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The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

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Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#91
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.

I didn’t think he was wearing a tinfoil hat. I agreed with RMS back then insofar as he saw things like TPM coming. However, he did not understand then and still does not understand that by using any device as complex as a computer, the user must trust _somebody_. His free software ideals lead him to think that if the user can read the source and modify it, he can trust it. But this is true of no one, regardless of hi…

Well, the saying goes that democracy is the worst form of government, besides every other form of government we've tried.

Freedom's no elixir, but proprietary isn't either. You have to trust someone, but in a better world, that's a community of experts reviewing freedom respecting software.

Sometimes, the benefits of that centralized control are real, but the concomitant abuse of said centralization appears almost axiomatically inevitable at this point, so you have to ask yourself if the benefits are even worth it. Microsoft's OS itself has nearly turned into spyware. It'll be signed spyware, assured that it's doing what Microsoft wants it to do. If I'm going to get exploited, I can at least get exploited while remaining free. There's a real chance that maybe I'm not getting exploited if I'm free, but just about 0% chance if I'm not even free.

I'm no ideologue, just sayin'.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#92
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Secure boot is opaque to most. Gigantic monolithic actors in the realm of hardware and software collude to keep the plebiscites from making anything too disruptive without them quickly running into an audit process that can be used to ensure that any virtue can be clean room redesigned by the monolith... Yeah. Seems pretty prescient to me.

Could you elaborate in plain English? Your comment makes no sense to me.

Certainly. Which parts, forgive me for the long delay, was building a shed today. In order though...

>Secure Boot/Trusted Computing

This is an effort born out of seemingly benevolent intentions. Rootkits, a form of malware known for implanting themselves into a computer system before an Operating System even loads and persisting in various exotic ways were quite difficult to detect or do anything about. By applying various cryptographic verification techniques though, one can be sure that software being loaded or delegated to is actually the "original legit stuff".

The issue comes back to trust though. The community fought hard against a move that had been shaping up in the standardization of UEFI and secure boot to fight against entrenched industry actors being able to gatekeep or be the only holders of keys. The fear was that someone like Microsoft would utilize their position to remove a User's ability to load a cryptographically "unblessed" OS. Happily, User's can swap out that cryptographic material now, but many of the more arcane aspects to doing so on a system to system basis are poorly documented and difficult to discover. At least the desktop world seems to be pretty accesible, but the mobile world is a nightmare in regards to getting it up and running from the get go with minimal support and a modest home lab.

>Monolith's

The monoliths I speak of are tech giants. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. The different flavors of evil wrought vary by the particular actor. Apple and Google have used their role as gatekeepers to their App store as a means to tap into novel business verticals, or to be able to ensure that other app developers can be frustrated or otherwise managed by applications of arbitrary structure and standards. Things such as code signing requirements baked into the OS have created situations where now there is a barrier to entry of at least understanding cryptography and the tools around it (once considered a niche and unnecessary computer programming skill, now core). It also dissuaded and complicates the keyboard to pixel prochain even more intimidating. I expected that I could hand my child a smartphone sized computer to program and crash to get familiar with computing fundamentals, but the world has gone hard the other way. Frankly any place with an App store has. Most mobile system foundries or OEM's are notorious for locking down access to the implementation details of their silicon.

Nvidia, Microsoft, and even AMD's graphics divisions have earned a access to a special place of hatred in my mind over the two pronged efforts of collusion with the media industry through software driver and hardware implementations that make it absurdly difficult to drive one's own purchased graphics and coprocessor equipment as well as supporting abandoned hardware configurations. (I'm looking at you Sony, and your abandonment of the Nvidia GeForce 630M.)

All of this user hostility was absent when I was growing up. You had this machine where the only limit was what you had the documentation to read to know how to drive it. Nowadays, it seems everyone is more interested in shoving a microprocessor in things, but threatening with lawyer, anti-tamper, or absolution of themselves from having to provide any documentation to a buyer at all, of the responsibility to deliver to the user any constructive value, while at the same time, maximizing lock-in and recurring revenue streams. Look at HP printers nowadays for how microprocessors being inserted into the meta-logistical function of ink management makes user's life actively worse, where previously one was free to source one's ink from anywhere with nary a concern.

It's got to stop.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#93

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

Tech people don't have this attitude, users do. Have you ever tried to teach someone who wasn't already enthusiastic about tech? Do you really think most users actually care? Since the beginning of the tech industry, users have been presented over and over again with choices of closed and open tech, centralized and decentralized platforms, and each time users have overwhelmingly chosen the more convenient closed & ce…

I have to agree with you themacguffinman, for years I tried getting my mom to use Linux, but it never stuck. One year for Mother’s Day I got her an iPad and she’s been happy with it and I rarely get tech support calls.

Although computers are a great innovation and the human mind is powerful I think that the abstract thinking required to use computers to their full potential isn’t distributed across the human population evenly. There are so many problems that can’t be solved with computers either.

Before you used to have a separate device for every activity in your life. Phone, video camera, scrap book, magazine etc. Now all those functions those items did can be rolled into one device. My mom can’t handle that her iPad is something more than a camera/Facebook machine. She asked me to delete Pages, the word processor that came with it, because she never uses it.

I think most people just want appliances. That’s what their minds can handle and that’s what the market responds with.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech people don't have this attitude, users do. Have you ever tried to teach someone who wasn't already enthusiastic about tech? Do you really think most users actually care? Since the beginning of the tech industry, users have been presented over and over again with choices of closed and open tech, centralized and decentralized platforms, and each time users have overwhelmingly chosen the more convenient closed & ce…

I have to agree with you themacguffinman, for years I tried getting my mom to use Linux, but it never stuck. One year for Mother’s Day I got her an iPad and she’s been happy with it and I rarely get tech support calls. Although computers are a great innovation and the human mind is powerful I think that the abstract thinking required to use computers to their full potential isn’t distributed across the human populati…

> I think most people just want appliances. That’s what their minds can handle and that’s what the market responds with.

TO expand on my other comment on this thread, I think what we need to do is train the next generation to handle and demand more, rather than lock them into appliances based on what the older generations supposedly can't handle. Maybe we need to look to historic systems like Lisp machines, NLS (the subject of Engelbart's "mother of all demos"), or the original PARC Smalltalk system to recapture a more ambitious vision for personal computers, from before Apple decided that they should be appliances.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#95
post #72

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

Well put! Your part about the current attitude that "users can't be trusted with this power and need to be protected from themselves at their own expense by some other benevolent entity" is spot on. We should strive to get back to having engineering level access to the general purpose computers we buy. And then continue on to give tinkerers the same engineering access for tools for making things: CNC lathes and mills…

>And then continue on to give tinkerers the same engineering access for tools for making things: CNC lathes and mills, etc. Then your "whoever you are ... you can do just about anything" part becomes even more powerful. My 2c.

We're close. Between home CNCing and 3D printing, both subtractive and additive machining processes are available and becoming more readily accessible for home production.

I've been excited about home manufacturing for a long time. It really has the potential revolutionize so many things in the world. The advancements in material research related to this has been pretty awesome over the last decade.

A world where any individual can produce most of anything they may need, using what will hopefully be more and more biodegradable and reusable materials.

Between that and small scale agriculture and power generation, this is where I really hope the direction the future goes.

A society built on small scale local first production that branches out further and further to a connected global grid. It gives power back to local communities, allows a trade network based on actual necessary commodities starting at a more local scale and scaling to a global scale seamlessly.

Something that puts the least pressure on the world while still allowing the benefits of a globally connected world.

So much amazing technology is available today to allow a smaller and smaller level of independence that can contribute back a lot to local society. Things that were out of reach 30 years ago or so are now within the reach of nearly anyone with small amount of resources and the willingness to learn and try.

To address some of the other comments here too. Educating enthusiasm to the general public is the best way to start. Whatever someone's interests are, there's a chance computers can be included in some way. Teaching people about how computers can help them with things they already enjoy will help them along the way to becoming enthusiastic about computers in general.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#96
general purpose computers will exist, they are literally the building blocks. However, it'll be bad when you as a private entity can't purchase CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, the building blocks for building your own general purpose computing device. I don't ever see that happening since there will always be engineers, students, hackers, startups, how will any new industries form if they can't get their hands on the source materials?

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#97

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

> Chromebooks Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. Far more rootable than any desktop machine still in production. No Intel ME, no PSP, and with the Samsung Kevin laptop you can build coreboot to boot the device with absolutely zero blobs -- even the Cortex-M0 power management unit firmware source is in there. It's really one of a kind.

I've never owned or used a chromebook, but don't they all have a "developer mode" that removes most of the restrictions?

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#98

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

> Chromebooks Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. Far more rootable than any desktop machine still in production. No Intel ME, no PSP, and with the Samsung Kevin laptop you can build coreboot to boot the device with absolutely zero blobs -- even the Cortex-M0 power management unit firmware source is in there. It's really one of a kind.

If I'm not mistaken, the RK3399 Chromebooks are all 3+ years old. Are there any recent models that are equally open? Giving Chromebooks to my nieces and nephew seems like it would be a good way to cover the mainstream content consumption use cases that they and their parents want, while giving them something more open than the Amazon Fire tablets that I'm embarrassed to admit I gave them a few years ago. But I'd like to buy a model that's near the beginning of its support lifecycle.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#99
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was too young in the 90's to know about him, but in the early 00's people definitely didn't think him crazy. Linux was doing well and his contributions to its success were recognised, even if he didn't get as much credit as he wanted (should've got?). I feel it's the past ten years that he's become more notorious for his quirks and his gaffes. For someone who was such a large philosophical influence on our industry…

> Even though we have Linux, I would love to see more dominant GPL projects out there. It is an excellent license when used strategically and I think it's dismissed as too extreme too often. Unfortunately, the startup/business world has largely taken over most forms of open source development, and they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL. That change enables a…

> they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL

How have they put pressure?

I've written some libraries personally and licensed them under the Apache or BSD license because I want it to be helpful for anyone who needs it. I'm really not concerned if they make money off it or not or if they contribute back.

If you're talking larger projects, a lot of the big, recent ones have come out of companies--projects like MongoDB, Cassandra, React, Kubernetes. Some like Hadoop were inspired by work at big companies.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#100

How can we circumvent future legislation to prevent someone from pulling a 70's Woz and building/selling a PC from off the shelf parts that don't have any DRM in them? There needs to be pre-emptive posturing by the community to protect inventors who can create non-DRM/TRM open source general purpose computers. GNU for hardware, but using CPUs that aren't manufactured by the top 3 (or 10) CPU vendors. At some point an…

"Can We Build Trustable Hardware?" https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5706
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