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The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

(gabrielsieben.tech)
733 points gjsman-1000 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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userbinator ◴[] No.32234457[source]
What is to prevent school WiFi from one day requiring a Pluton assertion that your Windows PC hasn’t been tampered with before you can join the network?

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.

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acdha ◴[] No.32237069[source]
> It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Stallman was.

I think it’s also worth asking why he didn’t have more impact despite pretty clearly seeing this problem. Part of the answer has to be resource disparities but I don’t think it’s just that - Linux didn’t really capitalize at all on Microsoft’s lost decade, and much of the innovation in security has happened on other platforms. I think there’s also some kind of blind spot in the open source community where a lot of people see this as something other people need, not them personally.

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api ◴[] No.32237422[source]
The reason the OSS community has had no impact is that it's never managed to produce software that regular non-tech-geeks want to use. The reason it's never managed to do that is lack of an economic model to finance the incredible amount of work required to make software usable by normal people.

I've been saying this ad nauseum forever and I'm not the only one.

A related problem is that the OSS world is mostly tech enthusiasts. It's like having car people design cars. They'd be full of special switches and options and stuff that car people want. Car people don't understand that most people hate cars. What they like is mobility. Same goes for computers. Most people hate computers. They just like what computers let them do: communication, making content, getting their work done, etc.

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tomc1985 ◴[] No.32239142[source]
This atrocious attitude is absolutely why software is such a hellscape of shitty UI and lack of features.

Normies should be eating our table scraps, not dictating how the software is written.

Normies learned how to drive a car. They can learn how to properly compute. And if they don't like the tech, they don't have to use the tech.

OSS is the last bastion of computing for people who know/like computing, because the armies of "designers" aren't selfless enough to donate their time like programmers are. And frankly it is better off that way, the prevailing trends in design seem to be all about limiting options.

Hard, powerful software over push-button appliances any day.

And, to use the car analogy, BMW gets away with this approach just fine.

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1. api ◴[] No.32240474[source]
Driving a car is far, far easier than administrating a Linux system (beyond a stock distro install that is working properly). The latter requires a ton of deep complex knowledge. It's more like rebuilding an engine than driving.