They're basically saying they have no choice but will evaluate better options.

So the follow up question is: Are you going to push the EU & Governments to do the logical thing and start developing, with your tax dollars, the necessary software & hardware to make it into the public domain so they arn't reliant.

Mostly it seems like few people see the need for brining government into software, no matter how much software & hardware are becoming essential utilities.

Why was this decision ever made?

Clearly tailored to the regular normie without technical skills.

Also I recall a discussion on Graphene's forums that DRM ID is not only retained there, but stays the same across profiles.

That means that I ride alone these days. I did not renew my membership this year.

The last time I experienced something like this was when Facebook starting being the only way to participate in certain events. Back when that happened, I simply counted myself as excluded and did other things with my time and money.

One of its first applications anywhere was protecting anti nuclear protestors from government provocateurs.

We could prevent so much fraud of we could only convince the credit card companies to start using it (instead of printing a symmetric secret on the outside of the card).

It's predominantly a force for good. If anything, its a bit anarchical.

What you're noticing is not the leading edge of set of harms brought about by asymmetric cryptography, but rather the late stage of adoption where the bad guys realize that their enemy's sword has had two edges all this time. Every technology that mediates an adversarial relationship goes through this eventually.

With the printing press came temporary freedom followed by intellectual property. So too with radios and the FCC. So too with social media. It's useless to blame the technology. Blame the people.

I’ve written to politicians over the years about technical matters and it’s uniformly either a clearly form response or an inaccurate summation of the technical risks, if I’m been charitable because they don’t understand them either.

At a certain point it begins to feel pointless.

I was referring to the static private key that is stored in the silicon. At any time an application can initiate a license request process using DRM APIs which will elicit an unchangeable HWID from your device. The only protection is that it will be encrypted for an authorized license server private key so collusion may be required (intel agencies almost certainly sourced 'authorized' private keys for themselves). Google or Apple also has the option to authorize keys for themselves. In 'theory' all such keys should be stored in "trusted execution environments" on license servers and not divulge client identities for whatever that's worth: <https://tee.fail>.

To me this is such a bizarre cyberpunk dystopia. Like if we could only send letters and packages to people subscribed to the same private postal service, or drive on roads that had cross-licensing with our brand of car.

Granted, for banking or government-interactions that isn't feasible, but wouldn't it for many other things? It would likely be more expensive given that the work to build something still needs to be done and the cost is distributed among fewer shoulders and the lower complexity since you don't need to build ad-tech doesn't make up for that, but I suppose that's a bit like quality food.

Hardware will be more difficult.

But you can own multiple devices. You can use an approved device specifically for banking or Netflix and whatever device you like for all your other tasks. Maybe you could use an approved device (a Yubikey?) to authenticate your other devices?

Also, governments should be leaning on them to approve more devices.

There's also tons of value in a boot ROM that can't be accidentally erased to add low level DFU routines.

No, you just need to make it illegal to have the bootloader contain hardcoded key material and use it for verifying the code it loads.

Micro is now nano, not amendable to modification, and even if it was theoretically possible, hardware is a super-easy target for legislation.

> Alternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM

If you had the political means to enact such legislation, you could legislate much cleaner and easier ways to deal with the problem.

I find myself saying this a lot but I still can't quite figure our why people keep seeking technical solutions to political problems.

I mean, these things aren't comparable, in some limited cases the naive approach might help but insisting on it while neglecting political action is worse than doing nothing.

GrapheneOS is still small and appears honest. Despite them being in the right in this fight and them deserving our support... We gotta keep them honest in the long run!

I don't think there's any way to tell if a small company will keep their values if they succeed in getting enough market share.

Google doesn't certify devices basing on security, so that kind of attestation should have no place in banking/government apps, otherwise it just enforces the duopoly

Let’s see then if they really want to collect all our information all the time. Right now, they take it and handle it irresponsibly because they’re free from consequences.

By "they" you mean FAANG and the FTC, right? Telling the EU to respect the Open Web does nothing to protect users if you continue to approve the export of attested hardware. America is deliberately abetting authoritarian schemes.

It's basically those people who can manufacture chips having technological supremacy over the rest of the humanity.

When did Https ever hurt you? That's built on asymmetric cryptography. Wherever you see the word "secure" it's basically shorthand for asymmetric cryptography.

Https

Ssh

Sftp

E2ee

It's asymmetric cryptography all the way.

But even bigger problem is that institutions designed to prevent this from happening are not doing their job.

Thousands security service and civil servants take their wages and look the other way.

It only makes sense they'll prioritize big-business interests over those of the common folk.

funny how you think the solution to people imposing their will on you is to impose your will on others

also, the solution you propose wouldn't work because signed firmware

The most damning part about Google Play Integrity is that, as the thread states, that Google lets devices pass that are full of known security holes, whereas they do not allow what is very likely to be the most secure mobile OS. This shows that they only use it as a method to shut out competitors and to control Android device manufacturers to pre-install Google software like Chrome (otherwise their devices do not get certified and won't pass Play Integrity).

IANAL, but anti-competition lawyers/bodies should have a field day with this, but nobody seems to care. Worse, the EU, despite their talk of sovereignty adds Play Integrity-based to their own age verification reference app.

I recommend every EU citizen, also if you do not use GrapheneOS, to file a DMA complaint about this anti-competitive behavior:

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/contact-us-eu-citiz...

Also, every time this comes up, @ the relevant EU bodies, commissioners and your government's representative on Mastodon, etc.

What I took away from the thread is that they're against services forcing attestation in general, and also pointing out that Play Integrity isn't about security, but rather about control, because Google could trivially make it work with GrapheneOS (which is more secure than any other Android OS on the market) but they won't.

They want apps to add their signing hashes manually just for them and don't want to join projects that would aggregate and act as a database or certificate authority.

It's a problem in search of a solution.

There must be a dozen other ways smarter people can think of but identity verification kills profits so the smart people don't work on them IMO. It's more profitable for social media to be an astroturfed shithole. It's more profitable to remove control of your PC.

A nonprofit business could do this if backed by all existing dotcom and bitcoin billionaires. But they’d all want to profit from it, so either non-profit (NGO) or governmental it is.

Fun fact: this is already a core function of USPS. They serve as an identity verification hub for both US passports and their informed delivery and PO box services. They just have a human-dependent process rather than an identity-generator booth. So they’d be perfectly positioned to take your ID, hand you an attestation request QR code, and get your identity-signatures on it — without being able to reverse-engineer your biometrics from those signatures, but still being able to detect gross variances when someone else tries to lie about being you in a future verification.

Anyways, none of this will likely ever happen, but the rich tech folks could make it happen at any time if they cared to. Instead we get THE ORB which is doing retinas as a for-profit without auditable artifacts or hardware. Sigh.

Anytime anyone criticises the EU here, you will get downvoted even after trying to warn the EU defenders that they are not our friends at all.

I was asking for evidence about the EU digital ID wallets about what the "disinformation" was around it 3 years ago [0] and not a single link of it was given.

At this point, being an EU defender and supporting the "open web" are incompatible since you will be using your EU digital identity wallet [1] with your phone to login to your bank and the internet will push age verification with it, locking you out if you don't sign up.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36105002

[1] https://eudi.dev/latest/

It's a bit odd that Europe prioritizes American big-business interests I guess? Idk, as an American it does seem kinda like an odd choice.

You might need to the sentence again since I was quite clear who I was talking about:

"EU government"

"banking apps"

...and everyone else who benefits from pushing "digital payments, ID, age verification, etc." that will use "Apple's App Attest and Google's Play Integrity" APIs.

It isn't that hard to understand.

I feel that we need a better political consensus on a free society that puts the monopoly of force in the hand of democratic legitimate forces. I currently feel that all digital violence lies in the hands of a few corporations. And at the same time there is politician that like this because they can through this proxy can indirectly execute control without any political legitimacy. Sorry, I do not believe in markets as guarantees for freedom. I have read too much dystopian sci-fi for that.

Example: I’m perfectly fine with my Touch ID sensor having a crypto-paired link to my SOC so that someone can’t swap in a malware-sensor at a border checkpoint; I also don’t want my device (or websites) to be able to discriminate against me installing my own homemade sensor. What that looks like in practice is close to what we have now, but not quite there yet — and is definitely not ‘no crypto-pairing at all’, as a ban on key material would enforce.

But if Google did support third-party attestation, would the GrapheneOS Foundation be happy? Most of the thread seems to be a call for attestation to die, which feels impractical and unachievable. But "Google could use it to permit GrapheneOS for Play Integrity if that was actually about security" seems to be the real ask, and that seems reasonable and achievable. If that's true, I think it would’ve been more effective to lead with that and focus on it.

The cynic in me suspects it's a way of slowly but methodically eradicating online anonymity and thus anonymity in general.

End users should be authenticated so you can prove you're selling real eyeballs in the demographic mix you claimed to marketers and to provide lip service for the 'think of the children' regulators.

But anyone who's paying for ads should have as little friction as possible to dropping money and spewing garbage.

I'm surprised nobody is looking at some sort of "corporations are people" angle here-- we've attested the device ownership, but it's owned by the Lorem Ipsum Corporation, which is a legal/demographic dead end and spawned just long enough to buy the device.

First I'll say the government already has an ID system with a backdoor they mandate you use (your federal social security ID and state ID). The backdoor isn't very interesting because anyone with your ID in hand also has it.

So how about this:

1. State assigns citizens an ID at birth 2. State allows citizens to submit a public key along with their ID at any time 3. Citizens can go to their bank / private social network / whatever and say "this is my public key, you can use it to sign messages to me, and you can verify someone a) alive and b) a citizen of $state is reading it (from here you can bootstrap whatever protocol you want) 4. The state<>citizen network established in (2) is constantly under attack as stealing someones private key valuable so you also need a legal and technical framework to defend it

The protocol for submitting private keys and defending it from attack is a much longer post, I'm convinced there are ways to do it that drastically favor defense over offense, but that's not the point here.

Our question is can a government force it's way into the protocol you bootstrapped on top

How would they?

1. They could reset your public key to one they control the secret to, and then impersonate you digitally to break into your bank or social network. However I don't think they could do this secretly (the key update would necessarily be publically visible), so it's not really a back door. They can already do this with a search warrant. And if you're paranoid you can bootstrap your secondary cryptographic networks with multiple factors. So, this is on net more secure for you.

2. They could try to recover your secret key by force or warrant - but again not a back door.

I think the real concern isn't backdooring it's blacklisting, if this system becomes the L1 for every L2 crytographic interaction, they can practically remove your ability to freely transact. But that's a political problem you address with political means, I'm convinced from a technical perspective this is more secure and far cheaper for everyone.

Then stop trying to take away the technology it's built on

1) Don't participate (and accept the consequences)

2) Participate (and accept potential disappointment/failure, with the benefit of having tried)

If you view 2) as fruitless unless your desired outcome is likely, you miss the potential value in the pursuit itself: working with like-minded people, building community, developing new skills, taking agency in your own life, and whatever else might come up along the way.

I don't begrudge anyone for choosing 1) (as long as they own their decision and don't force it on others), but 2) still seems like the aspirational choice I'd want to make if I could.

Stop re-electing people.

Stop sitting at home projecting apathy and ennui in between WOW raids and rounds of LoL.

Mountains of evidence from history shows public has to stand up for itself, not lick boot.

Refuse to give the politicians and owner class assurances they too refuse to provide.

Most of them are old af and have no survival skills. They're reliant on the latest social memes, stock valuations not religious allegory, that are not immutable constants of physics.

Boomers looted the pension system of the prior generation to fund Wall Street. Take their money. It's American tradition.

Remind them physics is ageist and neither physics and American society afford no assurances anyone has food and healthcare.

I'd propose the primary factor is social - when a child is born there is a recorded attestation from the family and care providers about the minting of a new soul. When keys are compromised you similarly seek attestations from your social network (or social worker) that you need to furnish a new key.

The network could be attacked by literal force, blackmail, or deception, but it's very expensive compared the defense (strong legal punishment for attempts to subvert the network)

That last part is why I think the state has to do it, not technologists. There has to be a strong legal and cultural immune system in place to defend the network.

This is also a horrible idea. If an OS can be vetoed for untimely security updates, it can also be vetoed for not having something like clientside scanning.