Windows 7: Should Intel decide what software we can run?

Ars Technica reports on Intel’s walled garden plan to put A/V vendors out of business. It starts out sounding tentatively very positive about plans announced at the Intel Developer Forum by Paul Otellini.

The idea appears to be very similar to the way Apple manages the iPhone App Store, where every single piece of software in it has to be approved and certified by Apple before it is made available to the public — except it is meant to apply to every x86 architecture platform Intel produces in the future, most likely including a future replacement for whatever computer you use to read this article. Intel is pitching its own plan with its marketing apparently focused purely on security for now, talking about trusted vendors’ software being the only software allowed to run on its platforms. The idea seems to be that a “default deny” approach to allowing software to run on the system would be preferable to the current “default allow”, with only certified software offerings being able to run on the system.



While the initial careful boosterism eventually falters, the assumption inherent in the tone of the Ars Technica article never even questions the validity of such an approach to security, with Intel acting as final arbiter of All Things Trustworthy. If you know anything about real security, though — where real security is defined by the needs of the user, and not the business model of the vendor — your first thought upon reading the article should probably be something like, “I wonder if I should plan to move all my hardware to AMD processors.”

It boils down to the simple concept of ownership and personal property. Once you have purchased something, no one else has the right to dictate how you use it. Any terms and conditions, laws, contracts, etc that dictate otherwise are an infringement on those rights.