The objective of computer security seems to have shifted from preventing someone else from running unauthoirzed software on your computer to preventing you from running unauthorized software on your computer. I would not describe this as security.
That didn't go away because people learned. And it never would have.
No. Those people get newspapers and landlines.
If they actually like any of the computers around them, it's probably the most locked-down ones: their phones and video game consoles.
[EDIT] That is, you're way off in thinking it's only a bunch of soon-to-be-dead grandmas who have trouble operating computers that don't prevent them from fucking things up too badly. The "digital native" generations are barely better.
If yes, man that's really dangerous thinking.
And I'm a life-long computer geek who's done professional mobile development. Most people care even less than I do. They just want it to work, because computers aren't their life, they just use them to get stuff done, or when someone else tells them they have to. Would it be sort of nice to have the option to unlock it? Yes, exclusively so I could run pirated games in emulators more easily, which is the only thing non-programmers I know with unlocked Android phones use all that freedom of theirs for. For most people, they'd not pay even a couple dollars to have the unlock option. It's worth basically nothing to them, because they do not have any actual use for it. But sure, it'd be nice. It's just not a big deal.
> If yes, man that's really dangerous thinking.
The NES had a DRM chip—a bad one, but still.
Some computers have been appliances, and some have been programmers' machines, for a long time, and the sky hasn't fallen. The former have just eaten some of the use cases for the latter, where a fully-capable general-purpose computer was at least as much of a liability as a boon.
Even Apple still makes normal-ass computers for people who need them. If your reaction to that statement is "pft, yeah, but they're clearly trying to get rid of those", well, people have been saying that for more than a decade, and it still hasn't happened and doesn't seem to be any closer, so... I'll believe it when I see it.
This is super misleading. There's only slightly more wide-open platforms now than there ever were, but there's way, way more locked-down ones.
> There's just also a couple new categories of computing appliance
A couple?
Yeah, I'm counting phones and tablets as two categories. But I'm also being really generous on how old something can be and still be "new" (15 years is quite a while, in tech) and not counting those as just an iteration (admittedly, a big one) on PalmOS devices and such. They're also much closer to being general-purpose devices than most other appliance-type machines (consoles, dedicated set-top boxes, et c.), occupying more of a middle ground between the two.
I suppose you could add smart watches and make it three. Set-top boxes are at least 23 years old (TiVo), so stretch even generous definitions of "new", and we had closed-source non-user-modifiable DVD players well before that.
Some people only have access to tablets and phones. Let them have the freedom we had to create something. With that freedom, maybe one of them grows up and creates the next Apple, only without the cruelty and greed.
On top of that, it would reduce waste.
> the next Apple, only without the cruelty and greed.
Sigh. Well, never mind, I'm out.
And cheers bud, see yah round.
Take the Web, we all run untrusted programs 24/7 there, every single snipped of Javascript is an untrusted program. Yet it neither does damage to our systems nor does it prevent the user from opening up the developer tools, hacking away on existing websites or making their own.
The Web isn't perfect either, but it's worlds better than Android and Co.
Susceptible to damage by inkjet cartridge DMCA attack.
Replace by "email support", nobody likes spam, much harder to defend. They've been softening up people with the anti-social media work, so it's palatable.
Good catch! I really am sorry if that's damaging or condescending, it's meant as a golden rule thing.
That's the opposite of what is being said.
yes, i do, and the thing that i mostly find is people paying for "legitimate products" that their computers can do for free with essentially no additional hassle. Apple and google arent in the business of protecting your naive family members, they are in the business of monopolizing the exploitation of your naive family members.
Just yesterday i discovered that jpeg compression is broken in preview, and has been for years. The top result for what to do about it on the macos subreddit is to pay for image editing software.
i suspect you of arguing in bad faith.
The ability to sandbox software (with a lot of effort) means that you can run software you don’t trust. The web is built on this.
The ones being sandboxed is the user.
Try getting investor dosh without it. Not happening.
And later moved into having workstation VMs accessed on the network as soon as PC virtualization catched with what mainframes have been doing for decades.
Sorry if I got your point wrong :)