I want a computer that I own
misc-stuff.terraaeon.com
misc-stuff.terraaeon.com
Owning my computer is still relatively possible. I can build a computer from parts which I can choose, and have a choice in which operating system to install on them. Laptops are slightly more closed, but even on those I can choose the OS myself.
Modern smartphones however, seem like walled gardens in which I have no control at all. I cannot choose any of the parts, and even doing simple reparation tasks like replacing a battery is a nightmare these days. I am locked into a single OS on my smartphone, which either spies on you or is locked down even more. Every iteration a bit more control is taken away from the user. And its increasingly hard to step away from them, since a lot of normal interactions such as banking almost requires you to have such a phone.
Both Android and iOS suck. I've made my own Android phone tolerable with F-Droid and trying to ungoogle it as much as possible. But unfortunately I find myself locked into using google play services since solutions like MicroG just don't cut it. They lock me out of slightly too much of my daily smartphone usage (note that this is definitely not the MicroG's developers fault, they have done amazing work).
I really want the PinePhone to be a solution here, but unfortunately I know it isn't.
Shut off the 'normal' smart phone when you don't need it (for banking or what have you).
Use the web version of Whatsapp (https://web.whatsapp.com/) if you must use it. You could even consider having a WhatsApp specific phone if you have an older model that you've upgraded from that contains no other data.
That was my solution anyway.
You'll need a external battery pack though for longer days away from home.
Also, PinePhone can run anbox - slowly.
Not a 100% solution but is dead simple and better than 0%
And I've actually got three apps: Firefox, Mattermost and Wireguard
Basically what they do is build and maintain a bunch of Matrix bridges for you. Whatsapp, Imessage, Telegram, Facebook, Slack, Twitter, Skype...
Does anyone have experience running the open version on their machine? (self-hosted)
That is the opposite of what they want. Do you think whatsapp and a banking app will allow installations that let them track users less? With banking I can sort of understand it, they have to protect the lowest denominator (reused password, no 2fa), so barring different installation methods that are used for "anonymous" purposes I can sort of understand the reasoning behind. but something like whatsapp where the main commodity is your data? Hardly their priority.
I'm at the point in my life where I don't really need proprietary apps on the go, so my "full take" device is a tablet that mostly stays home.
My bank’s app is essentially a wrapper around their mobile site. I can’t think of any specific features it has that require it to be an app, both technically, and in their implementation.
Check deposit may be the only feature not available in the mobile site. It’s certainly not a technical requirement that they can’t implement that though.
Sometimes when making a card payment online (not necessarily on the phone), my phone shows a notification from the app asking me to confirm the transaction.
I also worry that there isn’t enough of a development community behind the PinePhone to bring it to a basic level of polish. Instead of being the resurrection of the Nokia N900 as a hackable Linux phone, the PinePhone might actually be a repeat of the ill-fated Openmoko Freerunner.
For $150 it's quite a good deal. Plus, the software stacks are quickly improving, especially Mobian.
For example, for $4k, you can get this with specs roughly equivalent to a normal developer machine: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1SD1/intro.html
[0] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-February/14...
I bought two of these last year and they're great, stuff your own memory in there, add some storage and off you go.
Edit: clarified that this would be a mainboard + CPU.
If/when someone manage to conpromise those, they can basically take over your computer, and Intel/AMD doesn't provide any sort of killswitch or physical way of disabling it.
It can be used for 'out of band' management of your system, including firmware/bios rollouts and updates. Allows remote hijacking of attached hardware devices. Basically can puppeteer your entire system.
> why can't we do anything about it?
Because there is no ability to update or modify this code. It is only updatable by the hardware vendor as it is encrypted, signed and checked during update.
As someone could in theory cobble together an HDCP compliant rig and good heavens, might be able to intercept and decode HD content!
So much of what makes the tech giants so lucrative is that they act as centralization points for industry level orchestration of what user behavior to support.
You can bet that if an industry working group is stoked, there's likely hidden in there somewhere an implementation detail intended to curb an undesirable user freedom or general capability.
(sure the code could still do nasty stuff like facilitate tempest or other sidechannels, but that's leaps and bounds ahead of the built in assumed-RCEs of ME/PSP).
As if that even matters - pointless standard. can't think of any content that there isn't a torrent up hours after it's available lol
Problem is (temporarily) solved :D
The 4G ones run either Android (so a worse experience with the same spyware) or KaiOS (which is still fine but not very available).
They're slowly tightening SafetyNet which makes it harder to use free custom android ROMs as well.
It also makes me pretty pessimistic when it comes to privacy. I can uninstall Windows/MacOS on my laptop, coreboot it, use FOSS/privacy-centric software, etc. but it doesn't really mean much when my phone (which is basically attached to my body 24 hours a day, and is my main conduit of communication with others) is a privacy/security nightmare.
Most advice I've gotten has been flash a custom Android kernel or a de-Googled distro. This would definitely solve my problems, but this removes the ability to install Play Store apps which are a necessity for me. Not to mention that it gives the possibility of bricking my phone, which is way outside my risk tolerance for just getting rid of some annoying ads.
In case you do want to install a custom Android distribution (ROM) to clean out the Samsung bloat more thoroughly, the risk of hard-bricking your phone is almost non-existent nowadays. The worst that can happen is usually a soft-brick which can be fixed by reinstalling the original OS. As for Play Store, most custom ROMs either include or support installing Google services and Play Store with full functionality.
(disclaimer: I work on custom kernels and ROMs)
I love my Pinephone. It is undoubtedly my own, with no strings or trillion-dollar corporation helping steer. It's lots of fun to play with, but unless people already half-jokingly compare you to RMS due to your extremism, it's not ready.
Android circa 2009 would be a reasonable comparison: the potential is clear, the software is rapidly evolving, and there's a benevolent dictator at the helm. And that's enough for me to be happy with it :)
The basics are pretty much down. Kernel support is solid. It can make calls, send texts (MMS mileage may vary), and use data pretty reliably. Web browsing is actually pretty fast with Angelfish. You technically have access to the full repository of Linux ARM software, and some of it even resizes properly to the phone. The camera is usable but terrible. Anbox works for Android apps but is painfully slow and can't share data with the rest of the phone to my knowledge.
Battery life is terrible, I don't think that the phone has power states of any kind, so it's either with the screen on, on with the screen off, or off altogether. Updates frequently break my install, although updating through SSH has been working for me recently on Tumbleweed without breaking anything. Little things like Plasma not having a way to exit the keyboard, apps taking up full screen with no way to exit them, etc.
Performance is painfully slow, but has also improved (for KDE anyways) by leaps and bounds. It used to be completely unusable but now it's merely very slow.
I would say it's somewhere between for developers, and usable, at this point. You could use it with some sacrifices, and still have a functional wireless communication device. It absolutely is nowhere near replacing my OnePlus running Android, however.
Money: Pine64 is a small operation with limited resources, factories have minimum order quantities among other commitments.
Most Pine64 products have pre-alpha software and are aimed at volunteers who can improve it. Lots of people are willing to buy a product for <$150 and "see how it goes". $400 filters out a lot of people who might otherwise chip-away at software bugs on weekends. Additionally, people are less tolerant of dead pixels on a $400 laptop, and Pine64 would rather not deal with returns.
Sure, not quite as handy — or Handy, for the German-speakers among us — as a physical phone... But, say you keep your laptop with you in a backpack (Rucksack ;-) ) or such, and a Bluetooth hands-free headset clipped to your ear...? I hear lots of youngsters listen to music continually nowadays, so they already have some kind of earbuds in all the time anyway. Or maybe even some kind of Bluetooth "satellite" handset, to make it easier to initiate outgoing calls / read and write text messages?
They took all the trees, and put 'em in a tree GNUseum..
Didn't go that route though because of the unavailability of the supported models where I'm at
Canonical supported versions were based on snaps-predating app framework (click packages). There were a couple of phones released with it out of the factory (bq aquarius 4.5 and meizu mx4) and a bq tablet, but rest of the supported phones use android kernels for hw enablement.
Ubutouch has forked the software when Canonical pulled out and even runs an app store, but I think the best hw you can get is Oneplus 6t and then mx4.
I used mx4 as my daily driver for years prior to switching to Android for the first time 3 years ago. While not the fastest phone, mx4 was usable (things I hated most were sharp edges and how it would register touches in my pocket, and then get locked for 10 mins because of wrong passcode).
To be honest, I quite prefer the Ubuntu Touch over Android (and Nokia Meego/Maemo is up there too, but Palm Pre WebOS takes the cake as the best basic phone UX I've experienced).
I think Mobian has the biggest potential to be the pure GNU/Linux system in your pocket, so I am hoping it'd get Unity included too.
First time I've heard of Mobian, looks really interesting. Will keep an eye on it
by making the general populous care more about it, and force the electorate's hands.
A problem is, that there's no such thing. There's a common denominator (punishing killers, rapists, thiefs), but this is what punish all governments anyway.
When you go past this point, people's interests are atomized.
As another commenter pointed out - the Pinephone is device attempting to do that.
You see, in addition to controlling the cellular radio and all of those details, the bass band processor also does real time noise cancellation and a variety of other call quality functions that you would immediately miss if they were not there.
That processor is actually doing a lot of different things and is difficult to remove from a phone and maintain what most people would consider an acceptable user experience.
I don’t think the current dominance of the big two can end until the hardware and software requirements of making a good phone are much much more accessible to normal developers/engineers than they are today.
When they are ready, get one. They'll be amazing no matter which OS you end up with.
I could imagine a family of cellular and Wi-Fi devices that present as Ethernet bridges. They'd offer a configuration interface reminiscent of home routers (go to a magic IP either with a REST API or a browser-controllable menu). This eliminates a lot of the delicate, externally facing configuration options and has the side benefit of eliminating a lot of driver development hassle, especially on low-popularity OSs.
They do do this.
There's another round of sales coming up, keep an eye on the blog.
Had a recent experience with a Motorola phone with this. And there was no obvious technical reason they couldn't have held the battery down with something other than a shite ton of glue.
I've been using the Fairphone 2 for a bit over 5 years and while it's not an outstanding phone, it's lasted well enough. The challenge for me in Australia is getting spare parts, as they only ship to Europe sadly.
I'd love to run a more open software stack, but even just Linux on the top layer would mean not running the apps I need to get through daily life... it's why I had to retire my perfectly working Android 3 phone, so many things stopped working (the Covid tracking app FFS). But under linux are the various radio, camera, wifi etc modules and a lot of those have their own firmware. Pinephone has really struggled with that.
Sorry to burst your bubble, https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intelme
Purism was able to completely disable Intel's ME
edit: E.g. https://nitter.dark.fail/rootkovska/status/93845887552266649...
Coreboot is great as well, but a bit different.
This is insufficient according to conditions of TFA. It is widely assumed in the security industry (based on evidence from the various state-sponsored attacks we can see) that the NSA and/or other government agencies have backdoors and/or zero-day exploits for both the CPU secure execution modes and common networking hardware. It is very likely that there are "magic packets" which you can send to such devices which install a rootkit payload.
If security against even government intrusion is something you care about, it really difficult to buy or make a modern computer that is configured like computers were in the 80's and 90's: just running code we have complete access to, with no hidden interfaces.
And, that’s great! They shouldn’t know that, maybe there will be some cultural shift in the future, where everyone will be tech-savvy, and companies like Apple starts changing their approach. Until then HN users need to accept that most of those solutions are made for ordinary consumers, and embrace the niche for them. :-)
I have a PinePhone. It's much fun being around the guys who are making the next evolution of phone. Hackers gonna hack.
I'm still here bashing the walled gardens because no matter what the non-techies want to do, they need protecting from themselves by either the .gov or by being given alternatives.
Every day we get closer to giving them another usable option.
I like iOS, but not Android. Let me explain why.
I personally love Linux, Unix philosophy (I'm even sometimes an old beardy zealot about POSIX standards and the old way), and inherent customization possibilities.
On the other hand, I don't want to manage my phone like a desktop or laptop computer, or a server because of a plethora of reasons. First, user interface is not very suitable for that. Second, there's a lot more finicky things to manage. Last but not the least, that management task is continuous.
iOS takes all of these away. Complete backups are built-in (I know android has it, but I don't know how bulletproof is this). Defaults are sensible. Settings do not change spontaneously. OS behavior doesn't change drastically from device to device (Every android vendor tunes their OS and background process policy differently, creating a lot of WTH moments and more finicky management tasks). Updates are not slowed down by the vendor, the operator, the distributor and today's weather.
While iOS is a pretty strict walled garden, devices are set-up and forget. Even you forget that you have an iOS device, because you use it without thinking.
Radio security, isolation and its reasonable and unreasonable parts are discussed here extensively. As a HAM radio operator, I can only say that, radios can do wreak a lot of havoc even with informed tinkering, without any bad intentions. If you take a relatively cheap SDR and listen to your neighborhood spectrum (just see the traffic, not decode anything) your jaw will drop. It's a very crowded up there, and there's a lot of non-public traffic.
Another stuff about custom ROMs and Stock ROMs is SIM services. Yes, many of the SIM menus just sit here unused, but there are useful ones like mobile e-signatures. I carry my e-sig with my phone, in my SIM. So using it requires a verified and official software stack. As far as my experience goes, no custom ROMs run these services (intentionally or unintentionally).
I manage my family's Android phones, and I personally use an iPhone. As far as I can see, it's much easier to leave an iOS device on its terms and it'll fare better.
Feel free to discuss, counter or just burn this comment down. :)
You mention setup & forget, that's how probably 98-99% of Android phones operate. Same for me, all the people and family I know. Initial install&setup after purchase, and then just running 1-click updates if one chooses to. After 3-4 years, switch to another one.
Hardware is +-same, what differences there are are invisible to user (apart from basic things like dual sims and memory card slots, which Apple lacks desperately... and bigger zoom for photos). Some like the smooth Apple UI, some feel they have the same on Android, most don't care. Some care about privacy which Apple seems to be the champion, most of the world simply doesn't care and isn't even aware. Some realize privacy is an illusion even with Apple, if you are 95% of the world that lives outside USA, various 3-letter agencies can do whatever they want and abuse your data in numerous ways without any recourse.
Its all relative, the most important is if one is happy with whatever one has and doesn't have unrealistic expectations.
That sums it pretty well. I don't have anything to counter, but wanted to just say thanks for the frank comment and another perspective.
No Firefox on iOS, hence useless.
Of course, nowadays the assets of apps have to be part of the deployable, itself. So it's common to run localhost web server.
My impression is that the Firefox shell offered is still able to provide the various anti-tracking privacy features that many would point to Firefox for, and the variety of browser shells available should mean that you'd be able to find a UI to your liking if Safari's isn't.
At that point, the only thing I can see missing is a non-webkit engine. I get that that's an annoyance and definitely on the same anti-competitive level as 00s era IE, but by and large web developers account for it and it works acceptably. As much as I'd need it to for mobile browsing.
Would just be interested to know if there's something more I'm missing.
No plugins/add-ons effectively.
#2 is dark reader.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/
You usually view webpages in a very minimal interface, small screen, often on the go or leisurly, and with limited interaction on a mobile phone. So, aside from something like an adblocker (for which there are solutions), what would one use?
The topic is about owning your own hardware/software combo - so having addons/customization is the definition of it.
Well, somewhat snarky. It's still a legimate question.
Why would one "need" plugins on a mobile browser? What kind of functionality that mobile Firefox doesn't provide?
>The topic is about owning your own hardware/software combo - so having addons/customization is the definition of it.
Well, the topic is about owing your computer. Which has some merit (even though owing is a kind of a weasel word: you do own it, even if the OS enforces this or that measure. You can sell it at any time, for example, break it and nobody will ask you to return it, etc.).
So, the real topic is "doing whatever you want with your OS, with the ability to disable all checks, protections, etc, install custom everything etc".
Which I can see the appeal in some cases.
For a mobile phone what exactly is the great appeal?
I need that plugin.
As a vague counter point, I use Firefox Focus[0][1] which touts the tracker blocking and ad blocking I'd rely on extensions for normally. It meets my needs as the only additional extensions I use on desktop are for tab and session cookie management, both of which are moot points in a browser without tabs and a "clear cookies after each session" policy.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fo... [1] https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/firefox-focus-privacy-browser/...
Not to burn you down, but to burn Android down: no, Android does not allow you to take complete backups. Let alone "built-in". The only backups that are made are forced to Google cloud and only backs-up apps that where downloaded through Google Play and app settings for Google stuff. It is an extremely limiting almost non-backup if you're used to going around Google. When switching phones it's still a process of hours / days to get everything set-up the way you had it on a previous phone. Especially if it was rooted.
The only way I know to take a full backup image of an Android phone involves unlocking (not possible on all phones), rooting (not possible on all phones), installing Nandroid and pulling an image over USB. To restore to a "fresh" phone, you need to go through all of those steps again.
This would take hours to weeks depending on who does it and the puzzle your phone manufacturer sets up for you to unlock your phone.
This to me is one of the many absolutely mind-blowing facts about the trash Android OS (disclaimer: I'm still an Android user, because I can't accept a phone without a physical keyboard. Never used Apple products in my life).
Want to wipe your phone and restore an image after you travel into a "spy-state"? Nope. You simply can't with an Android phone.
You know a phone that was able to do this out of the box? My 2013 Blackberry Passport. No rooting or fiddling around required. Just install a desktop app, plug the phone into USB and press "full system backup".
Can't you enable developer mode, open a terminal and just run `dd`?
To root "well made" phones, you need to unlock the bootloader, and this will erase the data on the device, to prevent data theft or compromise...
It's a bit messier if your data also lives on an internalized sd card.
1) You don't want to risk dumping a mounted filesystem because of inconsistencies
2) Good luck getting the right device - in the end it's devicemapper all the way down with a lot of layers (ecryptfs, sdcardfs, bind mounts, ...) stacked between your shell and the device.
3) Unrooted phones don't allow access to raw Unix devices
4) You can't restore these backups anywhere if your phone (like almost all, I think it's a Netflix requirement) uses hardware key storage - simply because the key is in the secure element of your phone. Rooting a Samsung phone kills the HSM and switches over to software key management though.
5) Assuming encryption keys don't get in your way, you can only restore the dump on exactly the same model and firmware of device you have, because every manufacturer does stuff slightly different.
I run a custom honescreen: it's just another Android app! And yet everytime I have to set that back up again manually.
Android has had full system backup capabilities through `adb backup` for years. It does not require removing carrier locks or rooting and has been available since Android 2.x iirc.
I've used this to transfer all of my apps, app settings, and system settings between all of my Android phones:
Nexus One -> Galaxy Nexus -> Note 3 -> Galaxy S6 -> Galaxy S8 -> Galaxy S9 -> Galaxy S10 -> Z Fold 2, all with one continuous chain of backup and restores via `adb backup` and `adb restore`.
These restores sometimes even worked flawlessly across different Android OS versions! Sometimes this has caused a lot of weird issues wrt system settings, so admittedly this process can be quite buggy.
I use `adb backup` solely as a means of transferring my settings & app library between devices.
These are full system backups including potentially gigabytes of APKs, so I wouldn't want to run it every night. It is possible to use `adb backup` to only backup settings (no app files) if you want a lighter backup, but those backups aren't as useful for my purposes.
This is what I like about iOS. I tested this method a couple of times (with less destruction though), and it just works.
Apparently this is false, because apps can "opt out" of ADB backup and many do (see other comments), furthermore it doesn't backup the entire phone, but only the system image (partly). Does it backup the root state of the phone? Nope. Does it backup the restore partition of the phone? Nope. Making it a "maybe full system backup but not full system image backup that is kind of buggy". In other words, like I wrote earlier: not a -full- system backup at all.
I was specifically talking about effortlessly backing up and restoring a full system image. Blackberry OS10 style: plug in phone, press "backup system image" and get a carbon copy of EVERYTHING that runs on the phone that can be restored to a new or existing phone with 1 click. Your post confirms that this is not possible in Android: using ADB is not "effortlessly" and it's not a full system image backup.
Even if I would backup and restore from and to the exact same rooted phone (that's all I'm asking), the restored backup would not be the same as whatever was on the phone when the ADB backup was pulled. Nandroid can do this, in theory, with a lot of hassle (but not on my phone, because TWRP for my phone doesn't support decryption of the system partition).
I have very little trust in Google so I don't want to backup to google cloud (I just researched and it seems they do provide end to end backup encryption without Google having the key anywhere since Android 9, is that really the case now?)
There is no way Apple is going to let 3rd party could providers do backups directly. I doubt exposing the iPhone as a USB device over the internet with a VM running iTunes would work efficiently.
Maybe you can create an automation like that.
Things like the set of apps, settings (both app and system level), game progress, the set of open tabs, etc can be backed up, and IOS is even able to restore old app versions specified in the backup by downloading them from the store.
All that said, both IOS backup options are more comprehensive than the built-in android options.
iOS even restores your open applications and task manager state when you restore from the backup. Even more so, theoretically, it can restore every apps state at the point of backing up. It's a feature ported from macOS.
From my experience this is completely false. I just switched from Galaxy S8 to S20, and I transferred everything and had the new phone setup exactly like the old one, with all apps (that would allow it, LINE wouldn't) and even ringtones and text tones set how I had them in about 20 minutes.
They’re not. Backups are built-in but they’re not complete. For example google Authenticator data is not backed up. Microsoft Authenticator can be backed up, but you need to go through a few extra steps (and have a Microsoft account). Other secrets are not included either - my banks PhotoTAN app doesn’t store any credentials etc. There are reasons why this is so, but it’s really important to handle if you use your phone for 2FA.
AFAIK, applications allow their secrets to be backed up or not, and I'm not mad that my 2FA keys are no backed up and shipped overseas. I keep another copy of my 2FA codes in another application, so it's not a very big problem from my PoV, though.
Get Keepass2Android, and it'll track TOTPs just fine. Throw Syncthing on their and you can securely get those to any device you own without involving Google.
It's protection for when using untrusted computing devices, or because most people have their passwords in some way visible or shared.
TOTPs can't be reasonably made much longer then they are while still usefully entered, but my password database never leaves my own devices and neither does the password to it.
If someone compromises my phone to the level they can get that database, then they've already got my Google Authenticator or whatever DB as well anyway.
> they've already got my Google Authenticator or whatever DB as well anyway.
is of course good for them, but they still need to get my password from my other device.
2FA as the internet uses it has always been about dealing with accidental disclosure and public PCs.
That's why my phone doesn't have any bank software installed and doesn't have any password saved. It is logged into my google account though to which you probably can restore some passwords, but for all resources I care about (banking, investements, crypto, etc.) it's not possible. I also use separate email for those. If my HN or reddit account will be compromised via my phone - so be it, I don't really care. I can also tolerate compromised 2FA app as it's useless without passwords which are stored on another machine.
It's not a problem if you took measures to make sure you have a copy. It's a problem if you just take "full backups" for granted until you figure out that some things don't get included in "full".
And yes, for years one had to do the physical cabled backup restores for this, then these same app developers learned how to exclude their data from those as well. However, as of iOS 12, 13 and 14, there seems to be decreasing to zero effective difference in what’s included between tethered (with password), local WiFi (with password), and OTA iCloud backups.
You may be able to forcibly back these up using a third party tool that also lets you back up sandboxed temp files and the like, tools like iExplorer:
https://macroplant.com/iexplorer/mount-iphone-disk-mode-file...
If you’re jailbroken, that can backup anything under root of course.
On the other hand, it's useless for creation. But that's fine, the trade offs are worth it in my opinion. I have dedicated hardware running Linux/Windows for that purpose.
So much for not changing settings by themselves :)
If that isn’t what you want to happen, you go to the Settings app and turn off those toggles. (But I wish they would have a matching statement on screen that clarifies their changes are permanent until you change them again.)
Temporary toggles being in the control center is great. Most of the time that I quickly disconnect from WiFi or Bluetooth, it’s to solve some immediate, temporary issue.
The settings aren’t “changing themselves” — they’re doing what you asked them to do. The written message tells you what you asked them to do in order to teach new users what these buttons do.
Bottom line, it is doable, but I want a working linux phone, where camera and calls/sms/mms work and I dont use any newage communication software, so I dont care. Again, this is completely my use case as I practically consider the phone applications as mostly useless, dont play games and prefer paying in cash.
I hoped Cosmo Communicator[2] would be it but they didn't support the camera and since I am using it for taking notes, it is vital for me. Actually I even went into making degoogled rom for CC but I got stuck at selinux blatantly abused to prevent modifications and maybe some day I will recompile the kernel to kick it out or find time to reverse and binary patch the selinux checking.
Actually PinePhone is becoming more and more interesting option but they should really pump up the specs, again, at least for camera. The second possibility would be sailfish os [3] but again it has some closed source blobs.
Linux on Mobile and open EC and Coreboot etc. are all making rapid progress at the moment. I would still say we are talking in terms of years before more general Linux Phone adoption would be possible, and still the fact your online bank etc. doesn't make an app for Linux would be prohibitive to many (although anbox might help), so I understand pessimism here, but I think the excitement around Linux mobile and open hardware is sufficient that it will at least be revolutionary that it is possible to run open hardware and Linux phones etc. same as SteamOS was a failure if you look only at numbers of Steam Machines, and a revolution in Linux gaming if you look at Proton, GamerOS and all the improvements that came with it.
Viable alternatives affect the behavior of others, even if they "fail".
And if you're already a desktop Linux user like me, open hardware is already a reality. Only thing that's stopped me trading Dell XPS 13 for Purism 14 is that I will miss the QHD+ screen, as it is standard HD res. Still really tempted though.
Power or RISC-V ISA hardware are in low stock, have very few, specialised vendors and are not affordable. I have great sympathy for people who refuse to pay the outrageous difference to off-the-shelf hardware that can be bought anywhere just to gain a level of privacy that they should have in the first place.
AMD and Intel have rootkits in their hardware which are designed to be exceedingly difficult to remove. If the customer is a spy agency, they will ship with the rootkit disabled. If the customer is just a normal person like the one writing the article, one will not be able to have one for money or good words.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-no...
* spy on others
* try not to get spied on
This is my experience in removing the ARC firmware code from two different HP desktops (I attached both BIOS images):
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/issues/233
These PCs are quite inexpensive. I run OpenBSD with hardened Chrome on one of them, for all of my finances.
However, there was a recent Firefox bug in OpenBSD, and the patches weren't applied uniformly. It does seem that Chrome is more consistent, and gets more attention.
It still might fail. We try because we feel it is too important to simply do nothing, not because we expect mass success.
Not great for normies, but that's my tip anyway. Media consumption is a wedge issue and if you're prepared to spend money for privacy, there are a few ways it can be done.
IANAL but seems to me like laws along the lines of "you can reverse engineer DRM without being arrested" and "the patent holder/whatever of the DRM cannot deny you a license to use this without a good reason" seem like the right direction to me. Then the linux distros or anyone else can go off and build/integrate the DRM to the extent that they wish.
Because Widevine is so widespread and acts as a gatekeeper for content (for example Netflix), if Google doesn't bless your platform with Widevine support you're essentially dead as a consumer media platform.
Google should not have this kind of power because competition is good.
I can get by without carrying a microphone-and-camera equipped computer controlled by someone else around, and so I don't; but, if I want to return something I bought on the Internet, I don't get a receipt; and, if I want to go to a bar, there's a risk I won't be allowed to pay. (There is a law against the latter problem, but it is not enforced.)
Are there situations where paying without a smartphone is not practically possible? In the Netherlands people sometimes pay with smartphones, but these use the same infrastructure as the ubiquitous debit cards, so it is not an issue here. (Cash on the other hand…)
These payment terminals and the Dutch debit cards are by now all suitable for this type of contactless payment: you either lay the card on top of the terminal or hover it there, or hold it near the side (depending on the model); it can be done completely without terminal and card touching, and of course only the card carrier touches the card (i.e., you don't hand it over as is sometimes done with credit cards).
Credit cards are rarely used for payments in shops here, and are often frowned upon by merchants (and often refused). It's all debit cards (either as a physical card or virtual in a smartphone) and some cash — although covid may well proof to put cash that much closer to the grave.
I went ahead and bought a SM-T575 tablet a couple weeks ago. The only tablet I could find in the 8-inch range that had a somewhat decent CPU/GPU, a camera with light, NFC and a replaceable battery - while still being waterproof. And it's not made out of hard plastic that will shatter at the first fall. For all that joy however, it was a fucking PITA to root it and I only succeeded because of a helpful soul messaging me on Reddit of all places.
Seems like the only place one can find stuff supposed to live longer lives is in the expensive Enterprise section of manufacturers for a hefty premium - similar to "smart TVs" where the only "dumb TVs" available are "digital signage" type. And that's not good. We need regulation in this space, and fast.
I'm hoping the EU can help a bit. Please, EU, you're our only hope!!
There is the https://www.fairphone.com/en/ which is a modular and easy to repair smartphone. They also make it easy to install alternative operating systems like Sailfish or an OSS version of Android.
I love iOS in almost every way except sideloading restriction.
If I missed some way to implement what I want, I'd love to hear how can I do that. I don't need much, but I need push notifications from server and I need push notifications when I'm close to some particular location (like open a door when I'm near it). I might need NFC push notification, I'm not sure.
I don't agree that Android suck, I have second phone for testing and while I love iOS more as it feels more polished, I probably will switch to Android in the future, just because I want to run my code on my device.
Can someone confirm ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26399788
Long story short, you pay $100/year or $8.33/month for access to a suite of services that make apps frictionless for your users, and easier for you as a developer to offer high end features like authentication, notifications, and sync:
- App discovery, hosting, distribution, updates
- CloudKit, iCloud Documents, iCloud K/V Store
- Push Notifications
- Sign-in with Apple
- etc. (NFC is also in the list)
You do not have to pay anything if you do not want any of those services, however you will have to “refresh” your test app cert weekly or work around that.
I also looked into getting some of my own programs into my iPhone but rather than getting stuck on not being able to keep it there for a long time, I got stuck on how to even get the program into the phone. Turns out you need Apple hardware to push the code, so I'm stuck before even being able to try it.
Solid advice. You should follow it.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/15/apple-blocks-app-store-in...
If your app is using any payment processor that's not Apple within the App Store that app is not in compliance with Apple's own App Store policies. Epic Games would be very interested to learn this is happening. If you're using self-signed certificates or an "Iranian App Store" to install things you are also operating outside the bounds of App Store policy.
You're using Apple services in a region that is not officially supported by Apple. I don't understand how you think security and privacy protections are going to be in place when using smuggled hardware that's intentionally compromised and taking active measures to circumvent what protections Apple has, either by jailbreaking or rerouting requests to Apple to some other mirror.
That Fidibo app is obviously not “compliance with App Store policy.” Said policy has never been followed consistently. Feel free to email Epic if you think this changes anything. My magic ball says the best result you can expect is that Apple says, “Oops, they lied, and we didn’t notice.”
Your article is also just an article. App Store is usually fine in Iran, but sometimes there are connection problems. This is not even always a ban from Apple, the Islamic Republic is all too happy to ban foreign services.
Instead of giving me all these made-up stories, give me a list of all the major sacrifices Apple has made for user security. I can’t think of a single one. The nearest thing to a sacrifice they have done is supposedly not selling your data to 3rd parties (except China and friends), but this isn’t that lucrative for them and the PR it generates translates directly into profits. Most privacy choices aren’t this PR-able.
Apple has refunded me without question whenever an app tried to scam me, no matter how big people popular it was, whereas apps using third-party payment systems almost never give any refunds.
"you don't like what I like and my choices are obviously superior so I'm going to insult your opinion and act as if my opinion is undeniable fact"
However, the $100 is less a permission slip, and more buys you access to Apple services infrastructure that is largely worth the money so you don’t have to do it yourself and so your users can trust a single brand experience.
(For example, notifications before Apple’s notification service were insane, the app “Growl” made a lot of money just trying to tame the dozens of different ways confounded users’ expectations with notifications. Similarly, updating apps was crazy-making for users, then there was Sparkle, now you get the app hosting and distribution included in the $8/month.)
Just these few services are well worth $8 a month if you compare what you get to any other SaaS we’re buying all the time from HackerNews startups:
- App discovery, hosting, distribution, updates
- CloudKit, iCloud Documents, iCloud K/V Store
- Push Notifications
- Sign-in with Apple
- etc. (NFC is also in the list)
https://help.apple.com/developer-account/#/dev21218dfd6
Since you specifically mention push notifications which of course require an infrastructure to run reliably for you 24/7, there’s a good value for the $8/month. The systems behind making these “just work” for users are complex and expensive.
Where can I find, how can I build a computer---that isn't 13 years old---with open firmware of which one doesn't reasonably suspect that the NSA put a backdoor into it?
To me it makes more sense to continue with this phone, as I can find all the replacement parts I need on AliExpress, rather than investing in a new Librem 5 or a PinePhone. While I appreciate being able to use an open mobile OS, there's the problem of apps, and there's still the hardware problem - it's both more expensive (in the case of the Librem 5 at least) and has the same problem of eventual obsolescence.
At the end of the day you are relying on a suspect network connection, hosted by a profit seeking corporation, regulated by a privacy hostile government, to maintain your connection to the world. No matter how "free" your device is, the network itself will never truly be free.
People don't drop their battery-powered custom-built PC into 6ft of water and expect it to keep working (then dunk it again after two years of abuse, 4 floor drops, etc have worked against the case, seals, and so forth). They don't take it from freezing temperatures into the warm indoors and expect it to keep on trucking. They don't expose it to extreme temperatures on car dashboards in the summertime and expect it to still perform (it would absolutely hard-lock due to overheating if you tried it). Compared to a phone it doesn't matter very much how much a custom-built PC weighs +/- 1kg; phones fight for grams. If a custom-built PC uses an extra 15w who cares? But that might be more than the entire power budget of a phone SoC. People expect a phone not to spew EM that breaks the ability of anyone around them to use data or make calls. People also expect their phone to be able to complete a 911 call in an emergency so long as some kind of signal exists.
Modularity IS NOT FREE. STOP ACTING LIKE IT IS.
Modularity costs space, weight, and complexity (which often translates into user time spent troubleshooting).
If a user-replaceable screen means giving up waterproofing do you expect that to be a popular tradeoff? If making the battery replaceable reduces battery life by 40% is that a good tradeoff?
It is clear to me some people complaining haven't spent any time researching this topic and have no idea just how much engineering goes into modern electronics nor what the tradeoffs are. If they actually had to live with the results of their claimed preferences a lot of them would hate it and switch back immediately. At best I see people hand-waving half the battery life or double the weight as if it such things were trivial for devices people hold or carry on their person for hours a day.
I'm 100% serious when I say if you are working on your own company or product please make sure you approach these things with eyes open. If you are deliberately going to serve a different part of the market know that going in. It's fine to go after a niche - a niche can be profitable - but understand your customers and what they really value (not just what they claim to value). Don't let a bunch of contrarians on HN convince you there's a market for 10 million modular cell phones. You'll lose a lot of money when your "customers" skewer your product for all the compromises necessary to give them what they claimed to want.
The real tradeoff is size. The ultra thin electronics are the benefit of not having modules. Related to that is performance - the performance you can get is well correlated to how nicely you can put your traces on the PCB connecting the two. Having to go through a connector adds another competing constraint
Source: have done some modular and non modular designs of the same. Not nearly to the same precision and performance requirements as building a phone, but not that far off
From experience, no matter what you do, your phone will still continue to ping 1e100.net every few minutes. This may just be something innocuous, but there just is no way to get rid of this behavior (or to understand where it's coming from).
> adb shell settings put global captive_portal_mode 0
will disable it.
Ugh.
What am I getting at? Well, I know it's totally paranoid, but what if some agency out there in other countries who build these things are putting things on the boards to send telemetry data back. Perhaps something small and quick now and then while the computer is online. Something that you don't even notice unless you're constantly monitoring the internet traffic in and out. And the traffic itself could be something innocuous also. Something that slips under the radar.
I know I know, I'm totally paranoid here. But does anyone here worry about that at all?
>I want it to be, but which can also be used to communicate securely with anyone on the planet without being observed by a third party. I don't want to be spied on by Microsoft or Google.I don't want the NSA intercepting my conversations or even their metadata.
I don't see what this has to do with the actual computer honestly. You don't want Microsoft to be involved so I'm going to assume you are going to install Linux on whatever you get, awesome, this doesn't stop the NSA or Google from harvesting your data because that doesn't really have anything with the computer. Seems like you want a search engine and ISP that you own as well.
Are you going to ban TV networks and credit card companies next? Grocery store loyalty programs? Practically every company these days collects about their users and customers.
None of these businesses NEED to collect and sell your behavioural and demographic data to exist. TV and newspapers would probably start doing OK if precision targeted ads were not possible.
Unfortunately, the Americans, the Russians and the Chinese are against pervasive privacy and pay only lip service to the UDHR at best.
Microsoft works closely with Intel... I wonder if they might have access to the invisible OS running on your PC... (Linux would not disable that)
And Intel platform is no secret anymore. It is inspected as is Microsoft's behavior.
You can have a computer that does not connect to the Internet, or connects to the Internet very little, or only connects to the Internet through specific communication channels you open in a firewall. That's all very attainable.
However, as soon as you communicate with third parties, be it your ISP, a cloud provider, or your end communication partner, you are potentially sharing with more than you intend. It's a "the only way to keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead" problem. You can't control what other people choose to share.
Telephone? Nope.
Ham radio? Nope.
Letters sent through the mail? Nope.
I don't think so.
Wiredtapping and postal interception, as well as metadata (pen-trace and postal covers) are possible, but scale poorly when individual lines must be listened to by individual agents, or individual letters carefully opened and resealed.
Digital permits surveillance at mass scale. It seems ultimately a fundamental property of the medium, less a bug than simply a feature.
There is also a fairly robust tradition of privacy in postal mail (in most countries), and after some false starts, eventually applied to telephony, at least in theory. The situation for email is far less evolved.
These days, if you do want secure communications, postal probably offers some real benefits. I'm somewhat surprised that postal remailing services (send an outer message to a central point who deposits the enclosed prepaid inner envelope(s) to final destination(s)) isn't a thing, or at least not one that has any appreciable awareness.
The capabilities of voice-to-text and handwriting / optical character recognition make the viability of intercepting virtually any spoken conversation, or any _observed_ written communication, quite high. The costs are much greater than with straight machine-readable character text (ASCII/UTF-8/Unicode), but pretty tractable.
My view is increasingly that privacy is an emergent phenomenon responding to ever-increasing surveillance and observation capabilities. The modern discussion began in the 1890s (Warren & Brandeis: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/courses/cs5436/warren-bran...), as technologically-mediated intrusions were increasing greatly in capability. Though what the end-game is I do not know.
If anything, postal remailing would probably only work in a TOR-like manner, with many, distributed, non-for-profit remailers - but that opens a whole set of new problems, like who pays for the service, what prevents the remailer to just take the delivery for themselves (as undoubtedly such a service would be used to remail illicit substances and other valuables), and how would such a network of legitimate, trustworthy remailers know each other to do some tunnelling?
Even as an informal practice, the option could have some value. The question of whether to used a two-hop (source, mix, recepient) or three-hop (source, mix-1, mix-2, recipient, as with Tor) exists (the three hop system would triple postage, if messages were sent individually, though bulk distribution is another option, with break-bulk at the 1st or 2nd hop).
Again, what has surprised me previously is that I'd found no mention of the concept at all. Though I am finding several now, specifically emphasizing anonymity / location obscuring:
(Yes, Chromebooks have many benefits. I know.)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chromebooks-gain-sha...
For the longest time, this introduced the ecosystem to professional certification authorities, which are essentially profit-oriented organisations that gauged prices.
Let´s Encrypt made some of the situation slightly better, opening up small websites to encryption, but you are still dependent on an external CA and the goodwill of the browser manufacturer to distribute their root certificate with their browsers.
This statement here made me pause for a bit. He wants a computer with specific features, but doesn't want pay for the models that offer those features because they are too expensive?
Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too, but unfortunately, reality has constraints.
So, yeah, ideally everyone should own what they buy, if they want so - and they should be aware what exactly they buy and what are the gotchas. But... how? I believe this "caveat emptor" informational disparity is a multimillenia-old issue.
(Fine print, obviously, doesn't work - because human nature.)
> and now everything but a kitchen sink
My kitchen sink has a processor in it.
Alexa controlled sink :)
"Alexa, give me one cup"
Stupid I know
Given that the only people frothing at the mouth in desire of “having technology that [they] own completely” seem to be rich computer programmers, why wouldn’t companies jack the price up?
I see the whole personal data/tracking industry as that model. You can get a tracking-supported smartphone for $50 or with almost no tracking for $150. This whole thread is people saying they don't want to pay $150 to own a smartphone when they can get that phone for $50 with tracking.
I have a similar problem with slavery. I don't like it. But the smartphone market is utterly dominated by people who are just fine with slavery so there's just one company making a "less slavery" phone and that phone barely sells. Their forums have multiple threads with people complaining quite openly "why does it cost more to make a phone with less slavery" and suggesting that the company could provide more features for a lower price if they just forgot this whole "fairphone" business.
Smartphones are expensive to make and expensive to run. You pay that price either with money, or a mix of money and social/ethical cost.
Correct. He wants a computer with less complexity and less spying "features", and the market is failing hard at that.
> reality has constraints
No, these are entirely artificial restrictions. Companies invested very significant efforts to implement DRM, management engine, AMT, all sort of telemetries and backdoors.
The emerging model of "privacy for the rich, surveillance for everybody else" is it expected consequence.
EDIT: wow, downvoted to -3 already? Truly shining the hacker culture in "hacker" news /s
Yeah, that weakens his whole argument.
That said, I would like to know what models these are? Because I think it's pretty much universal.
I think the answer is linux.
https://system76.com, https://puri.sm
Can't speak to the quality, but I suspect those are the expensive models the author is referring to.
If we're talking desktops, Raptor Talos fits the bill better I think: https://www.raptorcs.com
1G+ has been the traditional price to break into "worthwhile" computing, "worthwhile" here usually meaning computing you get a choice on how to configure.
To give a bit of context, a "pay-day loan", typically something targeted at the majority of lower-working class folk who struggle to make it from rent check to rent check, goes for normally ~300-600$.
For a "lower-middle class" individual making ballpark 60-80k and making housing or rent payments, the norm in even lower cost cities is 1-2k. We aren't talking addl. living expenses, but already someone has to deal with the un-pleasantries of extreme poverty (gangs, illegal activities, never-ending debt and the prison pipeline) in the lower classes, and in the "middle" classes they are facing potentially tanking credit scores, getting behind on rent by a month (most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck), just to have a shot at getting one of these laptops.
Goodness help anyone in so called "3rd-world" countries.
When you read it back, it sounds silly to expect any company to make products that ever fit this criteria. Except expensive ones, of course, which maximize profits in their own way.
I'd like to see this fixed, but I don't think there's an easy way to do it. The issue dovetails with intellectual property laws - situation could've been different if money could be made in gutting hardware, firmware and software and removing anti-features at scale. But we can't have that, because every single piece of a computer is its own IP minefield.
Everyone wants the best stuff for free. That's not controversial. But it is controversial to complain that the best stuff is more expensive than the cheap stuff. Of course it is. That's the type of stuff they sacrificed to make it cheap.
If they want low end free btw, they do have that too. Pinebooks are super cheap.
Of course, not to say the above are all panacea, but something much more directly measurable and visible, like your health, local economy/ecology welfare, people can barely afford. The invisible, like the privacy affecting where your precious wallet gets spent, the habits which can be used to target and manipulate you, that's the invisible hidden behind marketing promising "great performance at a low price".
You get what you pay for, and the moral of this story is that what most people can afford, shit, is what they get (shit).
At least, until people decide to take control and dethrone the tyrants from their thrones. That's why govt and big biz can't stand a message to be private, they are well aware they stand to lose, well, everything, from anyone ever bothering to unseat them. Not to lump all biz or govt together, there are some worse than others.
Nah. Technically, and in terms of manufacturing cost, it would be even easier to make a simpler computer, without all those bells and whistles that can be turned against the user, without the Intel Management Engine, TPM, and what have you.
> That's the type of stuff they sacrificed to make it cheap.
No, it's economies of scale which make one expensive, and the other one cheap. And human greed, and the human need to control other humans.
Maybe I'm missing something here but how is it possible that on-die features like IME affect the manufacturing cost and complexity of a laptop for e.g. Dell?
That's true. However, vendors don't look at manufacturing costs in isolation - they care about profit. All these user-hostile additions generate more in profit than they cost in manufacturing.
This way, the best stuff costs more, even if it has less - because "value-add" garbage has negative total cost.
Non-technical users can and will be tricked into doing all sorts of ridiculous things to their computer, and then they will blame the computer manufacturer for letting them do that. Computer manufacturers responded by not letting them do that.
Mainstream computers are designed for mainstream users... the common clay of the land... you know... morons. They have to be protected from doing stupid things to their computers (because otherwise that's how you get botnets).
As the OP says, there are computers that don't have these features, and that you can do whatever you like with. But they tend to cost more, in part because they're not mainstream so they don't get economies of scale.
You're right that it is all about economies of scale. Economies of scale say that it doesn't make sense to tape out a whole separate die just for non-business consumers. They just don't sell that many units that it's worth it. It's cheaper to make one die for everyone and then sell one die with AMT turned off, even if it involves wasting a small amount of silicon for each chip produced.
Incidentally, this is why (apart from a few noxious exceptions like ECC) consumers are generally the beneficiaries of market segmentation. Businesses will pay a lot more, locking these features behind higher-priced models lets the consumer models be cheaper. Without market segmentation, the outcome isn't that you get a Xeon at the price of a Pentium, it's that you get a Xeon at the cost of a Xeon.
The same situation can be spotted on services. E.g. people already forgot that running email service costs money and they take the free GMail account as given. But around the corner they blame Google for poor support then free GMail account is randomly closed.
It is not only email. But if you want (support|control|freedom|insert-yourself) - pay for it.
From the consumer perspective: I want the 500-2000 euros device I bought not to spy on me. Were it not the status quo, this would sound ridiculous.
You now have a computer that is 10,000 times faster than one you had 30 yrs ago at half the price. Oh and it fits in your pocket. A lot of time and money went into creating that. Those people need to get paid. And yes you pay for it with some loss of privacy.
The reason why this product doesn't existing on the market is because because NOBODY (except the odd 4000 people on HN) wants this product. Most people don't even use a VPN or know what TOR is. If you don't want it, then design and fab your own chips and write your own software from scratch.
The right to privacy is not a 'first world problem', it is a problem.
The specific privacy problem espoused by this post is not just a first world problem, it's an HN problem. I am being disingenuous - this request is pure insanity and I absolutely promise you that this "computer you fully own" will have such a very small market that it doesn't have a chance of breaking even.
Where a right for privacy really matters is not in the part of the world where your google searches are used to pick an etsy ad, but where typing the wrong thing against the wrong person could land you in jail, or at the morgue.
You and the OP have the same problem you want a solution but are not willing to pay the price. And you think that what you want is what most people want, but from what the market tells us they are pretty happy with what is being offered right now.
I don't think you can make statements about me with such a definitive tone without first asking some questions.
I don't think about my car's airbags all that often because I'm not a mechanic or frequently in contact with sources of the latest airbag news. Two weeks ago I take my car in for some work and the mechanic walks out to me with this puzzled look on his face and asks why I have yet to have my airbags replaced; talks about how dangerous this brand is and goes on about the recall.
Now I'm interested. I had no idea. I've driven my nephews around in this car without any idea of the airbag issue. I've now been made aware and will act accordingly.
Regardless, cars increasingly feature the same sort of profit maximising nonsense: subscription-based services, problems that can only be solved by authorised dealerships, systems that can disable the car remotely, planned obsolescence etc.
There is an equivalent demand for Just A Car from people who don't want to fall into this trap.
* Nothing about "average consumer" was mentioned. * Speed and size aren't relevant to topics of ownership and trust. * People may pay with privacy, but it should be a consenting relationship. * 4000 > 0 * Whatever "most people" are into, there is yet a market for good VPN services, and people do use Tor.
I hope you enjoyed your exercise in hyperbole.
I think it happens more than you think, but people view this as eating healthy and exercising - should do more about it, but the world makes it easier to eat poorly and do things that aren't exercise.
What would help is if there are people with the capability to help aligned with solutions.
so let's keep on screwing them over, I'm sure there will never be any consequences as we poison society
People used to dislike computers because they're complicated (they still do), but now they dislike computers because they're actively user-hostile.
I also want to own my device, not rent it from a manufacturer.
Those that use a VPN for privacy are the "average consumer". Those, let's say more geeky, know that the VPN for privacy that are sold by lots of companies are a fallacy as using a VPN from home gives you zero extra privacy. It only moves the problem from your ISP to the VPN company, which likely isn't covered by the same laws. It is in almost all cases worse.
What I don't agree upon is that "NOBODY" would want open platforms; there's probably a larger market for that than there was a personal computing market in the 70's. There's businesses like Raptor that sell fairly open workstations, and they simply wouldn't if there wasn't a market for it.
The main issue is the disconnect between engineers/programmers and users. If there's growing amount of people who won't use the products they build themselves, then the idea of a war on general computing might snowball into a self-fulfilling prophecy where average users no longer has access to general computing through normal consumer devices.
Should we call lead toxicity a "chemist's first world problem"? Should we call material flammability a "fireman's first world problem"? Equipment sterilization a "doctor's first world problem"?
We think about this, so that regular people don't have to. That's the point of specialization of labor. It's our moral duty to be aware of these problems, and to ensure end-users aren't hurt by these problems. As an industry, we've not only failed at this duty - we've been actively doing the opposite. Harming users of technology on purpose, making their lives worse in pursuit of extra profit.
It's not that users should care about whether or not they own their technology. Technology that isn't owned by the end-user, and actively exploits them instead, shouldn't be available on the consumer market in the first place.
Actually, I think Apple has caused the prices of pocket computers to go up in the last few years (relative to features). And many of these features, I could do without (I.E.: I don't need so many sensors on my daily phone, this is dangerous from a privacy point of view). They removed the physical keyboard though...
> And yes you pay for it with some loss of privacy.
Why? You can pay $1,000 for your pocket computer and they still won't let you be administrator of it in the name of your own protection.
To tell you the truth, I don't like where today's computer designs are going.
Imagine we applied your "disregard until it becomes a bigger issue" approach and ridiculed every warning as a "your group problem is not a problem". Look around you. How is that working out?
Climate change for one: "eh... scientists are worrying about things that aren't even a problem yet, we'll tackle it when it becomes a problem, if ever".
Great strategy
> The reason why this product doesn't existing on the market is because because NOBODY (except the odd 4000 people on HN) wants this product. Most people don't even use a VPN or know what TOR is.
The general public wants it and even uses at times of mass protests and government censorship. They don't know the technical details but they do use it all over the world, albeit infrequently.
Running desktop/laptop Linux is a relatively minor sacrifice in terms of available software, especially if you consider Wine and Steam emulation. Yet market share is tiny. People do not seem to own a computer enough to do anything about it.
Probably he meant that Microsoft was not the same Microsoft as it is now. In the same way as having @gmail.com account let us feel "special" 15 years ago and Google was operating under "Don't be evil" flag. Things are changing.
What he wants is simplicity he can understand. 286 had a processor architecture with a security model everyone could understand.
If you want something more powerful, there're these:
- https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/workstations-and-servers
- https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/mainboards
People have to vote with their wallets and pressure vendors.
Looks like more of the same.
It does exist, it's all eminently doable, and I encourage people to explore this road. But it does cost more than mere money. Going against the grain always does.
> People have to vote with their wallets and pressure vendors.
I disagree. Expected someone with very little knowledge of the topic to make an informed choice here is highly unlikely to work. You could say the same about clothing created by child labour, but most people aren't going to spend a couple hours researching if the shirt they like is okay to buy, nor should they be expected to.
I believe the solution to this problem has to ultimately come from regulation.
> I must rely on encryption algorithms that are designed with subtle flaws that can take years, if not decades, to come to light.
Cryptography is an extremely technical field, so yes, you do. That's not really relevant to the matter of truly owning your computer. If you want to personally validate modern theoretical physics, that would also take years of study.
> Even open source encryption algorithms that some claim are above reproach are repeatedly being shown to have major flaws, and the fixes to those flaws have their own major flaws.
Again, a separate issue. That's not a matter of having a computer you truly own, that's a matter of software quality.
> Will this ever end? Will I ever have a computer that I own?
They pose this question as if it's a rhetorical one. The Free Software movement already exists. You can support it with code contributions, documentation, testing effort, money, or advocacy/activism. See [0]. If you don't like the FSF specifically, you can support other initiatives.
You can do an almost fully GPL compliant Linux desktop by building it yourself today. I can already see people thinking "but what about the closed source binary blobs? my video card? my network interfaces?"
But even your 12 MHz 286 or 386SX/20 had closed source AMI or Phoenix BIOS firmware on it. The motherboard manufacturer in Taiwan and American Megatrends sure weren't handing out the source code to that. And if you had a video card, or a soundblaster, its drivers loaded in config.sys were also closed binary blobs.
If you have a near infinite amount of money and resources, you can be absolutely certain (the hardware that runs NSA approved type 1 crypto goes through a very thorough vetting process), but such a concept is economically unrealistic for anything that normal people can buy.
Even if this was achieved, the rabbithole would continue though, because the thing you measure with could now have a backdoor. Remind me of the classic paper about the same problem with software: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
Good security is about minimising the attack surface and risk, not reaching some ideal pie-in-the-sky complete and total trust.
If you had a time machine and gave some developers in 1991 the massive cpu, ram, storage and bus i/o throughput that we have today in a $1200 desktop PC, I don't doubt that they would have made those binary blobs a lot bigger and more complicated. Something about the typical software environment expanding to fill all available resources, seemingly as an inevitability.
In the olden days of real mode MS-DOS, if you want to gather keystrokes from the user securely (e.g. a password) the program could simply take over the IRQ1 (keyboard interrupt) vector and that was sufficient. The extra paranoid could also revector the other interrupts (or disable interrupts entirely) and ensure they had exclusive control of the entire machine.
1. The underlying hardware interfaces (I/O ports, memory addresses, etc.) was considered part of the IBM PC "standard" and many programs would bypass the BIOS and talk directly to the hardware.
2. The software interface to the BIOS and VBIOS was also part of the IBM PC "standard", and so the firmware couldn't diverge too far from the expected behaviour without risking compatibility issues.
3. Once the PC entered protected mode, the BIOS essentially turns into a useless brick, and ceases to have any influence on the operation of the CPU. (That is, once in protected mode, the OS kernel in ring 0 had full control of the system, and none of the BIOS code remained active.)
The difference with modern systems is stark: binary blobs often provide the only means to operate the hardware devices, CPUs have special execution modes (such as SMM) which continue to execute binary firmware even after the OS has booted, and even the CPU itself holds binary blobs (such as microcode patches).
We used to make fun of the countries behind the iron curtain for their lack privacy. The thought of living in a surveillance state seemed horrible as well as unrealistic in "the west". Freedom / democracy loving people like us would never have that kind of problem. Now it seems the whole world has gone mad, and it seems that people looking for privacy, are just considered as people looking to do something terrible that the state needs to stop anyway.
This is obviously unrealistic for most people. You can toggle off automatic feedback & updates in a modern OS and you can install Firefox with tracker blocking and you are 99% of the way there, plenty enough in practice.
I want to point out both of these approaches introduce legitimate security holes (either from not using a production grade OS or from disabling updates on it) which are vastly more likely to have real impact on your life versus privacy tracking.
Tails always starts from the same clean state and everything you do disappears automatically when you shut down Tails.
Ie, nothing persists, which means you loose everything each time.
OpenBSD is also an extremely secure operating system. But also not terribly practical as a long term desktop environment.
Plus it doesn't solve issues with underlying hardware trusts.
I think this is an inherent contradiction - if you want to be in total control of your computer while not knowing how totally control your computer, you are never going to get what you want. You are always going to have to put your trust in someone else to manage your computer. Some of those people might be more trustworthy than others, but you are still trusting in someone else to manage your computer.
Software needs to be simple for users to be in control.
(Plug: a section of an article of mine covered this previously. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982860)
One of the fun parts about hitting DefCon every year is how easy it is to learn about what's new in this space. I hope they don't cancel this year: the social information sharing aspect is the best part.
Huh? You can buy a very cheap used ThinkPad for <$200 and run GNU/Linux on it. In fact, I don’t see any mention of Linux in this article.
This is a ridiculous premise.
If he exercises that control to limit what the computers are discussing -- which is the subject of the article -- then how does that subvert the premise?
How secure do you think face-to-face conversations are? (not sarcastic or anything, just genuinely interested on measuring security of conversations)
(1) a government is already specifically interested in you or the person you're talking to when you have your conversation: both the fact of the conversation and the content of the conversation can probably be captured pretty easily.
(2) no government is specifically interested in you prior to your conversation, but you take no special precautions: the content is probably secure, it's probably not being recorded, but your location is probably recorded so if you later become a target of interest then the fact of your meeting is likely to be recoverable.
(3) no government is specifically interested in you prior to your conversation, and you take precautions (being careful about when and where you meet, and not bringing your phone): probably your conversation is reasonably secure.
Not to mention a) arranging the meeting and b) getting to the meeting need to be performed some how. Getting from point A to point B is, in today's society, not a surveillance free affair. Everything you carry can be used to track you, and even if you carry nothing, hundreds of CCTV cameras can likely follow you along the majority of your chosen route.
Thus the 'metadata' of your meeting is still known, even if the contents of your meeting isn't.
I'm thinking of cellphone tracking, automated plate reading, good old surveillance cameras, bank transactions, and whatever your computers are collecting unless you actively fight to stop them.
Plus, it is a bit harder to mass surveil people, even with voice recognition, as one can go into a crowded place (or, well, could, barring current circumstances...) so most of the audio is drowned out.
The idea was that my iPhone could be as nefarious as it wanted to be — it could never talk to anyone I didn’t want it to talk to because iptables stopped it, or something.
The project didn’t pan out, but I did end up using pihole a lot which felt like a good compromise.
I also discovered that iOS and cell carriers have a some kind of partnership to silently send each other text messages containing lots of unique looking identifiers, which was fun (REG-RESP?v=3&r=...&n=+555994321&s=FB87CD658A...etc). I used a niche IOT carrier for a while that showed me the complete SMS logs, including all these messages being sent multiple times a day.
I’m sure there’s some banal engineering reason for it but it’s not exactly heartening to find “secret” text messages being snuck out, by the dozen.
In practice I strive for this. I run all the backend services I can get my hands on from my basement (Home Assistant, NextCloud). But getting to the 100% mark indeed seem impossible today without mayor inconveniences, compared to other people, in this time frame at least..
I think the best bet is for citizens of powerful and influential governments insist on legal privacy constraints for software and hardware manufacturers, as well as place limits on their own governments' snooping.
I believe urbit is the solution, just waiting for the implementation to get polished up.
This applies so much to modern Windows operating systems that it's frankly disgusting. I think most phones are also solidly in this space as well.
Apple is marginally better, but their efforts to ram iCloud services down your throat at every available opportunity is pretty obvious as well. Plus the amount of things that mysteriously call home. On the plus side, they don't actively send you ads baked into your lock screen or start menu.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-opened-microsoft-edge-and-ap...
For anyone else unlucky enough to want to know what happened here:
- Microsoft Edge on macOS is apparently a thing that exists (I was not aware of this)
- If you install and open Edge on macOS, a notification titled “Try the new Safari” appears on the top right of the display, claiming Safari is “Fast, energy efficient, and with a beautiful design”
- The linked article is basically a tweetstorm made worse by being surrounded by distractions.
[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-opened-microsoft-edge-and-ap...
Of course, you can't change the crappiness of the broader infrastructure, but "give me wisdom to accept what I cannot change" and all that. Choose your battles.
I don't quite get what the author is talking about. There are some concerns about what proprietary BIOS firmware does, but otherwise pretty much any PC on the market can run whatever software (including the OS) the user installs on them. Or can the author only afford a smartphone?
If you want to truly own your hardware I can recommend the mnt reform
But then again, the author could understandably reply that TLS is an example of a system that has evolved to require "checking in" with a central authority - the opposite of what they want. So fair enough.
Where is the middle ground between those two ends?
Maybe it is similar to what we have now?
I take it as a given that a few generations from now, every move, expression, twitch, etc. will be recorded, persisted (in perpetuity), analyzed, etc. by many mutually hostile parties. Even right now, we're never far away from dozens of active microphones (i.e. phones) that may or may not be live streaming an audio feed over the network. Many cities are covered in cameras. A lot of financial traffic is electronic already. So, you could argue that although incomplete, it's already getting hard to cover your tracks. Tin foil hats don't really suffice anymore.
In fact, I believe we are just living through a very narrow window of time where this is all technically feasible but not common practice or practical yet on a global scale. I'm talking about a cradle to grave thing. It's not going to be opt in or opt out for anyone ultimately. It's basically an arms race.
However, I take some comfort from the notion that there will be many parties doing that and watching each other and thus keeping each other honest. The irony of that is that this applies equally to dictators, corrupt politicians, criminals, terrorists, military, etc. as well. They may be empowered to misbehave but they won't be able to do so covertly. If you are powerful enough, you get to rewrite history. But in the future that will require access to the digital archives of all your enemies. And you can never be sure that you got every bit of that.
I want real information not force fed crap that is essentially information fast food causing type-2 terminal stupididty.
I want information without the built in addiction.
Infinity Search (https://infinitysearch.co) is something like what I have in mind, but they only charge $5 per month, and search results are noticably less comprehensive than Google.
Kind of like how there are various pay-to-use email services which market themselves on their security, I'd like to see a lot more competitors in the paid search engine space. Eg instead of paying $5 per month, let's pay $200 a year for a search engine which consistently returns superior results to Google.
I try to follow these guidelines:
1.) Used and buy only general purpose computers, where you can swap hardware and operating-system. Or even better, firmware.
2.) Avoid Big Tech: Apple (literally all), Microsoft (Surface) and Google (Pixel)
3.) Laptops: Invest into vendors which allow all purpose computing or especiall Linux. Big ones are Lenovo and Dell, small ones are {System76, Purism, Tuxedo, ...}.
4.) Desktop: Built it yourself or order some from a shop which built it for you.
Actually the Pixel Phones are rather good. But Google is not better than Apple. Miracast is really complicated but good. Google? Disables Miracast in the Pixel phones and tries people to lure into Chromecast, which is inferior and requires practically always Internet. If you want send content two meters across the room you don't want Internet! And Pushmail? Only with GMAIL on Pixel. We are in 2021 and this phones don't provide Pushmail for IMAP servers which actually provide this feature. Even Apple is better there, and Apple also provides CalDAV and CardDAV. But Apples doesn't provide file system access nor allow you to use your devics as you want!
Lenovo and Dell improved their Linux support a lot in recent years - so I consider them pretty positive. But nothing is perfect.
PS: Probably I receive downvotes because saying negative things about Apple is not well received here. Silicon Valley Clique?
https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toas...
Certainly the author of the article could clarify a few different areas for better leverage though, for example their desired state of the "mine"-ness of their data in transit vs. their data at rest on their client's side of things. Do they need to "own" their ISP?
And what's a hidden agenda from the factory--are we meant to intuit that without the author's help? Does it include software feature choice influenced by profit motives, or is the author talking about their subjective workflow being interrupted by something that is meant to fit a broader type or category of user?
I think the author could use at least a few different methods to organize and arrange some precise outcomes, and would then be well on their way to achieving what they want without needing to burden their imagination so much (286? Yikes, my PS/2 Model 30 was so nice to be done with...maybe excepting the keyboard) from the outset.
By design, I think.
>> I am locked into a single OS on my smartphone, which either spies on you or is locked down even more. Every iteration a bit more control is taken away from the user.
I got so fed up with this, I abandoned the whole mobile infrastructure and built my own phone with a Raspberry Pi 3B+. The Raspberry Pi is pretty open hardware (yes, I'm aware it's not perfect). For software I used Python 3, C and GTK. It does voice and SMS/MMS only, but that is enough for me.
I built it for myself. It's stable enough that I use it as my daily driver.
I am in the process of open sourcing the code and putting it out on github. https://github.com/another2020githubuser/thepyphone
I truly hope an open hardware smart phone becomes available soon. Until then, I'll use my home grown PyPhone to get by.
Owning something should mean that you are able to fix it.
A single person can peak under the hood of the entire OS and know what's going on (provided they learn the language). This is inconceivable even in something like Linux.
Simplicity is required for true ownership.
On the web you will still need to deal with how everything these days is behind the currently hip and trendy CDN, but you can choose not to use such websites. You can have a main machine and your freedom respecting machine. You choose your own compromise.
I did that some time ago and I have to say I love my freedom respecting mostly distraction free X200 for writing or coding. It is a great machine to work with, if you can accept old hardware and the implied worse performance.
I would summarize the thesis in this sentence ->
”I want a computer that does what I want it to do, not one that has a hidden agenda programmed into it at the factory.”
You won't get what you want with different hardware and an open OS unless you also fix the ecosystem.
And that means fixing ad tech, cloud services, DNS, open packet inspection, location tracking, security at multiple levels, and any number of other technologies, only the last of which is the local OS.
Worrying about the item in your hand or on your desk is almost literally looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
p.s. aren't Raptor Computing's systems pretty much free too?
While static content on a blog doesn't really need it, HTTPS would still help protect the privacy of visitors browsing history.
This is not to say our efforts at privacy are completely in vain, just that this perfect endpoint doesn't exist.
This is likely the only way forward other than RISC-V on FPGA. But they aren't exactly well defined. Or open. Solid hardware RISC-V is interesting and medium term viable but I foresee a world of blobs waiting in the wings. Time will tell.
Therefore economy will push us to goods we don't own. If you would like to own something you will have to pay the surplus for reduced turnover at the economies side.
Get a free hardware or hardware with crippled anti-features, they're plenty of vendors that supply it, slap Linux on it, PGP encrypt your email and use secure chat. Oh, your want all of that to be done for you? Well you'll have to pay then.
Or that another argument - that encryption is workaround. It's like saying that food is not solution for being hungry but a workaround, a ridiculous statement. How are you supposed to stay private and anonymous if you communicate in the open? Are you going to have a private cable line to every correspondent you talk to?
There's Dual_EC_DRBG . Are there any other instances where this happened? And I thought barely anyone even used Dual_EC_DRBG because it was super slow. Did the author ever use it?
Attempting to hide in a world full of people who could care less about their privacy will make you stand out to those watching, however.
I kid you not when I say that I derive immense pleasure from using it. Apart from a few (equally freedom respecting) devices I find, I literally never feel like I'm wanting for anything.
I can't recommend it enough. I don't have the words.
When I last truly owned my computer, connectivity (if it existed) was via dial-up.
The other thing I'd note is that we have more and better ways to communicate securely today than ever before. In the world I grew up in, we had phones, and Ma Bell knew who you called and how long you talked, and possibly even what you talked about. There was no real privacy or encryption possible; we all just pretended like those calls were private.
Private communication is possible now on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, and I assume ChromeOS, right?
There certainly are other people who also want that computer. (E.g. me.) Maybe there are as many or more who do than don't want any of you, or us, to have them.
We have the advantage that what we want is just like the computers everybody else has, except with things taken out.
The software is doable. The CPUs have "management engines" that, at least in some cases seem possible to disable. The wi-fi chips are a problem; we might need SDR to bypass those.
But the cell phone system is going to be a problem.
Until we reach a point where we can break that cycle, getting a machine like he's describing is going to either be really expensive or impossible.
In fact, I think you havethe effect straight up backwards. It wasn't the ads or walled gardens that created those free tools you like... It was the presence of those tools and the cleverness of users that made the formation of ad networks and walled gardens a thing.
I assure you, the Free part of Free Software is one heck of a force multiplier.
This is why Facebook is inherently free except for the ads. Same with Google. People have not demonstrated a will to pay for a search engine, or for a social network for that matter. The closest thing that I've seen to a Social Network that is paid for by the users is one that is quite politically oriented and isolated, and honestly that's more of a political statement than actually the regular public paying for something.
What do you, the customer, allegedly willing to pay, get from a search provider? Especially once everyone else piles on?
What you get is a simple tool, that then requorements bloats as soon as the rest of the economy notices you're a growing centralized control point.
You start getting DMCA pipelines. You start getting hosting amd analytics, and monetization. You get your supplier suddenly weighing everyone else's interests against yours.
You start getting manipulated results streams when all you wanted wss reasonably consistent and well organized search results according to your query.
And in today's age? You, the customer, will always lose. So people are willing to pay for search engines, they exist, but just aren't willing to pay for "someone else's" search engine. Many may even go as far as starting their own, and not advertising or commercializing it to minimize the number of entrenched filters between them and the Net. As impractical as it sounds.
Not a lot of normal folks grok it enough to articulate yet, but nevertheless I see the pattern starting to coalesce.
Each and every internet staple started as a bunch of folks doing a project. Keep an eye out for those, or become one of them. Do it for you. Nobody can tell you not to, or hold you to task for doing so. It's only when you start building up enough network effect driven inertia that you start to become that leverage point ripe for the co-opting.
Knowledge asymmetry is big business. The only way to keep people from pulling the wool over your eyes is to build what you need and have a good ole look yourself.
Be warned it isn't for the light of heart, hard-drive, or net link, and your results are only as good as your crawler.
There are also a lot of risks by perniciously going out and connecting with everything under the sun. I'd recommend keeping your forays constrained, or at least on a well insulated network.
I have a Pinebook Pro & an System76 Darter laptop. I use neither because the build quality is weak. Things like a proper trackpad, decent resolutions etc. Basically, I want a Macbook Air, but open-ish. And I'd gladly pay the 'premium' for it. Hell, that Darter was more expensive than a pretty decked out MBA & it is a heap of cheap plastics.
If the hardware was there, I wouldn't mind having to out some more effort in to getting a proper Linux distro running properly/
While this will not provide the kind of freedom on the software side that the thread seeks, at least you get the freedom to choose the hardware components that run your device.
I liken the happy Windows useds to the people held captive in Plato's cave: if they knew about the sun-lit real world, they would realise their misery. We the enlightened have a moral duty and should strive to educate and unshackle them.
Which models is he talking about here? Those Raptor Power9 workstations that are like $7k are the only things that come to mind.
It remains an interesting question. Is there any way to reclaim the autonomy and ethos of freedom from the earlier part of the digital era?
I'm not sure how that would look. I don't mean in terms of a set of hardware and software solutions.
I mean technology that's actually for the end users, available to everyone with curiosity as the only barrier to entry. It sounds like a utopian delusion even though it existed not so long ago.
I'm not sure there's a realistic way to get there from here. I'd love to be wrong about that though.
https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-95-remains-most-popular-op...
Edit: I think you could call Windows mainstream (or becoming dominant) around version 3, maybe a bit before. So that's over 30 years.
Maybe yes, but why? Why do you want it?
As long as you remain a human being, there will always be things you'd prefer be otherwise if you just wait a while. If we take that as an axiom, we can stop trying to react to every discontent with thoughts of wanting the world to be different. Once you accept that things are the way they are and there ain't a thing to do about most of 'em, maybe that's better than owning a computer you own. I dunno, works for me :)
Sounds like my mom - "make the gizmo do things".
Install Linux, leave us be.
I understand why people find Stallman irritating, but my word, he does tend to be right with terrifying frequency. (Come to think of it, that's probably part of _why_ people find him irritating.)
For wasting time reproducing the mistakes of the makers risking noise for signal ?
For fixing rules to be the king of a kingdom of one risking blood for throne ?
For protecting secrets to dangerous to share, having risking life ?
For the gut feeling sake of owning, missing common culture as a much more powerful nudge than Google & Co ?
Or just properly for the need of justice ? Just in math, just in time, just for men !
Don’t want to own, but to get proper : one small step in mind, one giant leap in mind kind ;))
I am worried more about software. I'd like to have a compatible privacy-oriented browser with governance that puts quality and transparency first.
If I want a typewriter, car or handgun I “truly own”, I might be able to build one, as a last resort. But building a satisfactory computer without the global supply chains (that impose the bemoaned limitations) seems impossible.
You can build (and own) the Apple I but you can’t reasonably write a Chrome-compatible browser for it, if Google aren’t interested.
Thus I find asking for a “computer you own, like any other tool” is a bit nonchalant wrt. the scope of the request.
This is an implicit admission that the technology itself really doesn't matter. If it did, the author would have scrounged and saved to get the expensive tool they need to start getting the results they desire, the same way musicians scrimp and save to get the instrument their ear tells them they need.
We’ve been the victim of foreign propaganda to the point where the people have been driven mad by lies and the destruction of the American culture. We need defense in cyberspace the same way that we need defense against any invading forces. Few, sane, people argue against having a Navy or an Army; it’s just by the nature of the internet as a new technology that we’ve neglected it this long. And, before you give me the “those who would give up freedom for security...“ line: we already don’t have freedom, we already don’t have security. I often wish that people could recognize that the government of the people and by the people is for the people. And quit treating out greatest tool against tyranny as a whipping boy for whatever personal crap they are going through.
And your suggestion that mass surveillance is a reasonable solution to domestic terrorism is quiet terrifying to me. Mass surveillance is far too easy to abuse. Sure you can have a 'for the people' government and it not be abused, but a 'for the people' government needs a healthy amount of fear of the people to remain so. Your country already has issues with gerrymandering, do you think that's made better or worse by the government collecting more information about the people?
To follow your overthrow path, would more surveillance have helped? Would less have hindered? I'd say no to both accounts. The government already had information on when/what was going to occur and that was obtained not with mass surveillance but with simply in infiltrating the communities involved.
We should also consider if mass surveillance is the best solution to the issues you mentioned. Perhaps you could get the same thing you wanted by increasing education funding. Perhaps the same could be accomplished by building better cyberspace communities where you can be closer to your neighbours rather than the much more filter-bubble communities we commonly have now.
Damocles was an obsequious courtier in the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse, a fourth century BC tyrant of Syracuse. Damocles exclaimed that, as a great man of power and authority, Dionysius was truly fortunate. Dionysius offered to switch places with him for a day, so he could taste that fortune first-hand. In the evening a banquet was held, where Damocles very much enjoyed being waited upon like a king. Only at the end of the meal did he look up and notice a sharpened sword hanging directly above his head, held only by a single horse-hair. Immediately, he lost all taste for the festivities and asked leave of the tyrant, saying he no longer wanted to be so fortunate. Dionysius had successfully conveyed a sense of the constant threat under which a powerful man lives.
The powerful are perpetually terrified. They are scared of each other. They are scared of the populace. If someone created a perfectly secure computer or phone with secure messaging capabilities, from the hardware up, that company would immediately be told to play ball or face blackballing.
The mobile phones are by far more limiting and take away control of the owner.
A simple example would be the possibility to edit the HOSTS file on Android. I am the owner and administrator of this device, yet I am unable to do basic controls of my device.
My gf asked me why her Android can't install new apps (gplay says it doesn't have enough space to install 14MiB app, phone says it has 200MiB free).
So I go to adb shell to see what's taking up space, df says 700MiB free on user data filesystem (so the stupid gplay app is lying). `ls` and `du` says permission denied almost everywhere.
To unlock/root the phone, it needs to be erased, or needs some apk installed (which doesn't work). Even Windows 95 20 years ago had less shitty debugging experience.
Just makes me glad I never bought a smartphone, personally.
Other time we needed access was just to back up the list of contacts. Also not possible without a stupid possibly closed source apk. It's not even part of adb backup. But many regular apps are allowed to steal your contact list and send it anywhere they want. Bleh.
"User hostile" doesn't even cut it, when you lose access to your data the moment app installation breaks, and can't get to your data via debug tools.
I feel forced to circumvent this so called 'protection'.
Who's going to tell him who made the x286 and DOS? Not exactly 501(C) organisations...
The inflation-adjusted price of an IBM AT when it was introduced in 1984 was about $15k.
Of course Apple and Microsoft won't get you any privacy (see Prism), but Linux and a good VPN can get the author everything they want.
This isn't a high bar for computers. I'm not sure what part I'm missing.
Nowadays, you can only truly own an emulator.
I don't think either are immune from the problem. Even Ubuntu was sending people's local disk searches to their servers so that they could push amazon ads. Everything I've ever touched from Apple seemed to push you to their own apps/ecosystem. If you want to put music on your iphone, you can't just plug it in and open it like a drive, they'll push you to itunes. They also seem to very heavily push their cloud stuff.
-- The key advantage of an old MS-DOS / floppy based computer is that you can always bring your system back to a known safe state--
Once you adopt any operating system that is always running, the OS has to protect the hardware from everything, if you want to be able to trust it. This rules out Linux, Mac-OS, Windows, etc. I'm hoping that Genode does a good enough job to be able to trust it, but it's a bit beyond my learning curve right now.
If you have a secure OS, which isn't stupid about trust, then you're back in the saddle again, and can build upon this foundation, being careful to never give any executable you run more privilege than it needs to do the job. Linux, Windows, and Mac-OS all have stupid defaults (allow everything the user is permitted)... Genode and systems that implement capabilities don't do that. (No, "access your contacts" on your tablet or phone is not a proper "capability", "you can read this file", and "you can write this folder" are proper capabilities).
-- A secure system lets you assign capabilities using dialog boxes like you're used to using, except they call them a "power box". The OS then enforces your decisions, not the application. No matter how rogue or confused your program gets, it can't access anything outside of the files or folders you've given it access to. 8)
We're a few years out before awareness of the stupid defaults we're all living with take hold, and the inertia of everything then has to be overcome. We'll get there eventually, if we can keep the idea at least an open option before big business closes it down for good.
No, you don't. Or, at least, you didn't want it enough for too long enough!
Each time you sent your friend a document which was not formatted in an open standard, you didn't want a computer that you owned.
Each time you accepted DRM in order to access some nice content, you didn't want a computer that you owned.
Each time you run a program or, God forbids, an OS which you didn't have the source code of, you didn't want a computer that you owned.
Each time you accepted to be target by advertisers as a way to enjoy a "free" service, you didn't want a computer that you owned.
Industry gave you what you wanted. Industry gives you what you still want.
Second,participating in a ubiquous system does not mean you support a part or all of it. If I buy chicken from the supermarket, that does not mean I support all the atrocities in chicken farms. I could avoid buying chicken and going vegan, but then the same argument can be made for pretty much any other industry. Someone is getting screwed either way, doesn't mean I like it.
What models are being referred to here? Sounds like the OP’s problem can be solved with more money.
OP could just not connect to the internet, job done, right? The issue isn't so much they want privacy, it's that they want us all to have privacy.
It's not reasonable to expect average-joe to know about coreboot, seek out hardware that specifically supports it, then find a collection of browser extensions and communication tools just to have a private conversation with a friend.
Instead we should have regulations in place that make it possible to buy the computer at the local store and talk to your kids online without being monitored every step of the way.
Which ones?
There’s a huge world of difference in complexity and understandability between an MCU and the SOCs in a phone even if the instruction set is the same.
https://github.com/mcci-catena/HW-Designs/tree/master/Boards... https://github.com/mcci-catena/catena-riscv32-fpga
ie. an FPGA you can put your own OS AND radio firmware on. Something like https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5921 (and see the updates https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates) doesn't cut it fully as the wifi has a firmware blob, and in addition I'm not sure how open the xilinx toolchain is (might be, I know some xilinx chips are supported by open source toolchains).
As an OS for the feather board, you could use DASH7 for the radio portion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH7), and Oberon as a general OS. (https://blog.gadgetfactory.net/2016/02/how-to-implement-the-...)
Obviously several problems exist there - only Linux has an available FPGA toolchain, so you need a linux computer to bootstrap Oberon onto the FPGA, and DASH7 won't run on the same device (it runs on STM32 boards mainly).
So, to get a completely open design, you'd need to port DASH7 stack and the FPGA tools to Oberon to allow self-hosting and fully open radio. Add to that the fact that this board doesn't supply any video output so your development is over ssh/terminal and you have a way to go to get a fully open system.
Other pain points are that Oberon is a systems language that uses GC, so for deterministic/realtime (radio) operation it is not usable - you'd need to use it's cousin Composita to have a deterministic memory managed OS.
Lastly, Oberon doesn't have any formal verification tools which would be ideal for verifying the entire self-hosted stack. I suspect you'd need to use a LISP of some sort to be able to verify things from the ground up. Of course most LISPs have GC so you'd need to migrate the Composita+Oberon (A2) architecture to LISP to be able to build higher-level verifiable constructs.
However... this is almost possible. There are a few key things to work out here, but it's closer than at any point previously :)
Do I own my M1 MacBook Air? Did I own my TRS-80 Model 4, an 8-bit, Z80-based computer circa 1983? Well, I didn't lease either one of them, I bought them outright. Apple can't demand their hardware back now any more than Radio Shack could have demanded theirs back then. So that's owning, right? No?
You say I don't own my Mac because I can't put a different operating system on it. It's true, I could run multiple operating systems on the TRS-80. Sort of. There was TRSDOS, CP/M, and... several nearly-interchangeable TRSDOS clones. Of course, I can run a lot more on the M1 if you count virtual machines (including all the TRS-80 operating systems), but I know that's not what you mean. You can run any OS that's been ported to the Mac on the Mac, though, and there's already work being done to port Linux and NetBSD. Do I not own the Mac because Apple's security measures make it difficult to do that porting?
You say I'm dependent on the largesse of Apple and they can "take things away" from me as long as I'm using the Mac. And, it's true they have a potential level of control over what I can run on macOS that Radio Shack didn't have over TRSDOS. Yet for practical purposes I depended on the largess of Radio Shack, too, and when that stopped, the writing was on the wall for that compuer line. Not the same thing? No, not exactly, but I bet you can't name a Mac application that you can't run because Apple pulled a hidden switch that stopped it from running. You can name a few that you could run a decade ago -- or in a very few cases, a year ago -- that you can't now because the OS changed, or the hardware changed. I can't run my once-beloved crazy writing brainstorming app, Dramatica Story Expert. But that's because its developer is legendarily terrible at keeping up with modern Apple hardware. It isn't because I don't own my computer.
You say that things aren't "private" on the Mac. What's that mean? The local data on the Mac is more protected than the local data on the TRS-80 was, I can tell you. Forget encryption, stuff rarely had plain text passwords! Data that isn't local is a question mark now, but it was a question mark then, too -- to the degree it was possible to have non-local data on places like BBSes and Compuserve and even the early Internet. I have way more data "in the cloud" now, but in many ways it's a lot more secure, because we weren't just thinking about security in the same way three or four decades ago. As for ad tracking, I'd argue that's a really important conversation about privacy, but it's not a conversation about "owning my computer" unless we're really stretching the metaphor.
And in the final analysis, "you don't own your own computer" is a metaphor, a semantic sleight of hand. I'm surely playing a semantic game here myself, but my issue with a lot of these arguments is that they're presenting as something that they maybe aren't. They're maybe less about liberté, égalité, fraternité than they are about nostalgia for a (remembered as) simpler, more tinkering-friendly time.
Perhaps we're going to return to a time where it's difficult to put an OS on your computer other than the one sanctioned by its manufacturer. Is that great? No. Does it mean we don't really own our computers? I'm just not sure I buy that.
[To vainly try to head off the "but iOS" responses: I'm explicitly talking about Macs in this example. And no, I don't expect Macs to ever be locked down to the degree iOS is. That's a rant for another time, though.]
> 2-26-21
as a date format is just wrong.
The reason most of the things you buy are cheap is due to economies of scale - you want something a lot of people want.
Want a bicycle with 2 wheels? Cheap. Want one with 7 wheels? Expensive.
Unfortunately for you, almost none of the things you say you want in a laptop are things you're aligned with most of humanity in terms of priority. Sure, most people might tell you they want those things, but they're not willing to give up the benefits of centralization, or pay a few bucks to get rid of ads.
Tldr: if you want something few people will buy, expect to pay more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
Snowden cited this as the reason he came forward.
This applies to communications and stored records however, not end user computers.
yep. Once he realized that the NSA was outright lying to congress and the American people had no ability in law to actually know or address the abuses going on leaking the truth was the only way anyone would ever hear about it.
I think this is the rub of the problem, because it's a contradiction: "I want secure software with no vulnerabilities, but don't you dare force me to update". This kinda sorta worked in the early 90's because most people weren't on the internet and few were actively thinking of exploiting anything -- it was a time of plaintext protocols and unauthenticated commands. The world has moved on, and our tradeoffs balance in a different place today.