Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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I was wrong about Snapchat, but I was also kinda right.
When I first encountered the idea of disappearing messages, I was both skeptical and alarmed.
Skeptical because disappearing messages have an obvious defect as a security measure: If I send you a message (or a photo) that I donât want you to have, I lose. You can remember the contents of the message, or take a screenshot, or use a separate device to photograph your screen. If I donât trust you with some information, I shouldnât send you that information.
I was wrong.
âThe rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterdayâââbut never jam to-day.â
-The Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll)
The new, surging antitrust movement has given hope to many who yearn to throw off the yoke of Big Tech. After all, the tech giantsâ dominance was attained through solidly illegal conduct, such as anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions, predatory pricing, and price-fixing. This produced conditions in which the companies were able to engage in more flagrant illegal conduct, including unambiguous, multi-billion-dollar acts of fraud.
I am recuperating from hip-replacement surgery and while that often means I canât concentrate enough to work, it also means I have long, uninterrupted periods to carry on correspondence, such as the paragraphs below, from my overdue reply to a left-wing economist with whom Iâve been discussing the case for interoperability. In our previous round, my correspondent had suggested that interop wasnât necessarily good, and that even profitable interop could be bad for all of usâââdo we really need 50 nearly identical inks on Amazon that can all work with our printer? How can anyone make a âgoodâ choice in that environment? My response is below.
Continue reading "Everything is Always Broken, and Thatâs Okay"
