"Big Brother Inside": Intel Yields To Pressure...

[Brian High]

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Copyright ) 1999 to 7am News

Intel Yields To Pressure Over New Pentium Chips
12:10pm PST, 25 January 1999

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Threats of boycotts and concerns over privacy have forced Intel to make
concessions over the design of its new Pentium III CPU chip and its built-in
fingerprint mechanism.

In an announcement today, Intel has said it will now distribute free
software that disables the fingerprint facility and that once the currently
committed manufacturing runs are done, the next revision of the chip will
have the feature disabled by default.

On this revised processor, users could still choose to activate the
fingerprint using the supplied software if they wanted to but this would
require them to shutdown and restart their computers.

Intel's announcement has been greeted with mixed feelings by some of the
groups who had criticized the privacy implications of the chip's original
design. While acknowledging that it may represent a concession on the part
of Intel, they assert that the mere fact the capability is still available
could mean computer users will be forced to enable it in order to transact
business over the Net.

"This would be a Hobson's choice situation" said one. "You'd have the choice
of keeping your privacy or being able to buy products over the Net -- and
that's no choice at all."

In retaliation at Intel's decision to incorporate the fingerprint technology
into its chips, some critics have been planning to replace the "Intel
Inside" logo on their computers with a "Big Brother Inside" one.



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