> For most people, if there computer was ‘theirs’, it would be that way for about 10 minutes until it was pwned by a bad actor.

This may have been true back in the early 2000s when people first had good broadband. However all the major operating systems have pretty decent security out of the box mainly due to the embarassment of events like MS Blaster Worm.

> The general issue of other people (I.e. Apple et al) having a lot of control over your computer, is entirely valid even if some of the points in the piece are exaggerations.

The problem is that if you buy a general purpose computing device. You should be able to run whatever you like on it.

They should just have a button somewhere in whatever the equivalent of the BIOS on these machines is that says "I am an adult and I accept the risks of turning off these protections" and then let you install Temple OS if you so choose to.

This is something that needs to be enforced by legal means IMO, something similar to right to repair.

> The problem is that people want it that way.

I don't know about that. They frequently get irritated by it and are just resigned to it IME.

However the popularity of single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi, People building their own gaming rigs and people tinkering with gadgets goes someway in refuting this notion. There will be of course many people that just won't care and will use "iDevice" and that is fine, however there is a large spectrum between "I only run stuff from the app store" to "I run custom Arch Install with optimised kernel with tk kernel patches".

> The presence of open software isn’t enough without a way for people to know what is trustworthy without being experts.

I agree. This is a failing of the open source community. I've actually written a draft manifesto called "better than freedom". This may actually push me to at least have it critiqued by my friends.

> Until we provide that, this situation cannot change.

Something has to change. We are sliding back into the 1980s where all the computer hardware was incomptable with one another.

The majority of "computers" people own are already locked down, and it seems clear that things will only get worse -- hardware is increasingly opaque and designed to do things against the interest of the user (or, to say the least, without the consent of the user).

> "Just about any computer you can buy today is going to have some kind of non-trivial boot time. It probably will require a whole ecosystem of crazy things to make it work. It will be fragile. You can break it easily."

I vehemently disagree with the italicized portion, at least in the way it's presented.

Those on here probably aren't affected, but many of the non-technical users I know are afraid of learning how to go beyond simple tasks on their computer (word processing, internet browsing, etc.) because they're afraid they'll break their expensive box and have to pay someone to fix it.

Most UIs today seem to help users avoid breaking things and typically have some sort of notification if they'll change something that would break their machine (e.g. UAC in Windows, padlock in OS X).

Even beyond this, general application development wouldn't pose these risks. Hardware hacking certainly could, but any time you're dealing with the physical workings of something that's an assumed risk.

We need to fight this. Do not buy locked down hardware. Boycott businesses and corporations pushing this. Tell the hardware suppliers that you will not take this. Use free operating systems and hardware whenever and where-ever at all possible. Pursue other people to do the same.

Finally, disregard laws which forbid you to circumvent, render ineffective or deactivate these kinds of restrictions. Spread ways to do this if you can, anonymously. Once information is out there, it cannot be subdued again.

The two are not mutually exclusive. Some Macs have been made in the past that were easy to open up, should you choose to. Others required special screwdrivers be used, removing choice. What is wrong with giving grown ups who have purchased hardware the ability to choose what to do with it? Support can simply be limited, for those who choose to customize, to system wipes.

None of those other examples are sold with the intention of the user changing the system in a way unexpected by the vendor.

PCs are supposed to be open-ended, and for this you typically pay more for the hardware capability than a product which serves as a gateway into a walled-garden ecosystem (phones, gaming consoles, etc.)

There is no true ideal version of this, there is no perfect world and there is no situation in which you can have full control but also have full protection without also knowing everything about the system you have.

Phones and Computers are 'appliances' that do not need to be changed by the user (and we are talking about the mass-market user here), if anything it needs to prevent being changed by the user due to the larger ecosystem a device is part of.

You can make the choice to not be part of the ecosystem, but most people would very much like to be part of a system, together, and one way of doing that is to have a level of sameness and consistency that so far is not viable without some sort of 'appliance-like' properties of the devices in question.

You can still buy a different device, not take part in an existing system, and do whatever you want. But you will have a hard time getting the benefits of interconnection, scale, and support. Those three elements are pretty much why some brands or devices are sold in masses and some aren't.

To this end I simply have multiples of most things. Some just need to do what it does for everyone else (interconnect, function the same way every day, have some company bear responsibility for practically everything), others are for me (open source hardware, open source software, no protections, but also no end-user support or responsibility).

And have you actually paid attention to the trade off of “openness” on PCs? Viruses, malware, ransomware, etc?

Locking down devices without an escape hatch enables rent seeking and hampers innovation and creativity.

I understand your point of view, but also understand that the future where the only open hardware is expensive one-off specialty stuff is rapidly approaching. Either through legal means, or limited availability, companies are posturing themselves to be the gatekeepers + rent seekers, and will hamper new 'out-of-the-box' ideas.

It's even more malicious than that. The corporations and governments are hostile towards users. They lock the computer down so we can't do anything that harms business and government interests. Can't copy or share files. Can't use strong cryptography the government can't crack.

These people believe computers are too subversive to allow the masses unrestricted access to them. They would rather we have nothing but restricted appliances that obey them instead of us. The computer doesn't serve us, it serves them as a tool to control us.

I feel like that's a completely reasonable viewpoint to have. For example, MS Pluton bothers me 100x more than my car keys having nonfree, locked firmware. In an ideal world, both of them are open. But in the meantime I'd be content with not having desktop CPU's be controlled and monitored remotely by their manufacturers instead of their owner.

There's a lot to be said about freedom of computing, but the fact remains that given the option to screw things up, then some people will do that. At the same time, we have a culture that incentivize catering to the non-technical users in a way that prevents them from screwing things up.

Long story short: If we want to turn this trend, then we need to:

1) Start telling non-technical users that any damage caused through their freedom of action is their own responsibility.

2) Produce competitive products that not only provide the desired amount of freedom, but which also compete on price, desirability, usability and the impression that the products are secure enough to use.

In many cases, 1 will be seen as a way of avoiding responsibility, and it'll take a tremendous amount of effort to convince users (and consumer protection agencies) that they should be less protected just in case someone else decides to tinker with their product. That alone makes 2 more or less impossible.

The general issue of other people (I.e. Apple et al) having a lot of control over your computer, is entirely valid even if some of the points in the piece are exaggerations.

The problem is that people want it that way.

They are in fact correct that computers are scary and too complex for them to manage, and they want someone they can trust to do it for them.

Stallman may have predicted the issue, but he really didn’t do much to solve the real problems.

The presence of open software isn’t enough without a way for people to know what is trustworthy without being experts.

Until we provide that, this situation cannot change.

Unpopular? I'd go so far as to say it's a given, and go so far as to so even an "expert user" isn't going to be able to reach 100% certainty while still using the system for it's purpose in almost all cases, unless it's air gapped or they've had their permissions reduced to the point they can't do certain things (which might help the regular user as well).

> Using a computer is fundamentally not like using a car. Using a car, by and large, does not change.

Except in the way that it's exactly like using a car. That is, in that it's someone operating a complex piece of machinery within narrow bounds that make it generally safe, but sometimes things happen either from the operator stepping outside of those bounds for convenience or inattentiveness or because of outside actions that make it unsafe.

> We let laypeople drive, even those who haven't the slightest idea of how their braking system works mechanically, because there is an extremely limited range of outcomes from pressing the brake pedal at a given pressure in a given set of conditions provided it's maintained.

I would say it's more because "normal" operation of a car only requires being trained to a specific level on specific capabilities. A professional driver that races may use the controls of the car very differently and achieve a much different outcome (the e-brake is just for when parked? Says you...).

We do tend to only legally allow specific types of car use in specific contexts though, so that's food for thought.

> Users really are that stupid, and will ultimately find ways to harm themselves and their devices any way you allow them to, so long as there's a competent adversary trying to get them to do it.

I totally agree. I just don't think that Linux is particularly worse than windows these days with regard to the trouble you can get into (you can run powershell scripts to do installs to, and I've seen the powershell equivalent to curl | bash.

There's a whole host of behaviors that people view as different when the context changes that aren't really different in practice. Running random executables on Windows is generally unsafe, and most people develop that sense after a while (either from being told or the hard way). Doing the same on Linux is unsafe in many ways too (except that often there's some additional trust we layer on some of the places we're getting the executables from), and running random shell commands isn't really any different, but people feel like it is because it's no longer in the context of Windows. That doesn't really make it better, it just makes people feel better about it.

If you want to be safe, you either stick with a vetted source you trust such as the package repo for the OS or software originating at a company you trust (which might just mean they're someone possible to track down and sue, so they're less likely to go rogue), or that has a reputation they don't want to screw up and a mechanism is in place that you're fairly sure you're using code from them (e.g. github and a trusted author or project). Other than things fundamentally like that, you're just rolling the dice. Which happens, and we've all done it, usually without problem. Which makes up complacent.