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Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform (hackaday.com)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Ya boy Richard Stallman agrees and has been saying this for years (although this article is more recentish), https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

“Treacherous computing” is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.

As of 2022, the TPM2, a new “Trusted Platform Module”, really does support remote attestation and can support DRM. The threat I warned about in 2002 has become terrifyingly real.

Actual, honest to god reasons to upgrade to Windows 11 are already vague and questionable. Your average user probably doesn't even see any particular reason and only perceives the nuisance of it. But it's hard to fully close your iron fist around a platform when TPM enablement is so sparse in the consumer space. So what better way to do it than a mandatory OS upgrade with it as a system requirement and assure all (or a vast majority of) systems align at once?

Of course there are ways for stubborn users to skirt those requirements, but that misses the primary point of Trusted Computing. While the OS may baseline function to some degree, there's no telling what functionality may be crippled by not being in a trusted state. EDIT: For example, this could easily tie into games with anti-cheat such that they will refuse to run on Windows 11 unless TPM is enabled.

I don't know the future any better than anyone else, I'm just trying to read the winds at the moment. I suspect they may not try to pull the entire trap closed all at once and that Windows 11 may continue to more or less function as we've seen past iterations. But the pieces will be in place by then and it's only a matter of time before some greedy exec gives the word .....

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I suspect they may not try to pull the entire trap closed all at once and that Windows 11 may continue to more or less function as we've seen past iterations

Microsoft will be taking a page from Google playbook. Google has be gradually reducing the "openness" of their android platform. They now have these "security checks" enforced on android. Meaning that it's trivial for an application to determine if the phone a "genuine android" or not.

This'll trickle into webbrowser too (if it's not already in browsers like chrome). It's only a matter of time before web pages will be able to determine if they're running on a "secure OS" and fail to run. It'll start out with your banking website, then expand to shopping websites, ultimately every page will enforce it ("oh, I see you have an unauthorized browser plug in installed. We care about your security, therefore we won't run. Please restore your device to it's secure defaults.")

This future is so horrible and Linux with its 4% market share won't change anything.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

Agreed.

And what's particularly galling about this is that it's never made any sense to me. Are you telling me an Android app, on compromised hardware or otherwise, could send malformed data that would for instance deposit $1M into my bank account? That doesn't sound like an issue of local security. An app is just a frontend, all validation would still be through the banking infrastructure.