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0 pointsfuncDropShadow2y ago0 comments

> TC is value neutral so the FSF slurs don't make sense

Trusted computing is often used such that one might think, it implies the user can trust something (his computer). But it is the other way around. A service provider can trust a machine - that a user bought -- to not do what the user wants. That is misleading at best.

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mike_hearn2y ago

There are really only two ways TC is used in practice in today's economy:

1. Clients verifying cloud VMs. The "user" in this case is not the same person as "his" in "his computer".

2. Games consoles being verified by PS/Xbox online services. In this case the users are in effect verifying each other, because part of why they need such tough security is to stop online gaming being wrecked by cheaters.

At a stretch you could talk about credit card chips and the ATM network as (3) but that's far enough away from general computing that it doesn't really count.

In both cases these are firmly pro-consumer use cases. Unless you want to pirate or cheat in gaming of course, but there's plenty of users who don't want to subsidize your fun with their own suffering, so they're happy to rely on TC to stop that. It's a big part of why console gaming dominates PC gaming. It's wrong for the FSF to imply all those people are brainwashed dupes because they have a different value system to Richard Stallman.

funcDropShadowOP2y ago

> There are really only two ways TC is used in practice in today's economy:

Isn't that exactly the case, because the idea of using TC in every PC produced a huge backlash?

mike_hearn2y ago

No, 'fraid not. There was no backlash except amongst a tiny subset of ideologically motivated developers who aren't making the decisions in these companies anyway. See how the big cloud providers all have TC efforts without fuss. Smartphones implement a much less open form of TC too again, devs don't care or welcome it (less piracy), users don't care or welcome it (see how HN threads fill up with praise for Apple's walled garden when it gets discussed). Linux supports all this tech just fine as well.

The reasons it hasn't taken off in desktop PCs are rather complicated and mostly due to patchy hardware support for the use cases that most matter there. It's much harder to implement in a diverse hardware ecosystem because for devs to rely on a new hardware feature that isn't just performance requires a very wide installed base. Intel and AMD never agreed on the right way to do it, and getting device vendors on board was too difficult outside vertically integrated ecosystems like consoles.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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mike_hearn2y ago

There are really only two ways TC is used in practice in today's economy:

1. Clients verifying cloud VMs. The "user" in this case is not the same person as "his" in "his computer".

At a stretch you could talk about credit card chips and the ATM network as (3) but that's far enough away from general computing that it doesn't really count.

funcDropShadowOP2y ago

> There are really only two ways TC is used in practice in today's economy:

Isn't that exactly the case, because the idea of using TC in every PC produced a huge backlash?

mike_hearn2y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse