Hardware security in PCs to accompany new Windows

[Peter]

On Wed, 18 May 2005, Sy wrote:

> I totally don't respect copy protection.  It requires hardware which
> is not user-servicable, not user-accessible in any form and such..
> otherwise it's just pathetic.  The push for computers which are just
> dumb terminals hooked up to a highspeed connection, or a closed
> hardware/firmware/drivers/operating system would be the only two
> reasonably successful ways of preventing various forms of
> content/software/whatever piracy.

Why is a lockdown to hardware better knowing that todays hardware is not 
expected to last 2 years of continuous operation ? A dongle or chipcard 
can be pulled and put into the followup machine as opposed to a fried 
motherboard or cpu s/n, not to mention hard disk s/n etc. xp already 
uses these items to lock the os to the instance of hardware one is 
running. I find locking to physical hardware that is known to fail often 
and hard is worse than locking to a piece of removable media (like a 
Dallas button, chipcard, or something like that). The current model 
requires re-registration every 2 years or so because the hardware tends 
to last that long. The total span of support is 6 years maximum so far 
(last supported = win98, we are in 2005). So whatever software you buy 
is not expected to last more than 5 years no matter what and no matter 
how many times you upgrade. Consider this when computing the TCO on 
something that costs $3k a license. I have operating 10 year old 
software (and older) and telco and other people use tons of computing 
equipment from the early 1990's. They use hardware license keys. So does 
your tv set top box, your bank (credit card) etc. Yes it can be annoying 
but other things are much more annoying (like the need to 'call home' 
for systems that are not intended to ever be connected to the outside 
world).

Peter
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml