CPU as a service has come!

[Paul Boddie]

On Monday 27. November 2017 13.52.55 Giovanni Biscuolo wrote:
> 
> please also consider that many respectable free software supporters are
> proposing solutions that are **useless tech workarounds**; e.g. looking at
> https://privacylab.yale.edu/ , in the "What we do" box, I read: "Hosting
> Tor", "providing TAILS OS", "hardened GNU/Linux", privacy-respecting tools
> such as PGP/GPG e-mail and E2EE messaging...

I know that you're trying to communicate that control of the hardware is 
essential, but those other things still complement efforts to maintain overall 
control of our computing environments, uphold privacy, and so on. As such, 
they are not useless.

Only if they are being proposed as complete solutions can they be considered 
as useless, ineffective or giving a false sense of security (workarounds, as 
you note). But at the same time, you wouldn't advocate controlling the 
hardware and then openly wonder why anyone would bother encrypting things or 
running secure operating systems.

So we need to consider all of these things, or at least many of them. These 
days, I constantly find myself reminding people to beware of the zero-sum 
game, as they promote their favourite things at the expense of other, equally 
worthwhile things. This is no different.

Paul