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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.
Depends on what you're arguing. If you mean that consumers prefer to buy walled-garden devices like iPads versus programmable computers, I agree that's something we have to fix ourselves, through outreach, PR, making better programming environments, whatever. But another angle is the government passing laws that make it increasingly difficult to offer unrestricted general-purpose computers. That I think is much more clearly a civil-liberties issue than just an issue of consumer preference.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That was a long piece of flamebait, so you'll excuse me if I only take part of it.
"Don't tell me what to do!" is one thing from a child to a parent, another from a slave to his master, a third from a man to his government, and yet a fourth from a purchaser of a product to its seller. Unless you feel all purchasers are children, the demand is not necessarily children.
Alarmism? Yes, they've been circumvented. Illegally in many cases. Which is only resulting in the other side tightening the screws more. And do you think those restrictions could have been circumvented if the most open computer anyone could get was an iPad?
Claiming this is alarmist with SOPA still on the table is sticking your head in the sand.
I think Mr. Doctorow errs in assuming two things: 1) that there's an intrinsic value in the total openness of programmable electronic devices, and 2) that the new "walled garden" approach adopted by Apple, Microsoft et al. is somehow being done to benefit the estate of Jack Valenti (thank God the Supreme Court couldn't extend his lifetime).
Before you mod me into oblivion, hear me out.
Most people do not give a good goddamn about having control over the code execution path. In fact they don't want control because they can get confused into letting viruses and other malware execute. They want their devices to make life easier, whether that means keeping track of information or playing games to pass the time or some other convenience, and given a two-dimensional optimization choice over the convenience/freedom axis they'll pick convenience every time. And they're not wrong or stupid or evil to do so. They just don't agree with your set of principles.
And thank God for that, because I for one would not want to witness the consequences of a Melissa or Slammer-type worm infecting every Android or iOS device in the United States. We would just stop.
There will always be vigorous and enthusiastic communities centered around truly general purpose devices. You need only look to the many devices other posters here have mentioned, such as the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and dozens of other hackables. Hell, through Amazon you can rent time on an infinite mountain of general-purpose computing if you're interested.
Let's face it -- hackers, by which I mean the folks who want to push devices to do things they were neither designed nor intended to do, are a teensy minority in the world of users.
Not really. Appliances usually won't have the RAM, GPU, storage, etc that a general purpose will have.
Way back in the way back, I had a computer upon which I had a development system and a web browser. It had a 16 MHz SPARC processor and 24 MB of RAM, a luxury back then. When the average cellphone of today is more powerful than the most powerful computers of then, this argument is beyond ridiculous.
Furthermore the "spyware" characterization is erroneous.
No, it really is not. Most network-connected devices will, at minimum, connect for update checks. Any television appliance that depends on remote servers for information is by definition tattling on you.
The less nerdy are making rational intelligent decisions. Locked down helps avoid malware and other maintenance issues.
[citation needed]
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Devices like the Raspberry Pi prove him wrong.
As long as they are legal. That was the point of the speech.
Doctorow is making the argument that stuff like that is being proposed and fought for in the current copyright war. Desire for it may spread to other developed sectors of the economy.
If it's Intel v everyone else and they do it on an international basis as part of a treaty, it could happen. The argument being made is that we should be aware of and prepared for this kind of thing because if other sectors of the economy start to get as annoyed by general purpose computers as the *AA have then there would be a serious fight.
Nick
Most processors sold today (by individual units shipped) aren't used in a general purpose computer or even an appliance that would be considered one. They're used in embedded applications, but it's the same processor (or very closely related) to the ones that are used for general purposes.
Most of those embedded users are squeezing every dime they can out of component costs, and those companies put together are far bigger than big content is. Nobody, including the chip fabs themselves, would stand for adding features to anything that looks like a CPU that would get in the way and drive up prices for the majority of their consumers. The latest x86-64 is used fairly heavily by embedded systems these days, plus the millions of them churning away in data centers around the globe on general purpose servers running every flavor of OS ever ported to it, making billions for their owners.
Does anyone really think Intel would stand by and watch 75% of their market get either obliterated overnight or priced out the market, that Amazon would let AWS become illegal, that any congressman on the planet wouldn't have hundreds of constituents explaining how they built businesses around writing software?
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I had mod points, and I was planning on use them all on this discussion, but as no one said what I wish to say, I'll spend them elsewhere. Here it goes.
You claim that the Raspberry Pi proves Doctorow wrong. Well, tablet computers prove him right. And smartphones, too. These are the two personal computer forms which dominate today's market, and will continue to dominate in the future. The market for laptops is shrinking while the market for tablets has increased 42%, according to some estimates Apple is becoming the world's dominant computer platform, with the dominant product being a closed, locked-down, walled garden of a personal computer.
And what about your home router? It's also a general purpose computer, which has been locked down hard to force you to not fiddle with it. The same applies to NAS and even some external HDs.
If that isn't enough, take a look at every chinese trinket toy which is sold on ebay. I'm referring to stuff such as MP3 players, media players, tablets, video game consoles and all of the sort. You can't fiddle with their software, you can't tweak their OS, you can only use them until it gets bricked. I personally have purchased a cheap, 20 dollar MP3 player with a neat color display which, at the time, put my cellphone to shame, and the damned thing could only be used to display song names and play tetris. And it was a full blown computer, which had a SD card reader.
My media player is also a general purpose computer, which has been castrated by my cable provider. My TV is also a general purpose computer, complete with HDMI input plugs, SD card reader and USB plug. It runs linux, too. But I can't do shit with it. It's from Sony, which also sells other personal computers, such as the Playstation line, playstation portable and playstation vita. And you can't do shit with them, either.
This is what Doctorow is warning about. And you said he has been proven wrong? How?
So no, Raspberry Pi does not prove him wrong. No matter how cool it is or how open it has been designed, it is a very specific product for a very specific market. There is a risk it will be put in the same category as a multitester, oscilloscopes and pulse generators: technical tools which only the technically literate are interested in using. That is, true general purpose computers are being relegated to something that only the fools at the local modern incantation of the homebrew computer club are even interested with, and this is very dangerous.
This artificial limitation already plagues the software development world, where compilers are seen as scary stuff which only technical people care to have. I've seen police reports where they claimed that the target of the raid was somehow a hacker and a pirate because he had linux on his computer, as a dual boot. People already accept these absurd views on computers. They perceive locked down computers as something which is desirable and here to stay, and the hardware vendors are already taking advantage of that ignorance and lack of insight.
The path to a computing world where all computers are tight-down walled gardens is already set, and if we don't acknowledge it and do something prevent this disaster to happen then it will happen. And it will happen in the near future.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
It's not just legislation, but also closed door trade agreements. Look at the way currency detection algorithms were inserted into color scanner, copier, and printer technology. Regardless of what we think about currency counterfeiters, that's a very clear example of how technology can become limited as per Doctorow's warning.
While all the hacker-ethic people keep looking for the next Gutenberg press to democratize information and technology, those in power are of course going to be concerned with controlling it, to protect their power hierarchies.
Personally, I have mixed feelings. Should we ever obtain an unfettered, consumer-controlled production capacity, we may all be buried in a pile of bread and circuses...
I doubt China or Russia would follow suit, and this kind of stupidity is just what will give them the lead in computer tech.
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