alex7734

I'd go further and say that, for general purpose computing devices, it should be possible to fully use, repair and repurpose it without contacting the vendor ever again.

That is, bootloader locking and remote attestation should be forbidden by law.

To get 3 billion dollars?

It's not a large amount of money for the US but it's 3 billion dollars...

You have SafetyNet in Android which does the same thing, prevent device or app tampering.

The same thing every government does: pocketing it or spending it in whatever they think will give them the most votes or influence.

> It's a dystopian nightmare only second to online ads. But ads at least can be blocked — you have zero agency in case of Cloudflare.

About that, I imagine the millisecond that you can validate using remote attestation that a client has no adblockers, Cloudflare will add a remote attestation "gateway" (like the one they have now with the captcha) that will, overnight, give every Cloudflare customer (so half of the internet) the ability to block users that may have adblockers.

It's simply too juicy of a service for these people.

The goal is not to prevent you from running Linux, is to make it so that Linux cannot access the content you are interested in.

Remote Attestation establishes a root of trust that can be used to verify that all of the software down the line is "approved":

- You won't be able to browse sites or use apps with ads unless you run a 'trusted' device, OS and browser that does not block ads.

- You won't be able to browse sites with captchas unless you run a 'trusted' device, OS and browser that does not allow bots to interact with the browser.

- You won't be able to run Netflix unless you run a 'trusted' device, OS and browser so that you can't record the content.

- You won't be able to play online games unless, again, you run a 'trusted' device and OS so that you cannot cheat, or more importantly modify it in any way (why would you purchase skins if you can mod them in?).

- You won't be able to use online banking unless you use a trusted OS because banks.

Remote Attestation is pretty terrifying and it will be here soon unless it is regulated out of existence, which is unlikely.

You can still have FRP with an unlockable bootloader. Just place the unlock bootloader button after the forced Google login so that even if you factory reset the phone you cannot unlock the bootloader without the Google account.

In fact that is how most phones (that still have an unlockable bootloader) do it, the button is in the developer options which if you reset the phone you cannot get to without having access to the linked Google account.

Very good. Even politicians can do a good thing every once in a while.

Now, can we get rid of hardware remote attestation and impossible-to-unlock bootloaders please?