Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom. The power of the authoritarian corporatocracy to force you to use only the (entire) systems they control. It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Stallman was.
RA is a technology that has its fair use, and can be desired for other systems, like in Linux. With a pure RA system your services can decide to trust or not those devices on your network that can be compromised, and report to other devices that there is something suspicious.
As anything, this can be used properly to increase the security of your edge architecture, or wrongly to limit the users actions.
Let me put another example. With RA I should be able to authorize validated systems in my R&D VPN. If you are using your own laptop with the company certificate, and the verifier tag the systems as "unknown" or "unhealthy", it will not allow the access to the internal network, but sure you can still use your laptop for anything else. This, IMHO, is a fair use of this technology.
Because god forbid you have control of your own PC?
Of course, the system for it is rudimentary, and puts a disproportionate amount of control in the hands of providers. And that works very well for them too.
Choosing a party is not like choosing an OS for your PC, though. Choosing the OS would be like choosing the political system - and recognizing the incredible privilege I have by being born into a democracy, I very much wouldn't like other people to change it.
Going further into democracy, while you might put an X on a paper sometimes, still forbids a very high number of actions. I'd liken it to having the power of choosing between Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store for your phone. Which, getting back to the point, is safer for the users than installing any third party software. Like how in a well functioning democracy, I'm forbidden to do a great many things, but also I can feel safe in the thought that others have the same restrictions too.
At least that's how I managed to understand your comment to the best of my abilities, so hopefully I'm missing something. Though if there is such a something, the point did not get across successfully.
This makes sense to entities providing a service, and also for many who doesn't mind not having control over their something, which is, I think, very similar to how we don't really have control over a great many of things. This is the point I wanted to get across to the original commenter, who protested "god forbid you have control of your own PC?".
iPhone users are safer from malware, PC users are safer from governments and Apple controlling what they can do on their computer.
Never-ending balance between safety and freedom.
The computer that requires a physical switch to disable secure boot is a good compromise (see many Chromebooks)
This is a very handwavey sentence and is doing far too much work in your reasoning. Yes, you don't have control "over a great many things", because the point is so vague so as to be meaningless. But it doesn't at all follow from that vague sentence that we should allow total corporate/government control over our personal digital devices.
In this case, the proposed cure is far worse than the disease.
With my reasoning I wanted to capture what people might think, while accepting something that they have no control of. I have a hard time with this, because I got a PC in my formative years and I loved to tinker with it, and hated, and still do, everything that stood in the way of that. But the general population doesn't share this experience. And if I look at my own life, I only have this experience with computers (and smartphones), all the other things are, even if not centrally managed, out of my control. At the first wrong noise I have to call an expert who hopefully fixes it and is hopefully benevolent to me, because I have no clue what happens to the device I own. Or even my own body, now that I think about it. And so, the PC and the phone is just in a long list of things that people depend on, but not control.
The addendum being here, and what most people miss who feel the way I described above, is that our ever-connected devices make a "paper trail" unprecendented in history. And it can be centrally managed, activated, replayed, assembled, or even more tracking could be remotely controlled to an extent[0] - and to an even larger extent with a specialized application[1]. This is where the otherwise similar level of "not being controlled" can lead to a much worse situation than ever before. And I wish I could point this out empathetically to people without sounding like a lunatic.
[0] https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/06/technology/security/nsa-tur...