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Microsoft Scales Down Palladium
bonch writes "Formerly known as Palladium, Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) will not be fully available in Windows Longhorn after all. Instead, Longhorn will offer "the first part of NGSCB: Secure Startup," says Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms. However, most hardware will not support this technology on release."
I'm guessing that despite everything it's main purpose will still be fulfilled...
Making MS lots and lots of good old cash.
You are probably hearing "security" and "trust" and falsely assuming this means YOUR security, or YOU being able to trust your computer.
In fact you, the user, are not the intended beneficiary of "trusted computing" at all.
The problem now is that people have too much control over their computers. From the perspective of somebody trying to limit what other people do, this is insecurity. If you write a computer program and sell it to someone, why, there's no guarantee at all that people will use it the way you wanted. People may find ways to trick your program into doing things it didn't intend, or even start to fiddle around with it and its innards, or use the files they made in your program in competing applications. It's as almost as if these people believe that just because they bought a copy of your software means they [i]own[/i] that copy. Something must be done about this. Vendors, like Microsoft, want to be able to "trust" your computer not to let you do things with it Microsoft doesn't want you to do. Hence, palladium.
Trusted boot is the first step in that. It convinces people that a piece of hardware in your computer that when switched on limits the ability to write to your hard drive to "trusted" pieces of code (and not scary things like Knoppix rescue cds) is a good idea. Somehow.