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posted by janrinok on Sunday October 09 2022, @05:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the pentagon-says-no dept.

Volume 189 of The PCLinuxOS Magazine has an article on Bill Gates' evil prophecy from 40 years ago where he aims for ending general-purpose computing. He achieves that goal a step at a time over the decades, with the help of many a mole and quisling. Lately, the Pluton chip and Restricted Boot play both play key roles towards ending this era of general-purpose computing. The Pluton chip is an extension of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) used by Vista10 and required by Vista11. Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, and even its upstream source, Debian, folded years ago in regards to secure boot by using Microsoft's signing key, possibly cementing that as the norm. The article covers that and many other incidents leading up to the current situation.

There is an ever-decreasing amount of time left to keep general-purpose computing alive and the author signs off with how to approach the political maneuvers going on:

The implications are already starting to show

At the beginning of the year, Matthew Garrett, the researcher who created the UEFI bootloader for Linux (which I do not agree with at all, as it sets a precedent for Microsoft to abuse the market, with its position of power, should not be allowed under any circumstances) said that the Pluton chip was not an attack on users' freedom to use whatever operating system they wanted, which was not a threat.

In July 2022, he recanted, when he was unable to install Linux on a high-end Thinkpad Z13, complaining that this was not a legal practice by Lenovo.

But, that's what Microsoft wants. Under the guise of enforcing security, it blocks the machine's access to the user himself, being the gatekeeper of personal computing. In other words, "my" microcomputer is over. From now on, it will be Microsoft's microcomputer, and only what it allows will run...[sic]

It is up to us, the users, to boycott AMD products that contain the Pluton chip, to favor recycled or refurbished computers. And there is still more to do:

  • Support the Free Software Foundation's campaigns against Windows 11
  • Support the Right to Repair movement, in the person of Louis Rossman, one of the most prominent activists of this movement
  • Bomb your congressmen with emails & phone calls, so that Microsoft is legally pressured not to go ahead with the Pluton project.

So folks, things have never been so in jeopardy as they are today. Microsoft wants to be the big brother, and dictate what everyone can run on their computers, under the benevolent guise of ensuring security. We can't afford that, or the future of personal computing and privacy will be ruined.

Finally, let's not forget that anyone who says they don't need privacy because they have nothing to hide is the same thing as not defending freedom of speech, because they have nothing to say...[sic]

Let's fight this! The scenario is ugly, and the battle will be hard!

However, procrastination by using only old or refurbished computers does nothing to address the cause of the problem. There is a finite supply of old equipment, anyway, and eventually they will run out. If there are no new general-purpose laptops, desktops, and servers in the pipeline by then the era of useful computing will have drawn to a close.

Previously:
(2022) Responsible Stewardship of the UEFI Secure Boot Ecosystem
(2020) Red Hat and CentOS Systems Aren't Booting Due to BootHole Patches
(2018) First-ever UEFI Rootkit Spotted in the Wild
(2014) Rootkits Target 64-bit PCs - Secure Boot Is Not Always Secure


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Monday October 10 2022, @05:42AM (3 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 10 2022, @05:42AM (#1275788) Journal

    Close but not quite. The mismanagement of their Linux-based smart phone did not start until Microsoft's Elop arrived and then started killing Nokia [blogs.com]. If you dig around enough in articles from 2010, you'll find that Nokia's Linux-based phone was getting better reviews than the iPhone -- up until Elop killed the line. If you're wondering why he sold of the headquarters and did other things to drive the company into the ground post haste, you'll also find some article from a little later exposing the fact that the Nokia board of directors had signed Elop up with a contract containing a $25 million bonus if he sold the company to M$. They did that while lying about it being just another standard contract.

    Tomi Ahonen's site [blogs.com] has a real treasure trove of well-documented analysis from that time, 2010 and a few following years. Without Nokia's Linux-based line of phones, the market became stale, uninnovative, and a duopoly between Google and Apple. While M$ Windows-based Lumia failure peaked out at approximately 3% of all sales, activation statistics show that less than half of them actually saw any use at all. They were still outnumbered by non-Nokia Linux-based phones. Lumia quickly went away. Now the market is just Android versus iPhone with Jolla not even being a statistical error and had been for a long while about 85% Android and 14% iPhone. However, now that has shifted greatly especially in some markets like in the US. Currently, in the US over 50% of the smartphones are iPhone [petapixel.com].

    Phones are not general-purpose computers even though they are basically portable super computers. Anecdotally, I can say that I no longer know anyone who has written programs (aka "apps") for either iPhone or Android who was not already being paid to do so professionally. Both Apple and Google have made it increasingly difficult to get custom software onto the phone, especially via their "app" stores.

    Smartphones are also terribly inefficient to use for any type of computing activity, so you have to wonder about the loss of productivity and output at a global scale, too, when so many try to do a task on a smartphone instead of waiting a few minutes and getting the same task done in a tenth the time and effort on a normal desktop or laptop.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 10 2022, @10:39AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday October 10 2022, @10:39AM (#1275811)

    Matter of perspective... Being Nokia, the hardware was in good shape, but the Qt software development had a number of internal to Nokia developers who later said the smartphone project was a smoldering dumpster fire.

    A lot of this came out during Jolla development, then Jolla mismanaged their finances and hardware release, and never quite got traction for their OS work...

    --
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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 10 2022, @10:47AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday October 10 2022, @10:47AM (#1275813)

    As for software development on a single smartphone, that's not too hard to do. Where it falls apart is when the OS updates and shifts the landscape sufficiently to require significant rework, particularly of the interesting features which are constantly labeled "security risk" and given new APIs, debatable whether they get any more secure, but clearly they obsolete a lot of applications that would otherwise have continued to work.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 10 2022, @11:14AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday October 10 2022, @11:14AM (#1275816)

    As to the inefficiency aspect, that's a matter of perspective. At the moment my mechanical keyboard and 25" monitor are in the same room as my sleeping wife, so while I could type this 3x or more faster on that interface if I could access it, in reality I can type this infinitely faster right now on my phone as compared to later when it won't happen due to higher priority tasks both on and off the computer.

    Somehow, quite illogically, it has become socially acceptable to bury your face into a 7" screen and occupy both hands tapping the touch screen in all kinds of settings where "real" computers are rejected due to their physical bulk.

    While smartphone interfaces are horribly slow and inefficient compared with the things they are replacing, their killer advantage is the constant availability of those clunky interfaces. Mine is a entertainment center computer remote, both through VNC and ssh, a garage door opener, IOT light switch controller, home thermostat control from anywhere (as in: left on a 7 day vacation and forgot to set the thermostat to economy...) And, it's a really crappy email and message board interface.

    For professional work away from my home desk, I carry a laptop (itself not quite as good as my "real" computer with mouse, big screen and better keyboard) and the phone becomes an internet hotspot. But for just being aware of incoming email and maybe tapping out a quick reply, the phone itself is capable... Actually, I carry two laptops (in a backpack) one with the corporate approved IT maintained Windows image that lets me access the company VPN and various "work apps" that don't work without that access, and an Ubuntu laptop that I do the bulk of my work on; no, dual boot is not allowed or possible with the corporate image, because: security, of course.

    Every interface has its compromises, it's not surprising that the handheld one available for a low monthly payment is winning the popularity contest, and also is subject to the most intense corporate abuses of privacy.

    --
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