- TC / TCG / LaGrande / NGSCB / Longhorn / Palladium / TCPA -

Version 1.1 (August 2003)

Ross Anderson

---

1. What is TC - this `trusted computing' business?

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is an alliance of Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP and AMD which promotes a standard for a `more secure' PC. Their definition of `security' is controversial; machines built according to their specification will be more trustworthy from the point of view of software vendors and the content industry, but will be less trustworthy from the point of view of their owners. In effect, the TCG specification will transfer the ultimate control of your PC from you to whoever wrote the software it happens to be running. (Yes, even more so than at present.)

The TCG project is known by a number of names. `Trusted computing' was the original one, and is still used by IBM, while Microsoft calls it `trustworthy computing' and the Free Software Foundation calls it `treacherous computing'. Hereafter I'll just call it TC, which you can pronounce according to taste. Other names you may see include TCPA (TCG's name before it incorporated), Palladium (the old Microsoft name for the version due to ship in 2004) and NGSCB (the new Microsoft name). Intel has just started calling it `safer computing'. Many observers believe that this confusion is deliberate - the promoters want to deflect attention from what TC actually does.

2. What does TC do, in ordinary English?

TC provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the application software, and where these applications can communicate securely with their authors and with each other. The original motivation was digital rights management (DRM): Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a TC platform, but which you won't be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.

TC will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software. In the first version of TC, pirate software could be detected and deleted remotely. Since then, Microsoft has sometimes denied that it intended TC to do this, but at WEIS 2003 a senior Microsoft manager refused to deny that fighting piracy was a goal: `Helping people to run stolen software just isn't our aim in life', he said. The mechanisms now proposed are more subtle, though. 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. (I'll explain some of them below.)

continued at http://www.againsttcpa.com/tcpa-faq-en.html

Exclusive to American Free Press

By Gordon Thomas

10-13-3

A top North Korean scientist, working on a race-based bomb, has vanished. Was he taken by Western intelligence operatives or did the Chinese nab him?

 

Has Dr. Ri Chae Woo, North Korea,s world-ranking expert working on a "whites-only" racial/genetic bomb, been snatched in a combined CIA, MI6 and Australian secret service operation? Or has Ri been grabbed by the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service"so that the communist government can discover just how far Kim Jong II, North Korea,s unpredictable dictator, has advanced his threat to launch the ethnic bomb upon the world?

 

So is the bible scientifically reliable? Does it contain insightful scientific truths way ahead of its time? First, let's consider some ancient eastern wisdom: "The moon is 50,000 leagues higher than the sun, and shines by its own light; night is caused by the sun's setting behind a huge mountain several thousand feet high, located in the centre of the earth, that this world, flat and triangular is composed of 7 states - one of honey, another of sugar, a third of butter, and still another of wine, and the whole mass is borne on the heads of countless elephants which in shaking produce earthquakes."

No it's not a joke, this is from the Hindu sacred book known as the Vedas. This great wisdom represents the popular cosmology of the day. The pagans said that the earth was supported by a giant man called atlas, while the Greeks had horses, elephants and snakes supporting the planet. This 'knowledge' was well known and trusted at the time the bible was being written, yet one of the oldest books of the bible declares that:

 "He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing." Job 26:7 (NKJV) "He sits enthroned upon the circle of the earth" Isaiah 40:22*

The bible writers somehow resisted the temptation to follow the science of their day, choosing instead to portray some astonishing scientific truth, way ahead of its time:

Before we look at these "scientific facts" in the Bible, I must preface them with some very important information. To do this, I will have to quote the Bible. This is not using what is commonly called "circular reasoning." I simply want to make a point that is relevant to what I am going to present.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil_summary.html
by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

"What follows is most certainly the single most frightening article I have ever read and certainly the most alarming piece that FTW has ever published."

SUMMARY

October 3 , 2003, 1200 PDT, (FTW) -- Some months ago, concerned by a Paris statement made by Professor Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton regarding his concern about the impact of Peak Oil and Gas on fertilizer production, I tasked FTW's Contributing Editor for Energy, Dale Allen Pfeiffer to start looking into what natural gas shortages would do to fertilizer production costs. His investigation led him to look at the totality of food production in the US. Because the US and Canada feed much of the world the answers have global implications.

What follows is most certainly the single most frightening article I have ever read and certainly the most alarming piece that FTW has ever published. Even as we have seen CNN, Britain's Independent and Jane's Defence Weekly acknowledge the reality of Peak Oil and Gas within the last week, acknowledging that world oil and gas reserves are as much as 80% less than predicted, we are also seeing how little real thinking has been devoted to the host of crises certain to follow; at least in terms of publicly accessible thinking.

This article is so serious in its implications that I have taken the unusual step of underlining 26 of its key findings. I did that with the intent that the reader treat each underlined passage as a separate and incredibly important fact. Each one of these facts should be read and digested separately to assimilate its importance. I found myself reading one fact and then getting up and walking away until I could come back and (un)comfortably read to the next.

All told, Dale Allen Pfeiffer's research and reporting confirms the worst of FTW's suspicions about the consequences of Peak Oil and it poses serious questions about what to do next. Not the least of these is why, in a presidential election year, none of the candidates has even acknowledged the problem. Thus far, it is clear that solutions for these questions, perhaps the most important ones facing mankind, will by necessity be found by private individuals and communities, independently of outside or governmental help. Whether the real search for answers comes now, or as the crisis becomes unavoidable, depends solely on us. It is also abundantly clear that fresh water, its acquisition and delivery, is a crisis that is upon us now as certainly as is Peak Oil and Gas.

Oil and gas running out much faster than expected, says study
By Charles Arthur, Technology Editor 02 October 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=449053

World oil and gas supplies are heading for a "production crunch" sometime
between 2010 and 2020 when they cannot meet supply, because global reserves
are 80 per cent smaller than had been thought, new forecasts suggest.

If the oil-companies don't do what they usually do - buy the patent and
prevent production from going ahead.
http://i.am/jah/envird.htm

--

Discovery may spur cheap solar power
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/10/02/solar.cells.reut/index.html
Thursday, October 2, 2003

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -- A major European chip maker said this week it had
discovered new ways to produce solar cells which will generate electricity

Source: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html

`Trusted Computing' Frequently Asked Questions

Version 1.1 (August 2003)
Trusted Computing' Frequently Asked Questions

- TC / TCG / LaGrande / NGSCB / Longhorn / Palladium / TCPA
Ross Anderson


1. What is TC - this `trusted computing' business?

http://foi.missouri.edu/bushinfopolicies/bushorwellian.html

Bush creates Orwellian society

By Matthew Brophy
Minnesota Daily
September 27, 2002

Freedom is Slavery; War is Peace; Ignorance is Strength. This is the
motto
heralded by Big Brother in George Orwell's book, "1984." This motto
might
as well be from the George W. Bush administration. Since the tragic

by Michel Chossudovsky [11-26-2000]

Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa, author of The Globalization of Poverty, second edition, Common Courage Press, 2000.

The important debate on global warming under UN auspices provides but a partial picture of climate change; in addition to the devastating impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the ozone layer, the World's climate can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated "non-lethal weapons." Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the World's climate.

In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the ("Star Wars") Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction. Potentially, it constitutes an instrument of conquest capable of selectively destabilising agricultural and ecological systems of entire regions.

Not too long ago, word began to circulate that European governments, suffering from a nasty case of snoopers' envy over the English-speaking countries' long-standing ability to eavesdrop upon phone calls, faxes, and e-mail around the world through the NSA-driven Echelon system, were cooking up a scheme of their own. Unlike the trenchcoat-and-fedora efforts of the five-nation Echelon arrangement, which are focused, at least theoretically, on communications outside of those countries, the rival European ENFOPOL 98 scheme was designed to give law enforcement authorities the legal and technical wherewithal to intercept messages within their jurisdictions at will. Now though, while the European proposal is still evolving, it seems to be less of a competitor to American snooping than part of a full-press effort by cops around the world to steam open everybody's envelopes.

America's guiding hand revealed - the secret international organisation behind Europe's controversial plans for Internet surveillance

June 3, 2003 05:14

(AP) A Pentagon project to develop a digital "super diary" that records heartbeats, travel, Internet chats - everything a person does - also could provide private companies with powerful software to analyze behavior.

That has privacy experts worried.

No one can be certain what genius first realized that disease could be turned from an uncontrollable killer into a weapon. Maybe some fourteenth-century Tartar. Perhaps the same one who got the bright idea, as he watched his comrades dropping from plague during their three-year siege of the Genoan-occupied Black Sea town of Caffa, to catapult cadavers over the city walls.

"It could have ended all plant life on this continent," geneticist David Suzuki says in the book. "The implications of this case are nothing short of terrifying."

A core objection to paranoid rants regarding the US National Security Agency (NSA) electronic eavesdropping apparatus called ECHELON is the simple observation that spooks trying to use it are literally buried in an avalanche of white noise from which it's quite difficult to extract anything pertinent.

Echelon is the name given to the super-secret SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) collection network allegedly operated by the most secretive of all U.S. agencies, the National Security Agency (NSA). But it is not simply an American endeavor. Also taking part in the massive eavesdropping scheme through a diplomatic construct known as the UKUSA Alliance are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Together they operate a system that is reputedly capable of recording every digital transmission relayed throughout the world each day, including telephone, FAX, and e-mail messages. According to the International Herald Tribune, the system has the capacity to "record up to 2 billion telephone messages daily." What

More than 300 field trials of genetically engineered biopharmaceuticals crops already conducted in secret locations nationwide... ..."Just one mistake by a biotech company and we'll be eating other people's prescription drugs in our corn flakes..."

Mobile (Cell) phones send signals that can be tracked, even when they're on standby, to within 2.5 metres of their location!

Robin Rupli, Voice of America, May 27, 2002

If you're under FBI surveillance, there's a good chance your phone calls and Internet traffic are traveling over the equipment of Verint Systems -- a company that's doing very well these days.

Engineers have crossed a symbolic barrier with a new way to make microchips with transistors that are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair or as small as a flu virus. The 90-nanometre width is regarded as a major milestone because scientists believe it will eventually lead to the production of transistors with atomic level dimensions.

In the early 1900's, Dr. T. Henry Moray of Salt Lake City produced his first device to tap energy from the metafrequency oscillations of empty space itself. Eventually Moray was able to produce a free energy device weighing sixty pounds and producing 50,000 watts of electricity for several hours. Ironically, although he demonstrated his device repeatedly to scientists and engineers, Moray was unable to obtain funding to develop the device further into a useable power station that would furnish electrical power on a mass scale.

Moses was right, and there were other ancient seers, too, who showed an altogether surprising knowledge of how the universe works.

by JAH Publications.

Most people have been wrongly taught and therefore believe that Jesus only taught for 3 and 1/2 years and was crucified at Ishtar of 33AD, so please do not take what I am going to say as something personal against any of you. It is not meant to be taken personally by anyone and is only meant to straighten out the common misunderstanding and set the record straight, as the list is dedicated to truth.

The A.D. system of dating is inaccurate: It is a system of dating which owes little to the birth of Christ and rather more to the imagination of a Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus who was instructed in A.D. 533 to commence a new calendar working backwards from his day to the birth of Christ. As is to be expected, he was years adrift in his reckoning. We know roughly when Jesus was born from the New Testament narrative:

For 3,000 years a secret code in The Bible has remained hidden. Now it has been unlocked by computer - and it may reveal our future. The code foretells events that happened thousands of years after it was incorporated in The Old Testament - from World War 2 to the Gulf War. This article presents what best-selling author Michael Drosnin believes is irrefutable proof of the existence of God. It was one murderous deed that finally convinced him it was for real and now it has all been confirmed by the world's leading mathematicians. This article about the code contains cross-references with the plain text and word-code prophecies in The Bible; explained by JAH...

The biotechnology industry continues to aggressively pursue the development of genetically modified seeds engineered for sterility...

The following article was originally published in the 36th-year edition of the Finnish-language journal, SPEKULA (3rd Quarter, 1999). SPEKULA is a publication of Northern Finland medical students and doctors of Oulu University OLK (OULUN LÄÄKETIETEELLINEN KILTA). It is mailed to all medical students of Finland and all Northern Finland medical doctors. Circulation 6500.

MICROCHIP IMPLANTS, MINDCONTROL AND CYBERNETICS

by Rauni-Leena Luukanen-Kilde, MD Former Chief Medical Officer of Finland

This has nothing to do with safety for the children, any more than the "War on Terror" has anything to do with stopping terror, any more than the "War on Drugs" has anything to do with stopping drugs. This is the ultimate form of slavery, making the entire world into a gigantic open air prison, a cattle ranch wherein you are tagged and trackable property of the State.

In the late 1980