Comment by josephcsible

> I've been a FOSS guy my entire adult life, I wouldn't put my name to something that would enable the kinds of issues you describe.

Until you get acquired, receive a golden parachute and use it when realizing that the new direction does not align with your views anymore.

But, granted, if all you do is FOSS then you will anyway have a hard time keeping evil actors from using your tech for evil things. Might as well get some money out of it, if they actually dump money on you.

Thanks, this would be helpful. I will follow on by recommending that you always make it a point to note how user freedom will be preserved, without using obfuscating corpo-speak or assuming that users don’t know what they want, when planning or releasing products. If you can maintain this approach then you should be able to maintain a good working relationship with the community. If you fight the community you will burn a lot of goodwill and will have to spend resources on PR. And there is only so much that PR can do!

Better security is good in theory, as long as the user maintains control and the security is on the user end. The last thing we need is required ID linked attestation for accessing websites or something similar.

Thanks for the reassurance, the first ray of sunshine in this otherwise rather alarming thread. Your words ring true.

It would be a lot more reassuring if we knew what the business model actually was, or indeed anything else at all about this. I remain somewhat confused as to the purpose of this announcement when no actual information seems to be forthcoming. The negative reactions seen here were quite predictable, given the sensitive topic and the little information we do have.

This is extremely bad logic. The technology of enforcing trusted software is without inherent value good or ill depending entirely on expected usage. Anything that is substantially open will be used according to the values of its users not according to your values so we ought instead to consider their values not yours.

Suppose you wanted to identify potential agitators by scanning all communication for indications in a fascist state one could require this technology in all trusted environments and require such an environment to bank, connect to an ISP, or use Netflix.

One could even imagine a completely benign usage which only identified actual wrong doing alongside another which profiled based almost entirely on anti regime sentiment or reasonable discontent.

The good users would argue that the only problem with the technology is its misuse but without the underlying technology such misuse is impossible.

One can imagine two entirely different parallel universes one in which a few great powers went the wrong way in part enabled by trusted computing and the pervasive surveillance enabled by the capability of AI to do the massive and boring task of analyzing a massive glut of ordinary behaviour and communication + tech and law to ensure said surveillance is carried out.

Even those not misusing the tech may find themselves worse off in such a world.

Why again should we trust this technology just because you are a good person?

that's a silver lining

the anti-user attestation will at least be full of security holes, and likely won't work at all

My thoughts exactly. We're probably witnessing the beginning of the end of linux users being able to run their own kernels. Soon:

- your bank won't let you log in from an "insecure" device.

- you won't be able to play videos on an "insecure" device.

- you won't be able to play video games on an "insecure" device.

And so on, and so forth.