Of all the electronic device you own that are capable of being exploited for automated surveillance, your PC or Mac is probably the only thing that is not actually being used for automated surveillance (not counting your web browsing habits, and provided you don't have any spyware on your computer). How dare you use a computing device that (hopefully) does not have any backdoors built into it, is not locked into any vendor's monthly payment plan, is not locked into any vendor's proprietary OS, and even supports "terrorist" techniques such as full-disk encryption?
Fortunately for Big Brother, key hardware components of general-purpose computers are only produced by a handful of corporations such as Intel and AMD. Don't be surprised if they agree to build all sorts of defects-by-design into their processors, graphics cards, HDDs/SSDs, etc. There are already plenty of excuses: I have popcorn ready for the day when graphics cards finally implement security systems to prevent them from being used for bitcoin mining or password brute-forcing.
The FSF should change their name to FCF, Free Computing Foundation. We need them badly, more than ever before.
Of all the electronic device you own that are capable of being exploited for automated surveillance, your PC or Mac is probably the only thing that is not actually being used for automated surveillance (not counting your web browsing habits, and provided you don't have any spyware on your computer). How dare you use a computing device that (hopefully) does not have any backdoors built into it, is not locked into any vendor's monthly payment plan, is not locked into any vendor's proprietary OS, and even supports "terrorist" techniques such as full-disk encryption?
Fortunately for Big Brother, key hardware components of general-purpose computers are only produced by a handful of corporations such as Intel and AMD. Don't be surprised if they agree to build all sorts of defects-by-design into their processors, graphics cards, HDDs/SSDs, etc. There are already plenty of excuses: I have popcorn ready for the day when graphics cards finally implement security systems to prevent them from being used for bitcoin mining or password brute-forcing.
The FSF should change their name to FCF, Free Computing Foundation. We need them badly, more than ever before.
[1] Cory Doctorow, "The Coming War on General Computation", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg