481–490 of 799 posts
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> Requiring authorized silicon (and software) isn't even the biggest problem here. It is indeed the biggest issue. It prevents be from owning and using the hardware I pay for, own, or make myself. It's switching the personal computers as we know it from being open to proprietary and owned by 2 large US corporations. I don't agree that it's not a problem.
Did you just read “not even the biggest problem” as “not a problem”?
Banking apps are the deal-breaker for me. I only do business with banks that offer alternative ways of securing transactions e.g. eTan / ChipTAN / PhotoTAN with a separate reader / generator (see https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Verbraucherinnen-und-Verbr... ). This is probably a pretty European thing to do, but at least it avoids being locked in and being tracked.
I also tried to use an old phone as a backup device. However, most authentication apps only allow it to be installed on a single device.
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While I agree, I think there's a better way to frame this with the public. We don't need to bring in pedo references. That looks very unhinged to most people. There's already a lot of support out there, in both public opinion and the law, for the idea that if I pay for something physical like a device, I own it. Any substantial alteration in its functionality, especially a reduction in what it can do, requires my con…
The problem with the reasonable framing you suggest is that it gets thrown out of the window the moment someone utters Protect the Children®. I'm willing to bet that most people, including those with kids like myself, don't truly believe that surrendering our basic rights to better protect the children is a rational thing to do, but they would never dare to push their opinion publicly. The few that do get all but lab…
Kier Starmer wants to protect children? He put Mandelson into government even though he was mates with Epstein. Doesn't sound like someone who cares about protecting children to me.
Rinse and repeat for any politician or political side, they are all only a step or two away from someone who's done something horrible to children. It doesn't matter to me whether I really think it's true or not (though in the example I've used, that is my opinion, who employs someone like that and really cares about children?) but *it does not matter*. This is an us versus them situation, and they are making proponents of freedom out to be criminals at best, paedos at worst. They can take some of their own medicine, and anyone who parrots their line. If ad hominem is the name of the game then let's play, I'm on firmer ground than they are.
I always say this when this topic comes up: remote attestation will be how our computing freedom dies. They've made it so that it doesn't even matter if they allow you to install whatever you want. Anything that isn't corporate owned is banned. Own your device? You "tampered" with it. You're banned. From everything. You're ostracized from digital society. You're not even a citizen, much less a second class citizen. E…
A fraudster, a terrorist, a money launderer, a drug dealer, a pedophile—these are actually a huge audience for whom the IT industry can release separate versions of the operating system and hardware. And that audience will pay for it. For the vast majority of ordinary people who consume IT benefits for free (being a commodity themselves), it makes sense to use controlled products.
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DRM is a technology and is inherently evil. Web attestation is DRM for the web, and is inherently evil. Age ID is a technology and is inherently evil. We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad. It's not lik…
>We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Are you seriously trying to suggest copyright infringement has not been an issue over the last 30 years? Both of them are solutions to problems that we've had over the last 30 years and were created for the greater good to solve problems that developers were facing.
In 1999, Intel received an absolutely massive amount of opposition when they decided to include a software-readable serial number in their CPUs, so much that they reversed the decision. Then the "security" and Trusted Computing authoritarians continued pushing for TPMs and related tech, and contributed to the rise of mobile walled gardens. Windows 11's TPM requirements were another step towards their goal. The amount…
Weird rant. TPMs are great. The modern computing landscape needs a safe place to put secrets. It's what made the iPhone (Secure Enclave is effectively a TPM) years ahead of Android in terms of security. The problem isn't the TPM, but attestation. As soon as the TPM is required to not be under your control to get access to Y, bad things happen. Hell, in actuality, the problem isn't even attestation, its policy. The EU…
Does it? Why waste time on developing exploits when you can just call up grandma and get her give you the money by her "own" volition - using her secure device - by pretending to be the bank/IRS/her grand daughter using AI voice/etc.
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>How about being banned from online banking, government services and all social networking / communication platforms? You aren't banned. You just have to use a secure device. It's like saying that a store banned you because they stopped taking checks and started requiring a credit card since they are more secure and harder to commit fraud with. As a person you didn't lose any freedom. Freedom does not mean someone ha…
It's not about being secure. Google allows devices with up to 10 years without any patches to pass their integrity API. Meanwhile Graphene OS, which is very secure and up-to-date, doesn't pass.
Graphene OS says they are secure, but the definition of secure they're using isn't the same one the service providers are using, so that doesn't help much.
The best route forward here is to push for a separation of certification types. Ideally it would be possible to pass the security related aspects of Google's CTS test suite and get approved by Play Integrity without triggering the other parts of Android certification.
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Do you consider being banned in a video game because of hacking to be an example of something killing computing freedom? The user still maintains all the freedom of doing whatever computing they want on their own machine, but if they want to play with others who don't want to play with cheaters then they have to use the official client. For people who want a high degree of freedom and be able to access as many digita…
We had fun in online games without kernel level nonsense. Why do I need to compromise my hardware when the problem is an outlier in the social graph? Anticheat is part an arms race and part just raising the bar so people cant cheat too easily. That said you can feed a video feed into a Kria K26 or even a pi or jetson and make automatic targeting completely transparant to the kernel. Then what? Hardware attestation in…
A lot of gaming migrated to consoles for this reason. They have secure remote attestation implemented properly. Accusing winners of cheating doesn't work there, and it's obvious why that results in happier and healthier gaming communities.
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The problem with the reasonable framing you suggest is that it gets thrown out of the window the moment someone utters Protect the Children®. I'm willing to bet that most people, including those with kids like myself, don't truly believe that surrendering our basic rights to better protect the children is a rational thing to do, but they would never dare to push their opinion publicly. The few that do get all but lab…
I don't actually believe this. People don't actually believe every car should have a GPS tracker so that if a pedophile drives a car, the police can track it. That is a ridiculous argument, and if they make it, there should be something you can say to make it blow up in their face. Unfortunately, as we've all now discovered, winning arguments isn't about being right, so I don't know which words you can say to make th…
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Do you think banks are using attestation gratuitously? It helps prevent a lot of fraud. You are opposing something that saves people’s savings every day just because you think it takes “freedom” away from a few hobbyists. Do you even have a phone that does not support hardware attestation or is all this posturing about something hypothetical?
Can you show me examples where locking down an OS has prevented fraud in banking? Honestly, if the only way to secure your banking system is by locking down users' devices, there is something really bad going on at your end, security-wise. Your system should be secure even without locking down user hardware.
When online banking was first created it was an absolute chaos zone. Everyone was accessing it from desktop machines riddled with viruses and malware. There are endless stories of being discovering their life savings had been wired to Belarus by some malware running on their machine that had grabbed their banking credentials when they logged in.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Akrebsonsecurity.com+b...
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/07/how-a-citadel-trojan-dev...
> U.S. prosecutors say Citadel infected more than 11 million computers worldwide, causing financial losses of at least a half billion dollars.
Half a billion dollars, by a single guy with a single virus!
Different parts of the world came up with different solutions for this. The US made all ACH payments reversible and international wires difficult, but that just meant the receiver paid for fraud instead of the person whose machine was full of viruses. This was an obviously bad set of incentives and hacky panic-based fix. Banks elsewhere in the world settled on providing users with authenticator devices that looked like small calculators into which you could type transaction details after plugging in a smart card. Malware could still steal all your financial data but it couldn't initiate transactions.
Obviously, all this was a hack. What was needed was computers that were secure. Apple and the Android ecosystem eventually delivered this, and the calculator devices were retired in favour of smartphones with remote attestation. This was better in literally every way, for 100% of users. Firstly, it protects financial privacy and not just transaction initiation. Secondly, it's a lot more convenient to use a device that's always with you than a dedicated standalone single-use computer. Thirdly, adding remote attestation made no difference because that's what the calculator devices were doing anyway. Fourthly, even in the case of customers of small American banks that weren't capable enough to manage dedicated hardware rollouts, getting rid of fraud instead of pushing liability around allows for lower prices and fewer headaches.
So remote attestation is a non-negotiable requirement for digital banking of any form. When Microsoft didn't deliver most banks preferred to literally manufacture and sell their customers single-use smartcards that remotely attested by you manually copying numbers back and forth between screens. Or they hid the cost of rampant fraud in the price of other services until such a time that Apple/Google saved them.