Notices by Phil (phil@fed.bajsicki.com), page 2

@kaia@brotka.st dude's blood must itself work as a vaccine by now

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social Naw, this can't be real.

@kaia@brotka.st Jesus. This should be part of the documentation, not something locked behind Discord...

I really thought MS was at least above that.

@kaia@brotka.st Link? I wanna see this.

@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.

@vertigo@hackers.town @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @gsuberland@chaos.social Agreed on most counts, but there is another side to this: hardware.

Hardware is extremely difficult to design, and even more difficult to manufacture. When it came to Amiga, sure.

But then you have modern hardware which is on an entirely different level of complexity. How could anyone address that when it's pretty much all proprietary?

Linux, I believe, couldn't function effectively if the corporations chose to withhold participation, because hardware support would be a much more difficult task than it already is.

Then there's all the black-box software that we can't get rid of in our physical CPUs... and while I vaguely understand its utility, I don't think it's justified considering the privacy ramifications. "Trust me bro" isn't good enough when it comes to accessing all my personal files and information.

So... what's the alternative? How can a person have actual freedom in the way they compute and use software, if not on these (shitty) terms?

Hell I'd be stoked to have a fully free and open source little machine which runs (an arguably bloated) Emacs and a web browser.

But it doesn't seem like there is anything like this. Even the 'very freaking secure' Talos II has a pile of proprietary hardware and software that it relies on...

What's the way?

Bruh.