[Sussex] BBC Video Downloads

[Jacqui Caren]

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> This week. But take a careful look at where it's headed: Brian 
> LaMacchia, who is one of the core authors of the technology, at his MIT 
> presentation on it when it was called Palladium, indicated that there's 
> a real security desire to control the BIOS and boot devices. It's even 
> extensible with the existing standards to control media devices such as 
> DVD drives or USB memory sticks: 

Encrypting motherboard bus lines is insane for home applications.
Even mil spec devices do not require this level of encryption.
The only people who befit from bus/interface encryption/singing
are the RIAA.

Anyone who has used HP mainframes will know where this comes from.
In the bad ol' days you had to buy a HP certified drive - the 
controllers in a HP box would only talk to drives "signed" by HP.
Other third party drives would not ever appear!

A recent foray into diesel injector technology shows that this is not
just a problem with IT systems. Common rail fuel injectors are very 
simple but now each injector has a chip embedded with the main purpose
of requiring a main dealer to recode your engine management unit if you
change an injector. An injector used to cost X UKP but now costs XUKP + 
Y UKP for re-coding and Y >> X, forcing you to use main dealers for 
service work, cutting small garages and parts resellers out of the loop.
Chips in high temp parts of the engine such as injectors simply do not
make good design sense, with some designs already showing high
failure rates.

Again the technology is in some very small way related to improved
performance but in reality its main objective is to sting us poor
idiots for as much as they can get. Also it was mentioned like HP
ink carts, the injector chips will 'kill' an engine if they exceed
thier lifetime, making buying a second had car a highly technical
process of having to check the "life remaining" in the EMU.

And people ask me why I insist upon driving Pre R reg cars :-)

Jacqui