For a phone without an OS!
And now for something entirely different (or may be not).
Someone got their latest retail therapy shipped without an OS:
My Pixel 2 XL Arrived With No OS.
Whereupon my reaction was, awesome!
Only a few years back, you expected to build or even buy a PC (by which I mean Personal Computer, not something running Windows) without an OS to begin with. The maker of the motherboard used a standard booting protocol like BIOS or UEFI. Most standard devices like disks, keyboards, mice, scanners, and printers would use public data exchange protocols. Anyone could use these to put together an OS. There was no question of collusion between the maker of the motherboard and the OS. If your OS was coded to the published standards, it would boot and let you use the hardware.
In turn, the OS provided open APIs to be used by applications. Some OSs like Linux keep their code public. When you install their binaries, you can verify their md5 hashes. If any 3-letter state or non-state actor has been messing with openssl or openssh source or binary, an army of nameless experts getting their jollies from inspecting openssl and openssh code for free was your best line of defense. A HTTP or SMTP exploit would be discovered and patched in days and you'd get a CERT advisory to upgrade. You didn't have to live this healthy, of course. You could buy your preinstalled Windows or Mac box if you wished and it "just worked". But some people wanted to take more care to project their data and privacy, and not all of them were drug lords or terrorists.
OK, the world was not as ideal as suggested above. Hardware makers always made Linux a pariah. Linux code writers always had to reverse engineer peripherals to make their drivers barely work, while the hardware maker published full-feature Windows drivers. This got much worse as people moved to portable laptops for personal computing. Even though the same chip is used in a PCI card modem and a modem on a laptop, the latter provided no Linux support. GPUs were left with sketchy public drivers. Many touchpads and trackpoints barely ever worked in Linux. Suspend/hibernate is still unreliable in 2017. The vast majority of laptop users use the pre-installed OS to avoid these pains.
Which brings us to what old timers may remember as the famous antitrust case against Microsoft, who dared bundle a Web browser with an OS and "encourage" users to use only that Web browser!
And how about now? You would be surprised if your "smart" phone were not siphoning off some data to the CPU (unfashionable, "SoC") maker, to the LTE modem maker, the phone "finisher", to the OS writer, and to at least three governments. Pulling up a company for bundling a browser with the OS seems ... quaint.
The acrid irony being, all these phones run some form of Linux OS at heart. Linux, the knight in shining armor that saved many of us from popping a vein from Windows BSODs. Linux, where you needed to reboot your PC or laptop only for hardware modifications (and sometimes, not even for adding a CPU!). Linux, for which no sensible hacker would write a virus or malware so you could browse unmolested. Linux, where you'd code up your iptables and be sure not a single network packet went out that you didn't allow. Linux of transparent .conf files you would edit with vi to change how your hardware behaves, no mysteries. Linux, where the OS writer has as much access to your private data as the maker of your toaster has to your blood glucose readings.
That world is ... gone. To remotely "own" the hardware you have bought with good money (but see below about that "good" bit), you need to "root" (innuendo intended, I am sure) your phone. Saying "I want to install whatever OS I damn well wish on my hardware" is criminal --- for most phones, "rooting" is done by sketchy pieces of software that bypass and fool code from the hardware vendor that "protect your phone from you". Frequently, as ways to "root" phones are discovered and announced, these "loopholes" are closed by phone makers. If your "rooting" software "bricks" your phone (renders it inoperable), your warranty instantly putrefies into a fetid pile. And the OS vendor of your mobile phone probably does know your blood glucose level. And if you work out daily.
This level of resistance to let the hardware owner own the hardware isn't normal or natural.
Someone got their latest retail therapy shipped without an OS:
My Pixel 2 XL Arrived With No OS.
Whereupon my reaction was, awesome!
Only a few years back, you expected to build or even buy a PC (by which I mean Personal Computer, not something running Windows) without an OS to begin with. The maker of the motherboard used a standard booting protocol like BIOS or UEFI. Most standard devices like disks, keyboards, mice, scanners, and printers would use public data exchange protocols. Anyone could use these to put together an OS. There was no question of collusion between the maker of the motherboard and the OS. If your OS was coded to the published standards, it would boot and let you use the hardware.
In turn, the OS provided open APIs to be used by applications. Some OSs like Linux keep their code public. When you install their binaries, you can verify their md5 hashes. If any 3-letter state or non-state actor has been messing with openssl or openssh source or binary, an army of nameless experts getting their jollies from inspecting openssl and openssh code for free was your best line of defense. A HTTP or SMTP exploit would be discovered and patched in days and you'd get a CERT advisory to upgrade. You didn't have to live this healthy, of course. You could buy your preinstalled Windows or Mac box if you wished and it "just worked". But some people wanted to take more care to project their data and privacy, and not all of them were drug lords or terrorists.
OK, the world was not as ideal as suggested above. Hardware makers always made Linux a pariah. Linux code writers always had to reverse engineer peripherals to make their drivers barely work, while the hardware maker published full-feature Windows drivers. This got much worse as people moved to portable laptops for personal computing. Even though the same chip is used in a PCI card modem and a modem on a laptop, the latter provided no Linux support. GPUs were left with sketchy public drivers. Many touchpads and trackpoints barely ever worked in Linux. Suspend/hibernate is still unreliable in 2017. The vast majority of laptop users use the pre-installed OS to avoid these pains.
Which brings us to what old timers may remember as the famous antitrust case against Microsoft, who dared bundle a Web browser with an OS and "encourage" users to use only that Web browser!
And how about now? You would be surprised if your "smart" phone were not siphoning off some data to the CPU (unfashionable, "SoC") maker, to the LTE modem maker, the phone "finisher", to the OS writer, and to at least three governments. Pulling up a company for bundling a browser with the OS seems ... quaint.
The acrid irony being, all these phones run some form of Linux OS at heart. Linux, the knight in shining armor that saved many of us from popping a vein from Windows BSODs. Linux, where you needed to reboot your PC or laptop only for hardware modifications (and sometimes, not even for adding a CPU!). Linux, for which no sensible hacker would write a virus or malware so you could browse unmolested. Linux, where you'd code up your iptables and be sure not a single network packet went out that you didn't allow. Linux of transparent .conf files you would edit with vi to change how your hardware behaves, no mysteries. Linux, where the OS writer has as much access to your private data as the maker of your toaster has to your blood glucose readings.
That world is ... gone. To remotely "own" the hardware you have bought with good money (but see below about that "good" bit), you need to "root" (innuendo intended, I am sure) your phone. Saying "I want to install whatever OS I damn well wish on my hardware" is criminal --- for most phones, "rooting" is done by sketchy pieces of software that bypass and fool code from the hardware vendor that "protect your phone from you". Frequently, as ways to "root" phones are discovered and announced, these "loopholes" are closed by phone makers. If your "rooting" software "bricks" your phone (renders it inoperable), your warranty instantly putrefies into a fetid pile. And the OS vendor of your mobile phone probably does know your blood glucose level. And if you work out daily.
This level of resistance to let the hardware owner own the hardware isn't normal or natural.
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