German Government and Windows 8

[Infinite Chaos]

Documents from the German Ministry of Economic Affairsobtained by German title Zeit Online uncover the alleged unease of officials at the direction of version 2.0 of the standard being developed under the auspices of the multi-vendor Trusted Computing Group (TCG).
TPM has been marketed as a security and Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology since its appearance in 2006, but version 2.0 would embed a chip on every PC that has complete control over which OS software can and can’t run, a setting not designed to be over-ridden under Windows 8. The chip is also where the cryptographic data is stored for Windows BitLocker and it enables remote administration. Link.

Why aren't more European governments looking at this as seriously as the German government? Is the British Government finally going to stop playing toadie too or should we just accept the Snowden case and revelations of just how much information the NSA is gobbling up (sometimes with help of lackey British Governments) means our data is simply is transit to the NSA?

Also, if we are to trust American assurances on the chip - just look where these chips are built...

Ironically, an expert quoted in the Zeit article goes on to worry that the Chinese Government as well as the NSA might be able to access data through TPM 2.0; many TPM chips are manufactured in the country.

Time to look at alternatives and what would they be?

Original Zeit Online article

 

[Rainman05]

Germany, calling win8 crap before it was cool.

 

[Canell]

Welcome to 1984 where "Trusted Computing Group" actually means "Untrusted Computing Group".
And use GNU/Linux.

 

[PeteEU]

Why aren't more European governments looking at this as seriously as the German government? Is the British Government finally going to stop playing toadie too or should we just accept the Snowden case and revelations of just how much information the NSA is gobbling up (sometimes with help of lackey British Governments) means our data is simply is transit to the NSA?

Also, if we are to trust American assurances on the chip - just look where these chips are built...



Time to look at alternatives and what would they be?

Original Zeit Online article

The German government .. well aspects, have been pushing to move from Windows to open source systems for a very long time, but have never gotten much headway because of the costs involved in doing so.

As for this "fear".. lets see if it is implemented at all, since nearly 50% of all PCs sold world wide are still home made machines with standard components. So unless the big chip makers and motherboard makers are forced to implement this, then I would not be too worried... unless you got stock in HP or Dell or Apple.