The simple answer is no, you can't trust your computer. A recent article written by Richard Stallman called 'Can You Trust Your Computer?' inspired me to write about this subject, which Im ashamed to say, I've known about for along time. Did you know that Kazaa, the music sharing software, has a partner that it leases remote access to Kazaa users for their business's clients? There's no telling what kind of personal information that they've gotten their hands on. Maybe some of that junk mail in your inbox and mailbox is thanks to them.

This whole problem with proprietary software designed for malicious purposes could simply be solved by sharing the source code to the programming community to be analyzed. That's precisely what's been going on in the free software community but it's being done to a much less extent with for-profit software. Furthermore, anyone who didn't hide behind a company name who did things like this would be called a hacker, or worst cyber terrorist, and be immediately sent to jail. Why have the big corporations been able to avoid such criminal charges?

Did you know things are about to get much worse? Their actually designing chips for malicious purposes now over at an organization called 'Trusted Computing', but it really should be called Treacherous Computing. These chips will be able to directly control your PC's hardware, completely. The things they can do with these chips are endless. They could restrict certain programs, files, documents, from being accessed by you. One thing they're planning to do which I think is very treacherous is that their planning on making files unique to each PC by encryption. This means you can't take your mp3's off your PC and play them on your iPod. It will also make it so you can't copy files over to another PC, they simply wouldn't work on another PC.

What's even more concerning about this whole thing is that the EFF is involved and they would only get involved if theirs enough facts to prove 'Trusted Computing' is trying to break laws or infringe on your rights for malicious purposes.