And in general, I find a lot of reactions to digitization and technological advancements to amount to melodramatic pearl-clutching, mostly by folks with no experience in the greyer side of technology. It's as if things like rooting your phone or pirating software, or indeed slapping a piece of tape on the integrated webcam, simply don't exist. Never mind how there are entire black market economies prospering precisely in regions with the most draconian restrictions.
Instead, I suspect these reactions stem from some deeply ingrained misconception of how governments and major corporate systems work. That they are somehow invincible, capable of conjuring up infinite resources for countless nefarious schemes... and not dilapidated towers of crippling bureaucracy, full of individual self-serving rogue agents, mostly scrambling for a promotion or a slightly better retirement package.
And all this comes from Microsoft, of all things - the company that officially gave up trying to prevent piracy of its products, then quietly lost the case with hardwired Windows-only PCs and laptops, and is pretty much irrelevant in the now all but dominant tablet and smartphone market. Not exactly a history of victories against inventive users or competing interests.
I agree on the matter of MS collecting user data, though that's usually for the now-ubiquitous business of selling it to advertisers. That said, I also remember the days when software like StarForce was supposed to be the end of piracy. Or when TPM itself came out, and people feared they'd be unable to install anything other than official Windows editions on their boxes. None of that came to pass either. As in all engineering ventures, the rule applies that whenever you consider something "foolproof", the Universe itself will conspire to create a better fool... or in this case, a smarter cracker.
Meanwhile, the question still stands as to why, in the modern conditions of near-total surveillance, places like London have become crime-infested hellholes instead of monochromatic Orwellian dictatorships. Even with regard to the pandemic, the biggest drivers of suppression have been peer pressure and plain old tattle-telling - wetware programming, so to speak. (So, in countries with traditional distrust of authority, as in Eastern Europe, the result was token at best - people only pretend to follow the rules, and even the authorities themselves only pretend to care.)
Instead, I suspect a lot of these demands and innovations are part of a standard business negotiation tactic - a requirement meant to be seen as ridiculous, and then discarded or circumvented - so that the real objectives still enter the contract, without even being outrageous enough to get covered in the media. Stuff like using particular hardware providers (with which MS has a referral contract), or demanding more beneficial financial terms... general purpose business bastardry, in other terms. Not exactly the most ethical of practices, but a far cry from the cyberpunk dystopia that people have feared ever since the invention of vacuum tubes.
Indeed.
And in general, I find a lot of reactions to digitization and technological advancements to amount to melodramatic pearl-clutching, mostly by folks with no experience in the greyer side of technology. It's as if things like rooting your phone or pirating software, or indeed slapping a piece of tape on the integrated webcam, simply don't exist. Never mind how there are entire black market economies prospering precisely in regions with the most draconian restrictions.
Instead, I suspect these reactions stem from some deeply ingrained misconception of how governments and major corporate systems work. That they are somehow invincible, capable of conjuring up infinite resources for countless nefarious schemes... and not dilapidated towers of crippling bureaucracy, full of individual self-serving rogue agents, mostly scrambling for a promotion or a slightly better retirement package.
And all this comes from Microsoft, of all things - the company that officially gave up trying to prevent piracy of its products, then quietly lost the case with hardwired Windows-only PCs and laptops, and is pretty much irrelevant in the now all but dominant tablet and smartphone market. Not exactly a history of victories against inventive users or competing interests.
I agree on the matter of MS collecting user data, though that's usually for the now-ubiquitous business of selling it to advertisers. That said, I also remember the days when software like StarForce was supposed to be the end of piracy. Or when TPM itself came out, and people feared they'd be unable to install anything other than official Windows editions on their boxes. None of that came to pass either. As in all engineering ventures, the rule applies that whenever you consider something "foolproof", the Universe itself will conspire to create a better fool... or in this case, a smarter cracker.
Meanwhile, the question still stands as to why, in the modern conditions of near-total surveillance, places like London have become crime-infested hellholes instead of monochromatic Orwellian dictatorships. Even with regard to the pandemic, the biggest drivers of suppression have been peer pressure and plain old tattle-telling - wetware programming, so to speak. (So, in countries with traditional distrust of authority, as in Eastern Europe, the result was token at best - people only pretend to follow the rules, and even the authorities themselves only pretend to care.)
Instead, I suspect a lot of these demands and innovations are part of a standard business negotiation tactic - a requirement meant to be seen as ridiculous, and then discarded or circumvented - so that the real objectives still enter the contract, without even being outrageous enough to get covered in the media. Stuff like using particular hardware providers (with which MS has a referral contract), or demanding more beneficial financial terms... general purpose business bastardry, in other terms. Not exactly the most ethical of practices, but a far cry from the cyberpunk dystopia that people have feared ever since the invention of vacuum tubes.