12 ms·

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

158 points by jlpcsl 4y ago

teddyh 4y ago
See also: The Digital Imprimatur (2003): https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
theandrewbailey 4y ago
(2011) Maybe 2012?
- AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
  So now it's no longer "coming". It's here.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
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  - deleted 4y ago
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onethought 4y ago
General purpose computing seems to be going fine… ? Copyright also seems to be going fine. This article seemed to paint a much bleaker future than actually eventuated
- masswerk 4y ago
  Let's say, it struck peripherals (e.g., printers) much harder…
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  I would argue otherwise. 15 years ago, if you were computing you were almost certainly using a general purpose computer. Phones were more locked down, but they also were basically just for texting and calling, and could never serve as a primary device. Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    Yup. Content was typically owned in physical form as a DVD or CD (maybe mp3?) and wasn’t subject to disappearing because a company went bankrupt or merely changed license agreements (stuff that happens now even for “bought” items). We’ve also abstracted away everything from files, for long enough that the idea of not streaming something but playing it locally is becoming more and more niche. Same for applications, which have gone more and more to web based subscription models. Default is closed, now.
    - dghlsakjg 4y ago
      Yup. I taught a basic HTML course for grade school age kids this winter. I had to start with how to make a file and folder and what the desktop was, etc. Basically, the issue was that their computing experience was all platform based. Everything for them was click a link, use the browser, walled google-classroom gardens, etc.
      - causi 4y ago
        When I was a kid, the younger you were the more computer-savvy you were. I figured it was due to being exposed to computers earlier in life, and I thought that in the future young people would be tech geniuses from growing up immersed in the internet. I was a fool.
    - dingleberry420 4y ago
      It's insane, really. Many of my friends have no idea what to do when I send them an .mp3 or an .mp4 file if it doesn't instantly embed as a media player in their chat application of choice. For them, the only way to share images or videos is by uploading it to a commercial, ad-infested, sharing site. By catering to the lowest common denominator we are creating a tech-illiterate society. This is on all of us who dumb down our features to make sure the users can understand.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  you aren't paying attention
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > Copyright also seems to be going fine. Unless copyright terms get shorter, they are not "fine". Even the status quo is not "fine". Life+50 years (or more) is ridiculously long: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work. The novel Nightmare Alley was published in 1946, and the author died in 1962: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel) There's no reason why it should (AFAICT) still be under copyright such that royalties need to be paid to, e.g., turn it into a movie: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film)
  - izacus 4y ago
    > If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work. Can we get something straight? In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. Artists get tiny peanuts or even less if they weren't known enough to fight corporate lawyers of their own publisher. "Poor artists recouping their life work" is a nice PR message from publisher corporations to defend status quo though.
    - throw0101a 4y ago
      > In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. If Sony/Tri-Star hasn't re-couped the cost of making Terminator 2 by now… * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film Or: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_music * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1991_books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1991_books
  - randombits0 4y ago
    Not to take you two steps back but copyright doesn’t really apply well to software to begin with. Consider this: Copyright applies only to creative expressions. Purely functional expressions are not copyrightable. That means that software is the embodiment of both creative and functional expressions that are commingled. They are so mixed together by the time the buyer gets it, there is no simple way of separating the two. That weakens the strength of copyright over the whole. It also misleads folks into believing everything about software is protected, even silly things like header files or trivial functions. Because these purely functional expressions are so highly intertwined with the rest, folks just assume they have a legitimate copyright over them! Even judges get this wrong! So software isn’t inherently copyrightable except for it any creative expressions it contains. What counts as creative expression? Traditionally, it didn’t take very much creative expression to be copyrightable. A screen design is copyrightable. A color scheme could be copyrightable. Code that saves a file after applying whatever edits the user has made is NOT copyrightable, as it is a purely functional expression. But what if I came up with a cool/fast way of finding primes and coded it into C. I created it. It is unique in the entire world! It took many hours to come up with. Certainly I should be able to protect my work, right? No. Mathematical algorithms are not creative expressions but purely functional expressions. It doesn’t matter how long it took to create or how the algorithm was discovered. But what about the code to implement the expression? The code is the expression of the algorithm. There may be a bit of creativity in the code, but we are back to functional expression as opposed to creative expression. Where’s the line? It’s fuzzy enough considering it in the abstract but impossible to consider given only the executable software itself. Personally, I think software should have it’s own copyright protections, unique from other written works. What that should look like and how it should work is an open question that should be discussed. Remember, the purpose of copyright is not to enrich the author. The purpose is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” If any copyright scheme fails to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”, it is not serving the public as intended.
- andy81 4y ago
  Many people's only computer is locked to programs from a single source owned by the operating system developer, and adware impossible to remove without defating the device's security. Where downloading apps from another source is possible, multiple levels of popups are triggered with warning messages optimised through A/B testing to minimise clickthrough rates. Widewine and similar hardware DRM are now standard. General purpose computing is still alive, but it's taken serious hits.
collegeburner 4y ago
just curious, i always remember seeing this article on boingboing: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html and always saw it linked there. which is original?
- kencausey 4y ago
  I'm not quite sure what you mean by your question. Craphound is Cory Doctorow's website but he has long been a contributor to Boing Boing. Are you asking which website it appeared on first? I don't know, it is at least possible it was nearly simultaneous.
  - well_actulily 4y ago
    Or at least he was a contributor to Boing Boing. https://www.metafilter.com/186302/In-the-blog-world-this-is-the-equivalent-of-the-Beatles-breaking-up https://www.metafilter.com/186302/In-the-blog-world-this-is-...
    - kencausey 4y ago
      Oh, OK, I haven't really been paying much attention to Boing Boing for a while. Thanks.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kmeisthax 4y ago
>Today we have marketing departments that say things such as “we don’t need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine our profits.” Today? More like the 1980s! Nintendo invented the whole App Store business model decades prior to the iPhone, and for reasons a lot more insidious than Apple's. This whole article has aged like milk. Or, more charitably; it's a snapshot in time of the worries of people a decade ago, many of which never came to pass. Since this article was written, SOPA failed due to an unprecedented public protest, encryption bans have sort of sputtered and gone nowhere, and the EU is legally mandating that iPhones run unauthorized software while iPhone buyers are clutching their pearls about it. That last one is particularly revealing. You see, the security landscape for individual users is far bleaker now than it was back in 2011. A decade ago it did not make financial sense to hack the average user, and now it does. Regular users - or at least some of them - are the ones still prosecuting the War on General-Purpose Computing. Governments and copyright maximalists are on the side of keeping things open. The spymasters like being able to drop their 0days in plausibly-deniable unsigned bait apps, after all. The case for copyright maximalists is less obvious. You might think that they'd prefer more DRM, because it makes things easier for them. And that's true up to a point. But there's also no way to standardize it. It just gives you monopolization everywhere. In fact, it's a repeat of the days of iTunes, where Apple had the entire music industry at their feet because they had so badly misjudged music downloads. The RIAA went DRM-free because it let them sell music the way they wanted to. And now we have Epic Games, one of the larger fishes in the game industry pond, trying to legally undermine the whole basis of the console industry so they can sell more Fortnite skins. I do still think the section about copyright being fundamentally boring still holds water. But it's less boring than it used to be back when the US pulled everyone into TRIPS and WIPO. A large portion of today's media consumption is on platforms that don't actually pay their way, at least not to the liking of the copyright maximalists. The war they fight is not on general-purpose computing, but on accessible social video platforms; the ones whose creators are crushed under the burden of having to constantly validate their legality and complain rabidly about it. This, too, has historical precedent. Google and Wikipedia were able to spook people into spamming their local Congresspeople out of passing SOPA/PIPA with a well-timed protest campaign. Going back further, while Napster may have had some of the most inept and hilariously bad legal argumentation[1], the public took their side - not the law's. When the public does care about copyright, it's almost always to weaken it or keep it from getting stronger. Of course this could also just get swept up into World War IV: The Culture Wars, like everything else inevitably does. All the international treaties that were designed to make copyright untouchable had their days numbered the moment that right-wing populists tried to wrestle countries out of the global trade system. Hell, there's a Republican congressperson that's genuinely trying to sell the GOP on going back to 28-year copyright terms purely to pwn the libs over at Disney. [0] There have been several notable instances in which really scummy mobile app marketing tactics have passed through App Review for whatever reason. [1] No, seriously, they tried arguing that they should be legally treated like radio because once someone downloaded a full and complete 320kbps MP3 copy of one particular hit song, they might go out and buy the full album full of other tracks they don't care about.
6510 4y ago
We might simplify the topic: Copyright is also a network - "all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies." Computers are a network even without internet. (you can carry floppies) This network does everything. It touches everything. We all want to pay for it. Our money goes towards making the network more useful. The copyright network really has very few players interested in preserving and expanding it but we all pay for it. > when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts. They send health experts, not copyright experts. They send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not as important. But it consumes the same budget. We have finite resources, finite expertise and finite moving hands. It means people are dying, health is declining, agriculture is hindered, water is polluted etc Meanwhile youtube is deleting just about everything. 3 strikes and everything you've ever published there is gone. Knowledge is lost. We don't know what impact it has but it is safe to assume stuff wont be what it should have been if the maker cant see videos important to his task. More obvious it gets with scientific publications that cite lists of papers and books that are no longer available. We need a new network to make sure people get paid for the useful things they make. It can simply be paid for in advance. It's not a challenge.
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  coming up with the network is not the challenge. hasn't been since www. the challenge is making the right incentives and popular adoption of the network.
  - 6510 4y ago
    Just shut it down. As the monstrosity won so many small fights it counts many components that we can remove one by one until the entire chain of parasitic entities is gone. If anything of value is lost we create solutions for those few things specifically. Since many depend on the income we will have to gradually tune it down. We can make donations, one can do crowd sourcing and we can create funds that assign budgets by committee. That profits wont randomly grow madly out of proportion with the work is not a bug but a feature. Roberts space industry suggests we are missing out in a huge way. First people were willing to fold over large sums of money for a game that was not made(!?) Then people were willing to fold over large sums of money for a game that was incredibly delayed(!???) And now people are actually enjoying being part of the development process(!????) Things are progressing towards a finished product but its so overly ambitious that complex works add up to very little progress. I never would have imagined people would put up with that but in hindsight it seems to make sense.
_23sd 4y ago
Clearly an attack on general purpose computing materialized, but it came about in a very different way from what was predicted here. If I had to summarize the overall thesis of the article it would be this: sectors of the economy other than the tech industry want computers to stop running programs that lose them money, and the government wants computers to stop running programs that break the law. In the future, with Hollywood as the vanguard, laws and regulations will stamp out general purpose computing and replace that model with more easily regulated computing appliances with a clearly defined purpose. To quote the article on how computers and an open internet would be stopped: >Regardless of whether you think [things like 3D printed guns] are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?” I don't think that was an accurate prediction of the past 10 years. Hollywood lost the copyright wars: even the most locked down TV dongle will happily play pirated movies with the right apps, often available from the official app store. SOPA failed, and to this day the US is free from IP and domain blocking (though many other democratic countries are now under court ordered blocking regimes). UEFI didn't kill the freedom to run any OS on your PC. User-modifiable device firmware wasn't banned, and thanks to the right to repair movement the law is actually being used to open up devices. Instead, the threat to general purpose computing came from the tech industry itself: Apple, Google, and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft, the same companies that used their influence to kill SOPA, locked down devices and operating systems to protect their own profits, not to protect non-tech sectors or to appease regulators.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > the government wants computers to stop running programs that break the law I thought the government was more concerned with surveillance than law-breaking programs. Or were you saying that they want us to stop running things like VPNs?
  - _23sd 4y ago
cosmiccatnap 4y ago
"It’s tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to go, because it’s fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved." Sadly I think occam's razor applies here past this statement.
- permo-w 4y ago
  the EU just passed the digital markets act, which will likely rectify some of this. I would imagine that's why this has been posted
brundolf 4y ago
General-purpose computing is just too economically valuable to be gotten rid of. Those who might otherwise want all machines to be locked down have no choice but to acknowledge this. The FUD has been going around for a decade and a half, and we've only ever seen it play out in small corners of the industry, not in the big picture.
- sliken 4y ago
  Dunno. Apple and Microsoft seem to be heading towards forcing users to install things only from their app store. Apple checks every binary you run against a black list, which pretty much flew under the radar ... till the service broken. Do you really think there would be a big backlash if Apple and Microsoft prevented "sideloading" and required all application installs to be from their official app stores? It's already pretty much the default for phones, and tablets. We aren't there yet, but it does seem to be the direction we are going.
  - ssalka 4y ago
    If this precluded the ability to eg install a program via curl or brew, or even just a .dmg you download from your browser, you bet there is gonna be hell to pay. > It's already pretty much the default for phones, and tablets. It's unfortunate they made it that far with smartphones, but there is much less precendent for thinking of a phone as a "general purpose computer" in comparison to a laptop/desktop.
    - sliken 4y ago
      I'm sure the complaints will be loud, especially on this site. Will it be a large enough fraction of users to make apple care? Not so sure. Increasing security/limitations now means that you can't install things in your /home any more (at least without root). I used to be able to install opensc for using a badge with ssh. Now I have to install cask ... which requires root/admin privs. Similarly if I say brew install iterm2, when I run it it just says "iTerm.app can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software" Certainly seems like the screws are tightening.
NHQ 4y ago
Battlefield smart phones and app stores.
Havoc 4y ago
I find the trend towards custom chips like M1 specifically alarming in this context. The line between that and hardware level shenanigans is very thin

158 points by jlpcsl 4y ago

See also: The Digital Imprimatur (2003): https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

theandrewbailey 4y ago

(2011) Maybe 2012?

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
So now it's no longer "coming". It's here.
- deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

onethought 4y ago

General purpose computing seems to be going fine… ? Copyright also seems to be going fine. This article seemed to paint a much bleaker future than actually eventuated

masswerk 4y ago
Let's say, it struck peripherals (e.g., printers) much harder…
dghlsakjg 4y ago
I would argue otherwise. 15 years ago, if you were computing you were almost certainly using a general purpose computer. Phones were more locked down, but they also were basically just for texting and calling, and could never serve as a primary device. Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  Yup. Content was typically owned in physical form as a DVD or CD (maybe mp3?) and wasn’t subject to disappearing because a company went bankrupt or merely changed license agreements (stuff that happens now even for “bought” items). We’ve also abstracted away everything from files, for long enough that the idea of not streaming something but playing it locally is becoming more and more niche. Same for applications, which have gone more and more to web based subscription models. Default is closed, now.
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    Yup. I taught a basic HTML course for grade school age kids this winter. I had to start with how to make a file and folder and what the desktop was, etc. Basically, the issue was that their computing experience was all platform based. Everything for them was click a link, use the browser, walled google-classroom gardens, etc.
    - causi 4y ago
      When I was a kid, the younger you were the more computer-savvy you were. I figured it was due to being exposed to computers earlier in life, and I thought that in the future young people would be tech geniuses from growing up immersed in the internet. I was a fool.
  - dingleberry420 4y ago
    It's insane, really. Many of my friends have no idea what to do when I send them an .mp3 or an .mp4 file if it doesn't instantly embed as a media player in their chat application of choice. For them, the only way to share images or videos is by uploading it to a commercial, ad-infested, sharing site. By catering to the lowest common denominator we are creating a tech-illiterate society. This is on all of us who dumb down our features to make sure the users can understand.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
you aren't paying attention
throw0101a 4y ago
> Copyright also seems to be going fine. Unless copyright terms get shorter, they are not "fine". Even the status quo is not "fine". Life+50 years (or more) is ridiculously long: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work. The novel Nightmare Alley was published in 1946, and the author died in 1962: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel) There's no reason why it should (AFAICT) still be under copyright such that royalties need to be paid to, e.g., turn it into a movie: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film)
- izacus 4y ago
  > If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work. Can we get something straight? In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. Artists get tiny peanuts or even less if they weren't known enough to fight corporate lawyers of their own publisher. "Poor artists recouping their life work" is a nice PR message from publisher corporations to defend status quo though.
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. If Sony/Tri-Star hasn't re-couped the cost of making Terminator 2 by now… * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film Or: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_music * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1991_books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1991_books
- randombits0 4y ago
  Not to take you two steps back but copyright doesn’t really apply well to software to begin with. Consider this: Copyright applies only to creative expressions. Purely functional expressions are not copyrightable. That means that software is the embodiment of both creative and functional expressions that are commingled. They are so mixed together by the time the buyer gets it, there is no simple way of separating the two. That weakens the strength of copyright over the whole. It also misleads folks into believing everything about software is protected, even silly things like header files or trivial functions. Because these purely functional expressions are so highly intertwined with the rest, folks just assume they have a legitimate copyright over them! Even judges get this wrong! So software isn’t inherently copyrightable except for it any creative expressions it contains. What counts as creative expression? Traditionally, it didn’t take very much creative expression to be copyrightable. A screen design is copyrightable. A color scheme could be copyrightable. Code that saves a file after applying whatever edits the user has made is NOT copyrightable, as it is a purely functional expression. But what if I came up with a cool/fast way of finding primes and coded it into C. I created it. It is unique in the entire world! It took many hours to come up with. Certainly I should be able to protect my work, right? No. Mathematical algorithms are not creative expressions but purely functional expressions. It doesn’t matter how long it took to create or how the algorithm was discovered. But what about the code to implement the expression? The code is the expression of the algorithm. There may be a bit of creativity in the code, but we are back to functional expression as opposed to creative expression. Where’s the line? It’s fuzzy enough considering it in the abstract but impossible to consider given only the executable software itself. Personally, I think software should have it’s own copyright protections, unique from other written works. What that should look like and how it should work is an open question that should be discussed. Remember, the purpose of copyright is not to enrich the author. The purpose is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” If any copyright scheme fails to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”, it is not serving the public as intended.
andy81 4y ago
Many people's only computer is locked to programs from a single source owned by the operating system developer, and adware impossible to remove without defating the device's security. Where downloading apps from another source is possible, multiple levels of popups are triggered with warning messages optimised through A/B testing to minimise clickthrough rates. Widewine and similar hardware DRM are now standard. General purpose computing is still alive, but it's taken serious hits.

collegeburner 4y ago

just curious, i always remember seeing this article on boingboing: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html and always saw it linked there. which is original?

kencausey 4y ago
I'm not quite sure what you mean by your question. Craphound is Cory Doctorow's website but he has long been a contributor to Boing Boing. Are you asking which website it appeared on first? I don't know, it is at least possible it was nearly simultaneous.
- well_actulily 4y ago
  Or at least he was a contributor to Boing Boing. https://www.metafilter.com/186302/In-the-blog-world-this-is-the-equivalent-of-the-Beatles-breaking-up https://www.metafilter.com/186302/In-the-blog-world-this-is-...
  - kencausey 4y ago
    Oh, OK, I haven't really been paying much attention to Boing Boing for a while. Thanks.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

kmeisthax 4y ago

>Today we have marketing departments that say things such as “we don’t need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine our profits.” Today? More like the 1980s! Nintendo invented the whole App Store business model decades prior to the iPhone, and for reasons a lot more insidious than Apple's. This whole article has aged like milk. Or, more charitably; it's a snapshot in time of the worries of people a decade ago, many of which never came to pass. Since this article was written, SOPA failed due to an unprecedented public protest, encryption bans have sort of sputtered and gone nowhere, and the EU is legally mandating that iPhones run unauthorized software while iPhone buyers are clutching their pearls about it. That last one is particularly revealing. You see, the security landscape for individual users is far bleaker now than it was back in 2011. A decade ago it did not make financial sense to hack the average user, and now it does. Regular users - or at least some of them - are the ones still prosecuting the War on General-Purpose Computing. Governments and copyright maximalists are on the side of keeping things open. The spymasters like being able to drop their 0days in plausibly-deniable unsigned bait apps, after all. The case for copyright maximalists is less obvious. You might think that they'd prefer more DRM, because it makes things easier for them. And that's true up to a point. But there's also no way to standardize it. It just gives you monopolization everywhere. In fact, it's a repeat of the days of iTunes, where Apple had the entire music industry at their feet because they had so badly misjudged music downloads. The RIAA went DRM-free because it let them sell music the way they wanted to. And now we have Epic Games, one of the larger fishes in the game industry pond, trying to legally undermine the whole basis of the console industry so they can sell more Fortnite skins. I do still think the section about copyright being fundamentally boring still holds water. But it's less boring than it used to be back when the US pulled everyone into TRIPS and WIPO. A large portion of today's media consumption is on platforms that don't actually pay their way, at least not to the liking of the copyright maximalists. The war they fight is not on general-purpose computing, but on accessible social video platforms; the ones whose creators are crushed under the burden of having to constantly validate their legality and complain rabidly about it. This, too, has historical precedent. Google and Wikipedia were able to spook people into spamming their local Congresspeople out of passing SOPA/PIPA with a well-timed protest campaign. Going back further, while Napster may have had some of the most inept and hilariously bad legal argumentation[1], the public took their side - not the law's. When the public does care about copyright, it's almost always to weaken it or keep it from getting stronger. Of course this could also just get swept up into World War IV: The Culture Wars, like everything else inevitably does. All the international treaties that were designed to make copyright untouchable had their days numbered the moment that right-wing populists tried to wrestle countries out of the global trade system. Hell, there's a Republican congressperson that's genuinely trying to sell the GOP on going back to 28-year copyright terms purely to pwn the libs over at Disney. [0] There have been several notable instances in which really scummy mobile app marketing tactics have passed through App Review for whatever reason. [1] No, seriously, they tried arguing that they should be legally treated like radio because once someone downloaded a full and complete 320kbps MP3 copy of one particular hit song, they might go out and buy the full album full of other tracks they don't care about.

6510 4y ago

We might simplify the topic: Copyright is also a network - "all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies." Computers are a network even without internet. (you can carry floppies) This network does everything. It touches everything. We all want to pay for it. Our money goes towards making the network more useful. The copyright network really has very few players interested in preserving and expanding it but we all pay for it. > when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts. They send health experts, not copyright experts. They send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not as important. But it consumes the same budget. We have finite resources, finite expertise and finite moving hands. It means people are dying, health is declining, agriculture is hindered, water is polluted etc Meanwhile youtube is deleting just about everything. 3 strikes and everything you've ever published there is gone. Knowledge is lost. We don't know what impact it has but it is safe to assume stuff wont be what it should have been if the maker cant see videos important to his task. More obvious it gets with scientific publications that cite lists of papers and books that are no longer available. We need a new network to make sure people get paid for the useful things they make. It can simply be paid for in advance. It's not a challenge.

shreyshnaccount 4y ago
coming up with the network is not the challenge. hasn't been since www. the challenge is making the right incentives and popular adoption of the network.
- 6510 4y ago
  Just shut it down. As the monstrosity won so many small fights it counts many components that we can remove one by one until the entire chain of parasitic entities is gone. If anything of value is lost we create solutions for those few things specifically. Since many depend on the income we will have to gradually tune it down. We can make donations, one can do crowd sourcing and we can create funds that assign budgets by committee. That profits wont randomly grow madly out of proportion with the work is not a bug but a feature. Roberts space industry suggests we are missing out in a huge way. First people were willing to fold over large sums of money for a game that was not made(!?) Then people were willing to fold over large sums of money for a game that was incredibly delayed(!???) And now people are actually enjoying being part of the development process(!????) Things are progressing towards a finished product but its so overly ambitious that complex works add up to very little progress. I never would have imagined people would put up with that but in hindsight it seems to make sense.

_23sd 4y ago

Clearly an attack on general purpose computing materialized, but it came about in a very different way from what was predicted here. If I had to summarize the overall thesis of the article it would be this: sectors of the economy other than the tech industry want computers to stop running programs that lose them money, and the government wants computers to stop running programs that break the law. In the future, with Hollywood as the vanguard, laws and regulations will stamp out general purpose computing and replace that model with more easily regulated computing appliances with a clearly defined purpose. To quote the article on how computers and an open internet would be stopped: >Regardless of whether you think [things like 3D printed guns] are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?” I don't think that was an accurate prediction of the past 10 years. Hollywood lost the copyright wars: even the most locked down TV dongle will happily play pirated movies with the right apps, often available from the official app store. SOPA failed, and to this day the US is free from IP and domain blocking (though many other democratic countries are now under court ordered blocking regimes). UEFI didn't kill the freedom to run any OS on your PC. User-modifiable device firmware wasn't banned, and thanks to the right to repair movement the law is actually being used to open up devices. Instead, the threat to general purpose computing came from the tech industry itself: Apple, Google, and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft, the same companies that used their influence to kill SOPA, locked down devices and operating systems to protect their own profits, not to protect non-tech sectors or to appease regulators.

drewcoo 4y ago
> the government wants computers to stop running programs that break the law I thought the government was more concerned with surveillance than law-breaking programs. Or were you saying that they want us to stop running things like VPNs?
- _23sd 4y ago

cosmiccatnap 4y ago

"It’s tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to go, because it’s fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved." Sadly I think occam's razor applies here past this statement.

permo-w 4y ago
the EU just passed the digital markets act, which will likely rectify some of this. I would imagine that's why this has been posted

brundolf 4y ago

General-purpose computing is just too economically valuable to be gotten rid of. Those who might otherwise want all machines to be locked down have no choice but to acknowledge this. The FUD has been going around for a decade and a half, and we've only ever seen it play out in small corners of the industry, not in the big picture.

sliken 4y ago
Dunno. Apple and Microsoft seem to be heading towards forcing users to install things only from their app store. Apple checks every binary you run against a black list, which pretty much flew under the radar ... till the service broken. Do you really think there would be a big backlash if Apple and Microsoft prevented "sideloading" and required all application installs to be from their official app stores? It's already pretty much the default for phones, and tablets. We aren't there yet, but it does seem to be the direction we are going.
- ssalka 4y ago
  If this precluded the ability to eg install a program via curl or brew, or even just a .dmg you download from your browser, you bet there is gonna be hell to pay. > It's already pretty much the default for phones, and tablets. It's unfortunate they made it that far with smartphones, but there is much less precendent for thinking of a phone as a "general purpose computer" in comparison to a laptop/desktop.
  - sliken 4y ago
    I'm sure the complaints will be loud, especially on this site. Will it be a large enough fraction of users to make apple care? Not so sure. Increasing security/limitations now means that you can't install things in your /home any more (at least without root). I used to be able to install opensc for using a badge with ssh. Now I have to install cask ... which requires root/admin privs. Similarly if I say brew install iterm2, when I run it it just says "iTerm.app can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software" Certainly seems like the screws are tightening.

NHQ 4y ago

Battlefield smart phones and app stores.

Havoc 4y ago

I find the trend towards custom chips like M1 specifically alarming in this context. The line between that and hardware level shenanigans is very thin