The Trusted Platform (TPM) hardware chip has been portrayed as "treacherous" by Richard Stallman, a critical piece of computer infrastructure by the NSA, and praised by it's inventors the Trusted Computing Group (TCG). But what is it really? Is it evil? Is it useful? Or is it neither--just a boat anchor that consumes electricity and hardware and software development resources to provide an "illusion" of security? Vim is a software engineer working on cryptographic and security technologies. He has 15 years security experience on UNIX-class systems.