the power of being root, scary movie III

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Fri May 20 07:41:31 UTC 2005


On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 11:28:56PM +0100, James Wilkinson wrote:
>Magnus Therning wrote:
>> It would still be possible for the root/admin to perform some tricks to
>> read your data while it's in RAM... but at some point you have to start
>> trusting your administrator :-)
>
>Ultimately, with current hardware, if you can modify the kernel you can
>change it to do whatever you want. (This is one reason why kernel
>hackers dislike binary modules: they do change the kernel, and a bug in
>the binary module can easily modify random other parts of the kernel).
>
>This is precisely why Microsoft and others have been investigating
>so-called "trusted computing": it has hardware support for a part of
>memory that the OS can't modify, and can ensure that the system hasn't
>been modified rom a known state. See
>http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html for further details.

<paranoia>
That's the official reason, the _real_ reason is that the powers that be
(the unholy alliance between Redmond and Hollywood) wants to control
even more what you do with your computer.
</paranoia>

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org
http://magnus.therning.org/

Software is not manufactured, it is something you write and publish.
Keep Europe free from software patents, we do not want censorship
by patent law on written works.

Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many
intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could
invent a cipher that no one could break.
      -- David Kahn
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