Re: Sysadmins

[Marco Gerards]

"Jonathan S. Shapiro" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sat, 2005-11-05 at 20:09 +0000, Brian Brunswick wrote:
>> On 05/11/05, Jonathan S. Shapiro <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > On Sat, 2005-11-05 at 20:25 +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>> > > The hardware can refuse to run anything that hasn't been authorised by
>> > > the manufcuter of treacherous computing hardware.
>> >
>> > This is an issue that I have actually tracked very closely.
>> >
>> > To my knowledge, there is no such feature in any currently proposed or
>> > implemented TC hardware. Can you please identify a specification that
>> > supports your assertion?
>> >
>> 
>> XBox, Playstation...?
>
> Good. I had forgotten those. But we are discussing general-purpose
> devices here, and I should have constrained my question to the TPM and
> TC proposals that are being proposed for computers.
>
> And honestly, I don't see a problem with XBox or Playstation. It's the
> user's right to buy a crippled device.

This sounds like a dangerous statement to me.  Will you say the same
when PC's are crippled like this?  I am hearing rumors about companies
like microsoft want to do the same for the PC.  Not that I will pay
too much attention to rumors, but that is besides the point.

My point is that if such PC is made and it replaces the common PCs for
some reason, some users can't buy a normal PC (perhaps because they
are out of production or because they need the newest hardware
features).  So in that case people might not have the choice anymore.
So in that case it would not be someone's right to buy a crippled
device, but it is forced upon him.

> If we want to argue that Hurd should not be ported to a system that
> precludes installation of some other operating system, I have no
> objection to this. However, this would not preclude running on systems
> that implement either the TPM or the TCPA chips.

If you can tell us something more about this than the speculations I
am hearing all the time, please do.

Thanks,
Marco