251–260 of 315 posts
I was there, 3000 years ago, when we started ringing the bell about “trusted computing”. Honestly it’s not as bad as I expected
Trusted computing is just another name for vendor lock-in. It was never about security.
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While this is fine for you, I worry about a sociocultural divide. I believe the likelihood of a smartphone being the only form of computing (and access to the internet in particular) grows with diminishing income / cultural means. This is based on anecdotal observation, does anybody here know of relevant survey data?
> relevant survey data Based on a cursory look, keywords can include "smartphone-only internet users" and "large-screen computer ownership". The American Community Survey asks questions related to that (income, computing devices). Comparing states, the poorer the residents of a state, the smaller the percent of households with regular computers ("large-screen computer ownership"), per "Computer Ownership and the Digi…
The idea that smartphones aren't computers and their users aren't deserving of software freedom is frustratingly entitled.
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In my country, the same verification service is used to access banks, health services (private and public), taxes, and even verify online retail purchases. This verification app on Android requires Play Integrity on first time activation so fresh installs of something like GrapheneOS will not let you use the app. It's still currently possible to use a hardware token alternative to the app. It is only getting less con…
I see all of these "in my country, we need a phone to do X" posts, and while I believe them, I feel like they always leave out key information. I'd also like to know: What actually happens when the customer does not have a phone? Do you just never get healthcare? Do you just never bank? Surely there are (perhaps inconvenient) alternatives that people without phones can use. The national government doesn't just let it…
I believe that in the depths of the cold war, when personal computers were just showing up, it was decided, deep within the National Security Agency,that it was more advantageous to let them continue to proliferate without fostering secure Operating Systems, though they were available. We all now live with the blowback from that decision. Most people don't even realize that actually secure computing is a possibility…
I affirmatively argue that actually secure computing is not a possibility. It's fun to build toy models where every process has exactly the permissions it needs and no more, sure. In the real world, your users are going to grant superuser/admin permissions to random installers, and they're not going to perform the complex verification rituals you told them to do beforehand. It's like trying to set up a warehousing sy…
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Yes, this is the main idea behind iOS and the App Store. I don't get why smart people are falling for this.
Let me try to strawman a little: I personally accept this on my phone because I honestly don't consider my phone to be a computer, and I don't really care about "computing" on it. My phone is not really that important to me. It is a toy/appliance that I goof around with. What it's running and how "free" and "open" it is, is about as important to me as how free the firmware in my car is, or the software on my gaming c…
So you’ll still be able to write code and scripts and play on the side on your laptop, but if you want to access your banks webpage (or really, anything you get through someone else’s server: streaming media, the news, porn, whatever) you’ll be forced to Chrome + laptop with TPM + authentication through smartphone app.
Not ideal.
What happened was people ended up putting a lot of money and sensitive data on their computers and desired a system which wouldn’t expose that just because they ran the wrong software.
And by "people" we mean Hollywood. A great deal of this was created to enable DRM, then exploited for other purposes. For instance, it's illegal (by contract) to let a device without Secure Boot play a 4K stream from any mainstream studio. This is why Windows requires Secure Boot.
No it isn't, and no it doesn't.
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The early MacOS era as well as pretty much the entire classic Mac OS era was infamous for being a more-or-less do it yourself environment for adding bits the OS didn't have or did sub-optimally for given use cases. The wisdom of such a freewheeling ecosystem in today's era is maybe debatable, but given how user-hostile the mainline OS and software vendors can be, I say there's still plenty of room for that ecosystem…
I guess I do remember adding drivers here and there for scanners and printers back in the day
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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…
Devil's advocating here... when have kernel extensions _ever been_ a part of the average user's experience?
What happened was people ended up putting a lot of money and sensitive data on their computers and desired a system which wouldn’t expose that just because they ran the wrong software.
The better answer is to build better OSes with better security models. I should be able to run a crypto wallet I downloaded from a Kim Jong Un fan site while high and it shouldn’t be able to do anything I don’t give it permission to do. It’s totally possible. Tabs in a web browser are basically this. I can do it with VMs but that’s lots of extra steps.
The only place it seems to fall flat is network I/O - LAN access requires permission, but dialing out to the wider Internet does not.
Compare Windows, which has jack (except for bloated anti-malware hooks in NTFS.)
Linux is _trying_ to replicate macOS with Flatpak/XDG portals, but those still need more time in the oven.
Source: I use both a MacBook and a Linux desktop daily.