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Just like how making weed illegal is virtually impossible because anybody can grow marijuana in their backyard.

How many regular people would risk owning turning-complete devices that can run unauthorized software if it would net you jail time if caught? Lots of countries are already itching towards banning VPN, corpo needs be damned.

Especially now that the iPhone has shown having a device that can only run approved legal software covers a lot of people's everyday needs.



I'm more referring to the fact that stuff like PowerPoint and Minecraft and who knows what are Turing-complete, albeit with awful performance.

Theoretically, you can have a totally owned device managed by Big Brother, yet generate AI smut with a general purpose CPU built in PowerPoint.

How do you possibly regulate that?


> How do you possibly regulate that?

The government could send an order to the software developer to patch out that turning completeness, and ban the software if it's not complied.

I get what you mean, it's never possible to 100% limit things. But if you limit things 98% so that the general public does not have access that's more than enough for authoritarian purposes.




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