Reading one of my favorite sites Slashdot this evening, a disturbing post that Apple’s Mac OS X kernel uses DRM compelled me to go off and read more about so-called “Trusted Computing” and Apple’s tie to Intel. I also thought about all the other ways we’ve got content producers, computing/software vendors and trade organizations colluding-to-control — with government playing right along — but this post will focus on Apple and Intel.

Trusted Computing is an alliance of Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP and AMD (there’s a good objective article about trusted computing here and one from the Electronic Frontier Foundation here).

A couple of snippets from that first article:

Every major hardware and software company has embraced Trusted Computing (TC), a technology that involves placing special security hardware inside every PC. Opponents say it’s designed to prevent competition, hinder interoperability, and perhaps give vendors permanent control over every PC they ship-even after it’s been bought and paid for.

Vendors disagree, of course. According to the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), the trade association that sets the specification for the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), the most important component in TC, it will improve network security. The TPM ensures that the machines at each end of a link can be certain of each other’s identity and configuration. TCG members say this will let enterprise networks detect and isolate client machines containing viruses and other malware, and warn computer owners if a machine has been tampered with.

It goes on (emphasis mine):

Despite its name, TC isn’t really about trust. It’s about verification to make trust unnecessary. This is achieved through digital signatures, which can be used both to authenticate a machine and to confirm its configuration. By signing measurements of a PC’s hardware or software, or a user’s biometrics and presence data, a TC device can vouch for a machine’s state, not just its identity.

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