If Google is in charge of deciding which OSes get approved, then this is about blocking OSes. I'm sorry. You can not in one breath argue that this isn't about blocking anyone and in the next breath argue that everyone needs to get their OS approved by Google.

> The current proposal is focused on the OS you are using and not on blocking certain browsers.

The current proposal does not describe attestation requirements, you're reading into this document something that is never specified. In fact, the current proposal explicitly calls out browser blocking as a possibility and calls that an unsolved problem: "Attesters will be required to offer their service under the same conditions to any browser who wishes to use it and meets certain baseline requirements. This leads to any browser running on the given OS platform having the same access to the technology, but we still have the risks that 1) some websites might exclude some operating systems, and 2) if the platform identity of the application that requested the attestation is included, some websites might exclude some browsers."

The proposal does not offer a concrete plan for preventing either scenario, it throws out a few ideas and then says, "we'll have to see." The proposal also does not at any point state that browsers will not be blocked. It states that any browser that "meets requirements" should be allowed. It does not specify what those requirements are, and there's no evidence offered in the document that a browser like Headless Chromium would qualify for them.

> And again there is no blocking going on.

We keep dancing around this, it's false. It's false given even the assumptions you've brought up. You yourself admit that OSes would be blocked. There is no reason to give a signal to a website about whether an environment is trusted other than to aid with blocking. Even the most charitable interpretation of this spec involves blocking. Every single risk listed in the spec involves blocking.

Please stop saying that this isn't about blocking, attestation as a concept is about blocking based on tampering signals.

> Imagine if there was a way to check if a user has antivirus installed and has ran a recent scan. This signal would be correlated with users who have malware installed.

I'm sorry, you think this is would be a good thing? You think that giving a website the ability to deny access if I don't have a trusted antivirus installed is in any way appropriate for the Open web?

> Malware on a user's machine can do the last 3.

I don't know if you're deliberately being obtuse about this, but very obviously malware is not what anyone is thinking about when they talk about cheating in video games or blocking bots from social websites.

> Be upset at sites that do that then.

Or, be upset at the people who give them the capability and encourage them to do so.

> Anyone can become an attester.

The proposal in fact says the opposite, that there will be a small number attesters and they'll be vetted by browsers.

> In that case I would recommend you to have Arch sign those drivers.

No. It's not Google's business if the drivers are signed. It's not my browser's business if those drivers are signed. It is none of their business what OS they're running on or what drivers are loaded.

> Attestation has nothing to do with preventing people from rooting their device. You still have the same autonomy to root your device.

I'm not sure what to respond to this with other than that it's obviously incorrect. Attestation in fact both can be used to directly prevent rooting and can be used to indirectly prevent rooting by shutting down services on rooted devices. Like... I don't know what argument to give you if you don't see a causal relationship between the two. Attestation is about blocking services and imposing consequences on modified devices, including rooted devices.

> You wouldn't have to boot into a different OS. The current state of the web is what you would experience. People using a secure environment will have benefits like seeing less captchas.

You're just kinda saying things. There is nothing in the proposal that indicates this. Attestation has never worked this way in any context.

> If your device is rooted you are able to remove any checks to the app itself that are blocking you from using it on a rooted device.

Oh my goodness, this is on a technical level just not how modern attestation works. It's designed to be incredibly difficult to circumvent, and hardware-level attestation makes that even more difficult. You can't just remove the checks, you need to be able to generate a signed attestation key. Please look up how TPMs work.

> Priorities change, but you can clearly see that it was being worked on and it did get to the point where it works for Chrome's adblocker.

No, the opposite. This is unreleased. It never got to the point where it works for Chrome's adblocker. It didn't get to any point. It got triaged a year ago and there's been zero activity on it since; CNAME uncloaking for extensions does not exist in Chrome. And to argue that the Chromium team cares about adblocking in one sentence and to say that it's everyone else's job to implement fixes is utterly absurd.

The reality is that Chrome has worse adblocking than Firefox and that they are lagging behind on extension features. There is no reason to believe that will change in the near future.

----

I'm just going to kind of group some stuff together here:

> Considering rooted devices might negatively impact their business it is their business. [...] Google on the other hand could kill many businesses, break people's sites, and cause a large amount of harm if they make big changes like that without finding someway to let people transition to a suitable alternative. [...] Imagine if there was a way to check if a user has antivirus installed and has ran a recent scan. [...] [etc]

This conversation started out as "nobody is trying to restrict anything" and whenever I actually poke at the edges of that, I find you offering excuses for why certain OS setups should be restricted. People should "just" get all of their custom drivers signed. If LineageOS isn't an authorized ROM, that's their fault, not Google's.

Your reply here is littered with technical misinformation and with assertions about how this will play out that seem to be based entirely on hopes and dreams rather than any technical mitigations or policies. But the bigger issue is that underneath all of it, you are trying to convince me that Google is not trying to limit device autonomy -- and the truth is, you do not support device autonomy in the way that Google's critics do.

It is bad for a custom ROM to have to get Google's permission to get signed or treated as a trusted app environment. That should not be Google's choice to make. It is bad for websites to have insight into whether or not an OS has a virus scanner installed. It is bad to require Open Source drivers to go through a validation process with Chrome. It is bad to punish users with rooted devices by throwing additional captchas at them. These are outcomes that are bad for user agency, user freedom, and user autonomy. And they will lead to worse outcomes including degraded adblocking performance and less user agency over devices.

Now, you're trying to convince me that they won't. But the underlying issue here is, once again, you disagree with me about what degraded adblocking performance even looks like. In your mind, it's not Google's responsibility to fix those problems, it's an Open Source project and someone else should do it for them. In your mind, blocking 20% fewer ads than another a browser is no big deal, it's not worth complaining about. And you can't get through one of your replies without going to bat for advertisers, basically saying that it would be irresponsible for Google to make user-privacy improvements in Chrome without thinking about the impact on advertisers.

The big issue here is not that we disagree about what the policy says (although we clearly do). What I'm seeing in your reply is that "critics are overreacting" on some level means "the user-freedom, privacy, and autonomy requests that they have are unreasonable."

So no, I don't trust Google's motivations and you probably can't convince me otherwise, because looking at the things you keep saying in these comments -- your list of acceptable outcomes from this policy are different from my list of acceptable outcomes. What you view as user abuse is different from what I and many Google critics view as user abuse. And it is not overreaction or ignorance or fearmongering that causes Google critics to advocate against this change. It's that critics have a different value system about user autonomy than you do.