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Comment by caractacus | Hacker News Reader

> My machine is my own. If I wish to grant other users access to the machine or data on it, cool. That's my choice. If I buy a program to do a task, good. When your program starts taking orders from "nameless faceless someone else", we have problems.

And the content you are streaming through 'nameless faceless someone else' is not your own. You pay to get access to it. Are you saying that because you install a program on your machine, you should have complete control over what it can and can't do to the content it provides?

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> And the content you are streaming through 'nameless faceless someone else' is not your own. You pay to get access to it. Are you saying that because you install a program on your machine, you should have complete control over what it can and can't do to the content it provides?

By hook or by crook, yes.

I've admitted that I'm a pirate. Look at my comments and you'll find it. If it's convenient enough I'll buy. I'm not under spending money on media.

And I do have complete control what the program can and cannot do. It's called a debugger. The encrypted files and keys are right there. It's nothing more than a bad obfuscation technique.

Yes absolutely.

Why do you feel they shouldn't?

I feel that a program should be clear about what it will do, to give you the choice of whether or not to run it on your hardware. Software is pretty dismal at doing that, and I don't know how to improve it. Something like a bullet-point list of properties like "SoundBlob will let you listen to music, but not save it locally" seem like it'd work, but I know that would quickly become a reflexive "click OK to proceed" situation.

I believe that software on my computer shouldn't have restrictions that I don't know about, take actions that I don't know about, etc. But if someone else wants to run some super-DRM app, I don't think that my opinions of what's best for them should limit what they can run on their machine.

In short, I want complete control over what runs on my computer and the chance to reject programs that don't work the way I want them to. I don't think that I have the right to change their intended behavior (although, to be honest, I will when it suits my purposes).

I look at it a bit differently.

1. Do I have the right to run, inspect, modify, or do whatever to a binary running on my machine? Absolutely. Running Linux, I can inspect down to the kernel, if I so choose. But I can hook onto any program I want, and watch any program I choose. If I want to modify memory, I can. Root really means root.

2. So who owns the machine if someone else's program can tell you "You can't do this." ? That's not following what I want, therefore I can only imply that I'm not the owner. I'm all for signed hardware and protections, but things like the TPM give security and ownership to someone that's not me. I'd be for it if I had the private key of that chip.

3. So a computer that doesn't follow the user's requirements... what does that look like? It looks like a Tivo, iPhone, some Androids, Windows 10, and other locked down hardware. Yes, you may have bought it, but you don't own it. Worse yet, is instead of DRM, is that subroutines come from "the cloud" (AKA someone else's server), and streamed to the device when requested. Google shut down a platform for precisely that reason; they deactivated the API servers.

What's the way out? Free Software is a big way out, but so is Open Protocols, and Open Standards. You have a business for IoT (example)? Use MQTT/CoAP and talk via the standards and make it pretty. But also make it so I can close up shop and go elsewhere if you alienate me. Right now, that's the lockin comparable to DRM.

Part of the difference in our perspectives is that I don't think I should need to do any low-level manipulation to get software working the way that I want. It's easier to keep my computer doing what I want it to by altogether avoiding software that wants to claim ownership of the hardware.

I don't have control over what kinds of garbage someone else puts into their program, but I have control over whether or not I run that on my computer. Technically I have the ability to view memory, run it in a debugger, put in shim libraries to capture data, etc, but in most cases where control is a real issue, it's easier to just avoid the troublesome software in favor of an alternative.

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