Last week Jack posted on Cory Doctorow's rant about Apple's implementation of "trusted computing" (Wikipedia). Now John Gruber at Daring Fireball has also taken issue with the boy from BoingBoing.
To recap: Cory was upset that Apple's early developer kit for its new Intel-based operating system apparently includes trusted computing, because he thought it would deny him access to data which he owned. So upset, in fact, that he's considering ditching Apple. "If Apple carries on down this path, I'm going to exercise my market power and switch away," he wrote.
Gruber says he's gone over the top and assumed that Apple's intention is to lock down data, when there's no evidence to suggest such a thing.
In the actual case here, Apple's Developer Transition Kits... 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.
So, says Gruber, Apple is locking down hardware rather than data, and that's no surprise, since they've been doing that forever. It's a sensible riposte to the over-hyping tendency, even if it doesn't fully question corporate motives for possible bad behaviour... and it's worth reading if you - like Cory - are worried about Apple's plans.
