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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

> We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in

I'd say the Internet is pretty dang anonymous compared to, say, X.25 or PSTN.

I'm curious what kind of anonymity Eben Moglen had in mind.

> but please remember the real war is on computing freedom.

Excepting the MPAA and their fixation on encrypted HDMI, what computing freedoms are at risk of being lost, and to whom, exactly? (well, within the OECD - yes, things are bad in the PRC and in other autocratic regimes - but those are hardly new threats).

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Well, for one, it's getting increasingly hard to run arbitrary code on any kind of manufactured computing device.

Riding the current of valid security concerns, all platforms are moving towards all code being signed and attributable and most code operating only within abstract/virtual environments that only provide mediated access to the hardware or the host system.

how do GUIX configuration definitions, including the signed-boot parts, fit into the future here?

they probably don't.

The number of people on iOS and iPadOS with no other computing devices is high. Walled gardens. Lack of ability to easily install any apps you want. Pushes for remote attestation. Hypervisors beneath OSes. The darker parts of “trusted computing”. I could go on with many more examples.

TPMs and remote attestation on all platforms. For example, there's no reasonable way to run an adblocker on Android without rooting, and if you do root, many apps e.g. banking apps will refuse to run. The feature is called SafetyNet.

I find the firewall app Netguard "quite reasonable" as an adblocker on unrooted Android. The default for all apps I use is 'block access' and right now most apps continue to work. Those that won't work get deleted unless I really have a need for them on mobile.

TPMs themselves are fine, if you control them. See: Librem Key. (Agree with you on other points.)

> remote attestation

* Rule number 1 in Distributed systems fight-club is never trust the client.

* Rule number 2 in Distributed systems fight-club is never trust the client.

...so why do they trust their client in a little-snitch OEMs soldered to the motherboard?

you aren't paying attention to the trends. and the overall trend in modern world - especially within the OECD - is curtailing freedom in the name of some greater good.

we're one "cyber pandemic" away from all new consumer hardware being turned into locked down plastic toys for our own safety. and the seeds are already being planted in the minds of the public https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cyber+pandemic

we've had people being forbidden from taking trains or entering restaurants or going to the movies based on their vaccination status in western europe for very dubious sanitary reasons ( one could still be contamined with the black plague a enter those movies as long as they had covid vaccine, which was clearly not changing anything to the epidemic dynamics)... and nobody but a super small fringe minority cared

I was building an e2e app at the time, and let me tell you i had a real existential crisis as to why i cared so much about people's privacy against their own will

And what of the backdoor present in all consumer CPUs which intelligence agencies are exclusively allowed to purchase disabled? If you are making that argument, it seems like we’re already in quite dim a spot.

that's a different can of worms, but yes, we are. it's just going to get way worse, and there's nothing we can do about that.

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