i think they will. or worse yet they can make it without bios at all just device tree and all that garbage that phones do. then make it subsction based,filled with ai,cloud streamed only. no apps outside store. but thats too much orwellian stuff for now,i think what will happen is the locking bios thing for now.
what do you think?
The EU wallet seems to expect the user to simply have an Android phone with Google Play services that passes Google Hardware Attestation, or alternatively an iOS phone, or apparently you’re not a citizen: https://leminal.space/post/31858818/21120139
Don’t buy computers with locked parts. Buy computers with non locked parts. Problem solved.
It’s not that easy earlier all phones had unlocked or unlockable bootloader but now only few do. Even xiomi once hailed as cheap phone for custom ROMs now has unlockable bootloader
now only few do
That’s the one you buy then if that’s what matters to you.
To be clear I’m not saying it’s “easy” or that the situation is “good”, only that there are choices and if we as consumers can support them, and as voted can support politicians that do make legislation to protect them (or at least not make others mandatory) then we are still going in the right direction, even if most people don’t care.
Amazing how governments opposed to MAGA/US fascism, ensure the tools for fascism. I will choose “illegal” phone, computer, 3d printer.
The end goal of the elites is eliminating access to actual computers from the masses and using software to manipulate, spy on and control the masses.
That is why libreboot and the Free Software community need active support.
None of us can be free if any of us can’t choose freedom.
That’s what SecureBoot and TPM paved the way for.
They can’t get all computing devices. If desktop PCs are done for, I’ll go to Raspberry Pis. There’s plenty of embedded and industrial computer systems that can be repurposed to use as a general purpose computer.
The cyberpunk dystopia has arrived, prepare your tools and defenses accordingly.
The computers in the store, yes. I expect all computers in the store to be phones and the cell company will verify.
Open Source computers will be more important. Might need to brush up on wire wrapping… (Implication being that chip supplies might become dedicated to only those manufacturers that lock the product down.)
It used to be that similar (and equally bad) ideas were getting traction because of copyright law, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act
Now other excuses for the same thing have been invented. I wonder which will be next.
I don’t feel this push for locking us out of control over our own systems under the cover of “protecting the children with age verification” is anything more than a continued effort to secure a DRM-based hardware system for the MSFT OS and media companies. This smells just like their pushes in the past to steal control over hardware through legal channels. It’s the same war we’ve been fighting for 30 years now.
Read up on the Clipper Chip from the 90’s. What’s old is new again.
Just adding links for the lazy…
Clipper Chip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/usa/clipper.htm
Nah computing as a service will be for the masses and mainstream user who doesn’t care, and they will have age verification and all the “security” measures included. The custom build and DIY setups won’t change at all. Any Linux / BSD distro can just be hosted in a territory that doesn’t require these “security” measures, then anybody who knows how to use them will be able to continue unaffected.
hosted in a territory that doesn’t require these “security” measures
And then what do we do once everyone does these measures? There will be nowhere to run.
there is around 193 countries in the world. i dont think every single one will make it s legal requirement.
There will always be a couple companies going against the norm and make open devices. Or computers that are fully customizable IE just stick a different hard drive in there or whatever. I don’t think this will ever happen, regardless.
It doesn’t need to happen 100%, they simply need to kick any manufacturer making such open devices out of the affordable range for the masses, after all it’s only the poor that need not have access to knowledge.
Adding to this, it has already started happening on phones in the form of propreitary carrier locked devices being artificially cheaper than normal phones that you don’t even “own”, they are going for the ultra budget range first, then climb up from there, it will take a while to jump to computers but I absolutely see no reason for it to not start happening, after all the majority of users use Windows anyways, it can spread slowly.
Untill they make ram, cpus,and storage unaffordable.
Does the age verification stuff matter for this? Microsoft, if they wanted to, could already lock down systems in this way.
I don’t think it’ll come globally at all - even the most crazy laws I’ve read so far target “only” OS vendors.
If it comes it’ll be regional only as manufacturers will be hell bent on not losing revenue in the rest of the world.
Keep in mind that age verification needs to be done on a local level as there is no universal level of what is an acceptable method.
Windows will probably become a thin client/cloud OS as MS is already making moves in that direction with Windows 365 thin clients that were recently announced, and the fact that Win12 could be subscription-based.
I could easily see MS phasing out local Windows installs altogether in favor of a lower consumer-oriented Windows 365 subscription tier tied to the cheapest thin clients possible at some point.
I think this is what they really want. Perhaps it will come with the introduction of Windows 12, of course all for your “safety”.
But luckily there is still a giant supply of old(er) computers out there that will happily run under Linux / BSD.
there are a couple youtube channels I recently discovered that do just that. take REALLY old computers and parts and try to make them semi-viable for modern computing. and I’m talking stuff that is easily nearly 30+ years old.
BoomerTec and Action Retro. BoomerTec I really like as he’ll just pick up random old PCs and explain all the parts inside and even give a history on them. His vids are like really awesome relaxing sunday morning watches. He even finds FOSS stuff that will still work on really old pcs. because of his channel I even discovered forks of firefox that are still actively developed for 32bit or community builds of Windows XP that are still updated today. For example his recent vid he bought a PC from 1998 off Ebay and got Firefox, Photoshop, and OpenOffice working on it. even games.
Action Retro pretty much does the same thing but with a focus on Linux. He’s done videos of taking like old Compaqs from the 90s and getting linux running on them. Really impressive stuff.
Veronica Explains is also good for this. Her video of taking old chromebooks and getting linux working on them is very detailed and thorough. Extremely easy to follow even for first timers. Also what I like about Veronica Explains is her videos remind me of old TechTV Screen Savers and Call for Help.
Leaving the really ancient machines aside - for most tasks you really don’t need the newest tech. At home i am running a Core2Quad system with 8 GB DDR2 RAM and its absolutely fine under Linux or other free OSes. Webbrowsing even with a ton of tabs open is no problem, many games from the repositories are still running absolutely fine and for office stuff this system would still be overkill. Hell, would i switch out the old Nvidia GPU for something remotely newer even current versions of Blender would just work.
Only if Microsoft acquires a major CPU chipmaker. There has to be a lot of vertical integration under one company, the way it is with Apple products. Otherwise there are other OS like Linux that comprise enough of the market to ensure there will always be an unlocked BIOS option.
Doesn’t matter, Microsoft already sell computers, i.e. Surface. One can still buy computers from other manufacturers. They can buy an instance of the entire stack (pretty much as Apple did) and there would still be alternatives.
I want to push back on this part:
Only if Microsoft acquires a major CPU chipmaker.
In the USA, and other parts of the world, a small number of Billionaires are buying up everything. A small number of wealthy people could each own a part of the supply chain and for it on the vast majority.
For extra enforcement, add in a legal or cultural push for reporting or shunning violators through the media companies owned by that same group.
They make their own ARM silicon for datacenters, hypothetically they could just scale that down for consumer devices and there’s your vertical integration.
Conversely if Apple ever wants to enter the datacenter market, they could scale their M-series silicon up to meet that industry’s demands as well.
