Forcing your computer to rat you out

He’s right. I vividly remember conversations at Facebook of why forcing women in certain emerging markets to use their real identity for gaming profiles was a bad idea and PM stubbornly repeating the idea that it would be good for them

The biggest travesty of Google+'s "real name policy" was that it wasn't a real name policy at all; it was a "no unusual name policy". Some people who used their real name got blocked because their name was unusual, while people using a normal but fake name were left alone.

The only way to enforce a real name policy is to require legal ID, but that opens people up to identity theft.

You'd basically have to have an official government-issued internet identity that you can use to log into other sites, which is fine under a benevolent government, but not in a dictatorship.

Real names no longer deter on Facebook, not even when it's criminal. If you look on Facebook marketplace you will immediately find dozens of scams from some fabricated accounts and some real. People are out there using their real accounts to sell stolen tech, or not delivering on a purchase when someone uses Venmo, Cash app, etc. People are even so desperate that they think they can get away when facebooks purchase protection or PayPal purchase protection is used - and they're right. They don't care that their account becomes negative when the transaction reverses. By that time they've gotten their money and it will be 5-7 years before the statute of limitations forces the corps to take it to claims. While this may be criminal the scale of it is so large and policing unfit that there is little to no enforcement of what is high dollar theft. The protection system also means that the individual making the purchase isn't "harmed" in that dollar value so there is no civil claim and a criminal one would have to be persued by the corp.

Initially perhaps real names created some self moderation, but as time has moved on people figured out there's no actual consequences to being dishonest, morally bankrupt, or otherwise promoting of poor qualities. This is normalized over time to a point where it has likely reinforced those attributes - not reduced them.

> There is no such thing as a printer that will only run the "reject third-party ink" program. There is no such thing as a phone that will only run the "reject third-party apps" program. There are only laws, like the Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that make writing and distributing those programs a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine (for a first offense).

This framing is horribly wrong, and Doctorow's characterization of computers being intrinsically open to unrestricted computation is outright dangerous. He goes on to fill in a lot of nuance which kind of walks things back, but his narrative still revolves around the war on general purpose computing being primarily about fending off legislative mandates by government.

The DMCA certainly does create a chilling effect on researching and releasing vulnerabilities in trusted computing / digital restrictions management, including a chilling effect of other companies attempting adversarial interoperability. But at the core of it, the reason we don't see more exploits to get around "secure" boot and the like is precisely because these technical restrictions seem to mostly work. We did have a nice introductory period where people were finding logic bugs in chains of trust and whatnot, but those seem to have mostly calmed down as the code/logic gets reused for new devices with those bugs fixed.

So unfortunately, the real threat to freedom posed by remote attestation is indeed itself part of the physical "reality" of computational complexity plus the economics of electronics manufacturing. Governments don't need to mandate its use to have businesses slowly nudge people towards it, just as they have been successfully nudging people with CAPTCHAs/blocks for using less surveillable IPs and more secure browsers (eg resistFingerprinting = true).

Ultimately, it's going to take positive political action to prevent this looming societal threat - either active legislation prohibiting it and/or reworking the standards group to respect user freedom. Essentially - either baking in manufacturer known/controlled attestation/signing keys needs to be prohibited, or TPMs need to have a suitable maintenance mode that allows importing/exporting all embedded keys.

Basically another rant about the Google WEI nonsense, but given the author well worth the read. It's worth the read for the summary of how we got here if no other reason.

"...The Zuckerberg Doctrine claims that forcing people to use their own names is a way to ensure civility. This is an idea so radioactively wrong, it can be spotted from orbit."

The idea isn't wrong and there are certainly people who will think twice about anti-social behavior if their real name is attached to it.

The only issue here is that some people think they're entitled to use a pseudonym online on somebody else's platform that doesn't want them to. Ya'll need to go spin up a 5-person Mastodon server to echo-chamber a bit and hopefully learn you're behavior isn't acceptable to most for reasons that go well beyond you thinking you're a victim.

And for the few people who want to use a pseudonym online for reasons beyond anti-social behavior, FB has tools to protect your account notably for journalist. I get you'll have to use someone else's platform for communications at times, but FB has no interest in quelling this and you should just do what you need to do without trying to publicly sway opinion for likely other and hopefully unrelated anti-social reasons. FB is a social network, not the front page of the internet, and they have their own position to uphold that is beyond its users and clearly documented in TOS that people like pretending doesn't exist or cherry-picking to promote victim-hood.

FB and Zuck are not some boogieman out to get people lol, and there's plenty of different platforms to do whatever it is you need to do safely, or not at all.