Slashdot Mirror
Trusted Computing Group Formed
An anonymous reader writes "How does it come that the formation of the Trusted Computing Group goes unnoticed at /.? On Wednesday, heise had the story. At last, we will get `easily-accessible specifications for trusted computing standards that will ultimately let people work, conduct transactions, and use computing devices with a new level of confidence' ..."
And it's an extremely sick joke at that.
I hope that's mean't to be a joke, mate.
Apple is buying the record company - not the other way round.
Promoters
* AMD
* Hewlett-Packard
* IBM
* Intel Corporation
* Microsoft
Contributors
* Atmel
* Infineon
* National Semiconductor
* Nokia
* Philips
* Phoenix
* Sony
* STMicroelectronics
* VeriSign, Inc.
* Wave Systems
Adopters
List available shortly.
ie, when there are any
"The PC isn't done until Linux won't run."
This has damned ominous ovetones. You guys better watch out, or they're gonna take the ball away from you just like they snatched it away from Borland, Lotus, Novell, &c. &c.
Ah, well, in fifteen years Gates & Balmer will retire and then the world can make some progress, until then bend over and smile!
Mandatory babelfish translation
Or a zdnet article
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
This feels like linking the application to the hardware and perhaps the user so nobody else could possibly use it.
I feel that might be good for some things, like my prescription drug might be better off in a container only I could open. I'm not sure I like the idea for software I buy. It is like saying if I buy a book, I can put it on my bookshelf in my house but if my brother tries to read it, or I try to take it on the bus, it will have blank pages.
I suspect that the reason for most of this extra security is not concern for the user and their data, but some way of making extra profit by the manufacturers ie, if the authorised user is indisposed or incapacitated, then the hardware and software has to be re-purchased.
I'd like to make things difficult for a thief, but for me that mostly means encrypting and backing up data, not rendering the hardware and software useless by anyone but me. How inconvenient. Every time I want to rebuild the hard drive, or install a new one or buy a new computer, I'd have to buy the apps all over again.
I can see I'm going to get so very good at open source products.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Sony for example had a supperior IPOD clone but its shareholders and SONY entertainment sued them to prevent it from being launched. After all burning cd's= pirating in this world. These idiots will now own %50 of Apple.
After all even only potential and not actuall loses in the single digits is enough for wall street to scream at and even fire upper managment.
If you do not believe this look at Caldera before and after SCO was bought? They become SCO thanks to the shareholders and media executives.
Its Microsoft or the RIAA. Take your pick on your new master. Mac or PC.
http://saveie6.com/
First it was the turn of Palladium to be rebranded as The-Next-Generation-Secure-Computing-Services or some such. And now TCPA has been replaced by TCC! So the original TCPA/Palladium FAQ will become invalid, all the Slashdot debates on evil Palladium will be ir-relevant.
Is this a new strategy?
1. Announce something evil. Give it a name.
2. Educate consumers about what it does.
3. Debate the pros and cons in fiery fora.
4. Modify the name/acronymn a bit, and ram the same evil stuff!
Seems to be working.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
`easily-accessible specifications for trusted computing standards that will ultimately let people work, conduct transactions, and use computing devices with a new level of confidence' ..."
Confidence for who and of what? Hardly for users.
Confidence that users will have no freedom?
Confidence that anything non TCG/TCPA and non DRM is locked out?
Confidence that there will be TCG backdoors?
Confidence for software & content providers?
Confidence that your system can be wiped/accessed remotely at TCG's whim?
New level of confidence FOR users? Yes, new in the sense of unprecedented low level of confidence that the system can be trusted.
New level of confidence IN users? Yes, now they just lack the high voltage collar linked to the systems to dish out electrocution to all dissidents.
Ah but what was i thinking, thats coming mainly from "God's own country" so that can be wrong, can it?
... but I trust nobody but myself... not my Mom not my Daddi... and certainly an orgainzation with all the loopholes that this will create... It's a great idea in theory... Standards are the most important thing that can possibly come of this...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Probably not. But there -are- ways it could get better.
:>). They want you buying everything you want to watch, listen to or use. If they find out that by abusing their customers will result in no sales, you can bet the whole DRM train will be derailed before too long.
1) Don't buy the stuff. Old computer works? Keep it. Delay upgrading as long as possible. Visit the computer store occasionally for upgrades, but leave without buying anything if all they can offer you is hardware with DRM.
2) Don't listen to, or watch the stuff. Yeah, it's hard not to go to a movie now and again, I know. It's fun to do (albeit expensive). But most of the money you hand over for your ticket goes directly into the pocket of the people that are doing this to you. Rent a movie. Listen to an old CD you've bought, tape things from the radio, but don't go out and buy those new CD's. -Especially- not the DRM protected ones.
3) If you do go out to buy a CD, follow somewhat of a similar procedure to that of computer hardware. Bring your CD up to the counter. Tell them you have an old CD player, and all these protected CD's won't play in it. Tell them you've had to bring back about 10 CD's to various different stores because the protection on them was messing with your CD player, and if this one doesn't work you might as well just give up on buying them altogether. Whether it's true for you or not, it likely -is- true for the hundreds of people who really -can't- play these CD's, and at the same time, you'll be indirectly helping to protect your fair use rights.
There's a number of ways you can let these people know that it's not going to work, that you're not going to put up with it, but you have to -do- something about it. This whole DRM movement that's sure to cost the computing industry billions before the end is about money..they want more of it. They don't want you to download MP3's or movies, they don't want you stealing software (not that either of those is necessarily right in the first place, but that's another argument entirely
"I'd no sooner put my John Thomas in the hands of a lunatic with an axe than I would trust Microsoft with my data"
This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).
(from "The Road To Tycho", a collection of articles about the antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2096)
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do.
And there wasn't much chance that the SPA--the Software Protection Authority--would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime.
Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read. (10% of those fees went to the researchers who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in enough to repay this loan.)
Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.
There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.
It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers--you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's
It feels like we've been fed buggy apps for two decades, and now we're told the solution for unreliable software is restriction of our abilites and freedoms. It almost sounds like they've intentionally created the problem, having had the solution in mind the whole time. What happened to the concept of solving buggy apps by getting rid of the bugs in the code?
Even when my password hits the https client software, how do I know that the information is really being sent securely? I don't.
The counter example used by the digital rights people is that when they send me a key to access controlled media, how can they be certain that I don't intercept the decoded bit stream?
In the first case, it is reasonable to have a trusted platform because the user can choose to accept what software he runs. In particular it can allow me to differentiate between an allowable update and one that isn't.
In the second, then then the owner/user of the system can not be permitted to have control. If the user is permitted to have full control then the platform must disclose to the access granter that the link between the media decryption engine and the output can no longer be trusted.
One can argue that the first is reasonable but the second would prevent anyone from looking at digitally licensed media on an open computing platform such as Linux.
In any case, this all supposes that the platform as installed, is indeed secure. It probably isn't. Even systems that implement a good security reference monitor can be compromised by poor configuration and software layers that cross security levels. For example, the original NT kernel is very good, but it has been slowly compromised by the surrounding software.
It would be possible to make a dedicated system into a trusted platform, for example, an ATM. It is practically very difficult to implement a genera; purpose system in a trusted way.
See my journal, I write things there
I honestly don't think that trusted computing will be possible or extant until there are trusted humans.
C|N>K
They need to get rid of the word 'trust' as it's misleading. If I was to set up to make a product that allowed the user full control of their system would that be 'untrusted' and if so by whom? By the morons pushing TCPA?
The word they are looking for is 'RESTRICTED'! Just how much trust are we supposed to have in companies who collude to bring us a technology that has been deliberately given a misleading name?
The TPM spec is open, right? So what if a program like Bochs just emulates the security chip?
We all understand that "Trusted Computing" simply means whether or not Microsoft trusts us to run a program.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Well, if you need your nitroglycerine or your glucose pill, you've got just a few minutes before it's too late. If a passerby is bright enough to recognise a problem, they're likely also bright enough to read the label on the pill bottle you're vainly clawing at.
Let's take "only the registered user can access it" to an extreme: doors will no longer let anyone inside who isn't registered to that house. Great for preventing burglary, and never again will you have to worry about losing your keys -- your house will know you and let you in anyway, while keeping everyone else out. So your house is on fire but the doors won't let in the neighbour or fireman who's trying to rescue your kid. Or a burglar just puts a gun (hacked so anyone can use it, of course) to your head and tells you to open the door.
As to acceleration limiters: the reason they're not done to enforce the speed limit (or even slightly above the limit) is that doing so is hideously dangerous. It means ANY time you're caught in a situation where you need to get out of some oncoming vehicle's way in a hurry, YOU CAN'T. And that situation happens a lot more often than you might think, especially on busy freeways.
And finally, do you really want to live in a world where you're never, ever allowed to take risks? Because control over access and control over what risks (which includes doing anything new or different from the herd) you're allowed to take are flip sides of the same coin.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
They keep saying this isn't DRM, but it's most of the building blocks you need for DRM. And most of the applications they mention are possible without hardware support via an encrypted filesystem. All you need for Palladium is an OS which refuses to boot without the right user, computer, and boot parameters.
The other thing to note is that they keep stressing RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) licenses. Non-discriminatory means every organization pays patent licenses on the same formula. If the formula doesn't contain provisions to allow for open source software, then open source software can't use the standard.
Which book is that, Dianetics?
Only means what THEY can trust. It will surely have better security, but it is more in their interest than yours. Think of it this way: These corporations (Micro$oft in particular) are NOT on your side. Their only objective is to figure out ways to keep you trapped in their grasp, and, by so doing, capitalize on your dependence.
I have a good idea where they are going with this whole "Trusted" Computing move. Things like open hardware standards and Free Software give you the freedom (MOST IMPORTANT WORD) to have excellent commodity products, as well as competition which acts in the best interest of the consumer by keeping manufacturers honest. The problem is that it diminishes the ability of a company like Micro$oft to control you. Their ONLY option would be to actually *compete* and *innovate*. Considering the incredible pace of Free Software development, they don't stand much of a chance to continue to reap the profits they have in the past. They know this VERY WELL.
So, what do they do instead? Come up with the idea of Trusted Computing. Convince the public (the government especially) that Free/Open Software is somehow less secure (nice fat lie); Convince the government that Free Software is for terrorists (easy in this paranoid, self-righteous era); Convince the government to outlaw Free implementations and require proprietary ones provided by yours truly, Macro$haft.
"He who has ears, let him hear". The encroachment of Big Brother is very real. Security for Big Brother; Paranoia for you; The Almighty Buck for them.
They can never win unless we are ignorant enough to allow their FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) propaganda to become law. Be careful what you are made to believe. And be VERY careful WHAT and WHO you vote and pay for.
hateddamntruth.