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Comment by AnonymousPlanet | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe for one second that Google is doing this because Apple does so too. They would have done so long ago. I would rather bet this has to do with recent political shifts that are also pushing for mandatory digital IDs and spying on encrypted messages (see UK and EU). This and Windows 11 depending on certain hardware are all pointing in one direction: a war on general computing.

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And Apple has been in the forefront to normalized the "a war on general computing" for more than a decade now.

15 years ago this is exactly what we said was going to happen with the normalization of Apple's locked down ecosystems, and now here we are.

Why single out one company? Microsoft's mobile platform was just as locked down. Microsoft's hold over boot keys is a lock down that even spreads to other OSes and will be very relevant in the future I foresee. All pieces are falling into place for the final rag pull.

And like I said, I do not believe this move is because Apple paved the way. If they hadn't, Apple would make a similar announcement to Google now in 2025.

It is strange that this is happening all at once. Pretty much no major advances in the war on general purpose computing for the past decade, but in 2025 there are a number of major attempts to lock everything down.

Let's think about what happened in 2025. Say, January 2025. Say, 20 January 2025.

That's called 'Reductio Ad Trumpum' and it is just as absurd as its spiritual predecessor, 'Reductio Ad Hitlerum' (https://www.fallacyfiles.org/adnazium.html)

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Do you really believe it's Trump's fault that politicians in the EU are pushing for the end of encryption, mandatory digital ID, and age verifications?

never let a good crisis go to waste, right?

but the same processes that put the orange man there put similar people in other places too

and similar sentiments led to voters preferring authoritarian measures

You left the DMA and GDPR out of that, which makes the entire argument conveniently one-sided.

Yes and no, Safetynet and Play Integrity were also major attacks against computing.

>"a war on general computing"

This. It gives too much freedom to people.

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