Comment by AngryParsley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AngryParsley | Hacker News Reader

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I agree. In addition to the concerns you brought up, I see other issues with Pike's proposal. If computers are infrastructure, I'm forced to deal with whatever computers others have. This is a problem, because most people don't use computers as much as me and aren't willing to spend as much on them. I'd rather carry a maxed-out 11" Air everywhere than put up with my friends' and relatives' computers. (In fact, I do this.)

Pike doesn't address security either. Would you log into Gmail on a public computer? Would you enter your credit card info or visit your bank's website? I sure wouldn't. Phones from 20 years ago didn't have any storage or computational abilities, so these security concerns didn't exist for them.

While I'm a huge fan of cloud-based storage and synchronization, there are just too many issues with using untrusted computers everywhere I go. Maybe it was due to the interview format, but I'm surprised such an intelligent, technical thinker managed to avoid discussing the downsides of his proposal.

Don't forget that this is Pike's ideal setup. Presumably in this "ideal" the security issues no longer exist and my "setup" is available at any interface I interact with - instantly.

As you noticed yourself, the "dumber" the devices are, the more secure they will be. I'd happily log on to my e-mail account from a device that (I knew) booted an OS image from ROM just before I used it (comparable to those live CD-ROMs for secure applications like e-banking).

Let's go back to burning ROMs for OS upgrades instead of flashing/storing them on disk! People can replace batteries, so they shouldn't have trouble replacing an OS ROM ..

Batteries aren't static sensitive, and ROMs aren't available in gigabytes, but apart from that there is a certain appeal in a more secure OS environment.

It's a shame that (for example) Windows doesn't make it easier to make the entire system partition read-only, but applications are traditionally so abysmally poor at handling "no you can't write THERE" errors (yes, Photoshop, I'm looking at you) that most people gave up. UNIXes are better, but still at the mercy of morons (Acrobat has managed to drop files called "C:\nppdf32Log\debuglog.txt" all over my home directory, so it's probably just as well it's too fucking stupid to realise it's running on RHEL otherwise it'd be asking for root all the time instead)

True ROM chips are by definition available in sizes slightly larger than similarly priced DRAM or SLC flash, it's probably cheapest memory to manufacture. And you would be surprised about how many megabytes of ROM are contained in Android/iOS devices (baseband code is often i mask ROM on chip, modern SoCs tend to have some kind of support core with code in mask ROM and also some ARM acessible mask ROM with things like "low-level" bootloader, if you count reading files from filesystem on MMC and relocating ELFs as "low-level"), even desktop PCs contain significant amount of mask ROM (CPU microcode, sometimes embedded controller code, microcode for various other chips, probably bootloaders for HDD controllers). Bottom line: flash is still more expensive than mask ROM, given enough volume (and by definition will always be).

So who makes, say, 4GB E(E)PROM chips? I'm thinking Windows here, not Android. Clearly the technology isn't the problem but the largest ROMs I've worked with are all in the Mbit range.

I don't think these are widely available ... Practical solutions for Windows would probably be DVD-ROMs or read-only NAS filesystems, or (for reasonable speed) SSDs, preferably PCIe or Mini-PCIe with hardware write-protect switch.

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