Trusted computing environments only hurt 1% of the users anyways.
We live in a world where people talk about Thinkpads vs Macbook Pros, but for 99% of the world laptops are appliances they buy like we'd buy a toaster.
They don't care that they can't run Linux, if anything onerous code signing requirements ala mobile devices would be great for the safety of their devices with minimal effects on what they can do.
-
I'm not saying I want the market for power users to die, I'm one of them after all, but I also feel like these conversations on HN are often disconnected from the reality most people live in...
This isn't really a "they don't know better so they don't complain", this is a "even if they knew better they wouldn't complain"
The hypothetical homogeneous group 'they' you refer to doesn't exist. It's billions of people and 'they' feel many ways. By painting with a common brush, you shut down discussions of what could be and encourage fence sitters to give up. Let's talk about why it's possible, easy to do, and how to do it.
The more fence sitters you convince that things are possible, pushes the fence further and further towards the other side.
Exactly the parent commercial it's point: market segments /can/ and do change sizes and their proportional relations. And more people are beginning to understand the importance of security for privacy in a world that is increasingly digital and dependent on information technology.
Yes, several of these companies have come out of nowhere in the past decade and are now making low single digit millions in revenue. Huge growth, yes, but also, still a rounding error as far as the whole market is concerned.
I am saying that the market for people who care about these types of things is objectively niche. Large manufacturers build what they build because they fund the research to know what to build. And they are successful at selling them because they were correct.
There might be billions of people buying computers, but the set that has any opinion on boot code signing requirements is not large enough to cause any significant impact on the market as a whole.
There are companies that cater to these niche markets, like Pine/Framework/System76/Purism. They are tiny. Dell sells more computers in a single contract than all of these other companies have sold over their entire existence combined.
True. However, sometimes large buyers, such as governments or enterprises, change their policies towards purchasing requirements. For example, since 2013 France has had an Inter-Ministry Foundation of Free Software[0], which provides the preferred software to be used across France's government, as French law requires preference be given to free software (logiciel libre).
What impact might occur if a government like France were to require in the future only RISC V architectures with free boot loaders, of if the US government or a large corporation required use of measured boot to see at boot-time if the boot code or subsequent OS had been compromised?
With persistent threat actors and the falling price of processing power, I wouldn't be surprised if in the next ten years some larger organizations (or tens of thousands of small businesses) start demanding this kind if IT security from their vendors.
This is very feel good but falls short of making an actual point.
> The hypothetical homogeneous group 'they' you refer to doesn't exist
They do exist. Making wrong statements with conviction doesn't make it true.
You can look Chromebook sales figures, you can look at the best selling laptops at major retailers, you can look at what's driving record laptop sales, look at price points that are soaring, look at the mobile space...
-
> It's billions of people and 'they' feel many ways.
Which is why we draw conclusions based on a large sample size like I did above. You're never going to be able to consider billions of points of view, so yes, you need to try and find the common thread in their preferences and usages.
-
> By painting with a common brush, you shut down discussions of what could be and encourage fence sitters to give up.
No, by painting with a common brush, you can have actual useful discussions about the reality of things, rather than espousing your own personal whims.
-
> Let's talk about why it's possible, easy to do, and how to do it.
a) Where did my comment say it's impossible?
b) It's not easy to do or it wouldn't have existed in the first place. The whole point of my comment is saying that you need to figure out how to do it taking the current reality of things into context.
If the world thought how HN does we'd already have bills banning IME and PSB. So it doesn't. You can't pretend that people actually are a little nudge away from caring about this, or you'll quickly find that you're wrong and nothing will have actually changed.
-
> The more fence sitters you convince that things are possible, pushes the fence further and further towards the other side.
Again, what you could do if you believed that fence sitters were some large portion of laptop buyers is do what I've done, show some indications of this. Show us how niche efforts aimed at power users aren't the only rumblings about how awful locked down computing is.
What you're doing is still painting a group with a large brush, except you're not even showing us where you got the paint.
Huh? I like your ideas, but I'm not painting. I'm saying "don't paint". If you think of it like a nice dividing line through the people who think stuff can change and the people who don't, the folks on the line are 'on the fence'. You see? If you can convince a few of them (not large swathes of them, just a few), then the line shifts. If we all do that, we can change a lot of minds for good!
You get what I mean? So yeah, my recommendation is that we all talk like things are easy to make better, instead of saying, "too late its all over" because you'll encourage more people to try which I assume you agree is a good thing but if not, I guess to each their own.
I'm saying you're painting though, and I'm saying you can't talk like things are easy to get better and have a meaningful conversation.
Instead of trying to act like most people will ever care about locked bootloaders and PSB style co-processors, why don't we accept that they don't, they won't, and see what can happen from there?
An example of that is looking at it from a national security perspective. If you can paint it as a vulnerability to the tech industry you could see movement without the sisyphean task of convincing people that this stuff matters in their day-to-day lives
You are supposing that people would only use total control of a platform to forbid things almost nobody wants to do. This seems rather a waste. It's like being superman and using the ability to fly to get to business meetings slightly faster.
One would suppose instead that the logical thing to do is create financial opportunities that wouldn't otherwise exist by restricting what you can do without allowing them to insert themselves in the revenue stream.
I recall a long junked verizon phone I owned before android was a thing that could only ever be used with verizon. Despite paying for the phone in full including its GPS because Verizon had full control of the platform the only way to actually use the GPS was to pay Verizon $10 per month for navigation.
An environment where I could repurpose my existing phone instead of buying a new one when I switched carriers, where I could keep my phone number even, or one in which actually using the GPS didn't cost as much over time as the entire phone didn't exist but if you asked me at the time if I would like to live in our present universe or one which those restrictions remained the norm I should easily be able to answer.
I'm Joe, the guy who made takejohndown.com. Thanks for defending me on that other post, I saw a bunch of traffic from hackernews, surprised the post somebody was made was deleted, but then again I've been banned from the /r/NYC sub now just for posting a link. You won't believe how toxic it is there: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/s5nvz0/my_landlord_doe...
I am sympathetic but if you inject it into every thread you will probably get banned and unfortunately it will be correct to do so.
Hacker news is about aggregating interesting things to read not a collection of grievances. For example this thread is about tech and if half of it was random grievances it would be a shitty website. Asking someone if they sympathize with your issue and asking them if you can paint it on the side of their house will get you two very different answers.
You and other tenants need to get together and either sue or more broadly look at how misdeeds by landlords are handled in your city and or state.
This is why we need government intervention. If laws dictated that computing equipment etc. sold to the GP couldn't have 'locks' on them then these problems would instantly disappear.
Such laws can be easily be justified on grounds of (a) stopping monopolistic practices (anti-monopoly laws), and (b) minimizing e-waste.
This won't happen unless there's pressure on government like there has been over the right to repair from the Right to Repair movement. In fact such pressure could come from an extension of the group's current activities.
