21 ms·

The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

405 points by pdkl95 6y ago

new_realist 6y ago
These days, many computers only run authorized software, and trusted boot is fairly secure. They’re integrated hardware/software systems. This article is out of date, and a bit biased, to boot.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  It was published in 2012 though. Why do you say it is biased? I thought it was agreeable.
- walterbell 6y ago
  Which article would you recommend on this topic?
  - octoberfranklin 6y ago
    https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ ? Joking, of course. Half-joking.
- salawat 6y ago
  Not at all. Secure boot is opaque to most. Gigantic monolithic actors in the realm of hardware and software collude to keep the plebiscites from making anything too disruptive without them quickly running into an audit process that can be used to ensure that any virtue can be clean room redesigned by the monolith... Yeah. Seems pretty prescient to me.
  - twentydollars 6y ago
    Could you elaborate in plain English? Your comment makes no sense to me.
    - salawat 6y ago
      Certainly. Which parts, forgive me for the long delay, was building a shed today. In order though... >Secure Boot/Trusted Computing This is an effort born out of seemingly benevolent intentions. Rootkits, a form of malware known for implanting themselves into a computer system before an Operating System even loads and persisting in various exotic ways were quite difficult to detect or do anything about. By applying various cryptographic verification techniques though, one can be sure that software being loaded or delegated to is actually the "original legit stuff". The issue comes back to trust though. The community fought hard against a move that had been shaping up in the standardization of UEFI and secure boot to fight against entrenched industry actors being able to gatekeep or be the only holders of keys. The fear was that someone like Microsoft would utilize their position to remove a User's ability to load a cryptographically "unblessed" OS. Happily, User's can swap out that cryptographic material now, but many of the more arcane aspects to doing so on a system to system basis are poorly documented and difficult to discover. At least the desktop world seems to be pretty accesible, but the mobile world is a nightmare in regards to getting it up and running from the get go with minimal support and a modest home lab. >Monolith's The monoliths I speak of are tech giants. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. The different flavors of evil wrought vary by the particular actor. Apple and Google have used their role as gatekeepers to their App store as a means to tap into novel business verticals, or to be able to ensure that other app developers can be frustrated or otherwise managed by applications of arbitrary structure and standards. Things such as code signing requirements baked into the OS have created situations where now there is a barrier to entry of at least understanding cryptography and the tools around it (once considered a niche and unnecessary computer programming skill, now core). It also dissuaded and complicates the keyboard to pixel prochain even more intimidating. I expected that I could hand my child a smartphone sized computer to program and crash to get familiar with computing fundamentals, but the world has gone hard the other way. Frankly any place with an App store has. Most mobile system foundries or OEM's are notorious for locking down access to the implementation details of their silicon. Nvidia, Microsoft, and even AMD's graphics divisions have earned a access to a special place of hatred in my mind over the two pronged efforts of collusion with the media industry through software driver and hardware implementations that make it absurdly difficult to drive one's own purchased graphics and coprocessor equipment as well as supporting abandoned hardware configurations. (I'm looking at you Sony, and your abandonment of the Nvidia GeForce 630M.) All of this user hostility was absent when I was growing up. You had this machine where the only limit was what you had the documentation to read to know how to drive it. Nowadays, it seems everyone is more interested in shoving a microprocessor in things, but threatening with lawyer, anti-tamper, or absolution of themselves from having to provide any documentation to a buyer at all, of the responsibility to deliver to the user any constructive value, while at the same time, maximizing lock-in and recurring revenue streams. Look at HP printers nowadays for how microprocessors being inserted into the meta-logistical function of ink management makes user's life actively worse, where previously one was free to source one's ink from anywhere with nary a concern. It's got to stop.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Biased in favor of empowering individuals, rather than making them serfs under corporate landlords? What's wrong with such a bias?
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    We lived under that model, and it sucks for a lot of people. Barons also provided for the common defense. An unlocked software architecture and untrusted code leaves people at the mercy of hackers, it doesn't empower the average user. We can do that defense of users better than we're doing right now, by divorcing the trust model from the paid vendor model, but it's worth noting how we got here in the first place and why where we are now is better for a lot of people than where we were. If we can't recognize that, it's hard to make a value proposition that people will actually sign on to.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      An unlocked software architecture and untrusted code leaves people at the mercy of hackers, it doesn't empower the average user. There are other solutions to this problem that do not involve surrendering control over everything that matters to corporate interests that may coincidentally align with your own sometimes. For example, do we really think a corporation primarily motivated by making its profits is going to be habitually careful about software security? We know this is not often the case, because the quality of so much software produced by big businesses today is terrible in terms of security. What is more telling is that it continues to be terrible even though we are well aware of methods to mitigate many of those vulnerabilities. But those methods usually require more skill and/or more time to get right, and typically that means greater up-front costs, and since it turns out that Joe User will often put up with junk security and pay good money for the software anyway, the profit incentive does not have the outcome we would like. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean Joe likes the poor security. He might be willing to use the tech anyway because he values what he gets from it more than he believes the dangers are costing him, or because he believes the dangers are inherent in the tech and unavoidable, or because he just doesn't realise the dangers are there in the first place. This can be solved in a number of ways, but most of them come down to showing people that it's possible to do better by writing software that actually does better, and given the lack of commercial incentives coming from above, the most likely place we'll see that is in community efforts. Those efforts don't even have to result in some sort of openly developed software that dominates its market to succeed here, just to make it obvious to enough normal people that they don't need to accept substandard junk and they should demand better in return for their money. Much the same argument can be applied to issues like privacy, repairable and upgradeable hardware, open standards for data portability, freely programmable devices, and no doubt many more. If competition in the commercial markets isn't getting the job done, yet we know doing the job is possible, it's up to those of us with the knowledge and skills to push things forward for now. That could mean directly creating better hardware and software, educating our less skilled and experienced peers to improve standards in the industry and make hiring better people less expensive, or simply educating users and pushing for higher standards from the customer's side.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Authorised by whom?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > This article is out of date Only if you're trying to say that the war is mostly over, and general purpose computing lost.
  - johncolanduoni 6y ago
    The general purpose computing doomsayers lost the average person caring whether they have a general purpose computer that they were never going to use as such anyway. They haven’t come within a light year of actually losing the ability to own devices that can run whatever code they want to.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      Yes, people don't even want to install software on their own devices, which is why it's so weird that companies spend so much time and effort preventing them from doing it.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
> But in general, the poorer and younger you are, the more likely you are to be a tenant farmer in some feudal lord's computational lands. An analogy that will probably define the 21st century...
- rektide 6y ago
  all it takes is endless zero pay toil living with doesn't just work not all easy open source. to make our own lands. heck yeah let's keep all picking the subsidized to near free consumer experience.
  - rektide 6y ago
    holding at -2. i do think it's worth asking what the alternatives are, and what we have to do to chase them. i was very salty above, but i feel like i have embodied the zeitgeist, captured the popular attitude, fairly accurately, to get an escape from capture into techno-feudalism. i for one also have spent a lot of my life with endless zero pay toil, chasing the better alternatives, basically sure that my life will never reach any kind of techno-culmination, never achieve any kind of useful escaped coherency, but engaged in the struggle none the less. for zero pay, expectations of reward, other than personal satisfaction at having made a go at homesteading myself on the digital. i'd also say that i don't find open source uneasy to work with, & in fact it feels more comfortable to me, lets me go down rabbit holes but rabbit holes that ultimately, usually, culminate in some kind of ground truth & insight, some understanding gained. my macbook on the other hand started refusing to connect to my wifi 3 weeks ago & there's next to no hope for understanding why the macbook has had this change of heart, for finding out what went wrong. the macbook will remain unknowable, a thing that is unexaminable, outside the scientific process & unadaptable; in some ways it's comforting, getting to a hard wall & having no place further to look, but i for one will take & hope humanity continues to have rabbit holes to dive into & chase down, towards reason, towards understanding, towards betterment. and it's just so much easier & more interesting to situate myself in such a powerful land, as OSS brings. i think we should take Cory's techno-feudalism concerns very seriously, and very much consider what we ourselves can do, and assess more honestly the behaviors & perceptions of the options about us.
heavyset_go 6y ago
This is something Stallman[1] and others have talked about for a while now, with this article having been published in 2003[2]. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
- city41 6y ago
  I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I don't think that's changed.
  - naringas 6y ago
    I have always thought that he was on to something. I think it's actually quite impressive that he saw something incoming which only now (20 years later) is becoming feasable. then again, a lot of people think I am also crazy, so there's that
  - robotresearcher 6y ago
    By no means all people. He became very well known in the tech community in the 90s because a significant number of people were interested in what he was saying. He won the MacArthur award in 1990.
    - konjin 6y ago
      People don't want to listen to Stallman because he talks about motivations. The number of times I've had people downvote me for pointing out all organizations will act to maximize profit regardless the cost to others is extraordinary. It doesn't matter if it's google, mozilla, microsoft or the fsf.
fsflover 6y ago
Some companies fight on the side of users in this war. Check out https://puri.sm/products/ https://puri.sm/products/ for an example (happy user).
- Shared404 6y ago
  Some other interesting companies: https://starlabs.systems/ https://system76.com/ https://www.pine64.org/ Most of these are probably well known to those who frequent HN, but just in case I'll mention them.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    https://thinkpenguin.com/ https://thinkpenguin.com/ https://minifree.org/ https://minifree.org/ https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en But the first company (Purism) specifically attempts to change the industry, they state it as one of their goals: https://puri.sm/learn/why-purism-computers-are-better-than-proprietary-devices-from-other-vendors/ https://puri.sm/learn/why-purism-computers-are-better-than-p....
    - Shared404 6y ago
      This is true. Thanks for both the other companies, and the important distinction.
      - fsflover 6y ago
        One more: https://tehnoetic.com/ https://tehnoetic.com/ And for completeness: Purism’s CEO Todd Weaver Testifies at California Congressional Privacy Commission https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-ceo-todd-weaver-testifies-at-california-congressional-privacy-commission/ https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-ceo-todd-weaver-testifies-at-c...
        Shared404 6y ago
        I've now favorited this thread, thank you for the many recommendations. Do you happen to know if any of these companies monitor their supply chains to avoid China? I recognize that that's not the fight that many of these companies are fighting, but it seems like a worthwhile one that would probably tip at least me over from one option to another. I've done a little poking around myself, but haven't seen anything.
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436139
dpc_pw 6y ago
Seize the means of personal computation, switch to Urbit.
- yobert 6y ago
  I was excited about urbit until they went all blockchain-ey
  - dpc_pw 6y ago
    Ethereum is only used for PKI, and it will eventually be replaced by a different system. Urbit is really not a blockchain-y project.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Git also uses blockchain, so what ?
platz 6y ago
previous submissions from different url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335261 (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364 (2019)
agbell 6y ago
A couple years ago I saw a version of this talk from the chaos computer club on youtube and really loved it. I think its an important issue. So I emailed Cory and asked if I could interview him for a podcast. He responded almost immediately and said yes. At the time he was doing interviews on major network programs about a new book, and I figured he would never respond. He was basically like you would expect Cory Doctorow to be in person, smart and well spoken, friendly and fired up about computing freedom type issues. We need more public intellectuals like him.
- pa7ch 6y ago
  I saw Cory Doctorow speak at Clemson Uni in South Carolina of all places sometime around 2008. The room was only partially filled. I was already into computer security, but I was really impressed by him and have followed and read his work ever since. He had a big influence on me. I went on to see him at security conferences on the west coast many years later.
preommr 6y ago
The only thing that brings me solace in regards to doomsday scenarios like this is that they're extremely unlikely because of human incompetence. We are so far away from companies creating and embedding computers everywhere for this to be an issue. Let alone for sophisticated means of interaction. And lets say we somehow exceed all expectations and companies start creating marvelous products that are all on par with the iphone. It's still going to be difficult for them. There are people out there that are afraid of 5g because they think it causes coronavirus. We've avoided capitalizing on nuclear energy because of NIMBY. These nutjobs combined with perpetually on the fence observers will be a big enough stumbling block for a lot of this overreaching behavior. Remember how places banned google glasses? Have faith in human stupidity and disorder - it's a tried and true system.
- arexxbifs 6y ago
  > We are so far away from companies creating and embedding computers everywhere for this to be an issue. Apart from those in TV:s, loudspeakers, phones, light bulbs, doorbells, cars, airplanes, watches, trains, billboards, medical equipment, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, thermostats, elevators, vending machines, kitchen appliances, lawnmowers, musical instruments, cameras, bathroom scales, thermometers and a few more things there's almost no computers at all in most everyday objects.
  - hilbertseries 6y ago
    > there's almost no computers at all in most everyday objects. This is true, without your qualifier. Go into a random house in America and you won’t find many smart appliances. Internet of things devices are more of a hobby for those with disposable income, than some thing greatly taking over. There’s not a real problem that smart lightbulbs are solving to be worth the time and hassle for most people. There are a couple of exceptions, like internet connected TVs that can play Netflix for you, make a lot of sense. But go look at Home Depot, not many fridges, ovens and microwaves are being advertised and sold as smart.
    - malaya_zemlya 6y ago
grawprog 6y ago
Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid for and properly managed by them for the users own safety. This is bullshit. It's for profit and control. The general purpose computer is hands down the most amazing, equalizing piece of technology humanity has ever created. It's one of the few things that gives the average person the same abilities as the wealthy or elite. Whoever you are, where ever you are, if you have a general purpose computer and some knowledge, you can do just about anything. Rather than teach people about this amazing, near magical piece of technology enabling anyone to do amazing things, the whole attitude, at least since i've been around using computers going back fairly far is, 'users can't be trusted with this power and need to be protected from themselves at their own expense by some other benevolent entity'. Instead of being taught as something that's now just a part of life, the way something like driving is, despite being nearly as, if not more important than, driving is in society these days, general computing is still pushed as this mysterious arcane art the average person needs to be protected from through the use of everything mentioned in my first paragraph by someone who can lock everything up and provide security for them. How else could they convince people to own three, four, five a dozen of what is essentially the same thing? Just locked down in functionality in different ways. I lay responsibility on the early generation of tech people that got rich quick in the late 90's early 2000's. They seen the potential computers had to bring, they took advantage early and made money, they got greedy and have done nothing since but try and keep the average person out through whatever means necessary. Those people are the ones running the tech giants today, pushing locked down hardware, and trying to crush general computing as a thing. ETA: I changed my original wording from blame to lay responsibility on. My intention wasn't to blame anyone in particular but to bring awareness to the let down by those original people that benefited from the openness of general computing only to be at the forefront of trying to lock it down now.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  All this stuff has really started to take the fun out of programming and hacking for me
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
How can we circumvent future legislation to prevent someone from pulling a 70's Woz and building/selling a PC from off the shelf parts that don't have any DRM in them? There needs to be pre-emptive posturing by the community to protect inventors who can create non-DRM/TRM open source general purpose computers. GNU for hardware, but using CPUs that aren't manufactured by the top 3 (or 10) CPU vendors. At some point an investor should be able to call up TSMC and make an open source, CPU/MCU, no?
- superkuh 6y ago
  "Can We Build Trustable Hardware?" https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5706 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5706
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dilyevsky 6y ago
One of those titles where you know author name immediately =)
fsfffs 6y ago
As alluded to in the talk, I think the initial "war" solution isn't contentious for many people and most on HN. The civil war problem though, user rights vs owner rights, I think can be helped along though maybe not solved completely with basic income and mandatory information disclosure. Lots of the problems he talks about involve people very underlevereged in the market and incapable of making decisions both because of an unequal distribution of information and/or capability. So maybe we can solve the capability problem by giving everyone enough cash to allow them to make market decisions not solely based on survival, but also based on things like moral value. For example, people could more sustainably make purchases based on things like logging, spying, data protection or even allow someone to move from one rental property with an overzealous landlord to another without being captive to the whims of the owner out of circumstance. The monetary threshold is arguable and having the capacity to make non-binary market decisions when capable doesn't mean that people will -- most that are capable of voting with their wallet today still often don't. This wouldn't solve those human problems, but in many markets I feel we're reaching a point where many people are not just unwilling to make pro-consumer decisions, they're incapable. My second point, mandatory information disclosure, is kind of a necessary component to a functioning capitalist market. Consumers can't make informed market decisions without information from the market. Forcing correct information disclosure of one kind or another allows consumers to compare services. Sure this doesn't solve problems with what should be mandated or "natural flavors", etc, but the more correct information consumers have, the more likely they will be able to make the best market decision, be that ingredients, certifications or schematics.
- fsfffs 6y ago
  So the above advocates for a "complete owner-controlled" system, but the users in the market (every human) is also buoyed with cash and information where they can make market decisions not solely based on their income and thus market decisions that may, if they wish, be based on non-survival based values they have and by nature of increased demand, increase their market prevalence.
sabujp 6y ago
general purpose computers will exist, they are literally the building blocks. However, it'll be bad when you as a private entity can't purchase CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, the building blocks for building your own general purpose computing device. I don't ever see that happening since there will always be engineers, students, hackers, startups, how will any new industries form if they can't get their hands on the source materials?
- rgbrenner 6y ago
  There are a lot of other fields where you need to go to university just to use the building blocks of the field. Doctors cant just acquire cadavers and try it out at home. Those industries move much slower, but innovation in our field might be related to how new it is. There are many cheap computers like rpi, but regulations could demand certain security controls that might eliminate those devices. So I could imagine (a terrible) future where innovation slows, our devices are like ipads, and you need to go to uni to use a real computer. It would take some time... but I think theres a chance it could happen.
  - sabujp 6y ago
    yea i really don't see that happening, there are too many hackers and tinkerers on earth
  - ece 6y ago
    The internet has neutral authorities for managing DNS, SSL, numerous protocols like http, and Net Neutrality exists even if the current FCC doesn't seem to think so. There should accordingly be a neutral authority for signing apps, and requiring that companies build on neutral connectivity standards like PCIE. The ecosystem can stay open as it matures, but you're right, if the internet remains 4 giant companies, then yeah, even general purpose computing devices can be reduced to iOS, Windows 10 S, and Android with locked bootloaders and no alternative app stores.
dmix 6y ago
I wasn’t aware Cory worked with Metallica on the anti-piracy side. I’m curious if his stance has developed or matured since then.
83769243571 6y ago
There will come a point when walled gardens predominate to such a degree that general purpose computing platforms will show themselves to be one of the last remaining impediments to the kind of absolute censorship of ideas (or even empirical facts) that "woke" HNers cannot tolerate--at which point they will abruptly switch sides and endorse outlawing, restricting, or at the very least stigmatizing those platforms and their users.
karinlee 6y ago
You come to the site and receive a lot of text and good information. There is a lot of damage from corona all over the world, is your health okay? It would be nice if everyone did not damage and survived well. I also created and run a site. Please come to play once to see and go and leave some sketches. Have a happy day^^ My site address: https://sukacrot.site/ https://sukacrot.site/
peter303 6y ago
I saw Cory yesterday at the Denver scifi convention MileHiCon. He is the guest of honor this year. Yes, he was on a couple of panels about digital rights. One panel discussed Amazons predatory policies on self-publishing. If you do it there, Amazon prohibits any manifestation of your work on any other platform.
einpoklum 6y ago
> Opponents of DRM like the slogan, "You bought it, you own it." Not really. Capitalist opponents of DRM like that. Many of us are against ownership and property as such - but do support autonomy, privacy, decentralization of power and the breaking of the dichotomy between user and designer/programmer, between producer and consumer.

405 points by pdkl95 6y ago

These days, many computers only run authorized software, and trusted boot is fairly secure. They’re integrated hardware/software systems. This article is out of date, and a bit biased, to boot.

matheusmoreira 6y ago
It was published in 2012 though. Why do you say it is biased? I thought it was agreeable.
walterbell 6y ago
Which article would you recommend on this topic?
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ ? Joking, of course. Half-joking.
salawat 6y ago
Not at all. Secure boot is opaque to most. Gigantic monolithic actors in the realm of hardware and software collude to keep the plebiscites from making anything too disruptive without them quickly running into an audit process that can be used to ensure that any virtue can be clean room redesigned by the monolith... Yeah. Seems pretty prescient to me.
- twentydollars 6y ago
  Could you elaborate in plain English? Your comment makes no sense to me.
  - salawat 6y ago
    Certainly. Which parts, forgive me for the long delay, was building a shed today. In order though... >Secure Boot/Trusted Computing This is an effort born out of seemingly benevolent intentions. Rootkits, a form of malware known for implanting themselves into a computer system before an Operating System even loads and persisting in various exotic ways were quite difficult to detect or do anything about. By applying various cryptographic verification techniques though, one can be sure that software being loaded or delegated to is actually the "original legit stuff". The issue comes back to trust though. The community fought hard against a move that had been shaping up in the standardization of UEFI and secure boot to fight against entrenched industry actors being able to gatekeep or be the only holders of keys. The fear was that someone like Microsoft would utilize their position to remove a User's ability to load a cryptographically "unblessed" OS. Happily, User's can swap out that cryptographic material now, but many of the more arcane aspects to doing so on a system to system basis are poorly documented and difficult to discover. At least the desktop world seems to be pretty accesible, but the mobile world is a nightmare in regards to getting it up and running from the get go with minimal support and a modest home lab. >Monolith's The monoliths I speak of are tech giants. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. The different flavors of evil wrought vary by the particular actor. Apple and Google have used their role as gatekeepers to their App store as a means to tap into novel business verticals, or to be able to ensure that other app developers can be frustrated or otherwise managed by applications of arbitrary structure and standards. Things such as code signing requirements baked into the OS have created situations where now there is a barrier to entry of at least understanding cryptography and the tools around it (once considered a niche and unnecessary computer programming skill, now core). It also dissuaded and complicates the keyboard to pixel prochain even more intimidating. I expected that I could hand my child a smartphone sized computer to program and crash to get familiar with computing fundamentals, but the world has gone hard the other way. Frankly any place with an App store has. Most mobile system foundries or OEM's are notorious for locking down access to the implementation details of their silicon. Nvidia, Microsoft, and even AMD's graphics divisions have earned a access to a special place of hatred in my mind over the two pronged efforts of collusion with the media industry through software driver and hardware implementations that make it absurdly difficult to drive one's own purchased graphics and coprocessor equipment as well as supporting abandoned hardware configurations. (I'm looking at you Sony, and your abandonment of the Nvidia GeForce 630M.) All of this user hostility was absent when I was growing up. You had this machine where the only limit was what you had the documentation to read to know how to drive it. Nowadays, it seems everyone is more interested in shoving a microprocessor in things, but threatening with lawyer, anti-tamper, or absolution of themselves from having to provide any documentation to a buyer at all, of the responsibility to deliver to the user any constructive value, while at the same time, maximizing lock-in and recurring revenue streams. Look at HP printers nowadays for how microprocessors being inserted into the meta-logistical function of ink management makes user's life actively worse, where previously one was free to source one's ink from anywhere with nary a concern. It's got to stop.
bigbubba 6y ago
Biased in favor of empowering individuals, rather than making them serfs under corporate landlords? What's wrong with such a bias?
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  We lived under that model, and it sucks for a lot of people. Barons also provided for the common defense. An unlocked software architecture and untrusted code leaves people at the mercy of hackers, it doesn't empower the average user. We can do that defense of users better than we're doing right now, by divorcing the trust model from the paid vendor model, but it's worth noting how we got here in the first place and why where we are now is better for a lot of people than where we were. If we can't recognize that, it's hard to make a value proposition that people will actually sign on to.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    An unlocked software architecture and untrusted code leaves people at the mercy of hackers, it doesn't empower the average user. There are other solutions to this problem that do not involve surrendering control over everything that matters to corporate interests that may coincidentally align with your own sometimes. For example, do we really think a corporation primarily motivated by making its profits is going to be habitually careful about software security? We know this is not often the case, because the quality of so much software produced by big businesses today is terrible in terms of security. What is more telling is that it continues to be terrible even though we are well aware of methods to mitigate many of those vulnerabilities. But those methods usually require more skill and/or more time to get right, and typically that means greater up-front costs, and since it turns out that Joe User will often put up with junk security and pay good money for the software anyway, the profit incentive does not have the outcome we would like. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean Joe likes the poor security. He might be willing to use the tech anyway because he values what he gets from it more than he believes the dangers are costing him, or because he believes the dangers are inherent in the tech and unavoidable, or because he just doesn't realise the dangers are there in the first place. This can be solved in a number of ways, but most of them come down to showing people that it's possible to do better by writing software that actually does better, and given the lack of commercial incentives coming from above, the most likely place we'll see that is in community efforts. Those efforts don't even have to result in some sort of openly developed software that dominates its market to succeed here, just to make it obvious to enough normal people that they don't need to accept substandard junk and they should demand better in return for their money. Much the same argument can be applied to issues like privacy, repairable and upgradeable hardware, open standards for data portability, freely programmable devices, and no doubt many more. If competition in the commercial markets isn't getting the job done, yet we know doing the job is possible, it's up to those of us with the knowledge and skills to push things forward for now. That could mean directly creating better hardware and software, educating our less skilled and experienced peers to improve standards in the industry and make hiring better people less expensive, or simply educating users and pushing for higher standards from the customer's side.
wizzwizz4 6y ago
Authorised by whom?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 6y ago
> This article is out of date Only if you're trying to say that the war is mostly over, and general purpose computing lost.
- johncolanduoni 6y ago
  The general purpose computing doomsayers lost the average person caring whether they have a general purpose computer that they were never going to use as such anyway. They haven’t come within a light year of actually losing the ability to own devices that can run whatever code they want to.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    Yes, people don't even want to install software on their own devices, which is why it's so weird that companies spend so much time and effort preventing them from doing it.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> But in general, the poorer and younger you are, the more likely you are to be a tenant farmer in some feudal lord's computational lands. An analogy that will probably define the 21st century...

rektide 6y ago
all it takes is endless zero pay toil living with doesn't just work not all easy open source. to make our own lands. heck yeah let's keep all picking the subsidized to near free consumer experience.
- rektide 6y ago
  holding at -2. i do think it's worth asking what the alternatives are, and what we have to do to chase them. i was very salty above, but i feel like i have embodied the zeitgeist, captured the popular attitude, fairly accurately, to get an escape from capture into techno-feudalism. i for one also have spent a lot of my life with endless zero pay toil, chasing the better alternatives, basically sure that my life will never reach any kind of techno-culmination, never achieve any kind of useful escaped coherency, but engaged in the struggle none the less. for zero pay, expectations of reward, other than personal satisfaction at having made a go at homesteading myself on the digital. i'd also say that i don't find open source uneasy to work with, & in fact it feels more comfortable to me, lets me go down rabbit holes but rabbit holes that ultimately, usually, culminate in some kind of ground truth & insight, some understanding gained. my macbook on the other hand started refusing to connect to my wifi 3 weeks ago & there's next to no hope for understanding why the macbook has had this change of heart, for finding out what went wrong. the macbook will remain unknowable, a thing that is unexaminable, outside the scientific process & unadaptable; in some ways it's comforting, getting to a hard wall & having no place further to look, but i for one will take & hope humanity continues to have rabbit holes to dive into & chase down, towards reason, towards understanding, towards betterment. and it's just so much easier & more interesting to situate myself in such a powerful land, as OSS brings. i think we should take Cory's techno-feudalism concerns very seriously, and very much consider what we ourselves can do, and assess more honestly the behaviors & perceptions of the options about us.

heavyset_go 6y ago

This is something Stallman[1] and others have talked about for a while now, with this article having been published in 2003[2]. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

city41 6y ago
I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I don't think that's changed.
- naringas 6y ago
  I have always thought that he was on to something. I think it's actually quite impressive that he saw something incoming which only now (20 years later) is becoming feasable. then again, a lot of people think I am also crazy, so there's that
- robotresearcher 6y ago
  By no means all people. He became very well known in the tech community in the 90s because a significant number of people were interested in what he was saying. He won the MacArthur award in 1990.
  - konjin 6y ago
    People don't want to listen to Stallman because he talks about motivations. The number of times I've had people downvote me for pointing out all organizations will act to maximize profit regardless the cost to others is extraordinary. It doesn't matter if it's google, mozilla, microsoft or the fsf.

fsflover 6y ago

Some companies fight on the side of users in this war. Check out https://puri.sm/products/ https://puri.sm/products/ for an example (happy user).

Shared404 6y ago
Some other interesting companies: https://starlabs.systems/ https://system76.com/ https://www.pine64.org/ Most of these are probably well known to those who frequent HN, but just in case I'll mention them.
- fsflover 6y ago
  https://thinkpenguin.com/ https://thinkpenguin.com/ https://minifree.org/ https://minifree.org/ https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en But the first company (Purism) specifically attempts to change the industry, they state it as one of their goals: https://puri.sm/learn/why-purism-computers-are-better-than-proprietary-devices-from-other-vendors/ https://puri.sm/learn/why-purism-computers-are-better-than-p....
  - Shared404 6y ago
    This is true. Thanks for both the other companies, and the important distinction.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      One more: https://tehnoetic.com/ https://tehnoetic.com/ And for completeness: Purism’s CEO Todd Weaver Testifies at California Congressional Privacy Commission https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-ceo-todd-weaver-testifies-at-california-congressional-privacy-commission/ https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-ceo-todd-weaver-testifies-at-c...
      - Shared404 6y ago
        I've now favorited this thread, thank you for the many recommendations. Do you happen to know if any of these companies monitor their supply chains to avoid China? I recognize that that's not the fight that many of these companies are fighting, but it seems like a worthwhile one that would probably tip at least me over from one option to another. I've done a little poking around myself, but haven't seen anything.

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436139

dpc_pw 6y ago

Seize the means of personal computation, switch to Urbit.

yobert 6y ago
I was excited about urbit until they went all blockchain-ey
- dpc_pw 6y ago
  Ethereum is only used for PKI, and it will eventually be replaced by a different system. Urbit is really not a blockchain-y project.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Git also uses blockchain, so what ?

platz 6y ago

previous submissions from different url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335261 (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364 (2019)

agbell 6y ago

A couple years ago I saw a version of this talk from the chaos computer club on youtube and really loved it. I think its an important issue. So I emailed Cory and asked if I could interview him for a podcast. He responded almost immediately and said yes. At the time he was doing interviews on major network programs about a new book, and I figured he would never respond. He was basically like you would expect Cory Doctorow to be in person, smart and well spoken, friendly and fired up about computing freedom type issues. We need more public intellectuals like him.

pa7ch 6y ago
I saw Cory Doctorow speak at Clemson Uni in South Carolina of all places sometime around 2008. The room was only partially filled. I was already into computer security, but I was really impressed by him and have followed and read his work ever since. He had a big influence on me. I went on to see him at security conferences on the west coast many years later.

preommr 6y ago

The only thing that brings me solace in regards to doomsday scenarios like this is that they're extremely unlikely because of human incompetence. We are so far away from companies creating and embedding computers everywhere for this to be an issue. Let alone for sophisticated means of interaction. And lets say we somehow exceed all expectations and companies start creating marvelous products that are all on par with the iphone. It's still going to be difficult for them. There are people out there that are afraid of 5g because they think it causes coronavirus. We've avoided capitalizing on nuclear energy because of NIMBY. These nutjobs combined with perpetually on the fence observers will be a big enough stumbling block for a lot of this overreaching behavior. Remember how places banned google glasses? Have faith in human stupidity and disorder - it's a tried and true system.

arexxbifs 6y ago
> We are so far away from companies creating and embedding computers everywhere for this to be an issue. Apart from those in TV:s, loudspeakers, phones, light bulbs, doorbells, cars, airplanes, watches, trains, billboards, medical equipment, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, thermostats, elevators, vending machines, kitchen appliances, lawnmowers, musical instruments, cameras, bathroom scales, thermometers and a few more things there's almost no computers at all in most everyday objects.
- hilbertseries 6y ago
  > there's almost no computers at all in most everyday objects. This is true, without your qualifier. Go into a random house in America and you won’t find many smart appliances. Internet of things devices are more of a hobby for those with disposable income, than some thing greatly taking over. There’s not a real problem that smart lightbulbs are solving to be worth the time and hassle for most people. There are a couple of exceptions, like internet connected TVs that can play Netflix for you, make a lot of sense. But go look at Home Depot, not many fridges, ovens and microwaves are being advertised and sold as smart.
  - malaya_zemlya 6y ago

grawprog 6y ago

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid for and properly managed by them for the users own safety. This is bullshit. It's for profit and control. The general purpose computer is hands down the most amazing, equalizing piece of technology humanity has ever created. It's one of the few things that gives the average person the same abilities as the wealthy or elite. Whoever you are, where ever you are, if you have a general purpose computer and some knowledge, you can do just about anything. Rather than teach people about this amazing, near magical piece of technology enabling anyone to do amazing things, the whole attitude, at least since i've been around using computers going back fairly far is, 'users can't be trusted with this power and need to be protected from themselves at their own expense by some other benevolent entity'. Instead of being taught as something that's now just a part of life, the way something like driving is, despite being nearly as, if not more important than, driving is in society these days, general computing is still pushed as this mysterious arcane art the average person needs to be protected from through the use of everything mentioned in my first paragraph by someone who can lock everything up and provide security for them. How else could they convince people to own three, four, five a dozen of what is essentially the same thing? Just locked down in functionality in different ways. I lay responsibility on the early generation of tech people that got rich quick in the late 90's early 2000's. They seen the potential computers had to bring, they took advantage early and made money, they got greedy and have done nothing since but try and keep the average person out through whatever means necessary. Those people are the ones running the tech giants today, pushing locked down hardware, and trying to crush general computing as a thing. ETA: I changed my original wording from blame to lay responsibility on. My intention wasn't to blame anyone in particular but to bring awareness to the let down by those original people that benefited from the openness of general computing only to be at the forefront of trying to lock it down now.

the_only_law 6y ago
All this stuff has really started to take the fun out of programming and hacking for me

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

How can we circumvent future legislation to prevent someone from pulling a 70's Woz and building/selling a PC from off the shelf parts that don't have any DRM in them? There needs to be pre-emptive posturing by the community to protect inventors who can create non-DRM/TRM open source general purpose computers. GNU for hardware, but using CPUs that aren't manufactured by the top 3 (or 10) CPU vendors. At some point an investor should be able to call up TSMC and make an open source, CPU/MCU, no?

superkuh 6y ago
"Can We Build Trustable Hardware?" https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5706 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5706

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dilyevsky 6y ago

One of those titles where you know author name immediately =)

fsfffs 6y ago

As alluded to in the talk, I think the initial "war" solution isn't contentious for many people and most on HN. The civil war problem though, user rights vs owner rights, I think can be helped along though maybe not solved completely with basic income and mandatory information disclosure. Lots of the problems he talks about involve people very underlevereged in the market and incapable of making decisions both because of an unequal distribution of information and/or capability. So maybe we can solve the capability problem by giving everyone enough cash to allow them to make market decisions not solely based on survival, but also based on things like moral value. For example, people could more sustainably make purchases based on things like logging, spying, data protection or even allow someone to move from one rental property with an overzealous landlord to another without being captive to the whims of the owner out of circumstance. The monetary threshold is arguable and having the capacity to make non-binary market decisions when capable doesn't mean that people will -- most that are capable of voting with their wallet today still often don't. This wouldn't solve those human problems, but in many markets I feel we're reaching a point where many people are not just unwilling to make pro-consumer decisions, they're incapable. My second point, mandatory information disclosure, is kind of a necessary component to a functioning capitalist market. Consumers can't make informed market decisions without information from the market. Forcing correct information disclosure of one kind or another allows consumers to compare services. Sure this doesn't solve problems with what should be mandated or "natural flavors", etc, but the more correct information consumers have, the more likely they will be able to make the best market decision, be that ingredients, certifications or schematics.

fsfffs 6y ago
So the above advocates for a "complete owner-controlled" system, but the users in the market (every human) is also buoyed with cash and information where they can make market decisions not solely based on their income and thus market decisions that may, if they wish, be based on non-survival based values they have and by nature of increased demand, increase their market prevalence.

sabujp 6y ago

general purpose computers will exist, they are literally the building blocks. However, it'll be bad when you as a private entity can't purchase CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, the building blocks for building your own general purpose computing device. I don't ever see that happening since there will always be engineers, students, hackers, startups, how will any new industries form if they can't get their hands on the source materials?

rgbrenner 6y ago
There are a lot of other fields where you need to go to university just to use the building blocks of the field. Doctors cant just acquire cadavers and try it out at home. Those industries move much slower, but innovation in our field might be related to how new it is. There are many cheap computers like rpi, but regulations could demand certain security controls that might eliminate those devices. So I could imagine (a terrible) future where innovation slows, our devices are like ipads, and you need to go to uni to use a real computer. It would take some time... but I think theres a chance it could happen.
- sabujp 6y ago
  yea i really don't see that happening, there are too many hackers and tinkerers on earth
- ece 6y ago
  The internet has neutral authorities for managing DNS, SSL, numerous protocols like http, and Net Neutrality exists even if the current FCC doesn't seem to think so. There should accordingly be a neutral authority for signing apps, and requiring that companies build on neutral connectivity standards like PCIE. The ecosystem can stay open as it matures, but you're right, if the internet remains 4 giant companies, then yeah, even general purpose computing devices can be reduced to iOS, Windows 10 S, and Android with locked bootloaders and no alternative app stores.

dmix 6y ago

I wasn’t aware Cory worked with Metallica on the anti-piracy side. I’m curious if his stance has developed or matured since then.

83769243571 6y ago

There will come a point when walled gardens predominate to such a degree that general purpose computing platforms will show themselves to be one of the last remaining impediments to the kind of absolute censorship of ideas (or even empirical facts) that "woke" HNers cannot tolerate--at which point they will abruptly switch sides and endorse outlawing, restricting, or at the very least stigmatizing those platforms and their users.

karinlee 6y ago

You come to the site and receive a lot of text and good information. There is a lot of damage from corona all over the world, is your health okay? It would be nice if everyone did not damage and survived well. I also created and run a site. Please come to play once to see and go and leave some sketches. Have a happy day^^ My site address: https://sukacrot.site/ https://sukacrot.site/

peter303 6y ago

I saw Cory yesterday at the Denver scifi convention MileHiCon. He is the guest of honor this year. Yes, he was on a couple of panels about digital rights. One panel discussed Amazons predatory policies on self-publishing. If you do it there, Amazon prohibits any manifestation of your work on any other platform.

einpoklum 6y ago

> Opponents of DRM like the slogan, "You bought it, you own it." Not really. Capitalist opponents of DRM like that. Many of us are against ownership and property as such - but do support autonomy, privacy, decentralization of power and the breaking of the dichotomy between user and designer/programmer, between producer and consumer.