To Fight Big Tech, We Must Seize the Means of Computation
truthout.org
truthout.org
Of course, you could try to open up or bypass the DRM module (e.g., via the GPU driver during hardware accelerated decoding), but that won't work with a TPM module and signed kernel space.
If you look at the security technologies introduced into consumer decides over the last decades, it all serves the dual purpose of securing your hardware from ... you.
Some blu-rays force you to update before you can watch them. Also, the key revocation lists can (I believe) be included in the blu-ray itself to make them work offline, too.
Alternatively you plug into the output of the decryption module in the monitor before it hits the screen?
I believe you can also in some instances skip the hardware capture card and instead capture the data stream out of the host's RAM.
Inside the monitor, the decryption module and the main SoC controlling the hardware are usually the same physical chip, so grabbing data there will be close to impossible.
the monitor itself is doing the unencrypting. As the other person said, it's specifically to protect the video from ... you.
Nope. Thanks to HDCP the data never hits the kernel or the host memory unencrypted. It doesn't even require TPMs or signed kernels.
Also, if the DRM module supports hardware decoding, the GPU will need to see a decrypted stream. The GPU memory is in principle accessible to the driver. So if you can manipulate the driver, or setup another kernel module, you might be able to grab that content.
Apparently they present as a compliant HDMI output to the source device, but they don't require HDCP or similar on the output they're passing it on to.
From there, you're free to do whatever you want with the output.
Manufacturing non-compliant devices could become extremely risky.
We can't run random code from the internet, because we can't control its side effects when we run it. This leads to avoiding novelty in general. This leads to going only to "safe" sites, and only looking at "safe" types of content, from "safe" channels.
It doesn't help that the anti-virus systems we're forced to run (because of our insecure computers) flag any novel executables as "dangerous" merely because their signature hasn't previously been present in a statistically large enough sample of users.
As for the "access" part of internet connectivity, which was originally intended to be symmetric, we collectively don't care because there aren't any trustworthy operating systems that can withstand direct connection to the internet without the full time attention of system maintainers. You can't turn a box on with a public IP and expect it to survive a decade without updates. (Unlike the wiring in my house, transformer on the pole, and everything else in the power grid)
Once we get Genode, Fuchsia, GNU Hurd, or some other capabilities based OS for our machines, we can reverse at least the "safety" part of the problem.
Locked hardware isn’t much of an issue either. Most of that either can be unlocked or there are equivalently powerful unlocked alternatives to be had.
What people must seize is the network, and the network effect. Most of today’s tech empires are built on owning the hub around which everyone communicates. The fact that they own a lot of hardware is just about irrelevant to their market power or dominance.
The only area where compute power determines relevance at all today is AI base model training and large scale AI deployment and that is likely not going to last that long. In the next few years the market for accelerators for AI is going to heat up a lot and prices will come down. There is no way the nVidia monopoly will last more than another two years tops.
Yet we don't do it. A sort of digital rigor mortis has descended upon the land. A comatose capitulation, complete lack of vital signs, let alone the lust for life that characterized the early period of the Web when everything seemed possible.
The "network effect" is really a psychological and economic mind game. Once a sufficient number of people were conditioned (tricked by novelty and lack of education and regulation) to consider it a "reality" it became a runaway self-financing monopoly.
A collective digital hallucination that is actually against the self-interest of the vast majorities, based on rather dodgy foundations and atypical of how societies are generally organized. It was never a perfect world but it never flirted so closely with a surveillance dystopia.
This state of affairs becomes very puzzling when it is now almost a point-and-click exercise to setup the equivalent of the early facebook or twitter or skype etc (#fediverse, #matrix, you name it). Either this is the darkest hour before dawn or it is the darkest hour, period.
The problem is that good software that ordinary people can easily use is extremely labor intensive to produce. Software is very expensive.
This means you have to have an economic model and there has to be a toll booth somewhere or an indirect way of generating revenue like ads. Centralized services make those parts easy.
Everything else can be built in a decentralized manner. Many times it’s even easier to build that way. But how do you build it if there’s no funding available and nobody pays for anything?
It can’t all be volunteer. People need to be paid. There’s nowhere near enough volunteer open source labor available to build really polished usable systems for everyone.
It’s similar to the dynamic in other areas of media. Media is usually a deflationary race to the bottom. The best media has no funding.
We pay for almost everything in tech. Part of the digital hallucination that oppresses us is to have this self-flagellating view.
Nobody gets any free hardware of any kind. Nobody gets any free network infrastructure and bandwidth of any kind. Its all paid, by purchases, monthly subscriptions etc. With real, hard earned money by people from all walks of life and economic means. Not to mention that historically people happily paid for newspapers, TV licenses and they still do for streaming.
The deceit of big tech is propagating the idea that after you have shelled for the all the above, you really don't have to pay for certain very specific pieces of software and services - oh just pay with your reduced privacy and agency (which you don't even know is important).
What is happening is that the masses can't tell they are being ripped off (and the potential risks to individuals and society) and nobody in authority does warn them either.
In such a situation it is indeed impossible to have a normal economic model to compete. Bad business models repelled good business models.
But there is just the slightest glimmer of light at the end of this dark tunnel. While you are right, the volunteer open source enthusiasts can't substitute for the absence of healthy funding they achieved something very important: they showed that alternatives are possible, they don't require trillions, they just require a society with basic decency.
You can build high quality open freedom and privacy first software. Then you will probably go bankrupt. Lots of people will use it but nobody will pay for it.
Mastodon is used by millions. I’ve heard the devs make way below market rates and the foundation behind it is cash starved. That’s just one example.
Yes, the funding situation around mastodon is very transparent and many other interesting projects in this space are total labor of love. I will forever admire those people whether they manage to make the world better or not.
Well, politicians could create a healthy market for software overnight by outlawing various targeted advertising practices. Once personal data gathering and use for advertising (and who knows what else - who ever reads and understands these manipulative "terms and conditions") is prohibited, any software supported by generic ad technology will be unsufferable.
Ten years ago you could excuse politicians, regulators and the lot that is supposed to work on our behalf as not being informed. Today there is no excuse.
The network is currently download only for most households. We need iCloud and YouTube and other companies hosting our content because of ipv4/CGNAT and lack of upload bandwidth.
Ideally, we would be able to host our own content on our own NAS at home and access it from anywhere, but the market or people who have an internet connection capable of that is not worth addressing.
I don't think we need to subvert the network. What we need to do is foster interest-specific community. As a child, I did not have access to the internet. I spent my days playing with friends and my communities were my family, the street I lived in, and my school.
Now my most used mobile app is WhatsApp where I interact only with people I know (I pruned my contact book) and because SMS and calls are not cheap. They added something called Channels that I'm not enabling. The other platform I visit is Hacker news, for tech related discussions. I don't care about Facebook, Twitter, or Google. The majority of people that does use them do not understand what is HTML or a domain name (based on my entourage).
I don't know if we can evade their grasps on our data (shadow profiling), but I know I'm not using them. And I try to evangelize people about them. But I don't have faith that the majority of people will abandon those social platforms. But I've done and now I'm purposely seeking more specific communities online.
When the educated are not pulling in your direction... it becomes much more expensive to get traction.
We already have experienced facebook, why would we re-experience facebook 1.0??
We need geniunely new concepts. We cannot share geniunely new concepts because the internet has locked itself down and any leaks of new concepts are stolen or blocked (at some point).
Big tech feels entitled to own the internet, and it has got exactly what it wants. The daytime TV of networks. First link clicked sells some product, high quality evidence and knowledge hard to find and moral culpability hidden behind complex laws.
It appears dark, because the light is trapped. Work on your new-ness in private, it is the only way.
> There is no way the nVidia monopoly will last more than another two years tops.
I feel as if I've heard paraphrases of this sentiment for at least the last ~6 years. Is there a reason you think nvidia's monopoly is decreasing or will decrease? They have quite the lead in terms of market share for discrete GPUs AFAICT (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-market-healthy-and-vib...). Even if costs go down etc., there are market dynamics at play here that I'm not convinced this industry will get disrupted anytime soon. The only major competitors in innovation for this space are Apple, Intel, and AMD, with Apple being the only one with manufacturing improvements, and that's a walled garden with very low market share for desktop computing.
Prior to this year AI was much more of a niche thing. It wasn't seen as the unambiguous next generation of computing the way it is now.
They have poured an enormous amount of time and effort into CUDA and its related libraries. All of that work—in addition to the hardware—is what makes their moat deep and wide. If AMD and/or others invest similarly in ROCm, that will be very telling. Oh, and the work that the Mojo folks are doing is also very interesting; I could also see that as a looming threat for NVIDIA!
That is, there is a network out there. You're not going to seize the existing one. You're not going to take over Facebook, either by government mandate or by force of arms. You're just not.
And that's OK, because "seize" was always a morally bankrupt idea anyway.
You want a network that's the peoples' network? Great. Go build it. Go convince people to use it.
That's not as hopeless as it sounds. As the existing stuff becomes more and more horrible to use, the existing players are doing your marketing for you.
I'm happy about the quality of discussion in Lemmy, although it would be nice to have more niche communities. On the other hand, the enshittification of Reddit is for sure not over, so I'm happy to have left that timesink earlier rather than later.
The interesting question is, what makes an efficient protest? What is effective in what situations? How is it organized?
I've kept both my accounts, and I look at both... And I'm quite happy with Lemmy in comparison. Reddit does tend to both have more content and more comments, but they're generally lower-value to me than Lemmy's comments.
I now check Lemmy first, and if I have more time to waste, check Reddit.
And that was with Reddit. Try inciting a full scale revolution against Google and Amazon, for what they are right now. It's not happening.
I've honestly come to the conclusion that 98%+ of people... don't give a darn about "computational freedom." And, to be honest, why should they? They have so many other demands on their lives than an argument about what software they can run on their phone. As long as it runs what they are used to, they don't care. The market also shows this as well. If "computational freedom" was something that most people actually cared about, Linux would not be sitting with ~2% market share.
I also have found that most people like appliances. We argue against appliances - like, why would you want your phone to be a dumb appliance considering everything it could possibly do? I've even seen Right-to-Repair and other people (I believe Cory included) screeching about how Apple has turned smartphones into appliances. For most people though... that's a feature, not a bug. Appliances mostly just work. "Computers" in their mind, don't. They don't want their phone to be like their "computer". In which case, I think Microsoft bears the greater blame for permanently sullying what a "computer" feels like.
Edit: And while I keep adding my thoughts, I think it is interesting how the App Store, despite literally restricting what customers can install, actually gives customers a very strong sense of "freedom." How many people install apps on Windows? Almost none - in part, because the openness of the platform made most people terrified to install, or even just download, anything. Customers aren't afraid of installing, or trying, anything from the App Store - so to them, the iPhone probably feels more free than their PC. While I generally support sideloading, I do get the sense that most people will, ironically, feel less free overall once it rolls out.
I think one of the big problems is not that phones etc are appliances but that everything company is trying to turn their offerings into an appliance (and alternatives becoming more and more niche), and at the same time alternatives are just not allowed to be on the same footing.
In some places you need either an Android (Google Android that is) or an iPhone to partake in some services (commercial or otherwise). Very often it feels penalizing to refuse to use either of those, or you lose out in quality of life or available services as a result. This isn’t good.
Reddit and its ilk are already dead. Even Lemmy's content starts to repeat itself due to 'cross posts' or other allegedly community building activities.
The chief problem of these platforms is their gameability. Numbers create social 'games' and before you know it, nobody gives a shit what you're saying, they just want to say some short quip, make a number go up, and feel superior.
It comes back around to the problem of: you can't solve social problems with more technology. Social media has a huge verifiability and trust problem.
We need to do away with karma systems, because giving people power to silence each other only leads to abuse. Invitation trees as a social concept keeps people honest, at least if they don't want to piss off others who invited them or were invited by the same person.
The group on Reddit really has no backbone. They folded as soon as their Reddit accounts were threatened. Real protest would've been gaming their system with bots (the same way they do!) And manipulating the narrative en masse.
Nobody had anywhere to go except the Fediverse, and that has its own collection of issues.
Social media is just not compatible with the way people socialize. It's a glamor and attention competition, and the winner gets... likes?
But yeah, to call that half-assed protest a revolution is somewhat of an insult to activism.
How do you define that?
People organizing themselves and changing their situation, successfully, is as old as time. Likely, you live in a country where democracy was forced on the powers-that-be in that way.
He spends the first 2000 words talking about how industry bribed the government to set unjust, inhumane policies on copyright, reverse-engineering, antitrust. Then in the 2nd half, all his tech proposals have to do with alternative tech solutions: federation, mastodon, driver coop apps, etc.
The problem with big tech is just capitalism. You don't fight capitalism with new apps. You fight capitalism with an independent political movement of workers. This movement wouldn't even be a tech-oriented movement because most people rightly don't give a fuck about tech.
We have to fight the political power of Musk and Zuckerberg by cutting off their ability to make profit. This happens through organizing in the workplace, and with a WORKERS PARTY opposed to the capitalist duopoly.
China has a "WORKERS PARTY". How's that working for them? Or is that not a true "WORKERS PARTY"?
wow never thought of it like that
DEF CON: https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?si=EBlHqv2tmKICIYhT
Srsly Wrong: https://srslywrong.com/podcast/297-platform-decay-and-how-am...
It's a great podcast. I recommend the episodes on degrowth and half earth socialism in particular.
We cannot sieze the means until you can afford a couple billion for a semi conductor fab and to run it at a loss for a very long time.
The cpu instruction sets are becoming black boxes, the programming languages are controlled by committee, the internet is run by certification and big tech companies that will choke you out if they don't like you.
The hardware is getting locked down with tpm chips.
I could write the next revolutionary piece of software and the pre-existing big tech gatekeepers have power over its profitability and the hardware and OS guys determine if my program can be run at all.
So tired of wasting decades on snake oil. Never has freedom been so controlled.
The ONLY way to generate an agreement with your own purposes, top to bottom, is to make and sell your own hardware and software, on your own network.
The existing platforms are permanently compromised by interest groups.
What I mean, we here speak about math models, we even know about open source models of economy of some countries.
I cannot remember here link, but anyone could find scientific articles about analyze of legislation texts, and scitech community even have one win case, when pointed on ambiguity in legislation and one parliament heared them and fixed text. To be more concrete, these works begin in 1990s, now they have official recognition.
No one I know does not check their SMS and email, and doesn’t pick up phone calls.
I’ve not been on social media for about 5 years now, and I have not fallen out of touch with a single friend because of that. For other reasons like moving away physically or not gaming as much anymore, but not for this. Everyone still picks up my calls and reads my messages.
Less relevant if your friend/family circle doesn’t organize group activities or chat as a group often, I guess.
facebook/nextdoor/discord send me vague "you missed a message/notification" email spam all the time, and it's never been worth my time to actually visit the app/website to see what they're notifying me. Slack and github, on the other hand, send me the actual message so I don't have to open a huge app and navigate tons of BS just to see it's somebody saying "LOL!", and 99% of the time it's something I'm actually involved in or interested or subscribed to.