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What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

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Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

#131

Post by coldpie »

candiddevmike wrote: post #43
matheusmoreira wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't matter. Remote hardware attestation means they will know you're trying to bypass their control. You'll be denied service at every turn. Can't even log into your bank account.

IMO, I don't see how remote hardware attestation avoids being spoofed. Yes, TPM is involved, but the end of the day, it's an API request/response. There are so many ways the request could be spoofed, and the attestation likely requires coordination with hardware vendors that have proven to be Highly Secure TM with the history of secure boot leaks.

> I don't see how remote hardware attestation avoids being spoofed

I don't disagree, but is that really a game you want to be playing with your government and your bank?

Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

#132

Post by pjmlp »

sumtechguy wrote: post #39
renegat0x0 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile is where it is all going. PCs will be like android in the near future.

what? windows 11 was just for new features right? ... right?

Right,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthz/app...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...

Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

#133

Post by Seattle3503 »

dns_snek wrote: post #44
jwrallie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as common PCs can boot an iso we should be good to go.

Only as long as Google doesn't force Web Environment Integrity through. Running a custom OS won't help if important websites refuse to load unless they're running in an approved browser with a set of approved extensions, on an approved OS, on top of approved hardware.

I've been beating the drum that we need mobile drivers licenses and pairwise pseudonyms. It is a path to beating spam and bots in a way that doesn't hand control over to private entities.

Some folks don't like digital identity controlled by government, but it seems like the alternative is digital identity controlled by oligopoly.

Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

#134

Post by swiftcoder »

detourdog wrote: post #110
aa-jv wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree, it is absolutely dreadful , and we saw this coming and did nothing about it. Think about it: you need permission to run software on your own hardware. Every time you launch a Mac App, it checks in with its masters to be sure its okay to do so - every time you install an app on your mobile device, it does the same thing. People accept this terrible state of affairs because the "user experience is better…

It can be turned off on your Mac if that is what you want.

So far, yes. It's getting hardware with every release. First you had to click approve in a dialog to launch unsigned software. Later you had to right click -> "open" -> then approve. Now you have to open system settings to find the button to show the approval prompt.

Meanwhile to install a kernel extension you now have to reboot into safe mode and disable part of system integrity protection (with big warnings that it's at your own risk).

For the average user, kernel extension are already gone, and unsigned software not far behind.

Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

#136

Post by sifar »

klardotsh wrote: post #93
Semaphor wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Roms face a different problem: bootloader locking. Is that a problem these days? It was over a decade ago that I last needed to jailbreak a phone, nowadays it’s just "I’d like to unlock" "Ok".

That’s possible on very few phones these days. Only a handful of OEMs still ship phones that can be bootloader unlocked at all (at least in the US), and even several of THOSE require phoning home to the OEM to get an IMEI-dependent unlock key to pass to fastboot. Source: 7 years of running deGoogled Android phones and 11 years of running ROM’d Android phones before recently moving to iOS and giving up.

Curious, have run GrapheneOS on pixels ? They don't have this issue, though it might change now.

Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

#137

Post by netdevphoenix »

josephcsible wrote: post #102
cbdevidal wrote: post #7

Will LineageOS and other similar ROMs have this limitation as well, or will it be baked into the hardware?

No, but when remote attestation reveals that you're running an OS that's not blessed by Google, the megacorps will make their apps all refuse to run on your phone. A few already do so today, e.g., the McDonald's app. In practice, I expect a situation where we have two phones: one to run Big Tech's apps, and one to run indie apps.

> a situation where we have two phones: one to run Big Tech's apps, and one to run indie apps.

This in combination with using webapps where possible

Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

#138

Post by swiftcoder »

NoSalt wrote: post #128

> "When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions." None of what was writt…

> or Macintosh

I'm not sure how many Macs you've used lately, but this isn't entirely true: out-of-the-box, Macs only run software that has been signed and notarised by Apple.

You can still disable this, but the methods of disabling are getting more obscure, and it's not a given they will remain available

Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

#139

Post by skywal_l »

walterbell wrote: post #117
everdrive wrote: post #67

It's important to understand that we could genuinely lose general purpose computing. I don't think it's in serious danger at the moment, but we've been in the midst of a slide in that direction for the last 10-15 years. Part of it is mobile phones, part of it is TPM, part of it is market forces. The latest turn is strictly political. We've really foolishly built the technology necessary for authoritarianism just a fe…

EU CRA (enforced Dec 2027) prohibits shipment of non-certified binaries for "critical" software, including firmware and hypervisors. Operating systems like Linux are categorized as "important" software, https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/cyber-resilience-act...

I might be wrong but I don't think that open source software are subject to the CRA. If you look at article (18) here [0] it seems to explicitly exclude free software that you download from the internet.

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/2847/oj/eng

Re: What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

#140

Post by elric »

coldpie wrote: post #129
elric wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death by a thousand cuts. TPM, secure attestation, age verification, DRM, and probably more things I'm forgetting right now.

Passkeys are another brick in this wall. The authors of the spec built in client software identification and attestation, which means authenticating parties can require you to only use certain, closed-source passkey clients. It's not hard to imagine a future where only blessed Passkey clients, such as Microsoft's, Apple's, and Google's implementations, are allowed by most services.

Heh, I'm working on a blog post about this very topic. Passkeys are ... weird. There's a lot of potential for gatekeeping, where websites can indeed require you to use device-bound passkeys through device attestation, and where becoming a vendor requires interacting with the fido alliance....

I would say "I'm sure the mean well", but given that parties like Yubico benefit from not getting more competitors, the cynic in me is a bit worried.

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