Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

It's more like unpredictable software. I'm not saying we burn it, I'm saying don't give it agency. Only allow it to advise, not take action. I have experimentally used it myself on code, but did not allow it to commit to the repo, only show me it's proposed changes. It even proved somewhat useful at that, though I didn't apply it's changes, it did inspire a similar approach that I implemented and committed.

That a Teflon like surface takes part it? That is new ground.

A key to Capitalism from Smith himself is that it requires strong regulation to keep the playing field level. Smith also warned that charters must be given out exceedingly sparingly and the resulting corporation kept on a tight leash and held strictly to it's charter.

I guess we really blew that one!

But I rather doubt anyone involved in MAGA or others shouting "deregulate all the things!" have ever read "The Wealth of Nations". Most probably can't do it since centuries later the text is quite stilted.

There is no implied malice, that would require understanding what right and wrong are. It doesn't. The training so far for the various AIs seems to be whatever we can grab from the internet or scan from whatever books we can get our hands on.

Are you claiming LLMs are written to create fake social media accounts and launch a smear campaign against a project maintainer who refuses to apply the AI's PR? Because that actually happened. It was prompted to make a few requested changes to a program and get a PR accepted with those changes. And that's what the bot did, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

Put another way, would you run a makefile containing several billion rules that you are not allowed to examine first? Because that's what giving agency to LLMs is. Or might you prefer a debug mode where it shows what actions would be taken, but cannot take them? That is what I mean by not giving it agency.

Issues with the big red switch cannot be addressed in software. But you knew that, right?

AI is quite different. Nothing in Kali is going to do anything really surprising. If you ask it to launch X,Y, and Z attacks against a.com, that's what will happen. It will not suddenly blackmail Joe Random nor dox the Postmaster General. It won't try to recruit a server at b.com to it's quest. It won't try to steal cycles from someone's heart monitor as a distraction. It won't go shopping for a professional arsonist on the dark web. It won't even submit a bogus brief to a court citing non-existent case law.

Note that of the absurd things I suggested, only one of them is complete fiction on my part.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

Yeah, the company that killed VMWare is in no position to be deciding which open source software is acceptable and which is not. They'll probably (in time) require a payment for a positive review - and pretend to cover their asses by requiring payment for a review at all, but out of the theoretical kindness of their hearts, they'll do free reviews that all just happen to come out negative. Anyone who walks into this trap after knowing what they did to VMWare gets what they deserve.

As a Californian, I definitely would NOT have voted for this had I been given the opportunity.

And yeah, we LITERALLY have campaign ads running now to the extent of, "Pedophile murderers are being released to the streets ... and Candidate X voted for it THREE TIMES!!!!"

That one was yet another case of Ridley having a script, deciding it was good enough to start building sets and working on effects, and then constantly changing the script all the way up through editing. Whole subplots got dropped, characters who appeared in promo material just never showed up in the movie, character motivations stopped making sense, plot points were retroactively changed, etc. Prometheus suffered from the same problem, if not to an even greater degree. It's like those movies where everybody cries "studio interference!" ... only in Ridley's case, he's the one who interferes constantly with his own movies.

From TFS:

MS has been doing that for a good while, which is why in the few cases I have installed Windows on something, I have had to boot a Linux rescue disk to download a network driver Windows was missing.

Way to over-interpret the example! It doesn't matter if it's client, server, embedded, isolated standalone. A method where root can "gain" root access is not a security issue.