I always find it awkward to compare city-states to regular-sized countries. There is no “rural Singapore.” A lot of these independent cities are tiny because they were rich and powerful to begin with; That’s a fantastic starting point that no other country can have.
There’s not much many other countries can learn from Singapore because they all either don’t have enough money or have a greater variety of people to convince.
You seem to be conflating rich and poor and rural and urban, which have very little relation. Singapore was very poor, baring some rich businessmen, mostly Chinese IIRC, and had ethic tensions to boot between the Chinese, Malay and Indian populations it had ( one of the main reasons it was expelled from Malaysia).
New York was also very poor, barring some rich businessmen. You have to look at it relatively to its surrounding. Of course there were poor people too, but they lived in the “suburbs”, not in the middle of deserts like, say, in the US.
If I remember correctly from my visits in SG then the country was not rich from "the beginning", in fact it was very underdeveloped until the late 60s and beginning of the 70s and it worked out for them because of it was a dictatorship under Lee Kuan Yew and made the right decisions... and was tolerated by the West at the same time.
Underdeveloped by whose standard? An underdeveloped city does not seek independence. You have to place it in its context. It probably was not the poorest city by a long shot even at its birth.
> residential routers plus a USB stick will make this more possible.
This smells like "let them eat cake" except in the context of technology. Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. There's a vast difference between "Yes, backup my stuff, Apple; Here's my card" and "I know what an IP is"
At $12/year you literally cannot get anything like what Apple offers just in terms of backup — not the equipment, not the man hours required to maintain it. Even if I were able to set it all up, it would cost me a huge amount of money in lost revenue just to maintain it safely.
It feels like "I could build dropbox in 5 minutes" never stopped.
Maybe read it a bit more generously, in the vein of:
* Maybe we can get to a point where running your own services is easy enough and normalized enough that most people do it.
I'm doubtful, but there's at least some small winds in that direction-- disillusionment with FAANG, peaking of the large tech economy, some renewed interest in privacy.
Most people use mobile devices and want the ability to watch content anywhere, anytime at press of a play button. That’s the benchmark. No personal hardware setup will match that convenience and people who are not aware of the security risks shouldn’t be hosting their own content from their personal network online.
> Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff.
People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Not everyone is capable of playing MP3s on an PM3 player? Since when?
If these new systems that everyone is using is so much more complicated than that that you have to pay a professional service to do it for you, we have royally fucked up somewhere along the way.
> People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages.
Sounds like you’re trying to generalize from a very small set of people. The percentage of the population that had specialized full sized racks for their torrented stuff and what not was very, very small. For the rest of it, I imagine that “large drawer next to the desk” was the #1 solution, followed up by “in the car somewhere” for music CDs.
For the average person, the actual backup procedure from that era was very poor. Frankly, I doubt many did it at all. Even the nerds I knew mostly did a pretty half assed job, all considered. What professional backup software hosted in the cloud today blows even the most thorough technique from any consumer in the 1990s out of the water.
Why are we pretending it's the early 2000s? CDs were used because that was the best option at the time obviously. To compare them to services today hosting infinite amounts of LEGAL content streamed over the internet to millions of people on all manner of devices at the touch of a button is rather odd.
Likewise, it's weird that you need professionals to build such services? Anything that is so complicated that it requires professionals to create it has fucked up? In other words, every industry that ever existed is fucked up because they require more than a passing knowledge... professionals shouldn't exist.
I'm not necessarily comparing them, I'm just pointing out that this line "people can't manage their own shit and so must contract with companies to do it for them" is ridiculous in it's face.
You don't need professionals to build such services, no. Especially considering that the services don't really work better than a drive with MP3s on it.
Software is eating the world, I expect defensiveness on this site particularly, having massive back end data centers and frameworks just for people to do what took a 1tb drive 10 years ago is absolutely stupid.
What? When is the last time you built a YouTube or Netflix? When did people in the past EVER have access to near infinite amounts of content that could be streamed over the internet onto any device?
My grandma wouldn’t know what ‘burning’ a CD means, but she sure knows how to use Netflix.
It’s not defensive to explain the overwhelming reality of todays content landscape. I couldn’t be bothered explaining the difference between a single 1tb drive and YouTube or Netflix, it’s clearly obvious.
There is nothing ridiculous about contracting companies to do work. We hire professionals to perform all sorts of tasks everyday and purchase products made by them. It’s not lazy to do so, it’s smart. Why do I have to explain the basics of how the world works?
For e.g. Do you grow your own food? Fruit and vegetables all that. It's easy right some soil and seeds with minor maintenance. You don't need professionals to do something so basic. Why cant everyone become an expert at growing their own food? Why do we need farmers, a massive global supply chain and mega stores to do something so simple? The idea that we have this global spanning network just to supply a tomato to someone is stupid and we screwed up?!
We don't have time to be experts at every facet of life, the world doesn't work like that. Believe it or not, managing big stashes of content isn't common knowledge or on everyones priority list.
We aren't talking about YouTube and Netflix. We are talking about syncing your photos and messages to a cloud, purchasing apps and music and movies that stay outside your control, and then get taken away with no recourse and no reason given.
But on the topic of services like Netflix and YouTube, they're used to manipulate peoples tastes these days, discoverability is broken deliberately to push priority content, and really their only advantage is discoverability, so they've got virtually nothing going for them besides network effects and entrenched market position.
Services can be nice, when they work for a user. The problem is these services are designed to disempower users. We could live in a world where all these services empower users and work perfectly, but we don't, because there's a conflict of interest.
Care to explain how easy it is to setup your own cloud platform that can sync all this content from any device and has the necessary redundancy and security options. Obviously sharing would be important, would need to be able to easily collaborate with others, sharing photo albums etc. Some versioning options would be preferable also.
Needs to be very simple so my grandmother can build it, and cheap. No maintenance, set and forget. I assume there will be apps available for all her devices to quickly go through the process or will she need to create them? It needs to be easy to search for content and stream on any device at any time without fail.
She doesn’t care about ‘owning digital movies’ or the exaggerated threat of her accounts being closed. She's is much more likely to accidentally lose her own content managing it herself. She just wants to watch movies, how much will it cost to own all that content? Less the $10/month?
No professionals so let’s keep instructions basic and preferably just using a single blank drive with no content.
It must bother you that people don’t grow their own food? That they can’t manage their shit and need to buy it from a store?
Yeah, it's pretty simple. Get a raspberry pi 4 and an SD card, download a prebuilt raspbian image for owncloud from the owncloud website, write to the drive, pick up a 2.5" drive of your preferred size and a data to USB cable, slap it all together like Legos, owncloud offers client apps to install for synching pictures and what not, you get get them in the app store for your platform.
You can BTW buy pre built devices where this is already done from owncloud I believe.
It doesn't bother me that people pay other people to do things, no need to be condescending about it. What bothers me is when people are funneled into paying for services that are more stressful to use than doing things themselves, and then making excuses for the state of affairs for whatever reason (either they're convinced by the marketing, or their salary depends on it all continuing this way).
That sounds neither convenient or cheap. How is setting up a raspberry so simple, yet using youtube so hard? It's getting absolutely silly now. Its not an argument, if your option were the preferred then it would be the predominant means of consuming content, but it's not. Your reasoning is that people use this method not because it's the most preferred but because they cant manage their shit, or are manipulated by big business. Is that not condescending?
You seem to have this idea that people know what they want in their lives before it exists, know what problems they want to solve and unbiasedly navigate the world looking for solutions. But how it often works is people don't know they have a problem needing to be solved until they see the solution in marketing material.
People by and large use what they see in advertisements and justify the decision after the fact. What is preferred is not always what is superior.
Bandcamp is as easy to use as Spotify. Yet people don't use it as much. Why not? Marketing is why.
Mobile UX is full of deliberate friction points put in to support profitable business models at the expense of utility. The mobile experience is designed to funnel users towards making certain choices. This is beginning to happen in windows as well now. And people just go with it.
Is it condescending? Maybe. But if I was wrong you wouldn't have advertisements on TV, marketing people know what works and businesses aren't in the business of throwing money away for no return. People wouldn't bitch about Facebook and continue to use it, they'd go somewhere else.
Enough, stop pretending advertising is some critical brainwashing marketing tool responsible for the success of all businesses, regardless of product.
As for your reference to ownCloud, there are no pre-builds for raspbian. You have to build the web stack on the pi. This is the most inconvenient option imaginable, but I guess it's the hypnotising marketing stopping Grandma from building a web service.
I have been building websites professionally since 1995, including ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, Perl, lots of other stuff.
But, it's true that I don't have much recent experience outside of Wordpress, and I have not had the benefit of working in large teams to learn best practices.
Your site is laggy, zero accessibility, microscopic text unless your window is large enough, does not support anything you'd expect from a regular website. Just ship a PDF already.
The web is not paper, don't design for it as if it as.
Your approach is incredibly out of line. This is a proof of concept designed by one person. It's an idea, and an interesting one. Why do you feel the need to be so negative?
If it was a proof of concept, fine, but it's not, the author intends to develop this further and is accepting signups. I do not want this web. Just publish PDFs if you want to design fixed media.
So much hate. Whether or not it has legs, it's an interesting proof of concept. Reminds me of the early days of internet where people weren't afraid to explore crazy ideas.
> People have said that for literally everything we have on the web now
What I meant is that here the intent is to design something once and display it in the browser as if it was an image (or printed media), i.e. without filling the window properly.
This is 100% like displaying a PDF in a browser and it does not belong in one.
This kind of stuff ought to be regulated somehow, one can’t lose access to one’s life.
I recently wasn’t able to recover an old account because I did not have access to my 2FA number and their help site suggested I “contact the phone company to recover the number, then try again.”
I had to do the same exact thing for another service but they did allow me to change the number by providing some information like last transaction, ID, selfie with statement.
Yup lost my phone for a few months until my provider deleted my number and moved it on to some one else, now I am locked out of my paypal.
I tried to find a pay as you go sim where the number doesn't expire and I would use that exclusively for 2FA but such a sim does not exist in the UK, most expire after 3 months the longest is 6 months.
Now I know this is an issue but it doesn't seem like there is anything I can do to solve it.
I have a Giffgaff SIM for this reason. The expiry is 6 months and I have remembered to use it within that period so far. Not ideal but I would imagine you need a 2FA code more regularly than that.
I wonder if used with a smartphone (mine is in a dumb Nokia) whether you can automated a SMS send or outgoing call once every month or something?
You could avoid using SMS for 2FA. Most websites offer TOTP as first choice for 2FA. For the ones that insist on SMS 2FA being first choice, I don't bother using anymore. I delete the account and find another provider.
"most websites" has not been my experience at all. Sure, for the big ones like email that's and a lot of dev tooling that's the case. But there's a huge amount of services that requires SMS verification and once you loose access to that number you get locked out. A very common case is loosing ones phone (or having it stolen), at which point you have to log into your accounts again from another device but also don't have access to your SIM anymore.
Funnily Google suite does not offer TOTP with Google authenticator… Unless you use SMS/Voice 2FA first… and then you can activate TOTP, I asked if I can then remove the phone number later, and was told that it is possible, and that they won’t use this number for anything in the future. But who knows…
I’ve moved my mobile number to voip using https://www.aa.net.uk/voice-and-mobile/number-porting/mobile... and receive all text messages via mail. Use it for call forwarding when I’m abroad to avoid roaming charges, also sim swap attack seems less possible?
I did that a few years ago but have been finding that every year more and more websites are recognizing the number as VoIP and refuse to send SMS to it.
If you are in Europe, and at least for email, it is regulated.
The GDPR's Right to Data Portability means that a company is obligated to give you access to your personal data - they are within their right not to have you as a customer anymore, but they must give you at least a copy of whatever data they already have.
Of course, you'll probably have to jump some hoops to prove that you are you, but IMHO that's a reasonable compromise.
In short, you can send their Data Protection Office a letter demanding access to your data. In my case it took almost three months but they eventually relented and reset my password. I guess a lawyer could have gotten it done faster, but who knows.
Did they ever verify the you had the old password / recovery email like you offered? It seems strange to me that they reset an account password because they got many letters asking them to.
All e-mail communications were sent through the same address I gave as recovery address, so they didn't have to ask. It is possible that one of their e-mails was sent to my recovery address instead of my personal address, but since they are the same account I wouldn't know.
Doesn't work with Google. If you cannot log into the account, their legal team won't accept that you are the account holder. Even if you provide passport and driving license etc., they can't be sure, because you didn't upload the passport and stuff when opening the account.
I'm having trouble deciding whether you talk about something that has happened or about something that could happen.
Assuming it's the latter: given enough evidence that you are you (same name as the recipient, deep knowledge of the account, knowledge of the password, etc), any court would rule in your favor and force Google to turn over the account. But I would be willing to bet that, assuming you are no one "special", they would relent much earlier in the process - the cost of the lawyers alone would probably outweight whatever profit they obtain from you, and GDPR fines can be high.
Yes you can. There are all kinds of regulations. Many entities are held to high standards. They're exposed to liability.
The 'free' era of the internet has been enabled by excessive liability shields granted to shareholders that are collectively worth trillions of dollars, and those riches have been built around callous disregard for the property and rights of billions of people worldwide.
That being said, with Gmail, you get what you pay for. With Google's paid for hosted email, you don't get what you pay for either. It's not a good provider if you ever have any issues with it that cannot be solved by their automated processes.
There’s not much many other countries can learn from Singapore because they all either don’t have enough money or have a greater variety of people to convince.