I remember the WEI apologists trying to do the same thing to derail the argument. The problem is the goal, not the details. Just say no: DO NOT WANT!
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 like these technologies were created for the greater good and misappropriated by bad actors. They were proposed by bad actors in the first place, they cannot not be inherently good.
I don't think remote attestation (or even more so its umbrella technology, trusted computing) is nearly as specifically targeted as DRM.
> 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.
I agree that requiring remote attestation for generic web use is evil. It's way too heavy-handed an approach better reserved
I still don't think this somehow outright disqualifies the technology itself.
captcha/spambots has been a problem since USENET
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.
The policy is "I will not let you access this system unless your system software implements this technological protection."
A camera is technology. A security camera is policy, because it's a camera hooked up to policies on how to watch, record, and respond to what is required, and it is a political effort when connected with laws about face masks, prohibiting spray painting of the cameras, and allowing privacy intrusions.
Suppose someone invents a mind-reader that lets the user read the thoughts of anybody else in range. But the mind-reader requires great up-front costs to produce and also allows people with stronger readers to remotely destroy weaker readers, where strength is basically a function of cost.
In a vacuum, the mind-reader is "just a technology". But it aids autocratic surveillance much more than it aids citizens who want to surveill back. It's "neutral" but its impact is decidedly not.
TPMs and remote attestation enable entities with power to enforce their existing power much more effectively. In contrast, a general-purpose computer does the opposite because anybody can run whatever code they want, they can adversarially interoperate with anybody they feel like, and so on.
One of these is more evil than the other, even though they're both "just technologies".
People have woken up to the truth as the pieces come together.
This article from 2022 is fun to look at and see how prescient it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106
A TPM with measured boot (SecureBoot) does exactly this, remote attestation is how Alice proves to Bob that it is in a trusted configuration and wasn't tampered with.
This does not work. You aren't talking about pissing off a significant percentage of the users who go elsewhere.
The imbalance in power is unthinkable to people 100 years ago when the phrase was first popularised.
I think you're naively presuming the issue is simple and easy to address with a letter.
Regardless of your bank, payment systems such as Visa and Mastercard have blocked transactions involving mainstream online stores such as Steam because they unilaterally deemed some games to be problematic. You cannot fix this problem with an email.
