> I cannot say how much freedom it will take. Arguably, some of the new features will be “good.” Massively reduced cheating in online multiplayer games is something many gamers could appreciate (unless they cheat). Being able to potentially play 4K Blu-ray Discs on your PC again would be convenient.
However, I'm more worried about the questions the increased deployment of technology will bring, such as will Linux users be doomed to a CAPTCHA onslaught being the untrusted devices, or worse. Important questions that, unless raised, risk us just "going with the flow" until it is way too late.
This is way more than just about not watching movies in 4k that you could also pirate. This is about turning people who don't have "trusted computing" devices that track every behaviour of theirs into societal outcasts.
That being said, extending it to everyone in a way that curtails individual control of computing devices creates an environment that is dangerous in many ways. I don't want to be in a world where only "approved" software is allowed on my computer or something. This can get wrong really quickly, and a lot of the application of attestation technology for consumers is really just about removing their freedoms.
The place where the government should step in IMO is not to ban CPU vendors from implementing this, but to pass anti-discrimination laws, so ban companies from requiring remote attestation to unlock some specific feature. They should maybe endorse it, or be allowed to warn you, but they should still allow full access regardless.
For the B2B setting there are obvious dangers of monopoly abuse, here the government just needs to enforce existing laws. Microsoft dropping the requirement that the signing key for third parties has to be trusted is IMO a major antitrust violation.
I have a rooted Android phone and I had to spend effort spoofing attestation in order to even launch some of my games which don't even have multiplayer. Allow me to be the one to tell you that I do not appreciate it.
I don't even care enough to cheat at these games but if I wanted to cheat it would be merely an exercise of my computer freedom which nobody has any business denying.
Get the government to regulate the corporations requiring it. Classify any attestation requirement as discrimination or something. They're excluding people without good reason.
The current landscape of CAPTCHA technology is pretty bleak. It's pretty easy to use ML to learn and solve the early first-gen CAPTCHAs that just used crossed-out words. Google reCAPTCHA relies primarily on user data, obfuscation, and browser fingerprinting to filter out bots, but that only works because of (possibly misplaced) trust in Google. It falls back to an image recognition challenge (which hCaptcha uses exclusively) if you don't have a good data profile - which can also be solved by automated means.
I don't see desktop Linux being fully untrusted off the Internet, if only because Google won't let it happen. They banned Windows workstations internally over a decade ago and they are institutionally reliant upon Linux and macOS. What will almost certainly happen is that Linux will be relegated to forwarding attestation responses between Pluton, some annoying blob in Google Chrome, and any web service that does not want to be flooded with bots in our new hellscape of post-scarcity automation.
If it's just about limiting access, Cloudflare imposes a similar limitation of number of accesses you can have to a website via remote attestation. I think once remote attestation becomes more prevalent, it might become useful in the ad business too, e.g. to prevent you from using ad blockers, or similar things.
In the past you culd use your FOSS client to commicate with your ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger-using friends. Today, not using the official client will likely get you banned from the network.