12 ms·

Lockdown – The coming war on general-purpose computing (2012)

298 points by ryukafalz 9y ago

eponeponepon 9y ago
This always, always rewards a re-read. Five years down the line, though, and I'm no longer sure that "We haven't lost yet," as the closing paragraph puts it.
- dm319 9y ago
  Yes, this is a classic, and is ringing truer each year.
- flukus 9y ago
  Did we even fight the war? Around here I regularly see people advocating for this sort of lockdown. It used to just be apple, but now it's in windows and Chromebooks.
  - jackmott 9y ago
    a distressingly large number of programmers are welcoming it in windows world with the encroachment of windows store lockdown. its really depressing.
    - vram22 9y ago
      Can you elaborate? (I'm not familiar with the Windows Store, though I guess it is similar to the Apple and Play Stores.) What do you mean by your statement?
  - Sephr 9y ago
    Your point holds true for Windows 10 S, but why do you consider Chromebooks to be locked down? You can enable developer mode, install your own OS on them, or even re-use the Chrome OS kernel for other desktop environments through crouton. You're also not forced to use Google's Chrome Web Store (except on Windows with the official distribution of Chrome).
    - Confiks 9y ago
      Well, you can do all that until you cannot anymore. The systems are designed in such a way that Google only has to flip a switch, and all Chromebook securely turn into bricks (presumably only the ones that haven't had developer mode enabled). On top of that, Chromebooks are mostly used in an education environment where they are in fact locked down to Chrome OS for specific email address domains. Then the domain administrator can conveniently switch it into a brick.
    - jackmott 9y ago
      that mode still completely changes the universe. nobody can make a living selling chromebook software without consent of and payment to google.
      - Sephr 9y ago
        The point is that with this configuration you can use or buy software that normally runs on Ubuntu.
    - candiodari 9y ago
      Google for (oh the irony) "Widevine" and how it interacts with it. So it has the same sort of problems that Microsoft palladium had : things like Netflix and the like simply won't work as soon as you have the developer switch enabled. General purpose computing is dependent on 2 things : ability to run your own programs AND the ability to lie about that fact to the network. Without the second the first is useless. Google understands this subtle point, but it appears most people do not. So Google is exploiting our ignorance here.
      - microcolonel 9y ago
        I'm pretty sure Netflix works fine with developer mode switched on. I can confirm at the moment (away from Chrome OS devices right now) that Widevine works fine with Netflix on desktop Linux; I'm pretty sure I remember Widevine working on my Chromebook with developer mode enabled.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Counterpoint: hundreds of millions of Windows 7 holdouts even after forced upgrades to Windows 10.
  - imglorp 9y ago
    No, we never had a chance. If you consider these embedded "secure" CPU controllers in the news lately, we also have lost control of PC's as well. With baseband firmware, which was never ours in the first place, we have lost mobile.
    - hyperpallium 9y ago
      Offline general purpose computing remains. When the network becomes free, all will be lost.
      - im3w1l 9y ago
        Just like in the present we have mystery embedded CPU's all over in our computers, so in the future we will have mystery embedded modems siphoning our data all over in our computers. Offline will not be realistically achievable much longer. That's what I'm guessing anyway.
  - Niten 9y ago
    Well, the locked-down nature of iOS and Chrome OS are what make them markedly more secure than a general purpose computer in the face of real-world threats. Just this week, my Mom's Chromebook kept her safe from what appears to have been a targeted attack (someone sent her an email with a link to a malicious .ru domain and my name in the From header). That locked-down design is also why I'm writing this response on a Chromebook. It's for good reason that Tech Solidarity and other security-conscious organizations recommend using iOS and Chromebooks where possible: https://techsolidarity.org/resources/basic_security.htm https://techsolidarity.org/resources/basic_security.htm Of course, we must fight tooth and nail against any regulations that would restrict access to general-purpose computing, or put limits on connecting a general-purpose computer to the Internet. But it's important to remember that there are absolutely legitimate reasons to use and recommend locked-down machines, and that the most technically adept of us will use a combination of both categories of computing device in our lives.
    - gwbas1c 9y ago
      I've wanted a locked down computer ever since every program that I installed in 1995 wanted to put a useless icon in my tray and take over every file type association. General purpose computers are great when I'm writing the program, but awful when running someone else's poorly written program that wants to take control over my computer. I like to think of a general purpose computer like a giant truck: great if you like that kind of thing, but not for everyone.
      - chtfn 9y ago
        What about a thriving Free Software ecosystem where the code can be audited and modified, and where the best apps (i.e. the ones that follow what users generally accept to be a standard of "respect" to your machine and its user, as well as doing their job) bubble up to the top? Using various Ubuntu-based distros and Free Software apps over the last 8 years, I have never felt like any program was overstepping the boundaries.
      - Dylan16807 9y ago
        You want a curated software store/repo. The computer itself doesn't need to be locked down to get the benefits you're talking about.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Chromebooks are more open than nearly any other commercially available x86 and ARM laptop, they are in many ways more open than nearly any other commercially available x86 or ARM laptop since PC 5150. Yes, they have a verified boot process, but once you're admin on one you can just swap it to developer mode. It's clearly a feature, not a bug.
    - true_tuna 9y ago
      I can't tell if you're trolling by stating deliberately untrue statements or you have some insane thought process where this statement makes sense to you. The chromebook is deliberately and consciously a closed platform. You can't write or run arbitrary code on it, you can't swap the OS, you can't even SEE the OS. That's the primary selling point. "We got this, don't look under the hood" Getting your own boot rom on there is a huge pain (I had to remove a screw off the main board) there were like ten steps I would never tell a non expert to attempt.
      - ryukafalz 9y ago
        GP is right, in a sense. Chromebooks (the Intel ones, anyway) typically ship with Coreboot, and Google developers regularly contribute to upstream Coreboot.[0] While you're correct that it's a pretty closed platform out of the box, you ultimately have more control over the platform than a typical x86 PC, if you go through the hoops of flashing your own Coreboot payload. The fact that it's hardware with official Coreboot support is notable, IMO. [0] https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/search?o=desc&q=google.com&s=committer-date&type=Commits&utf8=%E2%9C%93 https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/search?o=desc&q=google....
      - microcolonel 9y ago
        > You can't write or run arbitrary code on it, you can't swap the OS, you can't even SEE the OS. You can write and run arbitrary code on it, you can swap the OS, and you can even rebuild the firmware from source and flash it yourself (though at that point you will void the warranty since the firmware is in a position to cause hardware damage, but not for any of the other things). There is a local terminal emulator, and when you turn on developer mode you can have a local unix shell with mount and write access to removable disks, so you can image install media for an operating system. The boot firmware comes with SeaBIOS by default for the reason that Google (for whatever reason) wants you to be perfectly able to install bios-based operating systems as long as they're compatible with the hardware. If it's Linux, then any downstream hardware drivers involved are packaged in google's public kernel repositories, and if it's a userspace component, it's in the ChromiumOS repositories, where you can pull and build the entire operating system (aside from the pepper plugins for digital restrictions management and flash). Seriously, try doing many of these things with a typical off-the-shelf Windows or Apple laptop and get back to me. On Windows laptops you need to jump through hoops to disable firmware features which prevent you from installing new operating systems, on Chromebooks it's well documented and has no effect on warranty or your ability to roll back the changes. Most (all?) windows laptops have no vendor-provided open source firmware, and most of them don't have even a third party one which works. To write an install disk on Windows, you need to install a third-party image burning application, and there's no guarantee that the firmware will even let you boot it. Many windows laptop manufacturers will either inconvenience or flat-out deny warranty claimants who have replaced the operating system on their laptop. Microsoft does not publish the source code of the NT kernel. Most Windows laptops contain at least one piece of hardware which is not adequately documented such that somebody could write a driver for it without reverse engineering. Apple laptops are in some ways better, in some ways worse here. On the one hand, the firmware does not explicitly prevent you from booting third-party images, on the other hand, the firmware and hardware have undocumented behaviour which makes it exceedingly difficult to get most new operating systems to reliably boot and install on it. Usually even if yo u do manage to install and boot something, some important piece of hardware (the wireless chip, the display output multiplexer, the webcam, the touchpad) is either slightly or completely different from a documented counterpart, and takes months or years to be supported by anything except OS X and the first-party drivers on Windows. Darwin releases are usually eventually open source, Apple's compilers are partially open source, but also include several proprietary components. Most of the operating system libraries which weren't already available when they started are proprietary. Though on the plus side, you don't really need anything extra to write a boot disk for a third-party operating system. On the down, there is no provided firmware source code, and the system is sufficiently underdocumented that it's unlikely anyone will ever write an alternative firmware image for your given Apple laptop model.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    There's a fair amount of lockdown with cloud providers as well. Not DRM related, but there nonetheless. Egress charges make it unsavory to move some apps out. And proprietary api setups make it more difficult to move as well...things like Google's cloud spanner, or AWS native features. The big cloud providers will also, over time, shape what's available in hardware in a way that won't benefit on-premise customers.
  - natch 9y ago
    Sort of a side note here, but I think this is a big misunderstanding about Apple. Sounds crazy, I know, but hear me out before judging. I think with Apple it's more about allowing the end user (the real end user, not the end user's boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband, child/sibling/parent, boss/teacher/roommate etc.) to have control over their own information. In order to enforce this end user control, Apple needs to lock out rogue programs. It can't do so 100%, but it tries to get as close as reasonably possible. They try even harder with mobile devices, because mobile devices tend to be so personal and capture so much private information of one individual.
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
      Apple has a lot to gain from controlling user experience, preventing malware, and protecting their 30% cut of software costs. Its not merely that they don't have much to gain from protecting users from snooping girlfriends. In almost every other instance they actually stand to gain from helping the other side. Apple has every reason to help your mom/dad/boss/school ensure that you don't misuse THEIR property. Your perspective seems to be mostly unfounded speculation that doesn't hold water.
    - chipperyman573 9y ago
      Also because users are used to their phones being able to do less than a laptop. "The appstore doesn't have it" is a legitimate reason to not be able to use a program on a phone but not a Windows machine (for example)
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I'd point at the SaaS model to be the death blow. Instead of running computation on our data, we put our data in third party control so that they can run their computation on what's now really their data. Chromebooks & stuff is just an extension of that in a world where SaaS is the dominant model of regular user's interaction with computers.
dano 9y ago
When in a company that runs windows with AD and lot's of strict GPO's in place, this is basically what you experience as an employee.
- hyperhopper 9y ago
  A corporate setting is completely different. They can choose how you access their own hardware (putting aside personal gripes for purposes of efficiency and convenience) However the real problem is hardware level DRM implementation and non-open CPUs, which really mean that I cannot truly own my own personal computer
_wmd 9y ago
Doctorow presented this at 2011 Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
bobajeff 9y ago
Well as long as you can still install Linux on a server or hobby board there will be some vestige of general purpose computing.
- gue5t 9y ago
  No. The problem is not a lack of access to a general-purpose computer. The problem is the lack of control over the computers you're forced to use in order to manipulate their attached I/O devices such as lights, refrigerators, screens, speakers, insulin pumps, steering and brakes, Internet connections, etc.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    The microcontrollers that used to run these things were never particularly free, were they? Is it worse just because the computers running them are now more powerful?
    - ryukafalz 9y ago
      They do a lot more now. They're often networked and remotely upgradeable. Sure, you couldn't see the code in the microcontrollers in your old TV - the ones listening for IR signals and driving the LCD. But modern TVs do all of that and more; they have internet connections, some have cameras and microphones, etc. And even if you couldn't see the code in your old pacemaker (which I would say was still a problem), your new one probably has wireless administration and firmware updates. Those likely have remotely exploitable security vulnerabilities[0], and even if you have one inside your body, you aren't allowed to look at the code yourself. [0] https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/21/pacemaker-security-is-terrifying/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/21/pacemaker-security-is-te...
    - swiley 9y ago
      It used to not matter so much, often it was possible to replace them with SOP PLC like devices without much work so it made sense to think of them like hardware.
    - 9y ago
naveen99 9y ago
You will always be able to do general purpose computing, maybe just with a loss of speed. No one is going to back door every 10 dollar microcontroller.
- ominous 9y ago
  And there's always pen and paper. ahah, silly article, worrying about such nonsense. /s
  - naveen99 9y ago
    10 dollar microcontrollers are way more powerful then pen and paper. In 10 years they may be as powerful as today's $2000 computers. It's a matter of scale. You can do general electronics with some AA batteries. If you want to build a nuclear reactor, yeah there will be interest from others in your affairs.
    - VLM 9y ago
      "In 10 years they may be as powerful as today's $2000 computers." That's been continuously true for some decades now. What might save us is capitalism in that the bean counters are not permitting $10 controllers for a toaster, those get the ten cent controllers. Also the cost of labor to program those is a limiter in that a mass market toaster with $50M of programming budget will be financially destroyed in the marketplace by a competitor spending $5K on "its a 60-180 second timer, nothing more". An embedded swamp will form of $25K cars with expensive insecure software. Your car will get powned 1000x more often than your toaster even though the risk to your life is fairly similar.
confounded 9y ago
Worth a quick note that Doctorow moved back to the EFF in 2015 fight DRM creating exactly this doomsday scenario (project 'Apollo 1201'). Donation link for those interested: https://eff.org/donate https://eff.org/donate
- camillomiller 9y ago
  My experiences with EFF in real life in Europe have been abysmal. I tend not to donate to organizations that are contrarian by statute. Especially so when you go to conferences, you hear panels where a EFF representative is chatting with a Google lobbyist and ends up using sentences like - and I quote - "OMG, you are so right", "Wow, I can't agree more". The theme was the censorship of content and a critique - clearly instrumental to Google's bottom line - that any content shouldn't be regulated by law.
  - r3bl 9y ago
    I had the opposite European experience. They seem to do pretty fine and talk constructively during the conferences I've attended where I listened to them, and I'm a regular donor to them, but, as a donor, I have to point this out: Their communication with the donors is almost non-existential. Waited for like two weeks to receive an answer for them, had to ping them after two weeks, they've replied, but failed to answer my questions, which I pointed out and never received an answer, then they've sent me a t-shirt to a wrong country (got the address right, missed the country completely and I have no clue how that happened), so I had to ping them again and let them know that they've fucked up the country while sending me a package, to which they didn't reply, but a couple of days later sent me another email in which they claim to have sent another package to the right country. Meanwhile, my initial questions remain unanswered for about two or three months now and all I get from them is "another donation successfully charged" emails.
    - saimiam 9y ago
      I just remembered that I sent them money after Snowden and I didn't get that promised t-shirt.
oldmancoyote 9y ago
The trouble with this sort of article is that it takes too long to get anything useful out of it. A better structure would be an explanation of the core idea at the beginning and the rest of the article to explore and defend the idea. Writing is not an ordered series of deductions as this author assumes. It's far more complicated.
- bruo 9y ago
  This kind of text work is called essay, it doesn't need to follow the rules of writing an article because it's not one. The author probably knows how complicated it's to write (he is a professional writer), and still manages to do it good enough to get some prizes for his work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Awards
  - oldmancoyote 9y ago
    Please don't presume to tell me what an essay is. This author has written a "story" with the climax (explanation) at the end. That is not an essay.
- camillomiller 9y ago
  Doctorow has great ideas and is a great writer, but damn, he could use a better editor most of time.
userbinator 9y ago
This and Stallman's "Right to Read" (posted yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14332257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14332257 ) are particularly relevant given the whole WannaCry situation --- no doubt there will be plenty of authoritarian-minded thinking computers (and maybe even programming them) should be locked-down/regulated more, to stop such attacks. In some sense, I rather take solace in the fact that hacks, attacks, cracks, leaks, etc. are continuing to happen regularly --- they are a sign that there is still some freedom left in society. "Imagine a world without crime" is a somewhat common phrase used by some, and if you actually do, you will realise that it would pretty much be the world of Orwell's 1984: there is no crime because there is no more freedom of thought nor action; everything has become under the control of some central authority. This goes beyond computers, although they will be a large part of it; it's really a general war on freedom.
- eksemplar 9y ago
  Big data, machine learning and things like facial recognition in the public space is exceedingly leading us toward a society of total control. We are not there yet, but I personally fear, that all it would take is the political realization, that the ability to predict behavior leads to more efficient governance. Technology has the ability to "set us free" or "enslave us", but it's up to the people to decide which they want in a democracy. In the current conservative climate, we're certainly heading more toward dystopia, racing rapidly to make some of the darker cyberpunk come true.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Humans are building a zoo for themselves. And turning the world into farms. What do you see as pros and cons?
    - mark_edward 9y ago
      farm animals are more productive, and spread quickly look at how many cows there are. on the downside, look at how they live. I'm afraid this comment isn't up to HN standards, but i've always thought the teleological end of humanity was something that resembles an ant colony more than pack wolves, i'm not sure there's anything to be done to avoid it.
eecc 9y ago
I don't mind a new security model for personal computing, one that sanely quarantines - or containerizes or sandboxes - an application. Any browser or App process has nothing good to do in ~/Library other than its own application support and prefs plist files (and the equivalent in Linux and Windows) If an App needs to access any artifact in my $HOME it needs to be explicitly authorized for that specific one (e.g. I want to embed images in a presentation) by a UI element that is part of a the OS itself. Right now, I might be running as root on my machine, because as soon as I'm 0wned, my whole life can be siphoned to some dodgy server on the net.
- nicky0 9y ago
  Apple needs to bring Sandboxing to macOS right away!
daoubt 9y ago
I always like to try to pick out the single most useful sentence or two from long essays like this. Here's my go: "So when I get into a car—a computer that I put my body into—with my hearing aid—a computer I put inside my body—I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, or to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests." Indeed.
pmiller2 9y ago
I'm really surprised there was no direct mention of the DMCA. That's turned out to be the thing that's given us un-repairable John Deere tractors and printers that won't use 3rd-party ink cartridges.
- zardo 9y ago
  At least until next year, your tractor software is not protected by the DMCA. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151027/10131232649/library-congress-releases-dmca-anti-circumvention-exemptions-hot-mess.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151027/10131232649/libra...
mark_l_watson 9y ago
This 6 year old article is still relevant but now most of the public seems very satisfied with iPhones or Android phones as their primary digital device. Even though I can hack on Haskell and Python code on my iOS devices, I see them, and am happy with them basically being appliances. When I program, I am in portable environments (Pharo Smalltalk, Emacs with Common Lisp or Haskell) that more or less can sit on top of any general purpose OS. If our government (I am in the USA) locks down computing devices to an extreme extent, then that will just screw up our economy and more well run tax jurisdictions (countries) will benefit.

298 points by ryukafalz 9y ago

This always, always rewards a re-read. Five years down the line, though, and I'm no longer sure that "We haven't lost yet," as the closing paragraph puts it.

dm319 9y ago
Yes, this is a classic, and is ringing truer each year.
flukus 9y ago
Did we even fight the war? Around here I regularly see people advocating for this sort of lockdown. It used to just be apple, but now it's in windows and Chromebooks.
- jackmott 9y ago
  a distressingly large number of programmers are welcoming it in windows world with the encroachment of windows store lockdown. its really depressing.
  - vram22 9y ago
    Can you elaborate? (I'm not familiar with the Windows Store, though I guess it is similar to the Apple and Play Stores.) What do you mean by your statement?
- Sephr 9y ago
  Your point holds true for Windows 10 S, but why do you consider Chromebooks to be locked down? You can enable developer mode, install your own OS on them, or even re-use the Chrome OS kernel for other desktop environments through crouton. You're also not forced to use Google's Chrome Web Store (except on Windows with the official distribution of Chrome).
  - Confiks 9y ago
    Well, you can do all that until you cannot anymore. The systems are designed in such a way that Google only has to flip a switch, and all Chromebook securely turn into bricks (presumably only the ones that haven't had developer mode enabled). On top of that, Chromebooks are mostly used in an education environment where they are in fact locked down to Chrome OS for specific email address domains. Then the domain administrator can conveniently switch it into a brick.
  - jackmott 9y ago
    that mode still completely changes the universe. nobody can make a living selling chromebook software without consent of and payment to google.
    - Sephr 9y ago
      The point is that with this configuration you can use or buy software that normally runs on Ubuntu.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    Google for (oh the irony) "Widevine" and how it interacts with it. So it has the same sort of problems that Microsoft palladium had : things like Netflix and the like simply won't work as soon as you have the developer switch enabled. General purpose computing is dependent on 2 things : ability to run your own programs AND the ability to lie about that fact to the network. Without the second the first is useless. Google understands this subtle point, but it appears most people do not. So Google is exploiting our ignorance here.
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure Netflix works fine with developer mode switched on. I can confirm at the moment (away from Chrome OS devices right now) that Widevine works fine with Netflix on desktop Linux; I'm pretty sure I remember Widevine working on my Chromebook with developer mode enabled.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Counterpoint: hundreds of millions of Windows 7 holdouts even after forced upgrades to Windows 10.
- imglorp 9y ago
  No, we never had a chance. If you consider these embedded "secure" CPU controllers in the news lately, we also have lost control of PC's as well. With baseband firmware, which was never ours in the first place, we have lost mobile.
  - hyperpallium 9y ago
    Offline general purpose computing remains. When the network becomes free, all will be lost.
    - im3w1l 9y ago
      Just like in the present we have mystery embedded CPU's all over in our computers, so in the future we will have mystery embedded modems siphoning our data all over in our computers. Offline will not be realistically achievable much longer. That's what I'm guessing anyway.
- Niten 9y ago
  Well, the locked-down nature of iOS and Chrome OS are what make them markedly more secure than a general purpose computer in the face of real-world threats. Just this week, my Mom's Chromebook kept her safe from what appears to have been a targeted attack (someone sent her an email with a link to a malicious .ru domain and my name in the From header). That locked-down design is also why I'm writing this response on a Chromebook. It's for good reason that Tech Solidarity and other security-conscious organizations recommend using iOS and Chromebooks where possible: https://techsolidarity.org/resources/basic_security.htm https://techsolidarity.org/resources/basic_security.htm Of course, we must fight tooth and nail against any regulations that would restrict access to general-purpose computing, or put limits on connecting a general-purpose computer to the Internet. But it's important to remember that there are absolutely legitimate reasons to use and recommend locked-down machines, and that the most technically adept of us will use a combination of both categories of computing device in our lives.
  - gwbas1c 9y ago
    I've wanted a locked down computer ever since every program that I installed in 1995 wanted to put a useless icon in my tray and take over every file type association. General purpose computers are great when I'm writing the program, but awful when running someone else's poorly written program that wants to take control over my computer. I like to think of a general purpose computer like a giant truck: great if you like that kind of thing, but not for everyone.
    - chtfn 9y ago
      What about a thriving Free Software ecosystem where the code can be audited and modified, and where the best apps (i.e. the ones that follow what users generally accept to be a standard of "respect" to your machine and its user, as well as doing their job) bubble up to the top? Using various Ubuntu-based distros and Free Software apps over the last 8 years, I have never felt like any program was overstepping the boundaries.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      You want a curated software store/repo. The computer itself doesn't need to be locked down to get the benefits you're talking about.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Chromebooks are more open than nearly any other commercially available x86 and ARM laptop, they are in many ways more open than nearly any other commercially available x86 or ARM laptop since PC 5150. Yes, they have a verified boot process, but once you're admin on one you can just swap it to developer mode. It's clearly a feature, not a bug.
  - true_tuna 9y ago
    I can't tell if you're trolling by stating deliberately untrue statements or you have some insane thought process where this statement makes sense to you. The chromebook is deliberately and consciously a closed platform. You can't write or run arbitrary code on it, you can't swap the OS, you can't even SEE the OS. That's the primary selling point. "We got this, don't look under the hood" Getting your own boot rom on there is a huge pain (I had to remove a screw off the main board) there were like ten steps I would never tell a non expert to attempt.
    - ryukafalz 9y ago
      GP is right, in a sense. Chromebooks (the Intel ones, anyway) typically ship with Coreboot, and Google developers regularly contribute to upstream Coreboot.[0] While you're correct that it's a pretty closed platform out of the box, you ultimately have more control over the platform than a typical x86 PC, if you go through the hoops of flashing your own Coreboot payload. The fact that it's hardware with official Coreboot support is notable, IMO. [0] https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/search?o=desc&q=google.com&s=committer-date&type=Commits&utf8=%E2%9C%93 https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/search?o=desc&q=google....
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      > You can't write or run arbitrary code on it, you can't swap the OS, you can't even SEE the OS. You can write and run arbitrary code on it, you can swap the OS, and you can even rebuild the firmware from source and flash it yourself (though at that point you will void the warranty since the firmware is in a position to cause hardware damage, but not for any of the other things). There is a local terminal emulator, and when you turn on developer mode you can have a local unix shell with mount and write access to removable disks, so you can image install media for an operating system. The boot firmware comes with SeaBIOS by default for the reason that Google (for whatever reason) wants you to be perfectly able to install bios-based operating systems as long as they're compatible with the hardware. If it's Linux, then any downstream hardware drivers involved are packaged in google's public kernel repositories, and if it's a userspace component, it's in the ChromiumOS repositories, where you can pull and build the entire operating system (aside from the pepper plugins for digital restrictions management and flash). Seriously, try doing many of these things with a typical off-the-shelf Windows or Apple laptop and get back to me. On Windows laptops you need to jump through hoops to disable firmware features which prevent you from installing new operating systems, on Chromebooks it's well documented and has no effect on warranty or your ability to roll back the changes. Most (all?) windows laptops have no vendor-provided open source firmware, and most of them don't have even a third party one which works. To write an install disk on Windows, you need to install a third-party image burning application, and there's no guarantee that the firmware will even let you boot it. Many windows laptop manufacturers will either inconvenience or flat-out deny warranty claimants who have replaced the operating system on their laptop. Microsoft does not publish the source code of the NT kernel. Most Windows laptops contain at least one piece of hardware which is not adequately documented such that somebody could write a driver for it without reverse engineering. Apple laptops are in some ways better, in some ways worse here. On the one hand, the firmware does not explicitly prevent you from booting third-party images, on the other hand, the firmware and hardware have undocumented behaviour which makes it exceedingly difficult to get most new operating systems to reliably boot and install on it. Usually even if yo u do manage to install and boot something, some important piece of hardware (the wireless chip, the display output multiplexer, the webcam, the touchpad) is either slightly or completely different from a documented counterpart, and takes months or years to be supported by anything except OS X and the first-party drivers on Windows. Darwin releases are usually eventually open source, Apple's compilers are partially open source, but also include several proprietary components. Most of the operating system libraries which weren't already available when they started are proprietary. Though on the plus side, you don't really need anything extra to write a boot disk for a third-party operating system. On the down, there is no provided firmware source code, and the system is sufficiently underdocumented that it's unlikely anyone will ever write an alternative firmware image for your given Apple laptop model.
- tyingq 9y ago
  There's a fair amount of lockdown with cloud providers as well. Not DRM related, but there nonetheless. Egress charges make it unsavory to move some apps out. And proprietary api setups make it more difficult to move as well...things like Google's cloud spanner, or AWS native features. The big cloud providers will also, over time, shape what's available in hardware in a way that won't benefit on-premise customers.
- natch 9y ago
  Sort of a side note here, but I think this is a big misunderstanding about Apple. Sounds crazy, I know, but hear me out before judging. I think with Apple it's more about allowing the end user (the real end user, not the end user's boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband, child/sibling/parent, boss/teacher/roommate etc.) to have control over their own information. In order to enforce this end user control, Apple needs to lock out rogue programs. It can't do so 100%, but it tries to get as close as reasonably possible. They try even harder with mobile devices, because mobile devices tend to be so personal and capture so much private information of one individual.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Apple has a lot to gain from controlling user experience, preventing malware, and protecting their 30% cut of software costs. Its not merely that they don't have much to gain from protecting users from snooping girlfriends. In almost every other instance they actually stand to gain from helping the other side. Apple has every reason to help your mom/dad/boss/school ensure that you don't misuse THEIR property. Your perspective seems to be mostly unfounded speculation that doesn't hold water.
  - chipperyman573 9y ago
    Also because users are used to their phones being able to do less than a laptop. "The appstore doesn't have it" is a legitimate reason to not be able to use a program on a phone but not a Windows machine (for example)
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I'd point at the SaaS model to be the death blow. Instead of running computation on our data, we put our data in third party control so that they can run their computation on what's now really their data. Chromebooks & stuff is just an extension of that in a world where SaaS is the dominant model of regular user's interaction with computers.

dano 9y ago

When in a company that runs windows with AD and lot's of strict GPO's in place, this is basically what you experience as an employee.

hyperhopper 9y ago
A corporate setting is completely different. They can choose how you access their own hardware (putting aside personal gripes for purposes of efficiency and convenience) However the real problem is hardware level DRM implementation and non-open CPUs, which really mean that I cannot truly own my own personal computer

_wmd 9y ago

Doctorow presented this at 2011 Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

bobajeff 9y ago

Well as long as you can still install Linux on a server or hobby board there will be some vestige of general purpose computing.

gue5t 9y ago
No. The problem is not a lack of access to a general-purpose computer. The problem is the lack of control over the computers you're forced to use in order to manipulate their attached I/O devices such as lights, refrigerators, screens, speakers, insulin pumps, steering and brakes, Internet connections, etc.
- closeparen 9y ago
  The microcontrollers that used to run these things were never particularly free, were they? Is it worse just because the computers running them are now more powerful?
  - ryukafalz 9y ago
    They do a lot more now. They're often networked and remotely upgradeable. Sure, you couldn't see the code in the microcontrollers in your old TV - the ones listening for IR signals and driving the LCD. But modern TVs do all of that and more; they have internet connections, some have cameras and microphones, etc. And even if you couldn't see the code in your old pacemaker (which I would say was still a problem), your new one probably has wireless administration and firmware updates. Those likely have remotely exploitable security vulnerabilities[0], and even if you have one inside your body, you aren't allowed to look at the code yourself. [0] https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/21/pacemaker-security-is-terrifying/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/21/pacemaker-security-is-te...
  - swiley 9y ago
    It used to not matter so much, often it was possible to replace them with SOP PLC like devices without much work so it made sense to think of them like hardware.
  - 9y ago

naveen99 9y ago

You will always be able to do general purpose computing, maybe just with a loss of speed. No one is going to back door every 10 dollar microcontroller.

ominous 9y ago
And there's always pen and paper. ahah, silly article, worrying about such nonsense. /s
- naveen99 9y ago
  10 dollar microcontrollers are way more powerful then pen and paper. In 10 years they may be as powerful as today's $2000 computers. It's a matter of scale. You can do general electronics with some AA batteries. If you want to build a nuclear reactor, yeah there will be interest from others in your affairs.
  - VLM 9y ago
    "In 10 years they may be as powerful as today's $2000 computers." That's been continuously true for some decades now. What might save us is capitalism in that the bean counters are not permitting $10 controllers for a toaster, those get the ten cent controllers. Also the cost of labor to program those is a limiter in that a mass market toaster with $50M of programming budget will be financially destroyed in the marketplace by a competitor spending $5K on "its a 60-180 second timer, nothing more". An embedded swamp will form of $25K cars with expensive insecure software. Your car will get powned 1000x more often than your toaster even though the risk to your life is fairly similar.

confounded 9y ago

Worth a quick note that Doctorow moved back to the EFF in 2015 fight DRM creating exactly this doomsday scenario (project 'Apollo 1201'). Donation link for those interested: https://eff.org/donate https://eff.org/donate

camillomiller 9y ago
My experiences with EFF in real life in Europe have been abysmal. I tend not to donate to organizations that are contrarian by statute. Especially so when you go to conferences, you hear panels where a EFF representative is chatting with a Google lobbyist and ends up using sentences like - and I quote - "OMG, you are so right", "Wow, I can't agree more". The theme was the censorship of content and a critique - clearly instrumental to Google's bottom line - that any content shouldn't be regulated by law.
- r3bl 9y ago
  I had the opposite European experience. They seem to do pretty fine and talk constructively during the conferences I've attended where I listened to them, and I'm a regular donor to them, but, as a donor, I have to point this out: Their communication with the donors is almost non-existential. Waited for like two weeks to receive an answer for them, had to ping them after two weeks, they've replied, but failed to answer my questions, which I pointed out and never received an answer, then they've sent me a t-shirt to a wrong country (got the address right, missed the country completely and I have no clue how that happened), so I had to ping them again and let them know that they've fucked up the country while sending me a package, to which they didn't reply, but a couple of days later sent me another email in which they claim to have sent another package to the right country. Meanwhile, my initial questions remain unanswered for about two or three months now and all I get from them is "another donation successfully charged" emails.
  - saimiam 9y ago
    I just remembered that I sent them money after Snowden and I didn't get that promised t-shirt.

oldmancoyote 9y ago

The trouble with this sort of article is that it takes too long to get anything useful out of it. A better structure would be an explanation of the core idea at the beginning and the rest of the article to explore and defend the idea. Writing is not an ordered series of deductions as this author assumes. It's far more complicated.

bruo 9y ago
This kind of text work is called essay, it doesn't need to follow the rules of writing an article because it's not one. The author probably knows how complicated it's to write (he is a professional writer), and still manages to do it good enough to get some prizes for his work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Awards
- oldmancoyote 9y ago
  Please don't presume to tell me what an essay is. This author has written a "story" with the climax (explanation) at the end. That is not an essay.
camillomiller 9y ago
Doctorow has great ideas and is a great writer, but damn, he could use a better editor most of time.

userbinator 9y ago

This and Stallman's "Right to Read" (posted yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14332257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14332257 ) are particularly relevant given the whole WannaCry situation --- no doubt there will be plenty of authoritarian-minded thinking computers (and maybe even programming them) should be locked-down/regulated more, to stop such attacks. In some sense, I rather take solace in the fact that hacks, attacks, cracks, leaks, etc. are continuing to happen regularly --- they are a sign that there is still some freedom left in society. "Imagine a world without crime" is a somewhat common phrase used by some, and if you actually do, you will realise that it would pretty much be the world of Orwell's 1984: there is no crime because there is no more freedom of thought nor action; everything has become under the control of some central authority. This goes beyond computers, although they will be a large part of it; it's really a general war on freedom.

eksemplar 9y ago
Big data, machine learning and things like facial recognition in the public space is exceedingly leading us toward a society of total control. We are not there yet, but I personally fear, that all it would take is the political realization, that the ability to predict behavior leads to more efficient governance. Technology has the ability to "set us free" or "enslave us", but it's up to the people to decide which they want in a democracy. In the current conservative climate, we're certainly heading more toward dystopia, racing rapidly to make some of the darker cyberpunk come true.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Humans are building a zoo for themselves. And turning the world into farms. What do you see as pros and cons?
  - mark_edward 9y ago
    farm animals are more productive, and spread quickly look at how many cows there are. on the downside, look at how they live. I'm afraid this comment isn't up to HN standards, but i've always thought the teleological end of humanity was something that resembles an ant colony more than pack wolves, i'm not sure there's anything to be done to avoid it.

eecc 9y ago

I don't mind a new security model for personal computing, one that sanely quarantines - or containerizes or sandboxes - an application. Any browser or App process has nothing good to do in ~/Library other than its own application support and prefs plist files (and the equivalent in Linux and Windows) If an App needs to access any artifact in my $HOME it needs to be explicitly authorized for that specific one (e.g. I want to embed images in a presentation) by a UI element that is part of a the OS itself. Right now, I might be running as root on my machine, because as soon as I'm 0wned, my whole life can be siphoned to some dodgy server on the net.

nicky0 9y ago
Apple needs to bring Sandboxing to macOS right away!

daoubt 9y ago

I always like to try to pick out the single most useful sentence or two from long essays like this. Here's my go: "So when I get into a car—a computer that I put my body into—with my hearing aid—a computer I put inside my body—I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, or to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests." Indeed.

pmiller2 9y ago

I'm really surprised there was no direct mention of the DMCA. That's turned out to be the thing that's given us un-repairable John Deere tractors and printers that won't use 3rd-party ink cartridges.

zardo 9y ago
At least until next year, your tractor software is not protected by the DMCA. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151027/10131232649/library-congress-releases-dmca-anti-circumvention-exemptions-hot-mess.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151027/10131232649/libra...

mark_l_watson 9y ago

This 6 year old article is still relevant but now most of the public seems very satisfied with iPhones or Android phones as their primary digital device. Even though I can hack on Haskell and Python code on my iOS devices, I see them, and am happy with them basically being appliances. When I program, I am in portable environments (Pharo Smalltalk, Emacs with Common Lisp or Haskell) that more or less can sit on top of any general purpose OS. If our government (I am in the USA) locks down computing devices to an extreme extent, then that will just screw up our economy and more well run tax jurisdictions (countries) will benefit.