We're not anywhere there yet, but we're closer than we've ever been, and things keep moving in the wrong direction.
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'.
But try looking into QubesOS. You create domains where applications can do whatever in the domain (a contained VM). So your personal domain is separate from your bank domain, which is separate from your media domain.
Of course, domains themselves can do naughty things. But they cant cross over to others.
And system resources are a separate domain, as is networking.
Some downsides - gaming is a no go mostly. And if you do SDR stuff, the USB domain is a heavy hit on performance. You really need dedicated machines for those things.
In which folders it can hide, which data to access, and which hardware resources to use.
> 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
And web attestation, which almost became a thing about a year ago. It is gone for now, but it will only be a matter of time before it decides to rear its ugly head again.
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].
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.
Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
Transcript: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
(Of course, Stallman warned of this type of thing much earlier as well.)
Many big institutions lean heavily on mobile apps and other gated computing.
I live in BC Canada and by far the easiest way to authenticate a login to provincial sources involves using the BC ID App as a second factor, even when logging in via desktop. Many banks now also use their app as a second factor, rather than a generic OTP option that can run on any hardware.
There were also issues like running Netflix DRM in browser on Linux for a while.
General purpose computers won’t go away, but they will continue to be gated from more and more services until you are more or less required to have a phone or locked down ecosystem device.
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
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.
* Auth app deploys to one or two app stores. No financial incentive to do otherwise.
* App stores remain within walled gardens. Tracking, DRM, proprietary drivers come with.
Also, my hardware, my choice. It seems there is no way to actually let them know.
1) sign a petition on change.org against that APK lockdown (currently 10.5k votes) - https://c.org/BHZzNvR6pr
2) In your Android device or Google account use "Send Feedback" and articulate yourself or "Contact us" in Android under "System settings > Tips and support" or best, if you are paying subscriber for any Google LLC service, send the feedback through the subscription management channels (such as feedback in Google One, Workspace or any other paid service)
I would also suggest that there is another user base who has been using computers for a long time, before GUIs existed, is fed up with fighting malware, welcomes the protection of a sandboxed, protected system, but doesn't understand the importance of having the option of escaping the sandbox. These users might not see the loss of not being able to install a kext on Mac OS without booting into Recovery Mode. But they will notice the loss when, at some point, we can't run anything that isn't signed on any platform.
Google and Microsoft are slowly moving towards the Apple model because it works as far as decreasing support costs go.
When the day comes that there isn't any hardware we can purchase that we can't install OpenBSD/Linux/whatever we want, it will be too late. We have to push back before then somehow.
And even so, perhaps it's later than you realize. Device attestation in the browser is the final nail in the coffin, and it's a question of "when" not "if" major sites start requiring it in the name of "safety" from bots.
I recently found a plugin that can alert to JS doing shady "fingerprint-like" activity. I did not expect it to go off quite as often as it does now.
It would seem that some sites are already asking _very_ probing questions about the browser so it's only a matter of time before they go one step further and demand proof and gate on furnishment of that proof.
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 ..
yet :D
On UNIX, Sun was the vendor that introduced the concept of SDK SKU, thus for having developer tools, an additional SKU had to be bought, and the until then largely ignored GCC sundenly got a new focus of attention.
Mainframes and micros always needed having a group of folks from the vendor professional services for specific kinds of configurations.
I still remeber working on traditional timesharing UNIX systems, one single server for all teams, what you get to do is decided by IT for your role.
There are plenty of examples from the past on how this has been happening already.
Trusted computing and even remote attestation have legitimate use cases. It's good, great even, that they exist. But just like everything, they can be used against you.
Having important info on your device and having that device accessible to the wild, wild, internet is a very real problem. If the "walled garden" is a flawed solution we should work on a better one.
I beg history to prove me wrong.
For anyone interested, please look at Hardware attestation and TiVoization, thanks.
if the computer won't allow to install or use other software until you install a vendor-signed version of systemd on a vendor-signed kernel we'll be there. it's about hardware attestation, not signed software, though.
The GNU freedoms never specified the right to run free software side by side with proprietary software on the same hardware; so the FSF should actually be fine with such an outcome.
If my bank requires me to use a phone for transfers (mine doesn’t), it might be acceptable to leave one in a desk drawer powered off as you would do with a hardware authentication token. It’s a special device for occasionally accessing a service. Fine. But when governments and industry collude to force citizens to carry these devices in order to live life normally, that’s not OK.
My intent is to be as stubborn and obnoxious as possible in resisting this until they either give up and provide an alternate path or lock me away for noncompliance. Fortunately there is still an alternate path available for most things, primarily thanks to elders who have trouble with new tech. (Thank you elders!)
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.
After that, certified locked down BigTech 'Personal Computing' will be the only menu choice.
They force anyone distributing software into the legal system so a “3rd party” can sue and destroy the life of anyone that goes against the system they want. Anything they don’t like will be accused of violating patents, etc. and the option to distribute anonymously for the good of users / society will no longer exist.
So you’ll still be able to write code and scripts and play on the side on your laptop, but if you want to access your banks webpage (or really, anything you get through someone else’s server: streaming media, the news, porn, whatever) you’ll be forced to Chrome + laptop with TPM + authentication through smartphone app.
Not ideal.
I care about the free-ness and open-ness of my computer, because that's where I do all my work, my E-mail, my finances, and all my "serious computing." I feel that a different standard applies on a Real Computer because they are totally different devices, used for totally different purposes. So what I accept on phones, cars, and gaming consoles, I don't accept on my computer.
Apart from the viruses, nothing of the above is true any more. Apple doesn't care if you're getting screwed over by an app, and neither does Google. If they can increase their profits by taking away our freedom and/or control over "our" devices, then it WILL happen, as sure as death and taxes.
So then the problem gets moved up to why are you (or group of you) not powerful enough to negotiate being able to run what you want and either not need “them” or be important enough that “they” need you.
And the answer will come down to the fact that 90% of people don’t care about running whatever they want on their machine, and they want the cheapest, quickest, easiest solution.
The best argument “for” building codes is the same as “for” secure platforms; that people should be able to expect a certain level of competence when buying a structure or phone.
But if you want to do it yourself, there should be a path.
Linux.
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.
A much bigger problem for running Linux on phones is that standard Linux runs like crap on phones. It doesn't have the mainline driver support amd64 computers have, and the battery life optimizations that make Android usable need to be reimplemented on top of Linux to get a day's worth of use out of your phone. Unfortunately, most Linux applications are written for desktops where they expect the CPU to be running all the time, the WiFi to be accessible whenever they want, and for sleep/suspend to be extremely incidental rather than every two minutes.
Banking on GrapheneOS
This in combination with using webapps where possible
Is that a problem these days? It was over a decade ago that I last needed to jailbreak a phone, nowadays it’s just "I’d like to unlock" "Ok".
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
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, ...
Without limitations on authority and control, I worry more that the world will devolve into a multilateral legal hellscape, even moreso than exists today. Given how much is dependent on software, you are going to have the governments of pretty much any country with multinational exposure trying this in the next 10 years if recent UK and EU developments are any indicator.
I knew of banks, but how is it that health services need remote attested mobile devices? Do clinics not support setting appointments through calls anymore, or what?
I believe if we look at the past compared to now, and then extrapolate towards the future, without proper action, we will keep slipping down the slope.
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.
Curious, but what bed/company do you speak of?
Probably won't help, but it is something.
I should be able to run a crypto wallet I downloaded from a Kim Jong Un fan site while high and it shouldn’t be able to do anything I don’t give it permission to do.
It’s totally possible. Tabs in a web browser are basically this.
I can do it with VMs but that’s lots of extra steps.
The only place it seems to fall flat is network I/O - LAN access requires permission, but dialing out to the wider Internet does not.
Compare Windows, which has jack (except for bloated anti-malware hooks in NTFS.)
Linux is _trying_ to replicate macOS with Flatpak/XDG portals, but those still need more time in the oven.
Source: I use both a MacBook and a Linux desktop daily.
No it isn't, and no it doesn't.
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.
I remember seeing KDE and GNOME already have their "stores", we need to keep a close eye on Linux.
What would you include?
Computers nowadays are so weird.
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's like trying to set up a warehousing system so perfect that the shrinkage rate is 0.
Not for tablets or game consoles though.
The killer app for jailbreaking is usually running unlicensed games.
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.
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'm not sure how many Macs you've used lately, but this isn't entirely true: out-of-the-box, Macs only run software that has been signed and notarised by Apple.
You can still disable this, but the methods of disabling are getting more obscure, and it's not a given they will remain available
Which is why after Snow Leopard, I switched to Linux 100%.
> 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.
I don't really think an LLM wrote this, because the use of punctuation is actually a bit clumsy. However, I have no problem parsing the author's intended meaning.
> The iPhone’s locked-down nature wasn’t a restriction; it was a selling point.
Was it really? I thought it was more about having 1 device that did it all when it launched, and app stores were a rather late addition if anything that still was more pro app store than pro lockdown.
To be clear, I think most of the text in that article was human written. I have absolutely no issues with em dashes or other humane figures of speech that LLMs have unsurprisingly picked up on.
But it was a few paragraphs here and there (like the example I gave) that felt odd and just out of place.
I don’t like that governments are forcing companies to open their environments up to random code, I wish they instead put legislation in place about transparent vetting processes, and allowing different kinds of apps.
In general I think software engineers get away with things no real engineering job gets away with, and it baffles me.
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 do understand the broader point. I know a few elderly people in particular who are walking targets for cybercrime. But I wish we had more differentiation. Locked down, easy to use phones for those who want or need that, and more open phones that act similar to laptops for those who know what they're doing (or, in any case, are willing and able to bear the risk).
When the software on these locked down devices breaks down, and it does, everyone is helpless.
When a zero day is found, again everyone is helpless.
If we cannot understand how something works on all layers, stability and security are only promises.
This is a recurring pattern: people make bad choices, mostly out of ignorance, but no one blames the public because we always assume that in a democracy the costumer and the voter are always right.
Behind every corrupt politician or every greedy corporation there are thousands or millions of negligent and ignorant voters and costumers.
So it sucks ass that a greater and greater share of what we consider computing has to occur in platforms that are utterly locked down to the core, but again, at the same time, putting my "regular user" hat on here: I don't want my phone to run anything from an untrustworthy source. My computer? Shit yeah, I'll try just about anything with a healthy skepticism as required, but not my phone. Losing a computer is irritating. Losing a phone is a fucking MESS.
Then I have raspberry pi and steam deck which I use for messing around with and running whatever weird software.
there are plenty of "honestly-pretty-good reasons" we plebs shouldn't have access to general purpose computers, and we're only a few decades away from them reclassified into the equivalent of fully automatic rifles.
If this was genuinely about security and UX then they would continue to provide viable "escape hatches", but it isn't and so they don't. That's what's being criticized.
I would characterize it more as Google is responding to the needs of the vast majority of its users, most of whom do not care to run unsigned software, certainly don’t write it, and have no need of escape hatches. Escape hatches are great, but each also represents a security weakness waiting to be exploited.
And not to leave it merely implied: they are also responding to large development organizations who want locked down platforms in which they can distribute, and more importantly crack down on those who would pirate their, software.
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.