Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, creator of the Holy Grail that is Pong announced at the Wedbush Morgan Securities annual Management Access Conference that piracy on computers will soon meet its end:
"There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now. What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world - which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords - which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem."
TPM, which stands for Trusted Platform Module, has actually been in use with some laptops since 2006, and Intel is apparently planning to make use of it sometime this year. It refers to a published specification which details a secure cryptoprocessor, capable of storing secured information, but also the generally given name for implementations of the aforementioned specification, referred to, as by Bushnell, the "TPM chip." It can also be known as the "Fritz chip," or "TPM Security Device." Making use of methods like remote attestation, sealing, and binding, it can theoretically be used in conjunction with any encryption-enabled application, like Digital Rights Management.
Bushnell goes on to say, "the TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay," and as soon as the installed base gets big enough, they'll start to see revenues from Asia and India.
Well, I've already communicated my stance on piracy, so there's no point in going through that again. I will say I don't really buy this 'end of piracy' thing though. I'm not any kind of computer engineer, but it would seem that if you can make it, you can crack it, in one way or another. Let the battle between good and evil begin.
Kidding. Sort of.
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