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Should We Be Afraid of TPM Chips?
AcidArrow asks: "I was looking to buy a new laptop and since I wanted to be on the bleeding edge, I thought one with the new core duo chips would be just what I need. Among the features on the laptops I was looking was 'Trusted Platform Module chip for the safety of your data'. Now, I don't know of any real uses for a TPM chip yet, but is this something that should worry me, or keep me from buying a laptop with said 'feature'? I don't intend to use it and I would like to disable it, if possible, but I don't want to make it easier for anyone to track down what I'm doing on my laptop."
You might want to do a little research on the efficacy of finger-print identification systems - in short it is pretty much nil. The cheap ones can usually be fooled by simply retrying a bunch of times with the finger at different angles, the more expensive ones can be easily fooled with the equivalent of a jello mold of the valid fingerprint - which can often be lifted directly off the scanner itself via the skin-oil left by the most recent user. So your 2-factor authentication is really more of a 1.1-factor authentication.