What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

Is the issue that they support secure boot type features?

> HN is not a monolith

This is a lazy argument, as I can safely say that 80% or more of HN has the same political bent, and every community ever has said “but not everyone.”

Read the comments on the Parler deplatforming. See what was upvoted. See what the consensus was. Nobody cares about the principles, even here, when rubber hits the road.

Imagine if the undesirables, on either side, started actively using all the decentralized censorship-resist tech for their cause. Would the builders and commentators here be saying “working as designed,” or would there be a sense of fury, a sense of “not like that?” A sense of “that was supposed to enable my cause, not yours?”

Suppose Proud Boys coordinated their Jan 6 activities on Signal and Tor. Suppose Truth Social was built on ActivityPub and MAGA developers were the loudest voices at FOSDEM advocating for censorship-resistant protocols. How do you feel? Are we still citing the same principles? If not, we never believed them.

> The public will not respond until the groundwork has been laid to make effective protest impossible. Only then will important things be regulated out. Until then it will just be “nerd stuff”.

I’m looking at history and noticing that 99.9% of revolutions did not have the internet required to be successful.

History tells us there will always be a “low cost” vendor with exploitable hardware, or if production becomes more tightly controlled, inevitable cost cutting and declining standards will provide a way in. Not that we shouldn’t oppose locked down hardware, but locking things down creates pressure and motivation for the people who like things to be unlocked.

I don't agree, it is absolutely dreadful, and we saw this coming and did nothing about it.

Think about it: you need permission to run software on your own hardware. Every time you launch a Mac App, it checks in with its masters to be sure its okay to do so - every time you install an app on your mobile device, it does the same thing.

People accept this terrible state of affairs because the "user experience is better" - but this is a fallacy. Under the cover of 'security issues' that their are incapable of fixing, due to very poor architecture decisions, OS vendors have instead bolted on an insanity and sold it to the user as progress.

Every computing device should have everything it needs, onboard, to write software for that computing device. That they don't is because the OS vendors are cowardly running from the bloat of yesteryear and adding more bloat tomorrow to cover it all up.

There will be a backlash against this. We see it already in the retro-computing and alternative-platform hacking communities, which are growing and growing, exponentially, by the year.

Its only a matter of time that someone wraps up this freedom-to-use concept in hardware that is sexy enough to compete with the totalitarian-authoritarian platform providers. Any .. day .. now ..

No, the issue is too much of the Secure Boot chain is currently being controlled by Microsoft.

Kernel being GPL has no point currently. Require hardware attestation with Microsoft private keys + systemd-boot + systemd + uutils can create a nice walled garden, allowing "vendors" to build locked-down hardware-OS pairs.

More importantly, uutils is MIT, which can attest at every level, without sharing a line of source code.

This will affect everything from small appliances to big iron and it can be very ugly.