The coming war on general computation<\/p>\n
January 2, 2012 by Editor<\/p>\n
The coming century will be dominated by war against the general-purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race, said\u00a0Cory Doctorow<\/a> in \u201cThe coming war on general computation<\/a>\u201d keynote talk at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin.<\/p>\n \u201cThe last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish, he said. \u201cThe coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.<\/p>\n \u201cThe problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to \u201csecure\u201d anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd general purpose computers\u00a0can<\/em> cause harm \u2014 whether it\u2019s printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs.<\/p>\n \u201cThe primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other \u201ctrust\u201d mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can\u2019t inspect or terminate, that run without users\u2019 consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don\u2019t want them to.\u00a0The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.<\/p>\n \u201cOur duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n