Doctorow on the War on General Purpose Computing 360
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.'"
Re:Welcome to 2006, Cory Doctorow (Score:4, Informative)
Cory Doctorow has been writing about this stuff for years, and is a huge influencer on slashbot comments. Lame critique, dude.
Re:all in all (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 [wikipedia.org]? It comes with a nice little tool which lets you interactively decide which files and directories will the software be allowed to access.
Re:all in all (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)
Re:Already there... (Score:5, Informative)
Freedom, security, stability. Choose two.
I have all three with Debian stable or CentOS.
Non exclusive garden example (Score:4, Informative)
A walled garden does not preclude allowing the ability to turn it off. {...} They could quite easily add an 'opt out' and let people install outside software at their own risk.
As an example of a non obligatory garden: the webOS system from Palm/HP/Gram, on Pre smartphones and the like.
Out of the box your Pre/TouchPad is the classical walled garden example:
It has a application manager, which lets you download or buy applications from a official repository of doctored applications.
But if you want to use your device in creative new way, you need just to type 1 command to switch the phone into developer mode. This command is well documented in the developer documentation. (The only draw back is that the first version was a little bit long to type, because it was a joke on the komani code. later versions introduced shorter alternatives). And then you can do pretty much anything you want with your smartphone/tablet. including installing any software of your liking. Or even installing an application manager which can also use homebrew and opensource repositories. (= Preware). And once you've finished sideloading external software, just switch back into regular mode and continue using your new homebrew apps or the new app manager.
There are no need for hacking, for exploits, for stolen keys, etc.
Using this is at the owners' own risk. But if you corrupted your smartphone/tablet by installing too much weird shit, there's the webOS doctor which is designed by Palm/HP/Gram, to revert back your hardware to factory default. (Though you lose anything you did which was not backed up on the cloud. You lose your homebrew applications. But not the personal assistant data).
And a non-locked android smartphone works in the same way, letting the user do side-loading or replace the firmware altogether.
BUT
Apple and Microsoft decided they didn't wanted to do it that way. They are trying to do as much as possible to prevent going out of the walled garden.
Apple refused to let users do anything else than get applications from the Apple AppStore and at some point even tried to sue against circumvention.
Microsoft is at the center of a controversy due to their abusive requirement regarding the ARM version of Win8 and the Secure UEFI booting.