Trustworthy computing

I’ve just read an interesting article titled What price for ‘trusted PC security’? by Bill Thompson on the BBC’s web site. He raises some interesting points about trusted computing and digital rights management.

I’d add that while secure, trustworthy computing and digital rights management are important, end user experiance is also important and will drive adoption or lack of. There’s always a trade-off between ‘security’ in the broad sense here and usability.

End users will gravitate towards easy to use systems, it’s a hassle to virus scan your PC and if you turn off your personal firewall the annoying warnings go away and it’s easy to download music. Real trustworthy computing will have arrived when we (the end user) don’t have to worry about security or digital rights management, when it ‘just happens’ as part of the user experiance.