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Your Computer Isn't Yours

sneak.berlin

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Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#681

Post by pvg »

lovelyviking wrote: post #671
pvg wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My control over My computer and My data How much private entities get to shape this stuff is a sensible concern but this sort of absolutism is how pretty much nothing actually works. You can't drive an unsafe car on public roads. You can't build an unsafe house, even on "your" land, etc. It's not crazy to regulate what kind of computer you can put on the public network.

It has nothing to do with absolutism, we are talking about basic human rights for privacy, massively disrespected recently. That fact though doesn't make them less valueable, relevant or required for the free society to function. May be for you it's not even crazy to regulate what kind of paper person uses for own notes because who knows, may be he will bring those notes to the public one day. But for me this communi…

No, you're trying to elevate some flaky security feature to a debate about human rights. It's not particularly meaningful or conducive to any kind of insight because once you make that jump, you just get to fulminate endlessly about principles and oppression. It's like starting to recite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights every time you stub your toe instead of just saying 'shit!' and thinking about maybe moving that table out of the way.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#682

Post by vetinari »

zepto wrote: post #678
vetinari wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? For few things yes (OpenGL or 32-bit depreciation); other things are simply not found in the new releases (Kerberos Ticket Viewer, TWAIN). Then there's a middle ground, where there is a window of few months to make significant architectural changes to your product (see VPNs and personal firewalls). So excuse me, I'm going to look for a new release of Cisco VPN that works with Big Sur. Of course, it is customer…

Sounds like don’t buy Cisco. But more importantly - you verified my assertion. Even if a small number of security related technologies have a smaller deprecation window, the others have very long ones. More importantly - we can even find out what they are! With Linux, can you even tell me whether Cairo, the graphics library behind GTK and for which there is no alternative is even still supported?

> Even if a small number of security related technologies have a smaller deprecation window, the others have very long ones.

It uses mechanism that was introduced in Mojave, so that deprecation window was very fast. Definitely faster than Cairo, which has already more than decade and half under it's belt.

There are alternatives to Cairo, but not drop-in ones; they would require porting (Skia, for example). Other than that, Cairo is basically "done". Yeah, there is occasional need for release with small fixes, but as a software-based rendering library it is not going anywhere. Not that announcing deprecation is otherwise widely respected; the Xorg-server was declared obsolete years ago, the last major release was in 2018, but hey, some still think there's a future and in a few years are going to be surprised by "sudden abandonment".

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#683

Post by voldacar »

Regarding the state of computing - there are so many cheap critiques but so little construction.

For years now, cutting edge OS research has just been reimplementing unix with $new_security_feature.

So many lines of code are written but so little changes in terms of what we are supposed to expect out of our computers, and if it ever does, it's always in the direction of walled garden phone-ification of the personal computer. It feels like our CPUs and RAM have grown, but our ambition has atrophied.

What we need is a new synthesis.

A personal computing platform that picks up in 2020 from where the lisp machines left off in the 80's. Something built from scratch to be interactive, dynamic, and hackable.

It will never actually happen, for "worse is better" reasons, of course. But it's nice to dream about.

If anyone out there is working on something like this, even on a conceptual level, I would love to hear your thoughts :)

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#684

Post by leereeves »

pvg wrote: post #681
lovelyviking wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with absolutism, we are talking about basic human rights for privacy, massively disrespected recently. That fact though doesn't make them less valueable, relevant or required for the free society to function. May be for you it's not even crazy to regulate what kind of paper person uses for own notes because who knows, may be he will bring those notes to the public one day. But for me this communi…

No, you're trying to elevate some flaky security feature to a debate about human rights. It's not particularly meaningful or conducive to any kind of insight because once you make that jump, you just get to fulminate endlessly about principles and oppression. It's like starting to recite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights every time you stub your toe instead of just saying 'shit!' and thinking about maybe movi…

The broader topic is a debate about human rights that's actively being fought in elections, parliaments, and courts. The right to privacy and the right to repair, for example, and a nascent debate about the right to run whatever software you choose.

"Your computer isn't yours" is a powerful way to express the essence of those debates. Who has the right to do what they want with a computer, the company that built it or the person who owns it?

Software signing is admittedly a relatively minor battle in that war, but it's not completely separate from the broader issues.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#685

Post by zepto »

vetinari wrote: post #682
zepto wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like don’t buy Cisco. But more importantly - you verified my assertion. Even if a small number of security related technologies have a smaller deprecation window, the others have very long ones. More importantly - we can even find out what they are! With Linux, can you even tell me whether Cairo, the graphics library behind GTK and for which there is no alternative is even still supported?

> Even if a small number of security related technologies have a smaller deprecation window, the others have very long ones. It uses mechanism that was introduced in Mojave, so that deprecation window was very fast. Definitely faster than Cairo, which has already more than decade and half under it's belt. There are alternatives to Cairo, but not drop-in ones; they would require porting (Skia, for example). Other than…

What are you talking about. Mojave is 2 years old. That isn’t a particularly small window. Even with the 2 year window on MacOS, an alternative was delivered.

But you are confirming the point - nobody even knows what is deprecated or what the alternatives are.

You still haven’t answered the question of how someone is supposed to tell whether Cairo is supported or not.

Is it done? How do you know. Does it need to be developed further? It sounds like it does since people say it’s very slow compared to skia.

It seems like you think you know what the status of things are, but other people don’t. How can that be?

This is the reality of Linux.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#686

Post by vetinari »

arcticbull wrote: post #673
vetinari wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For macOS, you also have to buy the right hardware. You cannot throw it at random $300 Acer garbage either.

You probably could if they'd let you heh, it's really well optimized, and works great on 5 year old Apple hardware with much worse specs than a $300 modern Acer. This is especially true as low-end cheap devices tend to be much more "standard" -- no exotic hardware.

You would either not even boot due to buggy UEFI implementation, or it was cheaping out on some hardware that there is not driver for anything except the OS release it came with.

In some aspects, the hardware on high-end-insh laptops have moved nowhere in the last few years. Yeah, they've got slightly better GPUs to handle 4k, Vulkan/SPIRV and new media codecs, and faster SSDs once they've got rid of SATA, but the CPU performance moved just in percents and it comes with the same memory. My wife still uses 2012 i7 Thinkpad (T430s) with 16 GB RAM, and there are not many cheap machines that could be objectively called better. Certainly not in the $300 range. Heck, until Ice Lake, you couldn't purchase a laptop with more RAM unless you went into luggable workstation segment, so it is no wonder that MacOS works relatively OK on 5yo machines. They are still way better than $300 Acer, despite that Acer having possibly some better paper specs.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#687

Post by diegs »

Great article.

The remarkable thing to me is that Apple is working so hard to distinguish itself from other competitors about how much they value privacy. Tim Cook famously said, "privacy, to us, is a human right [1]." I wonder how (or even if) they'll acknowledge this one and walk it back. Hopefully more articles like this will ring even more loudly.

Sending all this stuff via plaintext is just plain scary. I've never worked at Apple, but from my experience at other big tech companies, this would never pass a rudimentary security/privacy review (which surely this had, given the scale that this feature is operating at), which leads me to believe it's intentional.

On the other hand, given how badly it crippled people's computers, perhaps it was just really poorly engineered. I think Apple's response (or lack thereof) could be really significant. I don't own any Apple hardware, but am still keen to follow this story.

1. https://medium.com/@profgalloway/no-mercy-no-malice-apples-c...

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#688

Post by 7thaccount »

zanny wrote: post #178
ThePhysicist wrote: post #143

What we poor souls didn't understand all these years is that we're effectively helping other companies to steal from Apple by running software that isn't distributed via their app store [1]. I think now that Apple has learned from iOS how profitable a walled garden business model is they are trying to bring that model to the PC world as well. Shipping hardware with their own processors is an important step in that di…

Good thing said hacker culture spent 15 years buying inflated laptops and desktops from them ultimately for convenience to give them the market presence to do this in the first place. Its the same thing with Windows. People will preach all day that they won't make any personal sacrifices to try to avoid feeding literal cancers that are eating the software industry and are shocked when said all consuming voids take aw…

What is your ideal solution? Linux seems to have largely won. Will it run on RISC-V?

I wish we had a completely open system of hardware and OS. Is librem making any progress in this space?

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#689

Post by hanifc »

reactordev wrote: post #642
pdkl95 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I worry for Gen Z because they're tiny-mobile-device native. And the only usable tiny mobile devices are walled gardens. Without the ability to grow up playing with system level software, combined with the software industry's unwillingness to pass on institutional knowledge to younger generations, I fear we are already on a path towards a civilization that loses a lot of the technological capability we currently en…

Omg, I can’t up vote this enough. I have been telling principal/director-level engineers this for almost a decade. We shouldn’t be making hiring bar so high that it requires a PhD but rather hire on aptitude and hunger for knowledge and feed them. So much of being a senior+ in tech is knowledge sharing which we don’t do enough of. I’m guilty of this too! I value my personal time and don’t want to spent it building tr…

> We shouldn’t be making hiring bar so high that it requires a PhD but rather hire on aptitude and hunger for knowledge and feed them.

As a self-taught developer with just a few years of experience, I appreciate seeing this sentiment. I have this burning desire to be a great engineer and to learn as much as I can, but I'm not exactly sure what I should be doing or learning.

Do you have any advice as to activities, books, or other resources that you think would benefit a young engineer who would like to learn how to do things right?

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#690

Post by lovelyviking »

pvg wrote: post #681
lovelyviking wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with absolutism, we are talking about basic human rights for privacy, massively disrespected recently. That fact though doesn't make them less valueable, relevant or required for the free society to function. May be for you it's not even crazy to regulate what kind of paper person uses for own notes because who knows, may be he will bring those notes to the public one day. But for me this communi…

No, you're trying to elevate some flaky security feature to a debate about human rights. It's not particularly meaningful or conducive to any kind of insight because once you make that jump, you just get to fulminate endlessly about principles and oppression. It's like starting to recite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights every time you stub your toe instead of just saying 'shit!' and thinking about maybe movi…

>you're trying to elevate some flaky security feature to a debate about human rights.

It is not a "flaky security feature" It is a main thing that defines who controls the personal computer.

Accessing and controlling Personal Computer with personal notes is the same as accessing and controlling personal notes written on paper.

There is no elevation here from my side, it is literally about human right for privacy and I am not the one who tried to elevate the issue to unrelated areas like cars and houses.

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