MS Palladium: A must or a menace?
 

Does anyone know where to find more about technical details? It looks Microsoft says the same all the time. Without details...

I find it highly suspect when Microsoft speaks of "enhancing privacy". What they are trying to do (and this is purely my opinion) is corner another market now that they have found their portion of the OS war slipping ever so slowly. . .

Every Joe Average who buys the latest bloatware for his kids homework, online banking, or looking at porn will find himself locked out of websites etc. that don't have palladium support because the are "untrusted". This means that every website that wants to cater to our friend Joe must pay the license fee so their server will be trusted, or worse yet, change the server to NT <shiver>. Because all businesses want their websites available to the masses, they will do this. As a result the people like us who use alternative OSs will find ourselves locked out of these servers because our browsers are "untrusted". We could be locked out of 75% of the internet.

Think this is far-fetched? Let's all hope so. . .

Although I agree with many of the points raised by the doom-sayers, I would have to disagree that all web servers will pay... there are a good many sites that are run on an extremely tight budget - the extra expense would push them over the edge, and no amount of advertising would help, so not only would we be locked out of the sites that can afford the net-tax, but those that can't will also be 'erradicated'? Although personally I don't see that this will happen since there are too many sites of really huge businesses that depend on alternative OSs, not just Linux.

The problem is if Palladium reaches critical mass then the backbone will be in place. If the routers and switches that run the Internet are run by TCPA enabled hardware thats it for us. Linux users (and *BSD, OS2, whatever) will be cut off. MS is counting on this happening. They will lobby HARD to get this bulls**t legislated. I am in favour of added security measures. Nothing wrong with that (as long as my or anyone else's personal freedoms are not touched). But to have a single software vendor (Microsoft) and the MPAA and RIAA controlling this technology is WRONG!! With the EU and other countries looking at escaping MS's control over them, the USA might find itself alone with this controlled computing technology (as with the DMCA). Some people have said the industry will not abandon billions of $ in existing hardware. This will become (IMHO) a tax write-off. The FORCED sales of new TCPA compliant hardware will easily make up for whatever losses the industry must suffer in the short term. This battle is going to be won and lost in the American Senate or House of Representatives (forgive my ignorance, I'm Canadian). This is something to fear, folks. I can only hope that yesterdays (US) elections brought some intelligent men and women, who care about individual rights and freedoms, into the political spotlight. Just my 2 (Canadian) cents (which means I probably owe 17 US cents :-) ).

How would transition work? There are tens of millions of PC's out there which do not have Palladium. Any web site that insisted on it would lose access to all those customers. How many people are going to buy a new computer because they want access to a web site? I would guess none. As more and more people outside the U.S. are going with Linux (Peru, China, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand), the servers that insist on using Palladium will also lose their business.
This seems to assume that new computers will drive the transition. It seems to me that the largest number of customers will be served by the lowest common denominator. This will be true for some time to come and is without Palladium.

Hang on!
 

Let's separate the implementation from the company behind it and look at the proposal objectively.

A secure computing platform is absolutely necessary, regardless of who implements it. This is a fact which we can't escape and which Europe's leading OSS consultancy http://www.netproject.com is the first to admit to. Alan Cox also supports the concept of trusted computing.

The keystone is the development of an open implementation of the trusted platform.

PS. After the XP licensing fiasco no-one in the industry really trusts a Microsoft implementation of a trusted platform anyway!

I never thought of that

Nope now republicans (the party that favers rich people, old farts, & rednecks) control the House & Senate now :(

Alan Cox recently summed up the feelings about TCPA. "If No-one can be trusted, fine - let's have No-one in charge of the keys"

My little rant above is even considered conservative by some. . .I've read some articles that predict palladium to be the death of free software (do you think apache will pay license fees for every server that gets downloaded? Are you going to pay microsoft to download it?)

Even I, who hates Microsoft as an evil company far more than I hate their crappy software, think that is a bit extreme.

We can at least take solice in the fact that Microsoft will deliver Palladium at least three years late, and even then it won't work properly.

This link has some info, and links to several other articles:

http://www.epic.org/privacy/consumer...palladium.html

I don't think MS can do that for software they don't own, if they try they might have a big fight on there hands.

The funny thing about OS/2 is MS programed it for IBM. So you know they can do a lot better than pushing a unsecure, not a bit stable OS like windows out the door. I never used OS/2, but I would think it is a lot more secure & stable.

I worded my post kinda poorly, what I mean is that if you want to use apache to serve your website, and you want our hypothetical 'joe user' to access it, you will have to pay M$, hence a lot of businesses (and individuals) will have no monetary advantage for using GPL software like apache, and it will cease to be popular. . .hence it's decline, and possible death.

I'm not sure if it would be legal after the whole anti-trust thing, but I'm sure if they can, Microsoft will drastically reduce the cost of licences if you are using their software, and/or their approved hardware. Thus a lot of businesses might choose to use NT and IIS rather than Linux/Apache

The article I was referring to is here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25891.html
Im sure it can explain better than I. . .

What we need is a neutral body along the lines of the IANA or the ECMA to implement something of this magnitude, not a private corporation, especially one as corrupt and lecherous as M$

The way I see it, there will be two possible outcomes of Palladium.

1) Microsoft implemets the technology alonside Intel's LeGrand and start to control networks, the internet. They control the market, and the internet, and we are all stuck.

2) Microsoft does a horrible job implementing Palladium, and they wind up wiht very few people buying into it. They will basically screw themselves over, and lose billions.

I don't think this is farfetched at all, I have been saying thsi for months now.

Imagine corperate networks, if you will. Company A just spend $500 000 on server upgrades, and inplementing linux solutions. 1 year later, Palladium comes out and they say, "Hey, we just won't upgrade." But alas, Office Ten Thousand comes out, and thier users want to use it. Well, they have no choice but to upgrade, because it doesn't work with Longhorn! That basically gives them 2 choices: take the time and resouces and time to teach empolyees a brand new office suite, or scrap hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of servers.

Sound farfetched? I hope it is, if this actually happens it will be a major disaster for the compuing world.

yeeaaaa! just like a court just stopped their monopoly dead in its tracks, that was quite a showdown! good thing the plaintiffs won, right? oh, NO!!! I forgot! they lost.

reefer's right, mostly... it's probably worse. the net probably stops routing all untrusted data so the only people left with untrusted PCs-- 'the pirates' as far as they care-- are cut off forever. and untrusted PCs become illegal so we can't fall back on running a BBS either. they go back to phone taps, or worse, digitize the whole phone system and move it to the internet.

mail-order 'warez' CD-Rs will be all the rage not to mention GNU-CD's, until they start putting trusted CD-Rs on the shelf. you know, the part that tells your burner what kind and how fast, etc. or if it's rewriteable... you get the idea. they'll be tcpa-crippled. new burners and newest drivers only!! you agreed in the EULA to update your drivers!!

is this not more proof that lucifer's taking over the world? almost closing time when they lock us all in a digital box. and don't ever forget, anyone without the mark of the beast will be unable to use money... for being untrusted? and anyone who refuses to be 'marked' will be subject to execution... for treason?

Revelation 13:16 He [Antichrist] causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads,

17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

18 Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666.

and that's what Jesus had to say about forced registration, as far as I can tell. find Jesus!!!

read the whole chapter

Here is another article which makes interesting reading on the subject and is based on Bill Gates wanting the Chinese to pay for their software, strange but true, apparently....

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

Jim :)