6 ms·

These days, many computers only run authorized software, and trusted boot is fairly secure. They’re integrated hardware/software systems. This article is out

These days, many computers only run authorized software, and trusted boot is fairly secure. They’re integrated hardware/software systems. This article is out of date, and a bit biased, to boot.

matheusmoreira 6y ago
It was published in 2012 though. Why do you say it is biased? I thought it was agreeable.
walterbell 6y ago
Which article would you recommend on this topic?
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ ? Joking, of course. Half-joking.
salawat 6y ago
Not at all. Secure boot is opaque to most. Gigantic monolithic actors in the realm of hardware and software collude to keep the plebiscites from making anything too disruptive without them quickly running into an audit process that can be used to ensure that any virtue can be clean room redesigned by the monolith... Yeah. Seems pretty prescient to me.
- twentydollars 6y ago
  Could you elaborate in plain English? Your comment makes no sense to me.
  - salawat 6y ago
    Certainly. Which parts, forgive me for the long delay, was building a shed today. In order though... >Secure Boot/Trusted Computing This is an effort born out of seemingly benevolent intentions. Rootkits, a form of malware known for implanting themselves into a computer system before an Operating System even loads and persisting in various exotic ways were quite difficult to detect or do anything about. By applying various cryptographic verification techniques though, one can be sure that software being loaded or delegated to is actually the "original legit stuff". The issue comes back to trust though. The community fought hard against a move that had been shaping up in the standardization of UEFI and secure boot to fight against entrenched industry actors being able to gatekeep or be the only holders of keys. The fear was that someone like Microsoft would utilize their position to remove a User's ability to load a cryptographically "unblessed" OS. Happily, User's can swap out that cryptographic material now, but many of the more arcane aspects to doing so on a system to system basis are poorly documented and difficult to discover. At least the desktop world seems to be pretty accesible, but the mobile world is a nightmare in regards to getting it up and running from the get go with minimal support and a modest home lab. >Monolith's The monoliths I speak of are tech giants. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. The different flavors of evil wrought vary by the particular actor. Apple and Google have used their role as gatekeepers to their App store as a means to tap into novel business verticals, or to be able to ensure that other app developers can be frustrated or otherwise managed by applications of arbitrary structure and standards. Things such as code signing requirements baked into the OS have created situations where now there is a barrier to entry of at least understanding cryptography and the tools around it (once considered a niche and unnecessary computer programming skill, now core). It also dissuaded and complicates the keyboard to pixel prochain even more intimidating. I expected that I could hand my child a smartphone sized computer to program and crash to get familiar with computing fundamentals, but the world has gone hard the other way. Frankly any place with an App store has. Most mobile system foundries or OEM's are notorious for locking down access to the implementation details of their silicon. Nvidia, Microsoft, and even AMD's graphics divisions have earned a access to a special place of hatred in my mind over the two pronged efforts of collusion with the media industry through software driver and hardware implementations that make it absurdly difficult to drive one's own purchased graphics and coprocessor equipment as well as supporting abandoned hardware configurations. (I'm looking at you Sony, and your abandonment of the Nvidia GeForce 630M.) All of this user hostility was absent when I was growing up. You had this machine where the only limit was what you had the documentation to read to know how to drive it. Nowadays, it seems everyone is more interested in shoving a microprocessor in things, but threatening with lawyer, anti-tamper, or absolution of themselves from having to provide any documentation to a buyer at all, of the responsibility to deliver to the user any constructive value, while at the same time, maximizing lock-in and recurring revenue streams. Look at HP printers nowadays for how microprocessors being inserted into the meta-logistical function of ink management makes user's life actively worse, where previously one was free to source one's ink from anywhere with nary a concern. It's got to stop.
  - snerbles 6y ago
    Big guy keeps little guy out of mainstream hardware with threats of intellectual property litigation.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    That is plain English. Using a dictionary to help yourself out with the more uncommon words is a better approach than asking people to restrict their vocabulary to suit you.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      >Secure boot is opaque to most Secure boot is a technical term that the poster might not be familiar with, but given we are on HN it might be assumed they can figure it out. Still, not really plain English. >that can be used to ensure that any virtue can be clean room redesigned by the monolith... is not plain English, clean room is piece of jargon that again, being on HN the poster might be familiar with but also not. And frankly saying that virtues can be clean room redesigned comes a little too close to the poetic to be considered plain as well. In fact the more I look at that the less sure I am that I can interpret it without the use of some small amount of psychedelics. on edit: formatted on edit 2: also I suppose the original poster meant plebeians, as plebiscites are things the plebeians vote in, not impossible to interpret, but it would make it more difficult.
      - bigbubba 6y ago
        Secure boot and clean room? I figured they were thrown by 'plebiscite'.. I don't somebody will have much luck understanding a conversation on a technical discussion site about the war on general computing without knowing concepts basic to the premise.
        bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        I guess my second edit and your response crossed each other. There are lots of people on this site who have different levels of English, from different countries, and all of whom are not technical but might be interested in the details of a technical discussion because they work in a technology adjacent field. I mean I often see lawyers, business owners and similar non-technical people taking part in discussions and hoping for some clarification so they can see how it relates to their field, which really a war on general computing really relates to consumer's rights. Also I don't know that I consider clean room basic to the premise. More like, adjacent... on edit: seems I like the word adjacent currently.
  - raphlinus 6y ago
    Here's my translation into simpler English, with the caveat that I'm only about 90% sure it captures the original intent: The article is not biased or out of date at all. Most people can't figure out how to get around "secure boot" technology, which has the effect of locking people out. Big companies, both those that make hardware and software, work together to lock ordinary people out of creating alternatives. If an independent creator were to make something good, the big companies would just make their own version, that would be just as good for most users. Yeah, this article seems like it accurately predicted the future when it was written.
bigbubba 6y ago
Biased in favor of empowering individuals, rather than making them serfs under corporate landlords? What's wrong with such a bias?
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  We lived under that model, and it sucks for a lot of people. Barons also provided for the common defense. An unlocked software architecture and untrusted code leaves people at the mercy of hackers, it doesn't empower the average user. We can do that defense of users better than we're doing right now, by divorcing the trust model from the paid vendor model, but it's worth noting how we got here in the first place and why where we are now is better for a lot of people than where we were. If we can't recognize that, it's hard to make a value proposition that people will actually sign on to.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    An unlocked software architecture and untrusted code leaves people at the mercy of hackers, it doesn't empower the average user. There are other solutions to this problem that do not involve surrendering control over everything that matters to corporate interests that may coincidentally align with your own sometimes. For example, do we really think a corporation primarily motivated by making its profits is going to be habitually careful about software security? We know this is not often the case, because the quality of so much software produced by big businesses today is terrible in terms of security. What is more telling is that it continues to be terrible even though we are well aware of methods to mitigate many of those vulnerabilities. But those methods usually require more skill and/or more time to get right, and typically that means greater up-front costs, and since it turns out that Joe User will often put up with junk security and pay good money for the software anyway, the profit incentive does not have the outcome we would like. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean Joe likes the poor security. He might be willing to use the tech anyway because he values what he gets from it more than he believes the dangers are costing him, or because he believes the dangers are inherent in the tech and unavoidable, or because he just doesn't realise the dangers are there in the first place. This can be solved in a number of ways, but most of them come down to showing people that it's possible to do better by writing software that actually does better, and given the lack of commercial incentives coming from above, the most likely place we'll see that is in community efforts. Those efforts don't even have to result in some sort of openly developed software that dominates its market to succeed here, just to make it obvious to enough normal people that they don't need to accept substandard junk and they should demand better in return for their money. Much the same argument can be applied to issues like privacy, repairable and upgradeable hardware, open standards for data portability, freely programmable devices, and no doubt many more. If competition in the commercial markets isn't getting the job done, yet we know doing the job is possible, it's up to those of us with the knowledge and skills to push things forward for now. That could mean directly creating better hardware and software, educating our less skilled and experienced peers to improve standards in the industry and make hiring better people less expensive, or simply educating users and pushing for higher standards from the customer's side.
wizzwizz4 6y ago
Authorised by whom?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 6y ago
> This article is out of date Only if you're trying to say that the war is mostly over, and general purpose computing lost.
- johncolanduoni 6y ago
  The general purpose computing doomsayers lost the average person caring whether they have a general purpose computer that they were never going to use as such anyway. They haven’t come within a light year of actually losing the ability to own devices that can run whatever code they want to.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    Yes, people don't even want to install software on their own devices, which is why it's so weird that companies spend so much time and effort preventing them from doing it.

These days, many computers only run authorized software, and trusted boot is fairly secure. They’re integrated hardware/software systems. This article is out of date, and a bit biased, to boot.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

It was published in 2012 though. Why do you say it is biased? I thought it was agreeable.

walterbell 6y ago

Which article would you recommend on this topic?

octoberfranklin 6y ago
https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ ? Joking, of course. Half-joking.

salawat 6y ago

Not at all. Secure boot is opaque to most. Gigantic monolithic actors in the realm of hardware and software collude to keep the plebiscites from making anything too disruptive without them quickly running into an audit process that can be used to ensure that any virtue can be clean room redesigned by the monolith... Yeah. Seems pretty prescient to me.

twentydollars 6y ago
Could you elaborate in plain English? Your comment makes no sense to me.
- salawat 6y ago
  Certainly. Which parts, forgive me for the long delay, was building a shed today. In order though... >Secure Boot/Trusted Computing This is an effort born out of seemingly benevolent intentions. Rootkits, a form of malware known for implanting themselves into a computer system before an Operating System even loads and persisting in various exotic ways were quite difficult to detect or do anything about. By applying various cryptographic verification techniques though, one can be sure that software being loaded or delegated to is actually the "original legit stuff". The issue comes back to trust though. The community fought hard against a move that had been shaping up in the standardization of UEFI and secure boot to fight against entrenched industry actors being able to gatekeep or be the only holders of keys. The fear was that someone like Microsoft would utilize their position to remove a User's ability to load a cryptographically "unblessed" OS. Happily, User's can swap out that cryptographic material now, but many of the more arcane aspects to doing so on a system to system basis are poorly documented and difficult to discover. At least the desktop world seems to be pretty accesible, but the mobile world is a nightmare in regards to getting it up and running from the get go with minimal support and a modest home lab. >Monolith's The monoliths I speak of are tech giants. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. The different flavors of evil wrought vary by the particular actor. Apple and Google have used their role as gatekeepers to their App store as a means to tap into novel business verticals, or to be able to ensure that other app developers can be frustrated or otherwise managed by applications of arbitrary structure and standards. Things such as code signing requirements baked into the OS have created situations where now there is a barrier to entry of at least understanding cryptography and the tools around it (once considered a niche and unnecessary computer programming skill, now core). It also dissuaded and complicates the keyboard to pixel prochain even more intimidating. I expected that I could hand my child a smartphone sized computer to program and crash to get familiar with computing fundamentals, but the world has gone hard the other way. Frankly any place with an App store has. Most mobile system foundries or OEM's are notorious for locking down access to the implementation details of their silicon. Nvidia, Microsoft, and even AMD's graphics divisions have earned a access to a special place of hatred in my mind over the two pronged efforts of collusion with the media industry through software driver and hardware implementations that make it absurdly difficult to drive one's own purchased graphics and coprocessor equipment as well as supporting abandoned hardware configurations. (I'm looking at you Sony, and your abandonment of the Nvidia GeForce 630M.) All of this user hostility was absent when I was growing up. You had this machine where the only limit was what you had the documentation to read to know how to drive it. Nowadays, it seems everyone is more interested in shoving a microprocessor in things, but threatening with lawyer, anti-tamper, or absolution of themselves from having to provide any documentation to a buyer at all, of the responsibility to deliver to the user any constructive value, while at the same time, maximizing lock-in and recurring revenue streams. Look at HP printers nowadays for how microprocessors being inserted into the meta-logistical function of ink management makes user's life actively worse, where previously one was free to source one's ink from anywhere with nary a concern. It's got to stop.
- snerbles 6y ago
  Big guy keeps little guy out of mainstream hardware with threats of intellectual property litigation.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  That is plain English. Using a dictionary to help yourself out with the more uncommon words is a better approach than asking people to restrict their vocabulary to suit you.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    >Secure boot is opaque to most Secure boot is a technical term that the poster might not be familiar with, but given we are on HN it might be assumed they can figure it out. Still, not really plain English. >that can be used to ensure that any virtue can be clean room redesigned by the monolith... is not plain English, clean room is piece of jargon that again, being on HN the poster might be familiar with but also not. And frankly saying that virtues can be clean room redesigned comes a little too close to the poetic to be considered plain as well. In fact the more I look at that the less sure I am that I can interpret it without the use of some small amount of psychedelics. on edit: formatted on edit 2: also I suppose the original poster meant plebeians, as plebiscites are things the plebeians vote in, not impossible to interpret, but it would make it more difficult.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      Secure boot and clean room? I figured they were thrown by 'plebiscite'.. I don't somebody will have much luck understanding a conversation on a technical discussion site about the war on general computing without knowing concepts basic to the premise.
      - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        I guess my second edit and your response crossed each other. There are lots of people on this site who have different levels of English, from different countries, and all of whom are not technical but might be interested in the details of a technical discussion because they work in a technology adjacent field. I mean I often see lawyers, business owners and similar non-technical people taking part in discussions and hoping for some clarification so they can see how it relates to their field, which really a war on general computing really relates to consumer's rights. Also I don't know that I consider clean room basic to the premise. More like, adjacent... on edit: seems I like the word adjacent currently.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  Here's my translation into simpler English, with the caveat that I'm only about 90% sure it captures the original intent: The article is not biased or out of date at all. Most people can't figure out how to get around "secure boot" technology, which has the effect of locking people out. Big companies, both those that make hardware and software, work together to lock ordinary people out of creating alternatives. If an independent creator were to make something good, the big companies would just make their own version, that would be just as good for most users. Yeah, this article seems like it accurately predicted the future when it was written.

bigbubba 6y ago

Biased in favor of empowering individuals, rather than making them serfs under corporate landlords? What's wrong with such a bias?

shadowgovt 6y ago
We lived under that model, and it sucks for a lot of people. Barons also provided for the common defense. An unlocked software architecture and untrusted code leaves people at the mercy of hackers, it doesn't empower the average user. We can do that defense of users better than we're doing right now, by divorcing the trust model from the paid vendor model, but it's worth noting how we got here in the first place and why where we are now is better for a lot of people than where we were. If we can't recognize that, it's hard to make a value proposition that people will actually sign on to.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  An unlocked software architecture and untrusted code leaves people at the mercy of hackers, it doesn't empower the average user. There are other solutions to this problem that do not involve surrendering control over everything that matters to corporate interests that may coincidentally align with your own sometimes. For example, do we really think a corporation primarily motivated by making its profits is going to be habitually careful about software security? We know this is not often the case, because the quality of so much software produced by big businesses today is terrible in terms of security. What is more telling is that it continues to be terrible even though we are well aware of methods to mitigate many of those vulnerabilities. But those methods usually require more skill and/or more time to get right, and typically that means greater up-front costs, and since it turns out that Joe User will often put up with junk security and pay good money for the software anyway, the profit incentive does not have the outcome we would like. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean Joe likes the poor security. He might be willing to use the tech anyway because he values what he gets from it more than he believes the dangers are costing him, or because he believes the dangers are inherent in the tech and unavoidable, or because he just doesn't realise the dangers are there in the first place. This can be solved in a number of ways, but most of them come down to showing people that it's possible to do better by writing software that actually does better, and given the lack of commercial incentives coming from above, the most likely place we'll see that is in community efforts. Those efforts don't even have to result in some sort of openly developed software that dominates its market to succeed here, just to make it obvious to enough normal people that they don't need to accept substandard junk and they should demand better in return for their money. Much the same argument can be applied to issues like privacy, repairable and upgradeable hardware, open standards for data portability, freely programmable devices, and no doubt many more. If competition in the commercial markets isn't getting the job done, yet we know doing the job is possible, it's up to those of us with the knowledge and skills to push things forward for now. That could mean directly creating better hardware and software, educating our less skilled and experienced peers to improve standards in the industry and make hiring better people less expensive, or simply educating users and pushing for higher standards from the customer's side.

wizzwizz4 6y ago

Authorised by whom?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pessimizer 6y ago

> This article is out of date Only if you're trying to say that the war is mostly over, and general purpose computing lost.

johncolanduoni 6y ago
The general purpose computing doomsayers lost the average person caring whether they have a general purpose computer that they were never going to use as such anyway. They haven’t come within a light year of actually losing the ability to own devices that can run whatever code they want to.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  Yes, people don't even want to install software on their own devices, which is why it's so weird that companies spend so much time and effort preventing them from doing it.