So, from time to time I listen to the security now podcast.
Occasionally, there is some genuine insight.
Most recent episode involved discussion of security vulnerabilities, AI finding them, and software rapidly becoming more secure as they are fixed. This is good. Everyone happy, so far.
The second level upshot of this that I haven’t previously heard discussed (a blog by a third party I forget who) proposed that as software gets more secure, governments will want to insert backdoors deliberately (more urgently than previously as they could rely on general CVEs).
Result:
Other countries will abandon USA software such as Windows (and macOS) and move to Linux.
Which made me think: I think it’s already happening.
France has announced a switch
Germany has been looking to switch
Switzerland is switching
Denmark is switching
Malaysia is switching
I’m not sure if this is the root cause, but if it isn’t it certainly makes sense and will result in other switching away.
The irony being: USA/NSA backdoors into USA software will end up impacting only USA citizens.
And that could be the death of commercial software. Well, one reason - others being that software development is also being commoditised, but that’s another factor in itself…
Your thread title limits the death to Windows. Or do you mean all commercial software?
It is my understanding, FOSS also can be commercial.
Please clarify what you think will die. I find it hard to believe all software will be non-commercial.
And many European countries are decades behind the US. German governments still use fax… I guess they are already independent of any technology companies
Abandoning US solutions may be an ambition, and not reality any time soon. I believe it when I see it.
And backdoors have been a thing long before AI.
I do agree governments and companies should have more own capability. But decisions are made by IT departments. If they use FOSS, they have to hire qualified people and work. And if there is an issue, IT department is at fault. If they hire MS or any other company, they just pay money and lean back. If there is an issue, IT department can just blame MS. Don’t underestimate how convenient that is for IT. And CEOs often have no clue and just trust IT.
I think the bigger story that hasnt caught up to most places yet is, the friction to build your own maybe crappier bespoke version of any app is now within reach to everyone with a 200$ a month subscription.
“Claude, build me a replacement for service-now” and within a few days you can have a very workable prototype.
My latest foray into insanity is “Claude, customize my uefi bios so that i can do x8x8 bifurcation on asus w790e-sage” and… yep. he did it rofl
Zero friction software creation opens hilarious new doors where everybody can have exactly the software they want for the low low cost of tokens to make it.
If all the security holes are patches, are we going to end up with “air tight” hardware, like the vast bulk of cell phones, impossible to change OS, impossible to even root your own device ?
I am always skeptical of security claims. It used to be that they would put locks on things and people who say “oh no security blabla”, and now we have secure boot on everything.
How long until you can’t buy a single laptop without being stuck with the OS that came with it.
When we can’t even jailbreak a PC anymore and anyway all the software was running inside AMD SEV / Intel TDX so even if you jailbreak the OS, none of the drivers or application become inspectable.
They’re slowly building prison walls around us and people seem to think the walls are to keep us safe !
You did modulate and say “crappier” bespoke software, so I might be speaking to the choire..
but if we all argue that software is dead and I can instead just-in-time author services, we’ll all have to own the cost of maintaining it too. And sure, we can punt the ball and say “well AI can replace my DBA”, but the question is “how far is too far”.
If you ask the questions: “is it worth it to replace my proprietary TUI” and “is it worth it to replace the entire stack, down to the power grid”, the answer will surely be “somewhere in between” — but where?
I guess my comment is: there will always be some level of cooperation in the software stack. Whether that’s using FOSS, negotiating enterprise deals, or buying your standard SaaS stack. Saying ‘windows is dead’ is dead because I have the capability to rewrite it is maybe a stretch, no?
Yeah, it really is astonishing how good AI is a creating software.
You don’t even need Claude for most tasks, if you know the basics of what you want it does not take long to guide local LLMs enough in the right direction to get the job done.
Oh I agree with all of that and more, the problem is the top saas vendors in recent years have really ratcheted up the pricing. When you are facing multi million dollar snow renewals all of a sudden eyes shift to the worse version of we-have-snow-at-home.
What I am watching transpire first hand in the big enterprise space is, you can take claude+codex+a couple engineers to do the custom thing, and the real big take away is, people are willing to trade worse software in terms of functionality and polish for something they feel personally tailored to their whims.
Even if net cost ends up being a wash at the end of the day (right now scales are tipped WAY in favor of ai authored and maintained codebases driven by direct chat input from business users) my guess is more ego driven executives will love to show off how much better their version of salesforce is.
And in a surprising amount of cases its not going to be as bad as the crap they got from the vendor, that has been offshoring the development to cheaper and less skilled workforces in east europe or asia. My God I have so many bad experiences from my old job about Acronis backups for businness and Microsoft Dynamix AX.
We always had at least a couple support tickets open with Acronis at any given moment, for 5 years straight.
It is crazy to see what AI can strip out or cold out fairly quickly, which used to take a few hours and a lot more hair pulling.
But I don’t think it’s gonna kill commercial software I feel like most companies are gonna go hybrid, which most story have started doing with like what they’re hosting instead of all being in the cloud they sell host some stuff they’re just gonna start doing that with software like stop paying for finance software or whatever internal softer they’re paying for try to make their own so that even if it does break or isn’t pretty it only affects them internally ,which IT still will get shit for but it’s a lot better than your service going down in a bunch of customers spamming customer support.
The death of windows has been coming for a while and countries, switching away from ,it is less about back doors more about digital sovereignty, and not having to rely on a different country software cause all these countries are hacking each other no matter what they’re using. They’ll find the back door in whatever operating system decide to use.
If I’m understanding correctly by what you mean, no with all security holes being patched it won’t end up in “ airtight” hardware in any way shape or form unless the hardware companies are being dicks which wouldn’t surprise me, all getting patched would mean mostly generally more secure software because there’s always gonna be some vulnerability cause patch one they’ll find two new one so nothing is ever gonna “airtight”
Besides, it’s not just alleged hypotetical tinfoil head backdoor conspiracies.
There are actual laws passed in the US in 2018 that did start the snowball effect we are seeing now, like the Cloud act. It’s not just a reaction to Orange Man, bureaucracy is slow to react to anything.
Cloud act would theoretically allow the US government to require any US company or foreign company that operates in the US to hand over data of anything they feel is relevant to the case even in other countries.
Yes there are also theoretical checks and balances to allow the company to refuse through legal recourse, but that’s all a process playing out in the US and the target nation would still not have any say in it.
That UEFI modding bit is wild. I was literally just thinking the other day about whether I could loop an LLM into modifying a BIOS. The fact that you can prompt your way through an x8x8 bifurcation hack on a W790 board is nuts, but it shows where this is actually going. When the barrier to building customized tools or modifying your own firmware drops to basically nothing, the vendor’s walled garden is no longer a concern.
The mass exodus away from corporate US software isn’t just one isolated thing either. It’s a bunch of ugly realities boiling over all at once imo:
First, it’s pure, unmasked enshittification driven by the unregulated “line must go up” greed. Big Tech isn’t even pretending to build tools for users anymore. They’re injecting telemetry, ads, and forced indexing straight into Software / OS veins. You don’t own the machine, you’re just a digital serf being milked for data and subscription fees.
Second, the geopolitical climate is completely cooked. Hostilities are ramping up, trust in the US is (has) bottoming out, and governments everywhere are obsessed with total surveillance and control. If a government is going to lean on vendors to mandate backdoors, why would any other country (or any sane person) trust closed-source US software with their infrastructure?
It’s all colliding at the same time. The world is marching straight toward authoritarian control and ignoring the needs of actual people, while corporations happily hand over the keys and ruin their own products in the name of quarterly margins and glad jazz hands from the board.
When proprietary platforms treat you like a product to be harvested, and an LLM makes it trivial to patch your own firmware or roll your own Linux setup, the choice is pretty simple. - imho
Sure why not, others have used it to hack a laptop bios from HP to show hidden settings a few months ago Reddit
I’m a bit surprised that the bios signature verification in that laptop was just a bios module (so Claude could hardwire it to return “all good”, like crackers did to the primitive DRM in CD-ROM games in the 90s) instead of using Intel Boot Guard (which is done by the ME security coprocessor and a hardware fused key, so it’s another matter entirely). But then again, it’s HP.
It’s still an external service, or (in the future) it will rely on a self-hostable model made by third parties with deep pockets, so it’s the weak link in the chain. I can’t wait for SWAT teams to bust down doors to confiscate “highly illegal” GPUs with more than 16GB of vRAM or something because they can run local AI models that threaten the Elites
Let’s try to keep this thread on topic and respectful, folks. I’m not interested in coming back here to clean up 200 posts because people got into a shouting match.
Primarily proprietary operating systems. Maybe i should have specified closed source software - that’s perhaps more likely.
Because TLAs will want to backdoor things as they can no longer rely on naturally occurring vulnerabilities at some point moving forwards - and any country not the USA probably doesn’t want USA spy agency backdoors in their government.
And yes, the premise is that eventually, all the bugs will be found (timeline TBD) which will necessitate the deliberate back doors and make it clear to the rest of the world they are being implanted due to the legal process within the USA government that the TLAs will initiate.
To be clear, its not just the USA government - the UK government is trying to mandate government access to crypto, etc.
Point being - it will be clear to everyone that world governments will be demanding back door access to software, so anyone not aligned with that government will want to run something else, presumably something they can audit. I.e. open source.
ANd yes, fully aware backdoors existed before AI. The point is that they will be explicitly clear to everyone that they are intentionally being demanded now through legal channels. That’s the difference with status quo vs. if software is “secure” at some point in the near future,
Its not so much that its tailored to their whims - it’s that you’re not at the mercy of some corporate dickheads at say, Broadcom buying the vendor and then jacking your renewal pricing by 10x.
I have been using Claude Max at work, the insight that it has provided is that software as have been stated in this thread will be a commodity, on demand, custom.
I am tired of both Windows and Linux distros and I have plans for my 2027 holidays.
I will be running Anthropic/OpenAI/Google model, whatever is the flavor of the month, maybe two or all three of them. It will be a full time month of “work” building my own personal software platform.
I plan to build a dedicated box for that task, to setup VMs as permanent residence for each AI.
I still have not decided over a full kernel fork or not, It will depend on how good have the AIs become in one year.
Anything that it is not the kernel will eventually become a fork or custom, specially the browser. I deeply hate chrome and despise Firefox, both I use every day and I am tired of fighting them.
I have been discussing this with friends for years now, it was never a realistic path. That discussion changed over the last 6 months, it went from unrealistic to when and how.
A single developer maintaining an app that can’t deliver because he does it for free on his spare time won’t be a bottleneck anymore.
Updates that compromise your whole network with a single dependency will be a thing of the past.
And no gatekeepers any more, no matter if they are companies or developers who like their power position. Both are losing their power to AI.
