The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computers.

[GreyGeek]

by Cory Doctorow

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

Even if we win the right to own and control our computers, a dilemma remains: what rights do owners owe users?
....
Here is where the civil war part comes in.


Human rights and property rights both demand that computers not be designed for remote control by governments, corporations, or other outside institutions. Both ensure that owners be allowed to specify what software they're going to run. To freely choose the nub of certainty from which they will suspend the scaffold of their computer's security.


Remember that security is relative: you are secured from attacks on your ability to freely use your music if you can control your computing environment. This, however, erodes the music industry's own security to charge you some kind of rent, on a use-by-use basis, for your purchased music.


If you get to choose the nub from which the scaffold will dangle, you get control and the power to secure yourself against attackers. If the the government, the RIAA or Monsanto chooses the nub, they get control and the power to secure themselves against you.
In this dilemma, we know what side we fall on. We agree that at the very least, owners should be allowed to know and control their computers.

But what about users?


Users of computers don't always have the same interests as the owners of computers— and, increasingly, we will be users of computers that we don't own.

[woodsmoke]

A perfect example of a user not owning the computer is me at the college. I have absolutely no expectation of privacy or the ability to download any kind of application unless the college chooses to grant me the privileges.

To elucidate, I have privacy in my communication with students to a limited extend, but that privacy can be abrogated at a moment's notice if I am suspected of any wrong doing.

And, that is the way it should be. It is a public institution which has obligations beyond those to me.

[NickStone]

Some info about Cory Doctorow as published on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow

Life and career

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers,[4] Doctorow was raised in a Jewish activist[5] household. His father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan[6] and Doctorow became involved with nuclear disarmament activism and as a Greenpeace campaigner as a child. He received his high school diploma from SEED School, an anarchistic "free school" in Toronto, and attended four universities without attaining a degree. [7] [8] He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative in Big Rideau Lake in Ontario.
In 1992, Doctorow went on a volunteer visit to Costa Rica with Youth Challenge International (YCI), which he found "profoundly good and profoundly enriching".[9] In June 1999, he co-initiated the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn. The company was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario during the summer of 2003.[3]
Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years,[3] helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before quitting to pursue writing full-time during January 2006. Upon his departure, Doctorow was named a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[3] He was named the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission,[10] the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.[3][11] He then returned to London, but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.
In 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He was formerly a student in the program during 1993-94, but quit without completing a thesis. Doctorow is also a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Open University in the United Kingdom.[12]
Doctorow married Alice Taylor on October 26, 2008,[13] and together they have one daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born during 2008.[14] Cory became a British citizen by naturalisation on 12 August 2011.[2]