[ontolog-forum] Coming War on General Computing

[Ali SH <asaegyn+out@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Ontolog,

Cory Doctorow gave this talk at the recent 28c3 conference - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg&feature=related

For those interested in computers and its applications, it is at the very least food for thought. I'm curious to hear reactions to his sketch of how computing is trying to be reigned in.

A related article would be Wired's assessment of the recent SOPA bill:  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/civil-liberties-ip/

Best,
Ali

==========

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-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.md (CC-BY by Joshua Wise)

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