Battleangel

It wont exactly happen over night. But it is sneaking past us and for those buying new hardware next year I’d be real careful. If people start to unwittingly acquire such hardware it is only a matter of time before the rest of us can be coerced to follow. It is not hard to imagine that future ISPs would demand a TPM (Trusted Platform Module or The Phantom Menace?) before allowing one to access the net.

MSNBC - As the joke goes, on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. But although anonymity has been part of Internet culture since the first browser, it’s also a major obstacle to making the Web a safe place to conduct business: Internet fraud and identity theft cost consumers and merchants several billion dollars last year. And many of the other more troubling aspects of the Internet, from spam emails to sexual predators, also have their roots in the ease of masking one’s identity in the online world.

Change, however, is on the way. Already over 20 million PCs worldwide are equipped with a tiny security chip called the Trusted Platform Module, although it is as yet rarely activated. But once merchants and other online services begin to use it, the TPM will do something never before seen on the Internet: provide virtually fool-proof verification that you are who you say you are.

And needless to say, the first step will be to use it to enforce DRM. The author argues that TPM “isn’t inherently evil or good,” but at the same time he and everyone else who has any sort of footing in the real world will realize that these sorts of measures are never taken for the good of the people and are invariably abused. The only way that such measures would be remotely acceptable would be in some social system reboot or redistribution of holdings and resources. Given what we now have, with the huge concentrations of entrenched power and resources, this ID technology is not even worth considering.