Trusted Computing (TC) continues to be one of the most controversial technologies to come along in many years. Ross Anderson’s (anti) TCPA FAQ, Lucky Green’s apocalyptic DEFCON presentation, and sites such as notcpa.org and againsttcpa.com are full of predictions of online disaster if TC technology is allowed to go forward.
Interesting Uses of Trusted Computing
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It doesn’t matter how much self-serving technology Microsoft puts into “Trusted Computing”. Without “Trusted People” (TP), all of these systems will still be subject to massive misuse. And the complexity of “Trusted Computing” will make crime harder to track down than ever before.
Which brings us back to why Microsoft is gunning so hard for “Trusted Computing”. Because then the platform is completely locked down and it enables criminals to rule the world.
Nice if you are big thug of a company with nearly $100 billion in the bank. You get to charge everyone to upgrade all their systems and then you can do whatever you want and no one can check on you. So you make another $100 billion of illegal monopoly profit that cannot be examined because it is all buried in some “Trusted Computing” system. The dark side, clever is.
As the concerned company mentions:
>Process isolation: Running without being altered or interfered with by other >programs or the user himself
>Sealed storage: Storing data in encrypted form such that no other program can >decrypt it
>Secure user I/O: Displaying data and receiving input from the user without it being >altered or inspected by other software
>Remote attestation: Being able to prove to a remote system precisely what local >program is running
One can wonder if it will be done with same standard of programming as users
have come accustemed to…
AvS
This TC thing is scary.Really scary.
Process isolation: Running without being altered or interfered with by other programs or the user himself
Sealed storage: Storing data in encrypted form such that no other program can decrypt it
Secure user I/O: Displaying data and receiving input from the user without it being altered or inspected by other software
Remote attestation: Being able to prove to a remote system precisely what local program is running
I can do all this now, but with TC, control over that will be taken away from me. Come on. If all these people can come up with is some half-baked security, ‘it’s for your own protection’ crap then the conspiry theories will run and run.
We’ve seen a lot of attempts by people at Microsoft and IBM to explain all this, and none of it is convincing. It will just make hardware, software and computing ridiculously expensive by putting a layer of crap on that is totally unnecessary. I can see trouble ahead with this.
Any evil patent issues aside (hey, they could crop up anywhere, so they’re not a good argument specifically against TC), Trusted Computing could allow free OSs to do great things to protect the users and their machines. It’s a tool, like any other.
“Trusted Computing” is not just a tool, “like any other”.
It’s like calling a prison cell that someone else controls the door to, “an apartment, like any other”.
“Trusted Computing” is a tool, designed by Microsoft, for platform lock-in and crime-enablement. It is not designed as a general purpose tool. To say that it is any sort of general purpose tool is disingenuous.
hi, eugenia!
nice to see I gave you an idea for a new article! 🙂
( http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6481 )
Now, I have more than I could wish: An extra article about this strange “trusting computing” 🙂
Many thanx for your help, Eugenia!
I was already wondering why no one speaks about tcpa. Was it because the members gave no majority for this project?
Was it the war, which let’s many other people forget all other problems?
But out of this “failed project”, there has been the new group TCG created, who actively continues his work. Strangely the specifications do not go far enough for Intel, so they have their own project “La Grande”.
oh, I forgot:
the articles on wikipedia.org are recommended:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing
If I wanted Trusted Computing I’d get OpenBSD! Something thats already been out for a number of years now. not some half baked sales pitch to lock me in a M$ product wih even more holes than any Windows OS at present!
Can you imagin the super trojans!
Then let your favorite government (China, let’s say) implement it for the world (See how far that idea flies!).