Updated: May 27, 2023
Let's begin this article with a disclaimer. Y'know, so you can relate. In the past 100 years, advancements in science, medicine and communications have done wonders in improving the quality of life for billions of people around the planet. Things like antibiotics, DNA sequencing, the Internet, and intercontinental flight are just some of the many examples of the great advancement we made as a species in the past century.
However, not every forward movement is progress. There comes a moment, in many aspects of life, many domains of technology, when less becomes more, when enough is enough. And what I mean by that is as follows: there are many things in the tech space, all around us, which make no sense. They are hailed as modern, but they represent functional, philosophical regressions, the opposite of where tech and science have taken us. And we must talk about them. Of course, this ain't the first article of this kind I've written. But. Kick back and enjoy.
RCS vs SMS
Let's start with something relatively simple and not that big of a deal. I've been hearing about this now and then for quite some time. Supposedly, the general narrative is that Rich Communication Services (RCS) ought to replace the good ole SMS, because it offers better functionality and such. Okay. But, but, but. There is a problem. Now, in writing this article, I am basically arguing with myself, and cherry-picking whatever suits my narrative. Anyway, here it is:
RCS does not work without an Internet connection, ergo mobile data or Wi-Fi.
And that is all you need to know about RCS and why it cannot and should not be a replacement for SMS. Today, you just need to be connected to a cell tower, and if you need to receive an SMS, you can. With RCS, you need data. This is not, nor should be, a given.
One could arch an eyebrow and say: but who doesn't have unlimited data, lol? Hint: That's me arguing with myself again, right there. Well, the answer to any person who would say that is, find a world map, can be digital or an actual atlas, open it, and you may be amazed to discover that there's life outside the borders of the American state of California. Golly.
More practically and less cynically, if you travel abroad, you may suddenly discover that there are hefty roaming charges or that you don't have roaming services on your phone, in which case RCS will be useless, whereas SMS can still function, at least for incoming notifications and messages. Will that make your "Internet" experience complete? Absolutely not. But in some scenarios, you may need it.
Wait, you could say: client software that implements RCS often has a fallback mode to SMS! True. But you're not thinking far enough into the future. People start using this, five years from now a stat reads "only 4% of people are using SMS", the bean counters go "oh we can save moneh" and then, no more SMS, and if you don't have any data or credit on your phone, no incoming notifications for you. Which brings me to the next point.
Electronic SIM (eSIM)
Great stuff. Great for telcos, horrible for the consumer. How? Well, with the physical SIM, if you're not happy with how your phone or any data-capable mobile device is working, you can simply power it off, take the SIM card out, put a new one in, job done. Alas, with the electronic SIM, you're at the mercy of software and communication providers. In some parts of the world, this could or would or will be less of an issue due to more stringent legislation. In others, where you get vendor-locked phones and similar nonsense, eSIM is another layer of vendor lock-in. Which is why you should avoid this tech. Which brings me to my next point.
Credits: Image taken from Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY 2.5 Poland.
Passwordless future
In the past few months, I've come across a bunch of tech news article that bring this topic. Apparently, there's another technology being developed for the sake of security embedded in the notion that passwords are insecure. And to that end, the (logical) conclusion is, somehow, that we need to go passwordless!
Speaking of cherries and picking, this seems to me like a non-argument, but it is the concept behind a new joint effort by a bunch of companies (called, I believe, FIDO Alliance) to create a solution that would replace passwords with online identity public-key cryptography authentication. Sounds buzzwordy, and that's because it is.
Let's start with the problem. Passwords be insecure? Nope. Incorrect. Short and reused passwords can be insecure, but long passwords are just fine. Furthermore, it's not the password that's the problem, it's the overall security of online services that are the problem. I mean, think about it.
- How many times, in their lifetime, will an average person be brute-force hacked? Zero? Once?
- How many times can a person expect their data to be leaked or lost from companies' databases? The answer is many, all the time.
The issue with modern Internet security is that there's no long Gulag-time prison for data loss. Hundreds of millions of records get accidentally posted into an insecure cloud instance bucket, oops, mea culpa! Some company gets hacked, all its data gets stolen, another oops. This happens all the time. You can practically count on the fact you will have your personal data leaked or stolen from somewhere, somehow, sometime soon. Like that song by NENA, Irgendwie Irgendwo Irgendwann.
And yet, the focus is on making a new authentication method. This basically means: let's not work on the original problem, i.e., make online systems so robust that even if they get hacked there's no risk to customers. Instead, the assumption is, data will be leaked, but with this new technology, passwords won't be an issue. A noble idea, wrong implementation.
Passwords may not longer be an issue in this supposed passwordless future, except many other things will be. The online identity problem solution comes with a whole bunch of extra buzzwords. Bluetooth, using your phone as the unique "key" and more. In essence, you take a simple concept and make it a complicated concept full of single points of failure. And finally, anything can be hacked and misused. Also, when your data leaks, everything except passwords will be available to the hax0rs. And so, someone can still do a great deal of crap, if they set their hearts and minds to it, without being able to log into any particular website. The passwordless usecase solves only a tiny, narrow set of corporate IT problems, and none in the consumer space.
After all, 2FA was also designed as a safeguard against the weakness of passwords. You get your code via SMS. But then, that also proved to be weak. Hint: SMS swap. Not a weakness in protocol itself, but rather the best and most effective way of working around safety mechanisms - money and inside job. This also means, if we embrace the concept of mathematical induction, that any future system of similar kind will be susceptible to subversion, given enough incentive.
Back to passwords. Today, if you want to login somewhere, you need to remember the string that is your password. You can type it down or memorize it, whatever. Now, there's a phone that will make your life "better". What if your Bluetooth antenna doesn't work or cannot pair (and pair with what)? What if your phone runs out of battery? Gets lost? Stolen? The screen breaks? Something else goes wonky?
I know I intend to avoid using this "solution". And I also fully expect it to not be implementable, because if there's one thing history has taught me is that anything that uses Bluetooth for authentication doesn't really fly with non-nerds out there. Maybe 1% of people will be able to figure this out, but everyone else will not. So in a way, this is like IPv6, except on the consumer level. Yes, yes, we will run out of IPv4 address any moment now.
Product as a Service
Not to be confused with Platform as a Service (PaaS). Yes. Now. Greed knows no bounds. Once upon a time, companies would sell you products. But then, they realized that people used these products for much longer than the sales teams expected, ruining the prospect of recurring commissions and fresh revenue. Thus, the idea of monthly subscription for software was born, and unfortunately, it survived.
I understand how monthly payments make sense for services. Say a VPN. You utilize the company's network, and by proxy their data center lease, their electricity, their technicians' work. Therefore, you pay as long as you use REMOTE resources. But for LOCAL stuff that only you use?
Alas, this is exactly the focus of the Web 2.0/3.0 greed push. Transforming stuff that used to come with a perpetual license (you use it until you stop using it) into a model where you must renew every month or so to retain the right to use the exact same software. This is total and absolute nonsense, and it's something I intend to resist to the fullest of my abilities.
For instance, imagine an office suite. You write your documents. You can do it online, offline, whatever. Why should your software stop working after say three years or a month? I know why companies would want to milk more cash out of you, but in reality, that's not how it works. You buy a chair, it's yours. You buy an apple, it's yours. You buy something that has a deterministic, fully defined function, it's yours. That's the end of it.
I have no intention of using any product as a service. Ever. Two examples that come to mind would be Microsoft Office and Acronis imaging software (used to be Acronis True Image, now something else). If ever the Office goes subscription only, I won't use it. Similarly, I've recently discovered that the new, rebranded ATI now comes with a subscription model, so if you want to be able to image and restore your machines, you need to pay a subscription fee. Nope. This is why ATI 2019 (and possibly 2020, which is inferior to 2019) are the last versions of this software that I will ever use. I remember making Windows PE images with ATI 9/10 some fifteen years back. And I've been a loyal and PAYING customer ever since. We're done.
Touch interfaces in cars
I have already ranted on this topic a while back, but it is time to briefly bring it up. TL;DR: cars that bundle essential driving controls (like say climate control) into touch-based consoles, dashboards or whatever other digital interfaces may exist in the vehicle. Nope. Fail. Never doing that. I see this to be an affront to my intelligence, my comfort, my ergonomics, my efficiency, and my safety. Nope.
Furthermore, as I've mentioned in the article above, a Swedish car magazine has done a speed & efficiency study on a dozen car models, ranging from 2005 to now, and tested how quickly the driver was able to complete a sequence of actions. The winning car was an old, all-physical-controls model, way ahead of all the modern cars with mostly or fully touch-based interfaces. You can't beat human evolution with some pixels. And catering to people with low IQ (cuz trends amirite) is never a sound business logic.
Here, companies are already slowly sobering up, with some abandoning this ill-fated nonsense. Some are promising about-face 180-degree decisions. Good. Now, my finances will never go to a company that offers cars with touch-only controls. I will even compromise, so to speak, on my great petrolheadedness and drive performance-inferior cars BUT WITH PHYSICAL CONTROLS, by manufacturers I've never considered before if needed. That's called free market.
Touch in general
One of the great things about being human is the ability to use fingers. But hey, many animal species can do that. Even use tools. But what animals cannot do is use their fingers to write or type, and thus record complex information, and they sure cannot comprehend software interfaces.
The use of touch interfaces is nothing new or spectacular. You can see Bruce Willis using a touch display to find where his wife is in the Nakatomi building in a scene early on in the best Christmas movie of all time, Die Hard. This was in the 80s. Almost forty years ago. Fast forward to mid-2000s, the smartphone becomes a thing, and sure, yeah, if you want a mobile device, you can't lug a full keyboard and mouse around (although Nokia and Blackberry did just fine with the full-keyboard concept). Hence, touch. But that's where it ought to stay. Form factor and all that.
For some reason that eludes me, I guess the fact I don't have an MBA and I don't post articles on Linkedin, there are companies that feel touch should be part of everything, including the classic PC desktop, conceived and optimized for use via full keyboard and mouse, with speed and precision that exceeds any touch usage. And so, predictably, any software slash app that utilizes stylistic or functional elements of touch interfaces, and is used on the desktop is INFERIOR to its classic counterparts. Touch, as I've already told you many times, is inefficient in comparison to keyboard and mouse. That's 2:0 against touch. First we have cars, where using real human touch beats digital touch. Now we also have the PC, where any "modern" touch-inspired software fails the test of speed and precision that keyboard-and-mouse formula offers. Add flat, low-contrast interfaces into the mix, and you have creme de la turde on your screen.
Apps, apps, apps, delete
The word application has lost its meaning since the smartphone became the ubiquitous form factor for the normies. The concept of something that does something meaningful, i.e., software program, has become an app, and that's, in essence, a single-page Web browser. That is what 99% of apps are. Just HTML, CSS and lots and lots of Javascript wrapped into a blob.
The thing is, unless you need persistence and very specific, custom interaction with the content, you don't need apps. You can simply open your Web browser and log into the relevant site, because at the end of the day, that's all there is to it. In fact, you should use your Web browser, because apps are often coded with lax practices on the security and morality front. In many cases, you cannot block ads shown in apps. But you sure can block then in a Web browser. Firefox, to be more precise, with the UBlock Origin (UBO) add-on installed, the only acceptable way to use the Internet.
On my smartphones, this is how I go about the Webz. No silly tracking, no wasted battery due to ads, no stupidity assailing my senses, and better overall performance. In some cases, an app or two can do the job, carefully selected for the desired task. Like say the VLC media player. But the rest? Nah. Delete. Also, most phones come with tons of preinstalled junk. Delete, delete.
Customer service "AI" chats
Garbage. Absolute and complete garbage. Some time back, I wanted to contact my hosting provider (now ex-provider). No tickets or phone, only chat. Okay. The chat box opens. There is no "welcome" text from the AI bot. It waits until you type something. And when I do, it "complains" that the "response is invalid" and then gives me a list of options to choose from. Basically, you navigate yourself to what you supposedly need, and then the human takes over. Allegedly. I encountered the same elsewhere, even a bank. Except, the bank chat bot decided to close the chat because it decided that my need wasn't necessary.
You may say these are isolated instances ... except in every single scenario, 100% of them, wherever the initial screening or whatever is done by an automated system, it's crap. Cheap crap designed to replace poorly paid people. That's the level of corporate greed, and of course, you don't want to invest a lot of money in developing a tool that replaces cheap people, right? The end result is a total failure.
Well, my solution is to fire off complaints. In writing. Sure, they take time, but I'm a tenacious bastard, and I type fast. I also enjoying wordsmithing, so creating these long complaint letters is super-easy for me, almost like a therapy. But I do make sure to always express my disdain and dissatisfaction. Will that change the trend? Maybe not. It depends on how many people actually bother to resist stupidity.
Digital "AI" assistants
Oh boy, oh boy. Here's a total paradox. Someone seems to have watched too many sci-fi movies. Too many someones, too many movies. Because a few years ago, various companies starting peddling a solution to a problem that does not really exist. Voice-powered AI assistants will help you with the mess and confusion in your life. Lo and behold, a piece of code comes and it suddenly helps you "declutter" your hectic modern life. Only, no.
- Expectation: you have a real, useful assistant.
- Reality: you are shouting at a piece of software using technobabble SQL-like lingo so it can do basic things for you at half the speed it would take you to do those things yourself.
Here, much like with the cars, there's a glimmer of hope. Seems like the tech giants are slowly deprioritizing their work on AI assistant tools, because apparently, they are not profitable. Duh. How can a tool designed for techies and used by masses be profitable? It cannot. But then, there's the new and sudden rise of these "AI" chatbot thingies, AKA Clippy 2.0, another cycle of fad. Now, we shall rant about this in more detail, in a dedicated article, stay tuned.
Cable TV ... I mean online streaming services
The 80s are calling, they want their TV time back. But if you're nostalgic, worry not, the media companies are doing their best to recreate the synth-pop decade by giving you the same old overpriced, overrated watching experience ... online! That's the only difference. Instead of a coax cable, you get your content via the Internet using ... an ethernet cable or maybe a radio antenna (as opposed to the big aerial on your roof).
Today, there are dozens of streaming services. A large number of them offer "exclusive" content that is specific to their own production or IP rights from past endeavors or existing catalogs. You also get free streaming services that vomit commercials in your face every few minutes. All the best things from the 80s.
The end result is exactly what we had 30-40 years ago, only the approach is bottom up. Instead of a bundle landed on you from above, you build your own collection by subscribing to different services as you see fit (spoiler: streaming bundles also exist, believe it or not). You have some freedom of choice, but you also need to provide your personal details to multiple entities, which will then use your data with diligence, strict privacy, and no chance of it ever being leaked, like at all, because that's never happened before, you don't need to worry.
Digital ownership
Do you know the definition of oxymoron? There's one right there. Goes hand in hand with product as a service, you as a service, online streaming, and the constant bombardment of useless apps. A complete moronity package.
If you're confused, let me help. Digital ownership is, by and large, a glorified term by which companies, like streaming services, allow you, the user AKA the idiot, to "buy" digital content. Say you want to buy a movie, and you can. You pay, and it's yours. Technically. Except, in this case, what you get is just one giant, ephemeral pixel of optimism.
In the best case, digital ownerships means you get an encrypted binary blob that, under the right conditions, will play in some media player, most likely and exclusively the streaming service itself. In the worst case, you will get a glorified bookmark, which lets you watch "locked" content whenever you please. But said content may disappear if the licensing terms by which it was given to the streaming service changes (has happened before) or the company decided to pull the item off the digital shelves (has happened before) or the company decides you've been naughty so they cancel the your digital possessions (has happened before), or the user cancels their account and they lose access to their digital purchases (has happened before). Indeed.
The way I see it, unless you can download the purchased content to your computer and use it offline then it's not yours, and you didn't buy it. If the button actually read "Lease", I wouldn't be so emotional about it. Nor do I fret when it's a pure streaming service. Does as it says on the label, no beef. But any button that says "Buy" and all you get is a promise not to break your heart one day, well ...
Now, there are some companies that have digital stores, and they do actually let you download unencrypted copies of your purchases, to be used at your own disposal as you please. That's awesome, and I use and support such companies. And then there are those that only give you the illusion, and I avoid those.
Locked hardware
If you find digital ownership amusing, the concept of remotely governed hardware will leave you in tears! Of joy probably. Maybe. Now, a song or a movie that is-but-isn't-yours carries an emotional weight, but it doesn't fundamentally alter your day-to-day life. But what about hardware?
Think of a printer that won't work anymore because you're using the "wrong" ink, or because you didn't pay your "usage" subscription. Think of a fridge that won't let you stock certain things. Think of home IoT stuff that stops working for many random reasons, including the company suddenly canceling the product line, rendering it useless, or because the Internet connection is down, and badly coded "apps" cannot function without a phone-home umbilical. These aren't fictional scenarios. These are real-life cases that affect people who feel fashionable enough to buy locked hardware. The problem is very similar to buying digital content. Turns out you're merely leasing, not truly buying. Lulz.
This is the crux of my indignation. Because when you, say, lease a car, you know what you're getting. Temporary usage of a vehicle, you pay for it, and you give it back. But when you get yourself a router, a camera, a fridge, a printer, I believe most people are under the impression that they are buying stuff. And that carries certain weight. There is a meaning behind the word buy. Which is why I refuse to pay for any sort of stuff that behaves this way. If I buy it, it's mine. Forever.
Conclusion
In the past three years, I've deleted roughly 80 or so accounts of various online things, because why not. I've emailed car companies telling them I won't be driving their touch-possessed or subscription-rich models. Speaking of subscriptions, I canceled a few, on the software front. I also refuse to subscribe to any new stuff, including streaming subscriptions. I pay with cash wherever I can. It ain't much, but it's honest work.
My de-modernity journey continues. Now, I'm not a caveman. Nor someone who wants to live off plants and sunshine. None of that guilt-trip nonsense. I embrace technology, but only if it crosses a certain intelligence, efficiency and fiscal non-greed thresholds. Alas, more and more things are becoming pointless to the point of absurdity.
I know this may sound like the message of a desperate "old" man, but I'm not pining for the good ole days. I am simply not willing to embrace total cretinism and greed that seem to be the norm today. The distinction will be lost on the countless drones swiping their dopamine to oblivion with the efficiency of a sloth, but hey, some of you may enjoy this rant. Return to monke doesn't mean thresher farming and plague. No, it means going back roughly to 2010-2012, when there was still a somewhat sane and healthy balance between offline and online, between product and service, and the UI ergonomics were reasonable. That is all. Dedoimedo out.
Cheers.