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> ultimate control is with the manufacture, and not the user.

There are a host of ways of describing computer security, but in my mind the most fundamental idea is minimizing the amount of surprises a user faces. A brick might not be a useful stake knife, but it’s secure. Anyone can want more features, but features aren’t security.

If someone goes to a knitting blog they don’t expect it to have access to their exact location via GPS, phone contacts, social security number, bank routing number etc. As such for users to have meaningful control it’s generally 3rd parties not manufactures or users that security needs to deal with. If you want to use online banking you need to trust the device to not be sharing login information with random other apps you happen to have installed, that’s incompatible with allowing such random apps to connect with your bank account.

PS: Hong Kong users benefited from having devices not compromised by the CCP, that’s what I am referring to. Clearly more app stores would let various other apps in, but how may of them would have actually been compromised?



> the most fundamental idea is minimizing the amount of surprises a user faces

I wouldn't call being given the master key to my own computer "surprising".


What’s your specific objection here? Is it somehow not acting as you assumed it would when you bought it, because that’s what surprise means not simply being annoyed with someone’s business model.




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