Reply to post: Re: wasting taxpayers' cash

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

whitepines

Re: wasting taxpayers' cash

That's what the law is for. If the manufacturer didn't implement this properly then they'd be opening themselves up for legal action from both the customer and the government.

Call my cynical, but in my experience that's what EULAs are for -- effectively overriding the law and moving responsibility onto the end user. We may not like it but so far such atrocities as "licensed not sold" for software and "you must agree to telemetry to use Windows programs" have largely been upheld by various legislative bodies worldwide. The courts largely hold, for right or wrong, that using a computing device is optional, even in today's world, and therefore using or owning one is a choice. As a result you can give up rights in exchange for choosing the convenience of a computer.

Never mind that conflicts with the same governments forcing people to use various computing devices for access to government services, with no local office to pop down to if one chooses not to agree to some nasty privacy-invading EULA. Sigh.

Whilst it would be nice to have open source firmware on everything, it's an absolute pipe dream. Manufacturers make far too much money selling features to people for them to do this at anything other than gunpoint.

And you *can* actually get computers with open firmware these days*. While I don't expect a set top box or game console to ever come with open firmware, one shouldn't be putting confidential data on them anyway, right?

* Notably some of the IBM Power based stuff. Cheap ARM laptops too.

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