Ask Slashdot: Best/Newest Hardware Without "Trusted Computing"?

An anonymous reader writes "What is the best/newest hardware without trusted computing (TC) / Trusted Platform Module(TPM)? I am currently running ancient 32-bit hardware and thinking about an upgrade to something x64 with USB3, SATA3 and >1 core on the CPU ... but don't want TC/TPM. I have no need to run anything like Blu Ray movie disks or Microsoft Windows that requires TC/TPM or the UEFI boot process. Is anybody else still trying to avoid TC/TPM? What have your experiences been? Any pointers?" Worth reading on this front, too: Richard Stallman on so-called Trusted Computing,.

Comments

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you do turn it on, it only goes about doing what you ask it to do. You can use it to pull some random numbers from, for instance, and completely ignore the cryptographic functions. And neither UEFI or secure boot has nothing to do with TPM. That's completely separate and, on every x86/x86_64 machine I know of, able to be easily run in custom mode with your own keys (and noone else's keys), or disabled entirely.

So if you're being paranoid about this because of fears about spying or remotely taking over your computer... Well, you're being paranoid. If you're scared of that because of TPM, you should be much more scared of that because of not having the complete specifications to rebuild the computer from a hunk of silicon..

Re:get a mac.

[hairyfeet]

Bullshit just buy AMD as I don't think they even have a board that HAS TPM and what they are doing to fix that will leave the choice IN YOUR HANDS because instead of baking it into the board they'll have the "business class" chips with an ARM DRM chip they bought from ARM Holdings to do TPM and crypto and...well pretty much anything security related you want. Don't want the feature? All you do is don't buy the business class chips, simple as that.

My system has a 6 core CPU, 8GB of RAM (expandable to 16GB but for what i do frankly that would be overkill) and chews through any job I throw at it and NO TPM,same with my netbook which has dual cores and 8GB, same for my two boys quad and hexa, my dad's quad desktop...you get the idea.

Hell you can go over to Tiger and buy a TPM free quad laptop for $420 flat, or if you don't mind taking the whole 40 minutes it takes to slap one together you can get a fully loaded hexacore desktop for $310 after rebate, so not only can you support not having a TPM but you can save a good chunk of change which can be used on an SSD or faster GPU, win/win.