28c3: The coming war on general computation

> the idea that users shouldn't be developers has lead to a situation in which access to development tools and information are seemingly treated as a privilege instead of a right Unfortunately, a lot of people have been starting the War On General Purpose Computing[1] for a while now. While many people saw Doctorow's first talk[1] on the War On General Purpose computing, his sequel talk[2] about the upcoming Civil -War On General Purpose Computing is one of the most important talks I've ever seen. The talk is about exactly this point: Turing completeness scares various traditional powers (and some new/upcoming powers), and their instinct is to lash out and try to mandate that someone make a computer that can't run the various programs that scare them. Not understanding what "Turing Complete" means, they end up in a cycle that tries to blacklist anything that allows these scary programs to be written and used. Hiding the dev tools is just one step on a path that - by definition - must end up with the hobbling of computing devices until they are no longer Turing complete. This problem needs to be fought right now , in a big way. The non-technical population is just starting to understand the full impact of what it means to have a General Purpose Computer, and we are only seeing the first skirmishes. The 2nd talk I mentioned above by Doctorow[2] - which I very strongly recommend that everybody watch - points out how modern concerns over "dev tools" (or "copyright") are trivial.

It’s worth watching the talk (linked in the article, but special pointing out seems appropriate): ▶ this video I like to call it the secret keynote of 28C3.

Is it a serious problem that you can run whatever software you want on your computer? Should we make it so that no one can do that without permission to protect them? I recommend Cory Doctorow's talk on why this is a serious problem for society: link ▶ this video

Cory Doctorow has a prescient talk: "The coming war on general computation" from 2011 (12 years ago) in which he argues that all general computing platforms (OS, phone OS, browser) would face challenges by governments and corporations. This looks like another way to control content distribution and put more control in Google's hands. They've made a great strategic choice in building Chrome browser and effectively superseded Microsoft and Apple on desktops as a platform. The talk can be found here: ▶ this video When people have means to consume or produce content without control any governmental bureaucrat will try to control this activity. History supports this argument. No printing press > no cheap books > illiterate population > easy to control what spreads as information and what do not. Printing press arrived > cheap books > growing literacy > control over the presses. Lenin's first targets were the post/telegraph (communication), bridges and railways (movement of people) and all big printing houses (Lenin's Full Collected works - vol. 32, page 282) Radio arrived > Fixed Frequencies Radio sets sold & Governmental Radio jamming stations TV > Licence to broadcast Internet > Big Firewall of China & etc... And don't even think about moving money freely as experienced by requirement to show why are you paying someone and those nice people from bank compliance departments. The cost of enforcement in digital economy is way cheaper than before. The tools are there or can be built chea

You might have already seen this but in case you havent, there's a famous talk about this called "the coming war on general computation" ( ▶ this video ), and much of this has already come true

I'm comfortable with it on SmartCards or EMV chips, since those are tailored devices for a specific purpose and the trust model is understood by the participants. I'm not particularly upset that I can't root my credit card. Mobile phones, it's disappointing, but total consumer control was kind of a lost cause from day 1. What truly bothers me is the introduction of trusted computing into general-purpose consumer CPUs, where previously we had complete freedom. There's an old but still very good CCC talk that encapsulates my feelings about this [0]. [0]: ▶ this video

"The Coming War on General Computation", Cory Doctorow (2011). Speech: ▶ this video Transcript: link (Of course, Stallman warned of this type of thing much earlier as well.)

puts tinfoil hat on Ensuring that a critical mass of people use remote attestation[0] capable devices. The next step is a browser API[1] for this so that content owners can exclude devices capable of storing the content, or stripping out ads/tracking, etc. Sure, there will be a cat-and-mouse game where people will figure out how to fake the attestation for some period of time, but general computation[2] is probably on the way out. ---- [0] link [1] link [2] ▶ this video

Computers are a little different than specialised devices like… well, bombs & drugs let's say. Heard of the coming war on general computation? ▶ this video link

> Software is economically worthless without making it artificially scarce. A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for, which means "walled gardens", patents, DRM, license servers, anti-tampering mechanisms, and the like. In essence all content (music, movies, software, books, etc) follows the same pattern. You remind me of Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation" keynote, which interestingly didn't notice that streaming and similar cloud-based services would become the DRM of the last decade. Or, as it turns out, the rising appeal of non -general purpose devices that are more efficient. [0] ▶ this video [1] link

This isn't a big surprise, you should expect the tightening of the screws to continue and the pace of it to accelerate. The real issue here is general purpose computing. General purpose computing makes it possible to block ads, to rip your CDs instead of the industry forcing you to buy the same music again, etc. and as a result it is THE major obstacle to unlimited rent seeking and squeezing the last penny out of every user. Expect the industry to keep working in this direction until everything is as locked down as an iPhone. See also: ▶ this video

This is an interesting article. It made me think of the socio-political consequences of the move towards neural networks. Many of us, children of the personal computer revolution, were attracted to computers for its empowering and democratizing effects. Just with a computer you could build anything! You are as powerful as any of "them"! The proprietary software model was developed to monetize end consumers by enchaining them, but the free software model and the fertile communities of the early Internet showed that the model of personal computation could not simply be displaced by legalese. But if we take the author's position on the impact of deep networks, the model of computation is changing again. If teaching deep networks is the new way to write useful programs, our brains and personal computers are not enough... they are obsolete. We now need clusters and, most importantly, massive access to data! This gives extraordinary leverage to the hoarders of data and servers of the Internet, the googles and the facebooks. I'd like to think that maybe we are just at the beginning, the early "mainframe neural networks" era. That we just have to wait until there is enough technology and new markets discovered to build the "personal neural network". That consensual, open and distributed ways of sharing data will emerge and that new massively parallel computers will become affordable by the masses. That the models of neural networks will become well divulged and simplified and kids wi