Ross's TCPA paper

[jamesd at echeque.com]

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On 5 Jul 2002 at 14:45, AARG! Anonymous wrote:
> Right, and you can boot untrusted OS's as well.  Recently there
> was discussion here of HP making a trusted form of Linux that
> would work with the TCPA hardware.  So you will have options in
> both the closed source and open source worlds to boot trusted
> OS's, or you can boot untrusted ones, like old versions of
> Windows.  The user will have more choice, not less.

Yes he will, but the big expansion of choice is for the the seller
of content and software, who will have more choices as to how he
can cripple what he sells you.  For example he can sell you music
that will only play on a particular music player on your
particular machine.

But that is not enough to give the content industry what it wants,
for someone can still break it on one machine, perhaps by
intercepting the bitstream to the the DA, and having broken it on
one machine, can run it on all machines all over the internet.
Break once, run everywhere.

Microsoft has also been talking out of both sides of its mouth, by
saying that this will also protect against break once, run
everywhere.  The only way that this can protect against
break-once-run-everywhere is to reduce user choice, to make it
mandatory that the user can only run government trusted software,
and to reduce seller choice, prohibit sellers from providing
unacceptable software, such as napster like software. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
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