A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server.
A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices.
The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkable but so much of it is ultimately busy work that didn't need to be done if we regulated the consumer electronics market appropriately.
If you believe this, the fight should be against PlayStation and Xbox.
They’re 100% commodity hardware and fully locked down from any user freedom. Weirdly everyone focuses on Apple with all their might instead of gaming consoles.
Because gaming consoles are for a very specific purpose (and sold as such – the ruling against Sony for blocking Linux on the PS3 only happened because they advertised Linux compatibility) and Macs are general purpose computers
No Universal Machine inside any consumer product should "be for a very specific purpose," where it is locked down to prevent the consumer-owner from making software or firmware modifications to it. This goes for pacemakers, automobiles, microwave ovens, MRI machines, and even Intel IME or the little microcontroller on your NVME drive. If I were elected Benevolent Dictator For Life of the United States, I would immediately withdraw us from WIPO, strike down the DMCA, and implement a 100%+ sales tax on all "finished products" for sale which had even just one such Universal Machine in it locked down as described, AND mandate a minimum of 25 years full warranty and support on such products with forced 100% buy-back for failure to support or patch or open. We must relegate today's form of 'proprietary' to a rental/lease-only model and quit calling it 'ownership'.
We must demand hardware which strongly adheres to the GNU/FSF ethos or it must be rejected society-wide (or made too expensive for the average normie to afford, effectively killing its market). Universal Machines are to free humanity, not limit or enslave us! THIS is why I don't buy Apple and hold my nose buying x86 (Qubes OS) and Google Pixels (GrapheneOS); if I could afford Raptor Engineering's TALOS II, I would own only that!
Macs are special purpose hardware for running macOS. A PC you build from custom components in your office is a general purpose machine. The gaming console example by oc is quite apt.
So what you're saying is it would be acceptable for Microsoft and PC manufacturers to lock down their hardware to running Windows only? Most ship with Windows so why not?
Yes? That's what the law currently allows. If we want to make a law that says companies are required to let end users install _any_ software they want onto any device they legally own, that encompasses almost the entire consumer product ecosystem. It is becomes hard to determine what is "general purpose" and what happens if Acer says "this machine runs windows specifically and isn't general purpose?" or they say "you no longer own this machine, you are licensing the hardware from us?"
It would not be acceptable, and it is the duty of ethical whitehat hackers to break such digital locks, flip the bird to Congress and the WIPO's DMCA, and free humanity. It would be ethical to form militias and raid federal prisons to free whitehat victims caught up by the state for it. Liberty is not free.
As long as consumers understand that is the kind of device they are purchasing then it is acceptable.
It is cheaper for hardware manufacturers to only support a single operating system instead of designing a platform to be used by many. It also makes security simpler.
What fundamentally makes a box which has a web browser, allows for third party app installs, and can drive them by connecting to a 4k monitor in addition to a keyboard and mouse different than a PC - other than the vendor setting policy such that their store only allows game and media streaming apps?
Sure, but where do you draw the line? Many PCs ship with some custom hardware but are not locked down. The MacBook Neo is probably not locked down but uses the same SoC as the iPhone 16 Pro which is locked down.
IMO it's pretty arbitrary. I wouldn't expect to run software on an appliance, even if the underlying hardware is commodity. And an appliance is something that performs a specific task (fridge, car, etc.). There are gray area cases though when an appliance does more than its basic function (smart fridge, car infotainment).
There was a brief period of time where you could buy your car like this. You'd purchase a rolling chassis from one manufacturer, and commission a coachbuilder to put a body on top. Many premium brands such as Bugatti, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar (Swallow) started in this fashion.
Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.
We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.
As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.
Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.
If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.
No one said otherwise. Apple tightly coupling macOS is not mutually exclusive with Apple publishing specs for allowing to support other OS on that hardware.
That might be reasonable for a general purpose computer if we were talking about something like a Parallel Inference Machine running KL1 software on a KL0 kernel. But I think conflating Apple's products with that level of foundational engineering is highly disingenuous. They're not exactly trundling into the dark woods of exotic hardware and reinventing the bridge between human and computer. It's an ARM computer running a Unix clone. Apple's engineers aren't mapping every codepath and counting every micro-op, Darwin contains extensive amounts of third-party code.
Hardware and software have to interface at some point. When the people designing the hardware work at the company designing the software it's not unreasonable for them to come to some shared understanding of that interface which may not be standard, portable, or even publicly documented, and certainly not one that is stable.
This isn't incompatible with allowing users to install their own software. There just isn't an obligation on the original designers to make sure that software works. That onus is on the designers of that software.
That's all very well and true. However where I disagree is built upon the context that Apple is a very large corporation with a very large market share. There is a point at which an organization, private it may be, has grown to encompass a mass of the commons. It follows that it must be compelled to act in the public interest, and in a moral manner. Failure to implement architectural standards like ARM SR inhibits software freedom in no small manner, and for a general purpose computer with a large market share, it can be considered a failure to act in the public interest. The lack of a legal obligation is precisely the problem. Of course I support such regulation.
No Universal Machine, as a component or the whole product, which prevents owner modification through DMCA-styled digital locking mechanisms, must be allowed to be sold on the open market. Such contravenes the rights of ordinary citizens. It is disgusting to me that we have allowed this state of affairs through our collective and individual inaction. America's founding fathers (terrorists by today's definitions) tarred and feathered for much less!
Honestly this shouldn't be limited to traditional computing devices. Why do I need some hacker to reverse engineer my robot vacuum and then fully disassemble it just to install custom firmware to it? Should be a basic requirement of right to repair so all this smart crap doesn't wind up in a landfill when a company goes out of business or decides to arbitrarily drop support for it.
The EU is not some kind of god that will make others do your bidding if you pray enough to them. You've been misguided into following a false religion.
For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things. Buy the products that suit your needs and wants, and companies have incentive to make them. And if no company wants to provide a feature or function that you know a huge portion of people will want, then you have a golden opportunity to start a business providing this.
> For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things.
We're talking Apple publishing specs for their hardware. That's not some "niche, particular, random" feature each persons asks for. We're all asking the same thing. Same thing that IBM did and what made the PC and IT industry as we know it.
> You've been misguided into following a false religion.
You're being misguided by your patronizing attitude.
I don't believe it. Ask a random number of people or a random number of Apple customers, and less than a fraction of a percent will say that the option to install Linux on their MacBook is what they most want from Apple.
More people will probably ask for a handle, or LED flashlight, or how about built-in invoicing software? Should the EU (praised be their names) force Apple to give these customers what they want? Why would their wants be any less important than yours?
I can see the argument when it comes to locked-down mobile devices, but macOS is a general-purpose operating system with no restrictions on software sources that can't be easily disabled. Nearly every program available for Linux (excepting OS-specific stuff like desktop environments) is available for macOS, commercial and free, and there's plenty more that's macOS-only. Asahi is cool, but it's mostly used by enthusiasts - there's very little practical use for it as a macOS alternative. I think that you'd have a hard time convincing regulators that this cause really matters.
In any case, though, Apple agrees with you, and they explicitly built support for non-macOS OSes into the bootloader. This is a bug in the first developer beta of a new release.
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -- Carl Sagan
The problem is, as an investor, you don't know whether you're looking at a genius or a clown when dealing with these types of powerful trends.
Markets allow people to bet on it. So one would assume the author is taking the revenue from his $70/year subscriptions and shorting the bubble he sees (or at least positioning himself to do so).
I'd like to see regulators deal with the bundling requirements for devices. It would serve the greater good by preventing a company the size of Apple from obligating that someone must buy an iPhone to use an Apple Watch.
I don't have any sort of HSV infection (that I'm aware of) but I subscribe to this subreddit and check on it every month or so:
www.reddit.com/r/HerpesCureResearch/
It's interesting seeing what's going on in that field, and seeing how much effort afflicted people put into tracking possible treatments and cures.
From my reading it appears that there are many promising treatments in the pipeline with some of thek already available through official/unofficial means.
Ive been subscribed there for many years - progress is vanishingly slow. It has sped up since the alzheimers research cabal got busted up and it has become clearer that HSV is a very large contributor to dementia.
Then they should say white. I'm prepared to give a lot of leeway when conversing with non-native speakers but as somebody who has grown up within a culture that understands that the concept of cultural homogeneity cannot refer to native speakers of non-mutually-comprehensible languages or historically antithetical religious positions, if they choose to use the word in novel ways that's their problem not mine!
I don't know what the exact word is - I wouldn't quite say "culture", as there are clearly different cultural backgrounds at work, but just as with Canada mixing French and Anglo traditions, there is a generally homogenous Western European metaculture at work, premised on the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, the rule of law (and equality of opportunity under the law), freedom of religion, the importance of education and hard work, private property, and personal responsibility.
Ah, a generally homogenous Western European metaculture then, like that Canada! Thanks for engaging with the specifics of the Swiss Enlightenment you can keep the change
I for one eagerly look forward to alien-autopsy like videos of people reverse engineering robots that they acquired by 'disabling' whatever equivalent of Lime/Bird/Volt service sends out on the streets to do stuff for people.
It'll be neat to walk through some weirdo mechanics shop that's full of robots in different states of disassembly that have been repurposed to help with whatever mad scientist hacker schemes that they have in mind.
Walter is just wasting your time because he's a Libertarian who doesn't believe in (m)any tax policies but he doesn't want to outright say that because he knows most people are wise enough to disengage from conversations like this with a Libertarian.
So instead he'll just act like he didn't read that "basically" that you wrote, despite quoting it and then pretend like he doesn't really understand what you just wrote above.
Disclaimer: I have more exposure to Ukrainian variation of this setup (see jkurwa) than to actual Estonian and extrapolate a bit from what I heard from people. Half of this may be outdated or wrong, but I believe that the general vibe is correct.
From what I know about Estonian eID stack, they use traditional PKI to the full extent -- LDAP, PKI, OCSP, all the standard designs from the 90ies and then internally (for use by the government itself) they have a sort of a document exchange system on top of that where everything is done through CMS (PKCS). I believe this is why eIDAS and trust services directive talk about trust lists, qualified certificate authorities and all that.
So you get a physical id card that is a smart card for X509 certificate and then sign, encrypt and do all the stuff you do with keys once you figured out key management. Since the key can't leave the card you need to deal either with a special Estonian keyboard that doubles as a keyreader (in Ukrainian flavor we get a mobile app that can generate a key and get x509 issued remotely, maybe Estonia has that too nowdays or we get a file-based key from a trusted provider, like a bank) or get an actual keyreader or a phone. On the provider side you also have to deal with trust lists, because Estonia and Lithuania don't use the same root of course.
The first gotcha is -- if you have LDAP, CSP and OCSP and can query those, that's a bit of a privacy risk (AFAIK, primary key is based on the date of birth, because reasons). Second gotcha -- key rotation is not practical, so certificates are long lived. Certificates that I saw had demographic identifier of the person as a serial, which is not great for privacy, but convenient for deployment I guess (for comparison, Ukrainian flavor only allows CSP through subject key and has the number deep in the directory lookup extension)
I don't think the stack is bad, but I think it's an overkill for the basic feature of logging into the government website and blessing some bytes with your legal persona. It does help when the user signs a legal document and then tries to walk it back (for example because the document is now an exhibit A in a VAT fraud case, yes real story). I think this particular problem can be solved by non-technical means. More specifically, PKI solves the problem of verifying the identity of the user and then allowing to prove to a third party that it happened.
What is actually needed from the ID stack is allowing a first party in a closed system to match the token presented by a second party to their legal identity. I don't believe cryptographic signing or key derivation is really necessary, as the system that produces the key and the system that verifies the signed artifact are the same entity in most threat models.
I think DigID does the right thing by being a glorified OTP generator with more or less nice UX that solves just that. The actual problem is key provisioning anyways, but once you have done that, it isn't necessary to go full PKI.
To make my point even more ahm pointy, we don't use client X509 to log into github or google. We use passwords, HOTP and fidokeys, because x509 has bad UX and bad security too (in practice)
Add: downvotes for explaining why PKI is an overkill? okay, I will not survive that
I appreciate your comment, but don't bother complaining about moderation. It isn't an interesting read.
Why not use the cert on the ID to sign your own private key in the chain? That way, you can revoke the keypair should the need arise. The private key on the ID card would be valid for as long as the ID card is valid (here in NL: 18+, 10 years; 18- 5 years). And you can use each keypair for whatever. The benefit (and possible disadvantage) is the government knows you are you.
It's a wall of text prefaced by your disclaiming that you don't really know what you're talking about. So then why would I want to read that? Just say "yeah I'm not really sure about the details what I wrote above was word of mouth" and move on.
These people are serious. They feel a genuine sense of grievance for how they perceive the rest of Canada has treated them. They have come to believe that there is a legitimate Albertan identity that is unique to the region and people and that is being persecuted 'by Ottawa.' They also feel that the separatist course of action is one with nothing but positives and only minor negatives. Some of them lie about ulterior motives to see Alberta join the US, while others are in denial that this could even be a possible outcome should Albertans decide to separate.
A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server.
A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices.
The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkable but so much of it is ultimately busy work that didn't need to be done if we regulated the consumer electronics market appropriately.
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