Comment on Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform

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audaxdreik@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Ya boy Richard Stallman agrees and has been saying this for years (although this article is more recentish), 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.

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 …

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