Seriously, this thread is making Stallman look like a reasonable majority candidate for president. It seems all it took for people to forget what caused PCs to blossom is a little bit of gold coating.
Considering how many viruses, lost work, malware and hair-tearing that model has induced, it makes sense to go beyond it, doesn't it?
If you don't have root, you don't really own the device.
But you are right: no-one has properly owned their own devices since the 80s because no-one can verify them using primary sources.
But yes, if you want to completely trust your hardware you're probably going to be using an old Thinkpad X200 with coreboot - shame about that Intel Microcode though, eh?
Modern devices are basically converging toward being enhanced VT100 terminals connected to some multitenant mainframe somewhere (a.k.a. a "cloud.") Whether that's Apple's cloud, Google's cloud, Microsoft's cloud, Canonical's cloud, etc. You could get the same effect (if a little slower) by just having the device be a dumb framebuffer connected to a VM running in said cloud.
If I've paid the full retail price for a device (often more, I'm in Australia), I expect to own, not rent a device.
Hell, my municipal (bargain-basement) phone provider here in Canada gives me ~4000ms latency at the best of times. On the other hand, my city is saturated in "free for users of my ISP" wi-fi hotspots that my phone can automatically jump onto.
It seems like the latter are going to be the true solution to low-latency mobile connectivity for most of the more "spread out" countries that can't afford to saturate the country in cell towers.
I don't know about you but I want my sysadmin to work for me so that when I tell it to shut up and get out of my way, it does exactly that.
[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/poking-around-your-chro... [2] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton [3] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide
I do actually disagree there! And this is perhaps the fundamental disagreement we have. I want my sysadmin to be a capital-E Engineer and choose their ethics over my desires. Don't let me (the capitalist) tweak the bridge I'm paying for into one that falls down; and similarly, don't let me tweak the computer I'm paying for into one that gets malware, joins a botnet and DDoSes people.
You pay your Engineers, basically, to provide you the service of "knowing what's best for you"; to be your domain-specific nanny, making sure you don't do something you'll regret out of ignorance.
And what if it's THEIR ignorance (e.g. of market opportunities) that prevents them from doing what you asked them to?
It's not like all sysadmin issues can be judged by pure technical reasons, without business needs taken into account.
You want engineers/sysadmins you discuss with you, warn you when you propose something they think is bad, but ultimately work FOR you, and do what you tell them to. They should never override you to make you "you don't do something you'll regret out of ignorance". It's your company after all.
And current Windows is quite safe. A few safe coding lessons will do wonders for a company :)
Windows makes you sign binaries with your own certificate before running them to bypass the signed code protection?