Over on BoingBoing there's a story about distrubing developments in Apple's transition to Intel chips ("Apple to add Trusted Computing to the new kernel?"):
People working with early versions of the forthcoming Intel-based MacOS X operating system have discovered that Apple's new kernel makes use of Intel's Trusted Computing hardware. ... The point of Trusted Computing is to make it hard -- impossible, if you believe the snake-oil salesmen from the Trusted Computing world -- to open a document in a player other than the one that wrote it in the first place, unless the application vendor authorizes it. It's like a blender that will only chop the food that Cuisinart says you're allowed to chop. It's like a car that will only take the brand of gas that Ford will let you fill it with. It's like a web-site that you can only load in the browser that the author intended it to be seen in.For those reasons and more, I (and many many other people) are against things like the "Trusted Computing" project. It remains to be seen if it winds up being used in Macs, and to what extent. Posted by Tom Nugent at August 1, 2005 11:54 PM