Comment by nick486
20 days ago
realistically, the end point for moderately tech savvy folks is going to a be two-device setup. one cheap phone for basic communication , all the corpo stuff like banking and shirt-and-tie social media + a wifi hotspot. then a second "practical use" device that uses the hotspot, that you fully control and do your tinkering with.
edit: coming to think of it, teaching people to have a device for the "clean stuff" and separate one for the "stupid stuff" could even turn out to be a benefit.
This is already happening. It would be nice to have a purpose-built "clean"/”lame" device that not only did networking for you, but let you run whatever super special shit that garbage banking app needs attestation for while serving it over vnc or similar to your "dirty"/"cool" device. Then the lame device could be quite small, maybe even stuck on to the cool device as a dongle something.
Could the lame device be integrated or even better virtualised on the cool device?
Or staying at home
The end point is going to be you will only be able to connect to the Internet with a device that passes hardware attestation so people won't be able to tinker
This is really smart. It’s low friction. It’s a drag to need two devices, but it is a low compromise bridge to building up something like a pinephone/pinebook’s ecosystem without needing to keep swapping your sim card.
its how most home networks already work, when you think of it. you have a small locked down isp-provided technically-a-computer, that manages your connection, and behind that, you have all your own stuff on your home network.
if anything, it would be mobile computing "pulling the modem out of the computer", like home desktops did in the 90s. I probably still have that 14.4k pcmcia modem card laying around somewhere...
You make it sound like a bad thing! That's pretty much already where I'm at, and is in fact exactly what I want. My smartphone is for messaging and a handful of apps from major vendors (Google Maps, Youtube, 1Password, etc.) It shouldn't ever crash, have nagging software updates, require tinkering, etc., just like my microwave and washing machine. And for tinkering, I've got my Mac, my little Linux NAS, a variety of Linux handheld devices, etc.
Your heart is where your money. The device with the money would be the practical device for anybody except few RMS' followers.
And I'm happy to keep my heart/money away from the junk of social media and similar trivial shit. To give an example: I have two email ids, one for banking/government stuff and such and other for general purpose (sometimes I use those throwaway ones too for one-time things). If Google pulls this shit, I'm pretty much willing to go two-device - it would be actually more secure. I don't consider this some sort of RMS-idealogy, it is just the sensible next step.
I am already taking 4 devices with embedded batteries with me and it's pain during airport scans. I am not looking for taking 5th. :/