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

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

hackaday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 315 posts

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

#191

Post by rcxdude »

bakies wrote: post #158
coldpie wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I hate this, installed a new CPU and none of my passkeys work. The browser asks my phone and they don't trust each other and not a damn clue how to fix it.

Yep, big problem with them: most users have no idea where the thing that pops up and offers to store the passkeys actually stores them (sounds like in your case, in your computer's TPM was either on the CPU you replaced or complained and reset itself when the CPU changed). It's a ticking timebomb that all the 'users love passkeys! (after we nag them about it every time they login until they give up)' blogs fail to catch.

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

#192

Post by bitwize »

bayindirh wrote: post #109
symbogra wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the issue that they support secure boot type features?

No, the issue is too much of the Secure Boot chain is currently being controlled by Microsoft. Kernel being GPL has no point currently. Require hardware attestation with Microsoft private keys + systemd-boot + systemd + uutils can create a nice walled garden, allowing "vendors" to build locked-down hardware-OS pairs. More importantly, uutils is MIT, which can attest at every level, without sharing a line of source co…

Uutils is literally one guy's self-tutorial to learn Rust. The fact that it's breaking Ubuntu has more to do with that than some shadowy conspiracy.

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

#193

Post by dminik »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #177
dminik wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'm confused here. I had a look at what Stallman said and what Minsky allegedly did. Apparently, Minsky had sex with one of Epstein's girls, who later said she was forced into it. Now, his wife denies the allegation, as she was apparently with him at all times on Epstein's island. Now, I can believe that he went once, and maybe had sex with someone he didn't know was not doing so willingly. But, what about his wi…

His issue is that saying "assault" to mean "sex with someone" is dishonest, even if that person is 17. Which is obviously is. Any sane person hears "assault" and thinks that means "assault" instead it means something else. What is happening is that the meaning of words are being changed for the purpose of using pre-existing laws. Example, you think that Bla is very bad and isn't punished enough by the law. There's la…

Ok, but surely there are more important thing going on there than the wording.

It feels like Stallman wants to defend his friend, but doesn't really have any way to do that. So, instead, he pivots to pedantry.

Like ok, assuming that Marvin really did not know, it's wrong to label him as a sexual assaulter(?). Though legally a sexual assault still occured.

But, it still doesn't explain, justify or deny that he allegedly slept with someone , possibly behind his wife's back. And it also doesn't explain that they went *BACK* to Epstein's island after knowing he was a sex trafficker. And that presumably the girl he slept with might have also been trafficked.

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

#194

Post by matheusmoreira »

marcosdumay wrote: post #185
iamnothere wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History tells us there will always be a “low cost” vendor with exploitable hardware, or if production becomes more tightly controlled, inevitable cost cutting and declining standards will provide a way in. Not that we shouldn’t oppose locked down hardware, but locking things down creates pressure and motivation for the people who like things to be unlocked.

Everything seems directed into making that "low cost vendor" illegal and consolidating the market into a handful of players. And yeah, it's a politics problem, not an economic one. If corporations could simply push Trusted Computing without a corrupt police (and military) backing them, we would be there since the 90s already.

It's already been made illegal via DMCA.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...

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

#195

Post by elric »

coldpie wrote: post #161
bakies wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I hate this, installed a new CPU and none of my passkeys work. The browser asks my phone and they don't trust each other and not a damn clue how to fix it.

You could have used an open source client to manage your passkeys as you like, including backing them up in your own storage format. I wrote about it here: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-... > I was quite excited about it... until I found out that the Passkey spec authors have warned that client that it may face server-side bans because it lets you manage your own private key how you want…

Reading these comments, I'm happy to see that I'm not the only passkey skeptic.

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

#196

Post by stephen_cagle »

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…

I think it is unfortunate how many resources are put into making things secure with TPM's and how little resource is put into basically having secure and simple sandboxing...

All I really want is a computer that allows me to fully control the permissions and filesystem access of all the programs that I manually install on my system. Almost every program (in my case) needs 0 filesystem access outside of what it installed itself and shouldn't be looking or snooping at anything that isn't in its own process space.

I want a clear and simple way to limit the blast radius of how badly a program could actually screw up my system or have access to my files.

I recently experienced the opposite of this on Android, where I tried to install a very well reviewed ebook reader called MoonReader. But MoonReader seems to require complete access to every file on my Android device to work correctly. That is insane. I looked it up a bit more and it seems that Google has simplified (or something) permissions, but now there isn't much choice other than asking for full file access (I just want to give it access to one directory).

Anywho, just a minor vent, that we are insisting that the only way to make things secure is this sort of attestation path, but we don't spend any energy just making it possible to limit the blast radius of software on most OS'.

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

#197

Post by everdrive »

pizlonator wrote: post #176
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…

> we could genuinely lose general purpose computing. > At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever. Maybe Linux will save us. This was a fascinating thing to watch for me (pewdiepie telling people to install Linux): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0 My bet is that the momentum is strong enough that: - A critical mass of PC makers will continue to offer a Linux preinstalled option,…

I love Linux, but if 90% of the US were on Linux the same commercial / political pressures would apply and Linux would just look like Android or ChromeOS. Can you run an alternate OS on your smartphone? Yes, but you can't run your banking app. Linux alone cannot save us.

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

#198

Post by donmcronald »

iamnothere wrote: post #105
matheusmoreira wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how remote hardware attestation avoids being spoofed Hardware cryptoprocessor. Keys are held in a tamper resistant secure element. You're not gonna get at those keys without pouring some serious resources into the task. The keys are owned by the corporation and used to establish a root of trust from boot. If you change anything at all to suit your interests, verification fails, your machine is identifie…

History tells us there will always be a “low cost” vendor with exploitable hardware, or if production becomes more tightly controlled, inevitable cost cutting and declining standards will provide a way in. Not that we shouldn’t oppose locked down hardware, but locking things down creates pressure and motivation for the people who like things to be unlocked.

Your untampered device will be enrolled with a verified ID provider and they’ll be part of the attestation. The tamper resistance hardware benefits from decades of hacking. Plus you’re not talking about things like compromising a single long lived key or similar like you could with physical media or players.

We’ll probably get to the point where you need a verified id to buy a phone that does attestation. Tamper with it and go to jail. Who’s going to hack that?

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

#199

Post by codyb »

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…

I sincerely doubt it'll do much, but my next computer will not be Apple. Sadly, I just upgraded a year and a half or so ago, and sadly, good lord those damn arm chips are nice.

So hopefully in 8 years or so when I need a new machine, there's some decent options available to me.

But nice aint worth the cost when it comes at the expense of supporting something which is undermining everything else you believe in.

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

#200

Post by linuxhansl »

hollow-moe wrote: post #72

> Vote with your wallet Doesn't work when the only options are bad. Every Android OEM embraces the closing of android because it'll allow them to ship all the spyware they already do without the user being able to remove them (or disable them soon enough). Having 2 or 100 options has no difference if they're all bad.

How will Google know about my choice? I want to let them know that now there is no reason anymore to prefer to Android over another ecosystem.

Also, my hardware, my choice. It seems there is no way to actually let them know.

Post reply on HN