It's sad to me how exciting it is to run <your own software> on <your own hardware>
It's already somewhat involved to get new firmware on a lot of network connected home devices you buy, but it'll become even more difficult.
3D printers are about to get pushed over the edge via legislation.
Tractors.... gestures wildly at Deere
You can't fix software problems in your dishwasher or fridge.
Liability lawsuits drive a lot of this :/
That's the official line a lot of the vendors responsible will push, but the evidence for that is...lacking.
Compare that to the simple reality that doing this is more profitable and devices that can't be easily repaired lead to more consistent sales. Capitalism gonna capitalism.
And in the case of true fear of liability lawsuits, even that also has capitalist greed undertones:
Imagine you're building random-iot-device-with-a-lithium-battery. You could:
1. Build the whole thing so it's easily hackable
Your lawyers point out prior art in liability cases around exploding/burning lithium-powered-devices and won't really approve release without some precautionary measures
2. Properly isolate and test the battery and related systems, ensure they can't possibly overheat even in the face of arbitrary input from the rest of the system, if modified. Lock down the battery parts, leave everything else open.
3. Do some testing on the whole-ass system to assuage your lawyers, and then lock the whole thing down
3 is typically cheaper, a lot of companies then open door 3 instead of 2.
Capitalism and liability lawsuits tag teaming here imo
Side note, the reason we have a litigious society imo is because most companies reach for door #4
4. Yolo, release unsafe product even with company's own firmware, fires and explosions ensue, people are maimed and die, lawsuits follow. Because lawsuits are the only recourse, we don't hold the companies criminally liable or anything.
That's more than enough to avoid civil liability for user stupidity
Locking shit down is something you do for other reasons entirely
Then respond with more capitalism and don't buy devices that are not user-serviceable.
- Buy a PC instead of a PS5/Xbox
- Buy appliances that are compatible with Home Assistant, or stick to "dumb" devices
- Refuse to connect to the Internet devices such as TVs and cars that do not strictly need it, regardless of "convenience"
- Reject proprietary software and apps
- Only buy phones whose bootloader is unlockable, so that the stock OS can be replaced by something user-controlled
This isn't really an issue where capitalism prevails in favor of the user like with some privacy issues. We need legislation to pass.
Laws don't prevent firms from doing illegal things. Without public awareness, nothing will change.
And for those that don't: we now have a legal channel to report them to. Having the government enforce its laws is more effective than trying to arrange a general boycott.
- offer a locked and unlocked version and let the free market decide which is preferred. Provide an unlock option that divorces the device from corporate control and release the hardware to the customer (i.e. a MacBook that can be unlocked and put Linux on, but can never be used for macos again)
- subject to FTC anti-monopolistic regulations just like other industries. In some alternate universe, the FTC decided that sony should not have a monopoly on PS5 games, and competitors should have the ability to enter the market. This is the converse to unlocking, although competitors would still be bound to preventing copyright infringement.
> Hey boss, as your attorney I think we should ban employees from ever leaning on things because what if one of them got a spinal injury from leaning too much? We could be liable for permitting leaning when they could be cleaning.
That should especially include cars and phones, with 10x min damages if a vendor or insurance company falsely claims firmware modifications were at fault if problems arise.
(So, if you turn off unnecessary cabin beeping, and then get in an accident and the insurance company rejects because of “unauthorized modifications”, then they pay you and the other party at least 10x actual damages if they end up losing in court.)
Vendor retaliation (undismissable nag screens, force pushed regressions and compatibility breaks) should have even higher damages.
This would immediately enable people to run secure, open variants of android, and also mod their iPhones.
We now have the network effect affecting devices too :)
That’s specific to Democrat controlled states, unlike age verification requirements. They’ve decided to treat everyone like prisoners rather than imprison criminals.
Are we sure about this? I always thought that if you modify something and the modification injures you then the OEM shouldn't be liable. This sounds like a shallow dig at liability.
Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.
We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.
92.2M units sold, as of today 1 unit? running Linux.
Not everything needs to have political, teenage angst applied to it.
90M+ consoles sold is proof society has completely accepted the idea of a locked ecosystem with hardware they don’t get to control.
I think you are misinterpreting that number. It would be better read as "as of today, the first PS5 running Linux". There were people running racks of PS3s as Linux servers back in the day not as gaming stations but compute using its hardware. People will do crazy things. Do not write them off.
The reason they care whether your commercial software is licensed is that their business model is charging for software licenses for that software.
Once there were indications that people were very much interested in, and working on, running rips of commercial games on PS3 Linux, and/or leveraging OtherOS to jailbreak a stock PS3, it was basically game over for OtherOS/PS3 Linux, in spite of the fact that it had been advertised on the box (of the original "fat" PS3) as a feature of the system.
Piracy (in the running unlicensed commercial games/copyright infringement sense) had long been the killer app for jailbreaking, including mod chips (and other schemes for playing CD-R "backups") for the PS1 and PS2, as well as PSP jailbreaks and custom firmware; homebrew notwithstanding, the most popular use was playing commercial games without paying for them.
Sony also nerfed the original 5-console installation (aka "game sharing") for PSN games after players organized public game sharing web sites to split the cost of games 5 ways.
"No one could have predicted this!" as they (don't) say.
Try filing a warranty claim if it bends, the manufacturer will go and tell you to kick rocks.
(This is supposed to be satire but feels scarily accurate anyway.)
The whole set of software IP rules seems like mental gymnastics to justify a career (that I like, support, and benefit from) rather than rules that come from axioms or ethics that make sense.
The PS5 is a games console and is marketed as such, not a general-purpose computer. Of course they want, and "force", you to use it to play PS5 games. I have a hard time seeing this as coercive when computers still exist, even if architecturally a PS5 is virtually identical to a general-purpose computer in most of the ways that matter, because at least since the Fairchild Channel F, it's always been the case that consoles are just constrained computers.
> Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.
> We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.
Imagine, for instance, if that flat head screwdriver had a means to prevent you from using it to pry things open. Some kind of magical negative mass in the handle that kicks in to cancel out leverage but not torque, or an explosive charge that blows your hand off if more than a certain amount of force is applied non-rotationally, or something. It might seem a little less risible then, and you would probably just opt to buy a screwdriver that doesn't have such restrictions (especially if those restrictions were explosively enforced).
Like, I get it. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the argument that we should be able to do whatever we want with hardware that we own. At the same time, being upset about the PS5 making it impossible to run arbitrary software without hacking feels a little like being upset that your washing machine doesn't clean your dirty dishes as well as it cleans your dirty laundry: it's not made for that, and it's not really reasonable to expect it to be able to do that well if at all.
Except that's so completely not like what's going on with modern hardware. They're taking general purpose computers and restricting you from doing general purpose computing on them. Like, a dishwasher is made to wash dishes. It has a shape and a design made for washing dishes. You would need to make physical modifications to get it to wash clothes. This is like taking a machine that could wash both dishes and clothes and intentionally stopping it from washing clothes.
This is not OK. This needs to stop. Soon they'll come for our general-purpose computing with "features" for DRM.
But so much tech hardware is commodified. A pregnancy test probably isn't using hardware dissimilar to your laptop. It just has less of it.
I don't think there's an expectation that every electronic is user programmable. But anything that is general phrpose should be punished as such for trying to put in excessive restrictions. There are arguments for game consoles on both aisles, but I don't agree with the mentality of "anything with general hardware needs general programming ability"
Sony has had this business model since the original PlayStation (1994), but it doesn't seem to have destroyed the ability to run Linux on your PC, or to have a Linux-based game console like the Steam Deck or Steam Machine.
You may also be surprised that some people consider the fixed-function design of game consoles to be a positive thing.
Steam Deck is a gaming-focused handheld PC. It has a software certification system similar in function to what you see on console. If a user sticks within that environment, they essentially have the "console experience". There could be less friction with stronger certification enforcement, but Valve are consciously less strict for ideological and practical reasons. Is Steam Deck fixed function? Valve seems to intend it to be so, they just provide options for those who want to break free of the default gaming-centric environment.
Sony could provide an optionally accessible VM running a Linux distro, providing access to an open environment to install and run the stores that they want. Would it break their business model? Maybe, but no one is entitled to business models that are blatantly anti-competitive. It also wouldn't prevent it from being a fixed function console for those who want that, given that engagement with those features would remain a choice.
"Fixed function" isn't an excuse to build a vertical monopoly. It's been a long time coming for the console razor blade marketing model to come under scrutiny and Sony meets the criteria of being a gatekeeper under EU's DMA. When I look at what Microsoft is doing with Helix (which everyone else seems to be confused by) I get the feeling that Microsoft is anticipating exactly that outcome and getting out ahead of it.
> Soon they'll come for our general-purpose computing with "features" for DRM.
You... haven't noticed all of the existing DRM features?
This is like a post saying someone got Apple Basic running on their Commodore 64.
Hardware we buy should be open to be modified easily with a common open source scheme - but any modifications should void warranty.
At the same time, we don't live in that world and so this post and the work done is still cool and exciting.
Instead, it has been hijacked by those who have never opened a PC before or were never interested in the field to begin with and saw it as a VC vehicle get-rich-quick scheme infiltrated by tons of grifters.
Once the money dries up post-extraction then they (grifters) abandon the field to the true 'hackers' still in the field doing clever projects like this one.
Overall, it just shows that the hacker ethos never went any where. It's just younger people being exposed and thinking it's something new.
The problem, of course, is that ordinary people don't care at first, because at first the collar is only installed around your neck and not yet used to shock you, and people with no eye for the future say, what's the big deal? It's just a collar.
It's only after they're around enough necks that people start getting zapped for modifying the OS, but even then some people will say, it's for your own good, why are you defending "hackers"?
Then people start getting shocked for trying to compete with the incumbents or expressing unpopular opinions, but by that point every device without a collar is some kind of obscure Linux Phone with a high price and low specs.
Now you're at the point where all someone has to do is make a competitive device which is otherwise identical to the one they were going to make anyway but it doesn't come with a shock collar and ordinary people will want it because they're tired of getting screwed. But the same critics will show up to say that ordinary people don't care about that and point to the fact that they didn't when it was first being rolled out and nobody was getting electrocuted yet.
I'd love to do stuff like this but am still looking for a job. Let alone one with proper work life balances.
Let's say I want to build a drone from scratch.
(To me) it seems that, he is saying how bad the situation of hardware/lock-in is that we are being excited over being able to run our own software on said hardware in the first place (Aka the reason why we are here)
Being able to run doom on pregnancy tester is actually good. If I paid for the tester, I am gonna use the whole tester to run doom (LOL)
So I think this is what they meant.
But “we” have to own that the reason that Sony stopped selling/supporting Linux in their machines is because “we” used it to circumvent copyright on closed-source games. It is the problem with “our” ethics, not theirs that led to Linux getting pulled.
In any case OtherOS didn't have access to the full system resources and, on top of that, Sony actually lost money on PS3s because it was priced as a loss-leader, with game purchases being supposed to earn the actual money.
After Yaroze, Sony thought PS2Linux would bring some indies into PS2, instead it got full of MAME and other emulators, hence why PS3 no longer offered graphics acceleration.
I would have thought we'd have soft-mods to allow this within a couple weeks of any new console launch, and perhaps the hardware vendors would even be supporting it by now.
I was really looking forward to the Steam Machine but the RAM shortage ruined their plans.
I want to support gaming on linux, and the steam machine was what made it great.
Something doesn't add up.
It reduces security, expands attack surface, reputational damage from people complaining about their phones bricking doing something unsupported.
>We've been able to run anything on PCs for over 40 years
And the PC platform has had terrible security. Do not use it as an example of everything being fine. You are forgetting the malware for PCs which would spread by writing a custom operating system on a removal media. Then that removable media is plugged into another PC and when that PC boots up it boots that operating system which goes ahead and infects the OS installed to the hard disk along with any other removable media.
And your example is ignoring two things that make it even more absurd. One, I've never seen a computer that will auto-boot into removable media, the default is always existing media first, and changing that requires user input. But also, if you have direct physical access to the PC, you don't need these complex basically-nonexistent boot exploits. If you have physical access, it's already over. You can invisibly MitM the network, monitor, keyboard/mouse inputs even if the device doesn't allow custom systems. You can wait for the system to be logged in, then take any data you need. If you're a government actor, you may even have devices that extract unencrypted data from almost anything using zero-days, even the most 'secure' computers or phones.
Stealer malware is running rampant on the PC platform. It is not going fine.
>One, I've never seen a computer that will auto-boot into removable media
Look into late 20th century PCs. They are designed to boot from a floppy disk first.
>But also, if you have direct physical access to the PC
It does not take physical access to write to a floppy disk.
It exists. Arbitrary words like "rampant" let you skew the conversation in your favor with no data. In what I see, malware has only gotten rarer, and most people are never affected by anything like it. And then 99% of stealers get there by asking the user for permissions at the system level or using sandbox escape exploits, even in fully secure systems.
> Look into late 20th century PCs. They are designed to boot from a floppy disk first.
Yes. Luckily, we wised up and this is no longer the case. And we even managed to do it without locking users into what <VENDOR> has decided was the best and only choice for them! In addition to already being fixed, it's just completely irrelevant today. When have you last seen a PC with a floppy drive, let alone one that people continue feeding floppies to this day? Are you saying that you consider people writing modern floppy boot malware and then injecting those floppies into organizations running legacy computers an actual, realistic threat?
> It does not take physical access to write to a floppy disk.
It takes physical access to insert it, and a whole lot of indirect IRL access to sneak infected media into whatever business is still using them.
I'm not saying these things aren't bad. I maintain my previous point - the 'drawbacks' of open computing are minuscule, but real. The fact that you had to go all the way back to floppies, boot malware and physical attacks proves the point of how esoteric it all is. The internet is the real killer, and it affects every platform. The counterexamples come off as the kind of improbable justifications that every software megacorporation breaks out every time they want to lock down something "for your safety".
Since you picked the phone as an example, right now when I search for ChatGPT in the Play Store, the top app is a fake app with a counterfeit logo. Is it really this platform which was supposed to improve security?
It's a harder problem for sure but harder because Google earns money from the problem.
That's not true? Nearly every laptop, desktop, and server can trivially run whatever OS+software, of course, but also currently at least virtually all Android devices can run arbitrary user built/supplied software (I grant that, unfortunately, replacing the OS is often harder). Embedded stuff varies, but frequently anything capable of running a general purpose OS (which IMHO is generally the line to call it a "computer") can have it replaced.
>> Embedded stuff varies, but frequently anything capable of running a general purpose OS (which IMHO is generally the line to call it a "computer") can have it replaced.
A microwave isn't generally viewed as a computer. In particular, if not even the manufacturer isn't running arbitrary code on it (only a tiny little program to do... microwave stuff...) then I view it as out of scope to an argument about artificially-restricted computers.
Also, replace "consumers" by "people" who might need to control their devices to do things that may be against the interests of the manufacturer, like removing ads and surveillance.
In such an alternate timeline there may be another operating system even better than Linux.
It also depends on the criteria on which you judge it. I may be better in terms of compatibility because everything would be an expensive walled garden like Apple's. It would be worse in terms of choice because niche peripheral makers might not be able to enter the market at all. And it would certainly, almost guaranteed, be much much worse in terms of personal freedom because no-one would be allowed to modify any parts of any piece of software without some cryptographic hardware module stopping them. Imagine that situation, and then imagine how a government would use that to impose surveillance on all personal computing devices.
Maybe sco and similar would have managed to fight against windows, but i suspect online would be decades behind what it is without the freedom we knew in the 80s and 90s that so many HN pundits are salivating to grow away.
Maybe a minitel system would be better - we would t have the problems of social media at least.