Ok folks. Here it comes. MS and Intel(Wintel is NOT dead) wants to have everything signed by it so that there’s no more bad or malicious code. Of course this would put an end to the open source movement and several other industries in the software arena(which MS would LOVE to have happen). I don’t know how but somebody needs to clean engineer another ISA and we need to move from x86 yesterday at this point. If you like Apple’s we control everything…then this is going to be for you. I like the free, open way of doing things…frankly when something like this goes through it’s going to spell the end of choice on your own pc’s.
In describing the motivation behind Intel’s recent purchase of McAfee for a packed-out audience at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel’s Paul Otellini framed it as an effort to move the way the company approaches security “from a known-bad model to a known-good model.” Otellini went on to briefly describe the shift in a way that sounded innocuous enough–current A/V efforts focus on building up a library of known threats against which they protect a user, but Intel would love to move to a world where only code from known and trusted parties runs on x86 systems. It sounds sensible enough, so what could be objectionable about that?
Depending how enamored you are of Apple’s App Store model, where only Apple-approved code gets to run on your iPhone, you may or may not be happy in Intel’s planned utopia. Because, in a nutshell, the App Store model is more or less what Intel is describing. Regardless of what you think of the idea, its success would have at least two unmitigated upsides: 1) everyone will get vPro by default (i.e., it seems hard to imagine that Intel will still charge for security as an added feature), and 2) it would put every security company (except McAfee, of course), out of business. (The second one is of course a downside for security vendors, but it’s an upside for users who despise intrusive A/V software.)
via Intel’s walled garden plan to put A/V vendors out of business.
