Big Companies Suck

This past week I’ve been struggling, physically and morally, with the products of a few big tech companies.

Apple

This past week I upgraded my 2014 Mac Mini to Catalina. It took a whole day of updating and rebooting. At one point it stopped with the message “Estimating time remaining” … for hours. I rebooted it manually at that point, but that probably just meant it had to start over from the beginning.

Some of the other fallout:

• The computer is running even slower. Not unexpected but still annoying.

• Settings kept nagging me until I gave it my Apple ID.

• Finder windows keep drifting out of sync with directory contents. Sometimes I’ll create a file and it won’t show up. Other times I’ll move or remove a file, but Finder reports it’s still there; try to read it though, even through the Finder preview pane, and the application reports an error. (Terminal and folders on the Dock remain accurate.) Instead of catching up, the discrepancy keeps getting worse. The only cure I’ve found is logging out and back in. Or killing the Finder process, but then the entire desktop gets screwy.

• I use Terminal a lot. A lot. I’m an old Unix guy. Changing to zsh wasn’t so bad. But when I tried to change directories into ~/Documents, Catalina opened a dialogue panel to ask if this was OK. It did it again when I started messing around in an external drive.

• My Mac Mini hosts a Subversion server (svnserve). After the upgrade it threw an error trying to access its repository. Why? Because it runs as the user “subversion”, and the repository is in that user’s Documents directory. So I had to log in AS subversion, use the command line tool to do something Subversion-y, and then click on the resulting dialogue to say that, yes, svnserve has permission to enter /Users/subversion/Documents.

• I’ve yet to set up a cron job to back up the Subversion repository. However, I discovered a reference that said I had to manually grant cron “full disk access”. Otherwise (you guessed it) cron would fail because it lacked permissions.

• I’ve since learned launchd is Apple’s preferred solution … except that, according to the release notes, “Specifying privacy-sensitive files and folders in a launchd property list might not work as expected and prevent the service from running.” The upshot, I guess, is to avoid ~/Documents entirely; it’s in your home directory, but it’s not really yours.

• My computer has been trying to update XCode¹ for weeks. Every time it would fail. Finally I logged into the Mac Developer site – going through this ridiculous two-factor authentication thing – and downloaded XCode directly … as an xip file. Deleting the old XCode, then unarchiving the new one, took practically all the Mac Mini’s resources for hours. Finally I moved the new one into place, started it up, then waited for it to update itself. Finally, then, I was ready to update Mac Ports … all the command-line Unix tools I actually use …

(source)

Compare this to my Linux Mint laptop, which simply updates piecemeal, as I go. The software is a few versions behind the official stable releases; Debian apparently has an even slower “approval” process than Mac Ports. If I wanted to install the latest from source, – e.g. Ruby interpreters through rbenv – and putting it wherever I wanted, I wouldn’t have to find the right application to let me or OK some damn fool popups. The big downside of Linux letting you take responsibility for your own security is having to take responsibility for your own security.

Mac OS X used to occupy a nice middle ground between permitting anything and forbidding everything. That’s changing. According to one source I found, Apple wants to “deprecate” script interpreters like Python and Ruby because they’re not secure enough. One of the major draws of Mac OS X (or, now, macosx, I guess) was that it was Unix under the hood. Now it seems they want to banish those of us who like to poke around under the hood. In the future, it seems, they’ll only allow Apple-approved Apps do Apple-approved operations on a locked-down Apple-monitored operating system. (Didn’t Microsoft try that with Windows 7? Didn’t it fail miserably?) Meanwhile Microsoft is pivoting toward Linux, allegedly.

So yeah, I’m climbing out of the walled garden. I’ll move most of my files onto a NAS, and I’m looking at cheap alternatives for a Subversion host and for future programming projects I might actually complete. I’ll probably keep the Mac Mini around for iTunes Apple TV, Music, and Podcasts, although I’m looking for non-Apple solutions for the latter two. (Which may mean re-buying some of my music as CDs. Stupid convenient iTunes.)

Facebook and Amazon and Google, Oh My!

Recently I deleted my Facebook account. It was a long time coming: I barely used the thing, pro-Trump relatives made me not want to use the thing, and news about the company and its practices have become increasintly dire. The whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco may have harmed the futures of two countries, but its earlier role in Myanmar’s persecution of Rohingya Muslims had and continues to have the highest human cost. Over a year ago I announced I was going to delete it “real soon now” in favor of this blog. AOC’s grilling of Zukerberg just gave me the final push.

For a while now, I’ve avoided Amazon. (In favor of Barnes & Noble – which isn’t much better – or shopping local.) Several news outlets have documented the literally back-breaking labor its warehouse employees must perform, for minimal wages and negligible health benefits. And yet … I give ComiXology.com boatloads of my cash, even though it’s an Amazon company. “At least nobody’s running around a warehouse,” I tell myself. But Bezos doesn’t need the cash; he’ll just spend it on rockets.

And now I learned Google hired a former DHS staffer. This after all its other anti-competitive and not Not Evil practices. Just recently I moved most of my online accounts from my ACM email address to my Google address, on the grounds that I might quit the ACM soon. ($100 a year adds up.) Now should I move all those to yet another address? Which one? Yahoo? Apple? The e-mail address of this site … hosted in China?

Was the Internet a mistake?

Companies – and governments – with the wealth and reach to make our lives easier also make questionable or just plain immoral decisions. Some of them impact us directly, like Apple’s move to lock down its devices. (That’s what computers are now … devices, like a phone or watch.) Others only affect people far away, but in ways that make us profoundly uneasy. We can’t boycott them all, unfortunately. Not without living in the middle of nowhere, running on solar power² if any, either wholly disconnected or dependent on some shady Internet provider. I’m too old and out of shape to cut my own wood and harvest my own food, I’ll tell you that.

So we make choices. But the choices aren’t easy. Greta Thunburg has the time and support to sail to New York. The rest of us must make do with gas guzzling cars, and simply try to use them less. Likewise, in the Internet age, we wired people must decide which soulless evil billionaire we can cut off in highly inconvenient but largely symbolic gesture. Facebook was easy, Apple is harder but not unexpected, and one I’ve been contemplating since my MacBook Pro died three years ago. Amazon is harder still and a work in progress. Google may be a bridge too far, at least for now. One day, though.