
Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation - ableal
http://lwn.net/Articles/473794/
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throwaway64
This is exactly the sort of stuff RMS was saying decades ago, but most people
wrote it off as "unrealistic" and "paranoid". Its looking more like the right
to read every day.

Control of Computers/information systems is going to become one of the only
real ways to exercise control over people in the future, because it will
encompass everything else.

Its sad to see people welcome locked down shit like apple products, here with
open arms.

~~~
avoutthere
The critical difference between what Doctorow is saying and people buying
Apple products is _choice_. Now you can choose an open solution without being
a criminal.

~~~
frou_dh
If Mac OS X goes awry in the future, I'll abandon it. For now, it's my
favourite platform. Unless there's a transactional instant where evil descends
and alternatives go poof, I'm not too worried.

~~~
throwaway64
its never like that, somebody doesn't just decide to flip the evil switch, and
from that day forward everything is horrible.

Its a long process of acclimatization, don't believe me? Take a look at
android, which in most respects is far more locked down than any desktop
operating system, yet is hailed as "open".

~~~
frou_dh
These "appliance-like" computers are a new category, and the ongoing topic of
their ease-of-use vs. flexibility is not black and white.

As long as I also have a proper computer, I welcome the simplicity of the
tablet. If it looks like I will no longer have the option of buying or owning
a proper computer, I'll join you with the pitchforks.

~~~
freshhawk
ease-of-use vs. flexibility is a false dichotomy, at least in the way we're
using "flexibility" here. Apple made it seem like ease of use and crippling
software for lock-in and DRM reasons are in some way related because they did
both of those things so well but they are independent decisions.

It's a great argument for the anti-technology side because it seems to make
sense to those that aren't technical, but let's not start spouting that
fallacy on hacker news like it's actually true.

~~~
frou_dh
Ease-of-use wasn't the best phrase for what I meant. Perhaps fully coherent
experience is better. But I still believe the gist of it, so proceed to pity
me. I think a more containable example of this balance is the iPad having no
removable storage (like an SD card). On one hand it means fat margins on
selling higher capacity models, but it also eliminates a whole class of issues
around not being able to rely on apps (or their data/media) always being
present.

I would welcome more freedom on the iPad. If a switch showed up in the
advanced settings that allowed side-loading of unsigned apps, that would be
great. But it's not a deal breaker for what is a completely auxiliary device
compared to a proper computer.

~~~
efnx
You can always jail break your iPad, which in America is legal, I think :)

~~~
frou_dh
I know about jailbreaking, but it's incidental.

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kmfrk
What Doctorow criticizes is a general problem, not a problem in general-
purpose computation; we see the exact same fallacious thinking in the TSA.
Terrorists attack the United States with a hijacked aeroplane, so they ramp up
security in airports - and mainly _in_ the airports. The hijackers were
passengers, so they focus their attention on the passengers, and the
passengers only. The target was American buildings by means of hijacked
aeroplanes, so they focus their attention on who and what goes on the plane -
not what may happen in a crowded airport itself. A nutty attacker hides a bomb
in his shoes, later his underwear, so we have to take off our shoes and get
patted down or x-ray scanned respectively.

These are people trying to catch the specific perpetrators of yesterday, as if
they had a time machine and could go back and stop that individual, not people
who are trying to get to the root of the problem and deal with it. When
governments impose taxes on optical media, because they "help" people pirate
music, they might as well tax shoes and underwear while they are at it. When
external hard drives came into vogue, NAS's in particular, Western Digital
blacklisted media extensions like .mp3, because that would facilitate piracy;
whether the government, lobby groups or they themselves came up with this I
don't know. In this digital web age, people have moved their attention from
physical media to digital media online, and now "the internet" is the
complicit perpetrator.

The good and bad news is that this is a general error in people's line of
thought, and it is a good thing that this is a problem that you don't have to
be a geek to understand nor care about, because it will affect you whenever
you travel, have a darker skin than most people, or use the internet. You can
bury your head in the sand, but this will and does affect every person in the
Western world you can imagine. Blame the media groups, blame the TSA, but most
of all, recognize that we can't just focus our attention at the proverbial
shoes and underwear, but have to grasp the scope of the root problem at the
core of this, and how people soon enough will find something other to try to
regulate and police to no effect and benefit for us all. Today it's the TSA
and MPAA; tomorrow we will have to suffer a new organization of fools and
another slew of politicians.

~~~
jk4930
They are "Fully Prepared for the Past": [http://systems-
thinkers.org/resources/resource/the_systems_b...](http://systems-
thinkers.org/resources/resource/the_systems_bible_the_beginners_guide_to_systems_large_and_small_3rd_editio)

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narrator
The _official_ reason for the Iraq war was to prevent 60 year old technology
becoming available to a government that our government decided would
inevitably use it in a way that would be harmful to us. The war on drugs is a
war on the possession and manufacture of even older bio-technology.

The control of and access to technology is one of the main fulcrums of human
history. That's because control and access to technology inherently determines
control and access to military, economic and political power and often those
in power are always looking to consolidate and guard their privilege.

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listening
General purpose PC's will only disappear if the market for them disappears.

Ultimately it is

1\. the nerds who educate (or fail to educate) the consumer market about what
is possible using a general purpose PC and

2\. the consumers who buy electronics, including general purpose PC's,

who are in control of the future production and general availability of them.

Common sense says that factories will only produce what can be sold. They
respond to demand.

Touchscreen, keyboardless tablets and "smartphones" that cannot be connected
and controlled with a more flexible general purpose computer are limiting not
enabling.

This is however not the message being sent to consumers.

~~~
Silhouette
> General purpose PC's will only disappear if the market for them disappears.

I think this is the key point.

In some sense, the market for them _has_ been disappearing. The rise of web
and mobile apps has shown beyond any doubt that a lot of traditional software
is far too big and complicated for a typical home user's needs, and that Joe
Public can in fact be quite happy sharing his life story on a cloud-hosted
blog, keeping up with his friends via Twitter, playing simple puzzle games on
Facebook, and watching streaming movies on his iPad. Notice that all of these
are just variations on consumption/communication using on-line services.
Heavyweight tools like e-mail and word processors just aren't necessary for
what most people care about in their daily lives at home. In fact, I suspect
that for the average home consumer, open access to data (both their own
personal information and multimedia content they have paid for) and the whole
walled garden debate are going to be far bigger issues than open access to
general purpose hardware and software.

On the flip side, there will always be enthusiasts who do want more flexible
hardware and software for their own enjoyment. All of those activities I
mentioned above use software written by geeks, running on infrastructure built
by geeks and funded in large part by businesses. And businesses themselves
have widely diverse requirements and build many software tools both in-house
and to sell to the public and/or other businesses. In short, the entire global
IT economy is built around geeks and business, and geeks and businesses need
general purpose computing. No amount of lobbying by special interest groups is
going to beat the combined might of a global economy that now depends
fundamentally on progress in IT for its recovery and future success. If a few
sites on the scale of Google and Facebook do go dark for a day in protest
against SOPA, I think a few politicians, a lot of Big Media executives, and
the entire Web-surfing population of the world are going to learn that lesson
very quickly.

~~~
jeffdavis
"In some sense, the market for them has been disappearing."

Agreed! That's what I thought the keynote would be about before I began
watching. Users cared about general purpose computers before, because the only
way you could accomplish a task was to run it on your own computer. Now, the
thin clients are essentially here, and the ability to run an arbitrary program
is not very important to many people.

Or so they think, anyway. I'm worried about the point where devices at home
are _not_ Turing-complete, and they just connect to authorized services. Only
certain companies would really have the ability to program anything at all
(because they'd be the only ones with real computers), and it would be easy
for the government to step in and control them.

~~~
stcredzero
How about government registration for general-purpose computers? (I do not
support that idea. Rather, it is the next step in this line of reasoning.)

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ugh
It’s worth watching the talk (linked in the article, but special pointing out
seems appropriate): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg>

I like to call it the secret keynote of 28C3.

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colmmacc
Isn't it already the case that many scanners, printers and image editing
software have built-in restrictions to prevent the copying of currency?

How are those restrictions implemented? I don't mean in a technical sense, I
understand the dot pattern recognition. But how is it that the vendors build
it in? Are there legal requirements? (and if so, how do Open Source
implementations manage) Are they purely concerned about liability? Are they
paid to by the proprietors of the technology? (so that the can sell it to
mints).

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protomyth
The funny part is that Apple is not my current worry. I am very scared of
Microsoft's new policy for Windows 8 apps using Metro / WinRT. I am not a
lawsuit fan, but I hope someone sues them to force open access. I can see app
stores on devices (phones / tablets), but not forced on a PC.

The power a forced app store gives the platform provider is too much.
Microsoft could delay a competitors approval while they add new features to
their own product. Beyond that, the notion that only the platform provider
should have a "relationship" with the customer is bogus.

~~~
lukeschlather
The tablet/phone/PC dynamic is artificial. A computer is a computer. We
already see the prototypes of the computer of the future, which is a
smartphone you can plug into a dock with keyboard/mouse/screen and use as a
PC.

~~~
justincormack
Why? Computers are really cheap, and everything is in the cloud. Why do I need
to plug a smartphone in? Any screen soon will probably have a smartphone class
CPU in it. For that matter keyboards could too at little cost... Arguably a
tablet is just a prototype screen with a smartphone CPU.

~~~
lukeschlather
In a perfect world every device would sort of be a general-purpose GPU/CPU
hybrid that you can chain via an optical link like Intel's Thunderbolt.

In the real world, no two devices are going to be compatible because every
manufacturer is shipping an embedded OS with a locked bootloader that doesn't
run the program you need to read your data. So you have to plug your
smartphone in because you have no idea what OS is running on the monitor.

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jamesbritt
Previous thread <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3400449>

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maeon3
It's already happening now. SOPA is the present day war against general-
purpose computation.

Uninstall that program citizen before armed men break down your door and take
your device. Drop the device citizen, don't make me taze you. We need to
invest hevily on infrastructure and devices that make the war against general
purpose computation very difficult to block everything from a central
location.

~~~
eternalban
Waiting for the day that _publishing software_ would require government
approval ...

~~~
mdaniel
Isn't that the definition of a patent?

~~~
philwelch
A patent isn't a restriction on publication, actually the patent itself is
publication. It's a restriction on commercial use.

The original intention of patents was that, rather than keeping your trade
secrets secret, you can file them with the government. The government will
grant you an exclusive monopoly to it for a limited period of time, which is a
stronger but more temporary protection than is given to trade secrets, but
more importantly it will publish your patent so that once it expires it
becomes part of common knowledge. It was essentially intended as a means of
open-sourcing technology.

