It's about making sure you can't bypass systems like this-- or rather, that when you use your rights under the GPL to remove this privacy invading crud or just otherwise modify your software you'll be broadly banned from interacting with third party services.
It's trusted in the sense that it lets the person with power (the root of trust) trust the hardware.
That person just isn't you.
It's a way to enforce power relations by making the hardware respect them. From this perspective, it's pretty evident how it degrades adversarial interoperability, which is about ignoring power relations to build your own system.
* LP had zero objections to merging this commit into systemd [1];
* Amutable CEO is confident they have a very robust path to revenue [2];
* It is Facebook that pushes age verification laws all around the world;
I sense that his new startup is exactly what we are afraid of: a way to prevent reverting of these patch and then actually enforce the upcoming mandatory KYC to use the computer.
> What other benefit is there to remote attestation?
There certainly are benefits and they are huge. Like, I can make sure my servers are untampered, I would love that.
Problem is, that technology, once unveiled, will be inevitably used for surveillance. Like, online KYC required to use a computer and you cannot patch this shit out because your Linux build is attested and no banking or government website will let you log in unless remote attestation passes.
> There certainly are benefits and they are huge. Like, I can make sure my servers are untampered, I would love that.
But who decides what is untampered and can you still modify stuff yourself. I don't want my servers to be immutable for example. And only be 'allowed' to do what the vendor wants me to.
But anyway, that is not really remote attestation. That is local attestation because you can see it on your own server. It's only remote if it attests to someone else.
And yes exactly, the second point is exactly why I hate remote attestation so much. Hope we can hack around it for a while but eventually they will stick that stuff in hardware, I'm sure. That will make it a lot harder.