Nah never gonna happen, it's easier to just price people out of ever owning it in the first place
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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You make it sound like this is the first time it’s happened.
Look up Phil Zimmerman and PGP back in the 1990s.
Such computing power used to be classified under the same category as weapons -grade nuclear materials, and likely will be again.
And most people won’t even notice.
Adding some color to this tidbit of history -- because I don't think the OP's original question can even be meaningfully answered -- one of the rationales for American regulations on exporting cryptography was to maintain a military advantage: if American computers are powerful enough to break weak encryption, but everyone else's computers cannot break strong encryption, then it is a NOBUS capability that the USA and its allies have.
If having been handed such a capability, the most logical thing to do is to hold onto it for as long as possible, and let the adversary struggle for a few decades to reduce the asymmetry. By the time the 2000s came around, computer capabilities were equalized enough that denying strong encryption stopped making much sense, in addition to being unworkable due to internet distribution.
Which is why the tactic changed: with no more asymmetry, the new logical tactic is to actively contribute to making the strongest possible encryption, in collaboration with academics from anywhere and everywhere. This is when NIST started hosting competitions to select the next cryptographic algorithms, where the world's top cryptographers and researchers would vett each other's work, as a supercharged form of peer-review. The most resilient algorithm for the given criteria would be adopted for American use in the FIPS standards, among others. And as a result of this free proliferation, everyone including friend or foe benefits from those cryptographically secure building blocks, as seen in TLS 1.3 or E2EE secure messaging.
No doubt that the NSA or governments will still be paranoid about protecting their top secrets, but defense in depth means they have other methods to keep stuff secure, such as guarding an air-gapped network with armed soldiers. It's just that the weakness of encryption is no longer a realistic attack vector in the 21st Century.
Time has advanced, and new challenges arise.
For a while there Apple’s Power Macs were classified as weapons because they were capable of a gigaflop https://youtu.be/XjkoYlpf3EA
The S in GigaFLOPS is for seconds.
Thanks for being the best kind of correct
Mesh networks of lower power devices will come to exist and do the exact same things via distributed computing.
Modern Americans will complain but they won't significantly resist, because actual resistance is too much harder than typing.
Just connect a gun to the hardware and you are protected by the first amendment of course....
It's america, turn it to a firearm and you are fine.
Unfortunately, the 2nd amendment has only historically been upheld when it's about the right of Nazis to threaten minorities. The moment minorities get their hands on firearms, fascist lowlifes suddenly care about gun control.
What if minorities where shooting into schools?
They already blame all trans people for school shootings due to like, two trans shooters out of thousands
Not a stupid question but pretty silly to think anyone could answer this with anything more than an uninformed wild-ass guess.
We'll build robots out of our microwaves and refrigerators to start an uprising?
Great movie concept
Yep, 100%: Don't come between a nerd and their gaming rig.
What if instead they feed into every bubble to try and render powerful computer hardware outside the price range of anyone but millionares. While gradually encouraging a more, data center based control system so that rather than getting PC hardware ourselves... we'll instead only be able to afford basic cheap thin clients, made to connect to a more powerful virtual machine that is capable of running games or anything that requires any power, but of course we can't control what's monitored on it to prevent it from spying on us or refusing to allow us to do tasks that aren't approved by the company that owns the servers, which will be taking requests from the government.
Course that's a hypothetical dystopia, I can't imagine that happening.
They will be successful in this endeavor.
Alot of innocent people are going to lose everything as a result.
Imagine if somebody invented a replicator!