> A few years passes, and literally 90% of what he's said becomes true. He gets his credibility from his predictive powers, not necessarily being mature and put together. His article on trusted computing (where he calls it treacherous computing) that he wrote a few years back is extremely accurate to the current state of computing.
>> In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.
Please tell me how that is even remotely accurate? Who is producing a computer that requires explicit permission from the mothership to do anything?
>> Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can pass them to.
Please tell me which programs are being distributed that prevent other programs from running and/or opening documents?
>> These programs will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work.
Please tell me which programs download “rules” from an internet source, and then prevent you from accessing your own files because of said “rules” ?
>> Of course, Hollywood and the record companies plan to use treacherous computing for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), so that downloaded videos and music can be played only on one specified computer. Sharing will be entirely impossible, at least using the authorized files that you would get from those companies.
First off: digital music has gone entirely the opposite direction. When introduced, basically all major digital music used DRM, it’s now the norm that music is distributed DRM-free.
Movies do have DRM, yes, but I’m not aware of any digital service that limits you to a single device, and its definitely not the norm.
>> You, the public, ought to have both the freedom and the ability to share these things.
Why, exactly? I don’t like the way DRM hurts honest consumers either, and I don’t think ultimately it’s going to achieve the results the industry want, but I understand why they’re trying to do it.
>> There are plans to use the same facility for email and documents—resulting in email that disappears in two weeks, or documents that can only be read on the computers in one company.
Where, what plans? Also, for certain types of sensitive business documents, that sounds like exactly the behaviour a reasonable person could understand the use for - encryption and privacy is a huge fucking issue right now, can you honestly tell me you don’t see why it would be an advantage to have the OPTION to say “this document can only be read by the physical devices I approve”?
>> Imagine if you get an email from your boss stating a policy that is illegal or morally outrageous, such as to shred your company's audit documents, or to allow a dangerous threat to your country to move forward unchecked. Today you can send this to a reporter and expose the activity. With treacherous computing, the reporter won't be able to read the document; her computer will refuse to obey her.
Where does this happen? I’ve seen email security systems, where a software component requires mail to have a security classification, and only mail below a certain classification can be sent the world, higher classifications could have requirements such as destination WAN links to use, or destination domains etc, but this was 100% a software (Outlook + Exchange when I saw it) solution, it was not in any way related to TPM/etc and it didn’t prevent the obvious things like “print this email to a pdf” etc.
>> Word processors such as Microsoft Word could use treacherous computing when they save your documents, to make sure no competing word processors can read them. Today we must figure out the secrets of Word format by laborious experiments in order to make free word processors read Word documents. If Word encrypts documents using treacherous computing when saving them, the free software community won't have a chance of developing software to read them—and if we could, such programs might even be forbidden by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
So we’ve gone from absolute “X will happen” into “Y could happen”, where Y is in fact the opposite of something that has happened.
>> Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the US government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions.
Where. Where on planet earth is there a word processor that sends every word you type to POTUS for approval. The Hunger Games is more believable than some of this stuff.
And finally, we get to the part that is accurate:
>> As of 2015, treacherous computing has been implemented for PCs in the form of the “Trusted Platform Module”; however, for practical reasons, the TPM has proved a total failure for the goal of providing a platform for remote attestation to verify Digital Restrictions Management. Thus, companies implement DRM using other methods. At present, “Trusted Platform Modules” are not being used for DRM at all, and there are reasons to think that it will not be feasible to use them for DRM. Ironically, this means that the only current uses of the “Trusted Platform Modules” are the innocent secondary uses—for instance, to verify that no one has surreptitiously changed the system in a computer.
>> Therefore, we conclude that the “Trusted Platform Modules” available for PCs are not dangerous, and there is no reason not to include one in a computer or support it in system software.
So basically, the stuff where hardware and software companies wanted to devise a way to protect the integrity of software against malicious attacks, is pretty much exactly what happened, and all the shit RMS claimed would happen, either didn’t happen, or the opposite happened.
So, tell me again how this article is “extremely accurate”?