Comment by curtisblaine
1 day ago
Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a temporary stopgap.
1 day ago
Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a temporary stopgap.
It doesn't have to be that way, you can only push people so far before they riot. History has thousands of instances and many have been very ugly, 1789 and 1917 for instance.
People riot when they can't make ends meet, not when they can't install an app on their phone. Rioting is very costly.
To be frank, I don't think the general public cares enough. And the other side is always ready to use children safety, foreign hackers and scam prevention as an argument. Nobody will riot over tech people losing the ability to run their own machines with their own software. It already happened to printers and, most importantly, phones. When 95% of normal activities happen on mobile devices anyway, they will come for computers. They'll run a campaign, they'll lobby politics, cartel chip vendors and start introducing small changes in hardware and OS that will make it always a bit more inconvenient running your own software. Until there's nothing left to defend, and the industry will move on.