The History of Trusted Computing

This racket has been going on for over a quarter century, how did we all forget?

Mar 16, 2023

Trust or treachery?
"Trusted computing" may secure the PCs of the masses, but it also threatens to turn people's computers into spies for software makers and Hollywood.
November 7, 2002, 4:00 a.m. PT
SAN FRANCISCO--At the USENIX Security Conference held here recently, Microsoft developers touted the company's upcoming Palladium architecture as technology that would enhance privacy, stymie piracy and increase a corporation's control over its computers.
Others, however, see a more nefarious role for the security software.

A little over a year ago, I stumbled onto the creepily ironic nature of the TPM 2.0 chip, its backers, and its actual intended real world usage. I covered that briefly in a blog post on The Practical Paranoid Website. In that article I went over the immediate history of the Trusted Computing Group.

I had been looking into reasons why Microsoft had converted their Win 10x program into a rushed release of Win 11. Fundamentally, it was to push the adoption of the TPM 2.0. Win 11 required it, briefly, for operation. I covered this topic more in a part 2 on the same blog.

Honestly, I thought that would be enough coverage to get some traction and get people with far whiter hats than I, reputationally, to dig in deeper and publish on the subject. I was mistaken and during a comment debate on Peter McCullough’s Substack I rebutted a question about the efficacy of different browsers regarding privacy, with the fact that it was a moot argument. None had any. It bothered me to no end that I was arguing with the guy that created The Comptia Network+ Cert amongst other things.. and yet he had no knowledge of or really any response to what I was showing him. Basically, when one of the giants of the field fails to recognize an issue, it needs to be clarified better.

That was the impetus for dusting off my literary skills and starting this substack. I then covered my written materials with one of my uniquely mentally ill video presentations on the subject. If interested, I also did a podcast in 2020 and part of 2021 covering the Covid Epidemic Narrative Flaws as they happened over on Facebook. Look for the videos within that date range… or Click a date in the next section.

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With that all explained, I guess that I should probably explain the point of this post and how the initial quote paragraph ties in. I had covered the immediate history of the problem, but had no idea just how far back it went and how much we, the IT and Web nerds of the world had forgotten in order to get to the point where no one opposed the TPM 2.0 roll out. I will be writing additional posts to cover the full history of arguably the worst thing to happen to human communications since the invention of the Boy Band and all its hysteria. Those articles will be coming soon. Check back often.

The TPM History - Part 1

In the beginning, there was the The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance

In 2002 they were a Trust of allegedly competing interests who came together to find away to enforce licensing fees and spy on individual computer (and other digital device) users. They stated publicly that they were working to improve privacy protections and personal data security, but nothing could be further from the truth. The rest of the story, Part 2…

The History of Trusted Computing

This racket has been going on for over a quarter century, how did we all forget?

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