TPM removal

Is it possible to physically remove the chip, or is the best I can do just disabling it in the BIOS? Also, how do I get into the BIOS on a Z96J?

 

I believe hitting F2 during boot will get you into the bios. Not sure about phyiscally removing the TPM chip.

 

You cannot physically remove the TPM. It is soldered to the motherboard.

As far as disabling it in the BIOS, I think it's usually disabled by default.

Usually, BIOS keys are DEL, F2 or F10. For ASUS laptops, they usually use the AMIBIOS and it's typically F2.

TPM is pretty harmless by itself. It's just the fact that it can associate a system with you or your personal data because each TPM module has a unique ID. Or worse, ASSUME that it is you because it is your unique ID and ASSUME that nobody else can have the same ID. It's the idiots on the other side which make it so troublesome. But otherwise, it's useful in the sense that it can generate "more random" random numbers which would be used for encryption so it's "stronger", and can generate hashes much faster if the application supports it.

 

Has anyone written any utilities that allow you to flash the chip to an empty state (or at least to remove the unique ID)? I greatly dislike the thing on principle.

 

I don't think you can flash the chip quite in that way.

Link: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/31/1828258
Link: http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/
Reference: http://www.infineon.com/tpm/