The Coming War on General Purpose Computation

Cory Doctorow 9:26 pm Tue Dec 27, 2011

Here's the video of my keynote last night at the 28C3, the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, entitled "The coming war on general computation."

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to "secure" anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

Update: Here's a transcript, courtesy of Joshua Wise.

Update: Christian Wöhrl has produced a German translation, too.

The coming war on general computation

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