Taking Back Control Over Technology We Purchase (Study, Modify, Enhance, and More)
"The war on general-purpose computing continues"
Our friends at Soylent News are discussing a recent article entitled "What Happened to Running What You Wanted on Your Own Machine?" (Having made an archived version of it in archive.ph)
"Answer: Microsoft" says the top comment, but some person points out Apple's role and the article deals with Google's own push not only for DRM but also runtime lock-down (centralised censorship, worse than attestation).
There are people there who try to distract from the real history, including the role of Japanese companies.
"The war on general-purpose computing continues," an associate argues (we covered this before). "Trying to reframe basic installation as 'sideloading' is a major blow against software freedom as it marginalizes the very idea of control over your own devices."
They try to turn all computers into something akin to consoles or coin-operated arcade equipment, where the user is presumed hostile and a "cheater" ("anticheat" is a rootkit one installs on one's own computer; it's like what Sony did, except with users' consent). Then we have people who try to tell us that we should be denied from booting our operating system of choice on our own devices and should gleefully accept kill switches. █