Alan Olsen wrote:

> On Jan 20,  5:08pm, Tom Weinstein wrote:
> > Subject: Re: A different take on Intel's RSA announcements
> > Rob Lemos wrote:
> >
> > > http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2189721,00.html
> >
> > This just seems like FUD to me.  ID numbers should help detect theft and
> > fraud.  They aren't going to compromise privacy.  I expect it's going to
> behave
> > just like the debugging registers.  Nobody is going to be able to get at your
> > chip's ID without running software on your system.
>
> "What part of ActiveX do you not understand?"

If you're running ActiveX, you deserve what you get.  ActiveX can do a lot more
evil things to you than steal your processor ID.

> When you are running an application designed by a third party on your system,
> how do you know if they are not accessing that information and leaking it via
> some covert channel?  You don't.

You also don't know that they aren't dumping your registry the same way.  If you
care about this stuff, why are you running Windows?

> Chip IDs will be used for the causes of evil as long as marketing has a hand in
> the design process.  (For the process of obtaining customer demographics of
> course.)  Not a far step from governments demanding the ability to track down
> and stomp on those who violate their rules or just plain noseyness.  (When you
> have them by the Chip ID, their hearts and minds will follow.)
>
> Of course they have to run software on your system.  This means that we just
> have to worry about the software we run.  I expect that this will give rise to
> programs that will scan binaries looking for the chip ID instructions and
> replacing them with nulls or something more "interesting".

That sounds like a fine idea.  My point was that chip IDs aren't intrinsically
evil.  They're just yet another thing that can be exploited by evil software.

--
What is appropriate for the master is not appropriate| Tom Weinstein
for the novice.  You must understand Tao before      | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
transcending structure.  -- The Tao of Programming   |



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