Idea of something that undergraduate colleges could do, to encourage reflection about ethics in careers:
Annually poll all the students, to get rankings of how the ethics of well-known companies/brands are perceived by the students.
Then publish the results to students, in a timely fashion, before they're deciding job offers and internships.
I speculate that effects of this could include:
1. Good hiring candidates modifying what offers they pursue and accept -- influenced by awareness, self-reflection, and/or peer-pressure.
2. Students thinking and talking about ethics, when they didn't before. Then some of them carry this influence with them, as part of their character and intellect, going forward (like is one of the ideals of college education).
Also, maybe the second year of the poll, the sentiments are better-informed, because a lot more people have started paying more attention to the question of ethics of a company.
The perception breakdowns by college major would also be interesting, but maybe don't publish those, to reduce internal incentives to game the results. (Everyone knows some majors tend a bit more towards sociopathic than others, but some would rather that not be officials.)
They already have ethics classes in college. The unethical already don’t care. Students already do basic research but when the market is so shit, do you really expect them to permanently hamstring their careers by torpedoing their only offer? Especially given that as a fresh college grad, it’s not like anyone cares about your opinion anyways. So let’s guilt the vaguely ethical ones into never getting involved and leaving all the sociopaths to run the show. This is an idea destined for success.
Ethics classes (and certifications/trainings, like for doing human subjects research) are another thing that students are incentivized and conditioned to cheat on, rather than to reflect upon.
I'm talking about a poll that raises awareness across the entire student population, in a low-cost way, with no incentive to cheat nor to do anything other than give honest answers.
Regarding whether awareness of ethics would penalize those with any ethical tendency:
We can already see the last 2 decades of rampant unethical behavior throughout tech companies. Virtually every tech company knowingly sells out its users to data brokers, for example. Sociopaths already dominate, and have conditioned everyone below them to behave in an at least compliant way even when doing something unethical.
It's too bad we're starting late on that absolutely pervasive ethics problem, but we can't make the problem any worse by trying an education intervention now. And it's the traditional job of colleges to do this -- not to pump out oblivious worker drones.
If there's a way to read the book, the book can and will be copied. It doesn't matter if it's DRM protected with 84 bazillion bit encryption, if there are dead trees involved, or anything else. You can make it harder to copy, but copied it will be.
Mass piracy will continue full steam ahead at current rates.
Most of these sites allow you to read on a computer screen and those can be captured and OCR'd. And if they don't allow that, you can take a photo of your device and OCR that. And if you can't do that, you can manually type in the book. There's always a way, and it will always happen to any books that publishers are making any kind of profit on.
I love ebook readers. I just don't put any DRM'd books on them. But I also buy all that stuff used. No more money to Bezos, and it saves the landfill, too.
I'd like to be the person with the massive shelf of pretty books in a bookshelf.
But alas, I don't have the square meters for that. Also I tend to like THICCC books and carrying around a 1600 page monster daily on my commute isn't it.
I agree that Amazon getting even more control over the ebook market would be bad for authors and publishers.
But how would (hypothetical) more formidable DRM constitute even more control over the ebook market?
(Do you mean more control by preventing more piracy? Or by preventing more good-faith circumvention? Or more control because ebooks might be published even more Amazon exclusive than they already are, because of superior anti-piracy protection?)
Long ago, for a few years I would occasionally buy ebooks from Amazon when it was trivial to strip the DRM with basically my credit card number and a script.
Once they started trying to lock things down further, I completely stopped buying, moving to piracy mostly, and occasional scanning of physical books.
Being more technically capable than typical, I’m hardly a normal customer to try to target, but the way I see it all this does is piss off the minority who care and are capable of getting around restrictions. Those who don’t care or aren’t capable will just continue getting cluelessly fucked over as always. These measures less about effectiveness, and more like a money themed emotional support affirmation for someone in a suit. It helps them feel like they are accomplishing something, but that’s it.
I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that “AI” tools that easily and accurately rip and format data from a picture feed of a screen will become the way to go for bypassing whatever clever encryption schemes come along. This also has the benefit of ignoring the steganographic tracking data hidden in paid files, making piracy ultimately easier for the uninformed. This sort of thing was always possible, but was a bit janky and laborious.
Same here - I'll only buy books I can read on any device of my choosing. Kindle+dedrm was an option. https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/p/drm-free is another option I have used a lot. But if it's not available, I will go to the modern day library of alexandria. I will not pay for crap that will just stop working in a few years - a book can sit on my shelf for 15 years before I get around to reading it.
I've used eBay to buy several used Pixels for GrapheneOS, without problem.
The easy way is to search for ones for which the seller explicitly says "OEM" or "bootloader" unlockable/unlocked (or seller says it already has "grapheneos", "graphene", "calyxos", etc., installed).
For awhile, I came up with some tricks to try to get a better price by identifying ones that were bought directly from Google (rather than through a carrier, which are who has been disabling bootloader unlocking thus far), but decided it wasn't worth the effort.
Of course, you can also just buy a new one from Google.
A lot of the people once called weirdos -- a term now partly taken back, as fairly positive, such as in "weird nerds" -- are our hackers, creative thinkers and artists, progressives slightly ahead of history, etc.
The massive problem with tech industry "leaders" is not weirdos/nerds. It's greedy sociopaths, narcissists, and nepo baby halfwits who merely stumbled into way too much power.
Some prominent ones are now openly and proudly presenting themselves as toxic for society/humanity, and even as ruthless fascists.
Call the bad people what they are, but let's be nice to the good weirdos.
Lawyers: Besides whatever issue the company(ies) and investors might have with that behavior (self-dealing?), could it also let wronged individuals pierce the corporate veil, to go after personal assets?
Could this be the backstabbing surveillance capitalism incident that finally gives pause to tech executives?
I've never understood this convention (common on HN, some news orgs, and elsewhere), that, when there's an IP breach, it's suddenly fair game for everyone else to go through the IP, analyze and comment on it publicly, etc.
Annually poll all the students, to get rankings of how the ethics of well-known companies/brands are perceived by the students.
Then publish the results to students, in a timely fashion, before they're deciding job offers and internships.
I speculate that effects of this could include:
1. Good hiring candidates modifying what offers they pursue and accept -- influenced by awareness, self-reflection, and/or peer-pressure.
2. Students thinking and talking about ethics, when they didn't before. Then some of them carry this influence with them, as part of their character and intellect, going forward (like is one of the ideals of college education).
Also, maybe the second year of the poll, the sentiments are better-informed, because a lot more people have started paying more attention to the question of ethics of a company.
The perception breakdowns by college major would also be interesting, but maybe don't publish those, to reduce internal incentives to game the results. (Everyone knows some majors tend a bit more towards sociopathic than others, but some would rather that not be officials.)
reply