The Jailhouse

[HhH]

The TPM is a TROJAN HORSE...

that is being promoted by much of the technology industry to button up the way their customers use their products. There is (or at least shouldn't be) anything TRUSTED about the organization promoting this--the TCG.

It's my sense that the customers will NEVER yield to the sort of control the TPMs transfer from technology user to technology provider. (Aside from a few enterprises that grant too much latitude to their IT people, some of whom will be tempted to expand their fiefdoms at their employers' expense.)

It's my opinion that MSFT is already getting cold feet here and is in the process of watering down VISTA to the point that TPMs are an option and not a requirement. An option that, once people figure out the degree of control surrendered, they will not select. Period.

The technology firms are very close to making an industry-wide blunder equivalent to Intel's of a few years back. I think some folks realize that and are having second thoughts about being perceived as putting their own interests ahead of their customers'.

(Underlines in following article are mine.)
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Trusted Computing

http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=2067

Date 30 Oct 2005
Author Leo Waldock

Although Microsoft isn’t ready to release Beta 2 of Windows Vista it has been busy with its CTP (Community Technology Preview) schedule, and in October released build 5231 of Vista. This build looks much the same as build 5129 but it is the first version to include Windows Media Player 11, and the Windows Security Center has gained a tab for Spyware Protection, in addition to the Firewall, Virus Protection, and Automatic Updating tabs that came with Windows XP SP2. The look and feel of Vista hasn’t changed noticeably in build 5231, but that’s not to say that Microsoft won’t pull a rabbit out of the hat at the last minute in a bid to out-Apple Mac OS X. We are starting to make out the shape of Vista as it appears from the mists of 2006, but there is still a bit of a mystery over the Trusted Computing side of things. Microsoft is deeply involved in what was called the TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance) and is now called the TCG (Trusted Computing Group). Microsoft used to refer to its Trusted Computing technology as Palladium but has since changed it to NGSCB, or Next Generation Secure Computing Base.
Trusted Computing uses a chip called a TPM (Trusted Computing Module), also nicknamed a Fritz-chip, after Senator Ernest ‘Fritz’ Hollings of South Carolina who retired in December 2004 after 38years in the US Senate during which time he sponsored a number of legal bills aimed at protecting intellectual property rights. We can bitch all we like about intellectual property, copyright and software patents but The Economist recently stated that technology licensing is worth US$100 billion per annum globally of which the USA accounts for US$45 billion, which is an impressive chunk of cash. More scarily The Economist stated that ‘up to three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets, up from around 40 per cent in the early 1980s.’ No doubt a large part of that value is trademarks and brands such as Boeing, Coke and Nike rather than IT technology but there’s no denying that the Americans have a massive vested interest in protecting this money, whether we like it or not.

The Fritz chip sits on your motherboard and offers a secure, or trusted, computing environment. If the Fritz-chip doesn’t like your operating system then it won’t load, so you can forget about running Apple OS X on your PC unless Steve Jobs sells you a license.

Although the Darwin environment that underpins Apple OS X uses BSD and has been released as Open Source software by Apple, Rosetta, the translation software that Intel Macs will use to run legacy software relies on TCPA/TPM DRM and the Apple GUI also requires Rosetta. You may be able to install OS X but you won’t be able to do anything worthwhile with it.



Once your Operating System is up and running, the Fritz-chip will then check each and every application before it loads so if your license for Adobe Photoshop has expired its game over until you get in touch with Adobe and confess your sins.
Look here and you’ll see that the main players in TCG are AMD, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun but there are dozens of other companies on the Contributor list including AMI, ATI, Broadcom, Dell, Hitachi, Marvell, Maxtor, nVidia, ULi, Samsung, Seagate and Winbond. The only name that seems to be missing is Western Digital, and regardless of what you and I may think about Trusted Computing we’re going to be passengers with that little lot driving the thing forward.

Naturally Microsoft is fully behind Trusted Computing as it says here. “Windows Vista supports full-volume encryption to prevent disk access to files by other operating systems. It also stores encryption keys in a Trusted Platform Model (TPM) v1.2 chip. The entire system partition is encrypted - both the hibernation file and the user data. It also stores encryption keys in a Trusted Platform Model (TPM) v1.2 chip, if one is available on the PC.”

The TPM v1.2 chip that it refers to is likely to be an Infineon SLD 9635 TPM/TCPA chip, and if you study your motherboard carefully you may find an older Infineon SLD 9630 TPM v1.1 chip is lurking there, unused. Although TPM hasn’t yet arrived the first steps have certainly been made so it comes as something of a surprise to find that Microsoft has cut back dramatically on its plans for the implementation of Next Generation Secure Computing Base in Windows Vista. The original plan was to enhance security by providing Secure Start-up which has been described as protection for your hard drive in the event of theft, which should be of keen interest to the owners of laptops. Once the computer has started, each application would be separated from the Operating System and from other applications by software called a nexus. Microsoft has put this idea to one side in a bid to get Vista released by the end of 2006 and has instead implemented a system of secure compartments. There’s one compartment for Windows itself, another for applications and another for administration.

More significantly, the ‘Vista Ready PC’ hardware guidelines make no mention of the TPM, so while it is quite possible that Vista will support certain Trusted Computing features, it seems unlikely that software publishers will be able to include a TPM as a system requirement. You’d have to think that many members of the Trusted Computing Group would have loved to see Vista fully support TPM but Microsoft is also a loser here as it wants the protection of TPM as much as anyone, but Secure Start-up is better than nothing.

At least Microsoft gets a public relations consolation prize as it won’t be seen as the company that forces TPM down the throats, or at least not just yet. But if you’re breathing a sigh of relief then it may be a touch premature. You see, Digital Rights Management continues to spread its tentacles through movie, TV and audio content.
Let’s ignore Blu Ray and High Definition DVD for now as they are aren’t here yet. Let’s also gloss over the ridiculous state of the music download market where Apple is being berated by music publishers for attempting to offer its customers a reasonable price for music. In a moment of charity we won’t dwell on the startling news from Yahoo that it is raising its subscription price from US$6.99 per month to US$11.99 with the kicker that you lose all of the music you have paid for if/when you cancel your subscription.

Instead let’s look at TV. The TV companies are desperate to sell their content to subscribers in their home market, followed by subscribers overseas, and all the while they pack out the wretched programmes with adverts to turn 40 minutes of content into a one hour ‘show’. To add insult to injury Sky then adds pop-up adverts that trail other TV shows, so you can be in the final stages of a thrilling Moto GP race when some thoughtless, rude, selfish twat at Sky covers the on screen lap timer with an advert for a football match. If it’s a really bad day they’ll cut to adverts two laps from the end, just as Rossi forces Gibernau to run wide into the final chicane… but we miss that because they’re trying to sell us a mobile phone. It’s not enough that I’m watching motorcycles that look like mobile billboards racing at a track that is lined with advertising hoardings at the Grand Prix of Wherever, sponsored by Whatever and paying a subscription for the privilege too. To add insult to these many injuries they break up the flow of the action and as a result my entertainment level is reduced. Small wonder then that many of us are sick of this attitude and download TV shows from the Internet and small wonder that the TV companies are fighting back with confrontation, instead of paying attention to what their customers want.

There have been stories of HBO seeding false torrents to prevent its Rome series being distributed over the internet, which is annoying. However, this picture should really cause some alarm.







It’s a photo of a TV screen when the Tivo system in the US suffered from a glitch recently and displayed a message that wasn’t meant to be seen by the public. The recording is of ‘King of the Hill’ and there is a Restrictions section which reads
‘Due to the policy set by the copyright holder, this recording:
Can only be kept up to 7 DAYS after it starts recording. Cannot be transferred to VCR, DVD, or any other media device. To learn more visit www.tivo.com/copyprotection where we get the low-down on the dreaded Macrovision Copy Protection system and see that some programmes have restricted rights while others can’t be recorded by Tivo at all.

Windows Vista may not do much to advance Digital Rights Management but once the TPM swings into action it’s a safe bet that every last scrap of digital content will be locked down tighter than a drum. The only question is when.

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