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

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

#171

Post by klardotsh »

sifar wrote: post #136
klardotsh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s possible on very few phones these days. Only a handful of OEMs still ship phones that can be bootloader unlocked at all (at least in the US), and even several of THOSE require phoning home to the OEM to get an IMEI-dependent unlock key to pass to fastboot. Source: 7 years of running deGoogled Android phones and 11 years of running ROM’d Android phones before recently moving to iOS and giving up.

Curious, have run GrapheneOS on pixels ? They don't have this issue, though it might change now.

Two of my deGoogled Android phones were Pixels (4a and 7a) and one was a Nexus (6p). I know them well, though I never ran Graphene on them.

Pretty sure I read Google was no longer going to publish device tree sources for Pixel phones, which will make ROM development for them significantly harder, whether or not the bootloader is open.

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

#173

Post by lejalv »

fsf4alltemp wrote: post #60

This idea that protecting users is worth the cost of giving up your ownership rights is fallacious. Protecting 1 million grannies is an entirely different risk class than the security implications of stopping everyone from using their devices as they see fit. Protecting 1 million grannies means everyone loses ability to install apps that: -allow encrypted chat -allow use of privacy respecting software -download art/g…

> A US president could attempt to force Google and Apple to shutoff citizen access of banks and health services of an entire nation. Merely the threat could give them leverage in any sort of negotiations they might be in

This. We can’t anymore say to ourselves “but surely a US president would never do that”?

Reference: recent tirades at Canada, Spain, Colombia, Ukraine, ...

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

#174

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

> However, there is an increasing userbase whose first experience of computing was in these locked-down tablet and smartphone environments. They aren’t so demanding about little things like proper filesystem access or the ability to run unsigned code. They might not blink if that goes away.

I would also suggest that there is another user base who has been using computers for a long time, before GUIs existed, is fed up with fighting malware, welcomes the protection of a sandboxed, protected system, but doesn't understand the importance of having the option of escaping the sandbox. These users might not see the loss of not being able to install a kext on Mac OS without booting into Recovery Mode. But they will notice the loss when, at some point, we can't run anything that isn't signed on any platform.

Google and Microsoft are slowly moving towards the Apple model because it works as far as decreasing support costs go.

When the day comes that there isn't any hardware we can purchase that we can't install OpenBSD/Linux/whatever we want, it will be too late. We have to push back before then somehow.

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

#175

Post by kruffalon »

baby_souffle wrote: post #146
JeremyNT wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternate take: it's exactly as bad as you expected, but your timeline was off. And even so, perhaps it's later than you realize. Device attestation in the browser is the final nail in the coffin, and it's a question of "when" not "if" major sites start requiring it in the name of "safety" from bots.

> and it's a question of "when" not "if" major sites start requiring it in the name of "safety" from bots. I recently found a plugin that can alert to JS doing shady "fingerprint-like" activity. I did not expect it to go off quite as often as it does now. It would seem that some sites are already asking _very_ probing questions about the browser so it's only a matter of time before they go one step further and demand…

Would you mind sharing a link to that plugin?

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

#176

Post by pizlonator »

everdrive wrote: post #67

It'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…

> we could genuinely lose general purpose computing.

> At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever.

Maybe Linux will save us.

This was a fascinating thing to watch for me (pewdiepie telling people to install Linux): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0

My bet is that the momentum is strong enough that:

- A critical mass of PC makers will continue to offer a Linux preinstalled option, or at least some path to installing Linux.

- If Windows and macOS take more rights away, it'll just help Linux's market share.

So Linux's share will probably grow not only because Linux is getting better but because the corpo OSes trying to take away general purpose computing

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

#177

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

dminik wrote: post #168
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah yeah but the reason why I link to that, is that if someone is interested they can with minimal effort find by themselves all the information to understand it was just a smear job. Like, someone says "C assaulted B". And Stallman says "If A forces B to offer herself to C, C didn't assault B". Which is obivously correct. It could only be incorrect if you were redefining words to serve your purposes.

Ok, I'm confused here. I had a look at what Stallman said and what Minsky allegedly did. Apparently, Minsky had sex with one of Epstein's girls, who later said she was forced into it. Now, his wife denies the allegation, as she was apparently with him at all times on Epstein's island. Now, I can believe that he went once, and maybe had sex with someone he didn't know was not doing so willingly. But, what about his wi…

His issue is that saying "assault" to mean "sex with someone" is dishonest, even if that person is 17. Which is obviously is.

Any sane person hears "assault" and thinks that means "assault" instead it means something else.

What is happening is that the meaning of words are being changed for the purpose of using pre-existing laws. Example, you think that Bla is very bad and isn't punished enough by the law. There's law that severaly punishes Fleem. So, whenever you see Bla you call it Fleem and argue that the anti-Fleem law applies. That way you can effectively re-purpose a law. Specific example: "catcalling" is now "sexual assault" in the UK. It's easier to do it this way, than to argue that people should be punished for catcalling.

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

#178

Post by pjmlp »

1313ed01 wrote: post #148
pjmlp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC was an anomaly thanks to IBM not being able to go with their plans. On UNIX, Sun was the vendor that introduced the concept of SDK SKU, thus for having developer tools, an additional SKU had to be bought, and the until then largely ignored GCC sundenly got a new focus of attention. Mainframes and micros always needed having a group of folks from the vendor professional services for specific kinds of configurations…

An anomaly from some corporate pov, maybe, but at home the PC was definitely not more open to general purpose computing than the alternatives. Most early home computers booted straight into a BASIC prompt, and the line between being a programmer and a user was far more blurred than it is now.

It definitely was, all other platforms had vertical integration.

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

#179

Post by donmcronald »

coldpie wrote: post #129
elric wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death by a thousand cuts. TPM, secure attestation, age verification, DRM, and probably more things I'm forgetting right now.

Passkeys are another brick in this wall. The authors of the spec built in client software identification and attestation, which means authenticating parties can require you to only use certain, closed-source passkey clients. It's not hard to imagine a future where only blessed Passkey clients, such as Microsoft's, Apple's, and Google's implementations, are allowed by most services.

I think passkeys will be used against users. They’ll be used to attest to a user’s trustworthiness by tying authentication back to a real identity. Like another comment mentioned, you’ll end up needing something like a phone that’s locked down. Part of that will be authenticating with a verified ID IMO.

It’ll be incredibly easy to lock dissenters out of modern society. It’s too bad the vast majority of users will happily concede autonomy for a tiny bit of short term convenience.

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

#180

Post by marcosdumay »

everdrive wrote: post #67

It'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…

> We've really foolishly built the technology necessary for authoritarianism just a few years head of a general global trend towards authoritarianism.

Hum... It was foolish, but it was decades after the trend started.

Looks to me that the real trend was started mostly by the wide distribution of TV and the subsequent media consolidation (that happened everywhere).

Also, who is "we" here? Because it was exactly the authoritarian-wannabes that created most of it.

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