Sundara said:
We all know that Apple & Zuckerdick demand information and control. If you own any Apple products, something to be aware of is Apple can tap into your products and control them all at any given time.
I was having an issue with my iPad and I called Apple and without giving them any information other than my first name & them having my phone number from me calling, they were able to screen share with me on my iPad with just a quick confirmation button. This could be problematic if all of your JOS material is online. With all of your tech, likely Microsoft and androids as well, they can all be deactivated on another end and they can all become completely useless at the drop of a dime. It wasn’t like this 10 years ago when iPods and all this shit was just growing. They need to activate my plain iPad from another end, one that doesn’t have a sim or connect to cellular. This is something that shouldn’t even be a thing, it’s like it’s not my iPad, it’s theirs too now lol fuck this.
Consumer rights have been getting absolutely shit on the last couple decades. Apple is at the forefront of that for consumer electronics, but it goes further than just phones.
Alot of the products you buy, if they're digital, you don't
really own them, you're buying licenses to them, which the company can take away from you at any time for any reason without compensation.
Even if you buy physical copies of software and media you sometimes just get an activation key for a license to download the actual software from the company's servers and use it. And dog forbid if you don't have a solid internet connection, because the software needs to phone home every time you launch it to check if your license is still valid, otherwise it will lock you out or do other strange things. Some companies even limit the amount of times you can reinstall their products until they terminate your license and make you buy a new one.
Then there is DRM, that severely impacts the performance of the software and can be invasive to privacy and be prone to false positives and lock innocent people out of "their" own property, which companies say is to fight piracy(even though most of these DRMs get cracked on day 1, sometimes before they're even released) and have the ironic effect of driving more people to torrent cracked software because it runs better and with less hassle than the "legitimate" copies that have DRM.
But this isn't just a software thing. No. Even physical devices have DRM now. Your printer. Your coffee maker. Juicers, refrigerators... in a matter of time they're all going to come with their own DRM. All to monopolize your business and restrict your freedom of choice.
https://thespoon.tech/should-appliances-makers-use-drm-in-the-kitchen-to-lock-in-consumers/
Amazon' e-readers are well known for their DRM. They can link up with your kindle, view and modify your library and delete any books they don't want you to have. They also decide whether, to who, and how long you can lend your ebooks out for.
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/amazon-kindle-swindle
Amazon's Kindle Swindle
The Amazon Kindle is an ebook reading computer that poses very serious dangers to society. When you purchase a Kindle, you are subject to Amazon's Digital Restriction Management (DRM), a system designed to take away rights you would typically have when reading a book.
"This malicious device designed to attack the traditional freedoms of readers: There's the freedom to acquire a book anonymously, paying cash — impossible with the Kindle for all well-known recent books. There's the freedom to give, lend, or sell a book to anyone you wish — blocked by DRM and unjust licenses. Then there's the freedom to keep a book — denied by a back door for remote deletion of books." — Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation
Your basic rights to share, sell, or donate a book are subject to fights with Amazon over the legal and technological restrictions they try to impose. If you try to exercise these rights anyway, you might be violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- which could bring severe criminal penalties -- and Amazon can try to revoke your ability to use all the books you've bought.
After you read a physical book, you can give it to a friend or sell it. Not so with a Kindle book. You can donate a physical book to a library -- an institution whose purpose is to continue sharing it for as long as possible. The Kindle's DRM, however, is designed explicitly to prevent sharing and the public benefit that institutions like libraries provide.[1]
Amazon has a web page about e-book lending, which explains that only certain "lendable" books ("lendability" being determined by the publisher) can be lent at most one time, only within the United States, for a period of exactly 14 days. That's a pathetic (and failed) attempt to replicate what was always a very natural aspect of printed books.
In terms of strict analogy, Kindle DRM even prohibits you from moving your books to another shelf. Any DRMed book you buy for the Kindle is forever locked to your Kindle until Amazon decides otherwise (and they show no sign of wanting to give up that control). If somebody else makes another ebook reader (one that perhaps also gives authors a better deal) readers are stuck with the Kindle, unless they want to repurchase the books they've already bought. Like Apple and the iPod, Amazon uses DRM to create lock-in: they don't want you using competing products from other companies.
But the DRM affects you even if you don't try to copy or move your books. Amazon knows what Amazon books you have on your Kindle, and we strongly suspect that it also has the back door capability to view and delete non-Amazon books remotely as well. This is not conspiracy -- we know this capability exists because Amazon has previously deleted copies of 1984 from users' Kindles. It is only supposed to do this if it gets a court order, but do you want your books to be vulnerable to that?
This is why we have decided to rename the Kindle as the Swindle, and we invite you all to join us in tagging the Kindle and all of the the DRMed Kindle ebooks on Amazon.com with the phrase "Kindle Swindle."
[1] Even when non-Kindle ebook DRM schemes claim to let you "lend" ebooks to a friend subject to their terms, this isn't really lending. Your friend needs to identify herself to the ebook seller and enter into their own contract with the seller, and to have a particular kind of device. They aren't borrowing the book from you so much as entering into a peculiar and limited contract with the book seller.
Now keep this in mind when you consider that real life, brick and mortar libraries are switching to digital and remember who pulls the strings in the governments and universities and other organizations that have authority over these libraries.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/As-Libraries-Go-Digital/135514
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