My fear for the future is that any computing device must have a government provided co-processor, and it will not be able to connect to a network without it. Any citizen found with an illegal device would be punished.
Government-provided? Not likely. The state has long since lost (well, more like willingly let slip) control to corporations. You already have those black-box coprocessors, like the Intel Management Engine.
You fear the government doing something like this but the corporation already has. What difference is there? Please don't claim that the government has a monopoly on violence, that is certainly not the case.
I don’t think many large technology sector corporations employ physical violence. We do have organized crime, and private defense contractors like Halliburton, obviously, but in the context of companies that manufacture or influence manufacturing or distribution of computing components, if you want to say they do more physical violence than the government, I’d say that warrants a citation and evidence as an odd/irregular claim.
> You fear the government doing something like this but the corporation already has. What difference is there? Please don't claim that the government has a monopoly on violence, that is certainly not the case.
Can you please give an example from recent history (past twenty years) of corporations forming a duopoly on violence?
This is already the case for mobile networks. Open source basebands are illegal. The best you can do is sequester your proprietary government-aproved co-processor as far as possible from your main processor, but most computers with such network adapters built-in aren't designed this way - they're designed to promiscuously share memory.
> This is already the case for mobile networks. Open source basebands are illegal. The best you can do is sequester your proprietary government-aproved co-processor as far as possible from your main processor, but most computers with such network adapters built-in aren't designed this way - they're designed to promiscuously share memory.
I don't think open source basebands are illegal per se. I thought the legal encumbrance was due to the NDAs under which documents related to wireless chipsets are released. Can you explain a bit more?
It's not that there's a law (that I'm aware of) forbidding baseband software where the source is public - it's that operating a device with uncertified firmware is illegal. That means that devices with user-modifiable baseband firmware are also illegal (or at any rate, no manufacturer will take responsibility). So open community development of baseband firmware, in the usual model, is impossible - you can't legally test it (at least not without a questionably-legal SDR, a femtocell, and a faraday cage) and you can't certify it.
So while it might, technically, be true to say that open source basebands aren't illegal per se, the fact remains that they are functionally impossible because of the law.