Doctorow: the Coming War On General-Purpose Computing

GuerillaRadio writes "Cory Doctorow's keynote at 28C3 was about the upcoming war on general-purpose computing driven by increasingly futile regulation to appease big content. 'The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.'" If you don't have time for the entire 55-minute video, a transcript is available that you can probably finish more quickly.

Comments

Failure on our part.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

If we can't make the argument for general purpose computing then we get what we deserve.

Most users never wanted freedom, they wanted to get work done or enjoy themselves. Unfortunately you don't need freedom for that. This is why the loss of basic and HyperCard doesn't matter.

Re:Failure on our part.

[Culture20]

Eventually they will discover a killer app that they must be able to run on their device of choice - and then discover that since they went the iPhad route, they are completely denied the chance to use it.

Already happened with tethering and copy/paste. iPhone users stuck through the hard times through three phone upgrades before they almost got what they wanted.

Re:How walled is "walled"?

[Samantha Wright]

"Walled" is when you have to pay a substantial developer license to be able to do what you just described. Which you do. That's at least a knee-high stone fence right there. By contrast, free software development on Windows and OS X is possible once you already have the OS.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Alarmism

[jez9999]

Toasters are no longer simple mechanical devices for a reason. If an "appliance" concept really worked, all you'd need is a 555 timer chip and a variable resistor. There hasn't been a toaster that simple in almost 2 decades!

Last time I checked, msot toasters were actually pretty much that simple. Exactly which toasters have you been experiencing in the last 2 decades, and what more functionality do they contain?

Re:Raspberry Pi

[Simon Brooke]

The ARM was designed for, and first used in, general purpose computers; I had an Acorn Archimedes on my desk in 1988, and an R260 (running BSD 4.2 with X11 and OSF Motif) on my desk two years later. BSD and the whole of Debian including Gnome and KDE are available for ARM, and with quad core chips and both MacOS and Windows 8 currently in development for ARM, new general purpose ARM hardware - mostly ultra-portable, but also desktop - is definitely on the way.

Re:Raspberry Pi

[Lumpy]

Radioshack has always sold a Macrovision remover. it was called the VHS video stabilizer. anyone that had a clue was able to get a device to defeat macrovision easily and cheaply.

And if you had a clue about electronics, you could easily turn down the AGC setting on the VCR and defeat it.

Re:Raspberry Pi

[Anonymous Coward]

Same video on YouTube, in case you don't want to go to an ad and javascript infested online mag.

Re:Raspberry Pi

[Luckyo]

You missed my point. I meant that "garage hacker" crowd, regardless of their line of business is going after discovering the new low hanging fruit. They have nothing to do in internal combustion engine for car fuel efficiency business anymore, as all easy improvements to the engine have been done and current advances require extreme levels of investment and expertise.

Similar thing will happen in the application stores in near future. All of the apps that are easy to make, provide a new and useful utility and haven't been done yet will be done. And then the revolution phase turns into evolution phase, where improvement takes place from inventing. At this point, "garage hacker" crowd goes looking for a new low hanging fruit, and larger commercial entities invest into improving the already existing pool of technology in the field.