this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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The world would be a better place if locked bootloaders were not a thing. I agree that there needs to be laws in place to prevent the sale of these devices.
I don’t have a problem with boot loaders doing cryptographic checks in general, as long as the ultimate decision lies with the device owner.
How do you feel about locked bootloader's on game consoles?
I figure this is one of those edge cases people might fall on either side of. But consoles are also a really large segment of the tech market, so it's worth thinking about.
I feel like consoles are targeted at a section of the population that doesn’t value freedom over how they use their hardware. Locked bootloaders on consoles are technically not good, but it’s almost like it’s part of what defines a game console. If it really valued the users freedom, it’d just be a PC. The steam deck and similar devices are changing that idea though.
The PS3 used to have an unlocked bootloader with official Linux support. Sony removed it because of piracy. Of course, piracy is still possible, but as always, it's only an excuse to exert more control over customers.
Locked in the technical sense of being able to verify the operating system isn't a bad thing. The problem is when the device owner can't add signing keys of their choice.
The latter is what GrapheneOS does.
Something that worries me about that is attestation. This is the advice from the GrapheneOS Devs:
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-guide
They're asking app developers to trust their keys specifically, which would mean that the app might work on GrapheneOS, but not my fork of GrapheneOS with some cherry picked fix I want.
It would be much better if we stamped this out now, before all online services require attestation.
Agreed. Microsoft proposed something along those lines under the name "Palladium" a couple decades ago and was widely criticized, even in the mainstream press. Apple and Google doing the same thing to our phones barely got a whimper.