EFF Position on Trusted Computing

Seth Schoen writes "EFF has just released our analysis of Trusted Computing. We find that the technology could benefit computer security, but must be fixed to ensure that the computer owner is always in control. We also propose a specific way of fixing it. There's coverage of our position at news.com. More articles should be up in the near future at the new EFF Trusted Computing page. Thanks to all the people who helped us understand this technology!"

Comments

Re:Doesn't that...

[Alsee]

Every currently proposed DRM scheme can be defeated by plugging an audio cable from the speaker jack on computer A into the line in on computer B.

You underestimate the stupidity of our opponents. They have in fact not only proposed such a system, they have had congressmen advocating it.

And how could they conceivably accomplish this impossible goal? Simple, they want to make it illegal to make or buy an ordinary recording device without a "Fritz chip" inside that would shut down the device when it detected specially tagged sound. They even proposed requiring that every single analog to digital converter have such lock-out technology embedded.

You could be dictating a letter into an ordinary tape recorder, and if someone walked by on the other side of the street with a radio the "Fritz chip" would pick up the special tag in the music and the tape recorder would record dead silence until they walked out of range. You only discover later that there is a five minute dead zone in the middle of your recorded dictation. Your camcorder tape of your child's first birthday goes dead silent whenever it detects tagged music in the bacground, and the video goes dead black whenever it detects a tagged TV image anywhere in the background.

Reporters might be able to get a special licence for a special video camera that doesn't go dead in this manner, but it would probably have to embed a special tracking code in everything it records.

I'm fairly certain that this proposal is far too extreme to ever get approved, but there ARE people demanding it.

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