Answer: companies realized that they can milk you for more money by restricting your options and alternatives.
Yes, this is the main idea behind iOS and the App Store. I don't get why smart people are falling for this.
What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
111–120 of 315 posts
Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Won't matter. Remote hardware attestation means they will know you're trying to bypass their control. You'll be denied service at every turn. Can't even log into your bank account.
If you have the right to run what you want on your machine, then they do too. So then the problem gets moved up to why are you (or group of you) not powerful enough to negotiate being able to run what you want and either not need “them” or be important enough that “they” need you. And the answer will come down to the fact that 90% of people don’t care about running whatever they want on their machine, and they want t…
> So then the problem gets moved up to why are you (or group of you) not powerful enough to negotiate being able to run what you want and either not need “them” or be important enough that “they” need you.
How tiresome.
You're right, we gotta become more powerful. Via radicalization. They seek to marginalize us. To turn us into second class citizens. To destroy free computing as we know it, destroy everything the word hacker ever stood for. If you're on this site and this doesn't radicalize you, then I don't know what to say to you.
Gotta start lobbying governments to make it a literal crime for them to discriminate against us in this manner. Just like racism.
Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be across an ocean, but Europe isn’t exactly the other side of the world geographically or culturally. Many of the ideas being trialed there are working their way into parts of the US. The frog is being boiled slowly, but the heat is rising more quickly in big cities. > HN happily piled on in favor of this decision HN is not a monolith with a single opinion. The loudest users at the time (not just here, all ov…
> 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…
> 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.”
I disagree, but even if you were correct: like, what’s your point? Are you grouping me in with them because I happen to be posting here? I reject that characterization.
Edit: I feel like this is an attempt at some kind of “gotcha” based on the example you provided. No, I don’t believe access to tech should be gated based on politics. IMHO everyone should have access to private and secure systems, as part of their human rights regarding speech, thought, and personal privacy. I attempted to raise this point in several venues during the “deplatforming” fad and explained how the political pendulum made it a bad idea. The mob remained unconvinced.
> I’m looking at history and noticing that 99.9% of revolutions did not have the internet required to be successful.
You tell me how people are going to protest effectively in the face of:
- Ubiquitous visual surveillance and facial recognition
- Ubiquitous audio surveillance via pocket spies and things like Flock/ShotSpotter/other competing systems
- Ubiquitous ALPR systems and GPS-enabled “digital plates” being trialed in some areas
- Data mining coupled with AI behavioral analysis (sloppy but likely good enough)
- An increasing percentage of cars with remote shutdown capabilities
- The replacement of cash with digital currency that can be remotely disabled
The future looks a lot like China, but without their “economic miracle” that has kept the population satisfied.
Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see how remote hardware attestation avoids being spoofed Hardware cryptoprocessor. Keys are held in a tamper resistant secure element. You're not gonna get at those keys without pouring some serious resources into the task. The keys are owned by the corporation and used to establish a root of trust from boot. If you change anything at all to suit your interests, verification fails, your machine is identifie…
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 hope you're right. Truly.
Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trusted computing is just another name for vendor lock-in. It was never about security.
A more generous explanation is that it might be both — vendor lock-in also happens to be a security measure. Having important info on your device and having that device accessible to the wild, wild, internet is a very real problem. If the "walled garden" is a flawed solution we should work on a better one.
Having a separate dedicated general purpose computing device not connected to the open internet perhaps.
Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
#116I was there, 3000 years ago, when we started ringing the bell about “trusted computing”. Honestly it’s not as bad as I expected
I have an ugly hunch that systemd gonna be Google Play Services of Linux at some point. I beg history to prove me wrong. For anyone interested, please look at Hardware attestation and TiVoization, thanks.
People are trying to lock down Linux yes, but the specific software used for enforcement, systemd or otherwise, is mostly irrelevant.
Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
#117It's important to understand that we could genuinely lose general purpose computing. I don't think it's in serious danger at the moment, but we've been in the midst of a slide in that direction for the last 10-15 years. Part of it is mobile phones, part of it is TPM, part of it is market forces. The latest turn is strictly political. We've really foolishly built the technology necessary for authoritarianism just a fe…
EU CRA (enforced Dec 2027) prohibits shipment of non-certified binaries for "critical" software, including firmware and hypervisors. Operating systems like Linux are categorized as "important" software, https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/cyber-resilience-act...
Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
#118It's important to understand that we could genuinely lose general purpose computing. I don't think it's in serious danger at the moment, but we've been in the midst of a slide in that direction for the last 10-15 years. Part of it is mobile phones, part of it is TPM, part of it is market forces. The latest turn is strictly political. We've really foolishly built the technology necessary for authoritarianism just a fe…
So it's just about incentives right? Who has the power to make these decisions, and what are they likely to decide, given their incentives?
* Government makes services available via auth app of their choosing.
* Auth app deploys to one or two app stores. No financial incentive to do otherwise.
* App stores remain within walled gardens. Tracking, DRM, proprietary drivers come with.
Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
#119It's important to understand that we could genuinely lose general purpose computing. I don't think it's in serious danger at the moment, but we've been in the midst of a slide in that direction for the last 10-15 years. Part of it is mobile phones, part of it is TPM, part of it is market forces. The latest turn is strictly political. We've really foolishly built the technology necessary for authoritarianism just a fe…
Oh wow... The idea of losing general purpose computing is a terrifying thought I've never considered before.
"The Coming War on General Computation", Cory Doctorow (2011).
Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
Transcript: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
(Of course, Stallman warned of this type of thing much earlier as well.)
Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?
#120I hate to be the old guy yelling at the clouds, but was an LLM used to write parts of this? > Apple sold the walled garden as a feature. It wasn’t ashamed or hiding the fact—it was proud of it... The iPhone’s locked-down nature wasn’t a restriction; it was a selling point. Please, write as a human, I promise you it's good enough. I'd much rather read something that's a bit clunky but human written than something that…
LLMs only know how to use emdashes, semicolons, and ellipses because human writers used them first. The way I see it, a large part of "respecting yourself as a writer" in current year is not letting the mere existence of LLMs change how you write, just because a bunch of people have latched onto cheap signals like the presence of certain punctuation as a hallmark of LLM output.
I don't really think an LLM wrote this, because the use of punctuation is actually a bit clumsy. However, I have no problem parsing the author's intended meaning.