Asus pre-installed program.....

hey guys,

does ANYONE know anything about the preinstalled program on asus (mine is a w2jb) called "Infineon Security Platform" --- it shows up in the lower right icon tray as "TPM" --

when you click on it, it begins a type of wizard that guides you through creating some sort of security stuff for the laptop....

i don't know anything about it.....should i install it, what does it do... etc...

any help would be appreciated....thanks....

 

Trusted Platform Module is corporate evil and should be avoided.
It can be disabled in the BIOS.
Many manufacturers are now including it but thankfully its software implementation is has been limted so far.
Read more about it HERE and HERE.

 

I can't beleive you could say that with a straight face for someone who asked a serious question...... It's mainly for the corperate world.... they won't buy systems without it as this point and it does do a lot of good security wise...... you should read up on it. However, out of the box, it's disabled in the bios, the drivers are just installed and what you're seeing on the taskbar...... if you're not going to enable it, you could take that off the startup.

 

I literally uninstalled it. I lean toward ninjanized's opinion - try reading about it here.

~ Brett

 

Boy oh Boy, this forum has been extremely helpful to me and many others but there seems to be a draconian policy of tolerance when one of the site "big wigs" doesn't agree or like a persons post. I thought I was just being helpful by providing my opinion after extensive research on the topic of TPM and I even posted links to Wiki and a video for further review for anyone who was interested in learning more. Proportable is correct when he states that TPM is primarily being implemented in the corporate world and it probably is useful for those who work in that realm. But most everyday users everywhere look at TPM as a way of others controlling the content of their computers. I take pride in researching my facts, I have read up on it so I can say that with a straight face and anyone else who cares to check it out may just agree.

Also, while I'm not worried about "rep points", I don't appreciate Rouge Monk blasting me with negative rep while stating "that is so unhelpful". What's that all about? I included factual links so the reader should decide what is helpful, not him. I'm probably going to tick some more people off with this post but don't expect to treat relatively new but sincere visitors of this forum like morons without hearing about it. Thank you.

 

All I can say is if a businessperson or government official takes my personal data home on a laptop (*cough* VA *cough*) it would be really nice if it was encrypted with hardware encryption rather then software...

That Wiki article is hardly neutral or complete. I don't know why it doesn't have the 'disputed neutrality' tag up - every example they give is negative. Looking at the discussion history, this seems to be a backlash by Wiki's so-called 'editors' which came about as a result of someone putting a marketing document into the article...

 

Yes, the wiki article seems to lean a bit towards the negative side... On the other hand, wiki articles, at least those on "hot" topics, tend to be very accurate reflections of reality. So maybe that bias is saying something...

That being said, I strongly dislike the ideas behind TC. That's on a subjective level. On an objective level there are so many things that could go wrong with implementations of TC that I believe it's not worthwhile to use it, at least for personal computing.

 

Hell, even the white house knows if you leak something with some sort of a slant to the left, that people will think they couldn't have leaked it otherwise it would be all of them...... TPM isn't all good.... eventually it certainly will be - or at least has the oppurtunity to be. If you're paranoid to the fact that big brother may get your information - or anyone else for that matter..... but you believe that TPM would help.... you're just naïve... and then again, if you're worried about those things, TPM may also scare some of those same people - and for the same reason....

Basically, I don't think TPM is going to ever win over those people who are legitimately trying to secure information on the systems because they'll worry about holes and glitches and what not.....

I think we could all at least try to agree that it's a "feature" and a feature that will sell more computers and is at least include with good intentions and will most likely never be used by the average user, but was really developed to bring in those bigger clients that have been using for more security, to give them a reason... or better yet... a *need* for new notebooks.

 

First off, a corporation cannot be either evil or good. It is just a legal entity. People can be evil, both people that work for corporations and those that live in there parents basements.

Company IT folks are constantly fighting against many types of evil, script kiddies, external espianage, idiot employees who think they are tech savy, common crooks who steal laptops out of rental cars and it goes on.....

Trusted Platform gives the IT folks tools to fight many of these issues. A trusted machine is a big step in the right direction for securing remote access to a company network.

Let us not even talk about the issue of employees thinking that a company issued laptop belongs to them for personal use. Laptops are trashed by spyware, worms and viruses far far more often than an office desktop PC.

It is not that companies want to control employees use/operation of computers, it is that they have to. IT time fixing employee self induced computer problems is expensive and that is money that is taken away from other budget items such as raises and new laptops for the employees.