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DRM Based on Trusted Computing Chips
An anonymous reader writes "We've always know that Trusted Computing is really about DRM, but computer makers always denied it. Now that their Trusted Computing chips are standard on most new PCs, they've decided to come clean. According to Information Week, Lenovo has demonstrated a Thinkpad with built-in Microsoft and Adobe DRM that uses a Trusted Computing chip with a fingerprint sensor. Even worse: 'The system is also aimed at tracking who reads a document and when, because the chip can report back every access attempt. If you access the file, your fingerprint is recorded.'"
You're missing a lot of details about this software. It's closed source, and a violation of the DMCA to reverse engineer it. That means writing an open source version of the encryption/decryption tools is going to be a nightmare.
Second, running it at the OS level instead of the hardware level of the built-in features of the Intel CPU's is going to really slow it down: that will probably hurt performance a lot of open source versions of the Trusted Computing tools, even if they're legally created.
Third, the next logical stage of Trusted Computing is hardware locking: motherboards that won't load unsigned boot loaders, or won't access DVD drives or hard drives without being authenticated with Trusted Computing licenses to be held by OS distributions or DVD drive and software vendors. This can be used to block open source operating systems from even booting, or to prevent Trusted Computing managed DVD drives from being able to read DVD's that have Trusted Computing signed DVD's in them without a Trusted Computing signed media player.
It's very nasty, and it's at the core of why Microsoft and Hollywood are collaborating so well in this project.