I was there, 3000 years ago, when we started ringing the bell about “trusted computing”. Honestly it’s not as bad as I expected
And even so, perhaps it's later than you realize. Device attestation in the browser is the final nail in the coffin, and it's a question of "when" not "if" major sites start requiring it in the name of "safety" from bots.
I recently found a plugin that can alert to JS doing shady "fingerprint-like" activity. I did not expect it to go off quite as often as it does now.
It would seem that some sites are already asking _very_ probing questions about the browser so it's only a matter of time before they go one step further and demand proof and gate on furnishment of that proof.
Sure thing!
https://jshelter.org/ is the homepage.
Think about it: you need permission to run software on your own hardware. Every time you launch a Mac App, it checks in with its masters to be sure its okay to do so - every time you install an app on your mobile device, it does the same thing.
People accept this terrible state of affairs because the "user experience is better" - but this is a fallacy. Under the cover of 'security issues' that their are incapable of fixing, due to very poor architecture decisions, OS vendors have instead bolted on an insanity and sold it to the user as progress.
Every computing device should have everything it needs, onboard, to write software for that computing device. That they don't is because the OS vendors are cowardly running from the bloat of yesteryear and adding more bloat tomorrow to cover it all up.
There will be a backlash against this. We see it already in the retro-computing and alternative-platform hacking communities, which are growing and growing, exponentially, by the year.
Its only a matter of time that someone wraps up this freedom-to-use concept in hardware that is sexy enough to compete with the totalitarian-authoritarian platform providers. Any .. day .. now ..
Meanwhile to install a kernel extension you now have to reboot into safe mode and disable part of system integrity protection (with big warnings that it's at your own risk).
For the average user, kernel extension are already gone, and unsigned software not far behind.
The wisdom of such a freewheeling ecosystem in today's era is maybe debatable, but given how user-hostile the mainline OS and software vendors can be, I say there's still plenty of room for that ecosystem and it should be preserved.
Thanks, you missed the point.
Or were you saying something else that I misunderstood?
yet :D
Trusted computing and even remote attestation have legitimate use cases. It's good, great even, that they exist. But just like everything, they can be used against you.
And this might be a reaction to the fact that music piracy is quite easy; if it wasn't, perhaps there would be no Spotify where you get basically All The Music in existence for peanuts. (Note that no equivalent subscription service exists with regards to movies or games: Netflix and Xbox Game Pass have only a limited selection of content included in their subscription.)
On UNIX, Sun was the vendor that introduced the concept of SDK SKU, thus for having developer tools, an additional SKU had to be bought, and the until then largely ignored GCC sundenly got a new focus of attention.
Mainframes and micros always needed having a group of folks from the vendor professional services for specific kinds of configurations.
I still remeber working on traditional timesharing UNIX systems, one single server for all teams, what you get to do is decided by IT for your role.
There are plenty of examples from the past on how this has been happening already.
The clones relied on GW-BASIC and later QBasic, which came on disk and was bundled with DOS, to supply this functionality, and didn't have BASIC in ROM. In fact, some early BIOS implementations, if they did not find a bootable disk, displayed a message "NO BASIC FOUND" or similar.
Having important info on your device and having that device accessible to the wild, wild, internet is a very real problem. If the "walled garden" is a flawed solution we should work on a better one.
I beg history to prove me wrong.
For anyone interested, please look at Hardware attestation and TiVoization, thanks.
if the computer won't allow to install or use other software until you install a vendor-signed version of systemd on a vendor-signed kernel we'll be there. it's about hardware attestation, not signed software, though.
Combined with uutils, which is MIT, you can build a nice (!) walled garden.
Let me say I have seen enough shenanigans over the years.
Kernel being GPL has no point currently. Require hardware attestation with Microsoft private keys + systemd-boot + systemd + uutils can create a nice walled garden, allowing "vendors" to build locked-down hardware-OS pairs.
More importantly, uutils is MIT, which can attest at every level, without sharing a line of source code.
This will affect everything from small appliances to big iron and it can be very ugly.
- 22K stars
- 1600+ forks
- 33 releases
- 622 contributors
- 678 users (at minimum)
- Code of conduct (with a debian.org mailing address nonetheless)
- 1 distribution shipping it as default (so far)
> The uutils project reimplements ubiquitous command line utilities in Rust. Our goal is to modernize the utils, while retaining full compatibility with the existing utilities. We are planning to replace all essential Linux tools.
This is hell of a self-tutorial.
If this was GPL licensed, I'd love to try these. But at this point, it's looking for pushing GNU out of the Linux ecosystem, completely.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...
What prevents Microsoft from updating Windows PC standards and eliminate the possibility of turning off secure boot and allowance of enrolling your own keychain in the secure boot process?
These are long games. Being comfortable today doesn’t guarantee same comfort and allowances tomorrow.
Ironically, we’re discussing this under Android’s increasing restrictions.
The same Android which was championed as the bastion of mobile freedom when it first came out.
I worked at a big company where GPLv2 software could be used in our systems but not GPLv3. Is it better that that GPLv3 software didn't have more users? The company didn't contribute much back so maybe it's not a big loss.
The GNU freedoms never specified the right to run free software side by side with proprietary software on the same hardware; so the FSF should actually be fine with such an outcome.
If my bank requires me to use a phone for transfers (mine doesn’t), it might be acceptable to leave one in a desk drawer powered off as you would do with a hardware authentication token. It’s a special device for occasionally accessing a service. Fine. But when governments and industry collude to force citizens to carry these devices in order to live life normally, that’s not OK.
My intent is to be as stubborn and obnoxious as possible in resisting this until they either give up and provide an alternate path or lock me away for noncompliance. Fortunately there is still an alternate path available for most things, primarily thanks to elders who have trouble with new tech. (Thank you elders!)
Or… acknowledge this is a fear of a future 30, 40, 50 years away that may never happen, which is never an argument.
It’s like saying the government, because they have power, and the SCOTUS, because they have power, could decide to kill all children. Yes, they could. No, it’s absurd to let that power keep you up at night, or say the solution is to abolish their power.
Ha! Let me know how to achieve that and I will. I’ve advocated, donated, and volunteered for years on behalf of a number of causes, some with excellent organizations promoting them, and yet things continue to get worse. The only minor victories have been temporary delays of bad policy.
No, the best response for the average citizen is stubborn noncompliance and constant passive resistance. Drag your feet until the whole thing comes crashing down. And encourage your friends to do it too! (But don’t stop trying through conventional politics, maybe one day it will work. Just don’t get your hopes up.)
The banning of Parler did more for activism and awareness regarding platform control than all FOSDEM. Of course, HN happily piled on in favor of this decision, missing the moment to build common ground on platform control, for the sake of political expediency.
If the government, or tech, starts regulating out things people actually care about, then you’ll have your sway. The rush to technical solutions seems to imply we already internally agree tech and government aren’t going to do anything the average person cares about - as it assumes the “bad future” can happen without a national policy discussion anywhere.
> HN happily piled on in favor of this decision
HN is not a monolith with a single opinion. The loudest users at the time (not just here, all over the internet) were pro-censorship political activists, so maybe that caused you to interpret things that way.
> If the government, or tech, starts regulating out things people actually care about, then you’ll have your sway.
The public will not respond until the groundwork has been laid to make effective protest impossible. Only then will important things be regulated out. Until then it will just be “nerd stuff”.
This is a lazy argument, as I can safely say that 80% or more of HN has the same political bent, and every community ever has said “but not everyone.”
Read the comments on the Parler deplatforming. See what was upvoted. See what the consensus was. Nobody cares about the principles, even here, when rubber hits the road.
Imagine if the undesirables, on either side, started actively using all the decentralized censorship-resist tech for their cause. Would the builders and commentators here be saying “working as designed,” or would there be a sense of fury, a sense of “not like that?” A sense of “that was supposed to enable my cause, not yours?”
Suppose Proud Boys coordinated their Jan 6 activities on Signal and Tor. Suppose Truth Social was built on ActivityPub and MAGA developers were the loudest voices at FOSDEM advocating for censorship-resistant protocols. How do you feel? Are we still citing the same principles? If not, we never believed them.
> The public will not respond until the groundwork has been laid to make effective protest impossible. Only then will important things be regulated out. Until then it will just be “nerd stuff”.
I’m looking at history and noticing that 99.9% of revolutions did not have the internet required to be successful.
I disagree, but even if you were correct: like, what’s your point? Are you grouping me in with them because I happen to be posting here? I reject that characterization.
Edit: I feel like this is an attempt at some kind of “gotcha” based on the example you provided. No, I don’t believe access to tech should be gated based on politics. IMHO everyone should have access to private and secure systems, as part of their human rights regarding speech, thought, and personal privacy. I attempted to raise this point in several venues during the “deplatforming” fad and explained how the political pendulum made it a bad idea. The mob remained unconvinced.
> I’m looking at history and noticing that 99.9% of revolutions did not have the internet required to be successful.
You tell me how people are going to protest effectively in the face of:
- Ubiquitous visual surveillance and facial recognition
- Ubiquitous audio surveillance via pocket spies and things like Flock/ShotSpotter/other competing systems
- Ubiquitous ALPR systems and GPS-enabled “digital plates” being trialed in some areas
- Data mining coupled with AI behavioral analysis (sloppy but likely good enough)
- An increasing percentage of cars with remote shutdown capabilities
- The replacement of cash with digital currency that can be remotely disabled
The future looks a lot like China, but without their “economic miracle” that has kept the population satisfied.