The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

I'm completely missing how his example of a Word document that can only be opened by approved users on approved hardware within the corporation is supposed to be a bad thing.

Honestly, that sounds pretty fantastic. I've been using 3rd party tools/extensions to do this sort of thing in corporate and government environments for years, but having the attestation go all the way down to the hardware level is a big value-add, especially with so much ransomware/spyware/extortion/espionage going on these days.

Can someone please explain to me how the author might see this level of security as a bad thing?

The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits.

From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly.

Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared.

It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web.

It will be used by corporations and govs to prevent wisthleblowers and journalists to do their job. Or to prevent employees to get evidences of mistreatments in case they need to sue.

Because if you look at it, it's basically just a system for information control. And bad actors love that.

And of course it will be "for security reasons".

Trusting people with a terrible track record to not abuse a massive power in the future, espacially one that can be scaled up with the push of a button once the infrastructure is in place, is not a good bet.

If you want to use the OS to ban a book or program or whatever, you don't need fancy hardware features, just a database of hashes pushed down via a software update. Apple wanted to do a version of this for CSAM images, it only didn't happen because they chose to tell users about it and got massive backlash. The implication that governments need more powerful DRM features to do something similar just obscures the fact that they could do it tomorrow if the US government gave up their free speech stances.

But at least you could load your own OS.

Chip manufacturers could even decide that nothing good happens on open source operating systems, so you're now only allowed to run Mac or Windows operating systems.

The point is really that they're taking full ownership of the chips from you.