Treacherous Computing

Along with what we normally think of as spyware, a new movement has taken a turn toward the dark side of late, and is commonly referred to as "Trusted Computing ". Among those who are pushing for "Trusted computing" are Microsoft, Intel and most larger motion picture and record companies. "Trusted computing" is referred to by several aliases, such as Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), Palladium and Digital Rights, and all these schemes may be supported by the Millennium Copyright Act. Most of these terms are meant to disguise their real meaning to the consumer, in much the same way that politicians intentionally mis-name their bills to deceive voters.

The term "Trusted computing" is so galling and misleading, in my opinion, that from now on I will take a cue from Richard Stallman's excellent article and will call it by the name he coined which more properly describes it-- Treacherous computing.

The underlying principle behind Treacherous computing is to make it a law requiring the installation of digital encryption and a signature device on every new PC. This encryption system cannot be broken or shut off by you because the keys are kept secret from you, and known only to the makers of the proprietary software. These software programs will use the system to control which other programs you will be able to use, the data that you are able to have access to, and which programs and operating systems you are allowed pass them to. The system will regularly download and install updated authorization rules through your Internet connection. If you don't get these "updates" regularly, some functions of your computer will simply cease to work.

Of course, this can only happen with propietary software. If you don't know what that is, it is simply software that keeps its code hidden and secret. If you can't read the source code of an application, there is no way that you can possibly know what it may do on the sly. You can't modify it, and it puts you at a distinct disadvantage as far as being in real control of your own property-- your own computer. If you think that an app like ZoneAlarm can protect you, think again. Microsoft has become so powerful that no commercial product will dare to expose anything that MS does not want exposed. Most of these "protective" applications owe their very economic existance to MS Windows.

Microsoft has already put some of these practices into action. A Windows Media Player "security update" a while back, required that the user agree to new restrictions and rules to be able to update, and one version of Windows even reads your hard drive content and reports the apps on it to Microsoft. Their message that "No personally identifiable information is sent to MS..." is pure BS; they may not know your name at the time, but through the computer's GUID and other databased records, they can surely trace back to you when they want to.

Several bills to require these systems on all computers are already being considered. If this scheme is made into law, the government, MS or whoever is in bed with them could even keep all computers from reading any document that you might post on the web, if they don't like the content, effectively denying us our constitutional rights to free speech and a free press.

The only solution that I can possibly see for this mess is for people to migrate to the free open source software realm en masse. I have already done so, and the relief from worrying about malware and secret propietary code has been tremendous. Switching to an open source OS like Linux can be a bit of work, but it's well worth it.