“Electronic Waste”

By Scott Hamilton

I have known for years that the giants in the software industry were in a profit sharing scheme with the giants in the hardware industry and recent changes in Microsoft Windows 11 have given me even more evidence to prove my point. It is only in the last 10-years that we have seen only minimal improvement in computer performance on home computers. This means that for most of us, unless we broke something, we are still using our computer from ten years ago. This is getting ready to change if we want to use the latest software from Microsoft, and it really is a political decision within Microsoft driving the change.

Microsoft made a decision to not support any computing hardware without a Trusted Platform Module(TPM). The operating system itself actually does not have to utilize the TPM at all as the primary function of the hardware is to protect the firmware from corruption. A little background is necessary here to explain firmware. Firmware is hidden software that runs on your computer to manage the hardware interaction with the operating system (Windows). Firmware provides a layer between Windows and the hardware in your computer so that you can control access to the hardware outside of Windows. For example you can enter your BIOS setup, which is just one firmware on your computer, and disable a device, like a hard drive for example, and then Windows does not even know the device exists.

The TPM stores Private and Public Key pairs to check that any firmware was signed by the hardware vendor before allowing it to be installed on the system. This prevents a hacker from modifying your hardware definition layer and adding or removing devices from your system at the lowest level. Microsoft made the decision to require this component in all systems as part of the support matrix for Windows 11, by doing this they made an estimated 480 million devices currently in use obsolete overnight.

These devices are not obsolete because they are not powerful enough, do not have enough memory, or enough graphics processing power, but because they do not have a TPM which on average costs less than twenty dollars to produce. They could just as easily bypass the requirement for this component and not impact the performance of Windows 11 at all, yet they chose to require this component. The TPM cannot be added to an existing computer because it is integrated to the computer main board and as part of the “trust” is unable to be removed or replaced.

This is going to do two things for the hardware industry. Number one it is going to result in a lot of new computer sales in the next 12-24 months as people are slowly required to update their computers as Windows 10 support ends and hackers find vulnerabilities making it unsafe to continue it’s use. Second it adds a layer of planned obsolescence into computer hardware. As encryption algorithms are constantly changing to prevent easy attacks on hardware the TPM will continue to improve and being a non-replaceable component means that as soon as new ones release you will likely be forced to upgrade your computer bringing back the days when you wanted to replace it every three years because of improved performance. The only difference is that now you will have no choice in the matter, things will just stop working when your TPM is no longer supported.

The amount of electronic waste that will result from this political change by Microsoft is astronomical, and this is likely to continue to happen every three to five years as long as hardware vendors cooperate with Microsoft in the grand scheme. What I would like to know is where are all the green energy and environmentalist protests in regards to this egregious action. The electronic waste this year alone is going to match the last 5 years combined from a political stance. My recommendation is that we all stop using Windows and shift to a long standing open source alternative, Ubuntu Linux is really user friendly and compatible with all the modern online tools, including Microsoft Office 365 and yet does not have the strict hardware requirements laid on us by Microsoft. Until next week stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to shamilton@techshepherd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.