Treacherous Doom is Upon Us

One of the many fire and brimstone prophecies to come out of the the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been that treacherous computing is going to end the freedom of information as we know it. Well, this doom is now upon us, with the release of Nexus, a modular operating system built from the ground up to support Trusted Computing.

For an insight into why the FSF insists on referring to it as treacherous I recommend reading the linked article. Note the mandatory dig at Microsoft despite the fact that Gentoo has supported Trusted Computing in user supporting capacity for close to 5 years now. Basically, their argument boils down to the fact that information might possibly in some hypothetical scenario be hidden from you. The examples provided include the idea that documents you need to carry out you work could somehow be hidden from you to conceal things like corporate malfeasance. Never mind that for such a policy to be implemented would violate record keeping requirements in most Western countries that I am familiar with.

The sad part is, the FSF completely disregards any of the potential benefits. the Nexus website presents three potential usage scenarios. There are almost certainly many more. One of them is to prevent piracy. If you are buying digitally rights managed media you have dug you own grave and I have no sympathy, the other two however are:

• Spam-free e-mail system that defeats spam by enabling e-mail senders to mark messages as having been typed in by a human, which clearly distinguishes such messages from those that have been generated automatically.
• Attested MACEDON application, where access to the peer-to-peer overlay is restricted to nodes that are running acceptable versions of the software.

I could certainly go for a spam free e-mail system when estimates put spam volume at 94% of all e-mail. Furthermore, imagine the peer-to-peer overlay that can’t be tampered with by interested third parties, like say the movie/music industries (Note: I do not endorse piracy).

Ultimately, the FSFs position is analogous to saying that the entire study of nuclear physics is evil because of nuclear weapons. Never mind the countless other benefits reaped by mankind because we understand the workings of the stuff things are made of.