CNET’s interesting but inaccurate take on Microsoft’s DRM plans

Posted by Ken Y-N on July 2nd, 2008 at 06:38am

This recent post on the CNET news blog by Elinor Mills made me raise my eyebrow, mainly due to a number of inaccurate representation of the Trusted Platform Module.

First, there is a quote from Andrew Jaquith, an analyst at Yankee Group, about Palladium Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), Trusted Computing (TC), or something else not quite clear due perhaps to quoting out of context:

“It [Palladium/NGSCB/TC?] has changed from something that was very revolutionary and grandiose into something much more modest.”

The grandiosity (is that a word?) may have gone, perhaps due to Microsoft now cooperating with other companies, and the modesty is perhaps due to hiding its light under a bushel, but the Trusted Computing Group’s proposals and specifications are most certainly revolutionary and paradigm shifting.

BitLocker, Microsoft’s only product to come from the Trusted Computing effort

This is incorrect. BitLocker might be Microsoft’s best-known client-side tool that uses the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), but Microsoft have donated protocols towards the Trusted Network Connect (TNC) initiative, and have implemented support for it in their server products.

Microsoft has “convinced a lot of hardware manufacturers to put the chips in computers and they’re in a lot of computers, but they’re not doing anything,” Schneier said. “The question is what are they going to do with the chips? How is Dell feeling these days?”

I’m not sure where Bruce Schneier said this, as I cannot find a source for it. Actually, he doesn’t seem to have said anything publicly about TCG recently.

The president of the TCG and senior engineer at Sun, Scott Rotondo, had this honest assessment, however:

“A lot of them haven’t been utilized fully and in some cases not at all. The supporting infrastructure has been slow to materialize. It stands to reason that there might be frustration on the part of hardware manufacturers. We need to really make use of these things before the hardware manufacturers get tired and take them away.”

There was also a comment from a TCG spokeswoman:

…the organization is not focused on DRM and that applications that use the TPM include secure e-mail, multifactor authentication, password management, and single sign-on. The group is also working to extend the concepts of hardware-based security to storage, network security, and mobile devices.

Despite this comment, the articles continues with CNET beating the TCG equals DRM (Digital Rights Management) drum, as it does seem to me that the author suspects that because DRM equals Microsoft, this talk of other applications is merely a smokescreen.

I’d better stop here, as my eyes are tired from all their rolling. Read the full story on the CNET News Blog here.

Tags: v

Under Advocacy Tags: v