[KLUG Members] DRM in every Samsung machine

[Jamie McCarthy]

At my KLUG talk "Your Rights Online" a couple years ago, I
mentioned that the BIOS was one way for Digital Rights Management
to work its way into the computer.  DRM is aka Trusted Computing,
aka Treacherous Computing, aka whatever Microsoft wants to call
"taking over the world" this week.

Today's news is that all Samsung computers will now ship with the
Phoenix "Core Managed Environment" BIOS, which implements this at
a level Linux can't touch:

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/16/1443252

If this becomes widespread, it's a very short hop for Microsoft to
push BIOS manufacturers to ship, and computer makers to adopt, a
BIOS that refuses to boot any hard drive whose boot sector has not
been digitally signed by a trusted software company like Microsoft.
I.e., computers that refuse to boot free software.  The rationale
for this will be:  what good is it to have a laptop that will only
boot Windows from the hard drive, if the thief can just put in a
Knoppix CD and mount your Windows drive on Linux?

"Mark my words" :(
-- 
  Jamie McCarthy
 http://mccarthy.vg/
  jamie@mccarthy.vg