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Doctorow on the War on General Purpose Computing

Posted by timothy on from the worth-reading-all-the-way-through dept.

Cory Doctorow has posted the content of his talk delivered at Google this month on what he calls the coming civil war over general purpose computing. He neatly crystallizes the problem with certain types of (widely called-for) regulation of devices and the software they run — and they all run software. The ability to stop a general purpose computer from doing nearly anything (running code without permission from the mothership, or requiring an authorities-only engine kill switch, or preventing a car from speeding away), he says boils down to a demand: "Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out." "But there's a problem. We don't know how to make a computer that can run all the programs we can compile except for whichever one pisses off a regulator, or disrupts a business model, or abets a criminal. The closest approximation we have for such a device is a computer with spyware on it— a computer that, if you do the wrong thing, can intercede and say, 'I can't let you do that, Dave.'"

3 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. Re:all in all by next_ghost · · Score: 5, Informative

    Current OSs offer very little in the way of actually restricting applications. If you execute an application from a third party, it can do quite literally what it wants. Even Open Source doesn't help much as you have no time to audit it all. At best it might not have root rights, but that still doesn't stop it from searching through your personal photo collection, your credit card info, your mail and all that stuff.

    Ever heard of AppArmor? It comes with a nice little tool which lets you interactively decide which files and directories will the software be allowed to access.

  2. Re:all in all by amorsen · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a bit funny that you use Raspberry Pi as an example. After all, it has code to prevent certain parts of its firmware from running unless unlocked by a license key. You cannot even boot the thing without loading proprietary firmware doing who-knows-what.

    (Disclaimer, I own one)

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  3. Re:Already there... by rrohbeck · · Score: 5, Informative

    Freedom, security, stability. Choose two.

    I have all three with Debian stable or CentOS.

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