For about two decades, beginning roughly in 1995, the average resident of the developed nations was given a gift, an unprecedented opportunity for free speech. This opportunity was made possible by the personal computer and the ability it provided to access an open, relatively unregulated Internet. Never before had the common man or woman had opportunities to express his or her views to large audiences unhindered by gatekeepers--whether they be newspaper editors, book editors, television programming directors, judges, or other government officials. The fact that this situation lasted as long as it did is astounding. But now, the natural order of things is returning. Now, the brief window of free speech is closing, and it is closing quickly.
Not only is the Internet being increasingly regulated and sectioned off into separate Internets for each country, but the personal computer itself is being hobbled. We are told that our computers are being stripped of their functionality because they are just too insecure and too complicated for the average "normal" or "normie" to deal with. After all, the problem could not possibly be that the Windows operating system is an insecure piece of junk, reminiscent of a 40-year-old family minivan held together with chewing gum and bailing wire. It could not be that more money can be made by locking down the personal computer and moving most, or all, of its processing into the cloud, were giant companies, rather than the owner of the computer, will decide what software can run on it. Where a monthly fee can be charged for its use.
The truth is that companies and governments are in a secret war with general-purpose computing. The reason for the war is that companies want to protect their copyrighted intellectual property, and governments want to control their citizens.
Go ahead normies, open the cage and walk right in. After all, who needs anything but four cold, bare walls, a toilet, and a bed to sleep on. You will be happy here, where "we" will decide what you need and what you don't. "We" will feed, clothe, and house you. "We" will provide you with everything "we" feel that you need. Intellectual stimulation? Over rated. Freedom? You could hurt yourself with that. All you need is entertainment and more entertainment. Yes, that is ALL you need. Plenty of cat videos. Millions and millions of cat videos. Cat videos for everyone! Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Nothing but cat videos!
Obviously, I am being facetious to make a point. It is simply that when all software runs on cloud servers, companies, not owners of personal computers, will control what is available on their computers. When consumers no longer have the option of moving to other types of computers with more varied software, cloud server owners can choose software that is in their best interests, not in consumers'.
Two analogies are web browsers and "C" code development environments. Now that Google Chrome has won the latest round of browser wars, Google can turn Chrome into anything it wants. Google is even using Chrome's dominance to dictate how the Internet works. Likewise, Microsoft made ANSI C irrelevant after Visual Studio became virtually the only development environment for C/C++ used by commercial software and engineering companies. Since essentially all C/C++ code had to compile with a Microsoft compiler, programmers no longer followed ANSI standards, because that would have meant having to rewrite code before it would compile in Visual Studio. I can speak from experience on this, because I found myself being forced to do it too--even though I understood what was happening and why.
To see indications that major software companies ignore our best interests, one need look no further than macOS, Chrome OS, and Windows 10 S. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have been increasing their power over the years to lock down the computers on which their operating systems run so that most normie computer users have a harder time running unapproved software. (See here, here, and here.) They accomplish this through various means, including trusted platform modules and UEFI. One counter to my argument, and a hopeful sign, is that Google has recently opened up Chrome OS to allow it to run Android apps and Linux software. Despite this, all three companies' operating systems contain switches that can be flipped to prevent normal consumers from running unapproved software.
With many computers, consumers still have the power to flip the switch to load other software, but this may not always be the case. Once a switch exists, computer and software companies can always lock it so it can't be flipped. Consumers must now pay $50 to flip the switch in Windows 10 S to convert it to Windows 10 before they can load whatever they want on their computers. A number of years ago, an outcry from the technical and hobbyist communities forced Microsoft to change its policy on UEFI. Afterwards, manufacturers were required to add a switch in their firmware that would allow consumers to disable secure boot on PC's so they could install any operating system they wanted. But, beginning in 2016 with the anniversary update of Windows 10, Microsoft dropped the requirement to provide an option to disable secure boot. I know for a fact that secure boot cannot be disabled on all computers, because I own a Winbook TW700 tablet on which secure boot cannot be disabled. And, I am not the only one who owns a UEFI-locked computer. This HP support page says secure boot mode cannot be turned off on any computer with Optane memory. If secure boot cannot be turned off, the only operating systems that can boot are those made by developers who have paid $99 to Microsoft. The question is, why should developers have to pay Microsoft to run their operating systems on PC's? Microsoft does not own the PC. And, what is to stop Microsoft from one day refusing to allow alternative operating systems on PC's for any price? What is to stop governments from forcing Microsoft to put spyware on computers and make them unable to boot without it?
In addition to operating systems becoming more locked down, we are seeing a definite trend toward cloud-oriented computing. Software is moving off our computers and onto cloud servers. Should this trend continue, we may soon reach a point where our computers will be useless without a continuous connection to the Internet. Naturally, there is push-back to this. But, will it be strong enough to change the trend?
Many readers will probably not believe me when I say we are being pushed towards a locked-down computer that is basically nothing more than a dumb terminal (now known as a "thin client"). If you will allow me to present my evidence, I will explain why I think this is true.
First, the computer industry is not and never has been governed by an efficient market. By that, I mean that the market for computers has always been controlled by a small group of manufacturers who by-and-large determine which computers they will make, hence which computers we can buy. On the surface, computer hardware makers seem to be in stiff competition, especially where prices are concerned. But, below the surface a whole other reality exists. Computer hardware and software makers have always known they can make more profit by selling computers and software that we don't really want but that we will tolerate because we have no other options. So, while they compete based on price, I don't see much evidence that they compete based on functionality, repairability, upgradeability, quality, or other factors.
One piece of historic evidence for this is the computer market in approximately the five years before 2007. Asus released the first netbook, the EEE PC, in 2007. By the way, I bought an EEE PC 900 with a 4 GB SSD in early 2010, and I still own it. Before the EEE PC, if you wanted a new computer, you had to pay a high price for it, because lower priced new computers did not exist. After the EEE PC came out, it seemed that every manufacturer decided to copy it and release his own version. Suddenly the market was flooded with netbooks. Every time you turned around, there was another netbook. You know how it is when you eat too much ice cream over a period of weeks or months? You start to hate ice cream. Similarly, the flood of netbooks was partially responsible for the end of the netbook era.
But to make matters worse, I believe netbook manufacturers may have intentionally sabotaged the netbook market. Though I can never prove this, I can point to a couple of pieces of evidence. The first is the ASUS EEE PC itself. The Asus EEE PC 900 that I bought had a 4 GB SSD held in place by a screw that was soldered in place. This prevented the SSD from being upgraded. Why would Asus go out of its way to make this model of EEE PC non-upgradeable? The most likely reason I can think of is that Asus wanted to force EEE PC owners to buy new computers in order to get larger SSD's. By the way, I spent 20 minutes drilling the screw out of my EEE PC. Take that Asus! The intentionally limited upgradeability of netbooks (except perhaps for those of us with skills or drills) was certainly one reason for frustration with them. Still, a person could justifiably argue that just based on this evidence, we cannot say that ASUS intentionally sabotaged its own netbook market. Perhaps Asus merely had stupid or greedy management. Or, perhaps it had another reason for limiting the utility of this particular netbook model that I simply cannot fathom.
The next piece of evidence that netbook manufacturers were sabotaging their own market is that millions of Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 netbooks were released around 2014 through 2016 with 32 GB SSD's (actually eMMC chips) soldered to their motherboards. This was before the thin-at-all-costs mania had become the all-consuming zombie walk in the industry that it is today. Netbooks still had room for SSD connectors that would have permitted upgrades. Manufacturers simply chose not to put them in. Windows 8 and 10 require a minimum of 20 GB of hard drive space for a 64-bit machine. This means that at most 12 GB of free space remained on these machines as they came out of the factory. Actually, many "32 GB" hard drives, SSD's, and eMMC's are more like 29 GB. Many owners found after taking their new laptops home and allowing Windows to perform an automatic update that all or nearly all of their free hard drive space was gone. (See here, here, and here.) As a result, little or no room remained for installing any software. Do you really believe manufacturers were unaware of this? Yet, for years they continued releasing these abominations upon an unsuspecting public. Why? My thought is that they either did not care that their netbooks were nearly unusable, or they wanted consumers to hate netbooks, so that they would go back to paying for higher-priced laptops.
Sorry about my little detour there. Remember, I took it to show that the computer industry is not and never has been an efficient market. No such thing as a netbook existed until one company chose to make a cheaper product. Then all the other companies did the same. The same thing occurred when Apple released its Macbook Air. So, we know companies are capable of making less expensive, lighter, or better quality computers. They just don't until one of their competitors upsets the order of things by releasing something a little better than every other company is currently making. This suggests to me that the computer industry decides what it wants to produce without much regard to what consumers want or need. So, if the computer industry wants to move our computing power into the cloud, that is probably what it will do.
Now I will present a second piece of evidence that we may soon be forced into a locked-down operating system that is dependent on the cloud, whether we like it or not. Microsoft is now making more money from its cloud services than from Windows. In fact, Microsoft has been saying for years that it sees the future of the Windows operating system in the cloud. What it now refers to as a "modern operating system" is one that is always connected to the cloud. A hint that a rhetorical argument is being made is when you see the words "modern" or "old fashioned". Microsoft even claims that an operating system that is always connected is more secure--as if a you are incapable of seeing through that argument. The reason consumers are having such a computer security nightmare right now is because our computers are connected to the Internet with software that was not designed for it from the beginning. So, Microsoft's solution to the security problem posed by the Internet and its insecure software is to simply remove any possibility of owning an air-gaped computer?
For the sake of brevity, I will not lay out the evidence for the strong incentives that software and hardware makers have for removing functionality from our computers to protect copyrighted material or to comply with regulations of freedom-averse governments. Perhaps that can be a topic for a future article.
The Future of Computing that we may soon be Facing
I suppose one can argue that if we all have nothing but dumb terminals running software from a ROM (which cannot be written to), then no malware can get onto our computers. But, do we want to go back to the dumb terminal days of the 1980's? Is this the "modern" operating system that we want? The dumb-terminal-and-mainframe-computer days of the 1980's are the reason we switched to personal computers in the first place. Besides, I don't know about you, but I do not want a computer that only works when it is connected to the Internet. I want to be able to use my computer offline sometimes--for increased privacy, for increased security, while traveling, when my Internet connection is down, when I don't feel like paying for Internet service, when I don't want Windows to update while I am doing something important, or when I am running software that I don't want spying on me.
I can see why big corporations and governments would love for our computers to always be connected to the Internet. If they can make it impossible for us to watch a video or listen to music off line, then they will be able to monitor everything we listen to or watch to see if it has been pirated. In fact, if all content is stored on line, we may never have an opportunity to access pirated content in the first place (or anything else they do not want us to access). We can never hope to have any privacy at all with an always-connected computer. It will be just like using a company computer at work with the company always monitoring everything we do over their network. We will never even be able to compose a private message and encrypt it off line. In fact, if our computers have no hard drives, every piece of data and software we use will have to be stored in the cloud, where governments and corporations claim the right to sift through it whenever they wish. They have always argued that if it resides on their computers, they have the right to control it and to look through it. In fact, many of their terms-of-service agreements claim that any data that resides on their computers belongs to them. Yes, I can see why they would like to force us to be always connected. An always connected computer makes the perfect electronic consumer cage.
I have presented evidence for my assertion that we are heading toward a future with less online free speech and computers that have been hobbled to the point where we can no longer do anything without being watched. However, we can affect the future of computing simply by refusing to pay for the instruments of our own imprisonment. Although computer and software companies do have significant control over us, they cannot build computers that we absolutely refuse to buy. If we all educate ourselves to understand what is happening and make buying decisions that are in our long-term best interests, we can change the direction in which we are headed. We can be the drivers, instead of the driven.
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UEFI and why I Hate it so Much
Challenge of the 2020's: Avoiding being Soaked by the Cloud
Why I still don't use Windows 10
Know What You're Buying Before You Buy a Computer