They’ve longed lobbied for anti-circumvention legislation and the corrupt politicians in the US and the rest of the World (with the EU Comission as a notable mention) have made sure it was implemented everywhere, exactly to avoid such a future.
The entire rotten edifice of Intellectual Property in the present day is literally the product of decades of corrupt politicians stealing more and more from the Public Domain to extend and protect this entirelly artificial kind of “property” for the benefit of the ultra-rich.
I was there in the 90s when this corrupt destruction of the “commons” started limiting what could be done in the Digital domain and saw how Techies lost, which is how we ended up with two decades of every more and ever more enshittified “closed garden” setups for all kinds of digital things.
Without shit like anti-circumvention legislation run of the mill people would have easy access in their friendly corner store to China-made devices doing things like what you describe or, for example, break out of Apple’s closed garden.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
To be fair, that future is now. People are already hacking PS5’s to turn them into Linux machines
GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That only works for launch machines that have never been updated though.
despoticruin@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Up to firmware 12.70 which isn’t quite as bad as just launch consoles, but still. Give it time, motivated hackers make some insane things happen.