Not a sentence that I like to hear; bolted chip inside of computer. But apparently, this may in fact be the case as the article below details.

I have been silent, up to now, on the new Macs with Intel processor. You may find it strange, being evident and unhidden my passion for Macs, but there’s a reason for that and its name is Palladium.

To tell you the truth, it also has another name: “Trusted Computing”. The name Palladium is a leftover of a Microsoft project of 2002, then awkwardly renamed Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, but it is still used, although improperly.

The basic idea of Trusted Computing is that security on a computer is obtained via hardware, through a specific chip dedicated exclusively to this task and called Trusted Platform Module (TPM). It’s a very controversial project, as I wrote four years ago. Originally sold as a beneficial security system for users (which is partially true), trusted Computing and Palladium risk to open the doors to inviolable copy-protection systems and to censorship and surveillance issues to unprecedented levels.

The analysis by Electronic Frontier Foundation is inexorable and rigorous; although also the IBM refutation is worth reading. Source: Robin Good

[tags]trusted platform module,mac security,trusted computing,copy-protection systems[/tags]