TCPA BIOSes (10 Jan 2003)

So, AMI has released the first TCPA enabled BIOS. At first I was quite pleased at it occurred to me that it might be able to secure boot GRUB. Of course, it has all the nasty TCPA stuff too, but I'm not going to use that. If it has a write-enable jumper on the motherboard that I can bridge to write an SHA1 checksum, I would be quite happy. However, having read some of the (dry and frankly confusing) specs it doesn't even seem able to do that. So it really is utter worthless crap.

(Technical note: I know the BIOS only loads a bootsector into memory and checksumming that wouldn't be enough to secure it, but the boot process could be modified so that the BIOS loads the whole lot. Given what changes the TCPA are trying to inflict they wouldn't even blink at that.)