Technology

Little Brother is a novel about a future dystopia where copyright laws have been allowed free rein to destroy people's lives.

It's legislated that only "secure" hardware is allowed, but hardware is by definition fixed, which means that every time a vulnerability is found - which is inevitable - there is a hardware recall. So the black market is full of hardware which is proven to have jailbreaking vulnerabilities.

Just a glimpse of where all this "trusted", "secure" computing might lead.

As a short video I saw many years ago explained on the concept: "trust always depends on mutuality, and they already decided not to trust you, so why should you trust them?"

Edit: holy shit, it's 15 years old, and "anti rrusted computing video dutch voice over" (turns out the guy is German actually) was enough to find it:

https://www.lafkon.net/work/trustedcomputing/

ROFL no. I once knew someone who got offered an upgrade from whatever to Windows 10, only for it to fail half way through because their CPU was some weird corner case that the OS thought it supported but when it was time to boot... didn't.

Also if you want to talk e-waste, look no further than Chromebooks.

Windows 11 has problems, this is hardly one of them.

It may be a bold of me to say, but I hold the controversial opinion that I don't really give a shit which computer OS you use. If you can use a mouse and keyboard to navigate a desktop environment then 🤙 you are ahead of the curve at this point.