On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 12:35:17AM -0600, Scott Dier wrote: > Luckily, if this happens to x86 some day, everyone in 'Free' communities > will have a damn good reason to leave this platform in droves. :)
From what I've read, this won't actually work: TCPA enabled systems will
still run obsoleted operating systems like Linux and Windows XP, they
just won't allow you to access some secret keys stored in tamperproof
hardware. But OTOH, non-TCPA systems won't have the secret keys either,
so you don't buy anything from switching.
> I doubt PPC will ever have this sort of issue.
Mac hardware will if this gets remotely off the ground. There's no point
trying to protect all your movies for online distribution if people
are just going to spend a couple of grand on an Apple and Rip, Mix,
Burn anyway.
Of course, all you need is a security hole in your browser or OS, and
you should be able to bootstrap your preferred OS on top of that. Doing
so would probably be in violation of the DMCA and similar acts in non-US
lands, though.
> At this point, however, it is in their best intrest to make sure their
> technology gets in place to accept the masses without alerting the
> technologically knowledgable. TCPA could easily become better 'law'
> than anything based on mass acceptance and market forces.
TCPA doesn't have to become law. All you need is:
* enough content providers to think the mechanism is effective,
to make it so that if you don't have it you miss out on lots of
cool stuff. Try spending a couple of weeks without, say, mp3s,
flash, quicktime and realvideo for a while to get a taste. The
big distributors are already addicted to obscene amounts of
control, although people like Baen books (http://www.baen.com/)
look like they're having good experiences gathering evidence
for the opposite point of view.
* technical measures that are difficult to reverse engineer,
which is what TCPA is all about.
* laws to make exploiting security bugs illegal even on your own
system, which we already have or are getting in most of the
"free" world.
TCPA: propping up yesterday's business models, today.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
pgpuy65VrZqWH.pgp
Description: PGP signature
