9 ms·

There is a freedom problem, there is a hardware problem and there is a social problem. The freedom problem is this: you will not be able to roll your own keys.

There is a freedom problem, there is a hardware problem and there is a social problem. The freedom problem is this: you will not be able to roll your own keys. This is probably the biggest nail in the coffin for a ton of computers out there. In theory you could simulate via software the workings of a TPM. If you built a kernel module the browser would have no real way of knowing if it sent requests to a piece of hardware or a piece of software. But the fact that you would have to use Microsoft's or Apple's keys makes this completely impossible. The hardware problem is this: you will not be able to use older or niche/independent hardware. As we established that software simulation is impossible, this makes a ton of older devices utter e-waste for the near future. Most Chromebooks themselves don't have a TPM, so even though they are guaranteed updates for 10 years how are they going to browse the web? (maybe in that case Google could actually deploy a software TPM with their keys since it's closed source). I have a few old business laptops at home that have a 1.X version of the TPM. In theory it performs just as well as TPM 2.X, but they will not be supported because, again, I will not be able to use my own keys. Lastly there is the social problem: is DRM the future of the web? Maybe this trusted computing stuff really is what the web is bound to become, either using your certified TPM keys or maybe your Electronic National ID card or maybe both in order to attest the genuineness of the device that is making the requests. Maybe the Wild West era of the web was a silly dream fueled by novelty and inexperience and in the future we will look back and clearly see we needed more guarantees regarding web browsing, just like we need a central authority to guarantee and regulate SSL certificates or domain names.

josephg 3y ago
> But the fact that you would have to use Microsoft's or Apple's keys makes this completely impossible. Yes completely impossible to fake by design. Otherwise whats the point? But I think the root of trust is whatever signs the hardware TPM module. So, Intel, AMD and Apple. If I understand it correctly, the secure chain of trust will be something like, hardware TPM module -> secure boot -> windows signed kernel -> Chrome (signed binary). Its not clear to me if desktop linux will be able to participate in this ecosystem at all - which is ironic given how much google uses linux. Maybe a couple of the big distributions like Canonical will be able to sign their linux kernel builds. > Lastly there is the social problem: is DRM the future of the web? Its opt-in by website operators at least. Assuming this happens, there are two big questions in my mind: 1. How much of the web will go dark to anyone not using a corpo software stack? I imagine bank websites will adopt this technology immediately, while sites like HN, personal blogs and wikipedia won't touch this stuff. How much of the web will stop working on my terrible "hacker" computer where I use firefox on linux? 2. How will this interact with browser extensions and dev tools? If websites won't function outside of chrome, will we be able to continue to drive chrome programmatically? Will chrome's dev tools still work? Will websites be told about my ad blocker extensions? Will webdriver (and similar tools) be blocked?
- perryizgr8 3y ago
  > while sites like HN, personal blogs and wikipedia won't touch this stuff Don't be so sure, after all they adopted TLS. Which is essentially the same shit, just slightly less draconian.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Which is essentially the same shit I don't understand how TLS is anything like WEI. Can you explain?
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > How much of the web will go dark to anyone not using a corpo software stack? If you can detect if anyone is using a system that supports this then you can ban only them instead of allowing only them, right? Maybe we should nip this in the bud? If even 10% of sites banned anyone with this enabled from day zero before anyone else is requiring it, users would turn it off and then it wouldn't be there for anyone else to use.
  - joeyh 3y ago
    https://chaos.social/@jaseg/110781307230828144 https://chaos.social/@jaseg/110781307230828144
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago
  >Its opt-in by website operators at least. For now. But in many countries you already have to show ID to buy a SIM card. This could be extended to all devices that have this key on them. And then it could become a dereliction of duty for certain types of websites not to do checks they could easily do.
  - phh 3y ago
    > But in many countries you already have to show ID to buy a SIM card. I can buy a SIM card that gives internet pretty much everywhere around the world with bitcoin with silent.link. Granted you don't get an IP matching the local country, but still...
solatic 3y ago
> or maybe your Electronic National ID card This is the actual missing key bit. The problem that Google is trying to solve here is not actually a hardware / computational problem, it's a Real Identity problem. Hardware / TPMs are a poor proxy for solving that problem. There's drastically less eWaste and impact on software freedom if you seek attestation from a national ID provider than if you seek attestation from one of a handful of personal electronics OEMs. National ID providers can offer to sign not only Real Identity attestations, but also anonymized attestations to protect citizen privacy. A web operator can decide whether to allow for attestations from only their own national ID provider, foreign national ID providers, private ID providers, or none at all if they just have a read-only site and don't really care. The truth is that government inaction is forcing Big Tech down the road of violating user privacy and freedoms to solve Big Tech's problems. But getting the government to offer a flat Identity Provider playing field would solve these problems in a way that doesn't require such violation.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Any kind of digital National ID is a privacy disaster in itself because then things will use it to correlate your activity across different devices and services. That should not exist.
  - Knee_Pain 3y ago
    That entirely depends on how the mechanism is implemented. For example you could have the website never knowing your actual ID but simply passing an encrypted string to the national server, which would return a 200 response if the document is valid. You could also have additional requests like "is the user 18+". The website will just know the request is coming from something which has a valid ID available. The state will also not know which pages you browsed, only the domain of the request, just like with HTTPs your ISP does not know exactly the pages you browse but just the websites themselves. And before someone talks about the state knowing your browser history: they already can by calling up your ISP, and they would get a lot more information than this mechanism would provide.
    - 3y ago
k__ 3y ago
"The freedom problem is this: you will not be able to roll your own keys" I'd expect threshold cryptography to solve that issue in the near future.
- Klonoar 3y ago
  How so? Consider me ignorant but willing to learn - curious how this solves it.
  - k__ 3y ago
    It can turn key management into a MFA scheme.
mike_hearn 3y ago
> Most Chromebooks themselves don't have a TPM Citation needed. I'm pretty sure all Chromebooks have a TPM and it's a firm requirement for making one. ChromeOS uses the TPM extensively and fully supports remote attestation: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/tpm-usage/ https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/tpm-usa... TPMs have been a requirement on PCs since at least 2016 I think, and in reality most came with them before that too (but there's a v1 vs v2 difference). > a 1.X version of the TPM. In theory it performs just as well as TPM 2.X but they will not be supported because, again, I will not be able to use my own keys. This is all wrong. TPM 1.2 uses SHA1 for everything which is a broken hash function so there is a major difference in robustness between them. That's why TPM 1.2 is being phased out. It has nothing to do with "using your own keys" which is out of the domain of what TPMs do anyway, TPMs are always owned by the device user. You're thinking of firmware boot signing and other things that are separate to the TPM chip but even there, you can use your own signing keys.
- Knee_Pain 3y ago
  Thank you for the knowledgeable reply. This choice will still render a ton of devices basically e-waste for no real good reason
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    you're calling the bottom line of hardware manufacturers "no good reason"!
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Well... yes? Hardware can be very much bottom of the barrel and still be perfectly serviceable.
      - Peaches4Rent 3y ago
        It was sarcasm
  - 3y ago
raxxorraxor 3y ago
The wild west internet did perform perfectly. There are some problems here and there that could be improved. None of them are addressed by suggestion like this. This is for control and market reach, nothing else. Secure boot was as well. Evil maid problem is at least believable in a corporate context. These suggestions are just fluffy crap.
- kahnclusions 3y ago
  Really? Spam, scams, seo trash, bots and AIs, are utterly rampant. I don’t want Google and Microsoft to have the keys to the kingdom, but on the other hand, I really want a way to know that I’m having genuine interactions with real people. I wish government was getting more involved here.
  - xp84 3y ago
    If government were, they would just be acting to further enhance the moats of the largest companies, which finance their campaigns. At least in the US. I’m not sure how EU politics is actually motivated, though they seem to advance the most useless political solutions to technological problems (browsers not having good defaults for cookies? Let’s make website owners show confusing cookie modals within the website context, that don’t usually even work!)
    - Aerbil313 3y ago
      I live in Turkey and would totally love my government to distribute a national OS and a browser, even if with national TPM keys. Even if I did not trust my government to act in my interest. Because WEI and remote assertion will create absolute dependencies on American companies (who have no incentive to act on my interests anyway), even more than ever. And I don't think this is any good in terms of national security. F16 fighters sold to us which didn't fire on targets USA didn't want us to comes to my mind. Thankfully we were able to be independent from USA in weaponry in the recent years. What is a freedom problem for you is a national independence problem for us as well.
  - vetinari 3y ago
BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
they're looking for a way to completely capture the "boons afforded by digital assets" (digital goods) if they control your computer, they can prevent you from incurring in 'illegal' activities such as piracy but it all boils down to the logic of the market, the raw fact that capitalism works even with marginal costs. but when copying (and distribution) costs go lower (less than 'marginal' down to zero cost) it all starts to break down if people aren't selling digital assets to each other (which doesn't make sense with the technology we have right now), they cannot be taxed and so on. solution: fix the technology. make it so that only those with specially authorized keys (trust worthy actors) can copy digital information at will. everybody else will have to pay them for this privilege. oh and nevermind the fact that computers work by copying bits all over the place
jpadkins 3y ago
I think there is a 10% probability of a new, decentralized network forming in the next 5 years, replacing the internet / web as it becomes more authoritarian and centrally controlled. I speculate that it might start off as a mesh network, maybe using unregulated spectrum on a local level. It will probably resemble BBS fidonet, but with more modern features. bandwidth and E2E latency will be terrible, but it will be free. As long as there are skilled engineers who have the spirit of freedom, there will always be an 'open' network for humanity to communicate (with all the good and ills that comes with 'open').
- u8080 3y ago
  There is already yggdrasil/I2P with such ideas.
  - wwtdtgotiatl 3y ago
    Original creator of freenet has reworked the entire model and has a beta up and running. It's not focused on censorship resistance but instead decentralisation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36007984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36007984
- BEEdwards 3y ago
  Do you honestly think any significant amount of people will put up with the setup, latency, and inability to use their bank's website that would entail? Most people don't know how the internet works, don't care as long as it works and do not think about it beyond that.
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    Bank website would be on the old, regulated network. That would be for messaging & fun internet. No money or influence to be made. And fringe or grey area stuff. Copyright infringement, censure evasion… meh.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    The high water mark of Joe Q. Public giving a damn about DRM or anything related to it was when Keurig added DRM to their coffee machines. As soon as the normies who cared enough to do something about it (which still was nowhere near a majority of Keurig owners/users) found a simple workaround they stopped giving a damn again. The general public doesn't care, and won't care until it actually materially affects them. Until then they'll look at the people who do care as weirdos. And even then, plenty of people still won't care so long as they can access their social media etc. on their shiny new iPhone 28 or whatever version is out when that time comes.
throw_m239339 3y ago
The web was successful because it wasn't a lock down platform, any client could talk to any website. Google is essentially hijacking the web and turning it into something that it can entirely control and dictate, since Google owns not only critical infrastructure (Chromium, the most used browser), but the most visited websites (Youtube, Search). That's a coup d'état, no more no less. And the slippery slope is abrupt dude, we went from EME which was already spyware to WEI, and there will be a next step, since we would have already accepted Google's supremacy.
sneak 3y ago
You only need more guarantees regarding web browsing if you are an ad network.
aremat 3y ago
Electronic National ID? Given that people are apparently lining up for Worldcoin iris scans, this would seem to be 'fortuitous" timing.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I wonder if the internet will migrate to a radio spectrum allocation type system (I'm aware of APNIC - yes it's the same legally) where there's the Google spectrum, the MSFT spectrum etc...and they run all these enclaves but with their own credential tokens In which case the internet we all grew up creating will effectively turn into the "Ham radio" of digital computer communications and will be effectively bandwidth throttled the way amateur spectrum allocation is Doesn't seem crazy that something like this would be the end result
coldacid 3y ago
>Maybe this trusted computing stuff really is what the web is bound to become, either using your certified TPM keys or maybe your Electronic National ID card or maybe both in order to attest the genuineness of the device that is making the requests. If this is the future, I'm going to say "fuck the internet" and return to the soil.
cbozeman 3y ago
There's going to be some harsh language in the post, because this stuff pisses me off to no end, and what you're talking about, ultimately, is none of those things. We've allowed a lot of people to become really fucking lazy. That's the bottom line. Baby Boomers, some Millennials (not all), and a lot of Gen Z. Generation X had no choice but to gain a strong knowledge of computers if they wanted to do anything on the Internet, because it was still difficult, it still required a little reading, and you couldn't just press the WPS button on your router to connect your new MacBook Pro. Every single problem the web faces is that. Period. A lot of people never had to learn jack shit, so they don't know jack shit. They can't tell the difference in a legitimate website versus one that isn't. They don't know how to read a web address. They can't figure out that irs.gov is legitimate and irs.4doad04ldud.com isn't. I have met people who are 50+ years old who have used Windows computers since they were 22 years old, but look absolutely goddamned dumbfounded when you tell them, "Just click on the Start button and go to Word." Fuck. Them. Fuck every single one of them. We have tolerated lazy uninterested users for long enough. I'm not saying every computer user needs to be able to debug assembly code and fix their own driver issue by rewriting it from the ground up. I'm saying that as a society, we have progressed past the point where you can throw your hands up and say, "I'm JuSt NoT A CoMpUtEr PeRsOn!" To quote Captain Jean-Luc Picard, "NOT GOOD ENOUGH! NOT GOOD ENOUGH, DAMMIT!" And the entire industry across the entire planet and every single national, state, county, city, provencial, whatever government is going to have to get onboard, come together, and say, "Okay, here's a baseline set of knowledge about how computers and our communications systems work that every single human being needs to have." You cannot "tech" your way out of this problem. Not without massive corporate and government overreach and invasion of people's privacy. Lazy shitty people are just going to have to be made to suffer until they stop being lazy and shitty. There are plenty of average IQ people who can grasp the basics of how their computer and the Internet work - but they're never made to. Well it's time to start making them. The dumbing down of every single technological product and concept does our species no favors.
- getpokedagain 3y ago
  Not sure why this has no reaction. While this is the very forceful version of it I think the piss poor education of people is very obviously a huge contributor here and to nearly every other problem in the past few years.

josephg 3y ago

> But the fact that you would have to use Microsoft's or Apple's keys makes this completely impossible. Yes completely impossible to fake by design. Otherwise whats the point? But I think the root of trust is whatever signs the hardware TPM module. So, Intel, AMD and Apple. If I understand it correctly, the secure chain of trust will be something like, hardware TPM module -> secure boot -> windows signed kernel -> Chrome (signed binary). Its not clear to me if desktop linux will be able to participate in this ecosystem at all - which is ironic given how much google uses linux. Maybe a couple of the big distributions like Canonical will be able to sign their linux kernel builds. > Lastly there is the social problem: is DRM the future of the web? Its opt-in by website operators at least. Assuming this happens, there are two big questions in my mind: 1. How much of the web will go dark to anyone not using a corpo software stack? I imagine bank websites will adopt this technology immediately, while sites like HN, personal blogs and wikipedia won't touch this stuff. How much of the web will stop working on my terrible "hacker" computer where I use firefox on linux? 2. How will this interact with browser extensions and dev tools? If websites won't function outside of chrome, will we be able to continue to drive chrome programmatically? Will chrome's dev tools still work? Will websites be told about my ad blocker extensions? Will webdriver (and similar tools) be blocked?

perryizgr8 3y ago
> while sites like HN, personal blogs and wikipedia won't touch this stuff Don't be so sure, after all they adopted TLS. Which is essentially the same shit, just slightly less draconian.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Which is essentially the same shit I don't understand how TLS is anything like WEI. Can you explain?
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> How much of the web will go dark to anyone not using a corpo software stack? If you can detect if anyone is using a system that supports this then you can ban only them instead of allowing only them, right? Maybe we should nip this in the bud? If even 10% of sites banned anyone with this enabled from day zero before anyone else is requiring it, users would turn it off and then it wouldn't be there for anyone else to use.
- joeyh 3y ago
  https://chaos.social/@jaseg/110781307230828144 https://chaos.social/@jaseg/110781307230828144
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fauigerzigerk 3y ago
>Its opt-in by website operators at least. For now. But in many countries you already have to show ID to buy a SIM card. This could be extended to all devices that have this key on them. And then it could become a dereliction of duty for certain types of websites not to do checks they could easily do.
- phh 3y ago
  > But in many countries you already have to show ID to buy a SIM card. I can buy a SIM card that gives internet pretty much everywhere around the world with bitcoin with silent.link. Granted you don't get an IP matching the local country, but still...

solatic 3y ago

> or maybe your Electronic National ID card This is the actual missing key bit. The problem that Google is trying to solve here is not actually a hardware / computational problem, it's a Real Identity problem. Hardware / TPMs are a poor proxy for solving that problem. There's drastically less eWaste and impact on software freedom if you seek attestation from a national ID provider than if you seek attestation from one of a handful of personal electronics OEMs. National ID providers can offer to sign not only Real Identity attestations, but also anonymized attestations to protect citizen privacy. A web operator can decide whether to allow for attestations from only their own national ID provider, foreign national ID providers, private ID providers, or none at all if they just have a read-only site and don't really care. The truth is that government inaction is forcing Big Tech down the road of violating user privacy and freedoms to solve Big Tech's problems. But getting the government to offer a flat Identity Provider playing field would solve these problems in a way that doesn't require such violation.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Any kind of digital National ID is a privacy disaster in itself because then things will use it to correlate your activity across different devices and services. That should not exist.
- Knee_Pain 3y ago
  That entirely depends on how the mechanism is implemented. For example you could have the website never knowing your actual ID but simply passing an encrypted string to the national server, which would return a 200 response if the document is valid. You could also have additional requests like "is the user 18+". The website will just know the request is coming from something which has a valid ID available. The state will also not know which pages you browsed, only the domain of the request, just like with HTTPs your ISP does not know exactly the pages you browse but just the websites themselves. And before someone talks about the state knowing your browser history: they already can by calling up your ISP, and they would get a lot more information than this mechanism would provide.
  - 3y ago

k__ 3y ago

"The freedom problem is this: you will not be able to roll your own keys" I'd expect threshold cryptography to solve that issue in the near future.

Klonoar 3y ago
How so? Consider me ignorant but willing to learn - curious how this solves it.
- k__ 3y ago
  It can turn key management into a MFA scheme.

mike_hearn 3y ago

> Most Chromebooks themselves don't have a TPM Citation needed. I'm pretty sure all Chromebooks have a TPM and it's a firm requirement for making one. ChromeOS uses the TPM extensively and fully supports remote attestation: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/tpm-usage/ https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/tpm-usa... TPMs have been a requirement on PCs since at least 2016 I think, and in reality most came with them before that too (but there's a v1 vs v2 difference). > a 1.X version of the TPM. In theory it performs just as well as TPM 2.X but they will not be supported because, again, I will not be able to use my own keys. This is all wrong. TPM 1.2 uses SHA1 for everything which is a broken hash function so there is a major difference in robustness between them. That's why TPM 1.2 is being phased out. It has nothing to do with "using your own keys" which is out of the domain of what TPMs do anyway, TPMs are always owned by the device user. You're thinking of firmware boot signing and other things that are separate to the TPM chip but even there, you can use your own signing keys.

Knee_Pain 3y ago
Thank you for the knowledgeable reply. This choice will still render a ton of devices basically e-waste for no real good reason
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  you're calling the bottom line of hardware manufacturers "no good reason"!
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Well... yes? Hardware can be very much bottom of the barrel and still be perfectly serviceable.
    - Peaches4Rent 3y ago
      It was sarcasm
- 3y ago

raxxorraxor 3y ago

The wild west internet did perform perfectly. There are some problems here and there that could be improved. None of them are addressed by suggestion like this. This is for control and market reach, nothing else. Secure boot was as well. Evil maid problem is at least believable in a corporate context. These suggestions are just fluffy crap.

kahnclusions 3y ago
Really? Spam, scams, seo trash, bots and AIs, are utterly rampant. I don’t want Google and Microsoft to have the keys to the kingdom, but on the other hand, I really want a way to know that I’m having genuine interactions with real people. I wish government was getting more involved here.
- xp84 3y ago
  If government were, they would just be acting to further enhance the moats of the largest companies, which finance their campaigns. At least in the US. I’m not sure how EU politics is actually motivated, though they seem to advance the most useless political solutions to technological problems (browsers not having good defaults for cookies? Let’s make website owners show confusing cookie modals within the website context, that don’t usually even work!)
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    I live in Turkey and would totally love my government to distribute a national OS and a browser, even if with national TPM keys. Even if I did not trust my government to act in my interest. Because WEI and remote assertion will create absolute dependencies on American companies (who have no incentive to act on my interests anyway), even more than ever. And I don't think this is any good in terms of national security. F16 fighters sold to us which didn't fire on targets USA didn't want us to comes to my mind. Thankfully we were able to be independent from USA in weaponry in the recent years. What is a freedom problem for you is a national independence problem for us as well.
- vetinari 3y ago

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

they're looking for a way to completely capture the "boons afforded by digital assets" (digital goods) if they control your computer, they can prevent you from incurring in 'illegal' activities such as piracy but it all boils down to the logic of the market, the raw fact that capitalism works even with marginal costs. but when copying (and distribution) costs go lower (less than 'marginal' down to zero cost) it all starts to break down if people aren't selling digital assets to each other (which doesn't make sense with the technology we have right now), they cannot be taxed and so on. solution: fix the technology. make it so that only those with specially authorized keys (trust worthy actors) can copy digital information at will. everybody else will have to pay them for this privilege. oh and nevermind the fact that computers work by copying bits all over the place

jpadkins 3y ago

I think there is a 10% probability of a new, decentralized network forming in the next 5 years, replacing the internet / web as it becomes more authoritarian and centrally controlled. I speculate that it might start off as a mesh network, maybe using unregulated spectrum on a local level. It will probably resemble BBS fidonet, but with more modern features. bandwidth and E2E latency will be terrible, but it will be free. As long as there are skilled engineers who have the spirit of freedom, there will always be an 'open' network for humanity to communicate (with all the good and ills that comes with 'open').

u8080 3y ago
There is already yggdrasil/I2P with such ideas.
- wwtdtgotiatl 3y ago
  Original creator of freenet has reworked the entire model and has a beta up and running. It's not focused on censorship resistance but instead decentralisation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36007984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36007984
BEEdwards 3y ago
Do you honestly think any significant amount of people will put up with the setup, latency, and inability to use their bank's website that would entail? Most people don't know how the internet works, don't care as long as it works and do not think about it beyond that.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Bank website would be on the old, regulated network. That would be for messaging & fun internet. No money or influence to be made. And fringe or grey area stuff. Copyright infringement, censure evasion… meh.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  The high water mark of Joe Q. Public giving a damn about DRM or anything related to it was when Keurig added DRM to their coffee machines. As soon as the normies who cared enough to do something about it (which still was nowhere near a majority of Keurig owners/users) found a simple workaround they stopped giving a damn again. The general public doesn't care, and won't care until it actually materially affects them. Until then they'll look at the people who do care as weirdos. And even then, plenty of people still won't care so long as they can access their social media etc. on their shiny new iPhone 28 or whatever version is out when that time comes.

throw_m239339 3y ago

The web was successful because it wasn't a lock down platform, any client could talk to any website. Google is essentially hijacking the web and turning it into something that it can entirely control and dictate, since Google owns not only critical infrastructure (Chromium, the most used browser), but the most visited websites (Youtube, Search). That's a coup d'état, no more no less. And the slippery slope is abrupt dude, we went from EME which was already spyware to WEI, and there will be a next step, since we would have already accepted Google's supremacy.

sneak 3y ago

You only need more guarantees regarding web browsing if you are an ad network.

aremat 3y ago

Electronic National ID? Given that people are apparently lining up for Worldcoin iris scans, this would seem to be 'fortuitous" timing.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

I wonder if the internet will migrate to a radio spectrum allocation type system (I'm aware of APNIC - yes it's the same legally) where there's the Google spectrum, the MSFT spectrum etc...and they run all these enclaves but with their own credential tokens In which case the internet we all grew up creating will effectively turn into the "Ham radio" of digital computer communications and will be effectively bandwidth throttled the way amateur spectrum allocation is Doesn't seem crazy that something like this would be the end result

coldacid 3y ago

>Maybe this trusted computing stuff really is what the web is bound to become, either using your certified TPM keys or maybe your Electronic National ID card or maybe both in order to attest the genuineness of the device that is making the requests. If this is the future, I'm going to say "fuck the internet" and return to the soil.

cbozeman 3y ago

There's going to be some harsh language in the post, because this stuff pisses me off to no end, and what you're talking about, ultimately, is none of those things. We've allowed a lot of people to become really fucking lazy. That's the bottom line. Baby Boomers, some Millennials (not all), and a lot of Gen Z. Generation X had no choice but to gain a strong knowledge of computers if they wanted to do anything on the Internet, because it was still difficult, it still required a little reading, and you couldn't just press the WPS button on your router to connect your new MacBook Pro. Every single problem the web faces is that. Period. A lot of people never had to learn jack shit, so they don't know jack shit. They can't tell the difference in a legitimate website versus one that isn't. They don't know how to read a web address. They can't figure out that irs.gov is legitimate and irs.4doad04ldud.com isn't. I have met people who are 50+ years old who have used Windows computers since they were 22 years old, but look absolutely goddamned dumbfounded when you tell them, "Just click on the Start button and go to Word." Fuck. Them. Fuck every single one of them. We have tolerated lazy uninterested users for long enough. I'm not saying every computer user needs to be able to debug assembly code and fix their own driver issue by rewriting it from the ground up. I'm saying that as a society, we have progressed past the point where you can throw your hands up and say, "I'm JuSt NoT A CoMpUtEr PeRsOn!" To quote Captain Jean-Luc Picard, "NOT GOOD ENOUGH! NOT GOOD ENOUGH, DAMMIT!" And the entire industry across the entire planet and every single national, state, county, city, provencial, whatever government is going to have to get onboard, come together, and say, "Okay, here's a baseline set of knowledge about how computers and our communications systems work that every single human being needs to have." You cannot "tech" your way out of this problem. Not without massive corporate and government overreach and invasion of people's privacy. Lazy shitty people are just going to have to be made to suffer until they stop being lazy and shitty. There are plenty of average IQ people who can grasp the basics of how their computer and the Internet work - but they're never made to. Well it's time to start making them. The dumbing down of every single technological product and concept does our species no favors.

getpokedagain 3y ago
Not sure why this has no reaction. While this is the very forceful version of it I think the piss poor education of people is very obviously a huge contributor here and to nearly every other problem in the past few years.