HN Reader

Keep Control of Your Computing, So It Doesn't Control You!

from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computin...

Not a good term. Anti-personnel mines do exactly what they are intended to do. These devices/software do something against the interests of the user in the process of doing something the user actually wants (otherwise why would the user even get them?).

Perhaps "Faustian computing"?

I am just quite old enough to remember the late 90's/early aughts dotcom craze. The vibe in software feels very similar to me - back then I remember ad-riddled pages that'd spam you with popups and sometimes malware, all in the same fever pitch to eek out every possible penny so they could show revenue for their overpriced valuations. The web was seen as a gold mine that if you weren't pillaging, you were actively losing - until it all imploded.

The look and feel of a lot of web pages today (invasive ads taking up disproportionate amount of the page) reminds me a lot of that time, even without going to the dotcom parallels we have with the current hype cycle.

I prefer "antifeatures" as more precise.

https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2007/fall/antifeatures/

It's all in the software. Avoiding systems that work against you is harder than ever. Even our brains betray us, falling for the dopamine rushes expertly assembled by the exploiters.

An unchecked drive for profit maximisation is often at the source of this evil. Cory Doctorow has expertly described the phenomenon in his essays¹ about enshittification, a term he coined. He has raised a lot of awareness, yet we're still in a timeline where non-profit, decentralised services have small market shares. Perhaps the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering, is not yet great enough?

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¹ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

anti-personal computing: data collection, closed ecosystem, dark patterns, opaque programs, central control

anti-personnel computing: the use of a computing system to target, harm, control or neutralize individuals

I hear part of the Chinese miracle of central planning is that they have almost full knowledge of everything everyone is doing in the economy. In contrast, in the west, where we optimize for personal gain, you can get a lot done by throwing up barriers and creating friction. We also pretend/believe our governments use all data against us.

My gut tells me that cryptography and clever use of time and location can be used to use public data for specific purposes alone.

You could for example construct security cameras with sufficient encryption that only a judge can request access to a specific chunk of time and has to provide a specific case number.

It might even be possible for the judge to request a specific thing from the footage like time stamps and licenseplate numbers not from people living there or even similar faces and devices seen around similar crimes.

I don't want the specific time stamps and locations made available buy I don't see great value in keeping my annual toilet paper purchases secret or how many km I need to travel to purchase shoes.

Maybe (when seeking) we should get proximity push notifications for job offers that fit our resume.

I mean, we should explore the boundary between anti-personel computing and useful application. Maybe things are worse than we think, maybe they can be made mutually beneficial.

Eh. I think "user hostile" or "hostile architecture" (like unsleepable benches) is a better analogy, reserving anti-personnel for those cases where computers are used in genuinely dangerous ways. Like the Chinese ethnicity-recognizing security cameras.

I love term how it plays on the words and the negative association we have with anti-personell mines

If we could have a ban on anti-personell computers…

The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon)

>The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system.

Unfortunately, the Mac's bomb dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode!

And Window's "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!