> sorry, what?? i have never heard something so preposterous. It's not preposterous at all. It's the truth. Computers are world-changing technology. Citizens

> sorry, what?? i have never heard something so preposterous. It's not preposterous at all. It's the truth. Computers are world-changing technology. Citizens having access to unrestricted computers is something corporations and governments cannot and will not tolerate. Google hates it so much they added hardware remote attestation to Android devices. Computer freedom means we can subvert their silly "integrity checks" and do whatever we want. It means we can run uBlock Origin to kill their advertising and run things like yt-dlp to download their content and keep it forever. They won't tolerate that. > so far general purpose devices are still free enough to be usable. Not according to the FSF. You simply cannot find a computer today that does not require you to load some signed proprietary blob onto some chip somewhere. For that you need a CPU that must be like 20 years old by now. We do not drive our computers anymore. The entire operating system turned into the "user OS" that gets sandboxed away from the real action. It's just user code talking to the proprietary code via some kind of hardware API. https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo Just look at the sad state of our operating systems. Safely tucked away into some corner, completely oblivious to all the other computers around it. All that hardware running signed proprietary code you cannot control or modify. How did things get like this? I've pretty much given up on that. By this point I just want IOMMUs so I can isolate all those other computers and try to limit the access they have to what's supposed to be my system. I think it's pretty screwed up that my power as the owner of the machine has been reduced to this. > we can build our own networks too You cannot. Not successfully. If you try, you'll find that anti-money laundering laws, know your customer laws, anti-terrorism laws, all sorts of laws will compel you to become what you sought to avoid in the first place. The government got around limitations on surveillance by privatizing it. They will make you surveil in its stead, and if you fail to do so they will blame you for anything wrong that happens in your network. Either you surveil and rat out your users, or you go to jail instead of them. > it's already happening. and it will grow as the cost for that goes down. I hope you're right. I really do.