The combination of hardware attestation and walled garden "app stores" is the end goal of most policymakers in this area, and it happens to suit the monopolists in Google and Apple and Facebook down to the ground.

Perhaps a timely reminder that things do not always get better over time, and that we may have lived past the high point of secure communications in our lifetime.

Can anybody briefly explain what a “rot economist” is? Is it meant to be capitalised “ROT economist” which stands for something? Has my browser not rendered the characters correctly or something?

This story of course includes the now almost mandatory attack on e2e encryption, which according to this account when coupled with the people you know feature is “a dangerous tool” - with little explanation as to the nature and size of the danger.

This part is interesting: “Worse still, accounts that were less than 15-days-old now made up 20 percent of all outgoing friend requests, and more than half of friend requests were sent by somebody who was making more than 50 of them a day…”

The explanation leaves a lot to be desired though:

“…heavily suggesting that Facebook was growing its platform’s “connections” through spam.”

Doesn’t this make perfect sense where a new user joins Facebook with no friends to start with, then in the first few weeks of using it finds all of their friends and adds them?

The whole thing reads like a grab bag of grievances rather than a forensic takedown, shame.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34919240

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

[0] https://www.esafety.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-12/BOSE%...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33993746

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990364

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Why can’t either of these systems do what the Mac has been able to do since the 90s, and display the recursive size of a directory in bytes in the file manager, allowing one to sort directories by recursive size?

I am not exaggerating to say this is the single biggest roadblock to my permanent migration to Linux!

(I would love nothing more than to hear I’m wrong and “you fool, Dolphin can do that with flag: foo”!)

I'm afraid to say that this is completely wrong. Commercial banks do in fact create money via lending! The 101 textbook explanation offered here is at best outdated and at worst misleadingly perpetuates a myth that simply must die.

The Bank of England's note on money creation in the modern economy [0] is the place to start - and more or less reflects the explanation in the article.

[0] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

Not sure repeating the bushfires that created those releases is a long term strategy though…

The way to make sure TS tickets go to the biggest TS fans is to remove the influence of ability to pay and sort only by preference intensity.

Solving wealth inequality fixes this problem entirely - among others!

Edit: like all good economists, I leave solving that particular bit of the problem as an exercise to the reader.

Being able to pick and choose your customers (and apply conditions to any sale that favour Apple and disadvantage the customer) is a perfect indication of the level of market power that apple possesses.

Most businesses in competitive industries don’t get to do that.

My only comment is that this stuff is hard. Really hard. Consider that a two line HN comment may not be able to fit all of the relevant considerations and case-law in.

I recognise the irony.

[0] https://www.efa.org.au/2022/09/05/efa-statement-regarding-cl...

Yes, you can keep an old device around to use old apps or play old games. But to do that you must have preinstalled the old app, and that device can never be broken or reset, lest you lose the app.

The analogy to VHS is not a bad one, but when VHS players (and DVDs, and BluRays) stopped being current, all the old players and tapes didn’t stop working. That is the power that Apple has right now - to remove old apps from existence even for devices and operating systems that support them completely.

Same as the argument about the Mac - sure, new macs don’t run PPC software. But old ones do. And importantly, I can still install old software on an old Mac.

Remember the reports of phones with Flappy Bird selling for a premium of hundreds and hundreds of dollars? For a digital good that has no nominal cost, that shouldn’t be possible. It is only possible because of Apples monopoly on app distribution for the iPhone. You will not see a premium on a Windows 3.1 machine with Doom preinstalled, or a DVD player that comes with a copy of Lord of the Rings in it. Only Apple can do that, and it’s that power that people are upset by.