The banking system has been relying on remote attestation for decades to ensure that devices used in settling financial transactions have not been tampered with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_4758
Also, I think the chip-and-PIN cards used for most in-store transactions in Europe for the last 20 years rely on remote attestation and tamper resistance to prevent fraud.
Finally, in the domain of desktop and laptop computers, there is a big security hole in that most components (certainly, disk drives and storage devices, but basically any peripheral or board) are essentially embedded computers that can be pwned with the result that they stayed pwned even if the owner of the computer installs the OS from scratch. One solution to this would be for suppliers of peripherals and boards to get much better at securing their products or to stop using microprocessor to implement their products, but it would be quite a lot of work (and governmental intervention or at least intervention by industry-wide quasi-governmental entities that currently do not exist) to get from the current situation to the one I just described. The only products currently available that are secure against this threat (aside perhaps from using 40-year-old computers) use verified-boot technology to implement the security.
I.e., the only desktop and laptop computers you can buy where you can be reasonable sure some attacker hasn't installed malware in the computer's disk drive or track page or wifi module are things like Macs and Chromebooks, which implement the security using verified boot.
Do you simply not care that this Linux computer that you have such warm feelings about is fairly easy to pwn (in part because of the lack of verified boot and in part because desktop Linux software is just much easier to pwn than the systems software on a Mac or a Chromebook or an iPhone or an Android phone) such that if you ever got to be an effective activist against some government or some powerful industrial interest, that government or industrial interest could fairly easily eavesdrop on everything you do with this Linux computer?
That doesn't sound much like protecting your individual rights.
It's just not. Otherwise, all servers would be running your beloved iOS, wouldn't they?
>in part because of the lack of verified boot
This does not matter. I can generate my own keys.
>easier to pwn [...] than [...]an iPhone
Lol... If anything, phones are more vulnerable because you have less access to sandboxes and VMs.
Hey, look, an Apple CVE from two days ago. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-43284
And this one's from this month. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-43300
And here's Apple's sandbox failing, last month. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-43274