“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!