LXer: Linux and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM)
 

Published at LXer:

As computing and the internet become ever more a part of everyday life, reliable and strong security becomes increasingly necessary. Security is critical in the areas of business communications, online banking and online shopping, but until quite recently security has not been an integral part of the core computing hardware. Hardware manufacturers have been taking steps to rectify that by introducing the idea of trusted computing based on devices such as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Many of these ideas, and the methods to implement them, have come from what the open source community see as the proprietary commercial establishment and so are greeted with some suspicion. Nevertheless, in order to continue to flourish, open source will have to somehow accommodate them and provide support for secure functions such as TPM.

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Why? Why does open source have to accommodate Trusted Computing? There is a market for hardware that does not use trusted computing. That wont dry up, so manufacturers will continue to design and supply TC free hardware. Eventually, the market will show its preference for TC free hardware and another lame idea will die. Also, the author confuses user oriented computing security, which Linux provides very well already, with digital restrictions oriented computer security. Two completely different things.