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> I can't trust Moxie after he called Google, Microsoft and Apple having absolute control over people's good thing, and called people having control over their
by simoncion 11y ago
> I can't trust Moxie after he called Google, Microsoft and Apple having absolute control over people's good thing, and called people having control over their own devices "going back to the old broken desktop security model".
When speaking about non-technical, generally-clueless-about-computers people? This is ABSOLUTELY the correct attitude to have. Being able to trick someone into installing softare that reports back everything you do on your computer by getting the user to Punch The Monkey is a BUG, not a feature. The screaming hellpit that is the state of PC security is very bad for the average computer user.
For technical users, systems (like Secure Boot, along with a chain of bootloader/kernel/userspace software verifiers [0]) that let you -say- securely attest that you trust an alternative source of software are really good, when implemented properly. They help prevent drive-by malware installation, as well as let you know when your machine has been tampered with. This is a GOOD property to have.
What about users who want to run their homebrew software (or even start to learn how to code), but don't want to be bothered with code signing key enrollment? On the one hand, I guess -in this world- they're left out in the cold, if they're not doing something in the browser. On the other hand, any programmer is going to quickly face challenges far greater than any non-pathologically-bad key enrollment mechanisms... if the would-be non-web-programmer never gets over this hurdle, it's very likely (in its absence) he would have been stopped by any of the other couple-hundred difficult things along the way.
[0] It's late, so some of these verifiers (particularly the userspace one) might not exist in any mainstream distro.