Slashdot Mirror
IBM Shipping More PCs with Trust Chips
rts008 submits this EWeek story about IBM shipping more computers with trusted computing inside. Since the article mentions none of the downsides, we should: trusted chips will eventually be used by software manufacturers to make sure the computer's owner does not do anything with the software which the manufacturer does not want to permit.
Yeah, paranoia is fun and all, but I wouldn't mind a few links to support the downsides claim.
You'ld think IBM would know better than to associate the word "Trust" with "Technology". That combination is like a buzzword for suspicion to the Tech-wise.
Remember, trusted computing has its place. Maybe not on the desktop, but I can see it useful to lockdown point-of-sale machines, kiosks and librarys. It would be a hell of a lot easier for some places than it is implementing Group Policies and permissions for a computer that should be used only for a specific task.
Good.
Instead of encouraging people to break the law (pirate software, etc) - I wish more people would choose software that _grants_ them the right to use it as they see fit.
I wish everyone in the world had to pay full price for Microsoft and Adobe software instead of copy it or buy cheap pirated versions. Then people would start recognising the value of Free Software.
Until then, pirated windows is probably the strongest competitor Linux faces.
If these silly licenses will finally be enforced, people will start to demand software that they legally own the rights to - as opposed to simply stealing it from work.
The best thing that could ever happen to Free Software would be if people were no longer able to steal software from their companies an no longer able to buy cheap pirated versions.
Finally the general public would understand what the Free Software movement is all about.
Michael, I'm afraid you're mistaken. No processes will be allowed to run on your machine that *Microsoft* or a similar vendor did not specifically authorize. This means that the boot loader can be signed to prevent you from running a non-Windows operating system, a CD or DVD or hard drive disk can be signed to prevent legal and authorized duplication for what is legal home copying, and emulation software such as OpenOffice can be prevented from making the system calls to open data files generated with Microsoft Office, helping keep the Microsoft monopoly locked up.
Moreover, it can prevent experimenters from being able to design new drivers and software tools to work with the crypto-authorized hardware without spending very large amounts of money on development tool suites with frankly larcenous intellectual property agreements.
This development is potentially extremely nasty: while we're somewhat paranoid about it, the history of abuse of standards to lock customers into their monopoly justifies extreme concern about what Microsoft might do with these features.
The attempt is futile because every attempt to prevent illegal copying has been defeated. Some Taiwanese engineer will design a hardware addon to enable the customer to illegally copy the software.
The only way to protect the trust chips is to obtain a federal injunction (from a judge) barring hardware hackers from circumventing the hardware anti-piracy chips. However, those injunctions apply only to the USA. The Taiwanese engineers will gleefully ignore the injuntion -- as is their wont. The Chinese in China (including Taiwan province and Hong Kong) routinely ignore Western standards and custom.
After all, China is the software-piracy capital of the world. The piracy rate exceeds 91%.
TCPA (the chip that's in these PCs) is simply a Crypto co-processor. It provides acceleration for common crypto algorithms and it also provides a tamper-resistant storage location for keys. IBM maintains an Open Source implementation for the processor.
There's already been really neat things done with the chip like a truely secure version of Linux that's entirely tamper proof (this is doing by signing the kernel and boot loader with the TCPA.
Put away the foil hats people, this is actually really cool innovative technology that so far has given Linux an edge in the security world over Windows.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));