Free Republic

Here's yet another reason to be glad we don't use a Microsoft OS. The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, headed by Microsoft & Intel, provides both hardware and software standards that will allow only licensed operating systems to run on a machine. This means unlicensed operating systems such as Linx can no longer even be installed on a TCPA-compliant system. In a not so distant future (2004) the TCPA hardware will take charge, when you turn on your PC. This onboard chipset checks the integrity of your boot ROM, executes it and measures the state of the machine. After that, it...

TCPA / Palladium Frequently Asked Questions Version 1.0 Ross Anderson (See also the Economics and Security Resource Page which gives a lot of background to the issues raised here.) 1. What are TCPA and Palladium? TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, an initiative led by Intel. Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.' Palladium is software that Microsoft says it plans to incorporate in future versions of Windows; it will build on the TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features. 2....