Quoting Sam MacDonald <smac at visi.com>: <corrected top posting> > Mike Miller wrote: > > > On Mon, 9 May 2005, Ken Fuchs wrote: > > > >> Please support Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) BIOSes such as > >> LinuxBIOS, before it's too late. Future BIOSes will execute only > >> authenticated executables. Will GNU/Linux be one of the > >> authenticated operating systems? > > > > > > Wow. That is a disturbing suggestion. Is that really in the works? > > I'll tell you one thing for sure -- I won't buy any motherboards that > > cannot run Linux. > > > > Mike > > > > I would think that would be configurable and an option for servers not > workstations/home computers. > > Sam. What's being referred to here, in a a slightly inflammatory manner, is trusted computing. The concern was raised by Microsoft's attempts to develop their trusted computing platform, Palladium, in conjunction with Intel's Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA). Microsft's trusted computing implementation would likely be very restrictive and should not be considered a good thing. However, Microsoft, not surprisingly, is considerably behind on their development of Palladium. Hardware companies are already rolling out various components of trusted computing with support provided by third party software the hardware company provides. It is my opinion that trusted computing is going to be driven by the hardware manufacturers, not the software manufacturers. Like all other hardware, as long as specs are made available for how to interoperate with trusted computing features or the community is able to reverse engineer them, this will be a non-issue. Trusted comuting in and of itself is not a bad thing and may be the only way that computing can be made available to the general public in a truly secure fashion. Josh