Thanks, NY Times, for promoting ignorance and obfuscation of technology with the headline image to this article. Why would a photojournalist at those offices bother to do any legwork or research when he could call up on his/her screen some arbitrary symbols, arranged in no meaningful pattern, and just click the shutter without getting out of his/her chair? For that matter, why bother to progress beyond 1950s-era depictions of technology? It's not as if said technology has greater impact on our lives these days.

On the other hand, the Times article does call attention to a surprising effort on the part of the "Trusted Computing Platform Alliance" (Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP, and AMD), ostensibly allowing them to create a "trustable platform," more likely allowing them to offer copyright holders a captive audience, and—more seriously—limiting innovation by casting any software without a Pepsodent(tm) smile as suspect.

The term "trusted computing" is a chimera here, refering not to your ability as a user to trust the machine on your desk, but rather to the companies' trust that the computer will do exactly what it's supposed to, or rather, that it hasn't been tampered with in any way and hasn't had anything "nonstandard" installed. Here's how it seems to work: a piece of hardware embedded in your computer would be able to "attest" to a remote system (one that provides a private service, for example) that your computer and your software is all trustworthy (that it won't pass on the music you're streaming to anyone else, for example). The TCPA white paper, "Building a Foundation of Trust in the PC," takes pains to de-fang this feature: "It is important to note that the TCPA process does not make judgments regarding the integrity metrics"—it would only report the integrity. So, of course, the TCPA process doesn't make judgements; it merely provides the means for a service provider (Columbia Records, for example) to make a judgement.

This white paper would make a fine case study in the critical reading of "valueless" technical writing. Although the platform itself is apparently value-neutral about what sort of things ought to be done with a computer, one has to ask, on the one hand, why it is being developed exclusively by a consortium of industry giants, and on the other, whether it has any use for non-giants.

(Post Scriptum) Luckily, this venture will almost surely fail. Besides the fact that it's still not possible to plug up the hole where the music comes out of the computer (casting it for the moment as a question about the napsterizing of music), there is the problem of what will ultimately qualify as "trustable." The TCPA proposal would have your machine offer up a signed miniature copy (a hash) of your operating system, so that if one byte of it has been modified, the service provider would know and could deny service. Making that hash usable, despite the tremendous variation in and modularity of OSes, would be difficult. In fact, the only way I can imagine making it useful is to contrain the domain to a narrow range of OS versions—say, those that are made or bundled by Microsoft, Intel, HP, IBM, and AMD. What content provider would keep up on the day-to-day variation of the more actively developed non-proprietary OS versions, when it could still serve 87% of its customers—and trustably!—by recognizing only the big OS provider(s [sic]). Surely it would be no big problem to deny a service to any small-time OS which is altogether different (that is to say, creative): a major blow to the importantly-radical (and importantly-free) Linux and FreeBSD. "Trust," indeed.