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274 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.197s | source
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chuckadams ◴[] No.44006767[source]
I just can't get me enough of Raymond Chen and his wonderful walks down the dustier paths of memory lane. Feels like a more innocent time where I didn't feel like I was imminently going to be turned into paperclips.
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avidiax ◴[] No.44007294[source]
Yeah, the sense at that time was that you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you if you aren't careful. Of course, the machines haven't really done anything to us. They've just been locked down and remotely controlled to deliver ads and misinformation.
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EvanAnderson ◴[] No.44008269[source]
> ...you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you...

Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping.

The machine isn't trying to master me. The people who made the machine are. I wish people in the tech industry wouldn't be party to taking away computing freedom. It pays well, though, and they can console themselves with "It's not a computer, it's a phone"-type delusions (at least until the day "the man" comes for their PCs).

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1. Terr_ ◴[] No.44009367[source]
"The first thing we do, is we kill all the law--" Er, I mean abolish the DMCA.

Picking a lock on a device you own shouldn't be a federal crime.