Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

gabrielsieben.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 554 posts

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#341

Post by tzs »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #68
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill a good chunk of the american natives with mostly blades. Yet, you probably don't want to give willingly a nuke to a dictator. In the same way, giving this kind of power to people that have shown in the past to abuse information control is like banking on the wolf to behave in the hen this time. > Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie…

And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill most marican native with blades To be pedantic, it was diseases and outright, explicit murder. (which is not an excuse. Biological warfare is a modern war crime, after all.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigeno... banking on the wolf to behave in the hen [house] this time Fair point, but the United States is rapidly moving towards aut…

A good illustration of how devastating epidemics in North America among the natives were is that when the first European explorers reached the coast on the west side of what is now the United States they found that part of the continent to be highly populated.

That was in the early 1500s. It was another couple hundred years before Europeans started colonizing and conquering those areas. By the time that started those populations were already reduced by around 90% from diseases that has spread across the continent from the Europeans on the east side.

Before those diseases wiped out so many natives no European colonists were able to survive in what is now the US and Canada without the approval and help of the natives. If the local natives didn't want a colony there, they removed it.

Yes, the colonists had guns and the natives then did not but the guns in those times weren't actually superior to bows and arrows. The guns might have better range, but their accuracy was much worse and they took longer to reload.

Before diseases that the colonists (unintentionally) brought greatly weakened the native tribes pretty much the only colonists that did OK were those that allied with a native tribe.

There were a bazillion tribes, and there was a lot of conflict between them including warfare. Some smaller tribes that were losing their wars with bigger tribes allied with some of the colonies to try to get help against the bigger tribes. Those were the colonies that were allowed the stay and thrive.

For a great look at what life was like in the New World before Europe became widely aware of it, and what happened afterwards the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C Mann is quite good.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#342

Post by ori_b »

mavhc wrote: post #309
q-big wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I am too simplistic, but I do not see the evil in the TPM here, but only in the 3rd party policy. The evil is that the "Trusted" in "Trusted Computing" and "Trusted Platform Module (TPM)" means that one deeply distrusts the user (who might tamper with the system), but instead the trust lies in the computing (trusted computing) or TPM. In other words: Trusted Computing and TPM means a disempowerment of the use…

Indeed, so the user should not buy a computer where they're not in control of the TPM, if you can't disable it/add your own keys, then don't buy that computer

That rapidly converges on "you can't buy a computer and use it", because economic interests favor trusted computing devices.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#343

Post by ajross »

api wrote: post #291
acdha wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Stallman was. I think it’s also worth asking why he didn’t have more impact despite pretty clearly seeing this problem. Part of the answer has to be resource disparities but I don’t think it’s just that - Linux didn’t really capitalize at all on Microsoft’s lost decade, and much of the innovation in security has…

The reason the OSS community has had no impact is that it's never managed to produce software that regular non-tech-geeks want to use. The reason it's never managed to do that is lack of an economic model to finance the incredible amount of work required to make software usable by normal people. I've been saying this ad nauseum forever and I'm not the only one. A related problem is that the OSS world is mostly tech e…

> the OSS community [...] never managed to produce software that regular non-tech-geeks want to use

That's true, barely, only if you equate "software" with "things that draw stuff presented on a display to a user". Regular non-tech-geeks are using open source software (in the real sense, meaning instructions given to a computer to make it do something) pervasively, everywhere, every day, on all their devices (yes, even the Apple ones, but especially all the devices they use that aren't in their pockets).

Open source certainly isn't a failure, it literally won the war.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#344

Post by npteljes »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #339
userbinator wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about users with a million toolbars and Bonzi Buddy installed. I say let them be. As long as they also have the freedom to remove or not install such software, it's a good thing. Instead we have locked-down devices with the functional equivalent of such unwanted software, protected so that you cannot remove it without somehow getting root. "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

My parents grew up in a non English speaking developing country, and they cannot be reasonably expected to learn the nuances of malware laden links to figure out which English text link is good or bad. Do they deserve to not be able to shop online without fear of having their payment information stolen? Or mistyping a URL in their non native language and ending up at a scam website that installs malware? Or simply ha…

I don't mind the lock, but why don't we have the key? There's no reason to centally hold these hostage.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#345

Post by ori_b »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #59
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits. From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared. It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web. It will be used by corporations…

Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months . Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

> Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books.

Enforcement is a different issue.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#346

Post by slowmovintarget »

userbinator wrote: post #11

What is to prevent school WiFi from one day requiring a Pluton assertion that your Windows PC hasn’t been tampered with before you can join the network? Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom. The power of the authoritarian corporatocracy to force you to use only the (entire) systems they control. It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Sta…

...and before Stallman, Hayek. Hayek couldn't have seen the technological means, but he did see the "self-regulated monopolies" shaping up from anti-competition moves on the part of government (most of which are driven by lobbying).

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#347

Post by Covzire »

4bpp wrote: post #219
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months . Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

Did they actually ban the books, or did they merely ban their usage in K-12 instruction with the news outlet rounding that up to a book ban for dramaturgical reasons? Not that a ban in school instruction is necessarily good (though, I would guess, not nearly as rare), but the actual full-fledged ban that DRM could aid in enforcing, which would prevent you as an individual from reading a book you want to read in _any_…

All Florida did was add a criteria to their selection process to disallow books that include Critical Theory/Critical Race Theory or their praxis in the teaching of math, etc. Every state selects which text books can be used by their schools so if Florida "burns books" then by definition every single other state does too.

Where are the text books in California that teach math using Biblical stories and imagery? Obviously California burned all those books if we accept the argument being put forth with Florida.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#348

Post by underclocked »

acdha wrote: post #258
userbinator wrote: post #11

What is to prevent school WiFi from one day requiring a Pluton assertion that your Windows PC hasn’t been tampered with before you can join the network? Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom. The power of the authoritarian corporatocracy to force you to use only the (entire) systems they control. It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Sta…

> It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Stallman was. I think it’s also worth asking why he didn’t have more impact despite pretty clearly seeing this problem. Part of the answer has to be resource disparities but I don’t think it’s just that - Linux didn’t really capitalize at all on Microsoft’s lost decade, and much of the innovation in security has…

[dead]

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#349

Post by lubesGordi »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #28
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, now I'm nostalgic for the older days of hacker news where RMS was quoted every other post. The community is forgetting it's roots.

As someone who was here from day two, this is not how old HN was. It was many things to many people, and it’s very difficult to break out of the illusion that rose-tintedness tends to give us. (Guilty of it myself.) HN has been consistently contrarian. That’s about all that you can say without quickly becoming mistaken.

I've been around for a while too, and I've learned a lot from this forum. I can't tell if now I'm learning less here because I've leveled up or if there's just less tech talk.

As far as hn being contrarian, the only thing I see hn being consistently contrarian on is crypto. Any other examples?

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#350

Post by _23sd »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #52
Gh0stRAT wrote: post #46

I'm completely missing how his example of a Word document that can only be opened by approved users on approved hardware within the corporation is supposed to be a bad thing. Honestly, that sounds pretty fantastic. I've been using 3rd party tools/extensions to do this sort of thing in corporate and government environments for years, but having the attestation go all the way down to the hardware level is a big value-a…

The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits. From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared. It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web. It will be used by corporations…

If you want to use the OS to ban a book or program or whatever, you don't need fancy hardware features, just a database of hashes pushed down via a software update. Apple wanted to do a version of this for CSAM images, it only didn't happen because they chose to tell users about it and got massive backlash. The implication that governments need more powerful DRM features to do something similar just obscures the fact that they could do it tomorrow if the US government gave up their free speech stances.
Post reply on HN