> <i>There is no such thing as a printer that will only run the "reject third-party ink" program. There is no such thing as a phone that will only run the "reject third-party apps" program. There are only laws, like the Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that make writing and distributing those programs a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine (for a first offense).</i><p>This framing is horribly wrong, and Doctorow's characterization of computers being intrinsically open to unrestricted computation is outright dangerous. He goes on to fill in a lot of nuance which kind of walks things back, but his narrative still revolves around the war on general purpose computing being primarily about fending off legislative mandates by government.<p>The DMCA certainly does create a chilling effect on researching and releasing vulnerabilities in trusted computing / digital restrictions management, including a chilling effect of other companies attempting adversarial interoperability. But at the core of it, the reason we don't see more exploits to get around "secure" boot and the like is precisely because these technical restrictions seem to mostly work. We did have a nice introductory period where people were finding logic bugs in chains of trust and whatnot, but those seem to have mostly calmed down as the code/logic gets reused for new devices with those bugs fixed.<p>So unfortunately, the real threat to freedom posed by remote attestation is indeed itself part of the physical "reality" of computational complexity plus the economics of electronics manufacturing. Governments don't need to mandate its use to have businesses slowly nudge people towards it, just as they have been successfully nudging people with CAPTCHAs/blocks for using less surveillable IPs and more secure browsers (eg resistFingerprinting = true).<p>Ultimately, it's going to take positive political action to prevent this looming societal threat - either active legislation prohibiting it and/or reworking the standards group to respect user freedom. Essentially - either baking in manufacturer known/controlled attestation/signing keys needs to be prohibited, or TPMs need to have a suitable maintenance mode that allows importing/exporting all embedded keys.