"First, get it built into all CPU chips...only _then_ make it mandatory."

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Fri Jul 5 17:55:27 PDT 2002


On Friday, July 5, 2002, at 02:50  PM, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> This describes the system as "opt-in" and that says that it will
> not restrict the choice and options of the owner.  That is, users
> can enable the TCPA system and get their integrity metrics reported
> (these are basically hashes of the BIOS, OS boot loader, etc.), which
> will allow third parties to know that they booted into an unmodified,
> trusted system.  But they always have the choice to boot into a 
> modified,
> patched or untrusted system, and in that case either the TCPA chip will
> report it, or they can forego the use of the TCPA subsystem entirely.
>

As my title suggests, the strategy is clearly ""First, get it built into 
all chips...only _then_ make it mandatory."

Getting TCPA/DRM enforcement circuitry built in to all major CPUs, 
network appliances, and entertainment systems is the first stage. 
Obviously they'll talk about it all being voluntary, user-selectable, 
etc.

Then, perhaps after some major war or terror incident or other trigger, 
major OSes will require the TCPA/DRM features to be running at all 
times. Sure, maybe some little Perl or Java program Joe Sixpack writes 
won't need it, but anything not on the margins will require it.

This is for newer OS versions from Trustworthy Players, not for older 
OSes and older machines. Personally, I expect a lot of people may have 
several machines: the newest entertainment boxes which run TCPA/DRM, 
moderately recent business-type machines which may or may not run it, 
and older machines, which won't.

I know someone (Peter Trei, I think) was saying that the 
three-generations-hence 30 GHz processor running streaming holograms 
will certainly have TCPA running and no one will want to use their 
ancient 5 GHz Pentium 6 machines, but I disagree. I've been running my 
400 MHz G4-based Mac happily for almost three years. It keeps up with 
everything I can plausibly expect it to do with the current generation 
of apps: edit DV movies from my camcorder, run Microsoft Office and 
Mathematica and all the rest at very good speeds, display excellent 
graphics on my LCD screen, and so on. I could upgrade even today to a 
dual 1 GHz G4 tower (2 GHz of G4 being probably about the equivalent of 
a 3 Ghz Pentium 4, based on most benchmarks) and be good for several 
more years. (Though I expect I'll upgrade to

Plus, the trend to have more and more transistors devoted to graphics is 
a critical one: Most compute-intensive tasks will be graphics, running 
on a graphics subsystem. It seems likely that the user of 5-8 years from 
now will have several levels of CPUs: some running security and network 
access programs, some running other appliances and systems, and some 
running at the highest speeds and numbers of transistors, for graphics. 
Such heterogeneous systems make TCPA tough to mandate.

(Like a lot of us, I'm sure, I run several generations of machines. The 
more recent the generation, and hence the lower the noise level and the 
more user-friendly, the longer I am likely to keep them running. No way 
will I junk all these great machines just because TCPA isn't running on 
them. And, by the way, this applies in _spades_ to the millions of DVD 
players, Xboxes with DVDs, PlayStations with DVDs, laptops with DVDs, 
and computers with DVDs. This huge base of DVDs being sold, this huge 
base of systems able to play these DVDs, and the lack of real interest 
in HDTV points to a much longer lifetime for DVDs than some would have 
hoped. I see virtually zero interest in HDTV, qua HDTV. What I do see 
are more people using line doublers and Radeon 8500XP-type systems to 
boost the resolutions of already-good-enough DVDs to get rid of any 
trace of pixellation or lines. Your mileage may vary, but this is what I 
see. And out across America, I see virtually nil interest in whatever is 
supposed to be coming after DVD.)

--Tim May
"That government is best which governs not at all." --Henry David Thoreau





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