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Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

amutable.com

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Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#141

Post by seba_dos1 »

stackghost wrote: post #48
enriquto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

half of the founders of this thing come from Microsoft. I suppose this makes the answer to your question obvious.

My thoughts exactly. We're probably witnessing the beginning of the end of linux users being able to run their own kernels. Soon: - your bank won't let you log in from an "insecure" device. - you won't be able to play videos on an "insecure" device. - you won't be able to play video games on an "insecure" device. And so on, and so forth.

This is already the world we live in when it comes to the most popular personal computing devices running Linux out there.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#142

Post by jamespo »

eth0up wrote: post #135
smartmic wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Void Linux. And Gentoo. And Alpine Linux. And Slackware. And others.

After over a decade of Debian, when I upgraded my PC, I tried every big systemd-based distro, including opensuse, which I wholly loathed. I finally decided on Void and feel at home as I did 20+ years ago when I began. There are serious problems with the systemd paradigm, most of which I couldn't argue for or against. But at least in Void, I can remove network-manger altogether, use cron as I always have, and generall…

How is systemd stopping you use cron?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#143

Post by bri3d »

mikkupikku wrote: post #104
bri3d wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News has recently been dominated by conspiracy theorists who believe that all applications of cryptography are evil attempts by shadowy corporate overlords to dominate their use of computing.

Buddy, if I want encryption of my own I've got secure boot, LUKS, GPG, etc. With all of those, why would I need or even want remote attestation? The purpose of that is to assure corporations that their code is running on my computer without me being able to modify it. It's for DRM.

I am fairly confident that this company is going to assure corporations that their own code is running on their own computers (ie - to secure datacenter workloads), to allow _you_ (or auditors) to assure that only _your_ asserted code is also running on their rented computers (to secure cloud workloads), or to assure that the code running on _their_ computers is what they say it is, which is actually pretty cool since it lets you use Somebody Else's Computer with some assurance that they aren't spying on you (see: Apple Private Cloud Compute). Maybe they will also try to use this to assert "deep" embedded devices which already lock the user out, although even this seems less likely given that these devices frequently already have such systems in place.

IMO it's pretty clear that this is a server play because the only place where Linux has enough of a foothold to make client / end-user attestation financially interesting is Android, where it already exists. And to me the server play actually gives me more capabilities than I had: it lets me run my code on cloud provided machines and/or use cloud services with some level of assurance that the provider hasn't backdoored me and my systems haven't been compromised.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#144

Post by captn3m0 »

weinzierl wrote: post #88

Lennart will be involved with at least three events at FOSDEM on the coming weekend. The talks seem unrelated at first glance but maybe there will be an opportunity to learn more about his new endeavor. https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/speaker/lennart_poettering/

Also see http://amutable.com/events which lists a talk at Open Confidential Computing Conference (Berlin, March)

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#145

Post by noitpmeder »

michaelt wrote: post #108
2b3a51 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We are confident we have a very robust path to revenue." I take it that you are not at this stage able to provide details of the nature of the path to revenue. On what kind of timescale do you envisage being able to disclose your revenue stream/subscribers/investors?

"Ubuntu Core" is a similar product [1] As I understand it, the main customers for this sort of thing are companies making Tivo-style products - where they want to use Linux in their product, but they want to lock it down so it can't be modified by the device owner. This can be pretty profitable; once your customers have rolled out a fleet of hardware locked down to only run kernels you've signed. [1] https://ubuntu.c…

This sounds like a net negative for the end user

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#146

Post by cyberax »

plagiarist wrote: post #93
microtonal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't believe how many hours we have lost troubleshooting SysV init and Upstart issues. systemd is so much better in every way, reliable parallel init with dependencies, proper handling of double forking, much easier to secure services ( systemd-analyze security ), proper timer handling (yay, no more cron), proper temporary file/directory handling, centralized logs, etc. It improves on about every level compared…

The problem is not systemd vs SysV et al, the problem is systemd spreading like a cancer throughout the entire operating system. Also trying to use systemd with podman is frustrating as hell. You just cannot run a system service using podman as a non-root user and have it work correctly.

> You just cannot run a system service using podman as a non-root user and have it work correctly.

Err... You just need to run `podman-compose systemd`?

I have my entire self-hosted stack running with systemd-controlled Podman, in regular user accounts.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#147

Post by mikkupikku »

bri3d wrote: post #143
mikkupikku wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddy, if I want encryption of my own I've got secure boot, LUKS, GPG, etc. With all of those, why would I need or even want remote attestation? The purpose of that is to assure corporations that their code is running on my computer without me being able to modify it. It's for DRM.

I am fairly confident that this company is going to assure corporations that their own code is running on their own computers (ie - to secure datacenter workloads), to allow _you_ (or auditors) to assure that only _your_ asserted code is also running on their rented computers (to secure cloud workloads), or to assure that the code running on _their_ computers is what they say it is, which is actually pretty cool sinc…

How can you be "pretty sure" they're going to develop precisely the technology needed to implement DRM but also will never use or allow it to be used by anybody but the lawful owners of the hardware? You can't.

It's like designing new kinds of nerve gas, "quite sure" that it will only ever be in the hands of good guys who aren't going to hurt people with it. That's powerful naïveté. Once you make it, you can't control who has it and what they use it for. There's no take-backsies, that's why it should never be created in the first place.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#148

Post by [deleted] »

cyphar wrote: post #51
josephcsible wrote: post #39

This seems like the kind of technology that could make the problem described in https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html a lot worse. Do you have any plans for making sure it doesn't get used for that?

I'm Aleksa, one of the founding engineers. We will share more about this in the coming months but this is not the direction nor intention of what we are working on. The models we have in mind for attestation are very much based on users having full control of their keys. This is not just a matter of user freedom, in practice being able to do this is far more preferable for enterprises with strict security controls. I…

[deleted]

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#149

Post by jamespo »

microtonal wrote: post #45
chaps wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's lost many hours troubleshooting systemd failures, I would like an answer to this question, too.

You won't believe how many hours we have lost troubleshooting SysV init and Upstart issues. systemd is so much better in every way, reliable parallel init with dependencies, proper handling of double forking, much easier to secure services ( systemd-analyze security ), proper timer handling (yay, no more cron), proper temporary file/directory handling, centralized logs, etc. It improves on about every level compared…

I'd be interested in what other init alternatives offer the security options systemd does

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#150

Post by sam_lowry_ »

blibble wrote: post #137
enriquto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

half of the founders of this thing come from Microsoft. I suppose this makes the answer to your question obvious.

that's a silver lining the anti-user attestation will at least be full of security holes, and likely won't work at all

Dunno about the others but Pottering has proven himself to deliver software against the grain.
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