Owning my computer is still relatively possible. I can build a computer from parts which I can choose, and have a choice in which operating system to install on them. Laptops are slightly more closed, but even on those I can choose the OS myself.
Modern smartphones however, seem like walled gardens in which I have no control at all. I cannot choose any of the parts, and even doing simple reparation tasks like replacing a battery is a nightmare these days. I am locked into a single OS on my smartphone, which either spies on you or is locked down even more. Every iteration a bit more control is taken away from the user. And its increasingly hard to step away from them, since a lot of normal interactions such as banking almost requires you to have such a phone.
Both Android and iOS suck. I've made my own Android phone tolerable with F-Droid and trying to ungoogle it as much as possible. But unfortunately I find myself locked into using google play services since solutions like MicroG just don't cut it. They lock me out of slightly too much of my daily smartphone usage (note that this is definitely not the MicroG's developers fault, they have done amazing work).
Linux on Mobile and open EC and Coreboot etc. are all making rapid progress at the moment. I would still say we are talking in terms of years before more general Linux Phone adoption would be possible, and still the fact your online bank etc. doesn't make an app for Linux would be prohibitive to many (although anbox might help), so I understand pessimism here, but I think the excitement around Linux mobile and open hardware is sufficient that it will at least be revolutionary that it is possible to run open hardware and Linux phones etc. same as SteamOS was a failure if you look only at numbers of Steam Machines, and a revolution in Linux gaming if you look at Proton, GamerOS and all the improvements that came with it.
Viable alternatives affect the behavior of others, even if they "fail".
And if you're already a desktop Linux user like me, open hardware is already a reality. Only thing that's stopped me trading Dell XPS 13 for Purism 14 is that I will miss the QHD+ screen, as it is standard HD res. Still really tempted though.
It also makes me pretty pessimistic when it comes to privacy. I can uninstall Windows/MacOS on my laptop, coreboot it, use FOSS/privacy-centric software, etc. but it doesn't really mean much when my phone (which is basically attached to my body 24 hours a day, and is my main conduit of communication with others) is a privacy/security nightmare.
I like iOS, but not Android. Let me explain why.
I personally love Linux, Unix philosophy (I'm even sometimes an old beardy zealot about POSIX standards and the old way), and inherent customization possibilities.
On the other hand, I don't want to manage my phone like a desktop or laptop computer, or a server because of a plethora of reasons. First, user interface is not very suitable for that. Second, there's a lot more finicky things to manage. Last but not the least, that management task is continuous.
iOS takes all of these away. Complete backups are built-in (I know android has it, but I don't know how bulletproof is this). Defaults are sensible. Settings do not change spontaneously. OS behavior doesn't change drastically from device to device (Every android vendor tunes their OS and background process policy differently, creating a lot of WTH moments and more finicky management tasks). Updates are not slowed down by the vendor, the operator, the distributor and today's weather.
While iOS is a pretty strict walled garden, devices are set-up and forget. Even you forget that you have an iOS device, because you use it without thinking.
Radio security, isolation and its reasonable and unreasonable parts are discussed here extensively. As a HAM radio operator, I can only say that, radios can do wreak a lot of havoc even with informed tinkering, without any bad intentions. If you take a relatively cheap SDR and listen to your neighborhood spectrum (just see the traffic, not decode anything) your jaw will drop. It's a very crowded up there, and there's a lot of non-public traffic.
Another stuff about custom ROMs and Stock ROMs is SIM services. Yes, many of the SIM menus just sit here unused, but there are useful ones like mobile e-signatures. I carry my e-sig with my phone, in my SIM. So using it requires a verified and official software stack. As far as my experience goes, no custom ROMs run these services (intentionally or unintentionally).
I manage my family's Android phones, and I personally use an iPhone. As far as I can see, it's much easier to leave an iOS device on its terms and it'll fare better.
Feel free to discuss, counter or just burn this comment down. :)
I love iOS in almost every way except sideloading restriction.
If I missed some way to implement what I want, I'd love to hear how can I do that. I don't need much, but I need push notifications from server and I need push notifications when I'm close to some particular location (like open a door when I'm near it). I might need NFC push notification, I'm not sure.
I don't agree that Android suck, I have second phone for testing and while I love iOS more as it feels more polished, I probably will switch to Android in the future, just because I want to run my code on my device.
There is the https://www.fairphone.com/en/ which is a modular and easy to repair smartphone. They also make it easy to install alternative operating systems like Sailfish or an OSS version of Android.
Bottom line, it is doable, but I want a working linux phone, where camera and calls/sms/mms work and I dont use any newage communication software, so I dont care. Again, this is completely my use case as I practically consider the phone applications as mostly useless, dont play games and prefer paying in cash.
I hoped Cosmo Communicator[2] would be it but they didn't support the camera and since I am using it for taking notes, it is vital for me. Actually I even went into making degoogled rom for CC but I got stuck at selinux blatantly abused to prevent modifications and maybe some day I will recompile the kernel to kick it out or find time to reverse and binary patch the selinux checking.
Actually PinePhone is becoming more and more interesting option but they should really pump up the specs, again, at least for camera. The second possibility would be sailfish os [3] but again it has some closed source blobs.
Sorry to burst your bubble, https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intelme
To me it makes more sense to continue with this phone, as I can find all the replacement parts I need on AliExpress, rather than investing in a new Librem 5 or a PinePhone. While I appreciate being able to use an open mobile OS, there's the problem of apps, and there's still the hardware problem - it's both more expensive (in the case of the Librem 5 at least) and has the same problem of eventual obsolescence.
I can get by without carrying a microphone-and-camera equipped computer controlled by someone else around, and so I don't; but, if I want to return something I bought on the Internet, I don't get a receipt; and, if I want to go to a bar, there's a risk I won't be allowed to pay. (There is a law against the latter problem, but it is not enforced.)
What am I getting at? Well, I know it's totally paranoid, but what if some agency out there in other countries who build these things are putting things on the boards to send telemetry data back. Perhaps something small and quick now and then while the computer is online. Something that you don't even notice unless you're constantly monitoring the internet traffic in and out. And the traffic itself could be something innocuous also. Something that slips under the radar.
I know I know, I'm totally paranoid here. But does anyone here worry about that at all?
I went ahead and bought a SM-T575 tablet a couple weeks ago. The only tablet I could find in the 8-inch range that had a somewhat decent CPU/GPU, a camera with light, NFC and a replaceable battery - while still being waterproof. And it's not made out of hard plastic that will shatter at the first fall. For all that joy however, it was a fucking PITA to root it and I only succeeded because of a helpful soul messaging me on Reddit of all places.
Seems like the only place one can find stuff supposed to live longer lives is in the expensive Enterprise section of manufacturers for a hefty premium - similar to "smart TVs" where the only "dumb TVs" available are "digital signage" type. And that's not good. We need regulation in this space, and fast.
This is insufficient according to conditions of TFA. It is widely assumed in the security industry (based on evidence from the various state-sponsored attacks we can see) that the NSA and/or other government agencies have backdoors and/or zero-day exploits for both the CPU secure execution modes and common networking hardware. It is very likely that there are "magic packets" which you can send to such devices which install a rootkit payload.
If security against even government intrusion is something you care about, it really difficult to buy or make a modern computer that is configured like computers were in the 80's and 90's: just running code we have complete access to, with no hidden interfaces.
Had a recent experience with a Motorola phone with this. And there was no obvious technical reason they couldn't have held the battery down with something other than a shite ton of glue.
And, that’s great! They shouldn’t know that, maybe there will be some cultural shift in the future, where everyone will be tech-savvy, and companies like Apple starts changing their approach. Until then HN users need to accept that most of those solutions are made for ordinary consumers, and embrace the niche for them. :-)
People don't drop their battery-powered custom-built PC into 6ft of water and expect it to keep working (then dunk it again after two years of abuse, 4 floor drops, etc have worked against the case, seals, and so forth). They don't take it from freezing temperatures into the warm indoors and expect it to keep on trucking. They don't expose it to extreme temperatures on car dashboards in the summertime and expect it to still perform (it would absolutely hard-lock due to overheating if you tried it). Compared to a phone it doesn't matter very much how much a custom-built PC weighs +/- 1kg; phones fight for grams. If a custom-built PC uses an extra 15w who cares? But that might be more than the entire power budget of a phone SoC. People expect a phone not to spew EM that breaks the ability of anyone around them to use data or make calls. People also expect their phone to be able to complete a 911 call in an emergency so long as some kind of signal exists.
Modularity IS NOT FREE. STOP ACTING LIKE IT IS.
Modularity costs space, weight, and complexity (which often translates into user time spent troubleshooting).
If a user-replaceable screen means giving up waterproofing do you expect that to be a popular tradeoff? If making the battery replaceable reduces battery life by 40% is that a good tradeoff?
It is clear to me some people complaining haven't spent any time researching this topic and have no idea just how much engineering goes into modern electronics nor what the tradeoffs are. If they actually had to live with the results of their claimed preferences a lot of them would hate it and switch back immediately. At best I see people hand-waving half the battery life or double the weight as if it such things were trivial for devices people hold or carry on their person for hours a day.
I'm 100% serious when I say if you are working on your own company or product please make sure you approach these things with eyes open. If you are deliberately going to serve a different part of the market know that going in. It's fine to go after a niche - a niche can be profitable - but understand your customers and what they really value (not just what they claim to value). Don't let a bunch of contrarians on HN convince you there's a market for 10 million modular cell phones. You'll lose a lot of money when your "customers" skewer your product for all the compromises necessary to give them what they claimed to want.
Where can I find, how can I build a computer---that isn't 13 years old---with open firmware of which one doesn't reasonably suspect that the NSA put a backdoor into it?
From experience, no matter what you do, your phone will still continue to ping 1e100.net every few minutes. This may just be something innocuous, but there just is no way to get rid of this behavior (or to understand where it's coming from).
Ugh.
>I want it to be, but which can also be used to communicate securely with anyone on the planet without being observed by a third party. I don't want to be spied on by Microsoft or Google.I don't want the NSA intercepting my conversations or even their metadata.
I don't see what this has to do with the actual computer honestly. You don't want Microsoft to be involved so I'm going to assume you are going to install Linux on whatever you get, awesome, this doesn't stop the NSA or Google from harvesting your data because that doesn't really have anything with the computer. Seems like you want a search engine and ISP that you own as well.
You can have a computer that does not connect to the Internet, or connects to the Internet very little, or only connects to the Internet through specific communication channels you open in a firewall. That's all very attainable.
However, as soon as you communicate with third parties, be it your ISP, a cloud provider, or your end communication partner, you are potentially sharing with more than you intend. It's a "the only way to keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead" problem. You can't control what other people choose to share.
(Yes, Chromebooks have many benefits. I know.)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chromebooks-gain-sha...
Microsoft works closely with Intel... I wonder if they might have access to the invisible OS running on your PC... (Linux would not disable that)
This statement here made me pause for a bit. He wants a computer with specific features, but doesn't want pay for the models that offer those features because they are too expensive?
Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too, but unfortunately, reality has constraints.
Everyone wants the best stuff for free. That's not controversial. But it is controversial to complain that the best stuff is more expensive than the cheap stuff. Of course it is. That's the type of stuff they sacrificed to make it cheap.
If they want low end free btw, they do have that too. Pinebooks are super cheap.
Yeah, that weakens his whole argument.
That said, I would like to know what models these are? Because I think it's pretty much universal.
I think the answer is linux.
Correct. He wants a computer with less complexity and less spying "features", and the market is failing hard at that.
> reality has constraints
No, these are entirely artificial restrictions. Companies invested very significant efforts to implement DRM, management engine, AMT, all sort of telemetries and backdoors.
The emerging model of "privacy for the rich, surveillance for everybody else" is it expected consequence.
EDIT: wow, downvoted to -3 already? Truly shining the hacker culture in "hacker" news /s
From the consumer perspective: I want the 500-2000 euros device I bought not to spy on me. Were it not the status quo, this would sound ridiculous.
You now have a computer that is 10,000 times faster than one you had 30 yrs ago at half the price. Oh and it fits in your pocket. A lot of time and money went into creating that. Those people need to get paid. And yes you pay for it with some loss of privacy.
The reason why this product doesn't existing on the market is because because NOBODY (except the odd 4000 people on HN) wants this product. Most people don't even use a VPN or know what TOR is. If you don't want it, then design and fab your own chips and write your own software from scratch.
Should we call lead toxicity a "chemist's first world problem"? Should we call material flammability a "fireman's first world problem"? Equipment sterilization a "doctor's first world problem"?
We think about this, so that regular people don't have to. That's the point of specialization of labor. It's our moral duty to be aware of these problems, and to ensure end-users aren't hurt by these problems. As an industry, we've not only failed at this duty - we've been actively doing the opposite. Harming users of technology on purpose, making their lives worse in pursuit of extra profit.
It's not that users should care about whether or not they own their technology. Technology that isn't owned by the end-user, and actively exploits them instead, shouldn't be available on the consumer market in the first place.
I don't think about my car's airbags all that often because I'm not a mechanic or frequently in contact with sources of the latest airbag news. Two weeks ago I take my car in for some work and the mechanic walks out to me with this puzzled look on his face and asks why I have yet to have my airbags replaced; talks about how dangerous this brand is and goes on about the recall.
Now I'm interested. I had no idea. I've driven my nephews around in this car without any idea of the airbag issue. I've now been made aware and will act accordingly.
The right to privacy is not a 'first world problem', it is a problem.
so let's keep on screwing them over, I'm sure there will never be any consequences as we poison society
Those that use a VPN for privacy are the "average consumer". Those, let's say more geeky, know that the VPN for privacy that are sold by lots of companies are a fallacy as using a VPN from home gives you zero extra privacy. It only moves the problem from your ISP to the VPN company, which likely isn't covered by the same laws. It is in almost all cases worse.
I think it happens more than you think, but people view this as eating healthy and exercising - should do more about it, but the world makes it easier to eat poorly and do things that aren't exercise.
What would help is if there are people with the capability to help aligned with solutions.
I also want to own my device, not rent it from a manufacturer.
Actually, I think Apple has caused the prices of pocket computers to go up in the last few years (relative to features). And many of these features, I could do without (I.E.: I don't need so many sensors on my daily phone, this is dangerous from a privacy point of view). They removed the physical keyboard though...
> And yes you pay for it with some loss of privacy.
Why? You can pay $1,000 for your pocket computer and they still won't let you be administrator of it in the name of your own protection.
To tell you the truth, I don't like where today's computer designs are going.
What I don't agree upon is that "NOBODY" would want open platforms; there's probably a larger market for that than there was a personal computing market in the 70's. There's businesses like Raptor that sell fairly open workstations, and they simply wouldn't if there wasn't a market for it.
The main issue is the disconnect between engineers/programmers and users. If there's growing amount of people who won't use the products they build themselves, then the idea of a war on general computing might snowball into a self-fulfilling prophecy where average users no longer has access to general computing through normal consumer devices.
Imagine we applied your "disregard until it becomes a bigger issue" approach and ridiculed every warning as a "your group problem is not a problem". Look around you. How is that working out?
Climate change for one: "eh... scientists are worrying about things that aren't even a problem yet, we'll tackle it when it becomes a problem, if ever".
Great strategy
> The reason why this product doesn't existing on the market is because because NOBODY (except the odd 4000 people on HN) wants this product. Most people don't even use a VPN or know what TOR is.
The general public wants it and even uses at times of mass protests and government censorship. They don't know the technical details but they do use it all over the world, albeit infrequently.
* Nothing about "average consumer" was mentioned. * Speed and size aren't relevant to topics of ownership and trust. * People may pay with privacy, but it should be a consenting relationship. * 4000 > 0 * Whatever "most people" are into, there is yet a market for good VPN services, and people do use Tor.
I hope you enjoyed your exercise in hyperbole.
Running desktop/laptop Linux is a relatively minor sacrifice in terms of available software, especially if you consider Wine and Steam emulation. Yet market share is tiny. People do not seem to own a computer enough to do anything about it.
Probably he meant that Microsoft was not the same Microsoft as it is now. In the same way as having @gmail.com account let us feel "special" 15 years ago and Google was operating under "Don't be evil" flag. Things are changing.
If you want something more powerful, there're these:
- https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/workstations-and-servers
- https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/mainboards
People have to vote with their wallets and pressure vendors.
It does exist, it's all eminently doable, and I encourage people to explore this road. But it does cost more than mere money. Going against the grain always does.
> People have to vote with their wallets and pressure vendors.
I disagree. Expected someone with very little knowledge of the topic to make an informed choice here is highly unlikely to work. You could say the same about clothing created by child labour, but most people aren't going to spend a couple hours researching if the shirt they like is okay to buy, nor should they be expected to.
I believe the solution to this problem has to ultimately come from regulation.
Looks like more of the same.
> I must rely on encryption algorithms that are designed with subtle flaws that can take years, if not decades, to come to light.
Cryptography is an extremely technical field, so yes, you do. That's not really relevant to the matter of truly owning your computer. If you want to personally validate modern theoretical physics, that would also take years of study.
> Even open source encryption algorithms that some claim are above reproach are repeatedly being shown to have major flaws, and the fixes to those flaws have their own major flaws.
Again, a separate issue. That's not a matter of having a computer you truly own, that's a matter of software quality.
> Will this ever end? Will I ever have a computer that I own?
They pose this question as if it's a rhetorical one. The Free Software movement already exists. You can support it with code contributions, documentation, testing effort, money, or advocacy/activism. See [0]. If you don't like the FSF specifically, you can support other initiatives.
You can do an almost fully GPL compliant Linux desktop by building it yourself today. I can already see people thinking "but what about the closed source binary blobs? my video card? my network interfaces?"
But even your 12 MHz 286 or 386SX/20 had closed source AMI or Phoenix BIOS firmware on it. The motherboard manufacturer in Taiwan and American Megatrends sure weren't handing out the source code to that. And if you had a video card, or a soundblaster, its drivers loaded in config.sys were also closed binary blobs.
1. The underlying hardware interfaces (I/O ports, memory addresses, etc.) was considered part of the IBM PC "standard" and many programs would bypass the BIOS and talk directly to the hardware.
2. The software interface to the BIOS and VBIOS was also part of the IBM PC "standard", and so the firmware couldn't diverge too far from the expected behaviour without risking compatibility issues.
3. Once the PC entered protected mode, the BIOS essentially turns into a useless brick, and ceases to have any influence on the operation of the CPU. (That is, once in protected mode, the OS kernel in ring 0 had full control of the system, and none of the BIOS code remained active.)
The difference with modern systems is stark: binary blobs often provide the only means to operate the hardware devices, CPUs have special execution modes (such as SMM) which continue to execute binary firmware even after the OS has booted, and even the CPU itself holds binary blobs (such as microcode patches).
Good security is about minimising the attack surface and risk, not reaching some ideal pie-in-the-sky complete and total trust.
We used to make fun of the countries behind the iron curtain for their lack privacy. The thought of living in a surveillance state seemed horrible as well as unrealistic in "the west". Freedom / democracy loving people like us would never have that kind of problem. Now it seems the whole world has gone mad, and it seems that people looking for privacy, are just considered as people looking to do something terrible that the state needs to stop anyway.
This is obviously unrealistic for most people. You can toggle off automatic feedback & updates in a modern OS and you can install Firefox with tracker blocking and you are 99% of the way there, plenty enough in practice.
I want to point out both of these approaches introduce legitimate security holes (either from not using a production grade OS or from disabling updates on it) which are vastly more likely to have real impact on your life versus privacy tracking.
I think this is an inherent contradiction - if you want to be in total control of your computer while not knowing how totally control your computer, you are never going to get what you want. You are always going to have to put your trust in someone else to manage your computer. Some of those people might be more trustworthy than others, but you are still trusting in someone else to manage your computer.
Software needs to be simple for users to be in control.
(Plug: a section of an article of mine covered this previously. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982860)
One of the fun parts about hitting DefCon every year is how easy it is to learn about what's new in this space. I hope they don't cancel this year: the social information sharing aspect is the best part.
Huh? You can buy a very cheap used ThinkPad for <$200 and run GNU/Linux on it. In fact, I don’t see any mention of Linux in this article.
How secure do you think face-to-face conversations are? (not sarcastic or anything, just genuinely interested on measuring security of conversations)
(1) a government is already specifically interested in you or the person you're talking to when you have your conversation: both the fact of the conversation and the content of the conversation can probably be captured pretty easily.
(2) no government is specifically interested in you prior to your conversation, but you take no special precautions: the content is probably secure, it's probably not being recorded, but your location is probably recorded so if you later become a target of interest then the fact of your meeting is likely to be recoverable.
(3) no government is specifically interested in you prior to your conversation, and you take precautions (being careful about when and where you meet, and not bringing your phone): probably your conversation is reasonably secure.
Not to mention a) arranging the meeting and b) getting to the meeting need to be performed some how. Getting from point A to point B is, in today's society, not a surveillance free affair. Everything you carry can be used to track you, and even if you carry nothing, hundreds of CCTV cameras can likely follow you along the majority of your chosen route.
Thus the 'metadata' of your meeting is still known, even if the contents of your meeting isn't.
Plus, it is a bit harder to mass surveil people, even with voice recognition, as one can go into a crowded place (or, well, could, barring current circumstances...) so most of the audio is drowned out.
The idea was that my iPhone could be as nefarious as it wanted to be — it could never talk to anyone I didn’t want it to talk to because iptables stopped it, or something.
The project didn’t pan out, but I did end up using pihole a lot which felt like a good compromise.
I also discovered that iOS and cell carriers have a some kind of partnership to silently send each other text messages containing lots of unique looking identifiers, which was fun (REG-RESP?v=3&r=...&n=+555994321&s=FB87CD658A...etc). I used a niche IOT carrier for a while that showed me the complete SMS logs, including all these messages being sent multiple times a day.
I’m sure there’s some banal engineering reason for it but it’s not exactly heartening to find “secret” text messages being snuck out, by the dozen.
In practice I strive for this. I run all the backend services I can get my hands on from my basement (Home Assistant, NextCloud). But getting to the 100% mark indeed seem impossible today without mayor inconveniences, compared to other people, in this time frame at least..
I think the best bet is for citizens of powerful and influential governments insist on legal privacy constraints for software and hardware manufacturers, as well as place limits on their own governments' snooping.
I believe urbit is the solution, just waiting for the implementation to get polished up.
This applies so much to modern Windows operating systems that it's frankly disgusting. I think most phones are also solidly in this space as well.
Apple is marginally better, but their efforts to ram iCloud services down your throat at every available opportunity is pretty obvious as well. Plus the amount of things that mysteriously call home. On the plus side, they don't actively send you ads baked into your lock screen or start menu.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-opened-microsoft-edge-and-ap...
Of course, you can't change the crappiness of the broader infrastructure, but "give me wisdom to accept what I cannot change" and all that. Choose your battles.
I don't quite get what the author is talking about. There are some concerns about what proprietary BIOS firmware does, but otherwise pretty much any PC on the market can run whatever software (including the OS) the user installs on them. Or can the author only afford a smartphone?
If you want to truly own your hardware I can recommend the mnt reform
But then again, the author could understandably reply that TLS is an example of a system that has evolved to require "checking in" with a central authority - the opposite of what they want. So fair enough.
Where is the middle ground between those two ends?
Maybe it is similar to what we have now?
I take it as a given that a few generations from now, every move, expression, twitch, etc. will be recorded, persisted (in perpetuity), analyzed, etc. by many mutually hostile parties. Even right now, we're never far away from dozens of active microphones (i.e. phones) that may or may not be live streaming an audio feed over the network. Many cities are covered in cameras. A lot of financial traffic is electronic already. So, you could argue that although incomplete, it's already getting hard to cover your tracks. Tin foil hats don't really suffice anymore.
In fact, I believe we are just living through a very narrow window of time where this is all technically feasible but not common practice or practical yet on a global scale. I'm talking about a cradle to grave thing. It's not going to be opt in or opt out for anyone ultimately. It's basically an arms race.
However, I take some comfort from the notion that there will be many parties doing that and watching each other and thus keeping each other honest. The irony of that is that this applies equally to dictators, corrupt politicians, criminals, terrorists, military, etc. as well. They may be empowered to misbehave but they won't be able to do so covertly. If you are powerful enough, you get to rewrite history. But in the future that will require access to the digital archives of all your enemies. And you can never be sure that you got every bit of that.
I want real information not force fed crap that is essentially information fast food causing type-2 terminal stupididty.
I want information without the built in addiction.
Infinity Search (https://infinitysearch.co) is something like what I have in mind, but they only charge $5 per month, and search results are noticably less comprehensive than Google.
Kind of like how there are various pay-to-use email services which market themselves on their security, I'd like to see a lot more competitors in the paid search engine space. Eg instead of paying $5 per month, let's pay $200 a year for a search engine which consistently returns superior results to Google.
I try to follow these guidelines:
1.) Used and buy only general purpose computers, where you can swap hardware and operating-system. Or even better, firmware.
2.) Avoid Big Tech: Apple (literally all), Microsoft (Surface) and Google (Pixel)
3.) Laptops: Invest into vendors which allow all purpose computing or especiall Linux. Big ones are Lenovo and Dell, small ones are {System76, Purism, Tuxedo, ...}.
4.) Desktop: Built it yourself or order some from a shop which built it for you.
Actually the Pixel Phones are rather good. But Google is not better than Apple. Miracast is really complicated but good. Google? Disables Miracast in the Pixel phones and tries people to lure into Chromecast, which is inferior and requires practically always Internet. If you want send content two meters across the room you don't want Internet! And Pushmail? Only with GMAIL on Pixel. We are in 2021 and this phones don't provide Pushmail for IMAP servers which actually provide this feature. Even Apple is better there, and Apple also provides CalDAV and CardDAV. But Apples doesn't provide file system access nor allow you to use your devics as you want!
Lenovo and Dell improved their Linux support a lot in recent years - so I consider them pretty positive. But nothing is perfect.
PS: Probably I receive downvotes because saying negative things about Apple is not well received here. Silicon Valley Clique?
https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toas...
Certainly the author of the article could clarify a few different areas for better leverage though, for example their desired state of the "mine"-ness of their data in transit vs. their data at rest on their client's side of things. Do they need to "own" their ISP?
And what's a hidden agenda from the factory--are we meant to intuit that without the author's help? Does it include software feature choice influenced by profit motives, or is the author talking about their subjective workflow being interrupted by something that is meant to fit a broader type or category of user?
I think the author could use at least a few different methods to organize and arrange some precise outcomes, and would then be well on their way to achieving what they want without needing to burden their imagination so much (286? Yikes, my PS/2 Model 30 was so nice to be done with...maybe excepting the keyboard) from the outset.
By design, I think.
>> I am locked into a single OS on my smartphone, which either spies on you or is locked down even more. Every iteration a bit more control is taken away from the user.
I got so fed up with this, I abandoned the whole mobile infrastructure and built my own phone with a Raspberry Pi 3B+. The Raspberry Pi is pretty open hardware (yes, I'm aware it's not perfect). For software I used Python 3, C and GTK. It does voice and SMS/MMS only, but that is enough for me.
I built it for myself. It's stable enough that I use it as my daily driver.
I am in the process of open sourcing the code and putting it out on github. https://github.com/another2020githubuser/thepyphone
I truly hope an open hardware smart phone becomes available soon. Until then, I'll use my home grown PyPhone to get by.
Owning something should mean that you are able to fix it.
A single person can peak under the hood of the entire OS and know what's going on (provided they learn the language). This is inconceivable even in something like Linux.
Simplicity is required for true ownership.
On the web you will still need to deal with how everything these days is behind the currently hip and trendy CDN, but you can choose not to use such websites. You can have a main machine and your freedom respecting machine. You choose your own compromise.
I did that some time ago and I have to say I love my freedom respecting mostly distraction free X200 for writing or coding. It is a great machine to work with, if you can accept old hardware and the implied worse performance.
I would summarize the thesis in this sentence ->
”I want a computer that does what I want it to do, not one that has a hidden agenda programmed into it at the factory.”
You won't get what you want with different hardware and an open OS unless you also fix the ecosystem.
And that means fixing ad tech, cloud services, DNS, open packet inspection, location tracking, security at multiple levels, and any number of other technologies, only the last of which is the local OS.
Worrying about the item in your hand or on your desk is almost literally looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
p.s. aren't Raptor Computing's systems pretty much free too?
While static content on a blog doesn't really need it, HTTPS would still help protect the privacy of visitors browsing history.
This is not to say our efforts at privacy are completely in vain, just that this perfect endpoint doesn't exist.
This is likely the only way forward other than RISC-V on FPGA. But they aren't exactly well defined. Or open. Solid hardware RISC-V is interesting and medium term viable but I foresee a world of blobs waiting in the wings. Time will tell.
Therefore economy will push us to goods we don't own. If you would like to own something you will have to pay the surplus for reduced turnover at the economies side.
Get a free hardware or hardware with crippled anti-features, they're plenty of vendors that supply it, slap Linux on it, PGP encrypt your email and use secure chat. Oh, your want all of that to be done for you? Well you'll have to pay then.
Or that another argument - that encryption is workaround. It's like saying that food is not solution for being hungry but a workaround, a ridiculous statement. How are you supposed to stay private and anonymous if you communicate in the open? Are you going to have a private cable line to every correspondent you talk to?
There's Dual_EC_DRBG . Are there any other instances where this happened? And I thought barely anyone even used Dual_EC_DRBG because it was super slow. Did the author ever use it?
Attempting to hide in a world full of people who could care less about their privacy will make you stand out to those watching, however.
I kid you not when I say that I derive immense pleasure from using it. Apart from a few (equally freedom respecting) devices I find, I literally never feel like I'm wanting for anything.
I can't recommend it enough. I don't have the words.
When I last truly owned my computer, connectivity (if it existed) was via dial-up.
The other thing I'd note is that we have more and better ways to communicate securely today than ever before. In the world I grew up in, we had phones, and Ma Bell knew who you called and how long you talked, and possibly even what you talked about. There was no real privacy or encryption possible; we all just pretended like those calls were private.
Private communication is possible now on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, and I assume ChromeOS, right?
There certainly are other people who also want that computer. (E.g. me.) Maybe there are as many or more who do than don't want any of you, or us, to have them.
We have the advantage that what we want is just like the computers everybody else has, except with things taken out.
The software is doable. The CPUs have "management engines" that, at least in some cases seem possible to disable. The wi-fi chips are a problem; we might need SDR to bypass those.
But the cell phone system is going to be a problem.
Until we reach a point where we can break that cycle, getting a machine like he's describing is going to either be really expensive or impossible.
In fact, I think you havethe effect straight up backwards. It wasn't the ads or walled gardens that created those free tools you like... It was the presence of those tools and the cleverness of users that made the formation of ad networks and walled gardens a thing.
I assure you, the Free part of Free Software is one heck of a force multiplier.
I have a Pinebook Pro & an System76 Darter laptop. I use neither because the build quality is weak. Things like a proper trackpad, decent resolutions etc. Basically, I want a Macbook Air, but open-ish. And I'd gladly pay the 'premium' for it. Hell, that Darter was more expensive than a pretty decked out MBA & it is a heap of cheap plastics.
If the hardware was there, I wouldn't mind having to out some more effort in to getting a proper Linux distro running properly/
While this will not provide the kind of freedom on the software side that the thread seeks, at least you get the freedom to choose the hardware components that run your device.
Which models is he talking about here? Those Raptor Power9 workstations that are like $7k are the only things that come to mind.
It remains an interesting question. Is there any way to reclaim the autonomy and ethos of freedom from the earlier part of the digital era?
I'm not sure how that would look. I don't mean in terms of a set of hardware and software solutions.
I mean technology that's actually for the end users, available to everyone with curiosity as the only barrier to entry. It sounds like a utopian delusion even though it existed not so long ago.
I'm not sure there's a realistic way to get there from here. I'd love to be wrong about that though.
https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-95-remains-most-popular-op...
Maybe yes, but why? Why do you want it?
As long as you remain a human being, there will always be things you'd prefer be otherwise if you just wait a while. If we take that as an axiom, we can stop trying to react to every discontent with thoughts of wanting the world to be different. Once you accept that things are the way they are and there ain't a thing to do about most of 'em, maybe that's better than owning a computer you own. I dunno, works for me :)
Sounds like my mom - "make the gizmo do things".
Install Linux, leave us be.
I understand why people find Stallman irritating, but my word, he does tend to be right with terrifying frequency. (Come to think of it, that's probably part of _why_ people find him irritating.)
For wasting time reproducing the mistakes of the makers risking noise for signal ?
For fixing rules to be the king of a kingdom of one risking blood for throne ?
For protecting secrets to dangerous to share, having risking life ?
For the gut feeling sake of owning, missing common culture as a much more powerful nudge than Google & Co ?
Or just properly for the need of justice ? Just in math, just in time, just for men !
Don’t want to own, but to get proper : one small step in mind, one giant leap in mind kind ;))
I am worried more about software. I'd like to have a compatible privacy-oriented browser with governance that puts quality and transparency first.
If I want a typewriter, car or handgun I “truly own”, I might be able to build one, as a last resort. But building a satisfactory computer without the global supply chains (that impose the bemoaned limitations) seems impossible.
This is an implicit admission that the technology itself really doesn't matter. If it did, the author would have scrounged and saved to get the expensive tool they need to start getting the results they desire, the same way musicians scrimp and save to get the instrument their ear tells them they need.
We’ve been the victim of foreign propaganda to the point where the people have been driven mad by lies and the destruction of the American culture. We need defense in cyberspace the same way that we need defense against any invading forces. Few, sane, people argue against having a Navy or an Army; it’s just by the nature of the internet as a new technology that we’ve neglected it this long. And, before you give me the “those who would give up freedom for security...“ line: we already don’t have freedom, we already don’t have security. I often wish that people could recognize that the government of the people and by the people is for the people. And quit treating out greatest tool against tyranny as a whipping boy for whatever personal crap they are going through.
And your suggestion that mass surveillance is a reasonable solution to domestic terrorism is quiet terrifying to me. Mass surveillance is far too easy to abuse. Sure you can have a 'for the people' government and it not be abused, but a 'for the people' government needs a healthy amount of fear of the people to remain so. Your country already has issues with gerrymandering, do you think that's made better or worse by the government collecting more information about the people?
To follow your overthrow path, would more surveillance have helped? Would less have hindered? I'd say no to both accounts. The government already had information on when/what was going to occur and that was obtained not with mass surveillance but with simply in infiltrating the communities involved.
We should also consider if mass surveillance is the best solution to the issues you mentioned. Perhaps you could get the same thing you wanted by increasing education funding. Perhaps the same could be accomplished by building better cyberspace communities where you can be closer to your neighbours rather than the much more filter-bubble communities we commonly have now.
Damocles was an obsequious courtier in the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse, a fourth century BC tyrant of Syracuse. Damocles exclaimed that, as a great man of power and authority, Dionysius was truly fortunate. Dionysius offered to switch places with him for a day, so he could taste that fortune first-hand. In the evening a banquet was held, where Damocles very much enjoyed being waited upon like a king. Only at the end of the meal did he look up and notice a sharpened sword hanging directly above his head, held only by a single horse-hair. Immediately, he lost all taste for the festivities and asked leave of the tyrant, saying he no longer wanted to be so fortunate. Dionysius had successfully conveyed a sense of the constant threat under which a powerful man lives.
The powerful are perpetually terrified. They are scared of each other. They are scared of the populace. If someone created a perfectly secure computer or phone with secure messaging capabilities, from the hardware up, that company would immediately be told to play ball or face blackballing.
The mobile phones are by far more limiting and take away control of the owner.
A simple example would be the possibility to edit the HOSTS file on Android. I am the owner and administrator of this device, yet I am unable to do basic controls of my device.
My gf asked me why her Android can't install new apps (gplay says it doesn't have enough space to install 14MiB app, phone says it has 200MiB free).
So I go to adb shell to see what's taking up space, df says 700MiB free on user data filesystem (so the stupid gplay app is lying). `ls` and `du` says permission denied almost everywhere.
To unlock/root the phone, it needs to be erased, or needs some apk installed (which doesn't work). Even Windows 95 20 years ago had less shitty debugging experience.
Just makes me glad I never bought a smartphone, personally.
Other time we needed access was just to back up the list of contacts. Also not possible without a stupid possibly closed source apk. It's not even part of adb backup. But many regular apps are allowed to steal your contact list and send it anywhere they want. Bleh.
"User hostile" doesn't even cut it, when you lose access to your data the moment app installation breaks, and can't get to your data via debug tools.
Who's going to tell him who made the x286 and DOS? Not exactly 501(C) organisations...
The inflation-adjusted price of an IBM AT when it was introduced in 1984 was about $15k.
Of course Apple and Microsoft won't get you any privacy (see Prism), but Linux and a good VPN can get the author everything they want.
This isn't a high bar for computers. I'm not sure what part I'm missing.
Nowadays, you can only truly own an emulator.
-- The key advantage of an old MS-DOS / floppy based computer is that you can always bring your system back to a known safe state--
Once you adopt any operating system that is always running, the OS has to protect the hardware from everything, if you want to be able to trust it. This rules out Linux, Mac-OS, Windows, etc. I'm hoping that Genode does a good enough job to be able to trust it, but it's a bit beyond my learning curve right now.
If you have a secure OS, which isn't stupid about trust, then you're back in the saddle again, and can build upon this foundation, being careful to never give any executable you run more privilege than it needs to do the job. Linux, Windows, and Mac-OS all have stupid defaults (allow everything the user is permitted)... Genode and systems that implement capabilities don't do that. (No, "access your contacts" on your tablet or phone is not a proper "capability", "you can read this file", and "you can write this folder" are proper capabilities).
-- A secure system lets you assign capabilities using dialog boxes like you're used to using, except they call them a "power box". The OS then enforces your decisions, not the application. No matter how rogue or confused your program gets, it can't access anything outside of the files or folders you've given it access to. 8)
We're a few years out before awareness of the stupid defaults we're all living with take hold, and the inertia of everything then has to be overcome. We'll get there eventually, if we can keep the idea at least an open option before big business closes it down for good.
No, you don't. Or, at least, you didn't want it enough for too long enough!
Each time you sent your friend a document which was not formatted in an open standard, you didn't want a computer that you owned.
Each time you accepted DRM in order to access some nice content, you didn't want a computer that you owned.
Each time you run a program or, God forbids, an OS which you didn't have the source code of, you didn't want a computer that you owned.
Each time you accepted to be target by advertisers as a way to enjoy a "free" service, you didn't want a computer that you owned.
Industry gave you what you wanted. Industry gives you what you still want.
What models are being referred to here? Sounds like the OP’s problem can be solved with more money.
Which ones?
There’s a huge world of difference in complexity and understandability between an MCU and the SOCs in a phone even if the instruction set is the same.
https://github.com/mcci-catena/HW-Designs/tree/master/Boards... https://github.com/mcci-catena/catena-riscv32-fpga
ie. an FPGA you can put your own OS AND radio firmware on. Something like https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5921 (and see the updates https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates) doesn't cut it fully as the wifi has a firmware blob, and in addition I'm not sure how open the xilinx toolchain is (might be, I know some xilinx chips are supported by open source toolchains).
As an OS for the feather board, you could use DASH7 for the radio portion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH7), and Oberon as a general OS. (https://blog.gadgetfactory.net/2016/02/how-to-implement-the-...)
Obviously several problems exist there - only Linux has an available FPGA toolchain, so you need a linux computer to bootstrap Oberon onto the FPGA, and DASH7 won't run on the same device (it runs on STM32 boards mainly).
So, to get a completely open design, you'd need to port DASH7 stack and the FPGA tools to Oberon to allow self-hosting and fully open radio. Add to that the fact that this board doesn't supply any video output so your development is over ssh/terminal and you have a way to go to get a fully open system.
Other pain points are that Oberon is a systems language that uses GC, so for deterministic/realtime (radio) operation it is not usable - you'd need to use it's cousin Composita to have a deterministic memory managed OS.
Lastly, Oberon doesn't have any formal verification tools which would be ideal for verifying the entire self-hosted stack. I suspect you'd need to use a LISP of some sort to be able to verify things from the ground up. Of course most LISPs have GC so you'd need to migrate the Composita+Oberon (A2) architecture to LISP to be able to build higher-level verifiable constructs.
However... this is almost possible. There are a few key things to work out here, but it's closer than at any point previously :)
Do I own my M1 MacBook Air? Did I own my TRS-80 Model 4, an 8-bit, Z80-based computer circa 1983? Well, I didn't lease either one of them, I bought them outright. Apple can't demand their hardware back now any more than Radio Shack could have demanded theirs back then. So that's owning, right? No?
You say I don't own my Mac because I can't put a different operating system on it. It's true, I could run multiple operating systems on the TRS-80. Sort of. There was TRSDOS, CP/M, and... several nearly-interchangeable TRSDOS clones. Of course, I can run a lot more on the M1 if you count virtual machines (including all the TRS-80 operating systems), but I know that's not what you mean. You can run any OS that's been ported to the Mac on the Mac, though, and there's already work being done to port Linux and NetBSD. Do I not own the Mac because Apple's security measures make it difficult to do that porting?
You say I'm dependent on the largesse of Apple and they can "take things away" from me as long as I'm using the Mac. And, it's true they have a potential level of control over what I can run on macOS that Radio Shack didn't have over TRSDOS. Yet for practical purposes I depended on the largess of Radio Shack, too, and when that stopped, the writing was on the wall for that compuer line. Not the same thing? No, not exactly, but I bet you can't name a Mac application that you can't run because Apple pulled a hidden switch that stopped it from running. You can name a few that you could run a decade ago -- or in a very few cases, a year ago -- that you can't now because the OS changed, or the hardware changed. I can't run my once-beloved crazy writing brainstorming app, Dramatica Story Expert. But that's because its developer is legendarily terrible at keeping up with modern Apple hardware. It isn't because I don't own my computer.
You say that things aren't "private" on the Mac. What's that mean? The local data on the Mac is more protected than the local data on the TRS-80 was, I can tell you. Forget encryption, stuff rarely had plain text passwords! Data that isn't local is a question mark now, but it was a question mark then, too -- to the degree it was possible to have non-local data on places like BBSes and Compuserve and even the early Internet. I have way more data "in the cloud" now, but in many ways it's a lot more secure, because we weren't just thinking about security in the same way three or four decades ago. As for ad tracking, I'd argue that's a really important conversation about privacy, but it's not a conversation about "owning my computer" unless we're really stretching the metaphor.
And in the final analysis, "you don't own your own computer" is a metaphor, a semantic sleight of hand. I'm surely playing a semantic game here myself, but my issue with a lot of these arguments is that they're presenting as something that they maybe aren't. They're maybe less about liberté, égalité, fraternité than they are about nostalgia for a (remembered as) simpler, more tinkering-friendly time.
Perhaps we're going to return to a time where it's difficult to put an OS on your computer other than the one sanctioned by its manufacturer. Is that great? No. Does it mean we don't really own our computers? I'm just not sure I buy that.
[To vainly try to head off the "but iOS" responses: I'm explicitly talking about Macs in this example. And no, I don't expect Macs to ever be locked down to the degree iOS is. That's a rant for another time, though.]
> 2-26-21
as a date format is just wrong.
The reason most of the things you buy are cheap is due to economies of scale - you want something a lot of people want.
Want a bicycle with 2 wheels? Cheap. Want one with 7 wheels? Expensive.
Unfortunately for you, almost none of the things you say you want in a laptop are things you're aligned with most of humanity in terms of priority. Sure, most people might tell you they want those things, but they're not willing to give up the benefits of centralization, or pay a few bucks to get rid of ads.
Tldr: if you want something few people will buy, expect to pay more.
I think this is the rub of the problem, because it's a contradiction: "I want secure software with no vulnerabilities, but don't you dare force me to update". This kinda sorta worked in the early 90's because most people weren't on the internet and few were actively thinking of exploiting anything -- it was a time of plaintext protocols and unauthenticated commands. The world has moved on, and our tradeoffs balance in a different place today.