Re: [Fsfe-france] Re: [APRIL] Premier BIOS Palladium/TCPA !

[Hervé Eychenne]

Droit de réponse d'AMI
Reply-To: 
In-Reply-To: <address@hidden>

On Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 12:12:10PM +0100, Xavier Roche wrote:
> > Et bien, maintenant je propose de boycotter AMI, et par extension les
> > fabricants de carte mère qui se fournisse chez eux. En espérant que cela
> > pourra éviter a des concurrents de lancer le même genre de M... sur le
> > marché.
> 
> Bonne idée ; la FSF "monde" ne pourrait-elle pas se positionner clairement
> contre AMI ?

J'ai écrit à AMI pour leur faire part de mes doutes concernant
l'initiative TCPA et ses sérieux risques de dérive, ainsi que ma
volonté (supposée, ça marche toujours) de boycotter les futurs
produits AMI basés sur cette technologie.
Je n'ai rien dit de plus, et ai reçu le lendemain cette réponse
(générique, très certainement), que je fais suivre ici, pour info.

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Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 09:53:20 -0500
From: "Umbertina E. Vezzani" <address@hidden>
Subject: RE: TCPA BIOS
To: "'address@hidden'" <address@hidden>

Thank you for taking time to contact us here at AMI.  We are sorry to
hear of your decision to not seek out an AMI solution for your next
purchase.
While we respect your right to make that decision we would like to
take a minute to underline some relevant points about our announcement
that were not adequately conveyed in the "article" posted on Slashdot.
We urge you to please give us a minute of your time to fully understand
what AMI  is offering and thus be able to make a fully informed decision.

It must be noted that AMI has not announced support for Palladium.
Palladium is an initiative by an OS entity that is slated for the future.
To be honest, though we do know about it, AMI has not begun any
development related to it.  At this point we have not made any decisions
on support either.

TCPA does not equal Palladium.  While certainly there is some future
development overlap between the two, TCPA is being introduced by OEM's
as a security option to protect systems through hardware and firmware.
This feature is completely optional to our customers (OEM's, ODM's, CM's
and other system builders) that they may choose to make it available or
not depending on the needs of their market.  We have had requests from a
number of customers (motherboard manufacturers) for this technology.

Regarding the limitations of a system with TCPA I would offer the link
below to the public specification for further information on compatibility
with different OS's, and hardware.  Based on that spec we can tell you that
it does not limit the ability to run Linux (or any other open source
solution).

As a smaller company itself, AMI has always supported innovation and
creativity as these have been our main tools in competing against much
larger companies in our industry.  We would not do anything that in
our minds would damage our credibility or reputation for world class BIOS
solutions and will carefully evaluate this type of feedback when it
does come time to examine any future technologies.  We would also like to
recommend that anyone who is opposed to a Palladium-type solution in
the future, please make that known to OEM's and system builders.  As they
are our customers, we definitely listen to them in terms of what they (and
hopefully their customers) will want in future BIOS.

Thank you again for your time in contacting us and we hope that this
and some of the links below will shed some light on AMI's plans.


LINKS

Original Articles on theinquirer.net

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7089
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7103

AMI TCPA module Whitepaper
http://www.ami.com/support/doc/TCPA_whitepaper.pdf

TCPA Website
<http://www.trustedcomputing.org/>

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 Hervé

-- 
 _
(°=  Hervé Eychenne
//)
v_/_ WallFire project:  http://www.wallfire.org/