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I suspect we will see DRM built into the processor chips at some point and this ultimately regulated into mainstream standards. If you want a fast modern processor, you will no longer have total full control over it and companies like AMD and Intel will ultimately comply. It will come in the guise of national security and anti-piracy. Obviously only a few companies in the world can produce small nanometer fabricated chips. Not to mention software compatibility. It is certainly not a positive development if it ever happens.
We are also steadily transitioning more and more to cloud computing and software as a service, so again you will own less and less software and have to go with a subscription and service fee model where you simply rent the ability to use it. With 5G and faster internet technologies, eventually smart phones and PCs will merely be monitors, keyboards and touch screens with no processing power or memory inside.
The big winners in the food chain will eventually move behind the scenes to shut down the relatively free wheeling capabilities that are currently had. From a maintaining status quo at the top and financial or business perspective it makes sense for us to worry about it.
Both computing power and internet freedom are under a high degree of threat with the former less currently than the latter. However, if economic growth would stall too much with too many restrictions, then perhaps this fear is not entirely realistic. Both of these are driving much of the economic growth these days. The question is if there is a point where economic growth is not needed for a system to get locked into place. Internet freedoms and restrictions are already rising and a fever pitch basically everywhere. Fake news laws, national security claims, centralizing country-wide connections, extensive surveillance, etc. And once the freedom is lost, it never comes back except where it was done secretly and illegally with a rare whistleblower pulling the plug.
Enjoy your processing power and internet freedom while it lasts needless to say.
The last decade has seen evolution and stability and maturation of both protection and reversing tools but foundationally new ideas have been scarce. Likely virtualization by tools like VMProtect are of the more fresh ideas. Ghidra looks like the most positive development as well despite how recent it is, to finally have an open source decompiler framework though no decompiler has even begun to tackle issues like self-modifying code which require a more theoretically advanced framework.
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