Is there a way to address the problems outlined by the proponents of these technologies without placing too much power in anti-democratic and anti-user organizations like Apple and Google?
But the problem they try to solve is: user’s device is not under full control of the service provider. The only solution to that problem is to take away the control from the device owner. You cannot have both.
Which problems? As far as I can tell this solves zero problems for users of websites. Wanting to replace captchas with this is just another arms race that normal users will suffer from.
Well, captchas seem likely to become useless in the near future, and are currently a key feature used to prevent unwanted bot activity on many if not most websites. What can replace them?
Would this technology work better if there were a coalition of attesters that granted access to newer and smaller browsers and os makers?
The point of the attestation is to show that given browser won’t do some things. If the browser is open source on open source operating system the user can modify it in any way he wants, so not such attestation can be given to such browser.
Even if we are ok with attested browser being official builds never modified by users, then user could still fake it if they have full control of their operating system. So the operating system must also be attested, so it cannot be freely modified. And what is a point of open source then? You can see, but you cannot touch?
It’s up to the attester to decide. Maybe it needs to run some verifications every so often.
There’s nothing preventing it from refusing you attestation too, if your device is out of date, or is too old and won’t receive future updates
Is there a way to address the problems outlined by the proponents of these technologies without placing too much power in anti-democratic and anti-user organizations like Apple and Google?
But the problem they try to solve is: user’s device is not under full control of the service provider. The only solution to that problem is to take away the control from the device owner. You cannot have both.
Which problems? As far as I can tell this solves zero problems for users of websites. Wanting to replace captchas with this is just another arms race that normal users will suffer from.
Well, captchas seem likely to become useless in the near future, and are currently a key feature used to prevent unwanted bot activity on many if not most websites. What can replace them?
Would this technology work better if there were a coalition of attesters that granted access to newer and smaller browsers and os makers?
The point of the attestation is to show that given browser won’t do some things. If the browser is open source on open source operating system the user can modify it in any way he wants, so not such attestation can be given to such browser.
Even if we are ok with attested browser being official builds never modified by users, then user could still fake it if they have full control of their operating system. So the operating system must also be attested, so it cannot be freely modified. And what is a point of open source then? You can see, but you cannot touch?
Nothing. Nothing should replace them.
You, as a website, unconditionally have zero right to know anything about what a user is doing on their computer.
Block behavior, not devices.
How can the attester attest that a bot is not using a valid browser on a valid os?
It’s up to the attester to decide. Maybe it needs to run some verifications every so often. There’s nothing preventing it from refusing you attestation too, if your device is out of date, or is too old and won’t receive future updates