Be afriad.....very afriad!

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

I just read this about TCPA/Palladium.

It's a good thing for secure things....such as banking, and government/business environments.

But it's VERY bad for the general PC user. It will limit our ability to do EVERYTHING. Even things we take for granted....like surfing the web. You like Netscape? Microsoft (Palladium) decides that NS is not a good product. It can stop it from running on your system. But worse yet, give the ability to monitor EVERYTHING that happens on your computer.

So you say...alright...I don't mind people looking over my shoulder if the world is safe?

But what if a corrupt offical or just a blue coller hacker gets in. They can steal, delete, revoke licences on anything they want. They can do some of that now, for goodness sake.

This type of technology is already here...and it's not stopping at the PC. Portable CD and MP3 players already have some DRM features. And home electronics will have it to. Like Milk.....well your fridge might not....and spoil it. (ok...this is a REALLY EXTREME example.....but it's for emphasis. )

CPU's have had serial numbers since 1997. In 2000 BIOS manufactures started including code that can surf the net for updates/advertisements to download to your computer. Windows Media Player already checks to see if movie/music is legally purchased or not (as of yet it doesn't do anything if it is now). It also includes info in the system that gives itself the right to download anything it wants to the computer to improve security and privacy.....yeah...THEIRS!

Anyway....enought.

Read for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

I for one am sticking to AMD (however they are building 2nd generation TCPA into future chips. ), and getting used to Linux. And always keeping around some old boxes for doing current stuff on.

Linux, Windows XP, on older machines without TCPA is what it'll be for me if this goes through. Everythign I used will be hacked because I will not allow TCPA on my computer. Sorry, it's good for banks and online business servers but not for PCs, perhaps those people were right who predicted the death of the PC

Linux! Linux! Linux! Linux! All hail the penguin!

I see a penguin at the end of the tunnel! The penguin is sad though, because almost all games are made for Windoze.

AMD rocks!

Originally posted by King of Camelot
I see a penguin at the end of the tunnel! The penguin is sad though, because almost all games are made for Windoze.

Click to expand...

As more and more people migrate to linux, the more and more games will be ported over. And of course, there are Windows emulators for linux.

As I've made clear many times before, the control in Palladium incenses me. A few years ago I watched a TV show on public security and one of the experts said something I thought was rubbish at the time, but now seems forbiddingly true. He said, "The great American war of the last thirty years was racial equality. The great American war of the next thirty will be privacy."

Unfortuneatly, the theme that 1984 once professed has finally come to fruition. It has finally come to the point where technology can do what Orsen Wells once warned. And the fools will welcome it.

Gather round children and let me tell you a story.

In the far far future, beyond the centuries for which even your great grandchildren will see, was born a man. He was a great man by every measure that one can place on a man. It was he who built man's first faster than light craft, and it was he who went with it on it's first great voyages to the worlds beyond our own.

On his great journey he learned that language was a uniquely Earth invention, and that every other race in the universe used telepathy to communicate. But as it turned out, the Earthly invention, language, was of magnificent value to all the creature he met. Everywhere he went he taught Earthling language to the creatures and they paid him vast measures of wealth. He returned to Earth as the richest man who ever had lived.

One day he was in at a social club in New New York discussing his great journey with a team of wide eyed women and jittery journalists. One particularly inquisitive woman asked him, "Why do they want to learn language? Isn't telepathy a better form of communication?"

"No," he said. "Telepathic communication kills the idea of self for all creatures. Imagine if every day everyone within a 100 feet of you knew exactly what you were thinking, exactly what you were going to say, or exactly what you thought of them. There could be no privacy, no modesty, and no gracious lying. On all these planets, marriages don't last because one partner knows that the other thinks about someone else. Similarly, jobs don't last becuase the boss always intercepts some random thought about an employee taking vengeance on him. These are the things that we think about every day -what Jung called our 'shadow'- but can hide because of language. Language creates solace, language creates self."


Privacy has always been paramount to American civilization. We don't give the police the power to search anything and everything on a whim because we accept privacy as an inalienable right. Imagine if we did allow that kind of invasion.

For instance, there have been and always will be things that may be wrong, but not evil. There are levels of sin. Like...stealing towels from hotels. Sure it's wrong, it can even be called theft, but it's not something that a police force is going to throw up a road block for. Admittedly, that's a lite example. But imagine some of these other things that are so called wrong. For example, in Alabama there is a law on the books that says blacks cannot intermarry with whites. There are these kind of laws all over this country. Things like no oral sex, or no sex on sunday, or it's an arrestable offense to cry in public. These are things that are not only on the books, but also legally enforceable.

We give people privacy because there are always things that are not necessary for other people to know about. Without this notion of privacy it opens the door to all kinds of enforcement. If I got arrested for making love on the sabbath, I'd throw a fit. I'd start firebombing over that. Most people -normal people- accept certain things as open to interpretation by the individual. I say it's wrong to have sex on Sunday, you say it's OK, let's just leave it. You do it in your home, it's not my problem, and if it really is wrong you'll pay for it in the afterlife.

The quote, "People who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear [from surveilance]," has long been the mantra of the fascist. It's utter non-sense in it's purest form. Everyone has something to hide: whether it's sex on Sunday, or that you spank your kid, or that you installed Windows 95 on two computers. These are small things, and of no importance to anyone but the individual and the almighty.

Anything that compromises this veil of privacy, no matter how smoke and mirrored up it is, is a crime unto itself. People have secrets, and 90 percent of them are of no consequence to anyone. Stay out of people's lives, Emporer Bill. And stay out of our computers. What we do is none of your business, no matter how rich you want to be or how much of a tool you are.

I'm not trying to say piracy is a small thing. It certainly is not, but the ability for anyone to say what you can and can't do with your computer is a crime against the human right of self.

Makes me wonder as I blindly d/l the latest update.Just whose security are they concerned about ?

Well put BlueMonday, I'll never buy these products, and I'll always badmouth them to anyone who'll listen. ME made me change my tune about MS, I always thought they put out the highest quality software.. windows, office, AOE. Now you even have to give them a CC# to play on the zone. Why do they need your CC# for you to play a game on their server!?
Sad thing is people will buy into. I badmouthed ME for an hour to my Network Administrator buddy> the next day he went and bought it. The next week was spent listening to his countless crashes, and downtime as he tried to install dual OS. This is the same "Network Administrator" (That's his job title and the course he completed) who, couldn't figure out how I got his computer to echo my name during boot. So he took the easy way to get rid of it> reformat lol. Just pointing out that even some people that know about cpus, don't know sht, and will buy.
The latest IS The greatest.
MS is the evil empire, Go China