The Coming War on General Computation (2011)
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Then you can start expecting SWAT teams raiding people's homes for downloading songs illegitimately (and yes, you'll even see more dogs and even innocent people shot in the process - just like in that "parody" video where the SWAT team shoots the kid who was downloading songs in the head at the end, which I can't find right now).
Some of these are not felonies yet, but they're working hard [2] to "fix" that "problem". Current and future surveillance technologies, used by either NSA, FBI, DHS, or even the police will make that ever easier and more "tempting" to do.
[1] http://www.republicreport.org/2012/marijuana-lobby-illegal/
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/07/unauthorized-stream...
The immediate aftermath of a war can be just as horrifying as the conflict itself. And we know that it's important to plan the results you want out of a war (because somebody sure is).
So what do idle and technically unskilled hands /do/ for a living? My guess is that they won't change job descriptions very much, and since opportunities for helping Grandma across the street are relatively limited, they'll just be enforcing different stuff.
What stuff is that going to be?
The future was supposed to be amazing. What happened?
(~) I finally see the pro gun rights people's point of view. I'm disappointed in myself that it took a "me-relevant" analogy for me to understand.
People didn't care about politics. That's what happened. Politics is about who gets to decide how this future gonna be.
You can build all the flying cars and robots you want as a scientist, but if you don't try to influence politics (and not just by voting every 4 years or "writing to your senator"), you can still end up a slave.
So I wouldn't say it's inevitable. The same goes for surveillance. Many people think that due to technology, surveillance is simply inevitable. But 50 years ago, there already was a technology for suppressing free press, which was exercised in totalitarian regimes around the world. Still, democratic countries didn't have censorship of the press.
So there are optimistic precedents - existence of technology doesn't always mean that government is going to misuse it. Though probably not without a fight, anyway. I would end with modification of the famous slogan: "Think optimistic, act pessimistic!" We should assume better future is possible, but act under assumption that it's not going to happen (by itself, that is).
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-p...
I'm sure a lot of people here constantly fix the computers for their friends and family. Tablets and smartphones help decrease the amount of help they need. isn't that a good thing? Or is Doctrow scared of becoming irrelevant when hackers are no longer needed as techno-priests?
Low-cost manufacturers can thrive (comparatively) in that kind of environment by selling their devices for $25, but customers will suffer because their general purpose computers will be useless for non-hackers.
You cannot simply buy the RPi at a normal retailer, unlike (smart)phones, laptops, (smart)TVs etc. etc. This does not mean the RPi isn't a fantastic little machine or that it doesn't offer new possibilities. However, there is a world of difference between a developer board (that doesn't have a case, operating system, built-in storage etc.) and a ready-made consumer article.
General purpose computers become rarer with an increase in phones and tablets, all of them locked down. This is the making of a niché, and I think it is dishonest to simply assume people are worried about losing their status. Is the reduction in sales of general purpose computers the end of the world? Perhaps not. Should it prompt closer scrutiny and some concern? I think it should.
But the reason this happens is that most people, even when the computer they owned really was a general-purpose computer, didn't use it as one. Anyone reading or commenting on HN is an outlier; we actually need a general-purpose computer, because we need to be able to do things with it that its designers and builders never thought of. But most people don't. Most people want a small and pretty much stable selection of apps, and if those apps are there, they don't care whether or not the device they're running on could also run an infinite number of other apps.
As an anecdote: we have an iPhone 3G in our household, a phone that became progressively worse with certain updates after the release of both the 3GS and 4, to the point that it is nearly unusable for surfing now. This leaves me with exactly two options: stop using it as it was meant to be used, or buy a new phone. And for the other camp: in order to get an inofficial version of Android that is newer than Gingerbread on my phone, I would have to reformat its internal storage, which I can only do since it is unlocked by now. However, even that is not entirely without risk, and it is not supported.
Oh, I entirely agree; I've been bitten by this myself (and on desktops/laptops, not on mobile devices), and it's one of the main reasons I don't have an iDevice and don't use many apps on my Android tablet.
I'm just saying that you and I are outliers; most users appear not to care that their device is locked down and they will sooner or later be forced to upgrade. (Many of them are used to upgrading every time their phone carrier comes out with a shiny new toy anyway.)
As long as i can still buy a general-purpose computer for $200 that can do/run anything I want, or pay for processor cycles like a utility like I can with AWS, this will seem like computing purist's paranoia. It's a lot like Stallman's regular speechifying, when it strikes me that while he's not completely wrong, he's not really right either.
The use of the word pretty contradicts your assertion that they are not locked down.
Yes, if you are inclined you can buy a Raspberry Pi, but equally your kids could go from cradle to grave, never having touched a general purpose computer.
I see this as a problem. How do we inspire even a few kids in each generation to take up programming, if the only computer they've ever used is un-programmable.
I've blogged about this somewhere but I forget the link.
I think for most users, the experiences of using a programmable v.s. non-programmable device are about even in terms of inspiration. An iPad is just as likely to spawn an interest in games as a regular PC (perhaps more, as it's more approachable). The biggest problem is that locked down devices are poor programming platforms, but getting a basic platform to program is pretty cheap and easy, so I don't see that as a big problem.
A basic platform to program with is pretty cheap, but it'll _probably_ only run programs on a general purpose computer. I'm pretty sure you can't build iOS apps on a RPi.
I guess my big problem is that you can't build an iOS app on an iOS device. I see this as a problem given the prevalence of locked down devices now on the market.
I couldn't build NES games on my old NES either but that didn't stop me from starting programming.
It's true that some kids learned to program on their home computers. They did so against incredible odds.
Today's kids are surrounded by cheap, plentiful, powerful computers, and awash in information about programming on the Internet and in bookstores and libraries and schools. It has never been easier for a kid to learn to program, if they want to.
> How do we inspire even a few kids in each generation to take up programming, if the only computer they've ever used is un-programmable.
This is like asking how do we inspire kids to be writers if none of the books they've ever read have been typewriters. There is more inspiration for kid programmers today than there ever has been in the history of the world, because they are immersed in more computing than any previous generation.
Modern political discourse: Everything is a war on something.
This kind of language radicalizes people from the outset, and prevents a discussion from actually happening.
How about instead of calling it the "War on General Purpose Computing," "the War on Christmas," the "War on Women," the "War on Guns", heck, even the "War on Drugs," and the "War on Terror" - we take a step back, take a breather, and talk reasonably and calmly about the actual issues here?
Because that wouldn't grab headlines.
Personally I think if Islamists/gun grabbers/drug dealers/child pornographers want to destroy our way of life then they need to do it themselves -- I'm not going to do it for them by enacting draconian, broad-sweeping, and baseless laws that delegate power to people with questionable motives (all in the name of "safety").
It's great that the in-browser ecosystem is expanding and improving, but IMO we will still lose The War if we cannot tell our chips to do whatever we want. I hope we won't settle for the browser when we can and should have it all.
By that standard the state of general-purpose computing has been steadily improving as the most popular computing platform has moved from Windows--which is closed-source--to Android, which is open-source.
Mozilla and Google have been pushing on exposing more features like that to the web browser, but that's something Apple seems uninterested in (because it diminishes the importance of their App Store)
Of course they have. This increases the importance of their services. No matter which side the consumer purchases from, both sides of that coin have pros/cons & warts/polish.
It makes engineering and economic sense to have devices dedicated to specific purposes, since economy of scale and optimization can produce devices that are better at that specific function than a general purpose one, at a cheaper price point.
Devices like the tablets or smartphones address the need of many people to have a subset of a general-purpose computer (messaging, web browsing, media player) without the added overhead of having to manage a full-fledged computer.
Functionality that for years has been available mostly on general purpose computers has become so commonplace and necessary that a (huge) market for devices streamlining the experience has opened up.
I don't think general purpose computer will disappear any time soon, if anything computers have gotten cheaper, more powerful and, yes, more free.
The choice of a computation platform (from a raspberry pi to an eight core server, or maybe an eight core server in the cloud to which you ssh with your raspberry pi), OS (OSX, Windows, a gazillion Linux distributions...), programming language, availability of knowledge has never been greater.
So what if a locked down phone can run JavaScript? I can do a ToDo-list app?
A computer could live entirely inside a web browser and be useless for creation; just as a computer could have no web browser at all and be a content creator's dream.
There are plenty of arguments for the Javascript/DOM/&c. stack as an application framework -- that they're somehow more better at creation isn't one of them.
Perhaps its our duty to make even better tools and resources available to those who want create and produce in the age of tablets, and to create alternate platforms that don't include walled gardens and locked-down app stores.
The core of his argument is that special andpurpose computers open the potential for surveillance. This seems myopic in the sense that the only effective controls on government surveillance are political. General purpose computers or not, the government has no shortage of means to spy.
So far, the adoption of special purpose computers is being driven by market forces. They simply work better for most tasks than general purpose computers. There is a huge benefit to the human population from these devices, just as there is a huge benefit from having a rather leaky worldwide network easily accessible to "civilians."
So society has to struggle already with how to manage control of information. The availability of general purpose computers seems largely peripheral to this dilemma.
As far as the availability of general purpose computers to technical people, the harm he posits is almost entirely hypothetical. Not only are they still being produced in large numbers, there are fantastic numbers of existing computers that will continue to function for years to come.
A far more likely impediment to accessibility to powerful, modern general purpose computers will be that market forces will shift so that they are no longer commodity items, and the cost to access the latest and greatest will rise. This is a problem of market structure, and legislative attempts to address this type of pricing problem have proven to be futile.
If we were seeing calls by industry or politicians to legally limit the use of open source operating systems, then I think a call of alarm would ring louder (at least to me).
There are factors to consider in addition to the popularity of iDevices, tablets and such:
2. Will there or can there be a non-GPC that is usable for software creation. It is certainly possible for creation of text, images and so on, and some solution that allows using a managed language to produce binaries could be locked down fairly well. Certainly the likes of Microsoft and Apple would promote this, and the dot-net ecosystem already approaches it.
3. A possible dystopian scheme where the government tries to control access to GPCs and allows coding only on "captive" PCs as per (2).
4. Developers being discontented with (2) enough to reject the share-cropping arrangement and create a market for GPCs for individuals.
5. General public discovering advantages of having root on their gadgets and creating market demand, even though they will have little idea of the details ("I can do X with it this way but not when it's subject to the telco")
I don't think that matters all that much, though. Cameras were invented a long time ago, but plenty of kids still get inspired to pick one up and learn how to make compelling images...same with music, film, writing, painting, sculpture, etc.
All kids today need are the means to learn (it's never been easier) and a reason to give it a try (there millions of games, apps, websites, etc. to inspire them).
great example i saw floating around here the other day: http://privatecore.com/
Why? Because all forms of powerful server-based crypto rely on software-based crypto. The problem with this is they need the private key of yours on the server side, somewhere, from the whole thing to work. This means the server operator can recover the key from a running operating system, easily (through system utilities) or forcefully (reading it out of memory with specialized programs), or just writing code to fool you into enter the passphrase and storing.
If you have heard of host-proof systems, they indicate (I would say correctly) the only way for crytography on network service like the one offered here is the data is encrypted on the client and sent to the server, never ever will the passphrase see server receiving the data. Therefore, not even the service provider can crack it without the same effort as some adversary from outside the system.
That being said, I could have read too much into.
It's got some way to go, but it's certainly possible.