Am I the only one who is concerned that Facebook is going to eventually turn into a passive surveillance system for the government? I don't think it would be too difficult for Facebook to silently alert authorities when particular matches occur.
I don't agree that "microsoft already does this" - so don't take what I'm about to say to mean that. I mean only to show a piece of technology that more directly relates to the comments others have made.
That being said, Microsoft has developed a piece of technology called PhotoDNA[0], which is designed with the specific purpose of identifying child pornography. This is actively used on OneDrive and Bing, among other services - including Facebook. It's safe to say that OneDrive does not just delete the content if child pornography is detected - it reports to the authorities. Now, it's hard to argue that they don't have a right to do that, as long as the person is voluntarily using their services. That's where I draw a distinction here: Facebook could elect to turn on PhotoDNA on photos uploaded to their new service, and not properly educate their customers that stuff is being uploaded automatically. This does, essentially, constitute a passive surveillance system. Mind you, if it is used to establish that child pornography is found, you will have a hard time convincing most people that it is overstepping what Facebook should do. That's my concern - that this will be pushed as a "for the children" thing, and then extended to "to cut down on crime" later, once everyone stops caring about its existence.
That said, that's my concern. It's not necessarily what I think will happen. I have no reason as of yet to believe that it's the next step. I do not, however, want Facebook automatically uploading (or even scanning) my photos.
That article mentions both Microsoft and Google, and closes with "In addition, the software is used by Facebook and Twitter, among others." (referring to PhotoDNA to scan all your pictures in all your mails - only Google's and Microsoft's reaction to matches is described in the article though, I guess we can infer that Twitter and Facebook would do the same).
My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. That said, I do believe that eventually, paper money will go away (if for no other reason than to track every purpose for government surveillance).
This viewpoint comes up a lot on HN, but it's missing the point. Don't think about bitcoin as an alternate currency, think of of it as a distributed protocol, like TCP/IP or bittorrent, which supports arbitrary value transfer. The media tends to focus a lot on the price of bitcoin, but in the long run the price is irrelevant.
It's not a next step because the US dollar is monopoly money forced on you by the government. Also it's supply is controlled to keep the value steady.
Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe.
Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.
I wouldn't discount network effects. I think a lot of people are going to build more and more services on top of the bitcoin blockchain rather than creating their own blockchain, just because it's convenient in terms of adoption and development and so on. And once those services are there, it's going to be hard to migrate them off. And that will eventually create some sustainable value to the coins.
As to what that value will be, I have no fucking idea. I don't imagine that it will be a major currency. But it'll always have some use cases, imo.
I mean your argument is essentially like saying: TCP/IP is just a protocol and anybody can switch to a different protocol any time. Well, sure. But they haven't. And they won't unless it breaks completely.
Switching from bitcoin to litecoin seems trivial. I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin, especially since the current number of big users is pretty small. It seems like 99% of businesses who actually accept it are just using a payment processor, which could migrate to a new system overnight.
You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.
> there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.
That statement demonstrates you don't understand cyptocurrency at all. You're absolutely wrong, the difference between them is security, and that's something people value. And no, you can't trivially just substitute another crypto in place of bitcoin, other cryptos have neither the liquidity nor the security (which comes from the size of the network) to effectively move around the amount of money bitcoin can move around.
> I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin
Which means flatly you don't understand how cryptos work; no one who does would make that statement.
It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic. It's a step away from democratic government engagement in the money of a country.
Bitcoin encodes a lot of economic assumptions and values into its design, but there's no practical way for the people affected by those decisions to work to change them, unlike money backed by a democratic government.
I don't need to know how to code to vote in the regular elections that decide how the Fed operates, all I need is to be a registered voter.
The next thing after USD and other first world currencies will be something that gives more power to the people, not less.
Bitcoin is absolutely anti-democratic. There's no way for users to engage with the policy decisions implied in the design.
No bitcoin advocate has ever said anything about my point other than "Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history, and doesn't even make sense in the context of democratic governance.
I'll just note that you didn't even say that, you just said "yes it is! yes it is so democratic!" ... which, of course, it isn't, at all.
Bitcoin is a consensus network, to call that anti-democratic is just absolutely absurd. It is the very definition of a simple democracy, whoever controls 51% of the network wins.
> Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history
Nonsense, winning in any democracy requires gaining the support of the majority. If your idea has merit, it'll be adopted when the majority of of the network agrees it has merit by adopting it.
"You have to code, and then you have to get your changes distributed to more than half the world" fits no definition of democratic governance ever. The two are so far removed, I'm having trouble really understanding how you can conflate the two.
But I'll be charitable, and try and make sense of it, because you seem genuine (and genuinely confused).... I guess if you take a concept like "majority rules" and interpret it to its most shallow, then you can bend what you just described up there into a kind of democracy, but democracy isn't actually that shallow an idea.
It's about the distribution of political power to the people, not just "majority rules". That's why people get to vote on things that influence them, even where they're not subject-matter experts. Your typical bitcoin user is affected by Bitcoin design decisions, but has no say in them and no means to change them.
No, "just code it and get it adopted by 51% of the network" doesn't count. That's a far, far, far higher barrier to participation than a poll tax or a literacy test, and those have been dismissed long ago as crude methods of taking democratic power away from the people.
> "You have to code, and then you have to get your changes distributed to more than half the world" fits no definition of democratic governance ever.
You don't have to code. You have to have an idea worth being coded and make enough people care that someone does it, this is no different than implementing any other idea in any kind of democracy. It's called lobbying and getting support and under no democracy is getting change into place free of effort.
It doesn't look like democracy to you because you don't want it to, nothing more nothing less, your mind is closed and you're only looking for excuses to dismiss it.
And yes, it is democracy, as a decentralized ledger, it only changes when the network by a majority agrees the change is acceptable. Choosing which split of a network to follow is voting, if your personal definition of democracy claims this isn't democracy, then your definition is wrong. It is democratic to the core, there is by definition no central authority, change happens only by mass approval.
I installed Chrome in ~/Applications and saw what you are talking about. I believe they are really just shortcuts for Chrome for various Google services. I deleted them and haven't seen them since.
> POWER, OS/2, and The Thinkpad has convinced me that IBM just doesn't make the most of what they create.
They are all kind of different.
I used to use Thinkpads and I hated IBM for selling it. But from their point of view it was the absolute right thing to do. High end consumer laptops are dominated by Apple (heck IBM is buying Apple and giving them to all their workers, something like 300K Mac Book Pro's). Everything else is racing to the bottom with thinner and thinner margins. Windows running laptops have to compete with Asus and friends and the money just wasn't there.
Not sure about OS/2 much, don't remember the history. But with POWER, IBM has kind of started to turn around in the last few years.
At some point in the past they have made an explicit choice to not play in the consumer market. Heck, there used to be IBM stores, you'd walk in and buy IBM products like you go to an Apple store now. But they decided they don't want to play in that market (or better or for worse). We'll still see how it ends up working out.
So far it still stays in business after hundreds of years, maybe it just luck or there is something to its business approach. (Fun fact, it used to sell cheese slicers and time tracking devices as well at some point).
OS/2: decent OS, ahead of Windows for awhile, but IBM was never going to go to the mattresses enough to get it the install base it would need to compete with Windows. IBM's dysfunctional PC division didn't help. It would have been nice if IBM kept OS/2 up as a specialty operating system, but I think the overhead costs were too much and Gerstner was, by 1996-1997, very much in a kill-anything-that-isn't profitable mode.
Prior to Gerstner, IBM had a variety of esoteric products which were solely designed as loss leaders, never earned a profit, and relied on subsidies by other parts of the company to stay alive. Post 1993, really starting in 1994-1995 these got killed off or sold off, rapidly.
It wasn't enough to break even, one number I recall being thrown around was that we had to get to a 12% Expense-to-Revenue ratio, ignoring SG&A which was a corporate-wide number. Growth products, products in new markets were exempted entirely or given better targets, but old-line products were held to this magical 12% ratio (I was in the mainframe division at the time, which was grotesquely profitable and even today subsidizes much of the rest of IBM).
I don't think the physical stores lasted long, they eventually were sold off to ComputerLand, possibly as part of a consent decree (before my time). A lot of bad business decisions at IBM start with the various consent decrees it operated under as a result of various antitrust cases, and the utter fear of yet another antitrust case developing.
Yeah it didn't seem like they were really big and would have lasted, but it was kind of a contrast with today where a young person on the street would probably have not idea what IBM does.
IBM was big, really big. At one time, it had more than 70% of the computer business, so it was twice as big as every other computer company added together.
In fact, IBM was really big before computers even arrived. It dominated data processing based on punch cards and was sued for monopoly abuse in the 1930s. It was the original Evil Empire.
Microsoft -- founded in 1975 -- has been spectacularly successful, and IBM's performance has been mediocre for the past 15 years. Even so, Microsoft has only just overtaken IBM in revenues. (Both are now around $93 billion. On any reasonable growth path, IBM would be well over $200 billion.)
Indeed, Microsoft would probably be nowhere without IBM. It was IBM that set the PC standard with the IBM Personal Computer in 1981, and Microsoft was lucky to be part of it. In IBM terms, Microsoft stole a small part of IBM's rightful monopoly. IBM's response was to try to kill it with OS/2 EE and the MCA bus in PS/2 computers, as part of SAA.
IBM got out of selling ThinkPads long before Apple had any kind of dominance in the high-end laptop market.
Arguably they got out of it because there was no such thing as high-end consumer PC hardware, the margins were low, competition fierce, and they didn't want to play in the low-margin discount market.
Arguably the ThinkPad could have been a success as a high end business laptop. I think under Lenovo's stewardship it has languished and become a typical cheap Asian-manufacturer product of 500 SKUs, all slightly different, with quality on a downward curve.
On the other hand the fate of RIM/Blackberry shows there isn't much of a market for a 'business' device that is separate from a high-end 'consumer' device. The latter wins over the former.
The thing is they didn't at all continue on their "business device" strategy, they got suckered into trying to match Apple - they tried going touchscreen crazy and it cost them their core market.
In hindsight, not many people will understand this, but their greatest blunder was trying to charge / keep BES as a revenue product.
They should've given it away far and wide, made it open, encouraged people to customize it.
Imagine if there was a robust, easy to use, free version of BES available? How many business would be using it (>50%)
That would've kept RIM in the game for far longer, but they were short sighted and stupid.
