I mostly buy my PC games used on EBay. How is this DRM / TPM going to effect the used PC game market? Anyone know? Does this mean no more used games? What if I buy a new PC?

This DRM / TPM could backfire and further hurt the PC gaming industry, and push more gamers over to consoles.

I'd argue that you're taking too negative a view of this.

As regards MS and Vista: they actually did incorporate support for the TPM--it's used with the BitLocker function to provide (in principle) unbreakable encryption for the user's data. Contrary to what you imply here, MS have never been very keen on implementing features which amount to support for (other people's) DRM schemes, although they have done it subsequent to industry pressure simply because not doing so would mean that Windows (XP and Vista) users would not be able to watch HD content--and that is something that consumers typically do, in fact, want, for example. The TPM offers in principle very worthwhile functionality, but like anything, it can be used for both 'good' and 'evil', as it were. However, all current implementations that I know of also allow the TPM to be disabled if the customer doesn't want it due to privacy concerns, for example. Consider that MS doesn't seem to particularly care if its own products get pirated, judging by the deliberately lame copy protection schemes they use (do you think they really couldn't do better if they wanted to?), then there is not much chance that they will want to protect someone else's revenue stream beyond the extent necessary to prevent them from getting sued.

Anyway, in regard to the content of the post, I will not be in the least bit surprised when the anticipated "huge market" in Asia and India completely fails to develop. Videogames, as with all entertainments, are not a necessity for life, so the game industry can't force people to buy its products. I expect that most people who are playing the pirated copies would never have bought them anyway, and will just do without if piracy becomes impossible in the future. Aside from which, many games are apparently not even relatively stable before several patches, so I think that strong (i.e. unhackable) cryptographically-assured content protection is probably too much to expect as a given. If things like that were feasible, and if game developers (read: _not_ the publishers) actually cared to implement them in the first place, then they could certainly be introduced without requiring a TPM. The Module is certainly the entertainment industry's lobby groups' wet dream when described in the terms used here, but the reality is somewhat different.

I should also add that, unlike MS's original 'Palladium' Trusted Computing implementation (which Bruce Schneier has argued was mainly an attempt at screwing over the entertainment industry), the actual Trusted Platform spec, such as it is today, very strongly favours the trust of the physical owner of the Module. That is, as far as I can see, there's nothing to stop someone implementing a fake TPM as a purely software-based driver which will behave as the user dictates rather than as third parties would expect--e.g. it might provide consistent but completely wrong hashes in order to provide proper remote attestation regardless of any modification or misuse the user may make of the software.

Of course, such fake TPMs would be treacherous to anyone wanting to use them for DRM, because only the user would know for sure whether their TPM was trustworthy or not. The only way DRM could be implemented with such untrustworthy implementations around is by tying content to TPMs that the content provider already trusts because they have had a direct hand in manufacturing them (e.g. in portable media devices that they make and into which they can write keys). Therefore, it seems to me very unlikely indeed that the TPM could possibly be the answer that the entertainment industry is looking for, because the whole point of DRM is that they don't trust the consumer--so they obviously can't trust the TPM owned by the consumer either. The point of Trusted Computing is to provide a chain of trust, and for DRM purposes as applied to consumer PCs, the first link in that chain doesn't even exist.

"I will not be in the least bit surprised when the anticipated "huge market" in Asia and India completely fails to develop"

Completely agree here :)

"I think that strong (i.e. unhackable) cryptographically-assured content protection is probably too much to expect as a given"

It wouldn't be the developers implementing such a system. It'd be MS. With NGSCB, it's trivial to securely lock a piece of software to a single machine. All the complex stuff is built into the OS.

"there's nothing to stop someone implementing a fake TPM as a purely software-based driver which will behave as the user dictates rather than as third parties would expect"

Yes and no. There's nothing to stop someone making a software TPM (or even an unauthorized or modified hardware TPM). However, such a TPM would not be usable in Windows. It's like website SSL certificates - there's nothing stopping you using a self-generated certificate, but browsers will recognise that it didn't come from Verisign et. al. and show a warning. In the case of TPM-secured software, it'll simply refuse to work. So closer to Vista x64's required driver signing I suppose.

"the actual Trusted Platform spec, such as it is today, very strongly favours the trust of the physical owner of the Module"

Umm, no. In fact, it has NO trust of the physical owner of the module. That's the whole point (and the source of the "trusted" in the name).

What you're thinking of is a mechanism called "owner override", which has been rejected by the TCG. Not unreasonably, I might add, as it breaks most of the "good" functionality as well.

"Consider that MS doesn't seem to particularly care if its own products get pirated, judging by the deliberately lame copy protection schemes they use"

At the moment, there is exactly one mechanism out there for pirating Vista x64 - ACPI table modification (SLP2/SLIC). This option is only open because of the OEMs (they didn't want to spend the time to individually activate each machine at the factory). The rest of the system is pretty watertight, and if MS hadn't bowed to pressure from the OEMs you can bet that this one hole wouldn't exist.

MS sees the TPM as a huge opportunity for many reasons. It kills piracy, help lock people into their software, and is a nice wedge to use against Linux. They just have to find a way to make it acceptable to consumers.

"There's nothing to stop someone making a software TPM (or even an unauthorized or modified hardware TPM). However, such a TPM would not be usable in Windows. It's like website SSL certificates - there's nothing stopping you using a self-generated certificate, but browsers will recognise that it didn't come from Verisign et. al. and show a warning. In the case of TPM-secured software, it'll simply refuse to work. So closer to Vista x64's required driver signing I suppose."

It really depends, I suppose, on whether MS would sign the driver for it or not. It certainly would be within their capacity to refuse to do so, I agree--but, at least at present, MS seems to be aiming for compatibility with anything except badly written unstable drivers and outright malware. The driver-signing mechanism of Vista is not itself protected by TPM and can be hacked as well, although obviously it's in most people's best interest not to do so. Of course, it's also possible to make a BIOS hack or particular hardware which is compatible with and appears sufficiently like another manufacturer's product that a pre-existing signed driver would be applicable, so it would still be difficult to reliably identify rogue TPMs. The problem is that the TPM, as it's sold, contains only a randomly-generated RSA key pair, so if a software vendor wants to use it for DRM then they need to have some way of getting their keys into the device securely--and since they can't rely on the pre-existence of other well-known keys as a signature of authenticity, it will be very hard for them to tell if their software is communicating with a real TPM which fulfils the spec, or one which flagrantly breaks it.

"In fact, it has NO trust of the physical owner of the module. That's the whole point (and the source of the "trusted" in the name)."

This is not really what I meant. To clarify, I meant that the only people who can trust the 'trustworthiness' of the TPM itself are those who can verify that it is, in fact, a proper TPM. It seems to me that unless there is going to be some initiative in the future for all TPMs to have a certain key burnt into them, there is no way in principle for anyone to do this who has not had physical contact with it. Moreover, the spec states that tamper-resistance is not a strong requirement, so it seems unlikely that there would be any move toward building in a secret private key because, like with the commonly used media content protection systems, it would be extracted sooner or later and the whole system would be compromised. I agree with you that 'owner override' is not a very sensible concept but the fact remains that it's still within the power of the owner to clear all the information in a TPM except the random RSA key pair, so for any third party to require particular information to be there is, at the least, going to introduce serious compatibility issues. Then the question becomes, will the media industry implement strong DRM that doesn't work with many consumers' equipment, or will they just make the compromise of assuming that anything appearing like a TPM to their software will follow the spec? Neither is a good situation for them.

"At the moment, there is exactly one mechanism out there for pirating Vista x64 - ACPI table modification (SLP2/SLIC)."

Well, there are also some methods which involve the new VLK infrastructure. Although Vista's copy protection is better than that of previous MS products, the fundamental point is that MS makes a blacklist of product keys they don't like--they don't, however, make a whitelist of valid keys. Consequently they implicitly tolerate a low level of piracy (or a high level, depending on how quickly they put keys onto the blacklist) and it's possible to circumvent all of the anti-piracy mechanisms by using a valid but completely spurious key (and associated key server). This is at best a serious hindrance to piracy, but it's not an all-encompassing solution as would be a key whitelist.

In regard to MS vs. Linux: assuming that Linux supports the TPM (which it does), then I can't see any reason why this gives MS an advantage. Unless you mean that it can in principle allow software vendors to exclude all other software from a computer other than what they approve of? I don't know about you, but personally I'd not be very willing to buy a computer which was factory-locked to using a certain set of software, and I'm pretty sure that there are enough people out there feeling similarly to ensure that such computers won't become predominant any time soon. I can't see this changing for as long as the TPM is an optional component, unverifiable by third parties.

Judging by the success of consoles and the decline of the PC gaming industry, I think the PC gaming industry couldn't be doing a better job of killing off demand if they tried.