
The Coming War on General Computation (2011) - qb
https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.md
======
mtgx
When the war on drugs will inevitably be over in US, within a decade or so
(the trend towards it is growing), by then there will already be two new wars
started to "replace" the war on drug for anyone who benefitted from it (such
as the police, private prisons [1], etc): the War on Pirates, and the War on
Child Porn. If not both, they'll just use whichever works best. The real
agenda behind it will be the same either way.

Then you can start expecting SWAT teams raiding people's homes for downloading
songs illegitimately (and yes, you'll even see more dogs and even innocent
people shot in the process - just like in that "parody" video where the SWAT
team shoots the kid who was downloading songs in the head at the end, which I
can't find right now).

Some of these are not felonies yet, but they're working hard [2] to "fix" that
"problem". Current and future surveillance technologies, used by either NSA,
FBI, DHS, or even the police will make that ever easier and more "tempting" to
do.

[1] [http://www.republicreport.org/2012/marijuana-lobby-
illegal/](http://www.republicreport.org/2012/marijuana-lobby-illegal/)

[2] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/07/unauthorized-
stream...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/07/unauthorized-streaming-
felony_n_3720479.html)

~~~
homeomorphic
I also think we can expect that things which are today 100% legal, like free
software on hardware under the user's control, will be targeted too. In this
area I expect anti-gun-like retoric: "with so many important aspects of
society happening online, we cannot allow potential criminals and terrorists
access to tools that can do so much damage". (~)

The future was supposed to be amazing. What happened?

(~) I finally see the pro gun rights people's point of view. I'm disappointed
in myself that it took a "me-relevant" analogy for me to understand.

~~~
kintamanimatt
Perhaps we as a community need to dig our well before we're thirsty and start
putting tech-literate, sane-minded, ethical politicians in the seat of power
before the new batch of liars and crazies get there. After all, the media is
the driving force behind it and we're able to harness online media channels
that're rapidly becoming more relevant than the traditional broadcast media
platforms of yesterday.

------
tjaerv
Links to the actual upstream posts by Doctorow:

[http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-
general-p...](http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-
purp.html)

[http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html](http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html)

[http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html](http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html)

------
navait
We live in a world where anyone with $25 can purchase a rasberry Pi and hook
it up to a television/monitor. General purpose computing is more accessible
than ever before. And if people want a locked down device why shouldn't they
have a device that actually meets their needs?Unless the need for programs
dried up and ran away, we will always need(and have) general purpose
computation.

I'm sure a lot of people here constantly fix the computers for their friends
and family. Tablets and smartphones help decrease the amount of help they
need. isn't that a good thing? Or is Doctrow scared of becoming irrelevant
when hackers are no longer needed as techno-priests?

~~~
rmk2
I disagree.

You cannot simply buy the RPi at a normal retailer, unlike (smart)phones,
laptops, (smart)TVs etc. etc. This does not mean the RPi isn't a fantastic
little machine or that it doesn't offer new possibilities. However, there is a
_world_ of difference between a developer board (that doesn't have a case,
operating system, built-in storage etc.) and a ready-made consumer article.

General purpose computers become rarer with an increase in phones and tablets,
all of them locked down. This is the making of a niché, and I think it is
dishonest to simply assume people are worried about losing their status. Is
the reduction in sales of general purpose computers the end of the world?
Perhaps not. Should it prompt closer scrutiny and some concern? I think it
should.

~~~
pdonis
_General purpose computers become rarer with an increase in phones and
tablets, all of them locked down._

But the reason this happens is that most people, even when the computer they
owned really was a general-purpose computer, didn't _use_ it as one. Anyone
reading or commenting on HN is an outlier; we actually _need_ a general-
purpose computer, because we need to be able to do things with it that its
designers and builders never thought of. But most people don't. Most people
want a small and pretty much stable selection of apps, and if those apps are
there, they don't care whether or not the device they're running on could also
run an infinite number of other apps.

~~~
rmk2
This works until one of that "stable selection of apps" tells the user that
the version of their OS is not supported anymore, and that they would have to
update. If the device is locked, your update paths are limited. Just because
not everyone _uses_ all functionality doesn't mean I have to condone removing
that functionality entirely. And it does not mean that it might not burn a
user at some point in the future.

As an anecdote: we have an iPhone 3G in our household, a phone that became
progressively worse with certain updates after the release of both the 3GS and
4, to the point that it is nearly unusable for surfing now. This leaves me
with exactly two options: stop using it as it was meant to be used, or buy a
new phone. And for the other camp: in order to get an inofficial version of
Android that is newer than Gingerbread on my phone, I would have to reformat
its internal storage, which I _can_ only do since it is unlocked by now.
However, even that is not entirely without risk, and it is not supported.

~~~
pdonis
_This works until one of that "stable selection of apps" tells the user that
the version of their OS is not supported anymore, and that they would have to
update._

Oh, I entirely agree; I've been bitten by this myself (and on
desktops/laptops, not on mobile devices), and it's one of the main reasons I
don't have an iDevice and don't use many apps on my Android tablet.

I'm just saying that you and I are outliers; most users appear not to care
that their device is locked down and they will sooner or later be forced to
upgrade. (Many of them are used to upgrading every time their phone carrier
comes out with a shiny new toy anyway.)

------
Aqueous
And in the 2 years since this was published, this has turned out to be
completely spot-on...OH WAIT. it hasn't at all.

Modern political discourse: Everything is a war on something.

This kind of language radicalizes people from the outset, and prevents a
discussion from actually happening.

How about instead of calling it the "War on General Purpose Computing," "the
War on Christmas," the "War on Women," the "War on Guns", heck, even the "War
on Drugs," and the "War on Terror" \- we take a step back, take a breather,
and talk reasonably and calmly about the actual issues here?

Because that wouldn't grab headlines.

~~~
ihsw
I think it all boils down to the "War Over Control" where some people want to
control other people.

Personally I think if Islamists/gun grabbers/drug dealers/child pornographers
want to destroy our way of life then they need to do it themselves -- I'm not
going to do it for them by enacting draconian, broad-sweeping, and baseless
laws that delegate power to people with questionable motives (all in the name
of "safety").

------
dave1010uk
I remember when the iPad first came out and I (along with many others) were
concerned that it was a device for consumption and not creation: the first
step in the "war" on general-purpose computation. However, with the continual
improvements in web browsers and JavaScript runtimes (as well as things like
Emscriptrn) I'm far less concerned. Nowadays even a locked down phone can run
any JavaScript, which may provide the user with an IDE or a secure messaging
system. I still think there's a war but I think it's more at the network level
rather than device level.

~~~
homeomorphic
I think your optimistic view misses something important: nomatter how well
browsers can execute JS, it's not truly general purpose computing as long as
the stuff beneath the browser - from OS to hardware - is out of your control.

It's great that the in-browser ecosystem is expanding and improving, but IMO
we will still lose The War if we cannot tell our chips to do whatever we want.
I hope we won't settle for the browser when we can and should have it all.

~~~
snowwrestler
> it's not truly general purpose computing as long as the stuff beneath the
> browser - from OS to hardware - is out of your control.

By that standard the state of general-purpose computing has been steadily
improving as the most popular computing platform has moved from Windows--which
is closed-source--to Android, which is open-source.

~~~
homeomorphic
I'm not so sure. There seems to be an unwillingness to consider phones general
purpose (which isn't that strange, since not long ago they were indeed special
purpose). Just look at the acceptance of vendor lockdowns.

------
pcunite
Previously discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448754)

~~~
stalled
and here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436139)

------
b1daly
While I think there are certainly reasons to be concerned with the phenomena
Doctorow is describing, I find his reasoning unpersuasive.As a general
observation, he is making an argument that certain trends are bad because they
could lead to possible bad outcomes in the future. This style of reasoning
seems to me to be common in political arguments. The reality is is that there
are trade offs from policy choice in the present, which are hard enough to
quantify. Then there are going to be future trade offs, which become harder
and harder to predict the further out they are, and the more complex the
problem domain is.

The core of his argument is that special andpurpose computers open the
potential for surveillance. This seems myopic in the sense that the only
effective controls on government surveillance are political. General purpose
computers or not, the government has no shortage of means to spy.

So far, the adoption of special purpose computers is being driven by market
forces. They simply work better for most tasks than general purpose computers.
There is a huge benefit to the human population from these devices, just as
there is a huge benefit from having a rather leaky worldwide network easily
accessible to "civilians."

So society has to struggle already with how to manage control of information.
The availability of general purpose computers seems largely peripheral to this
dilemma.

As far as the availability of general purpose computers to technical people,
the harm he posits is almost entirely hypothetical. Not only are they still
being produced in large numbers, there are fantastic numbers of existing
computers that will continue to function for years to come.

A far more likely impediment to accessibility to powerful, modern general
purpose computers will be that market forces will shift so that they are no
longer commodity items, and the cost to access the latest and greatest will
rise. This is a problem of market structure, and legislative attempts to
address this type of pricing problem have proven to be futile.

If we were seeing calls by industry or politicians to legally limit the use of
open source operating systems, then I think a call of alarm would ring louder
(at least to me).

------
stesch
General purpose computers will be available for a long time. But they will
have the significance of a home computer in the 1980s.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
I don't know and neither do you.

~~~
lotsofcows
Er yes, that applies to absolutely everything. He's expressing an opinion.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
Fair enough, let me rephrase it: he is parroting a common cliché, one that is
based more on the desires and trends of the contemporary computer industry
than a deep reflection on the future of humanity.

~~~
lotsofcows
I suspect a typo in the second sentence. I think it's hard to argue with the
first.

------
throwaway2048
sadly people will always be ready to sell snake oil that promises the
impossble.

great example i saw floating around here the other day:
[http://privatecore.com/](http://privatecore.com/)

~~~
readme
Care to explain to the rest of us who don't see it why your link is an example
of "snake oil"? I'm familiar with the metaphor, but I don't see the deception
yet.

~~~
616c
I believe it is the "data in use" portion, glancing from the page.

Why? Because all forms of powerful server-based crypto rely on software-based
crypto. The problem with this is they need the private key of yours on the
server side, somewhere, from the whole thing to work. This means the server
operator can recover the key from a running operating system, easily (through
system utilities) or forcefully (reading it out of memory with specialized
programs), or just writing code to fool you into enter the passphrase and
storing.

If you have heard of host-proof systems, they indicate (I would say correctly)
the only way for crytography on network service like the one offered here is
the data is encrypted on the client and sent to the server, never ever will
the passphrase see server receiving the data. Therefore, not even the service
provider can crack it without the same effort as some adversary from outside
the system.

That being said, I could have read too much into.

~~~
EliRivers
Homomorphic encryption allows one to carry out operations on encrypted data
without having to decrypt it; I could encrypt my data, send it to a big
number-crunching server, they do the operations without decrypting anything,
and send it back to me to decrypt and see the results at my leisure.

It's got some way to go, but it's certainly possible.

