Posted by hornedhob 1/27/2026
I have this fond memory of that Notary in Germany who did a remote attestation of me being with him in the same room, voting on a shareholder resolution.
While I was currently traveling on the other side of the planet.
This great concept that totally will not blow up the planet has been proudly brought to you by Ze Germans.
No matter what your intentions are: It WILL be abused and it WILL blow up. Stop this and do something useful.
[While systemd had been a nightmare for years, these days its actually pretty good, especially if you disable the "oh, and it can ALSO create perfect eggs benedict and make you a virgin again while booting up the system!" part of it. So, no bad feelings here. Also, I am German. Also: Insert list of history books here.]
The website itself is rather vague in its stated goals and mechanisms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743756
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/09/intel-and-amd-trust...
You'll be free to run your own Linux, but don't expect it to work outside of niche uses.
A concrete example of that is electronic ballots, which is a topic I often bump heads with the rest of HN about, where a hardware identity token (an electronic ID provided by the state) can be used to participate in official ballots, while both the citizen and the state can have some assurance that there was nothing interceding between them in a malicious way.
Does that make sense?
- You're just moving your trust elsewhere, this time to a private corporation (whoever makes the CPU / TPM / other "trusted" component).
- This doesn't guarantee voter anonymity the way paper ballots do. Considering the analog hole and the complexity of computers, I can think of a billion ways a motivated and resourceful Mallory could to connect someone to their ballot.
You're saying that with a lot of assurance, but in my opinion that's still to be debated. We can build something that will keep at least a degree of separation between the identity that points to a specific individual and the identity that casts the ballot.
In the great scheme of things, this period where systemd was intentionally designed and developed and funded to hurt your autonomy but seemed temporarily innocuous will be a rounding error.
They'd need to get MS to sign it first, but otherwise yea. That's why I remove the MS keys on my non-windows systems.
Your step of removing the MS keys works of course :) Although I've heard that can be risky on various systems that need to load MS-signed EEPROMS. Also I think that firmware updates can be problematic?
Yea, I bricked a Gigabyte board and still haven't been able to fix it. I just replaced it with an Asrock board and that has settings for what to do with option-rom when secureboot is enabled (always execute, always deny, allow execute, defer execute, deny execute and query user) and I have no clue what half of them specifically do (like, does "allow execute" only execute if a matching key exists and doesn't execute if it doesn't? and what is the difference between "always deny" and "deny execute"? and defer to when??). But I just set it to always execute and my problem is solved.
It's the people behind this project who scare me.
One good news is that maybe LP will get less involved in systemd.
See Android; or, where you no longer own your device, and if the company decides, you no longer own your data or access to it.
Yes, system data should be locked to the system with a TPM. That way your system can refuse to boot if it's been modified to steal your user secrets.
Preventing this was the reason we had free software in the first place.
Jesus.
Probably obvious from the surnames but this is the first time I've seen a EU company pop up on Hacker News that could be mistaken for a Californian company. Nice to see that ambition.
I understand systemd is controversial, that can be debated endlessly but the executive team and engineering team look very competitive. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
I am glad to see these efforts are now under an independent firm rather than being directed by Microsoft.
What is the ownership structure like? Where/who have you received funding from, and what is the plan for ongoing monetization of your work?
Would you ever sell the company to Microsoft, Google, or Amazon?
Thanks.
No matter what the founders say, the answer to this question is always yes.
I don't think you will ever get a response to that
I'm not asking for a client list, to be clear.
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/speaker/lennart_poettering/