[Cryptography] Apple and OpenSSL

Fri Apr 25 10:20:38 EDT 2014

2014-04-25 15:19 GMT+02:00 <tpb-crypto at laposte.net>:

> Hello agaaaain! Apple was never, ever dominant in the laptop market, you
> are making a joke of yourself by insisting in such argumentation.
>

I wasn't talking about market share. Just that their laptops are the best
out there, I goddamn wish they weren't but they totally are.

Asiaco manages to churn out every permutation of device possible, meaning
one will inevitably fit your desires better than an iPhone. But the fact is
that the mobile landscape right now is "The android bunch and the latest 2
iPhones".

Apple came up with the form factor. Was the first to provide features until
Asiaco started having brute forcing every hwcombo out there. That's pretty
dominant.

Most laptops right now provide those monotrackpads. Thing is that
synaptic's implementation sucks.  Those things are terrible. Apple
trackpads aren't terrible. Apple screens have always been extra good,
others are better off slicing 50/100e off the costs. Apple's software
compatibility is high due to their low diversity (high per-product sales).

The Ultrabook was not an original idea. It was there because Apple was
going into a direction that ChinaCo couldn't just brute force upon. So
Intel guided them into it.

Basically, if Apple is going to jump left then the rest of the world is
going to tumble after it. That's dominance if you ask me.

And did you know we have tablets now? Who came with that first, again?
Google is actually killing Apple's dominance by making affordable products.
Apple has always been comfortable in it's underdog position though, nothing
new there. They sell a brand more than they sell a computer. It's less
techchange dependent so it's granted them some sort of stability. If they
release a new nearly identical iPhone many people will still go for it.

They're pushing their luck by doing a worse job at getting better since
Jobs's gone. That's life. Whatever.

You're right in a way. They don't have the highest sales, probably not the
highest profit either.

> Point in question is whether Apple deserves hate for not giving it to
> > FreeBSD. The answer is no. [...]
>
> It is not for you to choose, the fact that Apple is receiving hate and it
> increases as time goes by only invalidates your argument.
>

Popular opinion can now invalidate argument? Hatred determines guilt? In
today's messed up world it isn't even a proper sidechannel. People's ethics
are tangled up over the web, the news outlets are insane with wild ethical
assertions.

I really just can't see why this is wrong wrong. I can see why it's wrong.
Of course! They took something valuable, made good use out of it too. Made
MacOSX and iOS on it. And they don't give back at all!

But the need to give back.. Where does it come from? It's nice, makes us
feel fuzzy and warm inside, so to speak. It goes for nearly everyone that
giving back is justice, it's fair, it's honest, etc, etc. Not for everyone
though. And just because it's common doesn't mean you get it.

This is why I referred to Catch-22. Ethics packages are fine and dandy. But
in the end "they have the right because they can do it", which is what
Catch-22 was about, is all the ethical core that remains invariably. The
absurdity of Catch-22 was a way to talk to people about reality and
"reality". Words themselves don't even have meaning. Some ethics will make
you fail, invariably. And sometimes without them you fail as well.

Apple as a big large company has a different set of ethics. If Apple was a
person he'd probably be autistic and considered crazy. The thing is that
Apple is not a person. And that Apple's ethics do not include giving back
where it is not required.

So either it becomes required, or they won't do it. It can become required
by the amount of hate fired at Apple. So feel free to fire hate at Apple.
It will work, eventually. But the hatred does not have to have anything to
do with reality. It just has to disappear after Apple gives some money.
Reality is weird like that.

Anyway, I think Apple doesn't have to give back. I think so because
FreeBSD's people were given a good opportunity to declare in which way
people should give back. And they passed. They said "Nah, fuck it. We trust
in a commonality in ethics packages.". That was wrong. There is no way to
trust in "giving back" being part of peoples' ethics packages.

However, saying that it was a mistake implies there was no intent. And
intent is a feeling. A fuzzy thing. Maybe it's not a feeling, but It's not
a fact either. Even a declaration of intent does not make an intent
factual.

All that's factual is the actions. And the FreeBSD people performed the
action of explicitly (intentfully, you could even say) giving everyone
liberty to use and reuse without giving back.

So now Apple takes that liberty, as given expressly by FreeBSD, and it is
bad and evil? What the fuck?

Again, I get it. Okay. I get it. But it's just the thing that has this
world blundering into war after war, has brother kill brother, massacres,
shootings, rapes, financial abuse, slavery, unfair wealth distribution,
homelessness, creepiness, awkwardness, etc, etc, etc. It's all in this
common insanity. Assertions of ethics based solidly outside of reality, yet
inside everyone's minds.

Being able to somehow talk about it is what made Catch-22 such a special
book. But also somehow completely unsatisfactory. Like 1984 unable to
provide solutions, or even salvation. Just barely capable of putting this
common insanity problem into words. And where will it get us? How do we
address it?

We're addressing it, right now, right here, by having e-mail conversations
where we talk past each other. Where we dump symbols and have others parse
them differently than we intended, then give us answers that we will read
as an answer to our intentions.

Dominant in a market equaling market share, or not, causing me to be wrong
and (maybe!) right at the same moment and, as you said, causing me to make
a joke of myself.

Frankly there's too much confusion here, and I can get no relief.

> > [...] That seems wrong because of ethics. But you have to realize
> Apple's ethical
> > assertions package is different from yours, or freebsd's. Your package
> > evidently misses a catch-22 failsafe.
> >
>
> When there's a catch-22 you think about what is morally right, and being
> stingy seems to be not exactly something that will give love to Apple. The
> firm is not struggling to survival.
>
> What can happen if people get fed up enough is that like you say,
> BSD/Mozilla Open Source will disappear and only GNU Licenses will remain,
> good luck for Apple surviving the long term without having such generous
> tits to suck from. But its evil has to end.
>

There's more granularity possible than GNU has. Business was (and is)
eating up the world of software in a way that's not actually nice for
people that do software. GNU is a fully alternative approach, pretty much
incompatible with business. Bridging the difference is done by companies on
donations, which remain tricky and give less development force (see also:
Android and business suddenly turning on the afterburner), or with support,
which does not actually require developing the product.

So, what's the way that you can address the desires of the GNU people
(which are the right ones) and combine it with the sheer power to act that
business is all about? Certainly there's something there. I suspect we'll
be bickering about in-betweens for forever, and that nobody will ever be
able to truly communicate what we want and why, and that GNU and Closed
will both remain.

Somehow I think of capitalism as an obstacle for achieving what people
really want. I mean the people that develop and that consume. But at the
same time all things in capitalism are dependent directly upon desires (how
much is X worth is all eventually about desire). So the only conclusion is
that people's desires and/or awareness is out of whack. That's scary. Maybe
there's also something wrong with people desiring money and things that are
fictive, like the special coolness that a true Apple product could furnish
you.
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