So earlier this week while in SF, I was trying to get some work done on my way from the city to Sand Hill road. As per usual I turned on tethering on my Android phone and started up my laptop. Within seconds my wifi had connected to the hotspot, I fired up a browser and …. nothing. No connection. Open up terminal, ping google.com and times out. Huh? Turn off the phone, wifi, etc and restart just to clear out any wonkiness. Still nothing. Then I remembered that between my last tether and now I had upgraded to Android 4.4. aka KitKat. So next step start searching on my phone and sure enough: upgrading to 4.4 breaks tethering on T-Mobile. Here is my annoyed tweet upon recognizing this. I had to call and have T-Mobile re-enable this (paying more in the process).
What’s the big deal, you may ask. Well, I have been carrying an Android phone as my primary phone for quite a long time now because I feel that open general purpose computing is a critical underpinning of an open society. The idea of Apple telling me which software I can and cannot run on an iPhone is the kind of limitation on computing that I abhor. Now I am faced with the prospect that Google too is slowly but surely moving to a closed platform and my tethering incident is a direct reminder of this trend. Google is busy moving core features of Android out of the OS and into Google Play services. While this is being done under the valid argument of defragmentation it also puts Google in control. Combine that with Google’s removal of the CyanogenMod installer from the app store and you can see where this is headed.
So what should be done about it? First, we need regulatory clarity that rooting your phone is legal and will remain legal. In fact, endusers’ rights should be expanded here as is nicely laid out over at FixtheDMCA. Second, people should support efforts to keep Android open and to crack iOS open. For the latter you can now help fund a prize for jailbreaking iOS 7. Computing increasingly means mobile computing. We the people have to be able to decide what code executes on the computers we carry with us.
PS Another important initiative to help keep computing open is the Firefox OS
