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Comment by repiret

I agree with all of the articles points except for the first one: TPM and Secure Boot do not reduce user choice or promote state or corporate surveillance. If you want to be able to prevent root kits you need secure boot, and if you want to store secrets that don't need a user password to unlock and can't be stolen by taking apart the computer, you need a TPM; or you need substantially similar alternatives.

I would say that specifically with Secure Boot, Microsoft actually promoted user choice: A Windows Logo compliant PC needs to have Microsoft's root of trust installed by default. Microsoft could have stopped there, but they didn't. A Windows Logo compliant PC _also_ needs a way for users to install their own root of trust. Microsoft didn't need to add that requirement. Sure, there are large corporate and government buyers that would insist on that, but they could convince (without loss of generality) Dell to offer it to them. Instead, Microsoft said all PCs need it, and as a result, anybody who wants to take advantage of secure boot can do so if they go through the bother of installing their own root of trust and signing their boot image.

parent repiret 1 year ago

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