While I agree, I think there's a better way to frame this with the public. We don't need to bring in pedo references. That looks very unhinged to most people.

There's already a lot of support out there, in both public opinion and the law, for the idea that if I pay for something physical like a device, I own it. Any substantial alteration in its functionality, especially a reduction in what it can do, requires my consent. Reduction in what it can do should require my consent. Just because tech made it possible for the manufacturer to brick my phone or my car, start charging me extra for certain features I already paid for, or block the apps the OS vendor doesn't approve of doesn't mean they should or that it's even legal to do so. Additionally once I buy the device the vendor has zero business telling me how I can modify it, or whether I can repair it.

I own the thing I bought, fucker. It's my property and I have property rights. The corp has no right to steal away part of the thing I bought or change the terms after the fact. It's potentially criminal if they try.

This framing resonates with a lot of people.

The guy who really exemplifies this positioning at the moment is Louis Rossman and by focusing on these widely understood and popular concepts, he's gained the ability to direct an enormous amount of attention to an issue. He can absolutely swamp a legislature with letters from angry constituents for example when he gives an issue visibility.

Frame it as theft because it is. If they push an update without my consent that removes functionality or sabotages my ownership of the device, it's theft. At the very least product liability laws should apply. Some part of what I bought stops working, that goes to product liability. But I'd take it a step farther and say we're dealing with straight up theft.

I love how this is a problem caused by Big Tech (AI), with “solutions” brought by Big Tech (FAANG etc) and “countermeasures” will also be brought in by future billion-dollar industries (domestic-proxy provider BrightData is 1B already) while we will depend on existing Big Tech for “protection” (Cloudflare will remain a big player).

At this point the internet is exactly like the film Matrix, where humans are merely an implementation detail in the whole system.

Keep fighting. Spread the word. Ensure that everyone you know is aware of the totalitarian implications.

The only way to sure defeat is to surrender.

The most dangerous thing in computing is safety.

"Secure" is great. But when you hear "safe", that means there is some corp in the shadows predating on you because <insert boogeyman>. They decide what safe means, not you. They will abuse you to no end while keeping you "safe".

That's why companies always remove the features that keep you "secure" and give you ones to keep you "safe".

Hardware attestation is like hardware DRM. It is intended to limit and restrict abundance. Abundance of clients (as a proxy for user attention) and abundance of copying, access and replay (as a proxy for "piracy"), resp.

It won't matter to the masses, it won't hamper "bad actors" because hackers will find flaws instantly.

It's just enshitfication.

> these developments still fill me with a terrible sadness.

I wish they filled you with anger instead. It’s not too late. You’re not alone.

A fraudster, a terrorist, a money launderer, a drug dealer, a pedophile—these are actually a huge audience for whom the IT industry can release separate versions of the operating system and hardware. And that audience will pay for it. For the vast majority of ordinary people who consume IT benefits for free (being a commodity themselves), it makes sense to use controlled products.

> You're ostracized from digital society. You're not even a citizen, much less a second class citizen.

Before anyone downplays this concern as scaremongering ans slippery slope fallacy stuff, keep in mind that countries are shifting their national ID cars infrastructure to online services which are fundamentally designed around attestation. Moreover some class of services such as banking are progressively increasing requirements that your software and hardware needs to meet to allow you to manage your own property.

all "hackers" be vibe coding b2b saas these days

the meaning of this word has diluted so much

> Own your device? You "tampered" with it. You're banned. From everything.

Don't worry officer, my device is completely clean. Here you go check it. Why yes, I absolutely only ever use it for banking and updating linkedin on a suspiciously empty gmail, and keep it on silent 100% of the time. What's so odd about that? What? No, I just re-read a lot of books, that's my hobby, I read Catcher In The Rye 20 times a month.

...

It's about time people realize the concept of a real phone and a civilian phone as one and the same is dead.

In fact.

You don't need a "real" phone. Just the civilian one.

I use what's basically a portable retroconsole for entertainment. Including reading, incidentally. From its perspective, it is just a computer. Let's make it a competition, puny phones versus portable computing. Name me one thing you think it can't do, in return, I'll fire two YOUR phone can't right now, back at you. I'll forward two: It can run tmux and has a copyparty toggle for a portable filestorage on it. Yes, you can do both on the phone. But yours can't right now, and I you will suffer trying tog get it, while mine, it was 2 command lines and one config file each.

For once, we may be "saved" thanks to Trump. Because of the brutal change in geopolitics he triggered, the EU is now actively looking at all the hard dependencies on US controlled systems. Android and iOS are two of them.

I cannot tell if the alternative solution will be better, but I do think we will develop alternatives.

I think it's quite telling that this comment was written in Brazil. The so-called Third World is the future source of freedom (or Western countries that become third world perhaps). It may not be a bad idea now to start building open compute and banking alternative ecosystems based in those countries, marketed at Western citizens.

Do you consider being banned in a video game because of hacking to be an example of something killing computing freedom?

The user still maintains all the freedom of doing whatever computing they want on their own machine, but if they want to play with others who don't want to play with cheaters then they have to use the official client.

For people who want a high degree of freedom and be able to access as many digital services as possible I foresee such people using a hypervisor that runs both a provable secure OS and another OS that is as free as they want.