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Comment by buzzert | Hacker News Reader

> Except for a handful of very over-priced models that I can't afford to buy, our computers are increasingly designed to be little more than advertising platforms and vehicles for maximizing the cloud revenues of their true owners

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.

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This is a "have my cake and eat it too" rant, it has nothing to do with reality. He wants it to run Excel, he wants to be able to use google/fb/whatever. He just wants to be able to do it in a way that costs nothing or next to nothing and that somehow still gives him "full autonomy and control". Or, more accurately, the ILLUSION of full autonomy and control. Why an illusion? Because no matter how much control he has over his own computer, it doesn't matter the minute it talks to another computer. By definition he doesn't control that computer, and he is by definition trusting it to treat whatever personal info he discloses correctly. So his dream of a fully autonomous and controlled computer won't even give him what he really wants.

Then by extension any kind of communication with someone who isn't yourself is automatically untrustworthy and subverts ones goals of control. Even shouting across the hall to your roommate or family member.

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?

Apparently that's not safe either. "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."

The author claims that, but I don't know of evidence of it being at all widespread. Dual_EC_DRBG is the one instance I know of, and I thought barely anyone used it.

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