Is Microsoft skirting the issue?

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You have the "right" to remain silent.

`Trusted Computing'
The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is an alliance of Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP and AMD. Their definition of `security' is controversial; machines built to their specs will be more trustworthy for the software vendors and content industry, not for their owners. In effect, the TCG specification will transfer the ultimate control of your PC from you to whoever wrote the software it happens to be running. The hardware side of this design will make sure of this!

TC sets specifications for a computer on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with their authors and with each other. The original motivation was digital rights management (DRM): The ?entertainment? industry will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on TC, but you won't be able to copy. They will sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play for a limited time. All sorts of new ?marketing possibilities? will open up.

TC will also deny you access to software not REGISTERED compliant to ?TC standards?. It will protect application software registration mechanisms, so that unlicensed software will be locked out of the new order. The first version of TC, pirate or ?uncertified? software could be detected and deleted remotely. Microsoft has sometimes denied that it intended TC to do this, but at WEIS 2003 a senior Microsoft manager refused to deny that fighting piracy was a goal: `Helping people to run stolen software just isn't our aim in life', he said. The new TC is subtler, though. Some TC apps will work better with other TC apps, so people will get less value from old non-TC apps. Also, some apps may reject data from old apps whose serial numbers have been blacklisted. If Microsoft believes that your copy of Office is outdated your data may not be usable in newer versions. TC will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buy it; if you stop paying rent, then the software stop working and so may the files it created. So if you stop paying for upgrades, you may lose access to all the songs you bought using it.

Uncle Bill must be getting a new vault ready for the income!

There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists. Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.

TC can support remote censorship. For example, if a protected song is made available on the web as an MP3 file, then TC-compliant media player may detect it, report it, and remotely delete it. This business model is called traitor tracing, and has been researched extensively by Microsoft and others. Digital objects created using TC systems remain under the control of their creators. So someone who writes a document the court decides is defamatory can be compelled to censor it - and the software company that wrote the word processor could be ordered to delete it. We can expect TC to be used to suppress everything from pornography to writings that criticize political leaders.

Your software suppliers can make it much harder for you to switch to competitors' products. A word processor could encrypt all your documents using keys that product has access to; you could only read them using that product, not with any competing word processor.

Following embarrassing email disclosures in the recent anti-trust case, Microsoft implemented a policy that all internal emails are destroyed after 6 months. TC can ensure that this is done automatically. You can?t use a document as evidence if it doesn?t exist! Arthur Andersen would have found TC useful.

TC will dramatically increase the costs of switching away from Microsoft products (such as Office) to rival products (such as OpenOffice). For example, a firm that wants to change from Office to OpenOffice right now merely installs the software trains staff and converts files. In time, once they have received TC-protected documents from perhaps a thousand customers, they would have to get permission (in the form of signed digital certificates) from each customer in order to move files to a new platform. The firm won't in practice want to do this, so they will be much more tightly locked in. Hello to hikes in software prices!

Intel started this mess with Palladium and Microsoft has decided to take it a step further.

Digital Rights Management started the money ball rolling and Microsoft sees no end to the profit.
"It's a funny thing," stated Bill Gates. "We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains." Gates says that Palladium could ensure that email designated as private could not be forwarded or copied to other people, for example. In other ?Words?, "you could create Word documents that could be read only in the next week. In all cases, it would be the user, not Microsoft, who sets these policies."

For more info:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=25681&DisplayTab=Article
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

Enjoy your new life, you have no choice?

Posted by: msdead   Posted on: 08/31/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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