Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, this is a great article that I think sums up why I think windows 10 – and MacOs 11 – are both heading straight into dystopian land. Big corporations believe that it’s their computer, not yours, and thanks to Citizens United, those big corporations own the government as well.

(one of my friends immediately equates me saying this with me being a Trumpian Antimasker who believes the Hollywood Elites and Liberal Academia are responsible for all the ills of the world – and I really don’t think it’s the same thing at all. Trumpanzees and antivaxers believe in things which are *not true* – I believe in something which is *demonstrably* true, which is that Microsoft has placed themselves in a position to install software on your computer without your knowledge or consent and is steadily abusing this position more and more. You *cannot* remove Edge from Windows 10. Nor a whole long list of other applications. Microsoft sincerely believes it is their computer, not yours. Even scarier, in S mode you cannot install Chrome)

At this point I am *hoping* Microsoft screws up in some way which results in bricking millions of windows PCs, because at least that will get the government to notice how scarily dictatorship-like their position is over the desktop market. In the meantime, I will keep running windows 7,

So, I had a interesting thought about a possible use for the blockchain. One thing it could be used for would be store known good signatures for applications – in this particular case, each time someone chose to run a application, you would look up the most recent block with that signature on it and you’d also run some hashes. As more and more hashes got run, the signature would become associated with a block starting with more and more zeros – the idea here is instead of letting Microsoft push a list of signatures as good (and after all, why should we trust them? They gave us windows 10, not to mention a long list of other stinkers) the group at large would decide which signatures were trustworthy. The idea here is that a attacker ideally would not be able to get a large enough bank of computers to do enough hashing to ‘legitimize’ a signature – you could also add things like a restriction of how many hashes per IP address per day could be registered etc.

I would like for us to have some way of knowing which binaries we could trust, I just don’t want to have to trust vendors we already know we can’t trust (i.e. Microsoft) for those signatures.

Another thought that came to me is how much better the world’s software would be if every ten years (say) everyone was *required* to release their source code and then anyone could develop it further. We’d end up with competing companies developing operating systems that ineroperated – it’s good that we have competing companies writing operating systems but it’s less than ideal that they can’t all run the same binaries (for example)