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database agents. That way you can charge vendors a license fee
in exchange for permission to make a client, and you can ensure
that the clients are well-behaved and don’t trigger any of your
nasty bugs.
But you can’t meaningfully enforce that. EDS and other titanic
software companies earn their bread and butter by producing
fake database clients that impersonate the real thing as they it-
erate through every record and write it to a text file — or simply
provide a compatibility layer through systems provided by two
different vendors. These companies produce software that lies
— parasite software that fills niches left behind by other organ-
isms, sometimes to those organisms’ detriment.
So we have “Trusted Computing,” a system that’s supposed
to let software detect other programs’ lies and refuse to play
with them if they get caught fibbing. It’s a system that’s based
on torching the rainforest with all its glorious anarchy of tools
and systems and replacing it with neat rows of tame and planted
trees, each one approved by The Man as safe for use with his prod-
ucts.
For Trusted Computing to accomplish this, everyone who
makes a video-card, keyboard, or logic-board must receive a key
from some certifying body that will see to it that the key is stored
in a way that prevents end-users from extracting it and using it
to fake signatures.
But if one keyboard vendor doesn’t store his keys securely, the
system will be useless for fighting keyloggers. If one video-card
vendor lets a key leak, the system will be no good for stopping
screenlogging. If one logic-board vendor lets a key slip, the whole
thing goes out the window. That’s how DVD DRM got hacked:
one vendor, Xing, left its keys in a place where users could get at
them, and then anyone could break the DRM on any DVD.
Not only is the Trusted Computing advocates’ goal — produc-
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