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Phoenix DRM Reads Your E-Mail
martensitic writes "eWeek reports that Phoenix has developed a utility allowing users of its laptop DRM BIOS (last discussed here) to 'check their Outlook data on a notebook computer without needing to boot the machine.' Since Longhorn is still several years away, Pheonix is developing their own trusted apps to sell the BIOS to laptop manufacturers. One can only imagine what other innocuous bells and whistles will be used to leverage DRM onto Joe Laptop's machine."
It's not like the BIOS transmits info anywhere else or logs keystrokes. It's seems to be a quick boot access method to get to your PIM data. And, quite frankly - its ABOUT BLOODY TIME.
Even with a fast 2 gig PC its hard to convince the family to use the contacts database instead of the paper version- takes too long to boot, logon, load the app. Sheesh, it seems as if this type of information access is going backwards these days. The faster the hardware gets, the more bloated the software gets.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Zawinski's Law strikes again.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Why get such a BIOS? Increase BIOS complexity and you will end with a heavy, buggy bios. KISS!
I, for one, welcome our old great Award BIOS!
but with the prevalence of viruses and spam factory trojans contracted via the inboxes of lusers, this may be a case of lesser of two evils. *If I can disable it* then I don't mind.
Ah, it allows me to access my Outlook data. Very good. But does it allow me to connect to the net and retrieve new data for viewing?
--
The last digit of pi is four.
Open Source BIOS anyone? Prohibitively expensive? Administratively impossibile? Too geek even for /.?
Why just Outlook data? Why not extend this idea further. I dont USE Outlook, so I want my BIOS to enable me to check my Eudora mail, engage in ICQ, MSN-MSGR, and AIM chat, check the weather, stock quotes, movie times, and train schedules from my favorite web sites. To support all these things of course, my BIOS would need to bring up a sophisticated operating system... lets call it 'Bindows'. This 'Bindows' would be rather large, so it will need the ability to 'hibernate' quickly and wake up from hibernation quickly.
Yes, this will be great.
Much better than what we have now...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
With 20 second hibernation restores, are people really so pressed for time that they have to read e-mail from their fricken bios? Leave the bios alone. Bioses generally work fine, are feature packed, and nowadays don't give people problems. If manufacturers need to diferentiate their products they should add usefull features like DVD and mp3 cd playing without booting. These sort of features are for when I am generally not sitting at the computer but just looking at the screen, usually saving the battery life or perhaps noise level (media pc anyone?) If I wanted to read e-mail I would just boot and read e-mail.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I really get the feeling they're trying any old tactics to sell Joe Public the idea of DRM.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Hopefully the big manufacturers don't use Pheonix and come up with thier own (or continue using their own, whatever the case).
/Even/ if it did happen, I doubt the EU would let it go far. So even if the corrupt US lets MS win, I can buy a web proxy in the EU for surfing. Sucks, but it's better than losing my right to choose.
I find it real hard to believe IBM will allow DRM to get to the point where Linux is unusable/"untrusted" on a machine.
I also find it hard to believe that Microsoft will be able to lock the internet down to the point where only Windows workstations can get to websites anyways.
Daniel
Well hell just tell them not to shut down the pc. Damn that was tough.....
Got Code?
Surely this has,if nothing else, the potential to simply create more problems than it solves?
/.? :P
Solved: Annoying need to wait for a few seconds while my machine comes out of hibernate mode.
Problem: A plethora of BIOS destroying viruses and worms, spread by email, capable of rendering whole systems useless.
Given the (frankly silly) amount of worms circulating in today's email, would this really produce a worthwhile benefit? I fail to see how this produces more good effects than bad. If you really, honestly, have such a pressed schedule that you can't wait for your machine to come out of hibernate mode then
a) You need a less pressing job
and
b) What are you doing on
id rather my bios just connected the HD and not actually read data from my files thanks
what happened to doing a task but doing that task really well
if writing the bios is simple enough that you have time to add applications then just drop the price, my alternator for my car doesnt include extras with it just does its job cheaply and well
lol.
Thats a great informative post there.
I don't have to wait at all either. I have a P2 450 with fluxbox and kmail. I paid $150 for mine. How about you?
Get paid to code OSS
Whilst the BIOS will show virus ridden email, it will not execute virus content, there is no OS yet. This means you have a possibility to review your email to check for suspicious email without risk. Ever wondered why so many people still use Pine?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Use your PDA for storing contacts, not the PC?
--
This sig is inoffensive.
BIOS - Basic Input Output System
What does checking Outlook email have to do with _Basic_ Input or Output? Why don't they keep going and put a spreadsheet in the BIOS while they're at it?
From someone who did, once, inadvertantly flash a bios with the wrong firmware and have to go though the hell that ensued to get a new firmware chip....the idea that the BIOS can directly connect to potentially damaging information is downright frightning. Imagine the potential if they allowed dynamic updating (think windows update), and the hell that could ensue if someone figured out how to hack its updating system.
Perhaps those email-hoxes of old about a virus completely destroying your computer were actually profetic.
Chris Knight is my hero.
They weren't kidding, were they? The corollary is, then, that all devices evolve until they can read email.
It's not like the BIOS transmits info anywhere else or logs keystrokes. It's seems to be a quick boot access method to get to your PIM data. And, quite frankly - its ABOUT BLOODY TIME.
With the coming of widespread wireless availability, the BIOS will soon be able to access your PIM data without needing to boot the full O/S *and* ship a copy of all your email off to the FBI/DHS/ATF/DEA/Microsoft without your knowledge.
And coming from the perspective of US government law enforcement personnel, quite frankly it's ABOUT BLOODY TIME.
Actually it wouldn't.
I take you back to the days BEFORE e-mail viruses.
Most users would read BBS e-mail from a PC with ANSI enables.
There were some features and defects in the Microsoft provided ANSI driver that would permit someone to lock up your keyboard or crash your machine.
For a while I used that feature as a cheap macro system. But I dumpped it for security sake.
The point is that when you heep features on eventually something bad will happen.
Adding the ability to read e-mail to BIOS certenly qualifys as "heeping features".
It would make sense that typical outlook express viruses won't work on the Pheonix bios but that certenly dosen't stop anyone from develuping new ones.
I don't actually exist.
I never implied anything about non-volatile RAM. The article is about a mini-OS in ROM or PROM. It's not the same thing at all. Whatever they stick in that PROM will be obsolete in weeks. I don't want an OS in my boot PROM. As you said, the whole "BIOS" is a stupid idea. The boot PROM should be a minimal bit of code that knows enough to read data from a boot sector on a hard disk, a CDROM, and a floppy, then execute whatever it found on that boot sector. Leave the rest up to the OS.
The right way to do what Phoenix is proposing (if it should be done at all) is to change the OS so that it has a 'fast boot mini-mode' that comes up right away without the entire 5 minutes of booting everything. But Phoenix doesn't make OSes, they make boot PROMs. So their solution is to put it in the boot PROM. I'm sure if this was "Subway"s idea they would put a mini-OS in a lean turkey sandwhich and issue a press release that it was a great idea.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
birth of new companies, or rise of small ones. Why ? because i will certainly prefer a bios with no crap built in, and many others like me, will create the demand for such computers. Even if most players in hardware scene prefer to sell "secured" products, there will be a huge demand for clean bioses and computers.
Remember what happened when overclocking became something that most guys at least wanted to try ? One by one, all motherboard manufacturers (except Intel of course) began to produce models that allowed better support for overclocking. Now it's easy to modify bus speed by a precision of 1 mhz or something if i'm not wrong. No jumper mess or other weird tricks are necessary ( i remember taping of some parts on my celeron 300 to have 2.4 volts)
So, MS or whomever supports this kind of movements will create a huge push for migration to more open systems. It's not hard to guess that all major apps will suddenly refuse to work on "untrusted" computers. So, that will create another great oppurtunity for open source software, for it'll possibly be the only option to work on "clean" computers.
So there is a strong possibilty forusers migrating to "open" alternatives, which may create a nice **ck y*u effect to MS and supporters of such "trusted" environments
Once you lick the lollipop of mediocrity, you'll suck forever!