Comment on Google is going ‘all in’ on AI. It’s part of a troubling trend in big tech

• LedgeDrop@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  In regard to Linux users being left out in the cold… how so? Do you think that distros are going to start enforcing attestation? I doubt that it will be a hard requirement for most, even in the next decade or two. It’s an option, yes, but mandatory?

  It does not matter if Linux supports attestation or not, because ultimately the application (or website) will determine if it wants to run on Linux. It’s up to the company developing it’s application or website to determine if they want to support more than windows/Mac.

  Graphene has its own variation of attestation (they cryptographically sign requests with their own key - and not googles), but it requires additional hoops for each application - few companies are willing to do this.

  Attestation is a wet dream for companies. You don’t need DRM (as the OS will enforce it) and you can be certain your competitors/hackers cannot reverse engineer/pirate your code or run the application in an emulator. And the implementation effort to support it, is as simple as “make function call and check the response”.

  Linux will still exist (especially on the server side) and developers will still use it as a desktop machine. However, (as I implied) non-Linux games will stop working, accessing you banks website from linux will be rejected, emulation will cease - it’ll be a corporate paradise… the stocks will go up.

  FWIW, all of my banking apps work just fine with compatibility mode enabled on Graphene.

  Revolut explicitly goes out of their way to not work on Graphene.

  I’ve complained, they don’t care. The bean counters have done their risk calculations and decided that the personal data they collect/mine (and the integrity of that data) is worth more than losing a few graphene users.

  Also, I’m not sure saying it’s inevitable is the right way to go, it certainly won’t make others care about their privacy and security.

  You do have a valid point: giving up after trying nothing won’t help. However, I fear there will need to be “government intervention” to allow hardware and software to be “open for everyone”. I’ll admit my bias in wonder how well governments (of late) are representing the best interests of the people. But, these topics are complicated for even technically inclined people - let alone politicians. And the strawman argument against intervention is always going to be “in the name of security”.

  From my perspective, the writing is on the wall. This apocalyptic future won’t happen over night, but it will be a slow boil over the next 10 years (or so).

  If you’ve got ideas for how to avoid this, I’m all ears.

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