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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?

#231

Post by robotnikman »

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…

>At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever. Will the laws of your country make it harder or more difficult to avoid? Will major vendors lock you out of basic functions?

Somewhat related, but if x86 loses dominance it will be even more difficult if not impossible to install Linux or other alternate OS's on ARM devices. The majority of consumer ARM electronics make it hard enough, and normally requires you to run a specific patched (and most likely outdated) Linux kernel in order to boot.

There are ARM devices which meet the ARM System Ready standard which allows you to boot whatever OS you want, but they are mostly enterprise devices such as servers. Cheapest one I've seen which your average consumer might buy was an ARM workstation with a starting price of about $1500

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

#232

Post by rini17 »

robotnikman wrote: post #231
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…

>At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever. Will the laws of your country make it harder or more difficult to avoid? Will major vendors lock you out of basic functions? Somewhat related, but if x86 loses dominance it will be even more difficult if not impossible to install Linux or other alternate OS's on ARM devices. The majority of consumer ARM electronics make it hard enough, and normal…

Raspberry Pi and clones/alikes are ARM devices with perfect Linux support.

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

#233

Post by robotnikman »

elric wrote: post #122
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…

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

>secure attestation

And web attestation, which almost became a thing about a year ago. It is gone for now, but it will only be a matter of time before it decides to rear its ugly head again.

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

#234

Post by The_President »

7e wrote: post #6

Real world parallels to this abound. You cannot build whatever house you want on your own property, for example; it must meet strict building codes and be verifiably structurally sound. What ever happened to building what you wanted on your own land?

[dead]

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

#235

Post by NaomiLehman »

hollow-moe wrote: post #72

> Vote with your wallet Doesn't work when the only options are bad. Every Android OEM embraces the closing of android because it'll allow them to ship all the spyware they already do without the user being able to remove them (or disable them soon enough). Having 2 or 100 options has no difference if they're all bad.

I hear you but we are a minority. Apple will demolish the market when Gen Alpha grows up. Look at what phones are used to film at concerts by the crowd in the US. it's hard to find a single non-iPhone. Also for a more unbiased take, look up stats for teen preferences. It's not Gen Z that will change the world.

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

#236

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

dminik wrote: post #214
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ok, but surely there are more important thing going on there than the wording. Correct, it's the abuse of the legal system. > Though legally a sexual assault still occured. Just because something is true legally doesn't mean it's ok, good, correct, moral or ethical.

If the victim really was coerced/forced, then there is no wordplay going on here. No legal tricks. No abuse of the legal system. We're talking about sex trafficking, which we know did occur and Epstein was convicted of. Twice. And possibly rape/sexual assault, even though the "perpetrator" did not know about it. You're getting awfully close to defending Epstein there. I also can't help but notice that you ignored eve…

> If the victim really was coerced/forced

Coerced/forced by whom? Are you actually stupid or just pretending?

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

#238

Post by pseudalopex »

iamnothere wrote: post #209
donmcronald wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your untampered device will be enrolled with a verified ID provider and they’ll be part of the attestation. The tamper resistance hardware benefits from decades of hacking. Plus you’re not talking about things like compromising a single long lived key or similar like you could with physical media or players. We’ll probably get to the point where you need a verified id to buy a phone that does attestation. Tamper with…

Even if things get that locked down, I suspect that leaked attestation keys and fake/stolen ID verification will always be a problem. There’s a lot of money to be made in this, and someone will inevitably decide not to leave that money on the table, legality be damned. This risk only goes up with manufacturing that crosses borders, and despite the push to renationalize production, it’s going to be a long time before…

There is more money to be made selling exploits to criminals or states than selling false attestation or jailbreak to the public.

iOS jailbreak enthusiasts say it wasn't practical since years.

Some state secrets leaked. Many did not.

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

#239

Post by bhelkey »

stephen_cagle wrote: post #196
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…

I think it is unfortunate how many resources are put into making things secure with TPM's and how little resource is put into basically having secure and simple sandboxing... All I really want is a computer that allows me to fully control the permissions and filesystem access of all the programs that I manually install on my system. Almost every program (in my case) needs 0 filesystem access outside of what it instal…

Another simple permission is network access. Why can't I restrict, say, a calculator app from accessing the internet on either iOS or Android?

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

#240

Post by bigfatkitten »

rini17 wrote: post #232
robotnikman wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever. Will the laws of your country make it harder or more difficult to avoid? Will major vendors lock you out of basic functions? Somewhat related, but if x86 loses dominance it will be even more difficult if not impossible to install Linux or other alternate OS's on ARM devices. The majority of consumer ARM electronics make it hard enough, and normal…

Raspberry Pi and clones/alikes are ARM devices with perfect Linux support.

Raspberry Pi is one of the least open platforms around.

Broadcom SOCs preferred by Raspberry Pi require proprietary blobs to function, and much of their functionality is buried under a mountain of NDAs.

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