Google has proven time and time again that they don't want to make this technology fool proof and I severely doubt this will be any different.

Although I do agree that hardware attestation as a captcha is pure bullshit no matter the context.

This seems to presuppose that service providers using reCAPTCHA are either clueless idiots or actively expending resources and lowering their conversion rates to support the supposed Google/Apple duopoly. That does not strike me as a plausible claim.

What can't we do for these two companies we will beg, we will bend, we might even consider grovelling as long as the evil is around, to help us find the greater evils in the world. That is, the people we don't like, might be the bad guys today, but just don't worry you will be the bad guy too, just wait until the bad guys get into power...

I haven't read the hobbit or lord of the rings but man if this isn't greed corrupting all men then I don't know what is.

I feel sick of all this, I might really just move out and live the rest of my life out on the farm somewhere.

Break them up. Break them up. Break them up.

The headline seems to make the statement that Apple and Google are evil and doing this for monopoly lock-in, and GrapheneOS, a competitor, will stand for the people against that. But given their final counterpoint is that they should have been included too and they rant about being rejected from Google's Play Integrity API for unclear reasons they claim are malicious, it seems they do acknowledge there's security value here: we do critically need for full-chain-of-signature attestations for critical identity data, the only way to avoid someone using AI to create fraud identities trivially.

> "Microsoft Pluton security processor is a chip-to-cloud security technology built with Zero Trust principles at the core. Microsoft Pluton provides hardware-based root of trust, secure identity, secure attestation, and cryptographic services."

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...

Amid the massive hype of the Web3 Crypto era, there was a kernel of useful innovation : that you can choose to have unique digital copies of things, and thus you can have a way of sending value that bypasses the middlemen, be they local thugs, bent politicians, violent regimes, benevolent dictators, or the dominant hegemony.

Having central big-Corp approve your content or sign your executable or take a vig on your sales, or license your hardware - these may be common, but are not a universal law of nature.

The internet itself is our best example of the value of technology open for all to use. Frankly, that is in danger.

Whether it is bogus age-checks in your OS, a hidden bios OS, or the move away from owning your own compute [ because the GPU / CPU and RAM are priced so high you have to rent them ], consumers need to pool resources and ensure open access.

Kudos to France for mandating a Linux OS for their public service workforce. Good on the Europeans for doubling down on renewables to insulate themselves from petrodollar volatility, and making sure portable devices have replaceable batteries.

Cory Doctorow has some great rants on enshizzification. Garys Economics YT channel has some great rants on why high inequality steals resources, see also Piketty.

The technocrats on this forum have an understanding of these measures the common person may not, and thus a moral obligation to weigh in on the issues and warn 'genpop'.

Resist, dont let the buzzkills wear you down.

I don't think the govt should be able to set rules that limit and control children's freedoms with computers.

A child can't enter a nightclub or a liquor store. The closest digital equivalents are basically permanently available to them though.

I wonder if we'll get something similar happening with cloudflare

[1] https://bmail.ag/verify

You can't have the cake and eat it too. Maybe we need to close some doors, especially if the barrier for publication is literally just a couple of prompts and uploading the result to distributor like npm or play store.

> Governments are increasingly mandating using Apple's App Attest and Google's Play Integrity for not only their own services but also commercial services. The EU is leading the charge of making these requirements for digital payments, ID, age verification, etc. Many EU government apps require them.

Even the "beloved" EU government is also in on it as well as banking apps are pushing for this too. They do not care about you and the so-called "Open Web" is already dead on arrival.

[0] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116551068177121365

Isn't this a textbook case of an antitrust lawsuit? Y'know, with the whole ordeal with Windows/IE, I assume the court would find this as blatantly anticompetitive behavior.

It's just that there's nothing pro-authority about making it easy for people to verify: "this data hasn't changed since the signer signed it." It's a neutral capability.

There are cases where we can and should blame technologists for building antisocial things that shouldn't exist, but I think that cryptography for the most part falls on the pro-social side of that spectrum.

Then stop trying to take away the technology it's built on

Turns out right to repair laws are very popular with voters and small business owners. Maybe we all start to tread down that path more and figure out what sorts of regulations pressures companies into adopting open standards?

"I don't use a TPM in my computer so it shouldn't exist" has always sounded like a weird argument against the tech in my opinion.

Many Android phones have their secret storage implemented as a virtual machine rather than a TPM. The lack of a TPM doesn't suddenly give me any more freedom, although it does come with security downsides.

It is not an us vs. them sort of thing. Don't get me wrong, there are wicked people doing awful things, but I breathe the same air everyone else does. I remember building things 20 years ago with breathless excitement about how it might make the world a better place, and these days I am much quicker to think about how to monetize. Asking a fair price for something isn't evil, but none of us is an island and I don't like how my dreams have changed. I write these things in part to teach myself.

Because many people have fortunately realised that "EOL" is just an excuse to create lots of e-waste and push even more hostile unwanted changes.

The premise of this is to keep the person issuing the tokens and the person accepting them from correlating you.

The issue is when you have more than one service accepting them. You go to use Facebook and WhatsApp but they're both Meta so you present the same unblinded signature to both services and now your Facebook and WhatsApp accounts are correlated against your will. And they have a network that does the same thing, so you go to use a third party service and they require you to submit your unblinded signature to Meta which allows them to correlate you everywhere.

Example: I’m perfectly fine with my Touch ID sensor having a crypto-paired link to my SOC so that someone can’t swap in a malware-sensor at a border checkpoint; I also don’t want my device (or websites) to be able to discriminate against me installing my own homemade sensor. What that looks like in practice is close to what we have now, but not quite there yet — and is definitely not ‘no crypto-pairing at all’, as a ban on key material would enforce.

Example: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/july/information-sovereignty

1. Most people don't write.

2. The people who write are not always competent.

3. The people who write often have an agenda, too.

What's the consequence of that? Imagine what the politicians receive: tons of messages of people complaining, most of which are factually wrong. What to do then? How to know who is right? It's genuinely hard.

EDIT: please write here: https://european-union.europa.eu/contact-eu/write-us_en

I think it's an error to demand the alternatives be as good-- that might not even always be possible. But even if they're less good they're usually still better than anything we could have imagined decades ago-- they're good enough to use.

And that should be enough because we shouldn't consider handing control of ourselves to third parties to be an acceptable choice at all.

Sucks that they have a hard problem like that. Taking away everyone's freedom to exercise ownership of their general purpose computing devices and destroying online anonymity shouldn't be the answer (or, at least, we shouldn't stand for it). Maybe they can spend some of their billions in revenue on it.

Defense is depth actually works. It's better security to require a dedicated device to make it harder to commit fraud. This is why credit cards became a secure device instead of just being a magnetic strip.

Failed to mention this but part of the reason for this is that even after getting past CAPTCHA and creating an account, spam bots in online communities have always had to pass a sort of informal ongoing Turing test to not get outed as a bot by human users and banned. In the past, that would happen almost instantly as soon as the bot posted anything. Now they can often go undetected by even human mods for a long time, maybe even indefinitely.

Say your example: a user generates a pub/priv keypair locally and shares the public one with the government. How does the government know you’re rightfully sending the ID? How does the user know what they are sending? Can the app/website/tool/person at post office they are using to generate+store+send the public key be trusted by the user? How can the government give trust to the user that this tool/person can be trusted?

And there we have attestation again. Or walled app stores, or certification as we have for physical services.

I imagine the way to do this effectively would be to get some well-regarded infosec firms to audit both OSes (from source as much as possible), and also compile lists of vulnerabilities found, fixed, not-fixed, etc. over time. Then you need a witness who can explain all of it in a way that's accessible to and likely to sway a jury.

A difference is being drawn between HN users who are interested in tech, and the everyone else. Most of humanity has little interest in Tech, and would rather spend their time on other things.

This also means they are less aware of ways to keep themselves safe, or less on top of whatever current threat is sweeping through the internet.

After multiple interactions on this site, I can say with some confidence that the average HN commenter does not have the same experience with technology that the average user does.

This divergence is resulting in different priorities and conversations.

I want a pony! A legitimate desire. So it's okay if I rifle through your underwear drawer in case there are any ponies I could take?

Requiring there be a physical phone is a speedbump at best ( https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/05/12/13/403C0D44000005... ) and so de-anonymizing every person using the internet by attaching them to a device and allowing google to track them is not sufficient, nor is the privacy loss necessary for the kind of improvement they could realistically hope to achieve.

But most over even if the panopticon were highly effective and even if were the only option to achieve that end we should still reject it because it's wrong.

The frog is slowly being boiled so that people start to accept things which would be unthinkable in the past. Whoever refuses to bend nowadays sounds hyperbolic or insane, but I'm just using the "absolute temperature" here, you know...

> Neither of these situations are related to any so-called spyware. The fact that Google is involved here had to do with the fact that they are a trusted party for folks to rely on to ensure the desired properties are being met, nothing more.

They're NOT fullfilling that purpose here - read the post, insecure devices with Google Mobile Spyware pass that, while GrapheneOS doesn't. Yes, Google is trusted to ensure these security/ratelimiting properties are met, but instead uses/abuses that trust to ensure their anticompetitive business goals are met. Google is not an independent attestation authority and should not be treated as such, what Google is doing here should be (and most likely already is) illegal.

> Alternatively, Google could trust Graphene and everyone who already trusts Google would inherit such trust.

While far from perfect, that would be better, since we'll then only rely on having their hardware (legitimate business) and not their adware/spyware preinstalled with elevated privileges (illegitimate business, illegal monopoly).

The reason it's hard to boot up a secure social network (such as Signal) is the handshake for (re)identifying people. Signal makes a ton of conceits here (the UX essentially asks people to assume phone numbers are securely held) in the name of low friction and it's why they grew so fast. The "real" secure social networks are essentially too difficult to get real adoption because they don't make these conceits around phone numbers, and demand real key exchanges.

But if you had a L1 set of private and public keys the government works to maintain and defend, the L2 social networks like Signal (or banks, or markets, whatever) can do this cheap and easily.

Oh my god. It's 2026, and we're still repeating the "I trust Apple/Google/Microsoft enough to resist the government" spiel.

Hardware attestation is a surveillance mechanism. If China was enforcing the same rule, you would immediately identify it as a state-driven deanonymization effort. But when the US does it, you backpedal and suggest that it could be implemented safely in a hypothetical alternate reality. Do you want to live in a dystopia?

The surveillance of the future will be powered by the things we produce today. If the accepted algorithms leave cookies those cookies will be used tracked and monitized. The bad argument is the forced verification to do things on the internet. Making that start at the hardware is a lock in thats not okay. Business will always own the services and making standards that trade our practical liberty for the sake of security is a very compromised position in my opinion.

And it does start with the age verification, followed by id checks, etc. Its compromising precisely because no lines are drawn and no rights to privacy are codified in law. Without guiderails the worse path will likely be taken for maximum profit

Oh hell you do! Google profit comes from ADS! It's for their profit to surveil and track and deanonymize TO SELL ADS.

...But there is always at least one hacker.

The issue with hardening DRM is that at the core it's hard to protect against an adversary that with physical access to the device that keeps the very secret. From the vendor perspective, the very customer paying you is your potential enemy.

That means that the root of trust isn't itself protected with cryptography. Instead, it relies on security-through-obscurity, Faraday cages, fuses, anti-tampering and lots of glue. And it's a numbers game if there are thousands of different devices, potentially with different flaws while your adversaries are hidden among billions of customers.

There is still a gap between the hacker and main-stream availability, though: laws and legalism, like DMCA that penalize disclosing how the obfuscation and all work.

We understand that, as the saying goes, if you're not paying for something then you are the product.

But less technical people don't consider that, and don't have hoards of technical friends to convince them otherwise. They just think: they using the product, so they're the user, right? We know that's true but it's not the same thing as customer. Most people don't have that distinction in their head.

It's even partially true that Google does want to do things that attracts and retains users, because that's a prerequisite for selling them to advertisers. In my experience, that's an upper bound on the amount of thought most non-technical people would give it.

I think you're right that they are incompetent. The point is not to make them understand it, but rather to make them see that enough people care. The problem is that most people don't write, so the politicians don't see that they care. Same thing for companies. How many GrapheneOS users say "well when it stops working, I just move to another service, and if there is none, then I live without the service entirely". That way the companies never see that there is a need.

As long as this is in Google's hands, they can abuse it to control the market.

That said, Play Integrity accepting GrapheneOS would be a step forward, but they will never do it, because then other vendors might also want to pass attestation without preloading Google apps.

> Most of the thread seems to be a call for attestation to die, which feels impractical and unachievable.

I disagree, and I expect GrapheneOS devs do, too. Hardware attestation is a new thing, that isn't even really here yet. It absolutely can and should meet its demise.

BART (San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit), as a real world example, recently installed "evasion-proof" fare gates, and observed a 90% drop in vandalism-related maintenance expense. An overwhelming majority of fare evaders are not vandals, but apparently nearly all vandals were fare evaders. Bayes' theorem in action.

I don't have any data to back this up, but my sense is that attestation is an analogous situation.

In other words, banks and governments and other such institutions have noticed (and they probably do have data to back this up) that very few of their customers use "unapproved" devices and a very large majority of fraud comes from "unapproved" devices. They view banning unapproved devices as a high-ROI means to reduce fraud.

So, any argument predicated on "attestation is not security" is doomed to fail, just like saying "most fare-evaders aren't vandals". Yes, most people running GrapheneOS aren't trying to commit bank fraud, but the banks don't care about that if nearly 100% of fraudsters are using unapproved devices.

Yes, those AI startups can also buy cheap Android phones at scale, but it's a bit harder because they'll pay for stuff that their bots have no use for (a screen, a battery, a 5G radio, software, branding, distribution, customer support etc).

Not my preference, but they seem so far ahead of other ROMs right now that I use it still.

I do believe people have built and installed it on other devices without too much trouble, but I don't think that'll ever be supported.

It's a bit odd that Europe prioritizes American big-business interests I guess? Idk, as an American it does seem kinda like an odd choice.

But how are you preventing multiple services from using the same value for service_domain_name because they're cooperating to correlate your use?

There is also the problem that most external hardware is less secure than things like Apple's SEP. (But on the other hand, probably more secure than the long tail of cheap Android phones, which use virtualization rather than real hardware.)

Most banks in Belgium (e.g. Bancontact, Wero, Pom) or Sweden (Swish, was renting ice skates with it just this winter) have their own system but typically only nationals use that. It's still enough for shops to get instant payments without those US cards issuers.

TL;DR: yes and it's wrong, but also IBAN works.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/apple-...

I don't want to hear about how this isn't Apple's fault. This isn't the big bad orange man forcing Apple to act against its will; it's a business arrangement between Apple and the president. He gets censorship, they get a weaker EU.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/defe...

Most of the other big tech companies make their revenue from other companies paying them to leverage the influence they have over their users. So they are not constrained in the same way.

I believe that most Googlers are pretty aligned with the principles of the HN crowd, but Google the machine is not.

You might of. But there was a percentage of players turned away by cheaters or even just had a bad experience one day because of one. At scale this can cause a bad experience for a ton of players so trying to stop as many cheaters as possible does matter.

>Why do I need to compromise my hardware

You don't have to compromise anything. In fact it is optimal to have the system be as secure as possible that way cheats can't mess with the game.

>How do old boomershooter communities tackle cheaters?

By limiting the rate of new players. This goes against the wishes of games who want to achieve massive growth.

>When and why do methods that work on a social graph fail or necessitate anticheat?

If people provided IDs that could work too instead of anticheat, but usually people do not want to do that just to play a game. It adds friction to the onboarding process.

A lot of gaming migrated to consoles for this reason. They have secure remote attestation implemented properly. Accusing winners of cheating doesn't work there, and it's obvious why that results in happier and healthier gaming communities.

An old account with typical activity patterns can be extended some level of trust. If you sign up for an email address and immediately send a message with 100 recipients in CC, you're probably a spammer, so you get blocked. If you've used the account for years, ehh it's probably invitations to your high-school reunion or a donation drive for your Church, let's let this one through.

You can only extend this level of trust if you prevent your gullible users from constantly getting hacked; 2FA is one way to do that.

Also, you're overestimating the fees. Few apps or services hit the 30% threshold or stay there for long (the fee for subscriptions drops in the second year).

The real problem IMHO is Apple taking a significant amount out of developer pay checks. Users are fine. The impact is on developers.

99% of the payment activity I do on my phone (buying retail goods, travel arrangements, paying invoices) has no additional cost.

Until we have a real way to meaningfully process natural language (I have a serious idea for that, but that's another conversation), we won't be able to automate content filtration. The next best thing is ironically similar to what we came here to complain about: attestations in a web of trust. If everything we bother to read is tied to a user identity (which can be anonymous), we can filter out content from any user identity that is generally agreed to be unwelcome. The traditional work of moderation can be replaced by collaborative categorization of both content and publishers. Any identity whose published content is too burdensome to categorize can simply be filtered out completely. The core difference is that there are no "special" users: anyone can make, edit, and publish a filter list. Authority itself is replaced by every participant's choice of filter. Moderated spaces are replaced by the most popular intersection of lists. Identity is verified by the attestation of other identities, based on their experience participating with you.

I don't know about that. There are plenty of retirees who want nothing to do with this "modern technology" while still having large amounts of retirement savings that the bank very much wants at their institution.

Small (and for that matter large) business owners also have a tendency to have complicated financial situations and correspondingly want to deal with them using a computer screen rather than a phone, and that's another class of customers banks are certainly not interested in driving away.

Meanwhile I take it you're implying that the people who don't have a smartphone to do banking on are undesirable poors, but those are the people who do use a phone for banking, because bargain bin Android phones are available for ~$15 and that's the extent of what they can afford for an internet device.

Whereas the people using the likes of GrapheneOS might well be a small percentage of the customer base but they're still generally the class of customers the banks like, i.e. tech people with upper middle class financial situations.

Of course, I think the effective purpose of google's attest feature is to invade everyone's privacy which we should assume is part of why they don't use privacy preserving techniques. Privacy preserving techniques could still be abused, however.

Maybe they're even worse for humanity because they make bad schemes more palatable. I think right now I lean towards no: the public in general will currently tolerate the most invasive forms of these systems, so our issue isn't that they're being successfully resisted and the resistance might be diminished by a scheme which is still bad but less bad.

To me, it seems like just the right amount of friction, and user expectations can work in favor of privacy here: People will hopefully refuse to tap their ID on their phone for a service where they want to remain completely anonymous, even if the protocol technically might support anonymous assertions.

The reality is that there is software dependent on the user being unable to modify it. This safeguards the server against fraudulent users.

This nonsense mainly exists only because the operating system is unable to attest that it the app is secure and the right app is what is running.

>It's their computer, it should run whatever software they want.

I agree, but companies shouldn't be forced to match cheaters with legitimate players. Cheaters just can't secretly be cheating.

Condescendingly and incorrectly assuming that others think that corruption is impossible is kinda rude and also dodges attempts at correcting the corruption.

Anytime anyone criticises the EU here, you will get downvoted even after trying to warn the EU defenders that they are not our friends at all.

I was asking for evidence about the EU digital ID wallets about what the "disinformation" was around it 3 years ago [0] and not a single link of it was given.

At this point, being an EU defender and supporting the "open web" are incompatible since you will be using your EU digital identity wallet [1] with your phone to login to your bank and the internet will push age verification with it, locking you out if you don't sign up.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36105002

[1] https://eudi.dev/latest/

Fair enough. It might not be consequential for you, the fact remains Apple took 30% of every dollar you spent on the app store. This, after you paid a premium for Apple hardware. I'm happy the walled garden with a toll is worth it for you. All I'm saying is, others might not agree with that if they knew. Just look at the push back again tariffs as an example.

Is that really so? Does the average iPhone user actually factor the app store tax into their decision to purchase the device? Or do they just assume that is just how all software works because they have no exposure to software ecosystems outside the iPhone app store

This is the narrative for us in developed nations, but the majority of users today are people who were in developing countries and got a mid-tier smartphone to chat with friends and do banking with the same values as Apple users.

You aren't banned. You just have to use a secure device. It's like saying that a store banned you because they stopped taking checks and started requiring a credit card since they are more secure and harder to commit fraud with. As a person you didn't lose any freedom. Freedom does not mean someone has to be able to force their will on another person. That sounds like the opposite of freedom to me.

>What makes you think they will give us this magical hypervisor capability?

It's not magical. Look at Windows WSL2 which already works like that.

I don’t believe intrusive anti-cheating is required for online gaming to flourish. But even if it was, I would give up Elite Dangerous, for which I have bough a VR setup and build my cockpit, before I give up full control over my PC.

The latter is absolutely a thing where customers can (and should IMO) push back hard.

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

> [...] the easiest way to develop components of GNU was to do it on a Unix system, and replace the components of that system one by one. But they raised an ethical issue: whether it was right for us to have a copy of Unix at all.

> Unix was (and is) proprietary software, and the GNU Project's philosophy said that we should not use proprietary software. But, applying the same reasoning that leads to the conclusion that violence in self defense is justified, I concluded that it was legitimate to use a proprietary package when that was crucial for developing a free replacement that would help others stop using the proprietary package.

> But, even if this was a justifiable evil, it was still an evil. Today we no longer have any copies of Unix, because we have replaced them with free operating systems. If we could not replace a machine's operating system with a free one, we replaced the machine instead.

Still leave open the the question of RMS personally using SunOS (as opposed to some other proprietary unix) but I think at this point I'd just go dig up very old GNU sources for evidence of that, but I suspect your question was primarily about RMS' ethical reasoning which is well answered above.

A technology squarely and 100% percent intended to give people other than the end user the ability to sleep soundly at night knowing those dastardly end users can't muck with their software (the non-end user) on their (the end user's) devices is only a tool for the authoritarian minded. Sorry mate, but if you're sitting here thinking it's useful and neutral, you are part of the problem, because you're eyes-wide-shutting the fact the only people gaining from the technology are those that already have a terrible trustworthy-ness record in terms of not abusing the sovereignty of another person's machine.

Show me an industry that ships source code, and manuals with all software that runs on the device, along with hardware manuals and the manuals to write your own drivers and doesn't use hardware primitives to enforce their business models over you, then we can talk about an industry where "trusted computing" might be neutral to the end user. History has not seen this relationship bore out, however.

The "Trust" in "Trusted Computing" has only ever been realistically unidirectional in terms of favoring entrenched industry players. As a rule of thumb, if the primary benefactors of a feature are over 90% legal fictions; your feature ain't neutral. It's hostile to humanity. Period.

That the laziest of us don't mind and the worst of us want something is not a respectable argument for anything, ever.

Kier Starmer wants to protect children? He put Mandelson into government even though he was mates with Epstein. Doesn't sound like someone who cares about protecting children to me.

Rinse and repeat for any politician or political side, they are all only a step or two away from someone who's done something horrible to children. It doesn't matter to me whether I really think it's true or not (though in the example I've used, that is my opinion, who employs someone like that and really cares about children?) but *it does not matter*. This is an us versus them situation, and they are making proponents of freedom out to be criminals at best, paedos at worst. They can take some of their own medicine, and anyone who parrots their line. If ad hominem is the name of the game then let's play, I'm on firmer ground than they are.

That's not what the parent was saying. Most people don't have any opinion whatsoever on sideloading. You can go confirm this for yourself by asking a Mac or PC owner how scary it is. Most of them will respond that they genuinely never thought about it, not that they're afraid to consider it. To these people, it's a normal feature of their device that you could never remove.

The parent is lamenting that people don't care about this technology - Client Side Scanning, hardware attestation, Push notification surveillance - all of it is enabled not because of fear, but apathy.

> And they shouldn't have to. Yet they live in a world where they do.

This is fearmongering logic that doesn't really defend the App Store. Putting your faith in a centralized software auditor also requires you to pay attention and stay abreast of scams. It's just a different exploit chain to deliver the same payloads: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...

Oh but that is far incomplete a specification. What security purposes? Who are we protecting, from whom? On whose behalf does the OS isolates applications from each other? If it’s on mine, then you bet I absolutely want the ability to lift that isolation in specific cases. It’s my computer, I decide when and how the rules are broken.

But the moment I have that (a computer and OS that really work for me), I lose the ability to prove that I don’t. If I play an online game, being in control means the game company is not, and I can’t prove to them I’m not cheating.

I’m not aware of any third alternative.

So optional that everything that can require it will require it. Games want it because cheating. Streaming services want it because piracy. Banks want it because fraud. Web sites want it because advertising. Governments want it because encryption and anonymity.

> Services have no obligation to check attestation or use it as a hard signal to block people.

They will do so of their own free will.

> All previously existing freedom is still possible on your computer.

You're "free" on your paperweight of a computer that can't do anything useful because it can't interface with the rest of society. Maybe one day even ISPs will reject clients that can't pass attestation. Can't even join the internet if you "tampered" with your machine. Such is life in the land of the free.

These are true. They also don't have much to do with what I replied to, which was about "the propaganda efforts driving a large amount of far right nationalists into violent uprising."

You're simply misinformed if you believe that Russia-originated propaganda has played a bigger role in the rise of right-wing extremism in Europe over the last 10 years than Rupert Murdoch (and yes, I'm aware News Corp's assets are all in English), the Anglo manosphere including the likes of Andrew Tate, and Meta, Google (Youtube) and X intentionally designing their algorithms for outrage/engagement at all costs.

Russia wishes it would have as much influence as the above.

DMCA is abused every. single. time.

Source:

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/861...

https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eu-parliament-blocks-m...

It's also kind of weird to propose it as an asymmetry. Google's parent company spends around $4M on lobbying in the US:

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...

That's around $0.01 per capita. Your per capita contribution for individuals to out-spend Google on lobbying is two cents.

You are an HN user of some age. You might even be the family IT person. You may well be changing the experience of people in your orbit.

In contrast, my grandfather’s android phone had somehow 3 different SMS apps, all of which must have tried to remove the default app.

I doubt you think some chap living in rural India, has good data hygiene and habits.

(One argues that since you own both of them, you should simply set up the two servers yourself with a key of your own choosing, asymmetric or otherwise, and then restrict physical access to them.)

I can perhaps agree that the idea of SB can be good, but it was designed (and is used) in a bad way. Just look at how many distros do not support SB.

Honestly, if the only way to secure your banking system is by locking down users' devices, there is something really bad going on at your end, security-wise. Your system should be secure even without locking down user hardware.

What I'm claiming is that banks have the freedom of offering their customers 2FA other than smartphone apps.

> Do you even have a phone that does not support hardware attestation or is all this posturing about something hypothetical?

All the phones I own, including my daily driver, run some flavor of Debian. None of them support hardware attestation.

I'm in Europe, bound by PSD2, and own a couple of cheap, certified chip-and-TAN devices so I can do banking.

I don't think that's even true, unless you're using "trust" as a synonym for centralization.

Suppose you had actual competing app stores. Google doesn't control which ones you use; you can use Google Play or F-Droid or Amazon or all three at once and anyone can make a new one. You could get Android apps through Apple's store and vice versa. And then you choose who you trust; maybe you only trust F-Droid and Apple and you think Google and Amazon stink. Maybe you install 90% of your apps through F-Droid but are willing to install your bank app on GrapheneOS from Google Play because you trust your bank and you also trust Google enough to at least verify that the bank app is actually from your bank.

This is the thing that doesn't help the incumbents, right? The bank and the customer both trust Google to distribute the bank app but Google isn't allowed to prevent the user from trusting F-Droid for other apps as a condition for getting the bank app from Google Play. You can have trust without centralization.

https://seeingmachines.com/understanding-driver-drowsiness-a...

Since July 2022, Driver Drowsiness and Attention Warning (DDAW) systems have been required in all new vehicle types within the European Union (EU). They will be mandatory for all newly registered vehicles from July 2024.

I'd agree if you wrote that most users don't understand security at all, that users aren't really given the tools they need to maintain security, or that exploits are designed to target people's vulnerabilities. You seem to be blaming the victims of motivated (sometimes) advanced actors. Even serious engineers have been phished for NPM publishing access.

Do you have an example? And was this a binding or non-binding vote?

Suggesting politicians are corrupt without any evidence will make that worse. If people think their politicians are corrupt they will further disengage with the political process, which will ensure there's even less pressure on politicians to take action on niche issues like this.

I think it is far more likely that it is a lack of knowledge and incompetence. I am pretty sure that the majority of Parliament members, Council members and maybe even Commission members do not even know that there are viable alternatives outside Google (certified) Android and iOS. So they try to regulate their app stores, etc. instead.

I hope that with digital sovereignty becoming more important, there will be more interer in alternative mobile operating systems.

Too many people see something they don't like, imply a nefarious motivation without evidence, then expect everyone to agree that it is corruption.

If there is corruption, show the evidence. Otherwise, be honest and state that you don't agree with something. If you want to persuade people, back up your claims with verifiable evidence without falling back to nebulous claims of corruption.

Diplomatic status tax free too.

If it's Apple or Google let us know in the US because we have laws to go after them for acting corruptly in other countries.

Vaguely asserting corruption without specifics or even naming the perpetrators isn't "taboo", it's just poor form and silly. Letting such vague accusations float without evidence, motive, or even people to blame, leads to nothing good, and only vague distrust, which itself enables corruption. It leads to people believing there's no way to know the truth, therefore helplessness, and results in fascism like in Russia.

Lazy cynicism is itself a form of corruption of one's own mind.

That's my business, not theirs. If my password gets stolen, that's my problem, not my bank's. Same deal if my passkey gets stolen. They're welcome to try to educate me on good security hygiene if they want, but what hardware I use to secure my credentials is not something they should get to decide.

Passkeys are non-phishable. That's part of their schtick. I'm not a huge passkey fan myself, but this is a real benefit.

How do you figure? Isn't just having the digital ID be signed by a key belonging to the issuer good enough for that?

You're like the kid showing up to a test without a pencil.

It's ridiculous for you to suggest that an advanced AI model needs to run on your budget 7 year old graphics card that is already out of date for even today's gaming. My parents spent $2500 on a computer in 1995 and that was a 166Mhz Pentium 1. If they spent that money today it would be $5261. Think of what you can get for amount of money. Then you're over here trying to say a budget graphics card needs to somehow compete with the bleeding edge of computer innovation.

You do, in fact, need to spend money on appropriate gear if you expect to participate.

Spending humongous amount of money to get machine that'll felt obsolete in 2 years? I don't know.

I use a handheld card reader with a display as a 2FA for my bank transactions. It shows me the transaction and, after I confirm, sends a TAN to the bank. It is not a general-purpose device but a certified, tamper-evident/-resistant black box that does just that one thing.

> Meanwhile, we could educate people against common scams.

There's a million ways you can get scammed, no matter how many hours of training you've had.

It’s definitely something I would want, but as you hinted at yourself, if there’s no remote attestation, the user can just use a software TPM. So, a company using passkeys has two choices:

- Enforce DBC with remote attestation. This raises the security floor, but enforces device vendor lock-in, and prevent users from selecting unapproved, but potentially even more secure, devices.

- Do not enforce DBC. This lets users use less secure virtualised devices, but there’s no vendor lock-in, and those who want may use the latest most secure device ever.

Which alternative is appropriate is now a social & political problem. My opinion is that for general computers released to the general public, remote attestation is never legitimate. Even with the best of intentions it is fundamentally uncompetitive, and they make it way too easy to go full Evil Corp. Specialised appliances and employees however are different stories.

---

Anecdotally, I have worked on TPM provisioning a couple years back, and I had to warn my hierarchy that doing it the way they specified, the TPM could be impersonated: we checked the signature of the certificate, but failed to compare the certificate root with the manufacturer’s keys. My boss didn’t believe me, until I showed the production code happily provisioned a software TPM, without detecting the impersonation. (Actually, he didn’t believe me even then, I had to go over him to the security specialist.)

This was totally a case of remote attestation. But I believe this particular case was legitimate, because it was a specialised appliance (electric car charging station), that was meant to process payments, similar to a gas station terminal.

$600K+ went to kickbacks, er… “lobbying”, and thorn was hit with some pretty nasty scandals involving sex crimes.

Broad trust is required in lots of situations. Hardware attestation, financial clearing networks, or even physical supply chains. Ie, you have multiple independent parties who need mutual, verifiable trust to operate. Establishing that requires transaction costs like audits, SLAs, legal liability, and cryptographic integration. The economics don't work for 30 different players to cross-verify each other. So, we have oligopolies...

I generally lean towards that too, including for this issue. But we do need to own up to it. Explicitly ask ourselves, what kind of bad consequences, and how much of them, are we willing to put up with in the name of freedom?

Also, some framings make it difficult: the second someone speaks of protecting the children, all of a sudden freedom becomes secondary. Which leaves two counters, which are logically compatible, but tend to be rhetorically exclusive: denying that this new thing will actually protect the children; and asserting that the protection it allegedly provides is not worth the loss of freedom.

The second one is a hard sell, which is why we so often revert to the first one. Take age verification: sure it won’t stop determined underage teens from seeing images of bunny girls. But it will deter some of them. And assuming images of bunny girls are bad for teen health, it means age verification does "protect the children". A little. And voilà, we’ve destroyed the argument that age verification does absolutely nothing, mass surveillance for the win!

> […] which I don't think is an acceptable thing to do to mentally sound adults.

I haven’t thought of the psychological damage over-protectiveness may cause. That’s a bloody good point.

> There's plenty of competition in the banking space,

Given how people in some countries complain that it’s difficult to find a bank that doesn’t require a locked down phone for online payments, I would argue perhaps not plenty enough. I totally agree though that for any bank to require one of two OSes is not good, and for this reason would be tempted to outlaw such requirements (thus reducing corporate freedom, but I care more about individual freedom).

> some sort of software freedom law guaranteeing users the right to modify software running on devices they own.

That is very tempting indeed. Do understand though that such a law comes very close to mandating Free Software everywhere: for this right to be effective, users need access to the source code, and be allowed to let some professional modify that code for them. Any mass produce piece of hardware would effectively have to publish the full code source of their drivers for all to see. I would absolutely love that, but NVDIA would likely lose their marbles over this.

The story perfectly exemplifies how little democratic control the public has over what corporations do in and do to their community.

> Smartphone HW attestation is better in every way

They're still prone to side-channel attacks like SPECTRE. Crypto wallets are practically immune because they're air-gapped.

[edit] I just realised that's Mike Hearn of early BTC fame. I suppose he would know what a crypto wallet is.

Sometimes I see people captured by the train station unable to check out. They usually find someone with a charger but technically the formula is to fine them for not having a ticket. Then one might still need to buy a ticket to continue the journey. (bring cash)

Phones are usually empty when things [already] aren't going as planned.

In a functioning democracy, politicians represent the people. Meaning that some politicians will be on one end of the spectrum, and some will be on the other. If there are no politicians you disagree with, then probably you are not living in a functioning democracy.

> despite strong pushback

That is my point: look at the pushback! It's many people with very different opinions saying everything and its contrary, with a lot of technically incorrect takes.

Do you realise that when you say "they must be corrupt, because they don't share my opinion, and my opinion is absolutely the best", and you are not the only one saying that, then either everybody saying it should share your opinion or at least some of you are wrong, right?

Everybody wants to believe that they are right and everybody else is wrong, and therefore everybody else is either stupid or corrupt. I want to believe that sometimes, the world is actually nuanced, and people may have different opinions. I may have a strong opinion (and knowledge) about hardware attestation, but it doesn't mean that every politician does and hence has to be corrupt in order to not agree with me.

According to the dictionary, corruption is "dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers)." If this isn't corruption, I don't know what is.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corruption

Also,

> I disagree that we are because all politicians are corrupt.

I repeat, I never said this. There are politicians like Ron Wyden or Bernie Sanders that oppose digital surveillance and control.