How Microsoft plans to make computers less functional & kill p2p in the process!

[SA_Dave]

I just read this article about TCPA/Palladium. It's a proposed 'security' system due to be implemented (and in fact XP's activation feature is a hint of what's to come) in both hardware (ie. Intel) & software (ie. Windwoes), which'll be uncrackable. It'll also turn the internet (an even more successful Open-source project than Linux, FreeBSD or Apache) into a microsoft-controlled domain, effectively shutting out alternative platforms & making the GNU and tcp/ip obsolete!

It's better to be a little slow on the uptake than to miss it altogether!
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020627.html
This week's article is also interesting (so much for Service Pack 1 allowing you to install third-party apps!)

I thought these points from the FAQ were the most worrisome :

Its obvious application is to embed digital rights management (DRM) technology in the PC. The less obvious implications include making it easier for application software vendors to lock in their users.

But there are much deeper problems. The fundamental issue is that whoever controls the Fritz chips will acquire a huge amount of power. There are many ways in which this power could be abused, and Intel has refused to answer questions on the governance of the TCPA consortium.

One of the worries is censorship. An application enabled for TCPA, such as a media player or word processor, will typically have its security policy administered remotely by a server. This is so that content owners can react to new piracy techniques. However, the mechanisms might also be used for censorship.

And there are many other political issues -- the transparency of processing of personal data enshrined in the EU data protection directive; the sovereignty issue, of whether copyright regulations will be written by national governments, as at present, or an application developer in Portland or Redmond; whether TCPA will be used by Microsoft as a means of killing off competitors such as Apache; and whether people will be comfortable about the idea of having their PCs operated, in effect, under remote control -- control that could be usurped by courts or government agencies without their knowledge.

The question is: security for whom? The average user might prefer not to have to worry about viruses, but TCPA won't fix that: viruses exploit the way software applications (such as Microsoft Office) use scripting. He might be worried about privacy, but TCPA won't fix that; almost all privacy violations result from the abuse of authorised access, often obtained by coercing consent. If anything, by entrenching and expanding monopolies, TCPA will increase the incentives to price discriminate and thus to harvest personal data for profiling.

What are the benefits then? I don't know how they expect to get away with this, but it isn't surprising considering some of the other "laws" being passed or proposed in the U.S. at the moment. My own government (South Africa) recently decided that they wanted to control all local internet domain allocations, which means that they might easily be swayed by M$'s propoganda. Let's just hope that TCPA/Palladium isn't successful!