"Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins."
Every time I see someone campaigning to exercise their civil liberties via hardware or software, I wonder if their devices are connected to any network.
Because once you connect to a network, especially a WAN, your liberties are tempered by the rights of all other users.
If your device hosts malware, botnets, scammers, spammers, or other malicious activity, no you do not have a right to the liberty of your hardware. The network and the service providers have a fiduciary responsibility of harm reduction and threat mitigation.
Sure, some hackers are very very good at preventing malware and keeping the botnets at bay. You may be better at it than cloud providers or your ISP. In fact, it is the inexperienced users that we can't really trust. They'll get pwned and their browser will have a million toolbars with spyware. Their PC will join botnets and host CSAM. It is their ignorance and ineptitude that gets them into trouble.
And so because WANs, particularly the public Internet, are common property, and not your private domain or sandbox, this is why things like device trust and attestation are being added. Because you could do all you wanted with your Commodore 64 and your Apple ][. The blast radius was limited to your family and every friend who traded cracked software.
But once you're hooked up on a network, you need to stop swinging your fists at my nose.
Every time I see someone campaigning to exercise their civil liberties via hardware or software, I wonder if their devices are connected to any network.
Because once you connect to a network, especially a WAN, your liberties are tempered by the rights of all other users.
If your device hosts malware, botnets, scammers, spammers, or other malicious activity, no you do not have a right to the liberty of your hardware. The network and the service providers have a fiduciary responsibility of harm reduction and threat mitigation.
Sure, some hackers are very very good at preventing malware and keeping the botnets at bay. You may be better at it than cloud providers or your ISP. In fact, it is the inexperienced users that we can't really trust. They'll get pwned and their browser will have a million toolbars with spyware. Their PC will join botnets and host CSAM. It is their ignorance and ineptitude that gets them into trouble.
And so because WANs, particularly the public Internet, are common property, and not your private domain or sandbox, this is why things like device trust and attestation are being added. Because you could do all you wanted with your Commodore 64 and your Apple ][. The blast radius was limited to your family and every friend who traded cracked software.
But once you're hooked up on a network, you need to stop swinging your fists at my nose.