morriswindgate
03-01-2003, 11:39 PM
What are TCPA and Palladium?
TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, an initiative led by Intel. Their stated goal is a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform. Palladium is software that Microsoft says it plans to incorporate in future versions of Windows; it will build on the TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features.
How can TCPA be abused?
One of the worries is censorship. TCPA was designed from the start to support the centralised revocation of pirate bits. Pirate software will be spotted and disabled by Fritz when you try to load it, but what about pirated songs or videos? And how could you transfer a song or video that you own from one PC to another, unless you can revoke it on the first machine? The proposed solution is that an application enabled for TCPA, such as a media player or word processor, will have its security policy administered remotely by a server, which will maintain a hot list of bad files. This will be downloaded from time to time and used to screen all files that the application opens. Files can be revoked by content, by the serial number of the application that created them, and by a number of other criteria. The proposed use for this is that if everyone in China uses the same copy of Office, you do not just stop this copy running on any machine that is TCPA-compliant; that would just motivate the Chinese to use normal PCs instead of TCPA PCs in order to escape revocation. So you also cause every TCPA-compliant PC in the world to refuse to read files that have been created using this pirate program.
This is bad enough, but the potential for abuse extends far beyond commercial bullying and economic warfare into political censorship. I expect that it will proceed a step at a time. First, some well-intentioned police force will get an order against a pornographic picture of a child, or a manual on how to sabotage railroad signals. All TCPA-compliant PCs will delete, or perhaps report, these bad documents. Then a litigant in a libel or copyright case will get a civil court order against an offending document; perhaps the Scientologists will seek to blacklist the famous Fishman Affidavit. Once lawyers and government censors realise the potential, the trickle will become a flood.
Now the modern age only started when Gutenberg invented movable type printing in Europe, which enabled information to be preserved and disseminated even if princes and bishops wanted to ban it. For example, when Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in 1380-1, the Lollard movement he started was suppressed easily; but when Tyndale translated the New Testament in 1524-5, he was able to print over 50,000 copies before they caught him and burned him at the stake. The old order in Europe collapsed, and the modern age began. Societies that tried to control information became uncompetitive, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union it seemed that democratic liberal capitalism had won. But now, TCPA and Palladium have placed at risk the priceless inheritance that Gutenberg left us. Electronic books, once published, will be vulnerable; the courts can order them to be unpublished and the TCPA infrastructure will do the dirty work.
So after the Soviet Union's attempts to register and control all typewriters and fax machines, TCPA attempts to register and control all computers. The implications for liberty, democracy and justice are worrying.
I am now officially a member of this Anti-TCPA movement. I urge everyone reading this to read that FAQ slowly and completely. "Trusted Computing" may sound like a good concept, until you realize that it is based on the assumption that the user is inherently untrusted. Thus, TCPA is hostile to the user in that it treats him as a criminal on probation who must be prevented from doing something "unauthorized".
Whatever its intentions, this Trusted Computing technology will lead to the abuse of Human rights and freedoms. If anyone anywhere (Microsoft, Intel, the CIA, the Ministry of Propaganda, etc) has the ability to reach across cyberspace and just simply delete something they dislike from a person's computer, then we have lost our freedom to criticize those in power. If we cannot criticize those in power, we have gone back to the dark ages of tyranny and oppression where the lords and barons control the citizens.
A true democratic government is a servant of the people. Tyranny occurs when the government forgets that and decides that the people are the servants. One of the first acts of any new tyrannical government is to seize control of the distribution of information. I see TCPA as the first step towards that control.
I personally will not be using one of those PCs which require TCPA or its ilk to function. I will use a Macintosh or even linux. Eventually I will probably have no choice but to purchase a Mac. To the best of my knowledge, no Mac computer is planned that will incorporate this sort of technology.
Unbelievably, even that may not be an option for much longer. In the USA there is a bill, the so-called CBDPTA (Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act). First it was named SSSCA (Security Systems Standards and Certification Act). The new name sounds so much more harmless. Presumably the original name made it too easy to discover the purpose of this bill.
This bill plans to legally force secure (TCPA-compliant) systems. So in the USA it would then be illegal to buy or sell systems that are not TCPA-compliant. Violating this law would be punishable with up to 5 years in prison and maximum fine of $500,000. The law also effect development of "open" software. Open means that it would work on systems that are not TCPA-compliant.
Even if this bill was only valid in the USA, it would have catastrophic effects worldwide. Because US companies are not allowed to develop and sell "unsecure" software, others would have to jump onto the TCP bandwagon, so they would give total control over themselves to the TCPA (USA?), or they would have to live completely without software and hardware from US-companies. No Windows, Solaris, MacOS, Photoshop, Winamp or to say it short: The largest part of all software that's used on this planet would not be usable.
If Senator Fritz "Hollywood" Hollings and/or any of the other paid employees of Hollywood in congress make it illegal to use a computer without this technology, then I guess I and many others will become outlaws. The government is my servant, not my master, and I will never allow this to change. Hollywood Hollings and anyone else who thinks that I'll give up control of my computer can kiss my ass.
http://www.spywareinfo.com/newsletter/archives/feb-2003/22.php
TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, an initiative led by Intel. Their stated goal is a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform. Palladium is software that Microsoft says it plans to incorporate in future versions of Windows; it will build on the TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features.
How can TCPA be abused?
One of the worries is censorship. TCPA was designed from the start to support the centralised revocation of pirate bits. Pirate software will be spotted and disabled by Fritz when you try to load it, but what about pirated songs or videos? And how could you transfer a song or video that you own from one PC to another, unless you can revoke it on the first machine? The proposed solution is that an application enabled for TCPA, such as a media player or word processor, will have its security policy administered remotely by a server, which will maintain a hot list of bad files. This will be downloaded from time to time and used to screen all files that the application opens. Files can be revoked by content, by the serial number of the application that created them, and by a number of other criteria. The proposed use for this is that if everyone in China uses the same copy of Office, you do not just stop this copy running on any machine that is TCPA-compliant; that would just motivate the Chinese to use normal PCs instead of TCPA PCs in order to escape revocation. So you also cause every TCPA-compliant PC in the world to refuse to read files that have been created using this pirate program.
This is bad enough, but the potential for abuse extends far beyond commercial bullying and economic warfare into political censorship. I expect that it will proceed a step at a time. First, some well-intentioned police force will get an order against a pornographic picture of a child, or a manual on how to sabotage railroad signals. All TCPA-compliant PCs will delete, or perhaps report, these bad documents. Then a litigant in a libel or copyright case will get a civil court order against an offending document; perhaps the Scientologists will seek to blacklist the famous Fishman Affidavit. Once lawyers and government censors realise the potential, the trickle will become a flood.
Now the modern age only started when Gutenberg invented movable type printing in Europe, which enabled information to be preserved and disseminated even if princes and bishops wanted to ban it. For example, when Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in 1380-1, the Lollard movement he started was suppressed easily; but when Tyndale translated the New Testament in 1524-5, he was able to print over 50,000 copies before they caught him and burned him at the stake. The old order in Europe collapsed, and the modern age began. Societies that tried to control information became uncompetitive, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union it seemed that democratic liberal capitalism had won. But now, TCPA and Palladium have placed at risk the priceless inheritance that Gutenberg left us. Electronic books, once published, will be vulnerable; the courts can order them to be unpublished and the TCPA infrastructure will do the dirty work.
So after the Soviet Union's attempts to register and control all typewriters and fax machines, TCPA attempts to register and control all computers. The implications for liberty, democracy and justice are worrying.
I am now officially a member of this Anti-TCPA movement. I urge everyone reading this to read that FAQ slowly and completely. "Trusted Computing" may sound like a good concept, until you realize that it is based on the assumption that the user is inherently untrusted. Thus, TCPA is hostile to the user in that it treats him as a criminal on probation who must be prevented from doing something "unauthorized".
Whatever its intentions, this Trusted Computing technology will lead to the abuse of Human rights and freedoms. If anyone anywhere (Microsoft, Intel, the CIA, the Ministry of Propaganda, etc) has the ability to reach across cyberspace and just simply delete something they dislike from a person's computer, then we have lost our freedom to criticize those in power. If we cannot criticize those in power, we have gone back to the dark ages of tyranny and oppression where the lords and barons control the citizens.
A true democratic government is a servant of the people. Tyranny occurs when the government forgets that and decides that the people are the servants. One of the first acts of any new tyrannical government is to seize control of the distribution of information. I see TCPA as the first step towards that control.
I personally will not be using one of those PCs which require TCPA or its ilk to function. I will use a Macintosh or even linux. Eventually I will probably have no choice but to purchase a Mac. To the best of my knowledge, no Mac computer is planned that will incorporate this sort of technology.
Unbelievably, even that may not be an option for much longer. In the USA there is a bill, the so-called CBDPTA (Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act). First it was named SSSCA (Security Systems Standards and Certification Act). The new name sounds so much more harmless. Presumably the original name made it too easy to discover the purpose of this bill.
This bill plans to legally force secure (TCPA-compliant) systems. So in the USA it would then be illegal to buy or sell systems that are not TCPA-compliant. Violating this law would be punishable with up to 5 years in prison and maximum fine of $500,000. The law also effect development of "open" software. Open means that it would work on systems that are not TCPA-compliant.
Even if this bill was only valid in the USA, it would have catastrophic effects worldwide. Because US companies are not allowed to develop and sell "unsecure" software, others would have to jump onto the TCP bandwagon, so they would give total control over themselves to the TCPA (USA?), or they would have to live completely without software and hardware from US-companies. No Windows, Solaris, MacOS, Photoshop, Winamp or to say it short: The largest part of all software that's used on this planet would not be usable.
If Senator Fritz "Hollywood" Hollings and/or any of the other paid employees of Hollywood in congress make it illegal to use a computer without this technology, then I guess I and many others will become outlaws. The government is my servant, not my master, and I will never allow this to change. Hollywood Hollings and anyone else who thinks that I'll give up control of my computer can kiss my ass.
http://www.spywareinfo.com/newsletter/archives/feb-2003/22.php