Ehm... HN readers are typically tech savvy people so... Let's say you have a connected computer, formally not in your hand, but practically still yours, since y

Ehm... HN readers are typically tech savvy people so... Let's say you have a connected computer, formally not in your hand, but practically still yours, since you deploy it, you provision it etc during it's entire life. The user have almost no control on it. It's a closed system. Well... How many will try, even just for fun, to do something they like on that said computer? Now imaging it's not one but a gazillion and you are a company known to someone in your country intelligence offering you a significant amount of money for some "OSINT-alike help", than there is even a law that mandate "helping" under certain not exactly strict circumstances... The Attorney should be surprised if some snooping DO NOT happen, nor for the contrary. A bottomline: this is why we MUST MANDATE FLOSS by law, and we MUST own our tools. Just a small example: I bet anyone reading this comment know that banks can give their customer a {PDF/PADES,XML/XADES,JSON/JADES} signed receipt for any transaction (stocks ops, transfers etc), I'm also pretty sure NOBODY reading this have ever seen such perfectly feasible receipts EVER. All though those not to young probably remember on-paper receipts for most common operations back than. Why? Technically if all parts are fair it's simply a good practice, any party involved have a double signed proof of a transaction, every party have a copy of it, signed by both counterparts easily verifiable with their respective public keys registered in a large network of keyservers some owned and granted by the Government. Why not? It's a protection for all "no one can say to have ordered something different". Why this does not exists? Why while all the western automakers who suffer a significantly growing Chinese industry while we, once the best in the world now almost lag behind, do not decide to respond with an open design, imposing all using it remaining equally open, GPL-alike for hw, since we still rule in software and high tech stuff? Such an open design, offering FLOSS cars allowing to connect directly to them, having the car web-served by the car itself as a personal subdomain, no crapplications and crappy slow and unreliable services will be a significant incentive to buy our models. Why not teaching FLOSS desktops and model at school to form IT-literate Citizens instead of clueless users https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... of modern old mainframes now renamed cloud services with dumb terminals now renamed "endpoints"? Answer this and you'll discover the rest.