Lockdown - The coming war on general-purpose computing
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
Many of today's printers, scanners and image editors already ship with restrictions designed to prevent the counterfeiting of currency. In effect general-purpose digital imaging has already been restricted.
What I wonder is how are these restrictions implemented, legally? Do laws or regulations require it? Or is it ad-hoc? Are OEM vendors persuaded or paid to implement it by the proprietors of the pattern matching technology (who in turn sell it to currency mints), or they concerned about vicarious liability if they don't?
I'm interested because this may serve as a template for how other restrictions are implemented in future.
Why build a printer that you can plug a monitor into, power some usb devices, and also connect a keyboard and mouse to?
It would be entirely pointless and too expensive for a manufacturer to do that.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/surveillance/2008-07-13-pr...
It's mostly a non issue, but there are always edge cases. For example there is software that let's you print backup data that can latter be scanned in which was somewhat hampered by this technology. 600DPI * 600DPI * 24 bits * 8.5inch * 11 inch = ~100mb a page which is not all that amazing today, but still useful in the early 90's.
100mb is probably enough to hold all the code you will write in your lifetime.
It is a template for what not to do. Counterfeitting still occurs. It only adds expense for manf., and invades privacy of people (probably the real reason governments push it, the anti-counterfeit is just a cover).
Plus counterfeiting is already illegal. There are lots of laws against it. Punish the violators, not everyone else.
To effectively prohibit any general-purpose computer, the government would effectively have to forbid the sale of transistors and solder.
What Microsoft, Apple or any particular hardware or software company chooses to do might be objectionable and annoying but it can hardly threaten open computing itself: I can always build my own PC and install linux.
In Australia, the mandatory Internet Filter failed. But conspicuously, the government is throwing money at ISPs who voluntarily filter. Now most biggest ISPs are adopting it. I predict when companies adopt NBN to leave the one digit megabit era, they'll have to have "appropriate criminal content filters in place" in order to be eligible (Taking a note from UK's internet censorship).
tl;dr: The government can use capitalism to kill freedom of choice. Slower, silent yet deadly.
Edit: The government could make an Internet User Owns Device Act that dictates that the hardware bought can not be sold with such remote access to removing content on the device. The user has to specifically opt-in for the remote removal service. Essentially, people can own their own devices they bought.
That said, I agree that governments can and do interfere with free markets and property ownership to push their agenda.
If computers where UEFI Secure Boot can be disabled are allowed in your country.
Firstly, nobody can build a computer to the standard of a contemporary desktop out of transistors and solder. It simply can't be done, even if you don't care about its size or power consumption. You can build a little 4-bit computer, but that's no use to you. So they don't have to prevent all unsecured computation, they just have to prevent you doing more than, say, a billion cycles of computation.
Second, even if the bar is much lower than that — say, you can buy all the chips you need, you just can't buy them preassembled into circuit boards — that's already an effective suppression of general purpose computation. Maybe you personally have the skills and the time to build a computer from those pieces, but I and most people don't. So I've been effectively prevented from computation. I won't write programs and post them on the net, and the online programming communities will dwindle to a small bunch of experts.
And once almost nobody builds or uses general-purpose computers, it's much easier for the government to say "We can't think of a legitimate reason you need a computer, therefore, anyone who has one is a terrorist/pirate/communist." QED.
It may just be me, but I don't think our society views general purpose computers as quite that dangerous.
The point is, stuff eventually gets regulated because of how it might be used, not because of how it's normally used.
(Thanks for making me research it, I learned some interesting stuff and I would learn more if I had more time.)
You might agree not on everything but I think it's a great talk to give non-technical people an idea what might happen.
It covers much more than even the Lockdown article and the questions from the audience at the end are both interesting and lead to even more interesting responses.
Movies don't download themselves, people download them.
People keep repeating that, like an article of faith. I really wouldn't put it past the smart folks at NSA or wherever to figure out a way to gradually turn the Internet into Cable TV. I don't think the Internet's current ability to "interpret censorship as damage an route around it" is something we should take completely for granted.
A talented hacker has much more power than any official. If people want 'locked' systems that can't be hacked it shouldn't ruffle your feathers. They're not hackers.
If you close the door on reality it will come in the window every time.
The sky is always falling. The end is always near.
The term 'spyware', in particular, has a well-defined meaning which indicates that the malicious software is communicating data back to the creator in order to exploit the user unknowingly. The author of this article uses the term to refer to non-general-purpose computers, and I think that's exceptionally misleading. The iPad could be considered a non-general-purpose computer, but most people would not go around labeling it as coming pre-loaded with 'spyware'.
It is very simple: If you are not in control of a device, someone else is.
Except that it can't, really, because it is loaded with software that prevents the user from doing some of the things they should reasonably expect to be able to do. Regardless of whether it comes from Apple, I would certainly be happy to call software that prevents me from using a computer that I own in a manner in which it is otherwise capable 'malware.'
I don't want to pirate software or content, but I do want to be able to use the equipment that was sold to me and that I now own in any way that I see fit. Merriam-Webster defines Malware as 'software designed to interfere with a computer's normal functioning'; a definition which I think is entirely appropriate here.