IDAD 2024 - Dec. 20: For freedom, against restriction
Quoting: IDAD 2024 - Dec. 20: For freedom, against restriction —
Eighteen years after the Defective by Design campaign's inception, we're still continuing the fight against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), the practice of imposing technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media -- and won't back down until we've won. For our eighteenth International Day Against DRM (IDAD), we're targeting an issue that thousands of computer users around the world will face, whether they know it yet or not. As Microsoft has decided to end the life of Windows 10, one of everyone's least favorite nonfree software developers has mandated the use of a hardware TPM for those who want to downgrade to Windows 11, an unnecessary module that will send thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of perfectly functioning machines to your local landfill, potentially setting back e-waste reduction efforts for years. This doesn't need to happen.
While TPM has legitimate uses and could theoretically benefit user security if handled through free software, it is overwhelmingly used not to protect its actual users, but media conglomerates. Today, most of the major streaming media platforms utilize the TPM to decrypt media streams, forcefully placing the decryption out of the user's control. Why then require a TPM? It's easy: by offloading the decryption to a separate piece of hardware running its own software, media companies can ensure that users won't try to access the files streaming through their own machines.