28c3: The coming war on general computation

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Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation
The copyright war was just the beginning

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to "secure" anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

And general purpose computers can cause harm -- whether it's printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs.

The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other "trust" mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can't inspect or terminate, that run without users' consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don't want them to.

The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.

Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.

Transcript: https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctoro... (CC-BY by Joshua Wise)
SRT file with detailed timings (created automatically by YouTube) https://gist.github.com/3193854

• Category

  Science & Technology

[blinxwang]

Free Software, Free Society.

Use GNU/Linux!

[LordKelvan]

raspberryPi isn't open hardware afaik, at least atm

[Ana Lyze]

This is so good. 

[JeMartele]

How is "printing out AR15 components"dangerous?

Or does the author consider anything which his disturbs his gun control nut freakishness a threat?

Most illogical, and rather paranoid

[Kevin Buecher]

artists and athletes of the future will have to go to better schools, which will teach them how to control technology instead of being controlled by it.

[Jelena Jovanovic]

Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices

and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

perfect

[bassbeast1968]

The sad part is everyone cheers the "Death of MSFT" when what is replacing it is WORSE! I could wipe ANY windows PC and booted dozens of OSes on that hardware, can't do that on Apple or Chromebooks, its too locked down. I'm all for competition but don't replace a bad thing with a worse thing, like replacing flash for patented up the ying yang H.264, its not an advancement!

[PMeursault]

PC bullshit

[Somini AnAlternativo]

And yet, UEFI is a thing and there are reports of bricked laptops after installing Linux.

[clemonsx90]

If you asked a scientist to figure out the feasibility of going to the moon in the 1950s, he'd likely have estimated that it'd cost a trillion dollars and be prohibitively expensive. If you asked someone in 1920 if it'd be possible to get a country to round up several million inhabitants and systemically kill them, they'd think you have quite the imagination. It's also proved impossible to ban drugs, but that doesn't stop the government from waging a war on computation.

[Edwin J. P.]

Cory is paranoid and so are everyone who likes to agree with him e.g. Some factions in UN.

General computing machinery is so ubiquitous, convenient and trivial, that it is impossible and costly to ban it. The powers that be are aware of this and are not as not as stupid as Cory likes to imagine.

[Nix7c0]

If I had to guess, I'd say people do it, in part, to make other people ask themselves exactly that question.