[Am-info] Trusted Computing FAQ TCPA / Palladium / NGCSB / TCG

[Fred A. Miller]

Trusted Computing FAQ TCPA / Palladium / NGCSB / TCG

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

23. But isn't PC security a good thing? 


The question is: security for whom? You might prefer not to have to worry 
about viruses, but neither TCPA nor Palladium will fix that: viruses exploit 
the way software applications (such as Microsoft Office and Outlook) use 
scripting. You might get annoyed by spam, but that won't get fixed either. 
(Microsoft implies that it will be fixed, by filtering out all unsigned 
messages - but the spammers will just buy TCPA PCs. You'd be better off using 
your existing mail client to filter out mail from people you don't know and 
putting it in a folder you scan briefly once a day.) You might be worried 
about privacy, but neither TCPA nor Palladium will fix that; almost all 
privacy violations result from the abuse of authorised access, often obtained 
by coercing consent. The medical insurance company that requires you to 
consent to your data being shared with your employer and with anyone else 
they can sell it to, isn't going to stop just because their PCs are now 
officially `secure'. On the contrary, they are likely to sell it even more 
widely, because computers are now `trusted'.

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