<But Tench, you are missing the point.You see Intels ID ad OK because you say there is no privacy now so why not "ME TOO"...>
Yeah, I guess. I'm not saying there is no privacy now, unlike what Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems says. I'm just saying that the doomsday scenarios that the privacy groups are scaring us about aren't going to happen with a mere addition of a CPU ID.
One guy tried to justify the hype by saying that freedom isn't lost with a single blow, but with a thousand paper cuts, and Intel is just adding one more cut. With this justification, I guess I can now see why the privacy advocates are so gung-ho into making this a live-or-die issue. By attacking one corporation with a boycott, these privacy advocates are hoping that other companies, including those working for the government, will take notice and try to avoid anything which even remotely smacks of privacy invasion.
But that also supports my notion that these guys are pretty hungry for attention. In order to get their (rather irrational) point across, they feel like they have to proclaim that the sky is falling. I guess it's up to John Q. Public now to decide whether Intel's CPU ID is a good thing, a thing worthy of boycotting, or a non-issue.
I personally think it's a non-issue. Very few web sites will require the use of the CPU ID (though many will support it as an optional feature). Neither AMD nor Cyrix wants to even take a chance with serialized CPUs, and last time I checked, AMD has some significant market share, if not profit share. That means the CPU ID isn't going to become ubiquitous any time soon. And finally, the CPU ID is just a first step in Intel's drive to make transactions more secure on the Internet. It isn't perfect, of course, but I think Intel will take more steps in the future to provide better and better solutions for hardware-based security.
Tenchusatsu |
