Other uses of TCPA

[Nomen Nescio]

I think that people are beginning to understand that TCPA is not a
black and white issue.  It is neither the overwhelming threat that some
activists are describing, nor the panacea that the vendors are selling.
It is a technology with strengths and weaknesses.

As an exercise, try thinking of ways you could use TCPA to promote "good
guy" applications.  What could you do in a P2P network if you could
trust that all participants were running approved software?  And if you
could prevent third parties, including hostile governments, from seeing
the data being used by that software?  You may be surprised to find that
if you look at it with an open mind, TCPA could be a tremendous boon to
freedom-oriented technologies.  From file sharing to crypto protocols
to digital cash, TCPA lets you expand the trusted computing base to
the entire set of participating machines.  It's really a tremendously
powerful technology.

The biggest problem, ironically, is that TCPA may not be secure enough.
It's one thing to make video piracy difficult, it's another matter to keep
the Chinese government from prying into the sealed storage.  But with
future generations of TCPA integrated onto CPUs with improved tamper
resistance, it will be much more difficult to defeat the protections.
It may turn out that TCPA can significantly facilitate cypherpunk goals.