--Richard Stallman, "The Right To Read"
Right now the chip fabs require billions of dollars in investments in order to make our processors. They are single points of failure. There's nothing we can do if the government starts targeting them for regulation in order to curb effective cryptography, copyright infringement or any other subversive technology.
Imagine tax software (comercial or gov provided) refusing to work unless you use an OS with TPM support for "security reasons".
Or even worse, what would happen if gov regulations started requiring ISPs to stop working with non-compliant hardware? I.e. something like requiring network devices to attest they are "oficially" approved before allowing to connect?
I don't think this will happen any time soon (hopefully) but I can see how even making your own hardware might no be enough.
> Or even worse, what would happen if gov regulations started requiring ISPs to stop working with non-compliant hardware? I.e. something like requiring network devices to attest they are "oficially" approved before allowing to connect?
Looks like we're going to need a concept of networking freedom as well. Ideally, this will be solved by ubiquitous mesh networks that the government can't possibly hope to ever regulate or outlaw. Practically... We'll probably end up living in some dystopian cyberpunk hell since the vast majority of the population is too apathetic to join this cause and help run this decentralized infrastructure.
It doesn't have to be. The main goal is a free uncensorable network, if we must pay a price in performance for that, so be it. People use extremely old ThinkPads with libreboot because they're the last processors without Intel Management Engine.
> Governments have also shown the ability to regulate radio usage very well the world over.
Yes, because usually it's only a few people at a time who are interfering in radio communications. Easy to respond to a few isolated incidents. What if it was everyone at the same time?
What if every smartphone in the world could create and maintain its own mesh network? In some places there wouldn't even be a need for ISPs. They'd be needed for long distance connections only.
I believe that the creation of the Java version of that application was due to complaints from Linux users, so this is AFAIK a case where citizens used to be excluded based on their choice of operating systems, and convinced the government to allow more choice.
Another example is online banking in Brazil; for a while, most banks required the use of an horribly invasive "security plugin" for the browser which ran only on Windows. Nowadays, there's also a Linux version of that invasive software, so users of Linux are no longer excluded from online banking on their computers (it's not perfect because it still requires that invasive software, but it's better than before).
Is this a fact? I too remember something along these lines but I wasn't sure. If that's the case, it's amazing. Those Linux users are still citizens and they pay taxes too, they absolutely deserve to be supported even if they are 0.1% of the population. The government has nor should have any profitability excuse.
> for a while, most banks required the use of an horribly invasive "security plugin" for the browser
Yes, the Warsaw plugin. It's even on the AUR.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/warsaw/
I HATE that thing. I tried to reverse engineer it once to see what it does and why it slows everything down so much. I caught it intercepting every single network connection. I actually switched banks to get away from this stupid software. Literally malware.
> I don't think this will happen any time soon (hopefully) but I can see how even making your own hardware might no be enough.
This already happened in Android, at least where I lives (Indonesia). Most of Banks, Government Services, and freaking McDonald's apps will refuse to run if your phone are rooted "for security reason".
Websites can't tell, but lots of companies don't provide equivalent functionality via website. I know I can't upload check images for remote deposit unless I use the native banking app.
What irked me is sometime app developers are abusing it without asking themself "Does this app really need to check for rooted phones at all?"
I'm okay if banks apps are using that. But why does fast foods apps need to use that? Most people that I know are paying with cash when they order foods online (and you can't hack paper money with rooted android phones).
[1] https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet/attestation
like having to rotate your password every 3 weeks and requiring 4 special characters/...
Perhaps “food delivery” means pizza to you, but there are many places where it also includes thousand dollar bottles of wine.
Fraud becomes significantly less profitable and more of a pain in the ass if you need to set up a new phone for each account.
I'm not okay with it, to be honest. It's my money, and I trust a rooted LineageOS with it much more than I trust the default firmware of most phones. Besides, my bank lets you do the same operations from their website that you can do with the app, so in my case it's pure inconvenience, not security.
I have Google Pay and several banking apps on my rooted phone without issue.
Google can make it mandatory at any moment and then you won't be able to "hide" anything.
If you look at the IT/computing/internet position from a global perspective you'll note that there are many outrageous situations that warrant political action. These issues include copyright overreach, gross privacy breaches by the likes of Google, Facebook, et al, to internet protocols done at the bequest of corporations for their own benefit, to the ever-increasing proprietary nature of both software and hardware including CPUs not to mention hidden proprietary firmware code in vehicles that drivers do not have access to, etc. - much of it done under excuse or the false premise of security.
If one matter stands above all else then it is that there's no cohesive political opposition of any notable size that's capable of disrupting the political system/establishment to the extent where politicians must take notice.
This is a serious problem and it's a fundamental one. For instane, Cory Doctorow noted that the problems with copyright including copyright reform can't be sorted out as the big players have too much money, power and influence and those of us in opposition are just too few in number to make any difference no matter how just and legitiate our cause may be. In essence, in the grand schema of social and political life, copyright essentially amounts to nought - so it's little wonder copyright reform is left to wither and languish (note, this is my interpretation/summary of what he's been saying on various occasions).
Even organizations such as the EFF and influential people such as Tim Berners-Lee and Bruce Schneier have very little influence on their own in the face of huge corporate opposition, MS, Google, Facebook, etc not to mention governments, the NSA, GCHQ, etc.
In essence, it's all a lost cause unless we can all coalesce together to form one overarching body of international standing that's politically able to fight the forces of darkness. Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic that this will ever come to pass simply because pretty much all of those involved have demonstrated that they're very independent and headstrong and thus they're unlikely to be sufficiently united to be fully effective in a common political cause (one only has to look at the hundreds of disparate Linux distributions to see that). Nevertheless, it'd be wonderful if I were to be proved wrong.
In the same vein, I'd suggest that there's a more fundamental problem at stake here. That's the general apathy and unease about democracy currently held by huge swathes of the citizenry. Modern democracy formed hundreds of years ago when life and times were simpler thus the democratic systems that were set up to deal with them were structured accordingly and there's been precious little change since.
This brings us back to issues such as the copyright one I've mentioned. Modern democracy has no simple way of dealing with the many thousands of genuine legitimate causes that have arisen out of the complexities of modern-day life.
Modern democracies with their mainly (effectively) two-party systems can't effectively accommodate all the nuances of these complexities and like the parable of The Man, the Boy and the Donkey, they try to please all with botched compromises and end up pleasing none (for example, just witness the many political shemozzles over COVID).
In my opinion, the only way to overcome such problems is to review and then agree on new - or even which covenants should bind citizens and The State then take it from there (on some issues where there's no common agreement society may have to divide into groups and individuals be bound by the laws of that group, etc.) Whatever the outcome it's highly unlikely to be resoled in the foreseeable future.
- To what extent do you interop with existing (closed?) hardware, vs trying to recreate the world from scratch. Do you implement usb, pcie, etc, or do you make your own philosophically free equivalent that isn't compatible with existing devices?
- In any case you will have to cope with the fact that homebrew CPUs will always be a decade or two behind the cutting edge intel/amd cpus in terms of performance
- Your system has to be useful in order to get people to use it, but it has to have people working on it consistently in order for it to get to a state where it's useful. A chicken and egg problem.
There is, however, at least one off-the-shelf free computer system - I'm thinking of the Raptor Talos platform. But even then, you're paying significantly more for a computer that performs worse, unless you're running supercomputer-esque workloads on your desktop PC
If valve doesn't make Linux a viable gaming platform, they are going to be chess maneuvered into a checkmate by MSFT and Apple. Epic recognizes a similar issue too which is why even if they are competitors, they recognize the greater threat and are working together somewhat with Epic porting EAC to Linux & proton.
Right. I admire them certainly, and I'm thinking about getting a framework laptop myself, but we shouldn't really call their products free/open hardware because they use backdoored CPUs from Intel/AMD
Create market demand, and companies start providing market solutions.
"If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."
The fight is not about which programs the user can run, but who controls the user data
And the fight to stay in control of your data is far easier when you use Free Software.
It's worse than not having the right to execute. You can't even build the program you want. You have to use Apple pay, Apple subscriptions, Apple login. And you don't even get a relationship with your customer.
Truly draconian.
Their behavior is inexcusable but not surprising; what baffles me is that it's allowed.
Some things were so horrible, not even Stallman could imagine them happening in his worst nightmares.
We are still headed directly to the place he described.
But the user data is mostly in the cloud, owned by Apple, MS, Google, Amazon, Facebook.
In the future we will be lucky to have apps that work offline with local data.
Are you from the past? This here is 2021. And right here, the expensive, professional apps still lets you grudgingly do it, but small/casual apps that work really offline? That became rare. Usually it is mainly server and some local cache, you better take care of, if you are in an area with bad connection.
But more and more of my peers realize, how much spotify sucks, when there is suddenly no more internet.
Well, I still have my own music collection(and my own player for it) and use spotify just for discovery. Each to his own and thank you, for the existence of open source and foss.
And they get removed after some time.
I do not have single small/casual app I paid for or free ones that does not work with offline data.
Control of data is a related problem. It's absolutely relevant but it's not in any way opposed to computing freedom. In fact, they are aligned. Computing freedom helps us retain control of our data even when faced with hostile corporations.
The move to ARM will highlight the hardware freedom in a big way.
People are used to ARM being different and are that much more likely to forget open, general purpose computing right along with that "old" x86...
Heh, I always disliked x86. But now? I look at it fondly.
Strange times.
Edit: It is the IBM PC lineage I speak of here, not just the ISA.
We do!
[Looks over at Apple //e and IBM XT]
We need another open effort. Soon.
Remember the drama about whether Linux would be allowed to run under Secure Boot at all? That was last decade's reminder about hardware freedom and it had nothing to do with a new ISA. Thankfully Microsoft graciously decided that all Windows 8 logo hardware should allow users to load their own keys, but there's nothing intrinsic about the PC platform that forced them to make that decision, and nothing forcing them to keep it.
* This Ars article seems to say it's already been taken away. I'm trying to confirm Microsoft's current UEFI requirements in their docs, but I can't find them. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/windo...
There is something intrinsic to the PC: expectations.
The PC comes from a time where we got schematics, could build our own I/O cards...
None of that happened on mobile, and most ARM devices. Maybe the Acorn Archimedes...
And what I meant is ARM will highlight the LACK of hardware freedom. Maybe we agree here and got snagged on words?
Frankly, I am learning how to build more things. Probably will need to.
They do hold the keys. That is the unacceptable part.
Exactly. The issue isn't the TPM itself, such a device could even empower us. The issue is who holds the keys. Those with the keys own the machine.
I started discussion about that in this thread: