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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

The author nails so many points, it's a bit overwhelming.

The war on general computing seems to be the common underlying culprit, but how can this exploit ever be mitigated? The average person just wants "iPhone", and the subject of purchased hardware not serving them is even something they are interested in discussing or bothering trying to understand.

Computers are sneaky because what a computer is really up to can be made opaque to the end user.

Remember that experiment a few months back that made the computer beep everytime the web browser sent telemetry?

https://twitter.com/bert_hu_bert/status/1561466204602220544

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32617787 (11 months ago, 108 comments)

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The average person wants a secure device that just works. It’s very easy to maintain an iPhone that doesn’t have malware that can steal your banking auth token. It’s borderline impossible to do this on Windows. Since basically anything you run has full permission to read anything.

You can run a game on iOS and know for sure your other apps are safe. Do the same on windows and it installs a kernel module to monitor everything to make sure you aren’t cheating.

> You can run a game on iOS and know for sure your other apps are safe. Do the same on windows and it installs a kernel module to monitor everything to make sure you aren’t cheating.

I agree that Windows needs a better system for the user to restrict the permissions of an application. On the other hand: many AAA video games are known to use such a practice, and in such a situation, the typical gamer would rather allow the installation of such a kernel module instead of boycotting the game, as would be much more rational.

> The average person wants a secure device that just works.

I mean, I consider myself a tech person and I also want this for my everyday stuff. I love playing with gadgets and operating systems whenever I have extra time, but I do not want to troubleshoot wifi driver issues or reboot a crashed/bugging window manager when I'm in a rush to check the bus schedule on my phone.

I've been using various Linux operating systems on all my computers for almost two decades, but lately I've been thinking more and more if my next laptop should be a Mac just because I have less and less time to maintain and fix the machines. I want something that just works and I would pay good money to get a fully open and not enshittified phone or laptop, but they don't seem to exist.

Indeed. The author is the brilliant Cory Doctorow. He usually overwhelms.

Actually enforced regulation. GDPR, right to repair, stricter laws around advertising, forced interoperability, enforcement of existing laws against malware/spyware.

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