Degen has always thought of himself as an honest and caring person, but mostly, Degen has always been promoting the free world and more important, the individual persons rights.
Living in a country that for about 50 years have been almost entirerly controlled by a socialistic government, these rights have been challenged many times.
But then, last fall, the people finally came to their sences and choose the liberating alternative.
Everything seemed to be getting better, even if many of the old faults will take many years to correct. But just as we are on the right track, Degen became aware of another threat...
For the past 2 years, an organization created by various film and music companies, called APB, have started to harass ordinary people for sharing copyrighted material over the internet.
The discussion about this wether this should be illegal or not is a long one, wich I will not go through here, but Degen is under the firm believe that they are hurting themself more than they are hurting the filesharing society.
Again, without going into the battle of the legacy of filesharing, APB have been behaving... not nice.
APB have been called a terror organisation for their actions. Among other things, they have performed illegal operations to trace and stop filesharers, perhaps the worst is putting aside personal privacy. ISP´s have been forced to give out information about suspected filesharers (illegal under local law) and had their servers confiscated.
Actions like these, when performed according to law, is an essential part of the POLICEwork needed to catch the real crimminals in the world. They are most certainly NOT for an individual organisation to do.
Now, instead of hunting down, and more importantly, preventing crimminals and crime, the police have to waste time and money going after children, teenagers, students and other ordinary people who´s only crime (yes, it is still a crime) is having their computers copying a couple of billions one´s and zero´s.
Ofcourse, all criminals needs to be persued, but going after people for filesharing, when murderers, rapists and pedophiles are running around seems a bit stupid.
Anyway, this post is actually not about the APB and their terrorlike organisation, but about an upcoming threat to both the technology, independence of man, and perhaps the scarriest, the development of the human life.
Technology have been influencing mankind since... ever. When the first monkey picked up the first stick and used it as a tool of some sort, we were one our way.
During the latest 100 or so years, the technological advance has been moving quite a bit faster than during those first years, and we have come to depend on our technological aids more and more. Thanks to technological progress, we know so much more about the human form and have been able to extend our lifeexpectansy greatly through medicines and technological aids.
We shrink the size of the globe with every progress, taking us further into the future. We are even a mere 50-60 years from colonizing other planets in our galaxy.
All of this progress is due to 2 reasons.
1. Brilliant people who devote their lifes to improving technology
2. and especially in the later years, the many millions of people collaborating and helping eachother with every aspect of technology, using their homecomputers and their minds.
But now, many of the largest computercompanies in the world have gone together, attempting to stop the amateur computerworld. It should be mentioned, that this is probably not their true goal, but it is the function.
The threat is called TCPA, or
Trusted Computing Platform Alliance.TCPA was created by many of the larger technology companies in the world (TPA - Trusted Partner Alliance) in an attempt to protect their own hard- and software from the many threats that circulate the internet.
The idea:
Computer in generall depend on their users to do the right things. To tell the software what is acceptable in the computer, and what is not. All security software still has to be configured by the end-user to fit his/her needs and wishes.
TCPA takes away all the hazzle of allowing or disallowing processes or connections, or making sure that your new hardware wont damage your existing.
The clever engineers at the factory, who knows so much more about computers then you do is obviously better suited making these decisions for you, right?
TCPA will do all this for you, by installing a chip in your computer. To begin, it will be a individual chip for the whole computer, but the TPA´s plan is to make sure that one of these chips is present in every piece of hardware in your computer. One at the motherboard, one in the processor, graphicscard, soundcard, network and everything else.
Here´s the kicker...
With a TCPA chip installed in your computer, no hardware or software that have not been approved by the TPA will be able to function with you computer, so your safe. To get a TCPA approval wont be cheap so many of the smaller and midsized companies will probably have to raise their prices to cover the loss... This means that these companys will probably either go out of buisness, or be bought by the larger ones.
Ok, we loose a few companies, not that bad.
But the real problem lies in the software. With a TCPA chip installed, you wont be able to run any code that you wrote yourself (unless you write it in an overpriced application, instead of notepad). The open source concept will completely die, wich means that many many of the clever sollutions and new ideas created in the computerworld by scilled amateurs will be lost. The advance of computer technology as we know it, will be completely controlled by the TPA, and no one else.
Ofcourse I like the idea to create more secure computers, to thwart hackers and criminals, but if I wish to leave my computer unprotected, or if I want to write a program that will destroy my own computer, that is my choise.
I recently helped my father with his computer. The cd-player gave up, so I copied his games onto another computer, transferred them to his computer and showed him howto emulate the images, to fool the computer that the cd was present.
He was wery impressed that it was so easy to fool the computer, created by some of the most powerfull companies in the world. I drew the parable, that the computer was relly, a personal universe. As long as you can speak the language, you can do anything.
And I feel that is the point of this WERY long rant. MY compuer, is MY personal domain (haha) in wich I should be allowed to do absolutely anything as long as it doesnt hurt anyone else.
The TCPA concept will take away this right for me, leaving me with only the pre-approved choices of these companys. I feel this is about as close one could come imprisonment of the free minds that have brought the world forward since the 70´s.
The TCPA must be stopped. There are actually alreadu computers being shipped with the chip installed.
For more information, please visit
www.againsttcpa.com.There you will find, among other things, a list of the companies in the TPA.
Also, you could visit
this page, and view a nice little animated video, explaining all this, but in 2 minutes instead of.... many many letters.
Stop the TCPA, leave my computer alone!
