Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing (2012)

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

by jlpcsl • 4 years ago

158 87 4 years ago

memex.craphound.com

theandrewbailey• 4 years ago

(2011)

Maybe 2012?

AdmiralAsshat• 4 years ago

So now it's no longer "coming". It's here.

onethought• 4 years ago

General purpose computing seems to be going fine… ?

This article seemed to paint a much bleaker future than actually eventuated

masswerk• 4 years ago

Let's say, it struck peripherals (e.g., printers) much harder…

dghlsakjg4• 4 years ago

I would argue otherwise.

15 years ago, if you were computing you were almost certainly using a general purpose computer. Phones were more locked down, but they also were basically just for texting and calling, and could never serve as a primary device.

Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.

Robotbeat2• 4 years ago

Yup. Content was typically owned in physical form as a DVD or CD (maybe mp3?) and wasn’t subject to disappearing because a company went bankrupt or merely changed license agreements (stuff that happens now even for “bought” items).

We’ve also abstracted away everything from files, for long enough that the idea of not streaming something but playing it locally is becoming more and more niche. Same for applications, which have gone more and more to web based subscription models.

Default is closed, now.

SpicyLemonZest• 4 years ago

15 years ago the default was to consume content from TVs, which at the time typically had minimal computing power, although many people used them along with locked-down devices such as TiVo. I don't have any idea what kind of poll you could build to answer this question, but my bet would be that people spend about as much time on a general-purpose computer as they did in 2007, and the increase in phone and tablet usage reflects a computerization of previously free time.

GekkePrutser6• 4 years ago

This exactly. Mobiles are now the standard general purpose computers and they're all locked down. We don't really own our devices anymore nor our data :(

pca0061322• 4 years ago

Sadly a lot of people prefer this over an open environment, as locked down environments usually work out of the box, consuming recommended information is easier than searching by yourself. Centralization brings convenience at the expense of freedom, but it is much easier for us to feel convenience (or being frustrated by something inconvenient) than to understand the importance of freedom.

a4isms2• 4 years ago

The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.

Yes, but 15 years ago far fewer people did far less with computing devices of any kind than they do today. Imagine if, for example, I made this argument:

"In 1992, the default for using a personal computer was to both create and consume information, e.g. writing and reading email, writing and reading documents. Today the default is to just consume information, e.g. YouTube, TikTok, AppleTV."

That would be true, but not because of locking devices down. It would be true in because in the last thirty years, the industry had expanded the number of users and their use cases by orders of magnitude.

The people who sent and received emails are still sending and receiving emails. Same for the people writing and reading documents. But all those people are also now watching TV and YouTube and TikTok on computers instead of analogue televisions in their recreational time AROUND the documents and emails.

And there are many, many people who just want to consume content for every "maker" generating content of any type, whether it be programs, documents, videos, music, whatever.

How many people are involved in the construction and operation of the Webb telescope? How many people just want to see pictures of what it sees?

Makers are a small proportion of humanity, and even for makers, making is a small proportion of our use cases for tech.

corrral• 4 years ago

Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.

I love having the choice. Most of the time I want the locked-down thing. A bunch of extra "freedom" I'm not actually using is just a hassle and liability when all I wanna do is take and crop some photos, or do some writing, or whatever.

Now we have that option, and then also general-purpose computers are so cheap and widely available that you can easily score decent ones for free.

Far from being some computing apocalypse, the situation now is excellent. Computers were a barely-tolerated near-failure for most normal use cases, but now there are options that don't suck for normal people wanting to do normal things. And general-purpose computing is more accessible than ever.

Maybe some Dark Age of Computing still lurks, but it's not happened yet, and things have only gotten better so far.

IMO the worst thing about the current computing era are the handful of Web monopolies and the way "AI"/machine-learning has mostly enabled systems working against us rather than creating agents working entirely on our behalf.

throwaway0x7E6• 4 years ago

you aren't paying attention

throw0101a2• 4 years ago

Copyright also seems to be going fine.

Unless copyright terms get shorter, they are not "fine". Even the status quo is not "fine".

Life+50 years (or more) is ridiculously long:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...

If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work.

The novel Nightmare Alley was published in 1946, and the author died in 1962:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel)

There's no reason why it should (AFAICT) still be under copyright such that royalties need to be paid to, e.g., turn it into a movie:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film)

izacus• 4 years ago

If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work.

Can we get something straight? In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. Artists get tiny peanuts or even less if they weren't known enough to fight corporate lawyers of their own publisher.

"Poor artists recouping their life work" is a nice PR message from publisher corporations to defend status quo though.

randombits0• 4 years ago

Not to take you two steps back but copyright doesn’t really apply well to software to begin with. Consider this:

That means that software is the embodiment of both creative and functional expressions that are commingled. They are so mixed together by the time the buyer gets it, there is no simple way of separating the two. That weakens the strength of copyright over the whole.

It also misleads folks into believing everything about software is protected, even silly things like header files or trivial functions. Because these purely functional expressions are so highly intertwined with the rest, folks just assume they have a legitimate copyright over them! Even judges get this wrong!

So software isn’t inherently copyrightable except for it any creative expressions it contains. What counts as creative expression?

Traditionally, it didn’t take very much creative expression to be copyrightable. A screen design is copyrightable. A color scheme could be copyrightable. Code that saves a file after applying whatever edits the user has made is NOT copyrightable, as it is a purely functional expression.

But what if I came up with a cool/fast way of finding primes and coded it into C. I created it. It is unique in the entire world! It took many hours to come up with. Certainly I should be able to protect my work, right?

No. Mathematical algorithms are not creative expressions but purely functional expressions. It doesn’t matter how long it took to create or how the algorithm was discovered.

But what about the code to implement the expression? The code is the expression of the algorithm. There may be a bit of creativity in the code, but we are back to functional expression as opposed to creative expression. Where’s the line? It’s fuzzy enough considering it in the abstract but impossible to consider given only the executable software itself.

Personally, I think software should have it’s own copyright protections, unique from other written works. What that should look like and how it should work is an open question that should be discussed.

Remember, the purpose of copyright is not to enrich the author. The purpose is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” If any copyright scheme fails to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”, it is not serving the public as intended.

andy81• 4 years ago

Many people's only computer is locked to programs from a single source owned by the operating system developer, and adware impossible to remove without defating the device's security.

Where downloading apps from another source is possible, multiple levels of popups are triggered with warning messages optimised through A/B testing to minimise clickthrough rates.

Widewine and similar hardware DRM are now standard.

General purpose computing is still alive, but it's taken serious hits.

collegeburner• 4 years ago

just curious, i always remember seeing this article on boingboing: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

and always saw it linked there. which is original?

kencausey2• 4 years ago

I'm not quite sure what you mean by your question. Craphound is Cory Doctorow's website but he has long been a contributor to Boing Boing. Are you asking which website it appeared on first? I don't know, it is at least possible it was nearly simultaneous.

well_actulily• 4 years ago

Or at least he was a contributor to Boing Boing. https://www.metafilter.com/186302/In-the-blog-world-this-is-...

kmeisthax2• 4 years ago

Today we have marketing departments that say things such as “we don’t need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine our profits.”

Today? More like the 1980s! Nintendo invented the whole App Store business model decades prior to the iPhone, and for reasons a lot more insidious than Apple's.

This whole article has aged like milk. Or, more charitably; it's a snapshot in time of the worries of people a decade ago, many of which never came to pass. Since this article was written, SOPA failed due to an unprecedented public protest, encryption bans have sort of sputtered and gone nowhere, and the EU is legally mandating that iPhones run unauthorized software while iPhone buyers are clutching their pearls about it.

That last one is particularly revealing. You see, the security landscape for individual users is far bleaker now than it was back in 2011. A decade ago it did not make financial sense to hack the average user, and now it does. Regular users - or at least some of them - are the ones still prosecuting the War on General-Purpose Computing. Governments and copyright maximalists are on the side of keeping things open. The spymasters like being able to drop their 0days in plausibly-deniable unsigned bait apps, after all.

The case for copyright maximalists is less obvious. You might think that they'd prefer more DRM, because it makes things easier for them. And that's true up to a point. But there's also no way to standardize it. It just gives you monopolization everywhere. In fact, it's a repeat of the days of iTunes, where Apple had the entire music industry at their feet because they had so badly misjudged music downloads. The RIAA went DRM-free because it let them sell music the way they wanted to. And now we have Epic Games, one of the larger fishes in the game industry pond, trying to legally undermine the whole basis of the console industry so they can sell more Fortnite skins.

I do still think the section about copyright being fundamentally boring still holds water. But it's less boring than it used to be back when the US pulled everyone into TRIPS and WIPO. A large portion of today's media consumption is on platforms that don't actually pay their way, at least not to the liking of the copyright maximalists. The war they fight is not on general-purpose computing, but on accessible social video platforms; the ones whose creators are crushed under the burden of having to constantly validate their legality and complain rabidly about it.

This, too, has historical precedent. Google and Wikipedia were able to spook people into spamming their local Congresspeople out of passing SOPA/PIPA with a well-timed protest campaign. Going back further, while Napster may have had some of the most inept and hilariously bad legal argumentation[1], the public took their side - not the law's. When the public does care about copyright, it's almost always to weaken it or keep it from getting stronger.

Of course this could also just get swept up into World War IV: The Culture Wars, like everything else inevitably does. All the international treaties that were designed to make copyright untouchable had their days numbered the moment that right-wing populists tried to wrestle countries out of the global trade system. Hell, there's a Republican congressperson that's genuinely trying to sell the GOP on going back to 28-year copyright terms purely to pwn the libs over at Disney.

[0] There have been several notable instances in which really scummy mobile app marketing tactics have passed through App Review for whatever reason.

[1] No, seriously, they tried arguing that they should be legally treated like radio because once someone downloaded a full and complete 320kbps MP3 copy of one particular hit song, they might go out and buy the full album full of other tracks they don't care about.

tzs2• 4 years ago

Today? More like the 1980s! Nintendo invented the whole App Store business model decades prior to the iPhone, and for reasons a lot more insidious than Apple's.

I don't think Nintendo had any online consoles in the '80s. Are you referring to the NES refusing to run cartridges that were not authorized by Nintendo?

kmeisthax2• 4 years ago

Yes. It's the exact same business model, even though Nintendo did have to contend with retail partners instead of an online store.

65102• 4 years ago

We might simplify the topic: Copyright is also a network - "all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies."

Computers are a network even without internet. (you can carry floppies) This network does everything. It touches everything. We all want to pay for it. Our money goes towards making the network more useful.

The copyright network really has very few players interested in preserving and expanding it but we all pay for it.

when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts. They send health experts, not copyright experts. They send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not as important.

But it consumes the same budget. We have finite resources, finite expertise and finite moving hands. It means people are dying, health is declining, agriculture is hindered, water is polluted etc

Meanwhile youtube is deleting just about everything. 3 strikes and everything you've ever published there is gone. Knowledge is lost. We don't know what impact it has but it is safe to assume stuff wont be what it should have been if the maker cant see videos important to his task.

More obvious it gets with scientific publications that cite lists of papers and books that are no longer available.

We need a new network to make sure people get paid for the useful things they make. It can simply be paid for in advance. It's not a challenge.

shreyshnaccount• 4 years ago

coming up with the network is not the challenge. hasn't been since www. the challenge is making the right incentives and popular adoption of the network.

65102• 4 years ago

Just shut it down. As the monstrosity won so many small fights it counts many components that we can remove one by one until the entire chain of parasitic entities is gone. If anything of value is lost we create solutions for those few things specifically. Since many depend on the income we will have to gradually tune it down.

We can make donations, one can do crowd sourcing and we can create funds that assign budgets by committee. That profits wont randomly grow madly out of proportion with the work is not a bug but a feature.

Roberts space industry suggests we are missing out in a huge way. First people were willing to fold over large sums of money for a game that was not made(!?) Then people were willing to fold over large sums of money for a game that was incredibly delayed(!???) And now people are actually enjoying being part of the development process(!????) Things are progressing towards a finished product but its so overly ambitious that complex works add up to very little progress. I never would have imagined people would put up with that but in hindsight it seems to make sense.

_23sd4• 4 years ago

Clearly an attack on general purpose computing materialized, but it came about in a very different way from what was predicted here. If I had to summarize the overall thesis of the article it would be this: sectors of the economy other than the tech industry want computers to stop running programs that lose them money, and the government wants computers to stop running programs that break the law. In the future, with Hollywood as the vanguard, laws and regulations will stamp out general purpose computing and replace that model with more easily regulated computing appliances with a clearly defined purpose. To quote the article on how computers and an open internet would be stopped:

Regardless of whether you think [things like 3D printed guns] are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

I don't think that was an accurate prediction of the past 10 years. Hollywood lost the copyright wars: even the most locked down TV dongle will happily play pirated movies with the right apps, often available from the official app store. SOPA failed, and to this day the US is free from IP and domain blocking (though many other democratic countries are now under court ordered blocking regimes). UEFI didn't kill the freedom to run any OS on your PC. User-modifiable device firmware wasn't banned, and thanks to the right to repair movement the law is actually being used to open up devices.

Instead, the threat to general purpose computing came from the tech industry itself: Apple, Google, and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft, the same companies that used their influence to kill SOPA, locked down devices and operating systems to protect their own profits, not to protect non-tech sectors or to appease regulators.

drewcoo2• 4 years ago

the government wants computers to stop running programs that break the law

I thought the government was more concerned with surveillance than law-breaking programs. Or were you saying that they want us to stop running things like VPNs?

_23sd4• 4 years ago

In the article Doctorow talks about both surveillance and regulatory concerns, like vehicle safety and the ability to create weapons with 3D printers. If there was a law requiring surveillance backdoors in operating systems (as he speculated repressive governments would enforce with UEFI) then both are about law-breaking programs.

tinus_hn2• 4 years ago

UEFI didn't kill the freedom to run any OS on your PC.

With the new Secure Boot rules this ‘goal’ is ever closer. By default, new computers must now only boot the Microsoft boot loader, which can only boot Windows.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html

_23sd4• 4 years ago

The worry with secure boot would be manufacturers taking away the ability to manage/disable it on consumer devices. This rule doesn't seem to get any closer to that scenario, it's a change in the default configuration of "secured core" systems marketed for enterprise use. Secure boot can still be managed or disabled, and the change only impacts big Linux distros that got MS to sign their bootloaders. For the general case of being able to run any OS it's been necessary to go into BIOS settings since computers started shipping with secure boot by default around the time of Windows 10 release.

nunez2• 4 years ago

I don't think that was an accurate prediction of the past 10 years. Hollywood lost the copyright wars: even the most locked down TV dongle will happily play pirated movies with the right apps

Did they?

Remember how "music lockers" like Google Play Music and the original incantation of Amazon Music, used to be a thing? Yeah, Big Music killed that. The closest thing we have now is music matching services that will happily nuke your music when the publisher delists those compositions for whatever reason.

Plex and the like make organizing and consuming pirated movies easy, but finding the source of those movies is still not trivial, and people _still_ get scary emails from their ISPs if they detect that enough of your traffic is being used for this purpose.

The Netflix app does not allow AirPlay (used to) or Bluetooth streaming (also used to).

It's still very much a cat and mouse game, and the cat is getting smarter every day.

cosmiccatnap• 4 years ago

"It’s tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to go, because it’s fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved."

Sadly I think occam's razor applies here past this statement.

permo-w2• 4 years ago

the EU just passed the digital markets act, which will likely rectify some of this. I would imagine that's why this has been posted

brundolf• 4 years ago

General-purpose computing is just too economically valuable to be gotten rid of. Those who might otherwise want all machines to be locked down have no choice but to acknowledge this. The FUD has been going around for a decade and a half, and we've only ever seen it play out in small corners of the industry, not in the big picture.

sliken2• 4 years ago

Dunno. Apple and Microsoft seem to be heading towards forcing users to install things only from their app store. Apple checks every binary you run against a black list, which pretty much flew under the radar ... till the service broken.

Do you really think there would be a big backlash if Apple and Microsoft prevented "sideloading" and required all application installs to be from their official app stores? It's already pretty much the default for phones, and tablets.

We aren't there yet, but it does seem to be the direction we are going.

ssalka2• 4 years ago

If this precluded the ability to eg install a program via curl or brew, or even just a .dmg you download from your browser, you bet there is gonna be hell to pay.

It's already pretty much the default for phones, and tablets.

It's unfortunate they made it that far with smartphones, but there is much less precendent for thinking of a phone as a "general purpose computer" in comparison to a laptop/desktop.

ur-whale• 4 years ago

General-purpose computing is just too economically valuable to be gotten rid of.

It's already gone.

If you don't believe me, just try and read all the files on your very own {android, iphone} device (without desoldering chips) and see what happens.

permo-w2• 4 years ago

that's it gone in one sector of the market that never really had it in the first place

linspace• 4 years ago

General-purpose computing is just too economically valuable to be gotten rid of.

General-purpose computing is a just a local optimum for profit extraction. Nevertheless it feels like guessing the correct answer for the wrong reasons. I welcome and embrace the FUD.

teddyh• 4 years ago

See also: The Digital Imprimatur (2003):

https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

NHQ• 4 years ago

Battlefield smart phones and app stores.

Havoc• 4 years ago

I find the trend towards custom chips like M1 specifically alarming in this context. The line between that and hardware level shenanigans is very thin

Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing (2012)

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