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M$ to manage your computer (Palladium discussion part 3)

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Calum:

quote:MS Palladium protects IT vendors, not you - paper
By John Lettice
Posted: 28/06/2002 at 10:27 GMT

Ross Anderson of Cambridge University has published a lengthy and informative paper/FAQ on Palladium, the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), their relationship and their implications. His take is that Microsoft's Palladium, soft-announced by the company earlier this week, will be built on TCPA hardware, adding some extra features as it goes along. Some of these features, he notes, will the there in order to make the package look more attractive, while some of the components of Palladium are already shipping in Xbox and WinXP.

TCPA itself provides for a monitoring component to be included in future PCs. In phase one Anderson expects it to be an add-on chip on the motherboard, but further down the line it will be in the CPU. It's more crackable as an add-on, as you could conceivably get around it by monitoring bus traffic, but once it's in the CPU this becomes a lot harder, and he speculates about the likely effects in the event of TCPA/Palladium being to all intents and purposes uncrackable.

Aside from providing the music business with workable DRM, it would also allow software companies to lock in their users. The more Palladium/TCPA-enabled apps there are, the more this will be the case, and it will also have the tendency to favour existing players while locking out new entrants.

Anderson refers to the chip as the "Fritz" chip, after senator Fritz Hollings who has been "working tirelessly" to make TCPA compulsory. On boot, Fritz "checks that the boot ROM is as expected, executes it, measures the state of the machine; then checks the first part of the operating system, loads and executes it, checks the state of the machine; and so on. The trust boundary, of hardware and software considered to be known and verified, is steadily expanded. A table is maintained of the hardware (audio card, video card etc) and the software (O/S, drivers, etc); if there are significant changes, the machine must be re- certified. The result is a PC booted into a known state with an approved combination of hardware and software. Control is then handed over to enforcement software in the operating system - this is presumably Palladium if your operating system in Windows."
--- End quote ---


Read the article here and read the full document here[/b]

[ June 28, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

voidmain:
They might as well waste some more tax payer dollars and start another anti-trust trial now as to get a head start on this thing. I just can't believe the audacity of these companies!!  Wait, yes I can....

choasforages:
goddamnit. i think the FSF needs to get a fucking petetion out on this one

psyjax:

quote:Originally posted by choasforages:
goddamnit. i think the FSF needs to get a fucking petetion out on this one
--- End quote ---


Is this really happening?

I mean seriously folks, do you think this thing will fly?

No one will switch, if anything this is the death of M$. No one will buy new hardware and old stuff will be at a premium. Tons of 3rd party folks will spawn overnight making non-palladium stuff and users will flock to Linux and MacOS.

If they are serious about this, M$ is signing their death certifacate. Because even if Palladium fails and M$ goes back to their old ways, their rep will be soooo tarnished in consumers mind, who the hell would buy their shitty products.

Just a thought. I don't think it will work. People like freedom, epecially in the US.

choasforages:
if we were only taking inteligent people into acount microsoft would have been gone a long time ago, you failed to think about all the fucking morons out there


idiot:"wow dudes, with my new pallidium system, i don't get virus's!"

me:"can you run anything other then M$ software?"

idiot: "other then M$ software, like M$ is the only thing never mind those macintoshs, they suck!!"

never underestimate the power of idiots, especially large groups of them

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