So, Kuwanger said the following words in another topic, and got me to think about them:
I was 9 in 2004, when the "trusted computing" scandal/paranoia was at its peak, and don't remember much about it - apart from possibly having played a role in delaying the introduction of TPMs in mass market computers (which probably is a lesser reason than allowing motherboard manufacturers to pocket 40 cents more per unit);
but fast forward to the Windows 8 days and, as many of us know, we have the Wintel companies pretty much requiring EFI (which still gets a lot of, in my opinion unfair, criticism) and secure boot (which, for regular PCs and tablets - still the only field in which Windows is strong - must be deactivatable or reconfigurable by the user); not only these changes failed to be an issue for the advanced user, but their criticism distracted from more significant ones (like signed firmware or Computrace)...
...meanwhile, Microsoft got famously busted for unfairly bundling their (nominally free) browser and media player with XP and earlier while leaving the user no (official) way to not install them - only to now bundle with W10 two browsers (one of which the common person can't opt out of, while megacorps who can buy LTSB are discouraged from doing so), one media player and two halves, a cloud storage service, a cloud assistant, a(n actually fairly good and needed) photo editor, forced mystery meat updates... and hardly anyone complains about that?
Multiple years before that, Apple "invented" the "smart"phone (one on which apps could not officially be installed!), also using a notable (attempted) implementation (though hardly the first one) of a series of methods to prevent users from running arbitrary code on it, again with fairly little opposition though, surprisingly for the market category of phones versus PCs, I remember the reactions being louder than in the above case...
And let's not even get started on technical and moral criticism of what Apple's main competitor has been doing for years to both AOSP itself and manufacturers of phones with gApps...
True enough. This is the major reason why when the DMCA was drafted and signed into law there was so much protest in the tech community about it. At the time, they feared it'd turn into a dystopian future where Microsoft Palladium would lock out all competition forever, turning them into information gatekeepers. Thankfully a whole host of things, including MS's anti-trust trial and the rise of Google, really undermined that future.
I was 9 in 2004, when the "trusted computing" scandal/paranoia was at its peak, and don't remember much about it - apart from possibly having played a role in delaying the introduction of TPMs in mass market computers (which probably is a lesser reason than allowing motherboard manufacturers to pocket 40 cents more per unit);
but fast forward to the Windows 8 days and, as many of us know, we have the Wintel companies pretty much requiring EFI (which still gets a lot of, in my opinion unfair, criticism) and secure boot (which, for regular PCs and tablets - still the only field in which Windows is strong - must be deactivatable or reconfigurable by the user); not only these changes failed to be an issue for the advanced user, but their criticism distracted from more significant ones (like signed firmware or Computrace)...
...meanwhile, Microsoft got famously busted for unfairly bundling their (nominally free) browser and media player with XP and earlier while leaving the user no (official) way to not install them - only to now bundle with W10 two browsers (one of which the common person can't opt out of, while megacorps who can buy LTSB are discouraged from doing so), one media player and two halves, a cloud storage service, a cloud assistant, a(n actually fairly good and needed) photo editor, forced mystery meat updates... and hardly anyone complains about that?
Multiple years before that, Apple "invented" the "smart"phone (one on which apps could not officially be installed!), also using a notable (attempted) implementation (though hardly the first one) of a series of methods to prevent users from running arbitrary code on it, again with fairly little opposition though, surprisingly for the market category of phones versus PCs, I remember the reactions being louder than in the above case...
And let's not even get started on technical and moral criticism of what Apple's main competitor has been doing for years to both AOSP itself and manufacturers of phones with gApps...