We develop an approach to the longstanding conjecture of Kierstead concerning the character of strongly nontrivial automorphisms of computable linear orderings. Our main result is that for any η-like computable linear ordering, such that has no interval of order type η, and such that the order type of is determined by a -limitwise monotonic maximal block function, there exists computable such that has no nontrivial automorphism.

We solve a longstanding question of Rosenstein, and make progress toward solving a longstanding open problem in the area of computable linear orderings by showing that every computable ƞ-like linear ordering without an infinite strongly ƞ-like interval has a computable copy without nontrivial computable self-embedding. The precise characterization of those computable linear orderings which have computable copies without nontrivial computable self-embedding remains open.