The Doomsday Chip

[jordan179]

Note - I give anyone and everyone my express permission to mirror or otherwise repost this article, anywhere in the world and for all time.

Dedication - To two wonderful friends I have abroad, each of whom has helped me greatly in his and her own way.  My best wishes to both of you -- and keep safe!

IntroductionBack in the 1950's, the Egyptian

Comments

[cutelildrow]

As a foreigner I have no interest in letting the NSA or any other US government information collection agency get into my computer - and it really does not matter if there's nothing in my computer other than a massive collection of food recipes, gardening tips, family photos and artwork, with the occasional political essay. As a non-US citizen I also have no interest in being caught up in the US government's blatant violation of its' own laws - whether it's constitutional or antitrust - I'm not beholden to the US nor its' laws and obligations, and from the way that government institutions have been used in America to persecute conservative points of view, I'd have been one of the people likely targeted or victimized by such an approach (see the IRS scandal, which still has yet to be resolved or further reported on - I suspect they need the money to pay off their various welfare programs that aren't welfare programs, eh?TPM and it's actual applied bullshit is part of DRM, and guess what Microsoft? You're not the only company out there

[jordan179]

As a foreigner I have no interest in letting the NSA or any other US government information collection agency get into my computer.

I completely agree with you. Not only that, but to the extent that any foreign government cooperates with such an American information-collection, absent a clear mutual interest (such as putting-down international terrorism), that government would be betraying its own people.

This is the ultimate reason why this mad spy scheme is unlikely to do much good for the United States of America, even if by some miracle we avoid all the threats I mention. While the US government can mandate TPM compliance by American agencies, citizens and corporations, it can neither mandate nor enforce such cooperation by the agencies, citizens and corporations of other countries.

Given that the US government cannot do that, TPM-based espionage will only work to the extent that other countries are willing to use TPM-compliant hardware and software, or at least permit it to be used by personnel and companies in sensitive

[cutelildrow]

This may -- as we once discussed in chat -- lead to the movement of the Silicon Valley companies abroad, especially if the US Administration is insane enough to attempt to forbid the writing of such software.Ah, but what if it becomes illegal for an American company to leave the US, without say, massive fines, or even surrendering all assets? I'm assuming the worst especially as there is such a shortage of industry and jobs there in the US now. Manufacturing is gone (I believe Western Digital has moved their production out of the nation, for example; I don't know what other companies are still in the US); software engineering and data services are one of the few things that seem to continue being available as a viable industry there

[jordan179]

Ah, but what if it becomes illegal for an American company to leave the US, without say, massive fines, or even surrendering all assets?

Then individuals will leave and start-up new companies overseas. Short of refusing to let the actual businessmen and programmers leave the country, there's no way to force them to work in America. And prohibiting them to leave would probably trigger a panicked flight of the better programmers -- who, because of what they know how to do are impossible to hold.

[jordan179]

There has been attempts to try remove the very ability to even access the command prompt (in windows dos) or use terminals and command lines before.

I know -- one of those attempts is I think what triggered the writing of DOS Box.

[cutelildrow]

Well, it's part of the reason why I'm moving entirely away from Windows for probably anything that isn't gaming related.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

Bit of a shame, really because it was looking stable and secure enough at the very start that I did purchase licenses for it.

This doesn't even get into the way that Windows 8 shoves raid arrays insanely out of alignment so that if you're keeping your data in a Raid 5 or Raid- 10 array (to ensure you don't immediately lose your data if you have a hard drive fail on you) having your drives and data done into parity arrays doesn't matter - the loss of drive alignment means all the drives data are lost and you have a snowball's chance in hell of retrieving them.

This is not going to push me into cloud-backups, which I do not consider in any form or way secure.