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The EU is pretty enthusiastic about copyright too, I don't blame solely the US. > Humanity should sacrifice the entire copyright industry instead so that compu

The EU is pretty enthusiastic about copyright too, I don't blame solely the US. > Humanity should sacrifice the entire copyright industry instead so that computers can remain free. I agree, but I don't think it's likely to happen. Free computing would sooner be sacrificed to save copyright, and the other restrictions on information. At best, the current uneasy coexistence will continue.

matheusmoreira 7y ago
> Free computing would sooner be sacrificed to save copyright, and the other restrictions on information. True. It's not just copyright though. Free computing is a direct threat to the power of governments. Encryption is powerful enough to defeat entire militaries. They don't want mere citizens to have this power. They want a future where computers only run software signed by the government. This is likely to happen because electronics manufacturing is extremely expensive and centralized. We can write our own software but we can't make our own processors. Due to Intel ME, we already know how dangerous trusting these manufacturers can be. Perhaps FPGAs will change this one day. What if people could design and implement their own CPUs? Someone just posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891056 > At best, the current uneasy coexistence will continue. It's not an uneasy coexistence. It's a politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, people make technology that circumvents those laws. The government must always increase its reach just to maintain the same level of control over the governed. We'll end up with either a tyrant government that considers programmers a threat to national security or an ungovernable population that has access to ubiquitous subversive technology.
- incompatible 7y ago
  Governments wouldn't have much trouble shutting down Tor nodes in their own territory, as far as I know, since they can trace the IP addresses back to physical computers. Generally, they don't, which is the "uneasy coexistence" aspect. Perhaps they have legal reasons for not shutting it down, such as the US constitution, or perhaps they find it useful for their own purposes to keep it running, or perhaps they just don't care because it's not used widely enough. I can imagine an outcome in which the illegal information is driven further underground and no longer accessible at publicly known locations. Like the hidden ftp sites that supposedly exist in the "Warez scene". The trend that most people no longer keep their own data on their own devices, but use streaming sites and cloud servers, will presumably help keep information under control.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

> Free computing would sooner be sacrificed to save copyright, and the other restrictions on information. True. It's not just copyright though. Free computing is a direct threat to the power of governments. Encryption is powerful enough to defeat entire militaries. They don't want mere citizens to have this power. They want a future where computers only run software signed by the government. This is likely to happen because electronics manufacturing is extremely expensive and centralized. We can write our own software but we can't make our own processors. Due to Intel ME, we already know how dangerous trusting these manufacturers can be. Perhaps FPGAs will change this one day. What if people could design and implement their own CPUs? Someone just posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891056 > At best, the current uneasy coexistence will continue. It's not an uneasy coexistence. It's a politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, people make technology that circumvents those laws. The government must always increase its reach just to maintain the same level of control over the governed. We'll end up with either a tyrant government that considers programmers a threat to national security or an ungovernable population that has access to ubiquitous subversive technology.

incompatible 7y ago
Governments wouldn't have much trouble shutting down Tor nodes in their own territory, as far as I know, since they can trace the IP addresses back to physical computers. Generally, they don't, which is the "uneasy coexistence" aspect. Perhaps they have legal reasons for not shutting it down, such as the US constitution, or perhaps they find it useful for their own purposes to keep it running, or perhaps they just don't care because it's not used widely enough. I can imagine an outcome in which the illegal information is driven further underground and no longer accessible at publicly known locations. Like the hidden ftp sites that supposedly exist in the "Warez scene". The trend that most people no longer keep their own data on their own devices, but use streaming sites and cloud servers, will presumably help keep information under control.