[KLUG Members] DRM in every Samsung machine

[Bruce Smith]

> 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?

That's not much of a rationale, since the hard drive can be installed
and mounted on a different computer, and read by Linux anyway.

The real answer to securing hard drives on laptops is a BIOS that
encrypts the hard drive on the fly, so nothing can read it without
decrypting it.  Don't some laptops have this option already?

> "Mark my words" :(

So what can lowly people like us do to prevent this from happening?
Or are we doomed to set back and watch M$ slowly kill Linux?

 - BS