Gregory's Server@mcc this should be illegal.
|
34 comments
 @tshirtman @mhoye @mcc We could be running free software as the default. If it's preinstalled, normal users barely bat an eye. Ask me how I know. Industry giants come in, offer "a good deal". Support agreements get drawn up, often with morsels of regulatory capture thrown in. In exchange, they get another generation trained on their systems. Community efforts pick up maintenance on many of these old devices. A pittance of federal budget would more than cover it. Instead, we do this. @dpflug @tshirtman @mhoye @mcc free software has substantial maintenance costs in the form of labor, just like any other software. @wooliex @tshirtman @mcc You're right. I'm muddying the waters by bringing in-class usage into this. There are good discussions to be had there, but this is about e-Waste. Pictured is a big block of laptops that could be given a second life and be useful to a community. Instead, most are probably destined for landfills. That's all of our problem. Anyone nearby pays that bill. Shipping it overseas is just making it someone else's problem. The bottom line isn't the only line.  @mhoye @mcc it’s irresponsible to allow children’s information to be stored on network-connected devices that are years out of date on security patches. while one could argue that we should mandate longer lifespans, that the software should be maintained for 10 years instead of 3, the idea that we should allow arbitrarily decrepit computing devices to be used indefinitely is intuitive but also dangerous. @mhoye @mcc while searching the web for examples of RAT attacks on kids by way of example of the severity of the risk here, all I can find is lawsuits and enforcement actions against *school districts* violating students’ 4th amendment rights by secretly recording their webcams and screens with “legitimate” MDM access, so, just, fuck all of this, maybe the conclusion I should actually come to is that schools should not be allowed to have computers, just give kids cash to buy their own devices  @glyph @mhoye @mcc Even experimenting on the school level with allowing / encouraging / helping students to turn the "expired" devices into open ones by running open operating systems on them isn't allowed in my district (#yyc #YYCbe ). Although individual schools fund device purchasing (often through parent fundraising) they are re-possessed by the school board upon expiry. @ellenor2000 @glyph @mhoye @mcc (p.s. yes I tried personally to do this at my local school .. is how I learned this sad policy) @ellenor2000 @glyph @mhoye @mcc They also claim "linux devices aren't allowed on our network" although they stopped saying that right after I pointed out Android's lineage... @ellenor2000 @glyph @mhoye @mcc I've not heard that articulated clearly. Basically pretty boring: "it's more work", I think :(  @ellenor2000 @glyph @mhoye @mcc Logic doesn't work against giant bureaucracies :( @meejah @ellenor2000 @glyph @mhoye @mcc All that said, if any other #yyc dwellers have the intestinal fortitude to help with this, I'm absolutely game. I'm the wrong person to lead this, though; I'm not going to keep my mouth shut enough :/ at the required meetings...but I will help technically and directly with students.  I can understand the argument for school provided computers. At the dawn of the PC era, students from well off families did have a legitimate advantage by being able to afford a home PC. At the same time, yes, the admins of these devices have abused their access and I don't like training students on devices that treat them like Serfs of Google. @SaftyKuma @mhoye @mcc the schools are set up for failure here. they have budgets which means they cannot hire competent admins except those who will work for charity, their equipment is perpetually outdated, their deployments are highly adversarial (nobody's more motivated to attack student devices than other students), the environment is stressful and political… none of the solutions are tech, it's all policy and organizing. which, as a tech person, is a bit depressing. @glyph @mhoye @mcc And, of course, the lack of a stable interface is a political choice: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-api-nonsense.html @fugueish @mhoye @mcc in the spirit of disclosure I should say I have my own reasons to have a pro-Google bias (a close family member works there) but I also worked for Apple a decade ago and absorbed plenty of the inverse propaganda there. I do think regulators need to step in to address this, but "make EOLing hardware illegal" will just mean school admins root devices at end-of-support and give kids a malware smörgåsbord to do their homework on, because "updates aren't in the budget"  @be @mhoye @mcc Books have a substantially higher marginal cost. They're physically heavier by orders of magnitude. In my highschool, back injuries from overweight backpacks were common. I regularly sustained minor strains myself which I suspect are the cause of some back problems I have today. Most of all: physical books are just not how information is organized in real life any more. Technology has a lot of problems but imagining that we can return to a prelapsarian past is not a solution. @be @glyph @mhoye @mcc I agree with you. Often, people look at these issues through the lens of economics or technology - always about money or convenience. But if we look at it through a lens of environment, we might feel differently. That said, environmental issues plague book use also. So, perhaps instead of choosing one or the other, we apply an environmental lens and find the least offensive solution, whatever it is. @spearmintwarlock @glyph @mhoye @mcc Textbook companies try to do the same shit as Google is doing with Chromebooks by intentionally creating a situation where students are pressured to buy the latest edition of a textbook just so they can follow along with the page numbers, even if the text doesn't substantially change. @spearmintwarlock @glyph @mhoye @mcc Of course, it's a bit reductive to say that technology is the problem here. The problem is capitalism, and technology makes capitalists' control easier, cheaper, and more extreme. Regardless, older technology can be a better tool.  @mirth @mhoye @mcc my point is that, at *some* point, the devices are too old to be supported. The kernel is also a significant attack surface, and there are ABI stability issues with device support. There’s nothing dangerous about supporting them for longer, only costly. And maybe Google should be paying that cost for longer, I don’t know what their margins are like. It’s fine to say that 3 years is too early, my contention is only that “forever” is too long to expect. |
@mhoye @mcc yeah software maintenance is expensive, so when you sell for cheap, you certainly plan for shorter lifetime/support, to make the economics work. They could keep making the updates work for these models, but making it harder to develop features for newer ones, that are making money now.
Models being obsolete means code specific to them can be deleted, and newer code don't have to be compatible and tested on them.
Apparently users don't find the free software alternative suitable :/.