Seen in these terms, TCPA and Palladium do not so much provide security for the user, but for the PC vendor, the software supplier, and the content industry. They do not add value for the user. Rather, they destroy it, by constraining what you can do with your PC – in order to enable application and service vendors to extract more money from you.
This is all being sold as making the personal computer more trustworthy.
The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, or TCPA, was formed by Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft. All five companies have been individually working on improving the trust available within the PC for years. These companies came to an important conclusion: the level, or “amount”, of trust they were able to deliver to their customers, and upon which a great deal of the information revolution depended, needed to be increased and security solutions for PC’s needed to be easy to deploy, use and manage. An open alliance was formed to work on creating a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.
If you want me to trust you, then let me see what you’re doing and answer my questions.
It’s an odd use of the word “trust”: it has nothing to do with users being able to trust their computers. It’s not aimed at end-users at all: the intended customers are the media companies who can’t figure out how to distribute their wares without worrying about someone getting more than they paid for.
Thanks to the hardware and software being devised by the Faithless Five above, it makes the whole digital lifestyle that we hear so much about seem less like freedom and more like some dystopian future, where everything you read or hear is billed, no matter where you are and what you’re doing. The Attention Economy doesn’t begin to cover this: instead of selling your interest in entertainment to advertisers, we get billed for the entertainment as well. Super Bowl Party? Better not invite too many friends. New CD? Don’t turn the volume up too loud: could be unlicensed sharing.