TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

‘Anti-trusted-computing video’

By David Rothman

“Trusted computing” has been touted as a way to fight viruses and other threats, via super-effective controls at the hardware level. But could the technology actually be more of a friend of software monopolies and Hollywood copyright zealots than of ordinary computer users? A new video warning against TC has just come out, and Boing Boing, calls the film “stone brilliant.” You should also visit another site, Against TCPA.

TC, as Boing Boing describes it, “allows software authors to discriminate against your computer if they detect that you’re using an emulator or third-party app to access the code on it.” This is great. Imagine the opportunities for monopolies to come up with new gouges against businesses and consumers alike. To hell with consumer choice.

So will major pols in either party care? I can just about see the Bush Administration suggesting that Washington do away completely with Social Security and that we all get a tax break to invest in Microsoft and Intel. Hey, just kidding. There are also copyright issues. Can you “trust” Hollywood to interpret “fair use” for you and have your hardware do a Doberman act against you if you don’t go along? Also, how about the issue of the controls being used to thwart whistle-blowers leaking sensitive government documents, even at the local level?

In the end, “trusted computing” could backfire mightily against the perps of the technology. Sooner or later, as tech consumers, the more hip voters will wise up about the connection between DMCAish legislation and anti-consumer technology. Meanwhile I hope that the defenders of Trusted Computing will understand what a foul-smelling snakepit they are pushing the industry into. As noted before, some compromise with content providers on DRM matters is acceptable and should be done in good faith. “Trusted computing” is not acceptable in the least, especially if D.C. mandates it–hardly out of the question. As now envisoned, it is the ultimate nuts-and-bolts manifestation of copyright extremism.

More of the depressing details–from Against TCP:

TC will protect application software registration mechanisms, so that unlicensed software will be locked out of the new ecology. Furthermore, TC apps will work better with other TC apps, so people will get less value from old non-TC apps (including pirate apps). Also, some TC apps may reject data from old apps whose serial numbers have been blacklisted. If Microsoft believes that your copy of Office is a pirate copy, and your local government moves to TC, then the documents you file with them may be unreadable. TC will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buy it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created. So if you stop paying for upgrades to Media Player, you may lose access to all the songs you bought using it.

For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: TC looks like being the answer to his prayer.

There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants’ PCs are `born classified’ and can’t be leaked electronically to journalists. Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can’t bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.

There are some gotchas too. For example, TC can support remote censorship. In its simplest form, applications may be designed to delete pirated music under remote control. For example, if a protected song is extracted from a hacked TC platform and made available on the web as an MP3 file, then TC-compliant media player software may detect it using a watermark, report it, and be instructed remotely to delete it (as well as all other material that came through that platform). This business model, called traitor tracing, has been researched extensively by Microsoft (and others). In general, digital objects created using TC systems remain under the control of their creators, rather than under the control of the person who owns the machine on which they happen to be stored (as at present). So someone who writes a paper that a court decides is defamatory can be compelled to censor it - and the software company that wrote the word processor could be ordered to do the deletion if she refuses. Given such possibilities, we can expect TC to be used to suppress everything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders.

The gotcha for businesses is that your software suppliers can make it much harder for you to switch to their competitors’ products. At a simple level, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor. Such blatant lock-in might be prohibited by the competition authorities, but there are subtler lock-in strategies that are much harder to regulate…

Related: RIAA pushes broadcast flag for digital radio (in IP Democracy) and earlier Boing Boing commentary. Also see, via Copyfight, Mike Godwin’s scoop.