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Major PC Makers Adopt Trusted Computing Schema
An anonymous reader wrote to let us known about a News.com story regarding so-called trusted computing, and its adoption by the major PC manufacturers. From the article: "The three largest computer makers--Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM--have started selling desktops and notebooks with so-called trusted computing hardware, which allows security-sensitive applications to lock down data to a specific PC." Interestingly, while Microsoft is said to be behind the idea support won't be forthcoming for trusted computing until they release Longhorn next year, making this a hardware-vendor lead initiative.
Notice the "safety in numbers" flocking together of these vendors. None of them dare take such a step alone, because they know damned well that the publicity will be bad... and people won't buy their hardware. But put together and nice consortium of the largest hardware makers... and boom, everything's ok and fuck the consumer since he no longer has much choice.
Oh you can boot Linux but you won't be using it in any useful way. IIS will dominate the webservers in the world because their's will run on the "secure global information network".
Linux will fall into worthless obscurity because it will run on one of the various unsecure networks that the majority of computer users will never "want" to see. After all the only people that use unsecure computing are terrorists and those that are against the RIAA/MPAA/MSFT/GOV metroplex.
When trusted computing was a USB chip that the os could ignore, I did nothing - my os did ignore it.
When the trusted computing chip was needed to run Windows, I did nothing, I did not run windows.
When the trusted computing chip checksummed the bios, I did nothing, I could still boot linux.
When the trusted computing chip could lock out the bios or any OS not signed I did nothing...
my computer no longer worked.