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[dvd-discuss] ALERT: CBDTPA = Intel "Trusted Computing" Architecture?




(This email proposes that Hollings' Bill was crafted with an
eye towards Intel's "Trusted Computing Platform
Architecture."  This goes along with the position espoused
by the Intel representative at the Connectivity 2002
conference, and the reserved support of Intel's amicus
curiae brief in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case.  Forwarded
from the No DMCA in Canada list,
canada-dmca-opponents@flora.org; originally from the
Cryptography list, cryptography@wasabisystems.com.  -- Seth)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Sun, 23 Jun 2002 08:38:18 -0400
From: Sandy Harris <pashley@storm.ca>


The URL given is out of date: remove the .temp to get the
paper.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Ross's TCPA paper
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002 19:03:49 -0700
From: "Lucky Green" <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>
To: <cryptography@wasabisystems.com>
CC: <cypherpunks@lne.com>

I recently had a chance to read Ross Anderson's paper on the
activities of the TCPA at:
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/.temp/toulouse.pdf

I must confess that after reading the paper I am quite
relieved to finally have solid confirmation that at least
one other person has realized (outside the authors and
proponents of the bill) that the Hollings bill, while
failing to mention TCPA anywhere in the text of the bill,
was written with the specific technology provided by the
TCPA in mind for the purpose of mandating the inclusion of
this technology in all future general-purpose computing
platforms, now that the technology has been tested, is ready
to ship, and the BIOS vendors are on side.

Perhaps the Hollings "Consumer Broadband and Digital
Television Promotion Act" bill would be more accurately
termed the "TCPA Enablement Act". BTW, the module that Ross
calls a "Fritz" in his paper after the author of the bill,
long had a name: it is called a Trusted Platform Module
(TPM).

Granted, in the context of the TCPA and the Hollings bill,
the term "trusted" is used somewhat differently than the
customers of future motherboards, which are all slated to
include a TPM, might expect:

"trusted" here means that the members of the TCPA trust that
the TPM will make it near impossible for the owner of that
motherboard to access supervisor mode on the CPU without
their knowledge, they trust that the TPM will enable them to
determine remotely if the customer has a kernel-level
debugger loaded, and they trust that the TPM will prevent a
user from bypassing OS protections by installing custom PCI
cards to read out memory directly via DMA without going
through the CPU.

The public and the media now need to somehow, preferably
soon, arrive at the next stage of realization: the
involvement in the TCPA by many companies who's CEO's wrote
the widely distributed open letter to the movie studios,
telling the studios, or more precisely -- given that it was
an open letter -- telling the public, that mandating DRM's
in general-purpose computing platforms may not be a good
idea, is indicative of one of two possible scenarios:

1) the CEO's of said computer companies are utterly unaware
of a major strategic initiative their staff has been
diligently executing for about 3 years, in the case of the
principals in the TCPA, such as Intel, Compaq, HP, and
Microsoft, several years longer.

2) the CEO's wrote this open letter as part of a deliberate
"good cop, bad cop" ploy, feigning opposition to DRM in
general computing platforms to pull the wool over the
public's eye for hopefully long enough to achieve widespread
deployment of the mother of all DRM solution in the market
place.

I do not know which of the two potential scenarios holds
true. However, I believe public debate regarding the massive
change in the way users will interact with their future
computers due to the efforts of the TCPA and the Hollings
bill would be greatly aided by attempts to establish which
of the two scenarios is the fact the case.

--Lucky Green
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