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Microsoft Kills Off Its Trustworthy Computing Group
An anonymous reader writes Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group is headed for the axe, and its responsibilities will be taken over either by the company's Cloud & Enterprise Division or its Legal & Corporate Affairs group. Microsoft's disbanding of the group represents a punctuation mark in the industry's decades-long conversation around trusted computing as a concept. The security center of gravity is moving away from enterprise desktops to cloud and mobile and 'things,' so it makes sense for this security leadership role to shift as well. According to a company spokesman, an unspecified number of jobs from the group will be cut. Also today, Microsoft has announced the closure of its Silicon Valley lab. Its research labs in Redmond, New York, and Cambridge (in Massachusetts) will pick up some of the closed lab's operations.
I thought Trustworthy Computing was a scheme intended to ensure that no part (of the user experience) could fail?
As opposed to Trusted Computing, which I think is what you're actually referring to here, this instead of protecting the system from failure, secured the system against user violations such as overwriting the bootloader with one that isn't signed (like for instance, replacing or enhancing the BIOS with a signed EFI that prevents the user from installing alternative OSes such as OSX onto a commodity x64 or GNU/Linux onto a MS-subsidised laptop (think £250 deal at PC World. How do you think they get so cheap?)), TPM and TXT which can be used in tandem to lock a software license/instance to a specific machine using a specific hardware setup where the hardware has burned-in unique RSA hashes per device (didn't MS do this with Windows at one point where even replacing a wireless card killed the COA key?), Asshole Detectors (I don't know if this term is in common use, it just sounds cool) such as XBox Live, and vendor lock-in on the pretext of securing a closed network (such as the aforementioned XBox Live, any number of persistent online games such as World of Warcraft...)...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
yep, they're completely different animals.
Trustworthy computing: ensuring reliability and integrity of the user experience
Trusted computing: securing the system against the user.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Exactly. Microsoft tried to secure the software against the users, and tried to tell everyone it was more plain security.
I'm glad users didn't swallow it. MS's lame attempt at confusing everyone got the ridicule and hate it so richly deserved.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Windows 8/8.1 and Server 2012 aren't bad operating systems. They are just hobbled with hideous user interfaces.
There's also some new vomit-inducing screenshots of the Start Menu colors of Windows 9. It's still nice that the menu is coming back, but they seem to be going full-kindergarten in terms of appearance.