Trusted Computing even more dangerous than Cameron Diaz!

Posted by Ken Y-N on August 31st, 2010 at 04:28pm

Kevin Townsend had a bit of a rant on his blog about McAfee being bought by Intel, a matter which has been covered both here and elsewhere, but I did enjoy the tie in with Cameron Diaz, so it was too good a headline to miss out on.

He makes this point:

Trusted computing is a seductive idea. You protect the hardware so that nothing bad can run on it. But think about this. If you stop bad things, you have to allow good things. Problem is, it’s not you (the user) but them (the trusted computing supplier) that defines what is good and what is bad.

That is almost correct, covering an area I’ve been looking at recently about who trusts who, and what does trust in fact mean, but it is also rather wrong in that it is (usually) the TPM Owner that defines what is good or bad; in a typical home situation the owner will be you the user, although in a corporate environment it is probably the IT department, but since the company owns your hardware that’s to be expected.

Tags: cameron diaz, intel, mcafee

Under General Tags: cameron diaz, intel, mcafee