71–80 of 315 posts
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…
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…
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I think it's pretty uncontroversial that there is a global trend towards authoritarianism, but I'm happy to hear other opinions.
Will LineageOS and other similar ROMs have this limitation as well, or will it be baked into the hardware?
Roms face a different problem: bootloader locking. But the more Android changes drastically, the harder it is to integrate the AOSP changes into the different open projects
Is that a problem these days? It was over a decade ago that I last needed to jailbreak a phone, nowadays it’s just "I’d like to unlock" "Ok".
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…
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I was there, 3000 years ago, when we started ringing the bell about “trusted computing”. Honestly it’s not as bad as I expected
The future is likely bifurcated trust: Official, encrypted, attested systems; and unofficial, unencrypted, unattested systems. The GNU freedoms never specified the right to run free software side by side with proprietary software on the same hardware; so the FSF should actually be fine with such an outcome.
If my bank requires me to use a phone for transfers (mine doesn’t), it might be acceptable to leave one in a desk drawer powered off as you would do with a hardware authentication token. It’s a special device for occasionally accessing a service. Fine. But when governments and industry collude to force citizens to carry these devices in order to live life normally, that’s not OK.
My intent is to be as stubborn and obnoxious as possible in resisting this until they either give up and provide an alternate path or lock me away for noncompliance. Fortunately there is still an alternate path available for most things, primarily thanks to elders who have trouble with new tech. (Thank you elders!)
I was there, 3000 years ago, when we started ringing the bell about “trusted computing”. Honestly it’s not as bad as I expected
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…
> Sadly, over the years, Android has been steadily walking back that openness. The justifications are always reasonable on their face. Security updates need to be mandatory because users are terrible at remembering to update. Sideloading apps need to come with warnings because users will absolutely install malware if you let them just click a button. Root access is too dangerous because it puts the security of the wh…
It's particularly hard to swallow these justifications when advanced by Google considering how much malware there is on the Play Store. I have never once had an issue with malware installed via F-Droid but have had multiple issues with apps from the Play Store. But apparently it's F-Droid I need to be protected from. (Granted, the Play Store malware I experienced was in the nature of "pop up ads on your phone randoml…