It got this way because 99% of people are happy running what's in the app store, and the security protections are more valuable than being able to run arbitrary code.
Linux as an answer doesn't address the needs of 99% of people, so 98% will never adopt it. It's better to meet people where they're at and push for sideloading and alternative app stores.
> Sadly, over the years, Android has been steadily walking back that openness. The justifications are always reasonable on their face. Security updates need to be mandatory because users are terrible at remembering to update. Sideloading apps need to come with warnings because users will absolutely install malware if you let them just click a button. Root access is too dangerous because it puts the security of the whole system and other apps at risk. But inch by inch, it gets harder to run what you want on the device you paid for.
As much as I want to agree with this author (and do, to an extent) they are also providing the exact and honestly-pretty-good reasons for why this is happening: computers have breached containment, and they did it a long time ago. Computers are not just for us weird nerds anymore and they haven't been for some time; they're tools for a larger, more complicated, more diverse userbase, many of whom are simply not interested in learning how to computer. They just want shit to work, reliably. Random software on the Internet is not a path to reliability if you also don't know how your thing actually works.
I mourn this too but let's not pretend it's simply what happened because corporations are evil (though they are for sure that).
I don't agree, it is absolutely dreadful, and we saw this coming and did nothing about it.
Think about it: you need permission to run software on your own hardware. Every time you launch a Mac App, it checks in with its masters to be sure its okay to do so - every time you install an app on your mobile device, it does the same thing.
People accept this terrible state of affairs because the "user experience is better" - but this is a fallacy. Under the cover of 'security issues' that their are incapable of fixing, due to very poor architecture decisions, OS vendors have instead bolted on an insanity and sold it to the user as progress.
Every computing device should have everything it needs, onboard, to write software for that computing device. That they don't is because the OS vendors are cowardly running from the bloat of yesteryear and adding more bloat tomorrow to cover it all up.
There will be a backlash against this. We see it already in the retro-computing and alternative-platform hacking communities, which are growing and growing, exponentially, by the year.
Its only a matter of time that someone wraps up this freedom-to-use concept in hardware that is sexy enough to compete with the totalitarian-authoritarian platform providers. Any .. day .. now ..
Real world parallels to this abound. You cannot build whatever house you want on your own property, for example; it must meet strict building codes and be verifiably structurally sound. What ever happened to building what you wanted on your own land?
No, but when remote attestation reveals that you're running an OS that's not blessed by Google, the megacorps will make their apps all refuse to run on your phone. A few already do so today, e.g., the McDonald's app. In practice, I expect a situation where we have two phones: one to run Big Tech's apps, and one to run indie apps.
What happened was people ended up putting a lot of money and sensitive data on their computers and desired a system which wouldn’t expose that just because they ran the wrong software.
This is the real answer that is rather banal and boring compared to conspiracies of nefarious money harvesting.
95% of people don't know what "Run your own software" means, because to them, the app store lets them chose what apps to install. And they don't get viruses and malware like their 2008 laptop did.
That being said, there absolutely needs to be a mechanism for "lowering the gates" if the user wants full control of the device they own.
The TPM and secure boot conversation for gaming has shifted my perspective a lot. This technology is having a positive impact on player experience. It has become quite clear to me that there are wheels that will squeak regardless of the amount of lubricant used. I've begun to consider the position of being able to run anything my way at any time on any machine as being a bit extremist. Especially, in a game theoretic setting with other participants expecting some degree of fair play.
I am allowed to own multiple computers. Many do. I've got a Linux hand held, a windows desktop, an iPhone and a MacBook. All with varying degrees of freedom and function. I don't feel like I'm constrained right now.
HDCP is an example of the other thing in my mind. It adds zero value to anyone's experience. Any potential value add is hypothetical. You can't survey a person after they watch an unprotected film and receive a meaningful signal. It's pure downside for the customer. There's no such thing as competitive Netflix lobbies.
If I want to run arbitrary code, I'll do it on my windows box or fire up a Linux VM in the cloud somewhere. I don't need weird problems on my phone. If you are trying to touch all platforms at once, try using the goddamn web. I've been able to avoid Apple enterprise distribution hell with a little bit of SPA magic and InTune configuration for business customers. For B2C I just don't see it anymore. You need to follow the rules if you want to be in the curated environments.
Even if I try to steelman your argument that locking down general purpose computers has some benefits particularly to gaming, its very short term imo.
How far away are we from hooking up a vision model to the display output of let’s say, Battlefield 6 and hooking in mouse+kb input from said vision model + an aimbot that perfectly replicates a top performing players mouse movements?
I’d say not very far away.
Much like how in online chess, no technical solution can attest that a move is really from a human brain and not a chess program running on his phone.
This idea that protecting users is worth the cost of giving up your ownership rights is fallacious.
Protecting 1 million grannies is an entirely different risk class than the security implications of stopping everyone from using their devices as they see fit.
Protecting 1 million grannies means everyone loses ability to install apps that:
-allow encrypted chat
-allow use of privacy respecting software
-download art/games/entertainment that is deemed inappropriate to unelected parties
-use software to organize protests and track agents of hostile governments
-download software that opposes monopolistic holds of controlling parties
Using Linux is also not a real choice. To access my bank and health services in my country, I require a mobile device that is remote attested by either Apple or Google which are American countries. Hell, it's becoming closer to reality that playing online video games requires remote attestation either to "prevent" cheating or for age verification.
Thus the risk widens to the sovereign control a nation has over its own services. A US president could attempt to force Google and Apple to shutoff citizen access of banks and health services of an entire nation. Merely the threat could give them leverage in any sort of negotiations they might be in. For some nations in the future, the controlling nation may be China I imagine.
I think the real regulatory solution here is to break up monopoly practices. While the EU's DMA is all well and good in some ways, the EU is also pushing Chat Control... In a more fragmented market it becomes impossible for a bank or health service to mandate specific devices for access (they lose potential customers) so you could theoretically move to a device that doesn't do draconian style remote attestation that breaks if you go off the ranch. We need more surgically precise regulatory tools than sweeping legislation that would keep using alternatives like Linux or FreeBSD or whatever actually viable. It also makes it much harder for that same legislative body to enforce insane ideas like Chat Control.
The answer is not protect users from themselves. The answer is more freedom, with a legal framework that helps all users have more choices while helping victims acquire restitution.
> A US president could attempt to force Google and Apple to shutoff citizen access of banks and health services of an entire nation. Merely the threat could give them leverage in any sort of negotiations they might be in
This. We can’t anymore say to ourselves “but surely a US president would never do that”?
Reference: recent tirades at Canada, Spain, Colombia, Ukraine, ...
> The moment gaming became genuinely profitable, console manufacturers realized they could control their entire ecosystem. Proprietary formats, region systems, and lockout chips were all valid ways to ensure companies could levy hefty licensing fees from developers.
This is historically inaccurate. All console games were originally produced in-house by the console manufacturers, but then 4 Atari programmers got wind that the games they wrote made tens of $millions for Atari while the programmers were paid only a relatively small salary. When Atari management refused to give the programmers a cut, they left and formed Activision. Thus Activision became the original third-party console game development company. Atari sued Activision for theft of trade secrets, because the Activision founders were all former Atari programmers. The case was settled, with Atari getting a cut of Activision’s revenue but otherwise allowing Activision to continue developing console games. I suspect this was because the 4 programmers were considered irreplaceable to Atari (albeit too late, after they already quit).
The licensing fee business model was a product of this unique set of circumstances. The article author's narrative makes it sound like consoles switched from open to closed, but that's not true. The consoles (like the iPhone) switched from totally closed to having a third-party platform, after the value of third-party developers was shown.
> Consumers loved having access to a library of clean and functional apps, built right into the device.
How can you say they're "built right into the device" when you have to download them? Moreover, you were originally able to buy iPhone apps in iTunes for Mac, and manage your iPhone via USB.
> Meanwhile, they didn’t really care that they couldn’t run whatever kooky app some random on the Internet had dreamed up.
I'm not sure how you can say consumers didn't really care. Some people have always cared. It's a tradeoff, though: you would have to care enough to not buy an iPhone altogether. That's not the same as not caring at all. Also, remember that for the first year, iPhone didn't even have third-party apps.
> At the time, this approach largely stayed within the console gaming world. It didn’t spread to actual computers because computers were tools. You didn’t buy a PC to consume content someone else curated for you.
I would say this was largely due to Steve Wozniack, who insisted that the Apple II be an open platform. If Steve Jobs—who always expressed contempt for third-party developers—originally had his way, the whole computing industry might have been very different. Jobs always considered them "freeloaders", which is ridiculous of course (for example, VisiCalc is responsible for much of the success off the Apple II), but that was his ridiculous view.
It's important to understand that we could genuinely lose general purpose computing. I don't think it's in serious danger at the moment, but we've been in the midst of a slide in that direction for the last 10-15 years. Part of it is mobile phones, part of it is TPM, part of it is market forces. The latest turn is strictly political. We've really foolishly built the technology necessary for authoritarianism just a few years head of a general global trend towards authoritarianism. At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever. Will the laws of your country make it harder or more difficult to avoid? Will major vendors lock you out of basic functions? Will age verification require an agent run on your Windows or macOS computer? (or worse, require the use of a smart phone just to use the internet?)
We're not anywhere there yet, but we're closer than we've ever been, and things keep moving in the wrong direction.
EU CRA (enforced Dec 2027) prohibits shipment of non-certified binaries for "critical" software, including firmware and hypervisors. Operating systems like Linux are categorized as "important" software, https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/cyber-resilience-act...
I think it is unfortunate how many resources are put into making things secure with TPM's and how little resource is put into basically having secure and simple sandboxing...
All I really want is a computer that allows me to fully control the permissions and filesystem access of all the programs that I manually install on my system. Almost every program (in my case) needs 0 filesystem access outside of what it installed itself and shouldn't be looking or snooping at anything that isn't in its own process space.
I want a clear and simple way to limit the blast radius of how badly a program could actually screw up my system or have access to my files.
I recently experienced the opposite of this on Android, where I tried to install a very well reviewed ebook reader called MoonReader. But MoonReader seems to require complete access to every file on my Android device to work correctly. That is insane. I looked it up a bit more and it seems that Google has simplified (or something) permissions, but now there isn't much choice other than asking for full file access (I just want to give it access to one directory).
Anywho, just a minor vent, that we are insisting that the only way to make things secure is this sort of attestation path, but we don't spend any energy just making it possible to limit the blast radius of software on most OS'.
I sincerely doubt it'll do much, but my next computer will not be Apple. Sadly, I just upgraded a year and a half or so ago, and sadly, good lord those damn arm chips are nice.
So hopefully in 8 years or so when I need a new machine, there's some decent options available to me.
But nice aint worth the cost when it comes at the expense of supporting something which is undermining everything else you believe in.
>At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever. Will the laws of your country make it harder or more difficult to avoid? Will major vendors lock you out of basic functions?
Somewhat related, but if x86 loses dominance it will be even more difficult if not impossible to install Linux or other alternate OS's on ARM devices. The majority of consumer ARM electronics make it hard enough, and normally requires you to run a specific patched (and most likely outdated) Linux kernel in order to boot.
There are ARM devices which meet the ARM System Ready standard which allows you to boot whatever OS you want, but they are mostly enterprise devices such as servers. Cheapest one I've seen which your average consumer might buy was an ARM workstation with a starting price of about $1500
We're both closer than any of us believe. Insofar that ChromeOS is and isn't Linux, it's already locked down signed boot. But also we're further from it because general computing isn't going anywhere soon as long as people keep buying general purpose computers. Still until Qubes or similar sandboxed computing becomes the norm, blaming victims for getting malware onto their system only goes so far, and even if banks don't require it, regular people will start having a banking only computer because oh god please don't steal all my money.
This! I think we were all too naïve in having "we would never let it happen, right?" be the motto for our complacency and inaction.
I hope more people come around and recognize that Richard Stallman deserves a big, resounding "you were right, we're sorry" after being attacked for his dislike of "trusted computing" and TPMs [0].
If you've ever looked at the plans for Absolute Zero 2050, they predict a world with no shipping or commercial air travel, among many other restrictions. That sort of thing could only be implemented under an authoritarian government. I think that's where all this is coming from.
> Vote with your wallet
Doesn't work when the only options are bad. Every Android OEM embraces the closing of android because it'll allow them to ship all the spyware they already do without the user being able to remove them (or disable them soon enough). Having 2 or 100 options has no difference if they're all bad.
I hate to be the old guy yelling at the clouds, but was an LLM used to write parts of this?
> Apple sold the walled garden as a feature. It wasn’t ashamed or hiding the fact—it was proud of it... The iPhone’s locked-down nature wasn’t a restriction; it was a selling point.
Please, write as a human, I promise you it's good enough. I'd much rather read something that's a bit clunky but human written than something that's very polished but leaves me wondering what the author actually was trying to say.
Respect your reader, but most importantly, respect yourself as a writter too.
The rot is so much deeper than just running what you want on your own machine. And how we got here is easy to explain. There was once money it letting you run what you want on your machine. Now there's money in not letting you run what you want on your machine. And so, that's what we get.
There exists no path where a publicly traded company doesn't eventually view its customers as subjects. Every business school on the planet is teaching their students strategies and tactics that squeeze their customers in pursuit of maximizing revenue. And those strategies and tactics are often at the expense of creativity, ethics, and community. Just last week people's bed didn't work because the company that makes them architected things such that they have absolute control.
Only a reasonably altruistic private company might buck the trend. But the publicly traded companies are allowed, by the government(s), to use their largesse in a predatory fashion to prevent competition. They bundle and bleed and leverage every step of the way. They not only contribute to the politicians that do their bidding, they are frequently asked to write the laws and regulations they're expected to follow. Magically, it has the effect of increasing the costs of their competition to enter the markets they dominate. And so, the odds of an altruistic private company emerging from that muck is low.
Worse still, many of the elected officials (and bureaucrats) actively own stock in the very companies they are responsible for regulating. Widespread corruption and perversion of the market is the inevitable result.
I'm trying to do a better job and redirect my money to the places that better reflect my values. It's not even a drop in the bucket, but it's a lever where I feel like I have a measure of control.
The companies that make stuff could easily be beaten in the market by a non-profit competitor. With no worries about stock market prices and dividends, a non-profit could direct all it's money into making better products.
But the problems are that 1) nobody wants to work for a non-profit and 2) greed redirects the money away from better products into the founder's (or top management's) pockets. Firefox is an example.
I place a large part of blame of why the public is accepting of this trend of restrictive computing to Microsoft’s decision to loosen security despite of David Cutler’s excellent Windows NT. Cutler came from DEC VMS and built Windows NT to be an enterprise OS with separation between kernel and user space and enterprise level security. Microsoft to go after the consumer space ran a lot of apps and drivers in the kernel space. This meant for over two decades consumers learnt hackers could easily hack, bypass, and take control over their PCs. If you could disguise your code as a driver, it got God permissions to your PC.
> "When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions."
None of what was written in the rest of the article after this statement has any bearing on what they said in this statement. Sure, they said the "Microsoft Store", but aside from that, you still have the freedom of running whatever software you want on your own desktop computer, laptop computer, or server (Linux, Windows, or Macintosh) ... nothing has changed about this. I, for one, like the increased security on mobile devices. As far as gaming, I am not a gamer, so I just do not care.
People are perfectly happy with a walled garden. The question one should always be asking is what is the difference between that and a panopticon? What happens to me if I start seeing faded flowers and no-entry signs? Can I escape? With my stuff or friends or family?
I believe that in the depths of the cold war, when personal computers were just showing up, it was decided, deep within the National Security Agency,that it was more advantageous to let them continue to proliferate without fostering secure Operating Systems, though they were available.
We all now live with the blowback from that decision. Most people don't even realize that actually secure computing is a possibility now, even here on HN.
This general insecurity means that anything exposed to raw internet will be compromised and therefore significant resources must be expended to manage it, and recover after any incidents.
It's no wonder that most people don't want to actually run their own servers. Thus we give up control and this .... Situation .... Is the result.
It doesn't increase shareholder revenue. That is the second highest calling. The only thing more important is marketing and advertising, and this also helps that, so hey, two birds one stone.
I worry that this global push for 'Know Your Developer' and the attempt to make them legally liable for what they produce, is going to destroy open source, An 'open' linux included.
After that, certified locked down BigTech 'Personal Computing' will be the only menu choice.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 76.4 ms ] threadLinux.
Linux as an answer doesn't address the needs of 99% of people, so 98% will never adopt it. It's better to meet people where they're at and push for sideloading and alternative app stores.
Banking on GrapheneOS
As much as I want to agree with this author (and do, to an extent) they are also providing the exact and honestly-pretty-good reasons for why this is happening: computers have breached containment, and they did it a long time ago. Computers are not just for us weird nerds anymore and they haven't been for some time; they're tools for a larger, more complicated, more diverse userbase, many of whom are simply not interested in learning how to computer. They just want shit to work, reliably. Random software on the Internet is not a path to reliability if you also don't know how your thing actually works.
I mourn this too but let's not pretend it's simply what happened because corporations are evil (though they are for sure that).
Think about it: you need permission to run software on your own hardware. Every time you launch a Mac App, it checks in with its masters to be sure its okay to do so - every time you install an app on your mobile device, it does the same thing.
People accept this terrible state of affairs because the "user experience is better" - but this is a fallacy. Under the cover of 'security issues' that their are incapable of fixing, due to very poor architecture decisions, OS vendors have instead bolted on an insanity and sold it to the user as progress.
Every computing device should have everything it needs, onboard, to write software for that computing device. That they don't is because the OS vendors are cowardly running from the bloat of yesteryear and adding more bloat tomorrow to cover it all up.
There will be a backlash against this. We see it already in the retro-computing and alternative-platform hacking communities, which are growing and growing, exponentially, by the year.
Its only a matter of time that someone wraps up this freedom-to-use concept in hardware that is sexy enough to compete with the totalitarian-authoritarian platform providers. Any .. day .. now ..
95% of people don't know what "Run your own software" means, because to them, the app store lets them chose what apps to install. And they don't get viruses and malware like their 2008 laptop did.
That being said, there absolutely needs to be a mechanism for "lowering the gates" if the user wants full control of the device they own.
There are more
AROS, GNU-HURD and more
you can always contribute code, maintain an app, report a bug
You can buy HW to run AOSP, like Raspberry-PI or RISC-V
We are the consumers, we have the wallet.
I am allowed to own multiple computers. Many do. I've got a Linux hand held, a windows desktop, an iPhone and a MacBook. All with varying degrees of freedom and function. I don't feel like I'm constrained right now.
HDCP is an example of the other thing in my mind. It adds zero value to anyone's experience. Any potential value add is hypothetical. You can't survey a person after they watch an unprotected film and receive a meaningful signal. It's pure downside for the customer. There's no such thing as competitive Netflix lobbies.
If I want to run arbitrary code, I'll do it on my windows box or fire up a Linux VM in the cloud somewhere. I don't need weird problems on my phone. If you are trying to touch all platforms at once, try using the goddamn web. I've been able to avoid Apple enterprise distribution hell with a little bit of SPA magic and InTune configuration for business customers. For B2C I just don't see it anymore. You need to follow the rules if you want to be in the curated environments.
How far away are we from hooking up a vision model to the display output of let’s say, Battlefield 6 and hooking in mouse+kb input from said vision model + an aimbot that perfectly replicates a top performing players mouse movements?
I’d say not very far away.
Much like how in online chess, no technical solution can attest that a move is really from a human brain and not a chess program running on his phone.
Protecting 1 million grannies is an entirely different risk class than the security implications of stopping everyone from using their devices as they see fit.
Protecting 1 million grannies means everyone loses ability to install apps that:
Using Linux is also not a real choice. To access my bank and health services in my country, I require a mobile device that is remote attested by either Apple or Google which are American countries. Hell, it's becoming closer to reality that playing online video games requires remote attestation either to "prevent" cheating or for age verification.Thus the risk widens to the sovereign control a nation has over its own services. A US president could attempt to force Google and Apple to shutoff citizen access of banks and health services of an entire nation. Merely the threat could give them leverage in any sort of negotiations they might be in. For some nations in the future, the controlling nation may be China I imagine.
I think the real regulatory solution here is to break up monopoly practices. While the EU's DMA is all well and good in some ways, the EU is also pushing Chat Control... In a more fragmented market it becomes impossible for a bank or health service to mandate specific devices for access (they lose potential customers) so you could theoretically move to a device that doesn't do draconian style remote attestation that breaks if you go off the ranch. We need more surgically precise regulatory tools than sweeping legislation that would keep using alternatives like Linux or FreeBSD or whatever actually viable. It also makes it much harder for that same legislative body to enforce insane ideas like Chat Control.
The answer is not protect users from themselves. The answer is more freedom, with a legal framework that helps all users have more choices while helping victims acquire restitution.
This. We can’t anymore say to ourselves “but surely a US president would never do that”?
Reference: recent tirades at Canada, Spain, Colombia, Ukraine, ...
This is historically inaccurate. All console games were originally produced in-house by the console manufacturers, but then 4 Atari programmers got wind that the games they wrote made tens of $millions for Atari while the programmers were paid only a relatively small salary. When Atari management refused to give the programmers a cut, they left and formed Activision. Thus Activision became the original third-party console game development company. Atari sued Activision for theft of trade secrets, because the Activision founders were all former Atari programmers. The case was settled, with Atari getting a cut of Activision’s revenue but otherwise allowing Activision to continue developing console games. I suspect this was because the 4 programmers were considered irreplaceable to Atari (albeit too late, after they already quit).
The licensing fee business model was a product of this unique set of circumstances. The article author's narrative makes it sound like consoles switched from open to closed, but that's not true. The consoles (like the iPhone) switched from totally closed to having a third-party platform, after the value of third-party developers was shown.
> Consumers loved having access to a library of clean and functional apps, built right into the device.
How can you say they're "built right into the device" when you have to download them? Moreover, you were originally able to buy iPhone apps in iTunes for Mac, and manage your iPhone via USB.
> Meanwhile, they didn’t really care that they couldn’t run whatever kooky app some random on the Internet had dreamed up.
I'm not sure how you can say consumers didn't really care. Some people have always cared. It's a tradeoff, though: you would have to care enough to not buy an iPhone altogether. That's not the same as not caring at all. Also, remember that for the first year, iPhone didn't even have third-party apps.
> At the time, this approach largely stayed within the console gaming world. It didn’t spread to actual computers because computers were tools. You didn’t buy a PC to consume content someone else curated for you.
I would say this was largely due to Steve Wozniack, who insisted that the Apple II be an open platform. If Steve Jobs—who always expressed contempt for third-party developers—originally had his way, the whole computing industry might have been very different. Jobs always considered them "freeloaders", which is ridiculous of course (for example, VisiCalc is responsible for much of the success off the Apple II), but that was his ridiculous view.
We're not anywhere there yet, but we're closer than we've ever been, and things keep moving in the wrong direction.
> At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever.
Maybe Linux will save us.
This was a fascinating thing to watch for me (pewdiepie telling people to install Linux): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0
My bet is that the momentum is strong enough that:
- A critical mass of PC makers will continue to offer a Linux preinstalled option, or at least some path to installing Linux.
- If Windows and macOS take more rights away, it'll just help Linux's market share.
So Linux's share will probably grow not only because Linux is getting better but because the corpo OSes trying to take away general purpose computing
Hum... It was foolish, but it was decades after the trend started.
Looks to me that the real trend was started mostly by the wide distribution of TV and the subsequent media consolidation (that happened everywhere).
Also, who is "we" here? Because it was exactly the authoritarian-wannabes that created most of it.
All I really want is a computer that allows me to fully control the permissions and filesystem access of all the programs that I manually install on my system. Almost every program (in my case) needs 0 filesystem access outside of what it installed itself and shouldn't be looking or snooping at anything that isn't in its own process space.
I want a clear and simple way to limit the blast radius of how badly a program could actually screw up my system or have access to my files.
I recently experienced the opposite of this on Android, where I tried to install a very well reviewed ebook reader called MoonReader. But MoonReader seems to require complete access to every file on my Android device to work correctly. That is insane. I looked it up a bit more and it seems that Google has simplified (or something) permissions, but now there isn't much choice other than asking for full file access (I just want to give it access to one directory).
Anywho, just a minor vent, that we are insisting that the only way to make things secure is this sort of attestation path, but we don't spend any energy just making it possible to limit the blast radius of software on most OS'.
In which folders it can hide, which data to access, and which hardware resources to use.
So hopefully in 8 years or so when I need a new machine, there's some decent options available to me.
But nice aint worth the cost when it comes at the expense of supporting something which is undermining everything else you believe in.
Somewhat related, but if x86 loses dominance it will be even more difficult if not impossible to install Linux or other alternate OS's on ARM devices. The majority of consumer ARM electronics make it hard enough, and normally requires you to run a specific patched (and most likely outdated) Linux kernel in order to boot.
There are ARM devices which meet the ARM System Ready standard which allows you to boot whatever OS you want, but they are mostly enterprise devices such as servers. Cheapest one I've seen which your average consumer might buy was an ARM workstation with a starting price of about $1500
I hope more people come around and recognize that Richard Stallman deserves a big, resounding "you were right, we're sorry" after being attacked for his dislike of "trusted computing" and TPMs [0].
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html
> Apple sold the walled garden as a feature. It wasn’t ashamed or hiding the fact—it was proud of it... The iPhone’s locked-down nature wasn’t a restriction; it was a selling point.
Please, write as a human, I promise you it's good enough. I'd much rather read something that's a bit clunky but human written than something that's very polished but leaves me wondering what the author actually was trying to say.
Respect your reader, but most importantly, respect yourself as a writter too.
There exists no path where a publicly traded company doesn't eventually view its customers as subjects. Every business school on the planet is teaching their students strategies and tactics that squeeze their customers in pursuit of maximizing revenue. And those strategies and tactics are often at the expense of creativity, ethics, and community. Just last week people's bed didn't work because the company that makes them architected things such that they have absolute control.
Only a reasonably altruistic private company might buck the trend. But the publicly traded companies are allowed, by the government(s), to use their largesse in a predatory fashion to prevent competition. They bundle and bleed and leverage every step of the way. They not only contribute to the politicians that do their bidding, they are frequently asked to write the laws and regulations they're expected to follow. Magically, it has the effect of increasing the costs of their competition to enter the markets they dominate. And so, the odds of an altruistic private company emerging from that muck is low.
Worse still, many of the elected officials (and bureaucrats) actively own stock in the very companies they are responsible for regulating. Widespread corruption and perversion of the market is the inevitable result.
I'm trying to do a better job and redirect my money to the places that better reflect my values. It's not even a drop in the bucket, but it's a lever where I feel like I have a measure of control.
The companies that make stuff could easily be beaten in the market by a non-profit competitor. With no worries about stock market prices and dividends, a non-profit could direct all it's money into making better products.
But the problems are that 1) nobody wants to work for a non-profit and 2) greed redirects the money away from better products into the founder's (or top management's) pockets. Firefox is an example.
None of what was written in the rest of the article after this statement has any bearing on what they said in this statement. Sure, they said the "Microsoft Store", but aside from that, you still have the freedom of running whatever software you want on your own desktop computer, laptop computer, or server (Linux, Windows, or Macintosh) ... nothing has changed about this. I, for one, like the increased security on mobile devices. As far as gaming, I am not a gamer, so I just do not care.
I remember seeing KDE and GNOME already have their "stores", we need to keep a close eye on Linux.
We all now live with the blowback from that decision. Most people don't even realize that actually secure computing is a possibility now, even here on HN.
This general insecurity means that anything exposed to raw internet will be compromised and therefore significant resources must be expended to manage it, and recover after any incidents.
It's no wonder that most people don't want to actually run their own servers. Thus we give up control and this .... Situation .... Is the result.
After that, certified locked down BigTech 'Personal Computing' will be the only menu choice.