Conversation

@vertigo@hackers.town @gsuberland@chaos.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I don't think we're arguing separate things here. It's all one issue, it merely has multiple facets.

1. Corporations are secretive because they want more money.
2. Corporations hold on to low-level control over devices via baked-in firmware which then interacts with the drivers, and only through the driver proxy does the device respond to user requests.
3. Since the firmware isn't available or accessible to the user, there is no file format or inter-op API here, even if the firmware has an "API" (well, kinda) of its own for receiving instructions and returning data.
4. Each firmware has its own proprietary set of instructions, there is no standarization or interoperability-by-default. The vast majority of that work is offloaded to the OS kernel, which not only means the kernel has to juggle gajillions of different calls and translate them between different devices... there is also a very clear performance loss because of these additional (but necessary due to the proprietary nature of the situation) overhead.
5. I would kill to be able to pipe shell output from my Linux computer to PowerShell on my Windows laptop by just writing into its process (or an stdin socket) mounted into /proc/lan/192.168.1.167/[pid] instead of... well, I tried setting this up before and gave up when I realized this isn't as easy as it should be.

So... yeah. I think we're very much in agreement. I just don't think focusing on software is going far enough, because the problem isn't rooted in software. It's hardware/ firmware that's the real issue, and that snowballs down into the software implementations which need to make concessions for all the arbitrary idiosyncrasies that proprietary computing brings along.