guardian: 'The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.'"
Those just happen to be his competitors! What a crazy coincidence!
But it seems to me he wants to freeze natural development of the market into something more friendly to his core business. I don't think doing so is in OUR best interest as WEB consumers.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
but, well, they could suck at it
Google will probably be fine $25K for interfering with federal investigation on Google's invasion of privacy, even among nonusers of their services.
Really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_calling_the_kettle_black
i would add an additional item, and move it to the top of the list - companies that aim to track everything you do and aggregate that in one place. you could also add the gov't agencies that collude with them to track citizens. This would put FB and Goog tied at the top of the list. Not sure who is first, but they're both trying.
If Sergey Brin is lamenting Apple's restrictive iOS platform as a threat to internet freedom, then why not get to the root cause of that restrictiveness, which is malware? Spam and malware is a huge reason why companies and developers don't adopt an "anything goes" approach.
Also, I find it highly ironic that he would point to other companies facilitating censorship by various governments, but then doesn't mention Microsoft or Google itself, which largely went along with China's censorship in order to gain market share. Furthermore, it's not as if Google makes me feel more free in terms of the information I have access too. If anything, I am constantly worried about what information they have about me, who they might allow to see that information, and whether I'm leaving a data trail on their servers that the FBI can issue a subpoena for without my knowledge. Google's ubiquity and interconnectedness across all of its services poses a risk to internet freedom through its ramifications on user privacy.
So in short, Mr. Brin, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
It's good to know that Sergey posts here. Hi Sergey!
Seriously, how are Facebook and Apple threatening the freedom of the internet? Sure, I'm restricted if I'm using Facebook or Apple technologies, but there are literally thousands of places I can post and do whatever I want. The internet is a very big place.
Also, the other day I tried to sign up for a second Google+ account but it didn't like the names I was choosing because it didn't consider them "real" names. Seems a bit rich to be accusing others of limiting freedom.
>> Should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
What, does intuitively mean listening to your gut? I guess you've gotta be pretty casual to observe it, then.
>> Apple is worse than Microsoft ever was. And I am no fan of Microsoft.
Obviously you don't know much about Microsoft, especially the current stuff. And you seem to know too much about Apple, especially the disinformation campaign stuff, aka the Swift Boat version of Apple. Reality is much more flavorful, you should try it sometime.
I would not hate Apple if they were not the control freaks that they are. If you deal with Apple in anyway, they own you. iTunes is exactly the type of control over the users that China and Iran want over their citizens.
Keeping the Internet open is critical for many reasons. Google has been made better by the competition it has faced relentlessly over the years. Google+ is better than Facebook because they have had to innovate relentlessly. Android is getting better because they have to keep making it better because of the competition that exists.
If Apple and Facebook had their way, there would be no competition. Three cheers for Brin.
Should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
Should be, but obviously it isn't. Plenty of voters hear "This bill is important to protect american jobs" and they support it. Even more people hear "We're preventing child porn" and support it. The people who want to gain control over the internet aren't taking those approaches because they believe those lines.
The irony: this comes from a company that wants to know everything about you and shifted its entire strategy to compete with Facebook. A company currently facing DOJ and EU antitrust investigations. A company that just got fined $25,000 for obstructing an FCC investigation into Street View cars' Wi-Fi accidentally scraping personal messages and website visits.
Not to mention that Android is officially endorsed by the Chinese government as its mobile platform of choice (customized as Open Mobile System). You know, the government that has political opposition jailed, censors the Internet, and spies on its citizens in a way that makes the NSA look modest.
Look, Sergey, there are advantages to an open platform, but you're as much of a threat as the others.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a coercive monopoly with guns is far worse than a mere merchant with a huge market share.
Infuriate left and right
This is unexpected. I have to wonder if this is an effort to deflect scrutiny from his own outfit.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Apple is worse than Microsoft ever was. And I am no fan of Microsoft.
But worse at what? The article title mentions that it is in regards to "internet freedom". From this perspective there is no comparing Apple to Microsoft - Apple pushes for standards and Microsoft attempted to lock users to Internet Explorer based technologies. Remember the days before OSX and Firefox - one would constantly run into sites that required IE and Windows.
I'm not going to try to defend Apple with regards to other issues, but you really can't compare them to Microsoft wrt "internet freedom". Microsoft is the only company I can think of that actually tried to monopolize the internet.
Nice rosy colored glasses you got there.
You clearly don't remember the days when you could not buy a PC without paying for Windows. Or how hard it was to use a MS Office competitor.
Apple has TONS of competition. They make up only a small fraction of all markets their in. Yet you call them worse than Microsoft. Interesting.
The summary is a summary of a ZDnet summation of a Guardian article.
If you actually read the Guardian article, the three things Brin lists as threats are:
He gives Apple and Facebook as examples of the third. Which the sensationalist media (including slashdot) twist around to try and incite a frenzy of condemnation.
The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
What does Apple's restrictions on their app store have to do with internet freedom?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Top 3:
- Facebook
- Apple
- Government
Top 4:
- Facebook
- Apple
- Government
- Google
apple and microsoft are flip sides of the same coin. both have supported censorship outright before changing their mind when it was a potential publicity disaster.
So I would indeed say that apple and microsoft are pretty much in the same boat entirely, yes.
i love apple as much as i love microsoft...
but point (d) applies as much to google as any of the foes sergey named (except governments - their cause is not as benign as money).
Apple pushes for standards? No, not really. For example, they're the only browser maker that does not employ _anyone_ to work on CSS specs. Google, Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla all have employees doing so. Apple? Not so much.
Also, Apple is explicitly refusing to submit things like -webkit-text-size-adjust for standardization (they claim it's their "proprietary technology"),.
Oh, and the little bit about waiting until touch events were just about standardized in the W3C (without Apple's involvement, because they chose to not join the working group), then declare they have patents on the standard as written and they refuse to license them. Had they joined the working group, they would have had to disclose this much earlier in the
process, but it's in Apple's interest to have touch events working better in iOS than in web pages, so people create iOS-specific content and not HTML that works on all devices.
The result of all of which is that if you browse on a phone or tablet you constantly run into sites that require WebKit, and more often than not require Mobile Safari to render right.
Apple _does_ however try hard to make it _look_ like it's pushing for standards. I'll grant you that much. And it's not trying to monopolize the internet; just to slow down its development so it won't compete on a level playing field with iOS as an application delivery platform.
Microsoft is the only company I can think of that actually tried to monopolize the internet.
better think a bit harder.
every company wants the internet to themselves. Google was probably the first to really go for it, then Facebook try to make their own internet locked off from the prying eyes of search engines... who knows, maybe Pinterest and Twitter will ally and raise an army?
the problem is - internet users own the internet. it's the 20th/21st century's ultimate gift to individual freedom. of course, you can't monetize the "free" in freedom, but many will try.
as far as MS goes... you could always install whatever you liked on your machine. Apple is not following that business model. they started with iOS, and they're rapidly porting the walled garden to their desktops as well (as they become less relevant as tablets, phones, etc become the preferred browsing platforms).
let's see how far you get installing Firefox, Opera or Chrome on an iPad. ...and just like with nations, our freedoms are being taken away under the guise of improved security.
"The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of (1) governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, (2) the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as (3) Facebook and (4) Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms". link
AccountKiller
The race for control of the seven kingdoms begins!
ha?
i'm pretty sure you could buy the components and pop them all together. if the end result costs more, then what are you complaining about? just means MS are subsidizing, but you can always hit it with fdisk and save yourself some cash (and essentially get a copy of windows for negative bucks, to be used for whatever you wish).
i've never seen a day when you couldn't just buy hardware and install everything yourself... oh, wait, yes i have. you couldn't buy up mac bits and assemble a mac but install DOS on it.
For what we consider 'the internet', a 'gateway' to unfettered free communication. It will be converted into a heavily restricted, monitored, and regulated, commercial content distribution system at some point. Just a matter of time.
"marketing" has destroyed most everything that they have touched: TV, radio, magazines, even simply driving down the road. There is no reason to think they wont destroy this too. And then you have the government that is scared to death.
There will be some hard core holdouts for freedom, but for the masses, its slipping away.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Avoiding the Privacy Apocalypse" .coms could do with every word submitted - ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSYXw87BWXo
Learn how Clinton era laws opened world wide telco interception as US firms wanted a level export price with the EU equipment makers.
Why should one side have to add expensive backdoors and deal with all the short term upgrade costs?
Learn how individual French school children where to be tracked and profiled by the state and what the UK wanted to do with every IM, email in real time.
The govs saw what keyword ad tracking by privacy loving US
they expected the same access.
The video is just a talk, no Q and A at the end
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Sergey Brin has listed three threats to Internet freedom: Facebook, Apple,
...and no mention made at all of Facebook's recent scary support of the SOPA-heir: CISPA? Why wouldn't google want to tar Facebook with that one? ...might it be that google likes CISPA?
Why do you still have yours?
I also don't own any Apple products, and have no plans to buy any in the future, either; I don't recommend anyone buy those, either.
I'd like to remind everyone that you don't need any of these things in your life in order to have a happy, productive life, and in my opinion you're more likely to have a happy, productive life if you don't have them. While you're at it, stop wasting money on cable and satellite TV, and smartphones and the overpriced data plans that they come with, too. Read more books, interact with more people in person, and go outside more often and move your bodies around. I can almost guarantee that these things will make your healthier and happier than what they're replacing.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Link
Link
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Correction, Apple pushes for locked standards (h.264 codec, anyone?). Pushing a standard isn't always inline with pushing towards a free and open internet if the standards require putting the implementors at the mercy of patent holders who may or may not choose to squeeze them for every dime they have.
If by "push for standards" you mean "lock in to proprietary iOS", then yes, Apples supports standards.
If you're talking about their recent retreat on IPv6 support, then no, Apple does not support standards.
Both Apple and Microsoft support standards when it suits their list of checklist customer requirements, and do their damndest to lock in their customer base once they've gotten sign-off on the initial deployment.
Hell, even companies like IBM, Oracle, Sybase, et. al. try to lock people and companies in with proprietary extensions to "standards" like JEE and SQL by providing unique add-ons their competitors don't have. It's the nature of business to try to keep your customers.
Some just play dirtier than others. And from what I see, Apple plays amongst the dirtiest of all, suing for "patent infringement" by competitors instead of negotiating patent agreements, while they try to lay claim to the most basic of user input metaphors that should never have been allowed to be patented in the first place.
I mean, seriously, what is so creative about using a finger gesture to unlock a phone or tablet? What is so mind-bogglingly complex about "stroke up" that it deserves a patent? What's next -- claiming that finger gestures are somehow inherently different than mouse gestures?
I better shut up now. I'm probably giving them ideas. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Aside from throwing mud at Google's competitors, he is deliberately mistaking Web for Web Search. A library is the books in it, not the book index, and some of the books are in the "restricted" area. So what?
You will be absorbed. Your individuality will merge into the unity of good!
Palm trees and 8
I have built the last 4 PCs I have owned, and was not required to buy Windows at any point. Let's see you "build" an Apple from scratch. Let's also see you try to buy a Mac without OS X.
"But this one goes to 11!"
the monopoly is accountable to you through your vote. it is an extension of your will, not an imposition of an alien will on you
in fact, if you were to remove the monopoly, there would be no absence of monopoly, the merchant would merely fill the power vacuum, and he isn't accountable to you. he's accountable to the quest for more profits, at any cost, including the raping of your freedom. then he buys the guns and points them at you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_Government_Services,_Inc.
for the modern parable, see blackwater. what would blackwater become with no government already in place? the police, accountable to the corporation, not to you, which your real police department is
so your opinions and your views are illogical and historically wrong. they speak of a propagandized individual (corporate funded propaganda like fox news, the real threat to your freedom, not your government, which you VOTE for)
of course, where your government doesn't represent your will, it is because it is bought out by... corporate financial interests
heal YOUR government by removing the corporate infection, and understand the real threat to your freedom: the merchant you allude to
but make YOUR government your enemy, and see the corporate financial interests as harmless, and you are basically giving away your own hard won freedoms won by your forefathers (see pinkerton's above) to forces which have no interest in your freedoms at all, especially when your freedoms represent a threat to bottom line. then hiring goon sqwuads, with no government around to stop them, makes perfect capitalistic sense
there is your daily dose of anti-propaganda, i hope you aren't kneejerking too much right now
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Walled Gardens or "channels" each with specific content heavily protected and of course crack down on the discussions going on over the net blogs and forums.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Apple pushes for standards and Microsoft attempted to lock users to Internet Explorer based technologies.
Apple pushes for standards? No, not really.
Like many companies, they push for standards only if they're in a position of weakness. When they achieve dominance, they lock things down.
Examples of when they were in a position of weakness:
Operating systems, so they released Darwin with MacOS X
Web browsers, so they released Webkit with Safari
TCP/IP service discovery, so they released DNS-SD and MDNS with Bonjour
Examples of when they were in a position of strength:
Facetime
Fairplay
App Store
Have a nice time.
Apple's history? Apple used to be hacker friendly... In the Apple II days. Walled gardens and exclusive markets are NOT hacker friendly. Nor are their policies of suing people who make unauthorized devices intended to work with Apple products hacker friendly.
There are a lot of Apples that could have been, that would have been many times more exciting. Apple had an early shot at buying Amiga, but declined. Wozniak wanted the Mac to be Apple II compatible or to sell a cheap Apple compatibility board, but Jobs won those arguments. IIGS could have been faster than the Mac (might have required an extra clock crystal for video), again didn't happen.
Apple didn't start out evil, but they became so. Some of the opportunities that led them that way shouldn't have happened the way they did, like iTunes. Good one, RIAA...
Having programmed Macs in a networked university lab in the mid 90s, I can provide numerous historical examples of Apple being hacker unfriendly. Anyone wanting to work in lengthier tasks in pascal or C there snuck off and did it in a different department's PC lab, where the entire network crashing at once wouldn't wipe out everyone's work at random intervals.
And what if you were referring to Apple's involvement in the calendaring (CardDAV, CalDAV) working groups? Multicast DNS (Bonjour)? How about HTTP live streaming? Is Apple perfect? No. Is Apple anywhere near as nefarious as Google or Rambus? No. At least with Apple I am their *customer*. With Google and Facebook, I'm the product.
The revolution will be mocked
As a matter of fact, Apple is a much smaller danger to Internet freedom than Google. :) )
A person can easily avoid using Apple products or systems (and save a ton of money while doing so). They are popular, but surely not mandatory. It is trivial to buy hardware and software that is not made by Apple (and most of the world still does
At the same time, it's very hard to escape Google tentacles. Large percentage of web sites (perhaps majority) use Google-provided webmaster tools to track visitors and send information back to Google. So, unless user employs fairly sophisticated tools and does so very consistently - the only way to avoid Google grasp is to use virtually no Internet at all (certainly not for web browsing of any kind). That's a pretty big threat if you ask me.
But hey, what's obvious facts vs. Sergey bashing some of his biggest competitors :)
Slashdot has fallen quite a bit for such a misinformed, rambling post gets modded insightful.
It really comes down to the founders of the companies. Microsoft has taken on the personality of Bill Gates - lacks imagination, cares more about money than good products, etc.
You're projecting a lot of MS's business practices onto Bill Gates, conveniently ignoring the other players. Someone who lacks imagination does not drop out of Harvard to start a new company that managed to revolutionize desktop computing.
Someone who cares more about money than good products would not start the Buffets-Gate Giving Pledge, and contribute significant portion of their wealth via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Apple has taken on the personality of Steve Jobs with a little bit of Woz thrown in - obsessive compulsive about solid products with good design, outwardly controlling but hacker friendly at heart.
OTOH, Steve Jobs cut all corporate charity programs after taking over in 1997.
While the original Apple products where hacker friendly, that certainly was not the case after Steve Jobs returned.
The reason Apple is kicking ass right now is because it does such a good job at constantly producing products that work well, look good, and don't change dramatically all the time. They may not have the highest specs at any given time but the user knows what to expect and that they can expect a pretty good device.
When people say Apple is evil it just tells me they don't own any Apple products and know nothing of Apple's history. They're usually wannabe nerds that can barely use anything other than Windows and usually they think their awesome at Linux because they've managed to install the flavor of the month baby distro. They think hacking is taking a device that was expressly made for being hacked and following step by step directions. Probably they have absolutely no sense of taste either - they think their Dell Inspiron One is comparable to an iMac.
This is a load of fanboy horseshit I'm not going to even bother debunking.
The internet is dead. Love live the inter-nets.
Taco lickers.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Let me summarise your piece here:
1. Microsoft & Bill Gates have no imagination and style. They make crappy products and only care about your money. (Almost a line verbatim from The Saviour(TM) himself).
2. Apple is wonderful and has the soul of Woz.
3. People who install Linux and install "the baby distro" (which is what, exactly? Some super easy to use Linux distro that does everything for you and doesn't need a CLI ever - coz that would be wonderful for the year of the linux desktop) are idiots.
4. People who follow HOWTOS are not smart.
5. Dell are ugly and Apple are beautiful.
Either you're a complete fanboy or you work for Apple marketing or are you just out of touch completely.
Apple hasn't had the soul of Woz since the early 80's. You might not have noticed but Apple is very, very concerned with making money and very, very concerned with not letting people "hack" their devices. They go out of their way to make jailbreaking difficult and every update tries to re-imprison jailbroken phones. Apple are in no way hacker friendly. Not even a little bit. Apple has the soul of Steve Jobs and if Bill Gates had no imagination and only cared about money then Steve Jobs had dreams only of destroying competition and being a total control freak.
I'm typing this on my MBA, btw. I'm not an Apple hater - but you're living in a dream world if you genuinely believe what you wrote above.
A Dell Inspiron is comparable to an iMac. A whitebox from your local PC shop is comparable to an iMac. All home computers are comparable to an iMac - that's why they're in competition with one another and that's why the iMac doesn't sell anywhere near as many as the Dells and the Whiteboxes.
The reason Apple is kicking arse right now is because they're selling completely (to the masses) unhackable appliance fashion devices, like iPods, iPhone and iPads - not because Apple Computer sales are up because they're still not really any higher than they've ever been.
If Google is the Disneyland of the whole internet why the f*ck I cannot access google/groups without a google account?
Apple is worse than Microsoft ever was. And I am no fan of Microsoft.
But worse at what? The article title mentions that it is in regards to "internet freedom". From this perspective there is no comparing Apple to Microsoft - Apple pushes for standards and Microsoft attempted to lock users to Internet Explorer based technologies. Remember the days before OSX and Firefox - one would constantly run into sites that required IE and Windows.
It's so cute you believe that. Apple is trying to do the exact same thing as Microsoft, trying to shoehorn everyone into using their standards, h.264 which Apple owns a lot of patents on, Apples version of HTML5 and so forth. The only difference is instead of just forcing their customers to use their products and their protocols _ONLY_ they are trying to force the IEEE to make their protocols standard for everyone.
In that regard, Apple is worse then Microsoft ever were.
I'm not going to try to defend Apple with regards to other issues, but you really can't compare them to Microsoft wrt "internet freedom". Microsoft is the only company I can think of that actually tried to monopolize the internet.
No you cant compare Microsoft to Apple on "Internet Freedom".
Microsoft has never tried to control everyone by putting them in a walled garden.
MS never tried to control the Internet, only try to make everyone use Windows and IE (which everyone does, right, no one uses Firefox or Chrome, right). Apple is trying to control the Internet by saying "No, you can never have flash, ogg or WebM on our platforms, you MUST use OUR protocols and ONLY our protocols". Windows has always allowed you to run whatever you wanted, even when it was against Microsoft's best interests.
MS is evil, but evil entirely as a side effect of their unbridled greed. If giving out flowers and saving kittens was highly profitable, Microsoft would be the foremost floral distributor and feline retrieval company in the world. Apple is evil at the core and cares for nothing else but control over everything you do.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
...because if they did, they might remember a little incident of assisting the chinese government with its great firewall. And those pesky others? Coincidentally competitors. For a company with such deep search capabilities, they are amazingly blind sighted when it concerns themselves.
The FBI can never go bankrupt
Not technically true, for details see "Greece".
Freedom, Privacy, Internet
Pick
2 out of 3
Get it wrong you == LOSE
Apple pushes for standards? No, not really. For example, they're the only browser maker that does not employ _anyone_ to work on CSS specs. Google, Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla all have employees doing so. Apple? Not so much.
Also, Apple is explicitly refusing to submit things like -webkit-text-size-adjust for standardization (they claim it's their "proprietary technology"),.
Oh, and the little bit about waiting until touch events were just about standardized in the W3C (without Apple's involvement, because they chose to not join the working group), then declare they have patents on the standard as written and they refuse to license them. Had they joined the working group, they would have had to disclose this much earlier in the
process, but it's in Apple's interest to have touch events working better in iOS than in web pages, so people create iOS-specific content and not HTML that works on all devices.
Apple does have people working on CSS standards. They also have people working to patent the implementations to those standards too (pay attention to the patent applications--there's a surprise coming in the next six months or so).
Greece can go bankrupt because it is in the Eurozone and not in direct control of its own money supply. The U.S. can avoid bankruptcy by simply printing more dollars. That has ill effects, but it is not going bankrupt.
California could go bankrupt, but the FBI never will.
You think you are the customer but take a look at this quote from steve jobs,
"Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing."
Looks like you are the product.
Apple pushes for standards? No, not really. For example, they're the only browser maker that does not employ _anyone_ to work on CSS specs. Google, Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla all have employees doing so. Apple? Not so much.
Exactly. Google is on their own out there, without any help from Apple. Thank goodness they came up with WebKit to build Chrome wi...
Wait, what's that? WebKit is actually Apple's project? Apple encouraged web rendering standards compliance so much they actually help support Google in using their web renderer on a competing platform?
How very closed of them.
While the original Apple products where hacker friendly, that certainly was not the case after Steve Jobs returned.
I don't buy it.
Apple before Steve Jobs. Fully closed source. Unfriendly and unstandard hardware.
Apple after Steve Jobs. POSIX. Intel x86 hardware. OS X with about half the components open source and hosted by Apple. Bought and maintain CUPS, the printing system for both OS X and Linux (with Linux support still going strong.)
After Steve Jobs, Apple went from a fully closed company to a half open, which is certainly more hacker friendly than it used to be. After Jobs, you could actually download and modify the kernel to OS X. Couldn't do that before Jobs.
Heck, this was one of his first products after he returned:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW3TMPirrXs
That's the way! Stop reading before someone touches your Object Of Faith with filthy hands.
Yeah, they opensourced WebKit (I wonder how much choice they had on that count, considering that it was based on KDE's KHTML). But they also hinder web standards with submarine patents.
Apple is happy to work on the WebKit _implementation_.
They are not nearly as interested in actually working on _standards_.
Don't confuse "open source project" or even "open governance project" with "pushes for standards". Apple pushes for standards exactly when it suits them, in other cases it simply ignores them, and in yet other cases it actively obstructs them.
I'd argue that any organization, whether it be a Government or an business having control over the internet is a direct threat to it. Including Google. I think the one thing that the internet has taught us is just how shackled we were before it came along. The guards are quickly trying to put the chains back in place, and in fact, replacing the older ones with new and improved ones. We must all hope, that we'll eventually find a way to communicate that can not be controlled, monitored, manipulated... Technology is both freedom and a prison.
You can install Opera on the iPad, your point being?
Monstar L
They are not nearly as interested in actually working on _standards_.
Yeah, you're reaching... Needs citation. You need a concrete example of Apple actually seeking to block web standards.
Apple has worked closely with Google and accepted patches on WebKit. (Which brings them no value.) They helped Konquerer merge back in their changes (again, of no value). They ported to Windows, which doesn't really give them much.
But please, humor me. Cite situations in which Apple is actually acting to block open standards. And because it's the first thing people usually reach for, I'm not interested in H.264 because I think there are great technical reasons for H.264. But for such an abhorrent company like Apple, you should have no problem coming up with other concrete examples.
Yes, Apple is so evil that a part of the W3C that has existed for the last decade is having to carry out it's role in examine an Apple patent which Apple has so far not threatened the W3C with.
Evil I tell you.
I bet this is the first time that the W3C has ever had to do this, because Apple is so uncharacteristically horrible. If I look through the PAG's records, I should find no other times they had to review patents that might threaten the W3C, right?
You Willy_me have been tricked into using inferior browsers my friend. ... on a more serious note I was a mac and powerpc fan in the 90s before I discovered NT. Apple was expensive but I did not have bullshit like 640k limit that had many hacks like extended vs expanded ram, autoexec.bat hacks because a mouse drive used the same expanded ram for a game ... even though 6 megs of extended were unused, playing with Dos 6 memmaker, and the horrible graphics performance of Windows 3.11 and the complaints over crappy PCs were endless.
The 1984 mac was 10 years ahead of Windows and just worked. I told a friend in school I would have wished Steve Jobs became the next Bill Gates.
My God do I regret saying that as of last year. Bill Gates is a cute kitten in comparison to what he is doing to Andriod users. Bill gates used deceptive business practices and had lots of crappy code for programmers to include to encourage win32 only development, but at least he didn't sue every computer maker for having round corners.
If Steve Jobs won my guess is he would sue every maker who used a mouse, graphical interface, and maybe X itself. Linux would be command line only to this day as Apple would send out ninja lawyers to have anything resemble a font, icon, or widget. Sure he didn't invent the gui but he is known to sure as hell go nuclear and patent implementations instead of copyright.
The World Wide Web would be an Apple only experience if Jobs had his way and his dream of being the next IBM materialized. We have seen this with the IPad and his war agaisn't Android and Samsung.
MS right now is fading. It is only strong in the corporate market because that market is 7 years behind the consumer market in this economy. With Metro/Win 8 failing and IOS and Android taking over the drive will be for HTML 5 apps on any device. MS wont be part of that. We will see what will happen in 5 years from now. My guess would be corporations will be using tablets with keyboards running Citrix virtualized sessions of IE 6/XP (still) and salesforce.com and other cloud based apps in HTML 5. Windows 7 will still be around but it will be fading in 5 years year from now as it ages and no one will be using PCs anymore.
http://saveie6.com/
Google is turning into the new IE of this decade.
HTML 5 is ok, but many hacks are needed for Javascript compared to other browsers and its getting quirky. Not to mention pepper, SPDY, and its own Dart screams that it wants to rewrite standards for their own. In Chromes credit it is not crappy as IE 6 was but starting with IE 4 and then IE 5 MS included innovations with things like AJAX but started to get buggy. Chrome seems to be Google's version of it.
If Google had the market pull like MS did in 2001 by including it with every PC you bet it would quickly turn into a seperate development and be just as bad as IE 6. Google is no different. Netscape was turning crappy too and would be just as bad and is worse to develop CSS for than IE 6 believe it or not if you talk to old timers.
MS today is at least trying to do good as they are scared shitless they are no longer in charge of the world wide web and software development and is making IE 10 a great browser surprisngly. Just comes to show no one company should have that much power. Facebook has too much in the social space and a competitor would clean them up.
http://saveie6.com/
At its roots, WebKit is actually KHTML, part of KDE. It's a derivative of a GLP-licensed product. De-facto, it is *not* Apple's renderer.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I remember this little company called AOL that locked it's users down too...
> You need a concrete example of Apple actually
> seeking to block web standards
I gave two concrete examples: -webkit-text-size-adjust and touch events.
They also volunteered to edit a few CSS specs (transitions, animations, transforms) and then did absolutely nothing. At this point other editors are working on it, but the specs won't be done until much later than otherwise; had Apple been honest that they had no plans to actually work on them, someone else would have picked them up much earlier.
They obviously can't _block_ standards forever, with the exception of patents they refuse to license (and in that situation the standard would be changed to work around the patent). But they're sure trying to make the sure the standards process is as slow as it can be in many cases.
> Which brings them no value.
Sure it brings them value. It keeps Google from forking WebKit. How is that not value for Apple?
> They ported to Windows, which doesn't really give
> them much.
They ported to Windows because they thought they would get something out of it (e.g. maybe market share for Safari on Windows).
The problem is not the patent disclosure. That's normal, and required for W3C members.
The problem is deliberately not joining the working group so they could disclose the patents as late as they could in the standards process, and thus make it take as long as possible to standardize touch events.
Again, the issue is whether Apple is actually "pushing for standards" or whether they're "delaying them as much as possible". In many cases, it's the latter.
really? i hadn't looked that up.
i'll let my wife know as it'll slightly diminish her frustration with her iPad, which will indirectly effect me in her slightly raised level of satisfaction... less work for me in bed i suppose :)
Facebook has too much in the social space and a competitor would clean them up.
many have tried...
i would have loved Diaspora to be more than just dick pictures.
That's the best you can come up with?
You're not going back far enough. I'm referring to the Steve Wozniak days at Apple.
I'm also referring to the hardware lockdown in Apple products over the past decade.
You mean back in the days of the original Mac with no slots or expansion? Or Apple providing absolutely no source code to users from it's inception? Or Apple not allowing competitors to run it's OS and suing them if they tried, which happened frequently with the Apple II?
I'm really struggling to see how Apple today is less hacker friendly than the Apple of the early 80s. I can still go out today and buy a Mac with four expansion slots, four open drive bays, two optical drive bays, upgradable RAM, and replaceable processors. Arguable more hacker friendly than the Apple II. Yes, Apple makes more closed off systems like the Mac Mini, but that's a choice I can make as a consumer. And unlike the early 80s Apple, I can download source code for the operating system, or even load on the operating system from their chief competitor, and be provided support and drivers to do so.
Again, I'm really having trouble buying your argument. No, Apple isn't as open as Linux, or a few of the Android vendors, but compared to early Apple? Apple after Steve returned was far more open than Apple ever was since the Apple II was released.
The Apple II was more open by far than the macintosh, which is where steve jobs took the helm and directed them down the closed path. The only reason os x has anything to do with unix and bsd is the fact that copland (the original successor to the old mac os) was an abysmal failure and taking far too long.
Apple (well more appropriately at the time NeXt) used open source technology when it couldn't be bothered to develop it's own (which is fine) and then placed proprietary things on top of it to lock people out. A perfect example being quartz, you won't find it in darwin.
After Jobs, you could actually download and modify the kernel to OS X. Couldn't do that before Jobs.
The fact that most of that code was already out in the open and bsd licensed and not even written by them had nothing to do with that I'm sure.
Apple, especially with steve jobs has always had the aim of total control of the user experience. Steve jobs himself was a control freak, this is what many of his followers loved and the reason the interfaces wound up as they were. A few examples.
A clip is not a user-serviceable part.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Whether they are corporatists or socialists, what they have in common is not just a distrust of people thinking for themselves, but a fear of it. They are paternalistic as hell, thinking only they know what is good for everybody. Big business and big government just recycle executives. They squabble about the details, but the essence is the same: Big Brother, victimless morality laws, and endless wars.
The solution is individual power. Of course, statists will say that is laissez-faire to the max, but they are wrong; the so-called laissez-faire which is reputed to have existed is nothing more than big business and big government helping each other maintain the status quo.
Instead of the government controlling every step of the justice system, let victims prosecute, of course with penalties for bogus prosecutions, but in particular, let them prosecute companies for sloppy, inconsistent, or arbitrarily enforced policies, and eliminate all victimless crimes which let busybody Little Brothers ape Big Brother. That will keep monopolies in check, and keep the government from choosing what crimes to investigate and what criminals (both people and companies) to prosecute.
Anything of that sort scares the statists half to death. Only they have the wisdom and experience and farsightedness to guide the masses. That is why they prosecute morality, especially victimless crimes, and why they start wars and build empires -- it provides a distracting excuse for their heavy hand. The last thing they want is a society of free people.
Infuriate left and right
Libertarians are not the enemy of anyone except Big Brother. Their whole mantra is to leave people to their own devices.
You seem to think Big Business and Big Government are enemies of each other. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are the same, differing only in tiny squabbles which distract voters. The last thing either wants is for people to actually run their own lives and take the corporations to task.
If you actually think the coercive monopoly is going to use their guns to help people battle merchants, you are living in some weird alternate dream world. The only merchants who get in trouble are the few who don't go along with the other merchants and their government buddies.
That's the weirdest thing about Occupy Wall Street. They identify half the problem, corporations out of control, but then they refuse to see the other half, which is Big Brother actively assisting them. They are one and the same, and the government will never do anything to the 1% just because a few 99% rabble camp out in parks and shout for the government to come rescue them. Only individuals taking charge and upsetting BOTH Big Government and Big Business will solve anything.
Infuriate left and right
On the contrary, Apple hates standards. When they can (due to market share prominence), they will break those standards. The only reason Apple has 'embraced standards' is because they've been such a negligible force in the market that they've got to do so or nobody would be able to communicate with Apple users.
See: App Store/iTunes and compatibility. When they were the only game in town, they didn't play nice and it was hell to try to get your purchased media in a fashion you so desired, outside the realm of Apple.
Another good example of the lack of standard embrace is Mail App. It stores it's mail in a non-standard format (not mbox, not Maildir, etc.) and, at least until fairly recently, didn't offer the option to export or convert mail.
Apple is a follower, and has been one for some time. They don't do the embrace and extend, but they also don't do much more than embrace. Often, this results in somewhat broken implementations (Preview.app springs to mind).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Though not the worst offender, Google's ability to mislead, sell data, etc puts it up there, between Apple and Farcebook.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Webkit isn't Apple's project. WebKit was around for years before Safari came about - since 1998, when KHTML was released. It wasn't called WebKit until Apple forked it.
Yeah, that's right. It's successful because it forked from an Open Source project.
Ironically, Safari has always managed to languish behind the other WebKit based browsers in terms of actual functionality. Word has it that WebKit2 will likely just be a backport of features which have been in Chrome for some time...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I agree with Sergey. Facebook and other such sites represent the opposite of what the Internet was meant to be. Instead of creating an open facebook or twitter protocol for anyone to implement, they've closed it off and put a wall around their own little internet. Imagine the same was done in the early days; instead of SMTP we'd just have Hotmail. Instead of HTTP we'd have AOL. Eeeewww
Go back before the Mac came out, and you'll find the 'good' Apple. The original Apple I was sold as a motherboard kit (hard to get much more open than that); the Apple II series was designed to let users poke at the guts, replace & upgrade parts, add any of a countless number of third-party cards & hardware of all kinds, and modify/customize as much as we could manage with the help of the various books about its hardware. For a while there, in fact, there were even legal Apple II clones sold in stores, and obviously there was an overabundance of third-party software.
The Macintosh was the first Apple system to be tightly locked-down, in keeping with the way Jobs wanted Apple to evolve. As soon as the idealistic Woz was no longer around to champion the highly profitable Apple II line (which financed all of the pricy projects Apple undertook like the Mac, Lisa, etc.) Jobs did his best to eliminate it. That was how the company/products started shifting towards the locked-down approach they have now, almost destroying & greatly diminishing the former behemoth in the process.
Apathy Sucks, Nobody for President!
When people say Apple is evil it just tells me they don't own any Apple products and know nothing of Apple's history.
You are a moron. Of course when someone says that Apple is evil they don't own any of their fucking products. Why would you own products from a company that sucks? If I don't want my balls chained to Apple, then of course I don't own a bunch of Apple crap.
They're usually wannabe nerds that can barely use anything other than Windows and usually they think their awesome at Linux because they've managed to install the flavor of the month baby distro. They think hacking is taking a device that was expressly made for being hacked and following step by step directions.
Riiight.They are too stupid to use Apple stuff. You realize that when someone claims ignorance and stupidity in technology that the default response is to shove some Apple products into their face, right? It isn't technical nature of Apple's locked down products that makes them what you give grandma. Apple stuff is literally built so that a moron can use them. They ask themselves, "If I was a moron, how would this work?" and then make it that way. It isn't a bad design philosophy if you are shooting for mass market appeal, but it is about as far from nerd nirvana as you can get.
More to the point, your dull anti-nerd scree is the normal nonsense that slathering Apple fanatics love to babble on about. I am really sorry that you feel like an inadequate nerd, or that you think that being a nerd is a bad thing. My condolences on your insecurities.
Probably they have absolutely no sense of taste either - they think their Dell Inspiron One is comparable to an iMac.
If by "taste" you mean dull conformity to a single aesthetic shared by like half the nation, then yes, people who don't get Apple crap have no "taste". Of course, I suppose you think that someone who buys local coffee instead of that burnt Starbucks crap also has no "taste".
Actually .. recent versions of OS/X have been dumbed down and the overall strategy is to merge OS/X with iOS, which is, at its core, already OS/X. There's an appstore now for macs, and native OSX apps get seriously dumbed down.Eg iCal, Mail or the admintools. Your data is moved into the iCloud, wether you want it or not. IOS is just a subset of OS/X, therefore, if you run OS/X, you run iOS.
Last I checked the copyright laws in the US were enforced by the FBI. Rather than being a simple dispute that could be settled in civil court.
Is there really a difference when a big company can make a few phone calls to have you raided at gun point?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So Sergei, when exactly will I be able to look at all the information Google has on me
Here you go:
https://www.google.com/ads/preferences
https://www.google.com/dashboard
and share it with other search engines if I so choose?
Download from here, and upload it to any service you like:
https://www.google.com/takeout/
Oh...I can't huh, wow, your garden is so very, very open I cannot believe it
Since you actually can get your data, perhaps you're willing to reconsider that statement?
When I buy stuff at the supermarket the supermarket makes a profit and the suppliers of that product make a profit. Some suppliers will not make a profit from me since I choose to buy alternative products.
I don't see how i am the product, I am the customer for the supermarket and the supermarket is the customer for the supplier, and much like me the supermarket chooses which suppliers to buy from.
I haven't got any apple products so i am not apples customer or product I get to make choices of what products i buy and where I buy them from.
Even where Google gets the opportunity to target ads at me I still get the choice of buying from one of Googles customers or not. It is mostly not. On occasion I will buy a specific application from the android market, the ones I have bought tend to be cheap and work well and generally there has been a free version which has allowed me to evaluate the product i buy or don't buy.
I would guess that websites such as slashdot probably do more to influence me when it comes to buying things I probably will buy a raspberry pi eventually as i have a few idea's of what I will do with it however until the ordering backlog is cleared I doubt it. Slashdot is almost certainly been the influence behind the netbooks i have bought and the android devices I own (although the specific products were chosen by me.
Is it just me or is iPod becoming generic? Seems that it's becoming the walkman of mp3 players
People seem to use the expression buy a cheap iPod to refer to any mp3 player...
So even "iPod" buyers are not necessarily Apple customers or products.
The only way customers can become products is if they lose the ability to choose what they buy.
We are still some distance from that, although it is getting closer, with each litigation battle that takes place. It doesn't matter who wins, most of the time since we all get to pay a little more when the spat gets settled. We lose all the time to be honest every time a brain dead implementation of a function takes place it seems to be because someone got a patent on the better method. What it means is that an Apple device for example is not as good as it could be and neither is its competing product.
It also tends to mean that some products will die close to conception due to existing patents and copyrights and that is what really sucks. We could have better products than are on the market today if it wasn't for the damn IP war.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
It's true that all the information Google collects enables huge privacy infringement in scale that only Facebook can match, barely. I don't think for a second that Google as company is in any significant way better that others, but you must give it to Google that they at least initially tried. Some of that naivety is still there.
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Riiight.They are too stupid to use Apple stuff. You realize that when someone claims ignorance and stupidity in technology that the default response is to shove some Apple products into their face, right? It isn't technical nature of Apple's locked down products that makes them what you give grandma. Apple stuff is literally built so that a moron can use them. They ask themselves, "If I was a moron, how would this work?" and then make it that way. It isn't a bad design philosophy if you are shooting for mass market appeal, but it is about as far from nerd nirvana as you can get.
Sometimes it's even taken to the extreme. Single light that will indicate all possible statuses plus 4 arrow buttons for data entry? Yeah that's right, I'm talking about you AppleTV, you fucking worthless piece of shit.
AHHAHAHAHA, you honestly think thats even a fucking FRACTION of the data they store on you? If so I have a lovely "open system" I think you would be interested in.
Monstar L
Ex-Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, gave some contrasting statements in the past. See: Privacy Worries Are For Wrongdoers.
On related subject Facebook is one supporter of controversial CISPA law project.
Google is by now means perfect, by I still trust then more than the alternatives.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
How is that contrasting? Brin never mentioned privacy as one of his concerns. Also, it was by an entirely different person, who's now an ex-employee of the company.
I also never liked Schmidt. He seemed to much the manager, forced on to the actual productive people by the venture capitalist. He sounds like a bit of a sleaze, both personally and professionally.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
They can't even break the top 3!
Like anyone can even know that
Mostly agree. Only 1 correction. Eric Schmidt is still a Google "empoyee" (if you can call it that way). He is executive chairman.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
A company so desperate to take over everything, that they back up Verizon on destroying wireless net neutrality.
The biggest enemies of open web are the wireless carriers, but Google is too afraid of them to say anything about THOSE, instead it just joins the club and helps them further to achieve their controlled-web interests.
MacBook Air.
Are you the guy who used to post those "GTFO with your filthy beige hands" trolls?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
App Store iGun
The fact that Facebook and Apple are Google's competitors in certain markets -- namely advertising and mobile eco-system -- doesn't diminish his point that a walled-garden, unsearchable web (Facebook) is a poor substitute for what we had 10 years ago, and that a walled-garden mobile eco-system that ties you to a single hardware vendor (Apple) is similarly no good. Google+ posts are searchable on Bing or any other search engine and if you don't link your Samsung Galaxy SII, you can replace it with an HTC Rezound or a Motorola Razr Maxx without losing your apps or data.
You haven't addressed the points he makes about Facebook and Apple, nor his concern about governments imposing restrictions on use of the internet and surveillance legislation that affects internet users' privacy. Stating that Facebook and Apple are competitors isn't insightful - it's obvious, and it doesn't invalidate his argument.
Web freedom faces greatest threat ever from Google.
http://donttrack.us/
Casteism
This is getting old and tired. Not everyone finds "walled gardens" to be a problem. If you do, you're free to use something else.
No Google is not selling YOU. They're selling AGGREGATE customer data. Facebook is selling you - but first they get you to offer YOU up. Linked IN which hardly anyone has a problem with as far as I can see is every bit as bad as FB in terms of knowing who you know and therefore what resources you're likely to be able to marshal for yourself.. should anyone ever want to undermine your life in some fashion.
Think about this. Zuckerberg may or may not be a good guy but what he's not is extremely intelligent the way Brin and Page are. Brin and Page solved a hard problem in a clever way. Zuckerberg's online school year book really took off! Brin and Page are fundamentally academics steeped in the Liberal (big L) tradition of the university culture - openess, utility, egalitarianism, advancement through accomplishment. Zuckerberg is a twenty-something billioniaire whose value system, whatever it is, came under the influence of people with a LOT of money to give him, people also likely became his advisors and tour guides in solving Life's Big Problems.
Ask me who I fundamentally trust more to make good decisions when some morally challenged right wing government liaison comes knocking again, crinkling her nose, with yet another sticky moral conundrum they need his help on.
Google's foray into China was a clear attempt to change through engagement. The idea, as once organic hippie now organic entrepreneur Casperian Farm's founder said is to "change the system more than it changes you". When it became perfectly clear that China was not going to change at all , Google pulled out.
That's not just a post hoc just so story designed to make Google look good, that's exactly what did happen. They debated fiercely and a long time over whether to engage China at all and for just the reasons you'd hope they would.
I'm sorry but what does a twenty something billionaire whose success was tendered to him because he effectively won the "someone's gonna hit gold here" lottery really know about the long form value of things like the privacy of strangers private lives and freedom from unwarranted analysis by people and organizations with out-sized power and undersized consciences?
I'll tell you- he knows nothing. He can be talked into nearly any POV especially by those within the power structure that's funded his company's success from the start and have only brought him good things beyond his imagining.
With all this talk about what Google is doing with your aggregated surfing data, where is the talk about something both more subtle and powerful which is, what can you do with a company like FB which has MUCH more personal data than just aggregate shopping - porn habits of it users when it's headed up by a personality you and your cronies effectively formed?
The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world. I am pretty sure this was said in early funding discussions with Zuckerberg not present.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/15/web-freedom-threat-google-brin
Note that he was talking less about "government" in general than about those of China, Iran, and Saudia Arabia.
I didn't think board members were employees. But maybe that's just me being wrong - not familiar with operations at those levels :P
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
but the common response to this state of affairs is:
1. don't vote. as if not voting means you aren't subject to the will of the government. it's worse than voting randomly
2. "revolution!" cries the anarchist fanboys. that bloody mess is 10,000x worse than the plutocracy we both hate. and nobody controls what kind of government comes out on the other end
the right response?
3. heal your government. vote. get involved
to the problem of the apathetic angry bird player above, i add the problem of the spastic twit who sees corporations trying to influence their government, throw a fit, and completely gives up and cede the entirety of their government to corporate control. wtf?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Really???? Try reading the paragraph referred to. If you can find nothing spurious there, you are a fucking idiot. Lets assume you did (read it), shall we?
not all companies follow that.
Amazon has never had DRM on it's MP3s from day one. There's DRM on it's movie rentals, but that's expected (since you're explicitly NOT purchasing; you're "leasing")
That's not a counter-example. Amazon is in a position of weakness in the music business, so they push for openness. They're in a position of strength in book publishing, so they push their proprietary AZW format. The "leasing" argument is stupid, because it's counter to human expectation, and it doesn't apply to books.
As it turns out, DRM is a useability nightmare, so Steve Jobs convinced the record companies to let go of it. But Fairplay is still being used for videos.
Have a nice time.
What about the adwords walled garden?
The only way to choose to not be a google product is to not use a google service. Once you use a service, they are selling you.
They actually held on to fairplay to get DRM off of the music. It is very well documented from sources on both sides. Look it up. (If Google will let you). If Apple released Fairplay you would not have DRM free music today.
Since the iPod 1 it has never been even a little challenging to load MP3s from anywhere into your iPod. Not even a little. Your statements are all simply false.
There is no data moved into icloud "wether you want it or not". If you don't want it, don't turn it on. Don't log in.
Has either copied or inspired brin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/17/tim-berners-lee-monitoring-internet