Couloutac mentioned Richard Stallman's comments. I was curious what he said, so I looked it up.
There is an addendum at the bottom to his original essay. from the bottom of the essay at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html (I added a * to the most relevant line): As of 2015, treacherous computing has been implemented for PCs in the form of the “Trusted Platform Module”; however, for practical reasons, the TPM has proved a total failure for the goal of providing a platform for remote attestation to verify Digital Restrictions Management. Thus, companies implement DRM using other methods. At present, “Trusted Platform Modules” are not being used for DRM at all, and there are reasons to think that it will not be feasible to use them for DRM. Ironically, this means that the only current uses of the “Trusted Platform Modules” are the innocent secondary uses—for instance, to verify that no one has surreptitiously changed the system in a computer. *Therefore, we conclude that the “Trusted Platform Modules” available for PCs are not dangerous, and there is no reason not to include one in a computer or support it in system software. This does not mean that everything is rosy. Other hardware systems for blocking the owner of a computer from changing the software in it are in use in some ARM PCs as well as processors in portable phones, cars, TVs and other devices, and these are fully as bad as we expected. This also does not mean that remote attestation is harmless. If ever a device succeeds in implementing that, it will be a grave threat to users' freedom. The current “Trusted Platform Module” is harmless only because it failed in the attempt to make remote attestation feasible. We must not presume that all future attempts will fail too. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/CAL8H3o9mGQP2Oqnjt4sL0_obqOMdmo1ch%2BOWT%2B_p7RSqicstBg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
