8 ms·

Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation

198 points by ableal 15y ago

maeon3 15y ago
It's already happening now. SOPA is the present day war against general-purpose computation. Uninstall that program citizen before armed men break down your door and take your device. Drop the device citizen, don't make me taze you. We need to invest hevily on infrastructure and devices that make the war against general purpose computation very difficult to block everything from a central location.
- eternalban 15y ago
  Waiting for the day that publishing software would require government approval ...
  - Kadin 15y ago
    Probably won't ever happen -- that's a little too obvious. But approval from some giant corporate entity that is thoroughly in the pocket of the government, and approves or denies applications at the government's whims? That's not very hard to imagine.
  - mdaniel 15y ago
    Isn't that the definition of a patent?
    - eternalban 15y ago
      Never considered it from that angle. (You may have just convinced me software patents are indeed a bad idea; I was on the fence.)
    - philwelch 15y ago
      A patent isn't a restriction on publication, actually the patent itself is publication. It's a restriction on commercial use. The original intention of patents was that, rather than keeping your trade secrets secret, you can file them with the government. The government will grant you an exclusive monopoly to it for a limited period of time, which is a stronger but more temporary protection than is given to trade secrets, but more importantly it will publish your patent so that once it expires it becomes part of common knowledge. It was essentially intended as a means of open-sourcing technology.
- wnoise 15y ago
  SOPA is a war on communication, not directly on computation.
  - astrodust 15y ago
    This is the correct interpretation. Computation has nothing to do with SOPA. You could have the world's most locked down phone and still run afoul of SOPA because you're republishing copyrighted material with it.
throwaway64 15y ago
This is exactly the sort of stuff RMS was saying decades ago, but most people wrote it off as "unrealistic" and "paranoid". Its looking more like the right to read every day. Control of Computers/information systems is going to become one of the only real ways to exercise control over people in the future, because it will encompass everything else. Its sad to see people welcome locked down shit like apple products, here with open arms.
- maxniederhofer 15y ago
  The main difference, to me, is that Doctorow has a less offensive way of making the case than RMS and hence might actually be taken seriously.
  - click170 15y ago
    I don't find Doctorow 'less offensive' because I honestly didn't consider talks by RMS to be offensive at all, rather they were just a bit eccentric because he would go off on tangents about what might happen if we didn't align with his views, it felt a bit like an arrogant begrudged rant. But now we see bills like SOPA and ProtectIP, and now we already have computers that you can't run any program you want on it, and all these other stories hinting that there are companies out there as sinister as RMS suggested. I find RMS less and less eccentric with each of these things that comes to light.
    - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
      It's easier to write off RMS's eccentricities when you already agree with his message. It is also easier to write off his message because of his eccentricities if you don't. Yes, it is ad hominem, but it happens. That said, RMS has been able to get attention. Whether we would be in a better place with an "normal" RMS is impossible to say. Maybe having both Doctorow and RMS is critical to the fight.
- avoutthere 15y ago
  The critical difference between what Doctorow is saying and people buying Apple products is choice. Now you can choose an open solution without being a criminal.
ugh 15y ago
It’s worth watching the talk (linked in the article, but special pointing out seems appropriate): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg I like to call it the secret keynote of 28C3.
kmfrk 15y ago
What Doctorow criticizes is a general problem, not a problem in general-purpose computation; we see the exact same fallacious thinking in the TSA. Terrorists attack the United States with a hijacked aeroplane, so they ramp up security in airports - and mainly in the airports. The hijackers were passengers, so they focus their attention on the passengers, and the passengers only. The target was American buildings by means of hijacked aeroplanes, so they focus their attention on who and what goes on the plane - not what may happen in a crowded airport itself. A nutty attacker hides a bomb in his shoes, later his underwear, so we have to take off our shoes and get patted down or x-ray scanned respectively. These are people trying to catch the specific perpetrators of yesterday, as if they had a time machine and could go back and stop that individual, not people who are trying to get to the root of the problem and deal with it. When governments impose taxes on optical media, because they "help" people pirate music, they might as well tax shoes and underwear while they are at it. When external hard drives came into vogue, NAS's in particular, Western Digital blacklisted media extensions like .mp3, because that would facilitate piracy; whether the government, lobby groups or they themselves came up with this I don't know. In this digital web age, people have moved their attention from physical media to digital media online, and now "the internet" is the complicit perpetrator. The good and bad news is that this is a general error in people's line of thought, and it is a good thing that this is a problem that you don't have to be a geek to understand nor care about, because it will affect you whenever you travel, have a darker skin than most people, or use the internet. You can bury your head in the sand, but this will and does affect every person in the Western world you can imagine. Blame the media groups, blame the TSA, but most of all, recognize that we can't just focus our attention at the proverbial shoes and underwear, but have to grasp the scope of the root problem at the core of this, and how people soon enough will find something other to try to regulate and police to no effect and benefit for us all. Today it's the TSA and MPAA; tomorrow we will have to suffer a new organization of fools and another slew of politicians.
- jk4930 15y ago
  They are "Fully Prepared for the Past": http://systems-thinkers.org/resources/resource/the_systems_bible_the_beginners_guide_to_systems_large_and_small_3rd_editio http://systems-thinkers.org/resources/resource/the_systems_b...
narrator 15y ago
The official reason for the Iraq war was to prevent 60 year old technology becoming available to a government that our government decided would inevitably use it in a way that would be harmful to us. The war on drugs is a war on the possession and manufacture of even older bio-technology. The control of and access to technology is one of the main fulcrums of human history. That's because control and access to technology inherently determines control and access to military, economic and political power and often those in power are always looking to consolidate and guard their privilege.
protomyth 15y ago
The funny part is that Apple is not my current worry. I am very scared of Microsoft's new policy for Windows 8 apps using Metro / WinRT. I am not a lawsuit fan, but I hope someone sues them to force open access. I can see app stores on devices (phones / tablets), but not forced on a PC. The power a forced app store gives the platform provider is too much. Microsoft could delay a competitors approval while they add new features to their own product. Beyond that, the notion that only the platform provider should have a "relationship" with the customer is bogus.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  The tablet/phone/PC dynamic is artificial. A computer is a computer. We already see the prototypes of the computer of the future, which is a smartphone you can plug into a dock with keyboard/mouse/screen and use as a PC.
  - protomyth 15y ago
    I can sorta go with a tablet being a general purpose computer, but my phone has to be a phone first. I really cannot have it not work as a phone. One too many ND winters as a youth being stupid and stuck in a car waiting for someone to drive by taught me that.
    - Kadin 15y ago
      I'd agree with you if you'd replace "phone" with "communications device." I'm not convinced that voice calls will remain the dominant interpersonal communication medium once we're a (human) generation into ubiquitous smartphone deployment. Anecdotally, I'm sure we all know people who just use their "phone" as an email/SMS platform, and I could easily imagine a near future where palmtop devices primarily do various forms of text messaging, and then additional addons (perhaps a headset and a voice plan) are required to make voice calls over the legacy PSTN.
  - justincormack 15y ago
    Why? Computers are really cheap, and everything is in the cloud. Why do I need to plug a smartphone in? Any screen soon will probably have a smartphone class CPU in it. For that matter keyboards could too at little cost... Arguably a tablet is just a prototype screen with a smartphone CPU.
listening 15y ago
General purpose PC's will only disappear if the market for them disappears. Ultimately it is 1. the nerds who educate (or fail to educate) the consumer market about what is possible using a general purpose PC and 2. the consumers who buy electronics, including general purpose PC's, who are in control of the future production and general availability of them. Common sense says that factories will only produce what can be sold. They respond to demand. Touchscreen, keyboardless tablets and "smartphones" that cannot be connected and controlled with a more flexible general purpose computer are limiting not enabling. This is however not the message being sent to consumers.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  > General purpose PC's will only disappear if the market for them disappears. I think this is the key point. In some sense, the market for them has been disappearing. The rise of web and mobile apps has shown beyond any doubt that a lot of traditional software is far too big and complicated for a typical home user's needs, and that Joe Public can in fact be quite happy sharing his life story on a cloud-hosted blog, keeping up with his friends via Twitter, playing simple puzzle games on Facebook, and watching streaming movies on his iPad. Notice that all of these are just variations on consumption/communication using on-line services. Heavyweight tools like e-mail and word processors just aren't necessary for what most people care about in their daily lives at home. In fact, I suspect that for the average home consumer, open access to data (both their own personal information and multimedia content they have paid for) and the whole walled garden debate are going to be far bigger issues than open access to general purpose hardware and software. On the flip side, there will always be enthusiasts who do want more flexible hardware and software for their own enjoyment. All of those activities I mentioned above use software written by geeks, running on infrastructure built by geeks and funded in large part by businesses. And businesses themselves have widely diverse requirements and build many software tools both in-house and to sell to the public and/or other businesses. In short, the entire global IT economy is built around geeks and business, and geeks and businesses need general purpose computing. No amount of lobbying by special interest groups is going to beat the combined might of a global economy that now depends fundamentally on progress in IT for its recovery and future success. If a few sites on the scale of Google and Facebook do go dark for a day in protest against SOPA, I think a few politicians, a lot of Big Media executives, and the entire Web-surfing population of the world are going to learn that lesson very quickly.
colmmacc 15y ago
Isn't it already the case that many scanners, printers and image editing software have built-in restrictions to prevent the copying of currency? How are those restrictions implemented? I don't mean in a technical sense, I understand the dot pattern recognition. But how is it that the vendors build it in? Are there legal requirements? (and if so, how do Open Source implementations manage) Are they purely concerned about liability? Are they paid to by the proprietors of the technology? (so that the can sell it to mints).
jamesbritt 15y ago
Previous thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3400449 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3400449

198 points by ableal 15y ago

It's already happening now. SOPA is the present day war against general-purpose computation. Uninstall that program citizen before armed men break down your door and take your device. Drop the device citizen, don't make me taze you. We need to invest hevily on infrastructure and devices that make the war against general purpose computation very difficult to block everything from a central location.

eternalban 15y ago
Waiting for the day that publishing software would require government approval ...
- Kadin 15y ago
  Probably won't ever happen -- that's a little too obvious. But approval from some giant corporate entity that is thoroughly in the pocket of the government, and approves or denies applications at the government's whims? That's not very hard to imagine.
- mdaniel 15y ago
  Isn't that the definition of a patent?
  - eternalban 15y ago
    Never considered it from that angle. (You may have just convinced me software patents are indeed a bad idea; I was on the fence.)
  - philwelch 15y ago
    A patent isn't a restriction on publication, actually the patent itself is publication. It's a restriction on commercial use. The original intention of patents was that, rather than keeping your trade secrets secret, you can file them with the government. The government will grant you an exclusive monopoly to it for a limited period of time, which is a stronger but more temporary protection than is given to trade secrets, but more importantly it will publish your patent so that once it expires it becomes part of common knowledge. It was essentially intended as a means of open-sourcing technology.
wnoise 15y ago
SOPA is a war on communication, not directly on computation.
- astrodust 15y ago
  This is the correct interpretation. Computation has nothing to do with SOPA. You could have the world's most locked down phone and still run afoul of SOPA because you're republishing copyrighted material with it.

throwaway64 15y ago

This is exactly the sort of stuff RMS was saying decades ago, but most people wrote it off as "unrealistic" and "paranoid". Its looking more like the right to read every day. Control of Computers/information systems is going to become one of the only real ways to exercise control over people in the future, because it will encompass everything else. Its sad to see people welcome locked down shit like apple products, here with open arms.

maxniederhofer 15y ago
The main difference, to me, is that Doctorow has a less offensive way of making the case than RMS and hence might actually be taken seriously.
- click170 15y ago
  I don't find Doctorow 'less offensive' because I honestly didn't consider talks by RMS to be offensive at all, rather they were just a bit eccentric because he would go off on tangents about what might happen if we didn't align with his views, it felt a bit like an arrogant begrudged rant. But now we see bills like SOPA and ProtectIP, and now we already have computers that you can't run any program you want on it, and all these other stories hinting that there are companies out there as sinister as RMS suggested. I find RMS less and less eccentric with each of these things that comes to light.
  - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
    It's easier to write off RMS's eccentricities when you already agree with his message. It is also easier to write off his message because of his eccentricities if you don't. Yes, it is ad hominem, but it happens. That said, RMS has been able to get attention. Whether we would be in a better place with an "normal" RMS is impossible to say. Maybe having both Doctorow and RMS is critical to the fight.
avoutthere 15y ago
The critical difference between what Doctorow is saying and people buying Apple products is choice. Now you can choose an open solution without being a criminal.

ugh 15y ago

It’s worth watching the talk (linked in the article, but special pointing out seems appropriate): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg I like to call it the secret keynote of 28C3.

kmfrk 15y ago

What Doctorow criticizes is a general problem, not a problem in general-purpose computation; we see the exact same fallacious thinking in the TSA. Terrorists attack the United States with a hijacked aeroplane, so they ramp up security in airports - and mainly in the airports. The hijackers were passengers, so they focus their attention on the passengers, and the passengers only. The target was American buildings by means of hijacked aeroplanes, so they focus their attention on who and what goes on the plane - not what may happen in a crowded airport itself. A nutty attacker hides a bomb in his shoes, later his underwear, so we have to take off our shoes and get patted down or x-ray scanned respectively. These are people trying to catch the specific perpetrators of yesterday, as if they had a time machine and could go back and stop that individual, not people who are trying to get to the root of the problem and deal with it. When governments impose taxes on optical media, because they "help" people pirate music, they might as well tax shoes and underwear while they are at it. When external hard drives came into vogue, NAS's in particular, Western Digital blacklisted media extensions like .mp3, because that would facilitate piracy; whether the government, lobby groups or they themselves came up with this I don't know. In this digital web age, people have moved their attention from physical media to digital media online, and now "the internet" is the complicit perpetrator. The good and bad news is that this is a general error in people's line of thought, and it is a good thing that this is a problem that you don't have to be a geek to understand nor care about, because it will affect you whenever you travel, have a darker skin than most people, or use the internet. You can bury your head in the sand, but this will and does affect every person in the Western world you can imagine. Blame the media groups, blame the TSA, but most of all, recognize that we can't just focus our attention at the proverbial shoes and underwear, but have to grasp the scope of the root problem at the core of this, and how people soon enough will find something other to try to regulate and police to no effect and benefit for us all. Today it's the TSA and MPAA; tomorrow we will have to suffer a new organization of fools and another slew of politicians.

jk4930 15y ago
They are "Fully Prepared for the Past": http://systems-thinkers.org/resources/resource/the_systems_bible_the_beginners_guide_to_systems_large_and_small_3rd_editio http://systems-thinkers.org/resources/resource/the_systems_b...

narrator 15y ago

The official reason for the Iraq war was to prevent 60 year old technology becoming available to a government that our government decided would inevitably use it in a way that would be harmful to us. The war on drugs is a war on the possession and manufacture of even older bio-technology. The control of and access to technology is one of the main fulcrums of human history. That's because control and access to technology inherently determines control and access to military, economic and political power and often those in power are always looking to consolidate and guard their privilege.

protomyth 15y ago

The funny part is that Apple is not my current worry. I am very scared of Microsoft's new policy for Windows 8 apps using Metro / WinRT. I am not a lawsuit fan, but I hope someone sues them to force open access. I can see app stores on devices (phones / tablets), but not forced on a PC. The power a forced app store gives the platform provider is too much. Microsoft could delay a competitors approval while they add new features to their own product. Beyond that, the notion that only the platform provider should have a "relationship" with the customer is bogus.

lukeschlather 15y ago
The tablet/phone/PC dynamic is artificial. A computer is a computer. We already see the prototypes of the computer of the future, which is a smartphone you can plug into a dock with keyboard/mouse/screen and use as a PC.
- protomyth 15y ago
  I can sorta go with a tablet being a general purpose computer, but my phone has to be a phone first. I really cannot have it not work as a phone. One too many ND winters as a youth being stupid and stuck in a car waiting for someone to drive by taught me that.
  - Kadin 15y ago
    I'd agree with you if you'd replace "phone" with "communications device." I'm not convinced that voice calls will remain the dominant interpersonal communication medium once we're a (human) generation into ubiquitous smartphone deployment. Anecdotally, I'm sure we all know people who just use their "phone" as an email/SMS platform, and I could easily imagine a near future where palmtop devices primarily do various forms of text messaging, and then additional addons (perhaps a headset and a voice plan) are required to make voice calls over the legacy PSTN.
- justincormack 15y ago
  Why? Computers are really cheap, and everything is in the cloud. Why do I need to plug a smartphone in? Any screen soon will probably have a smartphone class CPU in it. For that matter keyboards could too at little cost... Arguably a tablet is just a prototype screen with a smartphone CPU.

listening 15y ago

General purpose PC's will only disappear if the market for them disappears. Ultimately it is 1. the nerds who educate (or fail to educate) the consumer market about what is possible using a general purpose PC and 2. the consumers who buy electronics, including general purpose PC's, who are in control of the future production and general availability of them. Common sense says that factories will only produce what can be sold. They respond to demand. Touchscreen, keyboardless tablets and "smartphones" that cannot be connected and controlled with a more flexible general purpose computer are limiting not enabling. This is however not the message being sent to consumers.

Silhouette 15y ago
> General purpose PC's will only disappear if the market for them disappears. I think this is the key point. In some sense, the market for them has been disappearing. The rise of web and mobile apps has shown beyond any doubt that a lot of traditional software is far too big and complicated for a typical home user's needs, and that Joe Public can in fact be quite happy sharing his life story on a cloud-hosted blog, keeping up with his friends via Twitter, playing simple puzzle games on Facebook, and watching streaming movies on his iPad. Notice that all of these are just variations on consumption/communication using on-line services. Heavyweight tools like e-mail and word processors just aren't necessary for what most people care about in their daily lives at home. In fact, I suspect that for the average home consumer, open access to data (both their own personal information and multimedia content they have paid for) and the whole walled garden debate are going to be far bigger issues than open access to general purpose hardware and software. On the flip side, there will always be enthusiasts who do want more flexible hardware and software for their own enjoyment. All of those activities I mentioned above use software written by geeks, running on infrastructure built by geeks and funded in large part by businesses. And businesses themselves have widely diverse requirements and build many software tools both in-house and to sell to the public and/or other businesses. In short, the entire global IT economy is built around geeks and business, and geeks and businesses need general purpose computing. No amount of lobbying by special interest groups is going to beat the combined might of a global economy that now depends fundamentally on progress in IT for its recovery and future success. If a few sites on the scale of Google and Facebook do go dark for a day in protest against SOPA, I think a few politicians, a lot of Big Media executives, and the entire Web-surfing population of the world are going to learn that lesson very quickly.

colmmacc 15y ago

Isn't it already the case that many scanners, printers and image editing software have built-in restrictions to prevent the copying of currency? How are those restrictions implemented? I don't mean in a technical sense, I understand the dot pattern recognition. But how is it that the vendors build it in? Are there legal requirements? (and if so, how do Open Source implementations manage) Are they purely concerned about liability? Are they paid to by the proprietors of the technology? (so that the can sell it to mints).

jamesbritt 15y ago

Previous thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3400449 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3400449