• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: May 19th, 2025

help-circle







  • The thing is, trusted computing as a security feature isn’t useless. For the particular case of phones, people generally use relatively low entropy passwords, because it’s impractical to do otherwise. The Titan chip uses trusted computing technologies to ensure that an attacker with physical access cannot bruteforce the password, which it does by forcing a timeout between successive attempts. It might do other things too, this isn’t my area of expertise, but (I believe) it isn’t needed for the general functioning of the device, as opposed to e.g. the intel ME.

    Of course, a security chip that you have the power to control would be better, and no less secure, but that doesn’t exist. However, neither the OS itself not the apps directly depend on trusted computing. Otherwise GrapheneOS couldn’t exist in the first place.

    Note that this problem doesn’t exist on desktops or laptops: it is entirely possible to memorize a passphrase around 96 bits of entropy, which is high enough that it can’t practically be bruteforced, especially if the algorithm to check if it is correct is computationally slow.

    So, you lost a bit of sovereignty for your phone in the interest of security, but phones aren’t private to begin with: the actual modem also uses trusted computing. The devs behind GrapheneOS considered this the best solution to the problem, after weighing the pros and cons. Personally, I’d be happy to have a flip phone which has no password, and then do everything of significance (possibly including call and SMS) on my laptop. That is to say, I’d rather I didn’t have to use GrapheneOS, but it’s compromises align well with my own for now.


  • I think that the (only) relevant factor is whether everyone else knows and wants it. Suppose your mod affected only yourself (so other players wouldn’t know about it) and you played in a way that was mostly reasonable, but providing a little bit more covering fire than should be possible. Your teammates might still have fun while they’re playing, though only if you don’t overdo it; but even then, they probably wouldn’t be too happy to discover your cheating once they’d already finished the map. If you give everyone infinite ammo, and tell them about it then that’s fine, but because they know about it, not because they benefit from it.

    For that matter, cheating in a competitive server set up for that purpose can be fun (though it can also be wildly unbalanced, especially if the game is asymmetrical)