A story that began several years ago and many of you will know it. However it's only now that it's importance will be seen by many. The Trusted Computing Group's "Trusted Platform Module" , whilst being in laptops and other devices for a few years, is now entering the mainstream on, for example, motherboards designed for home media centres (eg Gigabyte's GA-K8N51PVM9-RH, MSI's K8NGM2-FID btw.the codes both include their company code for business platforms but the advertising places emphasis on home media centre use). DRM enabling software support is expected shortly.

Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, England stated, "...TC provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the application software, and where these applications can communicate securely with their authors and with each other...TC can support remote censorship. In its simplest form, applications may be designed to delete pirated music under remote control. For example, if a protected song is extracted from a hacked TC platform and made available on the web as an MP3 file, then TC-compliant media player software may detect it using a watermark, report it, and be instructed remotely to delete it (as well as all other material that came through that platform). This business model, called traitor tracing, has been researched extensively by Microsoft (and others). In general, digital objects created using TC systems remain under the control of their creators, rather than under the control of the person who owns the machine on which they happen to be stored (as at present). So someone who writes a paper that a court decides is defamatory can be compelled to censor it - and the software company that wrote the word processor could be ordered to do the deletion if she refuses. Given such possibilities, we can expect TC to be used to suppress everything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders."
From the must read FAQ at "Trusted Computing" Frequently Asked Questions

Good article.

I myself am feeling particularly sore at M$ at the moment for whatever the heck it is that they've stuck into I.E. 7 Beta that will not roll back & uninstall cleanly. Once I removed it, I couldn't access even this site, or many of my other favourites. Considering the maount of time that they have been using roll-back technology now, I can only say that I am pretty certain this is no accident, & that there is something in there that they don't want to be removed again.

Looks like a format C:\ will be in the offing for me pretty shortly, & this time, I don't think it will be an MS OS going on again.

Cypher? ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thought you'd like that one!

Try to avoid linux distros with the "SecureLinux" included at kernel level (eg redhat based distros) because I think that locks onto the TPM...quite aside from the fact that it was codeveloped with the NSA. As far as I know Ubuntu is good. Sadly though this may change when the TPM gets incorporated into the cpu.

Thanks for the tip there Tree - I'll check this out, & keep an eye on the TPM issue.

Much appreciated.

You're very welcome

This link may clarify some aspects of TPM, the module is a discrete chip fitted to mother boards. The latest and near future incarnations of Intel & AMD processors have code in them which looks for and expects to see a discrete module (chip).

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/pdf/researc...0106Everett.pdf

Interesting presentation

Libra