“Apple Computer is doing far more to help the adoption of the controversial security technology known as Trusted Computing than other proponents, Mac security researcher Bruce Potter told attendees on Wednesday at the Black Hat Briefings,” Robert Lemos reports for SecurityFocus.
“Through the coolness of the iPod and its iTunes Music Service, the company has already made another controversial technology–digital-rights management–widely accepted by the the company’s consumers, Potter argued, pointing to the more than 1 billion songs sold by the company,” Lemos reports.
“Among other things, Apple uses the hardware component of Trusted Computing, known as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), to verify that the company’s PowerPC-to-Intel interpreter only works on authentic Apple hardware,” Lemos reports. “The Trusted Computing Platform uses encryption and specialized memory to secure a computer’s data, allowing only the application that created a file to access that data and allowing hard drive data to be locked to a specific computer, for example. However, critics worry that, without adequate policy guidelines, the technology could be used by third parties to undermine consumers’ rights to their own data.”
Lemos reports, “About 20 million computers, most of them laptops, shipped with the Trusted Platform Module in 2005, according to the Trusted Computing Group. Apple is expected to ship 10 million Macs, the majority of them Intel-based, in 2006.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: 10 million Macs in 2006? Apple had better get a move on then: Mac unit sales: Q1 06 (Apple’s fiscal Q2): 1.112 million + Q2 06 (Apple’s fiscal Q3): 1.327 million = 2.439 million in the first six months of 2006. 7.561 million Macs to go by New Year’s Eve!
Correction MDN:
10,000,000 to go by new years day. The 5th avenue Apple Store will still be selling computers at 11:59 on new years eve if I understand correctly
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I’d like to see them be correct. Their last half shipping estimate is over twice mine.
exponential growth. Stock goes up to 2000.00. Dell shuts down and has no money to give the investors. All by next year.
MDNMW: story, as in “what a great story”
face,
I don’t think you understood correctly. They said in 2006. That means that you get to count all of the year, not just the second half of the year.
But what does TPM on macs mean for the consumer? How will this benefit me? I know some wireheads who are extremely critical to the point of being paranoid on this issue. Will TPM place restrictions on what I can do and cannot do on a new mac?
<Looks appreciatingly at his g5 powermac under his desk.>
j,
In MDN’s take, they say that there are 7561000 million to go by new years eve. I was pointing out that they will have an extra day to sell them, since the 24-7 store will be open on new years eve. I did screw up by writing 10000000 instead of 7561000, so it does seem like I was intending to correct that part of MDN’s take. I wasn’t though, that was my mistake.
face, j, all they have to do is triple their sales rate for the second half of the year. Is that too much to expect? Any reality-based analyst is willing to give Apple a double-digit growth rate for each of the next two quarters. All Apple needs do is add a decimal place to that growth rate and they have it made!
Sorry, my handy-dandy calculator says Apple is unlikely to sell even 6 million Macs in calendar year 2006, never mind 10 million. Not that selling a bit over 5 million would be a Bad Thing, just a bit below the unexpected “10 million” in the article.
Trusted Computing is taking your rights away from you to do what you want with your computer
EFI is a extra firmware level between the OS and hardware that can connect over the internet, download drivers and other things even before the OS is loaded.
You won’t know a thing, unless you see your modem blinking while booting up. It’s a really bad thing because to use our computers we have to give blind trust to companies like Sony/BMG (rootkit fiasco) and others.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
Search Wikipedia for Trusted Computing and Extensible Firmware Interface.
Will Little Snitch work against TPM?
Security Pro = Andy = MadDude = Paranoid.
I really don’t see any reason why Macs will not sell just as fast as iPods have been. The figure may not turn out to be that unreasonable.
Little Snitch is a outgoing firewall that alerts of any outgoing network connections through the operating system.
With EFI, it’s a firmware level created by Intel with a lot more capabilities than present firmware. It sits between the hardware and the operating system, any system calls to hardware is first checked through EFI for permission.
So for instance if you got a piece of software that would rip DVD movies by accessing the drive itself, this wouldn’t be possible under EFI if a driver was programmed to prevent this.
With EFI constantly in contact with Apple and software vendors, they could know immeditaly if your running a illegal copy or even have installed a competitors software package.
Little Snitch prevents a lot of software from “calling home” and other things because you have control over outgoing network connections. Your privacy is your buisness.
With EFI based Mac’s and PC’s, this is no longer the case.
One can download the EFI programming kit from Intel and start finding hacks to regain our privacy again. But Intel can always change the rules and restrict general access to the development kits.
Apple is not cool by supporting this at all, but with only 4% market share and Intel flexing it’s muscles by virtually making PC’s all by itself, there really isn’t much anyone can do.
Microsoft and Sony envision their gaming devices being the “consumer PC” eventually. Apple is hedging it’s bets and considering becoming a generic PC vendor.
Apple sold 0.8M laptops last quarter with MacBooks hardly out of the stall and the edu season to come too.
Apple sold 0.6M desktops. Mostly iMacs and minis I guess.
Now if Apple double their laptop sales to 1.6M / quarter, sell 0.8M iMacs and minis that would make about 2.2M.
If they introduce the MacPro and Intel Xserve they could potentially sell 0.3 and 0.1M respectively.
Then you’re up to 2.8M.
Given the current momentum, good press and pent up demand for new pro machines and laptops they could easily get close to that number.
Add on the Xmas factor and it could happen.
Man can you imagine their revenue and profit at that point. I bet prices would drop too when manufacturing costs go down.
Apple + TCM + EFI = “All your computers (and data) are belong to us (Apple, NSA, FBI, etc.)”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
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“Trusted Computing is taking your rights away from you to do what you want with your computer”
Maybe you would like to enlighten me as to what the TPM in my MacBook is preventing me from doing, that I can do on my PowerMac?
Because I sure haven’t found anything yet.
And just because EFI has potential networking capabilities doesn’t mean it’s spilling all your secrets to Apple, sheesh. In any case this would be fairly easy to uncover by running a network sniffer between the Mac and the Internet connection.
Maybe you would like to enlighten me as to what the TPM in my MacBook is preventing me from doing, that I can do on my PowerMac?
Because I sure haven’t found anything yet.
Wait and see. It will come gradually with new versions of software.
And just because EFI has potential networking capabilities doesn’t mean it’s spilling all your secrets to Apple, sheesh. In any case this would be fairly easy to uncover by running a network sniffer between the Mac and the Internet connection.
Apple I’m not worried about.
Ryan: “Maybe you would like to enlighten me as to what the TPM in my MacBook is preventing me from doing, that I can do on my PowerMac? Because I sure haven’t found anything yet.”
Security Pro: “Wait and see. It will come gradually with new versions of software.”
BHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Security Pro, you have just been smacked! You ADMIT that TPM is doing nothing to customers. All you have is FUD and hysterical promises that it will do Something, Someday. Shut up!
“BHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Security Pro, you have just been smacked! You ADMIT that TPM is doing nothing to customers. All you have is FUD and hysterical promises that it will do Something, Someday. Shut up!”
Damn, you poeple are just sheeps. While nobody can predict the future, you should be glad that at least one person like Security Pro tries to inform you guys a bit about the potential problems of trusted computing.
Let’s speak again in 5 years, where it might be impossible for example to make backup copies of apple software etc…
Hobbes – “Damn, you poeple are just sheeps. While nobody can predict the future, you should be glad that at least one person like Security Pro tries to inform you guys a bit about the potential problems of trusted computing. Let’s speak again in 5 years, where it might be impossible for example to make backup copies of apple software etc…”
—> Hobbes, I agree 100%. The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is hardware, AND, is already deployed in millions of computers. It’s not being deployed to just take up space on your motherboard.
It has good uses, such as integration with the OS to harden security (as stated in the article), stopping spam at it’s source, warding off malware, hardware level security/encryption for online transactions/banking/email, and cutting down on cyber-attacks/crime, but it can be abused like anything else.
The fact is, it’s here – and nobody can do a damn thing about it. As Hobbes stated – no one can predict the future, but some of the implications are a cause for concern. ALL your emails tagged with a unique identifier? In fact, the very real possibility of every file on your system (including everything created by you) being tagged is a real concern to me. I’m not scare-mongering, but some of these issues are *real*.
“Will Little Snitch work against TPM?”
–> One word – NO.
“Will TPM place restrictions on what I can do and cannot do on a new mac?”
—> As it becomes more broadly deployed, absolutely. But again, it all depends on what you are trying to do. TC/TPM I believe will play a huge role in DRM in the future. You might say, “But I’m not stealing anything”, and you would be absolutely correct, but if Sony or whomever does not want a copy of ANY kind (even if it may be for legitimate backup purposes) of their copyrighted media made, you won’t be able to do it (they may allow a limited number of backups – who knows? Or, they will only play on your machine, NOT a set-top player). Even with good old VHS tape, you don’t technically “own” the movie. You own *the physical tape*, but the movie/content is the exclusive right of the producer/copyright holder – you are just allowed to watch it. Same goes for DVDs and CDs.
I am *MUCH MORE* concerned with the tagging I spoke of above more than DRM issues though.
Apple makes Trusted Computing cool”
—> The most ridiculous statement I’ve ever heard . . .