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Comment by stegosaurus | Hacker News Reader

Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016.

The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store).

Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.

I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.

I'll be fine as long as my old machines survive - but how are businesses going to produce mass market software when all the popular hardware is locked down?

Just to pick an arbitrary example - how does a project like Bitcoin take off when all we have are tivoized devices that won't run un"trusted" code? The community of a few hundred hardware hackers isn't big enough.

Not only that, despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots. It's a deliberate design decision to force the use of the network.

The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What's the next step?

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> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.

Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind.

> What's the next step?

Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally.

All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food, what will happen to kitchens now?

> Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone.

Sadly, that's an increasingly large segment of the population. Anecdotally, many of my extended family only have mobiles, maybe a tablet, and maybe a videogame console -- no laptops or desktops to be found. Many friends have similar stories.

To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know, including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone and at least a laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically challenged siblings.

Anecdotes are just that. I wont take yours to represent society as a whole, as you shouldn't take mine to either.

Compare your experiences, though, to that of the developing world. Many hundreds of millions of people have gone online for the first time this decade and almost all new Internet users only have smart phones. This huge population never owned a PC and may never need to own one, especially as apps get better and better.

Phone with SSH client, Bluetooth keyboard, Chromecast to TV, digitalocean Ubuntu droplet.

No computer != can't write code. What millenial had access to anything close to that nice when they learned to code?

While this is nice, I could never use something with such high latency for editing code or interactive sessions. You've just added latency all over the place. Delayed input and output plus networking across the world.

Remove the extra step going from Phone to Chromecast (plenty of phones have HDMI OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client) and this a great solution with minimal latency. Anything remotely comparable in the 80s/90s would have been totally out of reach on a student budget.

Serious (I hope!) question: how does one run the SSH client on the Chromecast? Are you proposing installing Linux on the Chromecast, or is this something available out of the box?

Totally agree with your point about HDMI, I overlooked it because my phone doesn't support it.

You can cast your whole screen from Android or a Chrome tab to Chromecast (now called Google Cast). That includes any SSH client you have running there. (There are SSH clients for both Chrome and Android)

If you look at my GGP comment, you'll see that mirroring to the Chromecast is what I initially suggested. I was specifically asking about the statement "OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client".

I suggested this because I've tried it, and it works well if you have no privileged reference frame to which you're comparing it. A new Precision with a Xeon and 32GB of ECC RAM is nice. Not necessary for the vast majority of development jobs.

Why would u want to carry so many things if you can have a cheap laptop that packs everything nicely?

Weight and battery life.

Laptops are not exactly heavy these days anymore

That's a 'cool trick', but it's not 'nice to code'.

Compared with what? If you're stacking it up against what Western first-world developers use (macbook with an SSD and more RAM than my first dev box had HDD) then of course you're correct. That's also emphatically not the use case I was addressing.

Stop arguing from extremes. A $300 notebook is better to code on than that phone-tv-remote-machine-via-ssh setup. For a start, you can use an IDE that isn't terminal-bound. You can also code at a desk (or wherever) instead of tied to wherever your TV is, at watching-the-TV angles and postures. You're also not going to lose your session and potentially your unsaved edits because the network interrupts. Yes, you could use tmux or similar, but now you've changed the standard keyset (and screwed normal scrollback), and are increasing the requirements to entry.

A cheap notebook is also a much lower barrier to entry - in order to have your own droplet, you need to know how to set up a cloud machine and connect to it properly. That's not trivial knowledge to a newbie (nor is it relevent, unless they're coding for servers), even though us old hands can do it in our sleep. Similarly, you need a way to pay for for the online subscription.

That seems far more Heath-Robinson than even the old days of plugging a computer into the TV and saving programs on tape.

Mind you, I learnt to program BASIC before I had reliable access to a computer too, so I programmed on paper. I wouldn't reccomend it for any but the most determined student.

Yeah, but these people with such great apps are also consuming stuff (like apps) created by people with more expensive hardware. A Pakistani friend of mine just received a laptop from a government program and he seemed like he was about to burst with joy. Now he has more power to create.

For the foreseeable future, the guy with the laptop and phone will be able to do more than the guy with just the phone.

And any person with six monitors stacked, a nice keyboard, a mouse, an office chair, large desk, dedicated office phone, large screen TV, new gaming console, cup full of pens and a pad of paper (all these are technologies) plus a laptop and a smart phone will probably tell you the people in developing countries are missing out if they want to experience what he experiences, let alone compete with him. This is why all that stuff is still on the market, and people are really pessimistic and fearful about whatever weird plans Apple has for an iOS/OSX merger.

The whole point of my comment was that anecdotes are by definition not universal. Maybe you missed that?

You're absolutely right -- it is just an anecdote :). hk__2 further down points out that these are possibly people who've never owned a computer, and that this should be viewed as a step forward -- hk__2's right! The devices they own are cheap (or at least: are much more affordable than a laptop has ever been) and limited, but having them is still better than having no device.

With that said, I'd argue that selling at these (absurdly) low prices is creating a new market segment. I guess I wanted to express my concern at dismissing the part of the population that "don't use more than a smart phone". They exist!

> To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know, including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone and at least a laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically challenged siblings.

But will that always be the case, especially when the "next Netflix" comes around?

I'm in the same boat as you, everyone I know has both a laptop and/or desktop as well as a smartphone and possibly tablet.

However, less and less of these people I know are buying new laptops/PCs because for the average person... why do they need those?

A friend of a friend saw me working on my NAS a few weeks ago and said "I didn't know anyone used those anymore."

I said "What do you mean?"

"Computers, I didn't know anyone used computers anymore."

Arguably the people using restricted mobile devices exclusively would have never used PCs. These are the same people that 10 years ago where buying DVD players, PlayStations and other limited appliances for their living room, because PCs are way too complicated for some people. And you can't really blame them. Just the other day I cleaned my father's computer of viruses.

I also believe the market for content producers that need general purpose computing devices is bigger than ever, and growing. It's just that it's being eclipsed by the market of content consumers. Plus upgrade cycles have gotten much longer, 4 or 5-year old PCs being totally fine. And speaking of phones, dumb phones are dead, the smartphone is the new norm, yet how many smartphone users are heavy Internet and apps users? I bet it's not that many.

> 4 or 5-year old PCs being totally fine

Especially content producers can easily use up all hardware enhancements for rendering and such, so they do appreciate a newer machine.

I'm a software developer, so I'm arguably a content producer. I have a 4 year old laptop that's still fine for software development, even though I'm using heavy tools to do it (e.g. Scala, IntelliJ IDEA), I only had to replace its battery.

Producing content doesn't necessarily mean 3D rendering. It can mean just writing Word / Excel / PowerPoint documents.

I guess in your case you are more of a content input, rather than producer. Or perhaps producers should be called content farmers/hackers.

Content, noun:

   1. the amount of a particular constituent 
      occurring in a substance.
   2. the material dealt with in a speech, 
      literary work, etc. as distinct from 
      its form or style.
   3. information made available by a 
      website or other electronic medium.

Producer, noun:

   1. a person, company, or country that makes, 
      grows, or supplies goods or commodities.
   2. a person or thing that makes or causes
      something.

Maybe we are not speaking the same language.

I struggled to find a single short description for activities that can easily saturate a modern PC's processing power and I/O, but I couldn't really. Let's not get hung up on naming here.

A lot of the people who now own a smartphone didn’t own any computer-like device (i.e. laptop/desktop/tablet) before; I think that’s a step forward, not backward.

Agreed. Getting hung up on percentages is anxiety inducing for early adopters, probably of every stripe. At some point you have to look at raw numbers.

Yes, I agree (and for the people I'm talking about you're absolutely right).

I think it is largely the same segment of the population that before didn't use computers anyway, or used them as dumb browsers or e-mail clients.

Funny enough, home kitchens used to not exist in Roman times as far as I know.

And home computers didn't exist in the 60s. What's your point?

What's yours?

> All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food, what will happen to kitchens now?

But this isn't an absurd question at all: Fast food and packaged food have dramatically changed the way people eat, for the worse.

Fast food has some undeniable short term benefits, which the lizard brain considers more important than long term benefits. It's no wonder why a lot of fast food chains are massively profitable. The same can be said for walled gardens.

Following that reasoning, there are other substances that have similar short term benefits. Like cocaine.

Many things have both short and long term benefits, in addition to their both short and long term detriments... Like Cocaine.

This is just the marketing hypnosis speaking. Fast food tastes awful.

The trend has been towards locked down hardware and software, and that trend is starting to encroach on even desktop systems.

>> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.

> Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind.

I don't see why (if we're talking 10 years time here). Cameras comes with wifi, Photoshop and other software is rented in the cloud, arguably it's easier to have your data in one place, close to the processing -- publishing is done in the cloud (even if the end result is a photo print, it's likely that you use a third party to do the printing).

Games streaming is already a thing. Granted, there are some hard physical limits on latency (speed of light roundtrip) -- but I see no particular well-founded reason to believe all our computing privileges can't be locked up in "the cloud".

It's much more feasible for a small team to produce an entire computer today (as in instruction set, volatile and non-volatile memory, i/o etc), than it was in the 70s - but it's still fantastically more expensive than buying off the shelf hardware. Which means that if the majority of the market truly moves to locked down devices, everyone will have to move to locked down devices.

>> What's the next step?

> Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally.

I think how Apple handled Final Cut Pro is a great example of how dangerous tivoization of an entire platform for computing can be.

"Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016."

I've often thought all web search engines would be considered grotesquely illegal if they hadn't been there since the beginning, but only started today. It is at times a fragile existence as it is even so.

Same with public libraries, for that matter. Can you imagine the hue and cry that the major publishers would raise if someone were just now suggesting buying one copy of a book for the express purpose of lending it to hundreds of readers? Or worse, having the government pay for it?

They'd be burning up the telephone lines to Washington and hiring lobbyists by the trainload.

Yes but there is enough friction with public libraries that that was never an issue. Also noting that many expensive books (or directories) have a market in selling to public libraries. Plus remember that only one person can take out a book at one time (unless multiple copies) and books take time to read so the impact is not the same as with digital works (you have to get to the library to take the book out and there are limits to how many you can borrow is another factor).

Just imagine how big their outcry would be if it was new thatyou could lend a friend your book by just giving it to them in person. Now suddenly he and his friends will not buy that book and read its content for free. That would also be considered piracy and surely forbidden as well. Some digital laws are just ridiculous.

You're right. In germany there is a law called "Leistungsschutzrecht" that makes it illegal to publish snippets of news stories of the big publishing houses especially in search results such as google news. After some months the publishers realised that now they weren't getting as much pageviews as before (go figure) and granted google an exclusive license to publish their stuff. So now there is a law that would require any new search engine to make deals with every major newspaper in germany. On the other hand we do not have such a thing as fair use, so I imagine that image search is an endless ongoing lawsuit in germany, as every image thumbnail is illegal publishing of copyrighted material.

Well I'm slightly proud to know there's at least one first world country with dumber copyright laws than my own.

Being second from the bottom probably is nothing to crow about though...

Oh, at least thirds. Spain is even in worst situation; Google News closed Spain service[1] since they considered unacceptable to pay for providing links.

Spain has had a bunch of "interesting" laws for copyright protection. Like having to pay a tax for any HD, DVD (whatever thing you use to store stuff and per MB) as a preemptive pirate protection. And I think that other European countries shared this strategy[2].

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/enrique-dans/google-news-leavi... [2] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/digital-tax-opposed-sp...

Oh, yeah, Sweden got that too. A "nice" organization called copyswede that tries to claim that all digital media is used for storing music, so we must pay a tax, per MB, for all storage media. The irony of it all, since Spotify, a Swedish company, we're not even storing music anymore.

There are various countries with that kind of tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy .Somehow Austria is missing on this List but I'am pretty sure they already have it ( http://futurezone.at/english/there-is-no-right-to-private-co... ).

Lots of countries, including the US, have a similar tax on certain blank media The tax collected by the govt, and distributed to content producers. What a racket.

Well, it seems stupidity abounds in a lot of countries when it comes to copyright. The supreme court of Sweden just ruled that taking a photo of a piece of public art (as in art in an open and public space, not even a gallery or museum mind you) and posting online infringes on the artist's copyright.

New Zealand banned Software Patents

I'm just curious, did you mean that Germany really doesn't have fair use or not safe harbor?

No, germany really doesn't have fair use. Which is a golden opportunity for some lawyers to make some cash.

While they don't have a single rule similiar to fair use they do have a long list of exceptions to copyright, including educational use, technical necessity, written and spoken political commentary, citations, and private use. In some cases more usuable than fair use, in some cases not.

Before the recent introduction of the Leistungsschutzrecht, Google News was completely legal to operate.

IANAL but I doubt that it was completely legal. See this case for an example of a non-google news aggregator pre "Leistungsschutzrecht": http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/start-up-offline-verlage-...

This is more of a case of legal bullying than anything. The Paperboy and Perlentaucher decisions have been rather clear on that matter. There have been also decisions that 10 word snippets or so are fine under citation rules.

(Ok, "completely legal" was a bit of an overstatement. It's not explicitely allowed and you would probably need large enough legal fund to defend yourself.)

Gosh, don't even get me started. Some laws here in germany are basically hostile towards web-development projects. At least the ones where you either have: user generated content or aggregated content from other services, sites or sources. Not that it would be illegal per se, but you would have to take care of so many things, that you would always wander on a very small grate grate between legal and illegal.

The "Leistungsschutzrecht" is really only the tip of the Scheißberg.

The publishers were worried about Google getting too much power over them, so set up a system that effectively prevents any new aggregators competing with Google. Classic. The publishers in Spain did something similar.

It reminds me of something Paul Thurrott said soon after Apple brought out the iPhone: They must look at these bumbling boobs that are their competitors, and they must be as happy as can be.

Another example might be robodialers if they hadn't been preceded by actual people making calls, which was preceded by people not being able to dial that many calls (rotary phone dialing is slow) and before that even needing an actual operator to complete a "sales" call.

All of the above certainly made it less annoying than it is today. Noting that there is no "do not call" list for businesses.

I think the use case has been well cemented into "free use" & "transformative" in the US now, especially post Google Books. In the EU, however, there's nothing to suggest to me that a search engine would be legal. Here's a report about content mining in the EU http://www.scienceeurope.org/uploads/PublicDocumentsAndSpeec...

I may sound way too off-topic, so I expect a lot of down-votes, but I think one should learn at least a little bit about hardware and how to design it manually. For example how to create FPGA designs by writing them in VHDL or Verilog.

In some sense it's like in the 70es or 80es. Big Corporations, (almost) monopolies, prehistoric laws...and a bunch of tech-savvy kids refusing to bow down ;)

You're asking this of a population whom think that setting the time on their microwave oven is too difficult?

I'm doing that with my kids. Hardware has never felt so open. I'm loving the RISC-V project!

> I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker...

On the contrary, the slowdown of Moore's Law means the future has never been brighter for open hardware. Someone could actually design something for a process that hasn't been obsolete for over two years and still have a hope of getting it manufactured before it becomes that way.

> I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.

Thing is that ever since the first PC, "personal" computing has really been about business computing. Heck, visicalc basically sold Apple IIs. This because it allowed accountants to not argue with sysadmins about mainframe time.

Secure boot and ME is Intel and MS responding to business needs.

Thing is tough that flexibility/usability will always be the enemy of security. A building is more usable when the door are left unlocked, but at the same time you can't use said building to store valuables.

PCs could ignore security for the most part back in the day, because they were airgapped.

Frankly the most secure thing a home user can do is to pull the plug on the router when they are not using the net. But then what is not using the net these days?

ME is a huge net negative for security though

From who's vantage point? The end user, or the corporate sysadmin managing a fleet of desktops and laptops?

Either - it's a massive added convenience, but in a corporate security setting an attacker invisibly having remote access to screen, input devices, and data is a security nightmare, and a single compromise can grant access to the entire fleet.

Couldn't agree more. One of the really annoying things about the mass popularization of tech is we seem to always choose the sexier products over the more practical ones.

On the hobbyist side of things, I wonder what it would take to get like, say, a kit ATX motherboard developed; one with modular parts that could gradually be upgraded or repaired over time, and designed to last at least a decade or two.

Buy an old PC-XT motherboard and you'll have essentially that, except for the form factor.

It's always been the software. VHS beat Beta, both beat V2000. V2000 was the best quality by far. VHS took a long time to get close. VHS had the most films.

Same with PCs - the software done it. MS Office, Wordperfect, etc. Lots of more interesting, more sexy machines in the market became also-rans.

I'm glad cars never quite got to the same homogeneity or we'd all be driving a Datsun Sunny or something equally horrific.

I wish the market had settled for 5 or 6 different PC / phone / chip architectures, as I think the progress would have been more interesting, and much much further. Damnit Motorola should have kept making 680x0s, they were much nicer than Intels to program.

> I'm glad cars never quite got to the same homogeneity or we'd all be driving a Datsun Sunny or something equally horrific.

Well, cars are incredibly homogenous ( https://medium.com/swlh/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d#.mu5k... )

Some niche markets exist, but 98% of what's being bought is a completely interchangeable middle ground compromise, made by huge companies that are only looking at maximizing short term profits, without care for technological, economic, or sociological advancement.

In every industry that requires large up-front costs for economic mass production, this is true. Hopefully, 3D printing and its sister technologies will make manufacturing many things on a smaller scale more affordable, and disperse the (mass-) consumer-producer dichotomy once again, in favour of local on-demand production of everyday items.

Only with such a level and flexible playing field can you expect innovation to thrive: if it becomes affordable to buy (or create) the best tool for the job, instead of relying on mass-produced mediocrity because one-off items increase one or two orders of magnitude more in cost than in marginal utility.

Very interesting link, thanks. I'd always presumed that much of the blanding and corner rounding going from concept to production was about crash and person impact regulations. I'd also assumed that was the reason Citroen lost their French idiosyncracy etc.

I never understood the appeal of crossovers either - ugly, pointless things in my eyes. Especially the Porsche Cayenne, a VW something with new badge and much higher spares prices.

There's still just enough small players to keep some interest, though it's an ever dwindling number.

That's bullshit. Tight margins plus physics (aerodynamics and safety) plus minimum fuel standards with lower SUV standards yield "crossover" vehicles that look the same. If we could still buy station wagons, we would; they died out with higher fuel efficiency standards, but by now they'd all look pretty similar too.

That Chevy Volt concept is awful. The actual car is tremendously improved; the blind spot of the concept could obscure the Sun it's so large and that's just one obvious failing. There's a reason you don't see weird shit: cars now are really good, so variances are most likely worse.

Last rant: the New Beetle. Same cost and size as the VW sedan, but less room inside, because the design is space-inefficient and a gimmick.

At one time, most people didn't use computers at all. The people who did were the hacker minority. Machines were not portable or networked - you'd only pack them up in your car to take them to the local computer group.

We may go back to that. There may be a hacker community using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Android phones and Chromebooks running in developer mode.

That's still going to be a lot more than a few hundred hardware hackers. Look at how many people bought Raspberry Pi alone.

There's a big middle ground between mainstream and utter obscurity.

HTML5 service workers allowing near parity of web apps to native apps could easily change all that. If my web app on a phone can receive push notifications from my server even when it isn't running, there's not much I can't do.

> Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016.

Is that bad or surprising?

Companies are very much dependent on timing, opportunity, seeing things as they are vs where they should go, and moving things in that direction.

Example: Android — hardware companies didn't want Microsoft to dominate desktop AND mobile OS — huge opportunity for someone to act on this market reluctance to accept MS.

Once the timing is gone, so is much of the opportunity.

> Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.

funny you mention that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11422531

The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play

I can happily install whatever I like on my stock Android device.

You need to enable untrusted sources hidden away in a settings menu somewhere, and click past a nasty warning informing you of how dangerous outside software can be.

ME is one thing (though given the hoops one must jump through to set it up, I'm inclined to believe most of the vitriol directed at it is the paranoid FUD variety),

..but secure boot? What possible reason could you have for being against a system that prevents bootkits from pwning your machine? You can load your own keys and boot whatever OS you want on all but a tiny subset of appliance-like locked down hardware nobody cares about.

In general, code signing is a Good Thing, so long as the control remains in the hands of the user.

"..but secure boot? What possible reason could you have for being against a system that prevents bootkits from pwning your machine?"

The fact that I can do the same thing with firmware on a cheap ROM write-protected with a jumper. Additionally, the fact that there's competing I.P. in FOSS and corporate sectors for firmware that does trustworthy boot while leaving what's allowed in my control.

"In general, code signing is a Good Thing, so long as the control remains in the hands of the user."

With Microsoft and Intel style secure boot, it remains in the hands of Microsoft and Intel. And so on. Which is why we're against it.

The fact that I can do the same thing with firmware on a cheap ROM write-protected with a jumper

Except secure boot isn't about firmware, it's about the code loaded on DASDs.

>With Microsoft and Intel style secure boot, it remains in the hands of Microsoft and Intel.

As long as you can program your own keys into it, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion.

As long as you can program your own keys into it

Is this not the definition of gatekeeper?

A system where you have to ask permission, but that permission is always granted is inherently different from a system where no permission is ever needed.

Among other things, that permission can be revoked at any time for any reason.

"Among other things, that permission can be revoked at any time for any reason."

BOOM! They can charge you for it and they can revoke it. Many companies did "open" platforms or software that later closed things off. Plus, they get more information about you than they even need.

So, we can choose between a security standard that's in our control or theirs. And by theirs, we're talking about companies with a history of real scumbaggery. The design should default to us with no asking for permission. Numerous ones in CompSci and I.P. markets can do that. No excuse except Microsoft and Intel's profits and schemes.

but that permission is always granted is inherently different from a system where no permission is ever needed.

Indeed. And that system, the one we've been using for a few decades leaves you vulnerable to bootkits in such a way that you'll never know you've been owned.

The PKI has to have a trust root anchored somewhere for the concept to work, and it can be anchored under your control using your keys.

No, we've been using a shitty system that's a legacy holdover from days and companies that don't care about security at all. You could just as easily design a system that had a safe, vetted firmware with nonvolatile storage inside. With a jumper or secret, you can put in new firmware you designed yourself or trust from others. That gets stored in there for later stage in a multi-stage boot process. That initial part is immutable means you can always reset if something happens. Secret can be generated on device and displayed to you via a dedicated serial port if you want.

Many possibilities. The idea that trusted boot can only work if Microsoft controls the secret and says a third party I.P. is allowed is ludicrous. Disproven by other implementations that didn't require them. Worst case, the root of trust is put in during first initialization with antifuses burning it in and pre-wired stuff reading results back out as maybe a hash. You can always know what you're starting with via a hash and it can't change after being set that first time.

For some reason, you're limiting yourself to only third-party, PKI solutions with high TCB and trust issues. The stuff I described has been immune or resistant to bootkits since the old mainframes that required you to physically insert write-protected firmware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEC_4000_series

Today, that could be a disk, SD card, USB drive, or smartcard you made yourself.

I'm still not sure why we're talking about firmware in the context of secure boot. The firmware isn't changing and isn't vulnerable to being rewritten by something with system permissions (excepting microcode updates and the like) - the boot sector is, which is exactly the thing that secure boot cares about.

Except that "Setup Mode" exists and every serious computing device that uses Secure Boot provides it, because big business customers wants it.

What is "Setup Mode"? It's "load your own root of trust and wipe any preinstalled keys". Nothing, nothing says that the root of trust has to be from Microsoft or Intel (and Secure Boot specification that is tested for Windows Logo certification would reject such system unless manufactured by Microsoft or Intel).

The difference with jumper is that you have standardized APIs etc. for the signing process, including a standardized "jumper".

> The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store)

So true. You can sideload on Android though. So all is not lost.

I can. You can.

The general public can whilst the 'allow untrusted sources' box exists.

But once that box goes, the vast majority of the audience for software outside of Google Play is gone. F-Droid is already tiny as it stands!

I think what OP is talking about is even though we know how to get over the walls of these gardens, the average user would not. :(

And with Xcode 7 you can deploy apps to your iOS devices with a free dev account.

Which is fine, but if I write a piece of software that I want to distribute outside of the app store, then everyone that wants to install it needs their own Mac, right? I don't think that's quite comparable to side-loading, which can be done from the device itself, without any external account or hardware.

There's nothing magical in Mac. iOS apps use standard cryptographic algorithms for their digital signature, so one can write a crossplatform client which will generate developer certificate for user, sign any given binary using that certificate and install it onto iOS device. For user it won't be any harder than typing "iport install things" (or click button with some fancy GUI).

I'm surprised that this idea wasn't implemented yet.

Still requires an external Laptop/PC, you would not be able to install custom software using only the device itself.

It would require an enterprise cert or Laptop/PC to bootstrap, but theoretically you could build an on-device store. I'm still waiting for someone to build this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BsOd4PXQ0SfsdMP0n30Ud_Aa...

Because when you do, Apple will require you to pre register devices and sign builds online from Apple servers, or do something else that blocks this

> despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots.

I'm sure there's different speeds and other variables to consider in flash storage, just as prices vary for RAM and just about everything else really. The exact tech in an SD card may not be suitable for your phone or tablet's permanent storage, and definitely not suitable for an SSD, otherwise everyone would be installing their OS on SD cards.

> The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What's the next step?

Something that envelops everything we do in our daily life whether we want it or not; sounds a lot like online advertising and social media!

What is there in Bitcoin that requires running untrusted code?

Think they were talking about "untrusted" as in not reviewed by/available in an "app store"

Okay, but I'm still not getting it. I mean, what's keeping anybody from getting their bitcoin wallet or miner on an app store? The Apple OSX app store has at least one wallet on it.

(Not that I agree with the "lock down everything" approach tech companies are taking, that is.)

The article is specifically talking about the 'next Netflix'. I'm talking here about the 'next Bitcoin'.

Perhaps the current one is fine. What about the one after that?

What about the 'Bitcoin' that launches in 20 years? Do we have any mass market free platforms left then?

Workstations may always exist - servers may always exist - but right now, the masses have general purpose computers on their desks, in their messenger bags. I want that to last.

I think it's more to do with the creation of cryptocurrencies in the first place, not just using them. A thin client with no level of user control (i.e. everything you do with it is managed on servers controlled by your provider) cannot be used to create something as low level as a cryptocurrency, or indeed any form of low level development.

Of course, this kind of thing is why we will always have some form of generic, user-managed-hardware market. If you take away the tools used to create the apps and services controlled by the gatekeepers, you won't have any apps and services. To put it another way, Apple doesn't want to be responsible for creating the millions of apps in their store, they just want to be the ones in control of those apps. The workstation is not going away.

"I mean, what's keeping anybody from getting their bitcoin wallet or miner on an app store?" That's the problem, nobody knows for sure if you can get any piece of software into the app store. I worked on an app that was in the app store for several years. During the last attempt to update, which did nothing but add new icons and startup screens for the new line of devices, the review team decided the app didn't do enough to warrant being it's own app and some more functionality should be added. I tried fighting it but eventually gave up. Now it still sits in the app store targeting iOS 7 and is still happily used, until someday Apple drops support for some deprecated bluetooth API.

Because Apple can ban apps from their store for any reason. Bitcoin wallets have been banned once if I remember correctly. Also, smart watch apps have also been banned on the Apple Store when Apple released their Apple Watch.

With all the positive sides of the App Store, this is really dangerous in terms of freedom.

Yes, Apple banned all Bitcoin apps for a while. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235986

Actually, for a long time, Apple did not allow Bitcoin wallets on the app store and repeatedly removed them. http://www.wired.com/2014/07/blockchain-back/

Some bitcoin users even smashed their iPhones in protest: http://www.wired.com/2014/02/watch-working-iphones/

> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe

Just pulled my old punch cards out of the attic and dusted them off, hoping I can use them again!

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