Slashdot Mirror
Discuss BIOS and Palladium Issues With an AMIBIOS Rep
After this Slashdot discussion about the relationship between BIOS biggie American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) and Palladium appeared, we got an email from AMI sales engineer (and former Linux.com contributor) Brian Richardson, who wrote, "I am a bit concerned that the information you provided misled your readers into thinking AMI was promoting Palladium or taking some sort of anti-open-source stance. This might be due to the fact that TCPA was mistakenly equated to Palladium, or questioning how Linux would run on a TCPA-enabled system ... or by the horde of angry Slashdot readers telling us they would never buy an AMI product because we were forcing standards on them." Brian offered himself up as (his words) a "Slashdot interview victim" to clear things up.(Update by RM: And, says Brian, he's happy to answer other BIOS questions as well.) So ask, already, and let's get things cleared up. (Usual Slashdot interview rules.)
If Palladium is designed to provide a secure environment then how come it lets the user run Windows?
One could argue that war is state-sanctioned murder. As is a firing squad.
Guns do things other than killing people. 1) Target shooting. 2) Shooting animals.
If I were a gun owner, I would want to use my gun for lawful purposes, such as target shooting or home defense. I would not want to use it for murder. The gun is not taking anything away from me; instead, it's giving me extra capabilities.
TCPA does not give me, the computer user, any new capabilities at all. Instead, it takes away capabilities, such as being able to access all the data on my system, convert data between formats, etc. It gives extra control of my data to media corporations, but this doesn't help me, the user, at all.
The whole point of this argument was whether AMI could claim innocence by selling a TCPA-enabled BIOS, using the argument that it allows both good and bad uses. A baseball bat manufacturer can claim innocence because their bats are sold for the purpose of playing baseball, not cracking people's heads open. A gun manufacturer can claim the same, although their product is obviously much more dangerous, and is normally used for killing something (which is only a bad thing if it's a murder). A tobacco manufacturer, OTOH, cannot claim any innocence because their products are only used to harm people (even though their customers do buy the product willingly). Similarly, AMI's new product can only be used to harm their customers, and it's even worse than the tobacco companies because the customers don't want TCPA and never asked for it. They're only doing this in collusion with other anti-end-user companies like Microsoft and Intel, in order to possible increase their profits at the expense of freedom, and by providing something that customers never asked for.
So by this analysis, AMI is even lower than the tobacco companies. Imagine that...