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The Illusion: Are You Really Controlling Software?

It happens every day that regular computer users discover security and privacy issues of proprietary software. Because the users don't know any better than to keep staring at the issues blankly, the issues are almost always ignored and forgotten. Yet later, when it spontaneously has some unpleasant consequences, the same users have harsh time searching for solutions.

Do they even know any solution? If not, then armies of desperate users might exaggerate their concern up to the point of ridiculousness; for instance when a person truly believes to Alex Jones' conspiracy theories and refuses to accept the facts. On the other hand, most software companies don't even bother to patch their own software and workstations properly. The companies also force you to provide them with your personal information, which stays stored in vulnerable databases and later is used against you for not only marketing purposes. Who is to blame? In this article, I'd like to describe the one reason behind increasingly concerning privacy and security issues of regular computer users and one solution.

A typical computer user is considered being an ordinary consumer. Contrary to our perception, software is viewed by a company as if it was a paid service. Now, this software company needs to sell the service, avoid its free use, prevent 3rd parties from profiting on it without sharing the profit. This company wants to know everything about users of its paid service and it's crucial to have a full control over the users. At any moment, the service can change without your awareness. The need for trust to consumer's software and hardware comes from that place. Requests for zero consumer's anonymity on the Internet come from there too. You should know that Microsoft is calling with the Treacherous Computing unpleasant misfeature and the idea behind it clearly leads to locking down an Operating System. It's designed to keep an operator off the operations, to achieve the illusion of a consumer who confusedly enjoys doing what he's questioned by "his" fully-controlled-by-its-vendor software.

It's indeed happening. The software restricts you nearly from everything that is not specifically allowed to do with it and the list of allowed operations is getting shorter every day in favor of higher profit. If you continue using such a software, you become even more insecure and addicted to it, as a smoker to his cigarettes, and you won't easily switch from a dictatorship to liberalism, you can bet on that. All countries already adjust their laws to put interests of influential monopolies, such as Microsoft, Adobe or entertainment producers from Hollywood, above the consumer's. If the current software (say "paid service") is no longer limited by consumer's hardware, the intentional limits are deliberately implemented directly in the Operating System's core. Microsoft now literally dictates what performance you can get from your hardware and how much the consumer is allowed to enjoy for the sum paid to Microsoft. The consumer is supposed to rely on paid services for the rest of his life. The consumer may be anytime cornered up by Microsoft to do whatever "his" computer wants without any over-thinking about the impact. And such a consumer is also deliberately treated in a manner he should never find out how any service works. If something goes wrong, don't poke at it and call Microsoft Support. You don't want to see Microsoft's income drops and the pricing gets higher, do you?

If RFID makes a good profit, why not use it? Businessmen do not care about any security, unless it's another way to make them richer. Non-anonymous Internet is again a way to get more money for a service and so is the (un)famous Cloud Computing with the forwardly proposed and blessed pay-as-you-go scheme by Microsoft, which is in fact the first and only major innovation of the current services. If you don't pay, you can't even download your data from the "cloud". You never get a chance to control it. Hence, it's the cloud. From my point of view, it's a good business model and I don't think about any conspiracy for a second. To me it sounds more like a sabotage of software by its full transformation to paid services with zero control by their consumers. The reason is always selling more services to more consumers, but one day we'll face the IT crisis because some innovations should have never happened.

Despite all of this, Microsoft has good deals with hardware vendors and resellers about pre-installing only Windows on the new computers for a small provision. We are still nowhere near of an easily returnable copy of pre-installed Windows because the same resellers and vendors often have many 3rd party deals about installing proprietary self-contained spyware in those pre-installed copies of OEM Windows, so when you buy a new computer it's just about time to reinstall everything. Or else you would be carefully prepared for getting along with zero anonymity and missing privacy on your computer. Your computer's software is often completely owned by other businesses and working against your best interests. Most of Windows drivers have that kind of a software bundled. Everybody is always happy, except the minority that knows how it works under the hood. If you want any reasonable security, privacy, or both, it's nowhere near of the business. Precisely for this reason, you should not be using Windows. Get rid of it for good and make sure it's your hands on the real controls again. Life is great when you choose to spend it rather with GNU/Linux or BSD.

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