It's really perplexing how people in such privilidged positions would put their name on this. Either their not as smart as they appear or somehow manipulated/corrupted.
I would assume they are prominently putting their names on the proposal to claim they lead this effort during performance review. After all, they are probably expecting a big payout for something like this.
Nah, they just realize that the sort of rank ideological hatred they're gonna get from the sort of people posting here isn't representative of the software industry as a whole let alone the wider world.
The iPhone is a bastion of remote attestation. You can't just rock up and download apps from the iPhone app store using a convenient API, it's restricted so only the iPhone itself can do it. Do Apple engineers hesitate to use their real names? No, because nobody cares and heck HN threads often fill up with praise over the fact that you can't even install apps outside the app store, let alone download apps from it and emulate them on a PC.
Games consoles are fully based on remote attestation. You can't connect a PC to the Xbox or PS gaming networks because they do RA to keep you out. Do the engineers who work on games consoles have to go into hiding? No, because nobody cares. HN never discusses it because it works and lots of gamers, especially the casual ones, prefer it.
Fact is that users like this tech because it solves problems that they'd otherwise have. The web lacks it and therefore has to rely on user hostile stuff like CAPTCHAs, phone codes, magic JavaScripts and social network logins which people hate, so they switch to native apps instead. And devs hate dealing with all the automated abuse they get, so that pushes them towards app-only services too.
One of them has been a SWE for only about 5-6 years, probably a smart person but naive enough to be the face of this proposal being pushed by some bigger fish in Google Corp that didn't want their name attached to it.
