A few days ago I noted Cory Doctorow’s rant about Apple’s rumored use of the Trusted Computing platform, where he paints a picture of Apple trying to lock down content in many nefarious ways. Now John Gruber has what seems to me to be a very sensible take on this:
Certainly such a scenario is a potential use of Trusted Computing DRM mechanisms — and such a scenario would indeed be dreadful — but it’s a far stretch to call it the “point of Trusted Computing”. In the actual case here, Apple’s Developer Transition Kits — which, I’ll remind you, may bear zero resemblance, internally or externally, to the actual Intel-powered computers Apple will eventually ship to real customers — are (reportedly) using TPM for one and only one purpose: to prevent the OS from being run on non-Apple hardware.
There is no indication, none, zero, not even a whiff, that Apple intends to enable, let alone encourage, developers to create software with the TPM file-access authorization-locking described by Doctorow above. None.
This is not about third-party software developers limiting access to your data. This is about Apple limiting access to their operating system.
Sounds like there’s no need for alarm. Move along folks, there’s nothing to see here.
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