Trusted computing [WAS new user question: debian on a Thinkpad T61]
On Jan 10, 2008 12:31 PM, David Brodbeck <brodbd@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
> On Jan 9, 2008, at 5:27 PM, Mike Bird wrote:
> > You might want to make the recovery CDs and save the recovery
> > partition.
> > In this sad world, being able to restore/reinstall Vista will
> > dramatically
> > improve resale value when you replace the laptop in a few years.
>
> Although maybe not as much as if it had XP. ;)
I just got the ThinkPad T61 laptop today. I went in to system
properties to take a look at the hardware device manager and I noticed
it included "Trusted Platform Module 1.2". Now, this raised a red
flag for me, as my first impressions of "trusted computing" were
framed by this article:
http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsoft-windows-vista
So, I have two questions:
(1) Is this really as scary as the article makes it out to be? (in
other words, should I be worried that this is on my computer?)
(2) Does Debian support TPM chips? What is the community's take on the issue?
My take is that TPM does have some security merits, but it also has a
lot of potential for abuse.
Google turned up these results of the beginnings of TPM support in Linux:
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/news/linux/15574/ibm-brings-trusted-computing-linux
http://lwn.net/Articles/144681/
Thanks,
--
Jimmy Wu
Registered Linux User #454138
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