The Doomsday Chip
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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 ( Read more... )
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 positions. But this is a fool's hope, for information is inevitably spreading about the treacherous nature of TPM, and in consequence by the time the NSA has its shiny new surveillance program in place, it will find this program nigh-useless for spying on anyone save Americans.
The main consequence of attempting this trick will be that those US corporations short-sighted enough to go along with it -- particularly Apple, IBM and Microsoft -- will lose their export markets: possibly their whole export markets. This will happen because a lot of foreigners will make exactly the same decision that you are making. Even from a purely selfish perspective, their Boards would have done better to defy the US government, suffer whatever impositions Obama levied, and retain their markets: they are going to take terrible losses from their decision to cooperate.
This might, unfortunately, probably end the domination of Silicon Valley over the international software market. If they produce software which only works with TPM-compliant hardware and operating systems, they will be limited to the domestic market. If they are wise, they will purchase foreign machines for R&D purposes and design versions of their programs intended for the export market. 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.
To the extent that files become non-portable between American and foreign computers, this will severely harm America's ability to cooperate in international intellectual and commercial ventures. I don't expect things to actually become that bad, however, because of the clear niche this will create for translation and emulation software. Though mind you, it's kind of stupid for us to arrange things so that we'll need to "translate" between "American" and "English" or "Australian!"
For now, Australia's dodged a bullet by collectively voting out our version of Obama. Abbott's been awesome at reversing the intrusive, un-Australian laws and bills that the Gillard administration brought in.
I concur. I am especially-pleased to see that Abbott was not merely satisfied with his victory, but is exploiting it to the benefit of all Australians by repealing Gillard's destructive and onerous laws.
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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.
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. This is stupid as this allows the user a method of being able to try get their computer to work if their graphical user interface (the desktop that most people see, in the loosest possible terms) refuses to work.
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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.
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I know -- one of those attempts is I think what triggered the writing of DOS Box.
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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.
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