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Bob Barr Weighs In On Trusted Computing Group
bearwayne writes "Former representative Bob Barr (R-GA), a conservative and non-technophile, who has now has teamed up with the ACLU to fight growth of the Federal government's infringements on Civil Liberties ala the Patriot Act, weighs in on the Trusted Computing Group/Alliance in this article at Creative Loafing. Among other things, he expresses concerns about censorship, loss of control over one's PC, and other corporate/government abuses."
If government-sanctioned vigilantism ever comes about by way of corporations being allowed to mess with others' computers or in any other form, I swear I will move to Switzerland.
Esoteric reference.
*snort*
Libertarian groupthink exists, and is no different than liberal and conservative groupthink.
Wherever you have groups, you have groupthink, regardless of how many people bother to 'think on their own' in any given group.
The problem with most "trusted computing" proposals so far is that "trusted" is an accurate description of them. It's just an imcomplete description. They aren't about insuring that you, the owner of the computer, can trust the computer or the software on it. They're about insuring that third parties can trust your computer to do what they tell it to do. The proponents omit that part because they know all too well that if they did say all of what they meant that Joe Sixpack would scream bloody murder and refuse to have anything to do with it.
Just to make a point, imagine a virus that couldn't be removed from a computer. Under the "trusted computing" proposals someone could do exactly that by tagging the virus as "user does not have permission to delete" and the computer itself would prevent the AV software from removing the virus.
Even though Barr is out of Congress, he's still an influential Republican who can spread word to those still in power. He's more of a libertarian, but unless the specifications and implmentations of the Trusted Computing stuff comes to light, we should all cast a weary eye on it. A lack of vigilance in this day and age should not be an excuse for complaining about lost rights. We can fight this battle now before the TCPA is shoved down our throats, and more importantly, we can fight with our wallets. Why should we buy computers that we cannot control? As a computer programmer, the TCPA scares me.
Well, it's good to see that someone who's kinda involved in government is going against the idea of making the Hollings Bill law, but I don't really see what the big deal about this article is otherwise. Barr is no longer in the House of Representatives, so he probably has little ability to directly do anything to stop the bill. The article - although an easy read for non-technophiles, which is good - really doesn't say anything we don't already know, and Bob Barr doesn't sound like he has much political clout.
I don't mean to rag on the editors or the person who submitted it, but I don't see how this is news. It would be nice if this article (or something similar) was published in a widely-read newspaper, but I think we've heard this story a few times before.
By the way, even if whatever law Hollings wants passed doesn't make it, what's to stop the TCPA's system from becoming a de facto standard? If most of the computers and content out there use it, you're stuck either keeping your old computer and hoarding old CD's and DVD's, or breaking down and using computers and content that are "protected" by the TCPA's technologies.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
Sharing a name with a dufus ex-congressman is a pain in the ass, but I have to give him credit for fighting the Neo-McCarthyism.
Bob Barr
This is what is needed, an article in a paper like Creative Loafing. For those who do not know, Creative Loafing is a *free* newspaper which can be picked up just about in any shop in the Atlanta area, and having lived in Atlanta for about a year, let me tell you, almost everyone who buys a paper picks up the free 'Loaf' at the same time.
The good thing about Creative Loafing is that a *huge* amount of people read it, and even better, these are the 'non geek' mainstream people who would *never* visit wired.com, or any other IT based news source.
99% of articles I've seen on the internet and in paper form are articles that are already 'preaching to the converted' - people who already know of the dangers of 'Trusted Computing'. This article in Creative Loafing will hit a huge mom and pop crowd, and hopefully the word will begin to spread about how evil DRM et all can be - and then hopefully, when Trusted Computing arrives (and it *will* arrive) these people will hopefully know better than to buy such crippled, enslaved hardware.
______
Jaylen
Go ahead, try to deny it. You can't.
I have never, ever met a libertarian who was at all interested in the welfare and happiness of anyone but himself. That's really what the whole philosophy boils down to - abandonment of the greater good.
I have a hard time believing Bob Barr is for civil liberties and people deciding their own laws- The people of Washington DC voted to use medical marijuana with a YES Vote and it was immediately blocked by Barr.
So, he is for civil liberties and freedom ONLY if you agree if its 'morally' acceptable. Does it really matter that it was Marijana? Regardless of Washington DC being a federal district, The whole point is the people have voted and decided on an issue and it was completely overruled by the Federal Government. The hypocrisy is amazing! How can you be worried about censorship, Patriot Act, and government abuses when you were the very person who prevented the people from governing themselves?
We need to wake up and see the whole story.
Bob Barr, when in office, was one of those insane neocons ranting about gays and hell all the time. But since he left office, it's clear that he's been treated by a good psychiatrist, and when he opens his mouth these days, good things tend to come out. He was on Bill Maher's show on HBO a few weeks ago and made a really good impression. Very anti-Ashcroft/Orwell. Good for him, and good for modern medicine.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Are we supposed to like Bob Barr or hate him? I can't remember, and my group-think-ophone is out of service.
I need to know before I read the article so I can dismiss everything he says as biased or accept it all as enlightened.
These folks make the case far better than I can:
;)
EFF's position paper
The American Library Association
Joe Barr mentioned a couple good points in his article at Creative Loafing.
Here's the DOJ's take. When you read it, ask yourself who defines a terrorist, and would you be willing to believe them?
Finally, the USA PATRIOT Act
(Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Hell, with a cool ass acronym like that for a name, how could you possibly be against it
(read: How could you possibly not be against it. Tortuously clever acronyms are often a sign of bad policy)
(Score: -1, Stupid)
So choosy with their freedoms
Can carry guns
Can't smoke dope, gamble, lap dance, be gay
State right's good when pro gun anti-abortion
State's rights bad medical marijuana gay rights, and physician assisted suicide
When do you put money in a Trust?
When you don't trust your kids to use it properly.
"Hmm so geeks are supposed to automatically distrust anything conservative?"
Hollings is a Democrat (who fortunatly is not running for reelection). I think the point is we should be distrustful of people who make rules without a proper understanding of their effects.
"most of us are libertarian"
how the heack do you know that? i really want to know. i, for one, am not a libertarian. i *am* just not that selfish.
ou seem to suffer the "elitist" syndrome. you definitely seem to think the rest of the work is dumb and only you and a select few are the ones that should control the world. wake up brother, your line of thought is entirely idiotic.
groupthink does exists among libertarians. otherwise, they won't be a group. and no, you are not that intelligent, elite, or insightful. you're a snob. and that is it.
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
Conservatism and liberalism are ideals too. And the idea that an "ideal" can't be groupthink is laughable.
Don't assume Bob Barr is wholy a man of principle with no ulterior political motives! Remember the impeachment of Clinton? He proudly stood there with his Republican colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee and engaged in one of the most partisan assaults on rationality and abuses of the constitutional processes in the history of the U.S. In fact, Barr tried numerous times to have Clinton impeached before Lewinsky's name was ever heard. I guarantee you that his motives were not solely because of the nature of Clinton's alleged transgressions - he would not have been nearly so dedicated if a powerful Republican President had been the culprit. He was most definitely concerned to take out Clinton as part of a broader agenda to counter the growing social liberalism of the time.
So Bob Barr may be saying the right things, but (and it is unfortunate that this has to be the case in politics) you cannot separate the message from the messenger; and I do not trust Bob Barr's ideas about how America ought to be in general.
There are plenty of single-chip MCUs, from Atmel AVRs on 8-bit scale to ARM on 32-bit, and everything else as well. Some of those chips are plenty powerful; for example, Netwinder was based on StrongARM, and Intel now moved onto even better architecture. I have PC/104 card in front of me, it runs Linux on XScale CPU as I type this.
So the question is, will it be mandated that every little chip must have this nefarious "secure core" or whatever they call it today?
It is plain impossible, price-wise, to embed this technology into every CPU manufactured. Most of those CPUs cost about $10, and they are self-sufficient; only add power. Even worse, there are soft implementations of many popular CPUs, MIPS/ARM being the prime example. These can be embedded into any blank FPGA just by pasting the code... and the FPGA definitely won't have the security required for the TCPA.
So where does it leave us? Will only PC platforms be affected by the law? Or maybe all Linksys routers (with Linux inside) will have to be reworked? And all Tivos? And all PDAs? This is getting ridiculous fast.
I work with embedded systems most of the time, and I tell you, this law simply can't go anywhere. We are immersed into a sea of computers, most of which are faster and more powerful than your average desktop. There are DSPs that, despite being poor in some operations, will encode your DivX movie faster than the best Pentium. Your cell phone has a few CPUs in it, as well as your TV and your car. Where this law is going to stop?
I also guess that if s/w vendors can raise the prices, they will. Cost of traditional s/w will shoot through the roof, now that you *must* pay for every copy. This will create a unique combination - a TCPA-free hardware and free software, and there will be a market hungry for both of the above simply because they can't afford to be robbed by ISVs, they just don't have the money. People who hold onto their olden Win95 boxes will have to either give up computing, or to switch to TCPA-free hardware and free software. The industry digs its own grave, as it seems.
Neoconservatives are the people like Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, etc. who believe in a global pax americana... that america must dominate and control the world. And, in the process, christianize everyone.
It's far from a libertarian.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.