Your point is about mass surveillance and the inauditable backdoor of ME, which is an important security issue by its own, and I'm definitely not optimistic abo

Your point is about mass surveillance and the inauditable backdoor of ME, which is an important security issue by its own, and I'm definitely not optimistic about the situation, especially when Boot Guard rendered removal impossible. What I was addressing there is a different issue, which was how the general objection of TPM in FOSS community came from - In the original vision of "Trusted Computing" around 2006, it was expected that a TPM and ME-based DRM would prevail in a proprietary system and lock every piece of media, software, and file down. You can read Lucky Green's presentation from 2002 to understand more about the situation of that time. https://web.archive.org/web/20180416211840/https://cypherpunks.to/TCPA_DEFCON_10.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180416211840/https://cypherpun... > You could create Word documents that could be read only in the next week - Steven Levy > Fritz Hollings Bill: S. 2048: Plug “analog hole” with 2048-bit RSA: Monitor out, Video out, Audio out. Microsoft: Additionally encrypt keyboard input to PC. S. 2048 makes it illegal to sell non-TCPA compliant computers: A $500,000 fine and 5 years in prison for the first offense; double that for each subsequent offense. But fortunately, THEY were way too optimistic... > As of 2015, treacherous computing has been implemented for PCs in the form of the “Trusted Platform Module”; however, for practical reasons, the TPM has proved a total failure for the goal of providing a platform for remote attestation to verify Digital Restrictions Management. Thus, companies implement DRM using other methods. At present, “Trusted Platform Modules” are not being used for DRM at all, and there are reasons to think that it will not be feasible to use them for DRM. Ironically, this means that the only current uses of the “Trusted Platform Modules” are the innocent secondary uses—for instance, to verify that no one has surreptitiously changed the system in a computer. > Therefore, we conclude that the “Trusted Platform Modules” available for PCs are not dangerous, and there is no reason not to include one in a computer or support it in system software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html