Quote of the Day | 1026
Apple and Microsoft—how would you compare them?
Microsoft and Apple have been changing places. For a long time, Microsoft was the main enemy of users’ freedom, and then, for the past ten years or so, it’s been Apple. When the first iThings came out, around 2007, it was a tremendous advance in contempt for users’ freedom because it imposed censorship of applications—you could only install programs approved by Apple. Ironically, Apple has retreated from that a little bit. If a program is written in Swift, you can now install it yourself from source code. So, Apple computers are no longer 100 per cent jails. The tablets too. A jail is a computer in which installation of applications is censored. So Apple introduced the first jail computer with the iPhone. Then Microsoft started making computers that are jails, and now Apple has, you might say, opened a window into the jail—but not the main door. A study of mobile apps found that, on average, each app informed a hundred different sites about the user; the worst one informed 2,000 sites.
Richard Stallman, in: ‘TALKING TO THE MAILMAN’
[x]#14624 fan vrijdag 26 oktober 2018 @ 23:23:21
