Ross's TCPA paper

[Mike Rosing]

On Sat, 22 Jun 2002, Lucky Green wrote:

> I must confess that after reading the paper I am quite relieved to
> finally have solid confirmation that at least one other person has
> realized (outside the authors and proponents of the bill) that the
> Hollings bill, while failing to mention TCPA anywhere in the text of the
> bill, was written with the specific technology provided by the TCPA in
> mind for the purpose of mandating the inclusion of this technology in
> all future general-purpose computing platforms, now that the technology
> has been tested, is ready to ship, and the BIOS vendors are on side.

A touch hand wavy, but interesting.  (and thank you to JY for the
pointer.)

> "trusted" here means that the members of the TCPA trust that the TPM
> will make it near impossible for the owner of that motherboard to access
> supervisor mode on the CPU without their knowledge, they trust that the
> TPM will enable them to determine remotely if the customer has a
> kernel-level debugger loaded, and they trust that the TPM will prevent a
> user from bypassing OS protections by installing custom PCI cards to
> read out memory directly via DMA without going through the CPU.

I don't see how they expect this to work.  We've already got cheap
rip off motherboards, who's gonna stop cheap rip off TPM's that ain't
really T?  I think it moves the game into a smaller field where the
players all have some bucks to begin with, but somebody will create
a "TPM" that looks like the real thing, but runs cypherpunk code
just fine.

> 1) the CEO's of said computer companies are utterly unaware of a major
> strategic initiative their staff has been diligently executing for about
> 3 years, in the case of the principals in the TCPA, such as Intel,
> Compaq, HP, and Microsoft, several years longer.
>
> 2) the CEO's wrote this open letter as part of a deliberate "good cop,
> bad cop" ploy, feigning opposition to DRM in general computing platforms
> to pull the wool over the public's eye for hopefully long enough to
> achieve widespread deployment of the mother of all DRM solution in the
> market place.

3) some people think DRM will work and some people don't, and they all
work at the same company.

Anyone who can comprehend the physical reality of computers can see DRM
can't possibly work.  Unfortunatly, that's a minorty of the human
population.  I think the CEO's may actually have a clue, but if there's
money to be made from suckers, why not!!??

Well, I know why not, and so do you all.  But I don't think mandated
"Fritz" chips will fly - and it's simple economics.  Logic will never work
:-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike