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In 1999, Intel received an absolutely massive amount of opposition when they decided to include a software-readable serial number in their CPUs, so much that t
by userbinator 5mo ago
In 1999, Intel received an absolutely massive amount of opposition when they decided to include a software-readable serial number in their CPUs, so much that they reversed the decision.
Then the "security" and Trusted Computing authoritarians continued pushing for TPMs and related tech, and contributed to the rise of mobile walled gardens. Windows 11's TPM requirements were another step towards their goal. The amount of propaganda about how that was supposed to be a good thing, both here and elsewhere, was shocking.
It turns out a significant (but hopefully decreasing) number of the population is easily coerced into anything when "security" is given as a justification.
The war on general-purpose computing continues, and we need to keep fighting.
Stallman was right, as always. Time to give his "Right to Read" another read. (If it hasn't been done already, an AI-generated short film of it would be a great idea...)
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
- krupan 5mo agoTotally with you until you brought in AI, a completely centralized and proprietary tool.
- userbinator 5mo agoLocal models exist, but there's also irony in using the tools to spread the message of the opposition.
- krupan 5mo agoThe local models are still centralized and proprietary. They are basically closed source software.
- userbinator 5mo agoClosed or open source doesn't matter; it's the ability to control them that's important. People have been cracking and patching for decades without source, but they have that control. Contrast this with remote attestation, where they might show you the source code for everything but you're still powerless to do anything.
- Rohansi 5mo ago> Closed or open source doesn't matter; it's the ability to control them that's important. People have been cracking and patching for decades without source, but they have that control. You have no idea what has been baked into the weights in the training process. In theory you could find biases and attempt to "patch" them out, but its a vastly different process vs. patching machine code. Consider what would happen if Google's open weight models were best at writing code targeting Google's services vs. their competitors? Is this something that could be patched? What if there were more subtle differences that you only notice much later after some statistical analysis?
- narrator 5mo agoPeople are already patching these models using abliteration to prevent them from refusing any request, so it is possible for end users to change them in meaningful ways. You can download abliterated models right now from Hugging Face that will respond to all kinds of requests that frontier models refuse.
- hparadiz 5mo agoYup there's a ton of people on HN sleeping on this new tech because they refuse to look at anything AI. We now have jail broken models but the average person on here doesn't even know how to download and try a model.
- CableNinja 5mo agoIt doesnt help that guides ive seen have been pretty handwavy or are not specific enough to the individual situation (i have z hardware, heres how its done). It also doesnt help when every post on HN i see is like 'oh waow i did x on a mac mini with 128gb ram'. That spec is beyond many, running on generally available resources (such as hardware one might have laying around their house) do not seem fit for the purpose, so its back to building a new machine (gl when ram is worth 2x its weight in gold), or buying a $1000+ mac mini, or other device. Any low end system cant turn out tokens fast enough, or doesnt have the resources for context or processing. Local ai is not ready, and if you think it is, prove me wrong with a detailed guide running commodity hardware with complete setup steps that can use a decently sized model. I spent 2 weeks trying to get anything running - 8gb RX550XT, 12gb ram, 8core cpu. I even tried turboquant to lower memory utilization and still couldnt even get a 3B or 4B model loaded, and anything lower wont suit my needs (3/4B are even pushing it).
- nullc 5mo agoRMS found it acceptable to use SunOS initially to create GNU. Open weight models can be a big boost to building Open AI (cough). Progress comes from incremental improvements, -- and open weight models are a big advance in privacy, security, and autonomy over relying on hosted closed systems. Source vs not is only one (important!) dimension, moreover in FSF land they define source as being the preferred form for modification, at at least for some kinds of modifications the weights are the preferred form.
- manytimesaway 5mo ago>RMS found it acceptable to use SunOS initially to create GNU. Any source on that?
- nullc 5mo agoI know it from personal experience using GNU tools on Sun early on (really Solaris in my case, I wasn't quite that early a user), and I think from a talk or essay by RMS but for a moment I worried it might have been personal correspondence. Finding a citation seemed like a fun challenge: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html > [...] the easiest way to develop components of GNU was to do it on a Unix system, and replace the components of that system one by one. But they raised an ethical issue: whether it was right for us to have a copy of Unix at all. > Unix was (and is) proprietary software, and the GNU Project's philosophy said that we should not use proprietary software. But, applying the same reasoning that leads to the conclusion that violence in self defense is justified, I concluded that it was legitimate to use a proprietary package when that was crucial for developing a free replacement that would help others stop using the proprietary package. > But, even if this was a justifiable evil, it was still an evil. Today we no longer have any copies of Unix, because we have replaced them with free operating systems. If we could not replace a machine's operating system with a free one, we replaced the machine instead. Still leave open the the question of RMS personally using SunOS (as opposed to some other proprietary unix) but I think at this point I'd just go dig up very old GNU sources for evidence of that, but I suspect your question was primarily about RMS' ethical reasoning which is well answered above.
- twobitshifter 5mo agoIs there a way to make a model more open source than open weights?
- tadfisher 5mo agoYou open the training data and the tools used to train it.
- SchemaLoad 5mo agoEspecially considering AI bots are the whole reason google is pushing this new recaptcha.
- userbinator 5mo ago"AI bots" are as stupid an argument as "think of the children". It's just a convenient distraction to restrict freedom and push their narrative.
- mmooss 5mo ago> In 1999, Intel received an absolutely massive amount of opposition when they decided to include a software-readable serial number in their CPUs, so much that they reversed the decision. > It turns out a significant (but hopefully decreasing) number of the population is easily coerced into anything when "security" is given as a justification. The people who opposed Intel are now telling each other how hopeless and powerless they are. You can see it on HN, in this thread: No drive, outrage, and self-organizing response to these issues, but despair - 'nobody cares', 'there's nothing we can do', etc. Quitting is a sure way to lose.
- userbinator 5mo agoThe people who opposed Intel are now telling each other how hopeless and powerless they are. I don't think those are the same people. I, for one, will continue this fight by telling everyone I know about the fact that Google is going for absolute control of the Internet, and by extension, everyone's lives. They have already become an unelected global government.
- mmooss 5mo agoI'm not talking about individuals - where is the overwhelming pushback that Intel faced?
- userbinator 5mo agoThere can't be pushback without awareness. At this point it's still something that most people don't know about yet, so do your part and spread the word. Get well-known YouTubers (Loius Rossmann is the first one to come to mind) to do so too.
- jorvi 5mo agoWeird rant. TPMs are great. The modern computing landscape needs a safe place to put secrets. It's what made the iPhone (Secure Enclave is effectively a TPM) years ahead of Android in terms of security. The problem isn't the TPM, but attestation. As soon as the TPM is required to not be under your control to get access to Y, bad things happen. Hell, in actuality, the problem isn't even attestation, its policy. The EU Parliament (the one the people vote for, the Commission are cronies) might eventually force corporations into something more citizen-friendly. Neither Apple, Google or Microsoft is going to drop a market that big.
- pretzel5297 5mo agoAgreed. Trying to limit progress because it may be misused is attacking the wrong part of the problem and will not work.
- jojobas 5mo agoTPMs add security against a narrow case of evil maid attacks. They might be useful for corporate computing (for cargo cult compliance purposes more than actual security) but they trojan horse more of "not owning the device you bought" with it to people that don't and shouldn't care about evil maid attacks at all.
- fsflover 5mo agoTPMs can also be based on free software and our own keys. It works well with Heads and Librem Key.
- jeroenhd 5mo agoAdding brute force resistance to consumer hardware is pretty useful. Now your password can be John1985 without fear of getting brute forced within seconds. "I don't use a TPM in my computer so it shouldn't exist" has always sounded like a weird argument against the tech in my opinion. Many Android phones have their secret storage implemented as a virtual machine rather than a TPM. The lack of a TPM doesn't suddenly give me any more freedom, although it does come with security downsides.
- 5mo ago
- loup-vaillant 5mo ago> (If it hasn't been done already, an AI-generated short film of it would be a great idea...) Once you have the script, that’s a couple actors in a classroom, a couple e-ink readers for props, the film crew… It can be shot with less than 10 people in a day, then one person for a couple days for cutting and post production. And that’s on the very high end for this scene. Considering the reach this video would meant to have, avoiding AI would not be that expensive.
- lewo 5mo agoOn the other hand, the TPM spec is pretty complex, especially because they wanted to address privacy issues: the endorsement key, burned by the manufacturer, is only able to encrypt messages and not able to sign them, because this could have been used to track machines. (and this makes a remote attestation protocol much more complex to implement) So, it looks like they were aware about such kind of issues and tried hard to mitigate them.