> nobody really seems to care about locking you out of your own (non-mobile) device
The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices.
> I ask that you care about republicans banning actual physical books from schools as least as much
This seems like a total non-sequitur. Why do you bring this up? In any case, the last 3-4 times I looked into one of these cases, the "ban" was actually just removing the book from the mandatory curriculum. There are also some at-least-as-severe "bans" from the left, like removing Huckleberry Finn due to racial designators that are considered offensive. The pressure to ban these books does not come from republicans.
> The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices.
Sure. But I don’t feel robbed of the ability to do general purpose computing so long as my device for general purpose computing allows me to do general purpose computing. Even if my locked down phone stays locked down. I want my phone to be a locked down appliance and I bought it because it’s a locked down appliance, not despite that it was.
The question is perhaps: is it a problem that we have 2 classes of devices (mostly open like PCs, and mostly closed like everything else from consoles to phones cars), and that we need the first kind less and less?
That’s certainly happening. But for me to consider something a war on general purpose computing I’d need to see actual attacks on my ability to use my general purpose computing devices. Not merely that I’m given more options to use other devices.
The vast majority of people do not buy devices because they are locked down. In fact the idea that someone buys a phone because it is locked down and not because it fits in their pockets and has a radio on it is so disingenuous as to defy the intelligence of the reader. You only ever see that take on Hacker News (or similar tech forums) where people who are vested into this world defend their decisions.
On the contrary--and I can say this with some air of authority--normal people bristle at restrictions they run into and when given the opportunity to escape those restrictions do so in large numbers. Despite the ridiculous amount of complication and even risk involved with jailbreaking one's phone, we had something like 12% of people with an iPhone jailbreaking them at some point (and, no: it had little to do with piracy, and even the United States Copyright Office agreed with that: people wanted functionality that wasn't being provided).
The reality is: people at best buy these devices without understanding that they are locked down or at worst despite them being locked down. The business model of selling a locked down device is just so enticing that it has become hard to find devices that maintain high quality that aren't locked down, particularly at low price points. The only reason there seem to exist any anymore is because there are a handful of people at Google--and specifically Google--who have decided to defend the world from this fate.
And even they aren't perfect. Virtually the entire category of ultrabooks seems to have fallen to Chromebooks, and I seriously had to sit around for an hour soldering to create a special magic USB debugging serial bypass cable that I use to essentially jailbreak these things so I can run actual-Linux on them.
And that's really what is going to be your fate: the concept of a general purpose laptop is going to slowly die off and you are going to find yourself with fewer and fewer options that cost an arm and a leg vs. the ridiculously cheap alternative devices that will start to have better hardware or different design tradeoffs and you are also going to switch.
The mere existence that "sure, I can still spend a small fortune to obtain a general purpose computer" doesn't somehow prevent our fate, particularly given that these arguments tend to come from anti-DRM "nut jobs" like Cory and I who will point out that your general purpose computer is cool and all but if it isn't allowed to connect to the same networks or busses (think HDMCP) as the locked down devices then we are still losing something important: we aren't claiming you won't be able to build a computer, only that it won't be useful anymore :(.
> You only ever see that take on Hacker News (or similar tech forums) where people who are vested into this world defend their decisions.
Outside of places like HN and similar you get blank stares if you ask the question of what people think about the closedneas or openness of their device. If you clarify that (say) they would perhaps like to use an app from a different source, it’s again blank stares.
I of course wouldn’t actively mind if it was much easier to sideload an app on iOS, but if there was e.g some openness push that required multiple app stores to not just be available but also that all be equally prominent (like the browser or media player thing in Windows) then I’m completely convinced that it would be a disaster for users. More freedom, cheaper, but fractured and insecure. I’m not sure it’s a net positive. And I’m sure my dad would be more confused.
> the concept of a general purpose laptop is going to slowly die off and you are going to find yourself with fewer and fewer options that cost an arm and a leg vs. the ridiculously cheap alternative devices that will start to have better hardware or different design tradeoffs and you are also going to switch.
I believe this too. And while I don’t much like this future, I don’t really have a good answer. I don’t think the answer is to somehow require any appliance to be more open. It seems misdirected.
That PCs will be expensive and niche is probably true. They’ll go back to where they started before the home computing revolution, to be professional tools for content creators, developers, scientists and similar. It’s not the PC that’s threatened, it’s the cheap home PC that’s threatened. Not the workstation or video editing rig.
But the thing about the cheap home PC for web browsing, photo organization and light word processing is that it was never really a good tool for the job. It was a malware ridden crash prone slow machine that we (the HN people who now tell our relatives to get iPads or ChromeBooks for browsing) had to fix around the holidays.
Normal people bristle at restrictions they run into -- but also apps that take advantage of the freedoms granted them. The early value of browsers and AJAX was precisely that the browser was locked down. "Nothing to install" is valuable because of this. So I think both of you can be right. "Buying devices because it's locked down" only seems disingenuous if the locking down is for oneself.
If the user can choose to unlock their devices, it's the users themselves locking down the device and it makes sense to say "Buying devices because it's locked down / can be locked down".
Otherwise, it's not "Buying devices because it's locked down", it's "I have no other choice but buying locked down devices".
The browser is something running on top of an open general purpose computing device. In this case, it's the user (who decided to run a browser instead of native apps) decided to lock themselves down and it's totally different.
People want control and people want safety without having to think about it all the time. I think we haven't found the best technical solution to this tension, and we're stuck on a local optimum of "ignorance is bliss." Ideal would be something people can learn at their own pace over time -- and still not think about most of the time. You know, what the word "abstraction" is supposed to mean.
This trend towards simpler and simpler abstractions is everywhere.
We see it in the development world as well, with languages provide ever higher abstractions, and frameworks providing ever more opinionated approaches to solving things.
This happens not because of some war against writing ultra high performance code in assembly, but because developers don't want to deal with assembly on a daily basis.
My phone is a device that needs to just work. My desktop/laptop are devices that needs to let me do whatever I want them to.
Too often, people in our community conflate the two and conclude nefarious intent, when what we're seeing are market forces at work and the creation of products that the market demands.
This isn't to say that we should not be vigilant, but I agree with what you're saying here - these trends are not by themselves evidence of a war on general purpose computing.
> Too often, people in our community conflate the two and conclude nefarious intent, when what we're seeing are market forces at work and the creation of products that the market demands.
I find it hard to ascribe it all to "market forces" when it's also aided by legislation like the DMCA. Anyway if the EU Digital Markets act someday opens up App stores, we'll see _more_ market forces at play and can see exactly what consumers truly want.
These aren’t mutually exclusive though. There absolutely are forces that we should be worried about.
My point is that despite these concerns, there are completely natural and understandable reasons for many of the trends we’re seeing that are unrelated to those concerns and don’t necessarily imply progression towards an environment hostile to general purpose computing.
But >90% of that time is used for consumption and communication, in which case an appliance that prioritizes security over hackability is the right answer for non-technical people. In the relatively few cases where a mobile general-purpose computer is necessary, there are many suitable mobile devices — laptops, rooted tablets, Linux phones, etc.
this comment was about Pluton. Mobile is an entirely different beast.
But that aside, the extent of the "lockdown" outside of recent Huawei shenanigans always seems to be limited to which corporations can put their services on a device under which rules. Not which books you can read.
Why would desktop vendors not follow the same pathway? To me, it looks like it is only a "tradition" (desktop computers are from an era when it was deemed normal to tinker with your OS) and the paradigm can shift.
They're very different markets with very different needs. The market share of PCs will fall, relative to phones, but never vanish, and as it falls the casual users will leave, leaving an even greater concentration of tinkerers.
There are hundreds of millions of passionate hobbyists of various types who use PCs specifically because of their deep versatility, including all of the nascent coders that the big corps depend on for their next generation of dev hires. Abandoning them would be like automakers abandoning the transport truck market because it's not as big as the family car market. They would lose a bunch of money, and money is the bottom line.
You are right that the business depending on the "tradition" is way bigger than I anticipated.
> There are hundreds of millions of passionate hobbyists of various types who use PCs specifically because of their deep versatility
I think there would be lots of hobbyists tinkering with smartphones…
> including all of the nascent coders that the big corps depend on for their next generation of dev hires
This is something I sometimes worry about: I think most of current developers/sysadmins/hackers started by tinkering with their computer, playing with snippets of HTML/Python/shell, and therefore we will get much less coders in the near future, as kids are moving to devices which do not allow such easy tinkering? (yes, I know there are smartphone apps that provide some functionality, but I think it's generally less accessible)
Because it is extremely disruptive to the entire platform? Windows has been keeping decades old APIs on life support for the sake of business customers. This would quite literally be the opposite move.
These two ecosystems have not converged in the past 20+ years, why would they now?
Also, somehow most Android vendors still provide bootloader unlock keys.
One, because it is a much more immediate issue than hypothetical digital access restrictions to the "wrong" books. These books are being made unavailable right now.
Two, because the FSF/GNU, as usual, has a huge blind spot for who they should advocate for. They always seem less concerned with a wide range of people having access to books or code (i.e. the supposed 90% of smartphone users) and more with _them_ (on a decade old libreboot laptop running linux-libre - something only a very dedicated individual will build or comission and accept the inconveniences of) having access to books. The book bans in, for instance, Texas are much more easy to circumvent, but affect many more people. Suppressing access to queer literature (for instance) for 80% of the population right now is much more dangerous than a hypothetical technology that could censor 99% tomorrow. Those 19% are probably not even worth chasing, because you already convinced a majority that this material doesn't exist.
> In any case, the last 3-4 times I looked into one of these cases, the "ban" was actually just removing the book from the mandatory curriculum.
"especially on those from historically marginalized backgrounds who are watching their library shelves emptied"
As an aside, there’s a very big world outside American politics, and many of us outside the US don’t really care for it being brought into discussions where it’s not otherwise relevant. Just my 2 cents.
I wish it was that easy to keep separate. I'm not actually in the US either, but current attacks against queer people in the US have still inspired similar tactics and movements to form here[1]. I guess it's no surprised if Russian Oligarchs (like CitizenGo) are involved.
> This anxiety of an imminent all-encompassing wave of DRM where you can only run approved software on all your Windows/Linux devices has been going for more than 10 years.
So much longer. Go read any of the warnings that Cory Doctorow has been writing for 20+ years about the imminent war against general purpose computing, how DRM will end our right to use our own CPU, and then look at the date lines, and then ponder whether literally any of his predictions have come true. Some people have made entire careers out of talking about this.
>So much longer. Go read any of the warnings that Cory Doctorow has been writing for 20+ years about the imminent war against general purpose computing, how DRM will end our right to use our own CPU, and then look at the date lines, and then ponder whether literally any of his predictions have come true. Some people have made entire careers out of talking about this.
Can you say for certain that his writings didn't contribute to those predictions not coming true?
I mean, yeah, I get it. I worry about general purpose computing going away too. I remember Stallman and Doctorow talking about this in the early 2000s and saw many iterations of this same thread pop up on Slashdot, HN, Digg, Reddit, etc. over the years.
I dunno man, I guess I’m just skeptical over the dooming at this point. I think a bigger issue is less about whether we will be able to run whatever we want on our computer, and more that the internet has just become a cesspool of ads, clickbait, ragebait, and app sandboxed content that’s not discoverable by search engines. I think you’ll always have a fairly reasonable choice of computers to run whatever software you want on. But todays internet just isn’t very fun anymore.
I work in the industry and all I see around me everywhere are skilled and talented people doing their level best to ship the best and most useful products to their customers at the lowest prices. The theory that the whole industry was scared off from its former evil plan by the TED talks of a bottom-shelf sci-fi author strikes me as highly unlikely.
>I work in the industry and all I see around me everywhere are skilled and talented people doing their level best to ship the best and most useful products to their customers at the lowest prices. The theory that the whole industry was scared off from its former evil plan by the TED talks of a bottom-shelf sci-fi author strikes me as highly unlikely.
Your hyperbolic and insulting annotations degrade your assertion.
It's pretty easy to go buy a completely unlocked computer, so the war is definitely not lost. Maybe if you only want to run Windows or MacOS. But even then, my MacBook hasn't yet refused to let me do something I wanted to do.
My point was that if one feels the need to restrict the statement "non-mobile", then the war is already lost. Mobile phones are the most common computers used today.
That said I'm glad that you personally have always been able to do what you want to do with your MacBook.
