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>You're conflating trusted computing with there being an OS-manufacturer monopoly over TCB boot keys. Because the two go hand in hand in the wild already. Just

>You're conflating trusted computing with there being an OS-manufacturer monopoly over TCB boot keys. Because the two go hand in hand in the wild already. Just look at all android phones. Where you have to make a pact with the devil to get your unlock keys (if possible at all) and that still doesnt give you full override capabilities and also marks your device as "tainted" so you can say goodbye to banking apps and increasingly more stuff. I'm not concerned about enterprise deployments because companies had a lot of tools to (rightfully) lock down devices given to their employees since the dawn of computing. However I am concerned about the philosophy coming over from phones to the desktop space with announcements like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25191319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25191319

derefr 5y ago
You and I have very different definitions of “in the wild”, it seems. To me, “the wild” is embedded civic-infrastructure / industrial systems. This is a place where people will encounter trusted computing involuntarily. Consumer electronics — phones, game consoles, etc. — these are places where people choose to buy the dang thing in the first place, despite the restrictions the manufacturer imposes. Trusted computing isn’t the problem, it’s a tool used by an abuser against their Stockholm-syndrome victims. The abuser themselves — and society having no social norms that protect against developing this particular Stockholm-syndrome — are the problems. The stuff people want from these devices — the reason they buy into these locked-down ecosystems — is almost always just the platform-locked software that runs on them, not the distinctive hardware (that the software doesn’t usually even take advantage of!) But that fact is great for the end-user: it means that, as long as one person figures out how to defeat the platform’s software DRM, and another person figures out how to write an emulator for the hardware, then there’ll never a reason to lock yourself into these ecosystems. When software is the USP, users can just use an alternative conformant implementation of the same platform (from the software’s perspective) that isn’t locked down, to run said software.

derefr 5y ago

You and I have very different definitions of “in the wild”, it seems. To me, “the wild” is embedded civic-infrastructure / industrial systems. This is a place where people will encounter trusted computing involuntarily. Consumer electronics — phones, game consoles, etc. — these are places where people choose to buy the dang thing in the first place, despite the restrictions the manufacturer imposes. Trusted computing isn’t the problem, it’s a tool used by an abuser against their Stockholm-syndrome victims. The abuser themselves — and society having no social norms that protect against developing this particular Stockholm-syndrome — are the problems. The stuff people want from these devices — the reason they buy into these locked-down ecosystems — is almost always just the platform-locked software that runs on them, not the distinctive hardware (that the software doesn’t usually even take advantage of!) But that fact is great for the end-user: it means that, as long as one person figures out how to defeat the platform’s software DRM, and another person figures out how to write an emulator for the hardware, then there’ll never a reason to lock yourself into these ecosystems. When software is the USP, users can just use an alternative conformant implementation of the same platform (from the software’s perspective) that isn’t locked down, to run said software.