20050804   

Michael considered fate at 12:52   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

Update on my Tuesday post regarding Apple, Intel, and DRM.. or was that TPM.. or TCPA? Whatever.

Open For Business has an article titled Palladium Not in Apple Dev Kits stating:

Earlier reports circulating around the Internet concerning Apple's inclusion of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip in Intel-based Macs were incorrect, OfB has learned...

...Commenting on earlier reports, a reliable source who requested anonymity told OfB, “While many rumors are being circulated on the web about Apple's future direction on Intel processors with DRM, the majority of them are just that - rumors.” The source, a registered Apple developer, continued, “Reality is that these boxes are production PC's in an Apple case, not DRM or TCPA protected, and none of these boxes will remain in circulation after their purpose has been served - they must be returned to Apple.

As you might have gathered from my previous post, I'm no expert, but I feel I can safely say that a lot of the people making noise about this issue are also not experts - and in fact the experts don't appear to be experts either. All the news articles I've read seem to belie a certain level of understanding of the differences between TPM, DRM, and TCPA when in fact they mix and match terminology like it's all just mr. potatoe head accessories. In fact this article uses a headline with the now-dated term Palladium, a word people still seem haunted by even though Microsoft has re-engineered their trusted computing/security naming scheme these days. The new version makes no reference to Palladium and instead is called the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB - because previous acronyms weren't long enough. I'm told you pronounce it "Ing Scub".. again, whatever). Security (against angry customers jumping ship) through obscurity?

Anyhow, what's the result of all of this? Mass panic for the Mac crowd, as you've seen. Given this, I guess there might be some falsity in the data I presented in my apple mighty mouse post - a lot of the Apple traffic on the blogosphere in the last few days could certainly be attributable to this fiasco, rather than the new input device.

Regardless, I stand by my previous stance: It's too early to tell what Apple is going to put out for consumer Intel boxes, it's reasonable to expect Rosetta to have a certain number of limitations - i.e. requiring certain hardware - and it's certainly reasonable to think that Apple is going to migrate it's apps to fully native Intel code as soon as they can.

Let's lower the threat level on this one down to yellow or blue, shall we?