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The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

(gabrielsieben.tech)
733 points gjsman-1000 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | 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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ajross ◴[] No.32238346[source]
> the OSS community [...] never managed to produce software that regular non-tech-geeks want to use

That's true, barely, only if you equate "software" with "things that draw stuff presented on a display to a user". Regular non-tech-geeks are using open source software (in the real sense, meaning instructions given to a computer to make it do something) pervasively, everywhere, every day, on all their devices (yes, even the Apple ones, but especially all the devices they use that aren't in their pockets).

Open source certainly isn't a failure, it literally won the war.

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1. api ◴[] No.32243958[source]
> it literally won the war.

Then why is everything on the consumer side becoming more closed?

The reality is that proprietary just moved to the cloud in the form of SaaS-as-DRM and we-own-your-data. Open source runs everything, but few things are open. The availability of the source for components of the stuff they use is irrelevant to 99% of users.