That's pretty much drinking the DRM koolaid. You can have both, verified boot and freedom. All it takes is a mechanism to replace the manufacturer's trust root with an owner-supplied one. The process would wipe anything secured by the trusted components (including keys securing the user data) but that should be fine since you can make a backup.
The only thing that wouldn't work is software that wants to ensure that the user has no control over the system - DRM or "the user is too dumb to be trusted with their own device" security theater.
Not the user with a CS degree that knows what they are doing.
Freedom to do what you want with the device you purchased is a right that is not to be infringed upon, especially not for the reason "the users might hurt themselves".
Setting up a technically nontrivial flow to unlock the bootloader (e.g. connect the device to a machine with an SSH client, approve SSH connection request with scary message, SSH to the phone, execute a shell script that tells you that you shouldn't unlock this unless you know what you're doing, and after confirmation the script unlocks the bootloader) is more than enough of a deterrent for the vast majority of non-technical users.
The remainder are acceptable casualties - people who refuse to read warning labels are going to have other bad things happen to them anyway (drinking poisons, injuring themselves while working with power-tools) as a result of their foolishness, and the solution to that is not to take away the power-tools from the whole population, but to train them to read and follow warning labels in the first place.
Those technically skilled users who want to unlock their bootloaders (and, you know, do what they want with the devices they paid for) should not have to pay for the stupidity of a small minority of foolish people who refuse to read warning messages.
The consumer has the right to buy from companies that sell products that actually fit their purposes, like I don't know, a computer, instead of trying to replace the firmware in a toaster.
As such, your comments in this discussion, and this one in particular, do not appear to be in good faith.
Hence why radios are kind of locked down to makers that could make use of illegal radio frequencies, some of which could even be damaging to human health.
My faith is that not everything with a CPU has to be open to install Linux on it.
And even if everyone were to install malware. There are other ways to secure banking. E.g. by providing an external token with a display. This is how hardware crypto wallets and some PIN generators for in-browser banking work. Or they could ask the owner to upload the attestation pubkey to their website, then the bank could still check if it's really their app that's running (as confirmed by the boot trust chain). I'm not sure how fingerprint scanners are tied into secure boot, maybe they could be used to verify user intent too.
Except the app is remote-controlled by a malicious “display driver” that waits for the user to do all this authentication set-up, transfers the money away, “are you sure”s it, then prevents the user from seeing any of the on-phone scam warnings until it's too late to reverse the transaction.
This irks me. Not everyone has such choice about what to buy.
Not an excuse anymore. Motorola has universal devices that work on all carriers. Including the most difficult ones in the US, Verizon and AT&T. The unlocked Motorola devices are also often cheaper than getting a device through a carrier.
There is always a choice. There are multiple devices at given price point.
Taking credit to buy a mobile is not a wise choice ever.
[citation needed]
I'm finding the majority of devices to be unlockable as long as you don't buy your device from a carrier.
Carrier locked devices are not typically the norm but in the US.
And if you truly cared about software freedom, you wouldn't be buying carrier locked devices in the first place.
I really wish people would stop griping about losing security features when you flip the one switch that ensures the security of the system. Unlocking the bootloader means it is now possible to modify system files. Of course Safetynet is going to fail. The point of Safetynet is to ensure the system hasn't been tampered with.
However, despite all of your doom and gloom posturing without actual examples, I've yet to actually use a single app (and I use several banking and root detecting apps like remote features for my car) that will prevent me from continuing to use the app if rooted. It just pops up and says "We see you're using a rooted device, this is not recommended." I click "OK" and proceed as normal.
The alternative is to use Apple and whelp, that'll never happen... since I actually do care about software freedom.