> Can the Trusted Platform Module control what software runs?
> No. There is no ability to do this. The subsystem can only act as a 'slave' to higher level services and applications by storing and reporting pre-runtime configuration information. Other applications determine what is done with this information. At no time can the TCG building blocks 'control' the system or report the status of applications that are running.
I'm not saying TPMs cannot be (or are not, today) used to give non-users control over what users can do with software running on their machine, however in the absence of evidence, I'm not inclined to believe that trusted computing efforts started with such "evil" intentions in the first place.
Albeit heavily abused, TPMs are still a great idea IMO.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20061003155033/https://www.trust...
> Members include Intel, AMD, IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco.
> The core idea of trusted computing is to give hardware manufacturers control over what software does and does not run on a system by refusing to run unsigned software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing_Group
https://trustedcomputinggroup.org/