[otakucode]

I am not surprised that their inclusion was sneaky. I recall when Intel attempted to market TPM for the first time. The reaction was swift and very negative. Slashdot was not in favor of 'security' through including security holes and relying upon obscurity of the information on how to exploit the holes being the single point of failure. It was closer to when the government was trying to mandate key escrow and Clipper chips than now and back then they had to walk it back and not release it with a high profile. Back then the most common worry focused on was that this would be used for hardware-based DRM in service of the entertainment industry.

[userbinator]

I recall when Intel attempted to market TPM for the first time. The reaction was swift and very negative.

Are you sure you didn't confuse that with the processor serial number (that Intel actually reversed their decision on)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106870

TPM was (unfortunately?) far more positively received, likely because it was marketed as a security instead of DRM feature --- and the same goes for a lot of other antiuser features today... the manufacturers have gotten smart about it.

[acdha]

The TPM got almost universally negative negative coverage outside of the enterprise IT space because there wasn’t an obvious benefit to anyone else and many concerns that it would prevent alternative operating system installs, lead to unbreakable DRM, etc.

This was unfortunate as it largely evaporated the middle ground who recognized that without some trusted base you also can’t recover from malware or have robust anti-theft measures. I wish the politics had been such that we ended up with a robust open-source implementation before so much shoddy, unreviewed code had shipped so widely.