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Comment by mildmotive | Hacker News Reader

And it will keep getting worse as long as the majority of the population lack proper core values to oppose it.

The majority of the population lives in poverty. It's very-very difficult to have any values other than survival while poor. There's also very slim chance poor people to be educated. They work 12h/day at jobs where they can't even go to toilet. When would they have the time to read about a bootloader?

This is the core problem. A person should be able to refuse attempts once he understands the goal. The problem is not technology, but the obfuscation through it (and privacy policies, lobbying).

I don't think it's a values problem. The technical issues here are complex. Can you explain bootloader locking or remote attestation to your grandmother?

Personally I think a better approach is to push the phrase "right to recycle and repurpose" as much as possible. People get that. Everybody personally has seen the unsettling amount of e-waste that passes through their ownership and into a landfill somewhere.

Right to repair isn't enough, because these restrictions don't block you from keeping things working the way they did when you bought the device. Recycling and repurposing is something everybody can understand. It answers the question of "wait don't only evil hackers care about that?"

How does it follow though. Bootloader locking and remote attestation don't stop you recycling devices or even repurposing them. They stop you changing the OS stack to an unknown one and then using them for the exact same purposes as before. That's much harder to explain and it boils down to in most cases, people still in love with the idea that one day a hacker/grassroots OS may become popular. Which is fun for developers to imagine but has no relevance to any end users.

>Bootloader locking and remote attestation don't stop you recycling devices or even repurposing them.

Not even close to true.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/43jywd/why-tens-of-thousands...

Anti-theft features aren't anything to do with remote attestation, and this feature does not stop recycling the devices, it just means that only Apple can recycle them. Which would likely be true anyway due to how integrated the components are.

> Anti-theft features aren't anything to do with remote attestation, and this feature does not stop recycling the devices Activation Lock relies on a remote attestation mechanism. It will not unlock without a connection to Apple's servers and can't be bypassed on the device.

>it just means that only Apple can recycle them. Which would be a problem

>Which would likely be true anyway due to how integrated the components are. You don't need Apple to melt down gold

It's not enough for the majority of people to oppose a trend. There are plenty of issues where trends continue despite scattered opposition from the majority.

Widespread activism could make a difference. If it becomes a major point of contention in elections, that could make a difference. These don't happen 'by default' though.

True, but at the same time, if your grandma's identity was stolen you'd be more likely to be willing to discard some freedom for the sake of security.

There's a general willingness to trade incremental freedom for security in many arenas but ascending that gradient is a hard sell

False dichotomy. Security does not have to come at the price of freedom.

What security can be obtained without sacrificing _any_ freedom?

I wonder if you travel by plane, and if you voluntarily consent to the full body scans in European and USA airports? Or do you oppose it by opting out?

I believe that the values are mostly present. They just don't have many easily understood and widely known ideals to compare to.

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