Criticism
NGSCB and Trusted Computing can be used to intentionally and arbitrarily lock certain users out from use of certain files, products and services, for example to lock out users of a competing product, potentially leading to severe vendor lock-in. This is analogous to a contemporary problem in which many businesses feel compelled to purchase and use Microsoft Word in order to be compatible with associates who use that software. Today this problem is partially solved by products such as OpenOffice.org which provide limited compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats. Under NGSCB, if Microsoft Word were to encrypt documents it produced, no other application would be able to decrypt them, regardless of its ability to read the underlying file format.
NGSCB and Trusted Computing are ineffectual at solving the majority of contemporary security problems, for example computer viruses and trojans. Despite this fact, Microsoft has in the past claimed that NGSCB was necessary to combat the threat of future virus outbreaks against Microsoft Windows users. Microsoft is no longer making claims that NGSCB will solve these virus problems.
Bruce Schneier in his Crypto-Gram Newsletter wrote
"There's a lot of good stuff in Pd, and a lot I like about it. There's also a lot I don't like, and am scared of. My fear is that Pd will lead us down a road where our computers are no longer our computers, but are instead owned by a variety of factions and companies all looking for a piece of our wallet. To the extent that Pd facilitates that reality, it's bad for society. I don't mind companies selling, renting, or licensing things to me, but the loss of the power, reach, and flexibility of the computer is too great a price to pay."
Read more about this topic: Next-Generation Secure Computing Base
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)