Would you prefer for your technologically illiterate relatives (think grandparents/etc getting their first computing device):
- A computer that is compromised by malware
- A computer that doesn’t permit the user to install malware, and as a consequence, possibly alternative operating systems
Your phrasing implies that “it would no longer be our computer” is equivalent to “one that’s not ours from the start.” As far as I know, Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to ransomware your computer/phone to make a few bucks. You just can’t root an iPhone. Equating the two is arguing in bad faith, at best.
> A computer that doesn’t permit the user to install malware
Let me know when that's ever invented. It's certainly not iPhone. The crApp Store is full of scams and ripoffs, costing consumers millions if not billions of dollars.
It's also worth noting how much goodware that users are not permitted to install, due to vendor lockdown and arbitrary restrictions, often motivated purely by the desire to squealch competition. Security, or in this case security theater, always has tradeoffs. Unfortunately, consumers often don't even know what they're missing, because the vendor restricts what they're allowed to see, but we developers know what kind of software that we can't make on locked down platforms.
Vendor lockdown is a tool for authoritarian regimes that enables censorship. For example, these regimes force the vendors to remove VPN apps from their "curated" stores, and since sideloading is forbidden, there are no alternatives for the poor users under these regimes.
> Would you prefer for your technologically illiterate relatives (think grandparents/etc getting their first computing device):
Ah, the good old "think of the grandma".
HN's version of "think of the children". And just like the conservative pearl clutchers, I don't think there's much sincerity in those thoughts. You are more afraid of the possibility that there would be less users to squeeze through adtech and crapware sold on appstores. Most HNers make a living from making the world an even worse place.
There's a lot of devs here very happy to have a captive audience of people too ignorant to know better, either exposing their eyeballs to constant onslaught of ads on "free" apps, or paying for really basic functionality.
I will never forget that show HN post that talked about selling a clone of Handbrake, a program that exists just to set a few flags on FFMPEG, and making a living out of it, because the Apple audience has been brainwashed to take out their wallet for the dumbest of things.
The average value add of people constantly bemoaning the idea that there could be regulations to stop them from enslaving new generations to tech is lower than that of scammers.
No, I don't think that's true. We got used to insecure systems, and then accepted Big Brother as a security model. We can have secure devices that aren't owned by a corporation, but judging by the comments section here, nobody knows that.
How might that work? You personally have the keys to the TPM? Then some confidence trickster will tell a naive user that to make big$buck$ on the internet you'll need to handover your TPM key. And people will.
