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Here's one on "internet news". It was also on Drudge at the time,.

It definitely ran at The Register

Regarding the NSA's distribution of Linux, I refer back to the original post, where I said I give this a low probability of being true. This is why I put all those question marks in the subject line, as well. I am as flummoxed as I can be, trying to figure this lawsuit out, and the general twisting, turning methods of the different players in the tech industry. A lot of times, it makes no sense [back to the statement: I don't have the big picture. Now it occurs to me, maybe there is no big picture.]

That said, I think the NSA has some real concerns to worry about, and they may well be immediate.

If the news report is true, I also find it interesting that the name Padilla pops up again. Shoot -- even if the news report is false, and they are manufacturing secondary news items to tarnish the name of Jose Padilla and help get a conviction, I find it interesting.

"IBM's position is that our contract is perpetual and irrevocable and there is nothing further to discuss," IBM spokeswoman Trink Guarino told internetnews.com Thursday. She added, "We do not see momentum slowing anywhere, either with AIX or Linux."

In a research note based on a meeting with Bill Zeitler, IBM senior vice president and group executive of the Systems Group, Deutsche Bank Securities analyst George Elling said Zeitler defended IBM's case against SCO by noting Big Blue's 700 existing or pending patents related to AIX.

700 existing or pending patents, do SCO know of those? what if the code is in AIX and Monterey?

How can IBM obtain patents on code that's supposed to be donated to SCO or is AIX completely seperate from SCOs code?

This is confusing, IBM are going to rip them to shreds.

Normally with an IP/Copyright issue you go for the little guy, get some cash and establish precedence, then go after the bigger fish. Unless of course your trying to annnoy some company and get them to buy you out.

I'm glad I use Verizon Wireless since I don't live in California.

Such a move makes sense in my opinion, because why should you need two chipsets and two standards to communicate through wireless? We don't have two cabling standards, so two wireless standards just seems silly in my opinion.

Moglen noted that SCO cannot readily make the claim that it inadvertently released the code, because the GPL requires that when code is released under its auspices, the developers must release the binary, the source code and the license, and the source code must be able to build the binary. Presumably, then, the binary functions the way the creators want it to function and has the capabilities they want it to have.

IBM assigned their Linux copyrights to the FSF. I don't know why this story has not been posted on slashdot before. It has a number of quotes straight from Eben Moglen, the FSF general counsel, that clear up a number of issues that have been debated endlessly here.

Nice troll attempt but Microsoft has been there done that. A simple google on Microsoft SEC would have saved you from looking like an idiot.

I should have studied magnetics instead of IC processing.

dont worry you will have your day, there are alarming indications that the magnetic media is coming to an end as a concept, for one IBM sold its hard disk unit bet you that they have something big coming, and things like this (read the last paragraph).

personally I think that in the future you will buy a daily snapshot of the internet stored on a 1"x1"x1" cube instead of surfing, and you will only need a connection only for email and live events.

I was looking for the actual patent #s (Patent 6,112,227 (Heiner) and Patent No. 6,199,102 (Cobb), as per an internet news story.

When I tried to return there via the mailblocks press page, all the links pointed back to mailblocks.

Looks to me like they are trying to hide those patent numbers. But it could just be a bug in their web site.

Interesing... there is another article here. It seems that they just announced this 12 year plan to switch over all their local phone traffic.

The timing makes me wonder whether they are announcing this in response to what Telus is doing so as to be able to claim they are on the cutting edge. It sounds like Telus is quite far ahead in terms of progress not just plans; albiet for long distance traffic for now

Some interesting tidbits from a parallel article.

Ballmer has only dropped about 15% of his ownership in MS since his involvement with the company as compared to Gates and Allen who each own only 50% of their original stake.

Contrary to intution, MS shares actually rose as this occured, climbing 6 cents to close at 24.22 on Friday. MS had declined 7 of the last 9 trading sessions.

It seems that the public hasn't taken this as an indication that MS is going the way of the iLoo anytime soon.

can be found at internetnews.com

Fictional news can't beat real headlines:
Microsoft Buys SCO Group's Unix
I note that the article text immediately does have the correct information that a non-exclusive license is what was purchased, not all the Unix assets.

However, my favorite quote from the SCO news is "teams of lawyers and engineers are scouring the source code"
I think lawyers scouring source code is generally not particularly effective.

(Don't look at me. That "zdnet.com.com" URL is what works. Using just "zdnet.com" fails. CNet runs com.com, and I don't know why the ZDNet site doesn't use the same link structure.)

There is a much better article in InternetNews.com here. They bothered to interview Moglen on this very issue:"From the moment SCO distributed the Linux kernel under GPL, they licensed the use. Always. That's what our license says."

Moglen also points out FSF owns the rights to IBM's Linux distribution, not IBM: "In fact, he said, when SCO first filed its suit against IBM, he approached SCO's lawyers because it is the Free Software Foundation and not IBM which holds the copyright to the Linux distribution IBM created, Linux for S/360. IBM created the Linux distribution but released it under the GPL and signed the copyright over to the Free Software Foundation."

What court will reward that kind of behavior, not to mention their refusal to show their code so any violations can be quickly fixed? I'm a paralegal and have been covering this on my blog Groklaw , if you want more info and links all in one place.

The real lesson for corporations will be: the GPL was designed to prevent smarmy corporate behavior. Don't use it unless you agree to its terms. If anyone considers it a loss to lose businesses like SCO...

Uhhh... WRONG. WRONG WRONG

More info here.

they do things like limit number of recipients per message, or recipients per day, that sort of thing. (Can anyone confirm that?)

I heard this too and did some research. Here's an article to quench your thirst for email liberty!

If people in the US and the UK value their lives, they will resist the impulse to try to turn Iraq into a colony that is run for corporate profit. (And yes, that's what this is, even though these guys are masquerading as a charity: they intend to take a cut from selling the "high.iq" domain). Iraq's domain namespace belongs to the Iraqi people, not to a clever British IT consultancy. Similarly, the decision as to whether to deploy GSM or CDMA belongs to the future Iraqi government, not to a congressman in the pocket of Qualcomm. Next, we'll see a bunch of Midwestern farmers clamor to get the government to buy up their grain and dump it on Iraq, thereby setting back efforts to rebuild Iraqi agriculture (which employs far more Iraqis than the oil industry does).

We're now at a tipping point: we can either insist that Iraq be run in the interest of Iraqis, or we can allow it to be taken over by a bunch of cronies and lobbyists. If the latter happens, we'll generate so much hate that it will be unsafe for Americans and Brits to travel abroad.

Here's a quote from an article that indicates that the source code is include with the two products:

"Red Hat promised that its CMS solution could get a company up to speed with content management in as little as two months. The J2EE-compliant software will be delivered with source code included, and provides a workflow-based engine for managing content on the intranet, extranet and Internet settings."

The article doesn't discuss whether it is Tomcat based or not, but did grow froma product acquired by RedHat from Ars Digita around 15 months ago. It will be initially available on Red Hat Linux, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris. (News from the AIIM Conference in MA.)

-- Rick

And what I feel is a better article.

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/1 584601

'A new bill would make Oregon the first state to take a formal stance against the hefty fees and technological limitations of software produced by large corporations such as Microsoft.'

'A House committee is scheduled to consider a proposal that promotes "open-source" software, which doesn't charge recurring fees and enables customers to alter the software code, making it more compatible with other programs.'

Imagine, [Norris] says, walking by a soda machine (say, one of the five million in Japan that will soon employ HSS), triggering a proximity detector, then hearing what you alone hear -- the plink of ice cubes and the invocation, ''Wouldn't a Coke taste great right about now?''

Sure, another MS exploit. Seems to be one almost every week, and it sucks.

What I do find interesting is that /. chose to post this article, but reject an article I submitted yesterday about a very serious security hole in Opera - Opera describe it as "extremely critical".

I'm not griping about having my story rejected, I've had many rejected and a few accepted, and that's the way things are, no problem. What I am questioning is the editorial bias. Here we are at a website which probably has one of the highest concentration of Opera users of any website in the world, and they chose to not post a negative story about "the good guys" (which has exploits in the wild) but did choose to post a negative story about "the bad guys".

Just more of /. displaying an unfair bias?

Even die hard Windows users I know switch to Mozilla or Opera.

All your friends are idiots. Mozilla is a monstrous operating environment that foists is own widgets on everything, requires twice as much RAM as Internet Explorer, and is patched more than four times as often as Internet Explorer.

Opera is also stuck in UI la-la land, plus it crashes. A lot. Not to mention the security holes...

IE may not be the most secure platform, but it sure as hell is stable.

Well, you seem for the most part to have shifted from a technical argument to a legal one. More about the legal stuff later.

This is a litigation thread, it was always a legal argument. There is no technical dispute- Microsoft's Java changes are simply wrong. They've even acknowledged this, by ceasing changes to their Java fork and rolling out their .Net system which is more in tune with their own vision.

I believe that anyone capable of writing Java code, is capable of understanding what the implications are of using non-standard features.

Untrue. Even supposing they can tell what nonstandard features are. Any executive-level decision to use Java for internal work was probably based in part on becoming less dependent on Microsoft's erratic behavior in the future. But the front-line programmers who implement this stuff only sees a deadline to run the software on the boss's laptop in 5 weeks, and does whatever it takes to get there.

There's really no benifit to the company if their accounting program runs on Unix, Windows, and the Mac.

It hurts the company, and it hurts all of society. It pins users to one system, reinforces the Microsoft monopoly, and undermines the goals of Java. But, the damage isn't short term- it's not an immediate cash loss, so it doesn't figure into the company's planning. (Few companies look even 5 years ahead, none 10).

Macintosh or Linux alternatives for all major Microsoft-based applications already exist. For many organizations, the element pinning them down to stay on MS Windows is custom-built apps. Usually, these things have little need for high-speed display or tight OS integration. They're probably just database frontends- exactly the sort of thing Java's limpid GUI system could cope with.

My large corporation uses data-entry DB frontends written in Java. We can only run them on Microsoft Windows, though. All us engineers sit in front of Sun, Irix, or Linux workstations, but we still need Microsoft Windows licenses to run Java programs. The irony is nearly fatal.

The Java contract dispute between Sun and MS has already been settled out of court.

And then Microsoft immediately broke the agreement. They had a settlement in Jan01. After violating it, Microsoft was hauled back into court. They lost that case in Dec02, and were ordered to ship Sun's Java.

If this were a simple contract matter, the court could force MS to live up to the terms of the contract

It is. They did.

Interestingly enough, the Slammer worm also affected the .NET Framework SDK whether or not the full SQL Server was installed on the machine or not. This is because a component of SQL Server is included in the 1.0 release of the SDK. Microsoft issued a critical patch for this issue too. Even after having spent spent 100M on their Trustworthy Computing Initiative by July of 2002, we have not seen a great deal of proactive security fixes from Microsoft. Instead, external exploits seem to still be easy (even old ones), and then Microsoft takes action. Microsoft software still has a lot of maturing to do. We shouldn't expect magic anytime soon.

I was pointing out the advantages of a properly multitasking system. I've rarely used NT/2K/XP, but I've been told the NT series does it right.

I know this is generalizing, but it does seem to display a continuing trend of stability, one way or another.

Out of curiosity, is there any reason they can't just go through their source code, line by line, looking for potential buffer overflows? I know they announced one recently, but I would think that that process would turn up more results more frequently.

I doubt that they will make money out of Hardware. Most Game consoles are sole at just breakeven or below. Companies actually make money on Software and not on the box itself. Here is a sleisha old link abt m$s pricing strat.

Computerworld

Cnet

Internetnews

Infoworld

And, of course, Microsoft Watch.

Quick paste:

Verizon Wireless emerged the victor from what could be one of the country's first cases of wireless spamming.

The country's largest wireless carrier, based in Bedminster, N.J., said it had reached a settlement with Acacia National Mortgage, which calls for the lender to stop sending repeated, unsolicited commercial text messages to Verizon Wireless customers.

Other terms of the settlement were not disclosed, including any possible remuneration for message recipients, who under some plans are charged a per-message fee. Under the Colorado state antispam law on which Verizon based its case, recipients or carriers can sue for $10 per message, plus any actual damages.

Full article is here

I love Verizon Wireless.

Dammit Hilary, stop trolling /. (j/k couldn't resist) :)

P2P is only perceived to be evil by the people that have the most to lose when their customer-base doesn't need them anymore.

Most of the people that I know that use P2P don't care how the RIAA (or Microsoft or the US gov't) feels about it. And the RIAA in particular certainly doesn't help its cause by releasing CDs that deny people their right to fair use. P2P is the modern equivalent to Thoreou's (sp?) Civil Disobedience. Bad laws will be broken and no amount of litigation weilding bad laws by those with obsolete business models will make people stop a practice that they don't feel is "wrong".

All we can do is hope Boucher gets his good law passed.

--K.

Surely ASP and ColdFusion destroy PHP in developing new websites. At least - the websites that matter

Like Yahoo!?

Sun is saying lots of things, that does not make them true.

Sun is the DEC of the 2000s. Its hardware business is stagnant and its software business has no real connection to the hardware. ...However they spend 65% of their time whining about Microsoft.

I doubt that it will come to that as Microsoft will certainly appeal and the chances of blocking the temporary injunction are pretty good, they can win simply by spinning out the appeal.

Java on the client is a pretty wierd idea. Very few sites have ever used Java. I don't think we will suddenly see a rush to switch from flash to Java on the basis...

• An article on InternetNews on OASIS ... with some info on what MS is already doing with XML. Light info, but it's a start.
  
• Usual Propaganda on MSDN on the new version of Visio .. including some details on how XML is used with it.
  
• An article on New World Fusion on how XML is used with the latest MSOffice beta .. as part of the whole .net thing. One interesting point is that Word, Excel and Access are going to support XML .. no word on Outlook and/or Powerpoint

XDocs An Adobe Wake-up Call

I wouldn't have Debian if I had a GUI installer. I wouldn't have Debian if I was using Mandrake's tools.

They're not?

RedHat does it's own thing just like every other distribution. Unfortunatly they are more powerful commercially than the other distributions b/c of their name and their "backing".

By pulling their collective resources and talent I'd say they have a better chance of taking on Microsoft (not fighting for contracts from Walmart amoungst themselves).

If I were you, I would think about what UL is trying to accomplish. They are banding together to make a standard to compete...against RedHat, against MS, against X.

Umm, ok, so we used to have Slackware. The reason I switched from Slackware to RH back in the day was for the simple fact that I was having more and more difficult of a time running newer programs (gtk, libc6). So say one distribution gains more power and forces OLD libs to stay around... That stifles what we are trying to achieve.

They already did and lost so far, what more as a result the name Windows as a trademark for MS' OS might not be protected. Lindows might be doing us all a favor.

What??? Can I have some of what you're smoking?
From internetnews.com:
However, the code won't be open in the sense that full open source platforms are, such as Linux. Rather, Symbian will allow developers in the program the same access to source code that it already has given to mobile phone manufacturers.

That's hardly Open Source...

Michael

This could work, though. There aren't really that many different spammers. If the FTC can find 20 of them a year, that should make a dent. If 20 a year were sent to jail for six months, the spam industry would probably start to shrink rapidly. This thing is winnable.

• BMI Declare that all their future music CDs will be copy protected
• While EMI Germany do likewise, they also insult the complainant. (I'm informed it is even harsher than the translation)
• And soon you won't be able to return the CD if it doesn't work (UK)
• And beware of innovations (this article, beat you to it slashdot - nyah nyah!), as they may be slipping DRM in the back door
• Web radio was getting very popular, everyone was getting in on the act. Not any more. Only the big radio stations still broadcast.
• Microsoft joined the party with their "Trusted Computing" initiative, meaning *you* can trust MS software, Which in reality is a DRM thing (MS software can't trust you)
• Oh, and extending copyright. Courts admit that it can't be extended indefinately, but how long is a piece of string?

• Reuters sued for linking to a URL
• They haven't been the first to be sued for deeplinking. Check out This particularly fine example.
• How a single sniper is more dangerous than all the world's hackers combined

• Getting sued for silence
• Thanks to the CBDTPA, nearly everything *must* embed DRM. This includes cockpit voice recorders, digital speed cameras, hearing aids, and big mouth billy bass
• Even phoning a friend can breach copyright, 2 musicians copyright 100,000 phone numbers (dial tones).

• A review of the technologies shows that it is futile to protect CDs, (based on the assumption that new devices will more likely circumvent protection rather than enforce it)
• Richard Stallman (Free Software advocate) jumps in with a cautionary tale
• And a felt tip pen can bypass some protections

The important lesson that seems to have been missed is... learn enough about the underlying technology to understand whether or not the business model makes sense or not through one's personal analysis, don't make an investment decision based on what the "pundits" say.

So the entire printing industry is going to change over from supporting PDF as an input format that supports everything up to and including embedded job ticket and billing information because Microsoft said "Boo!"

All of us are immediately going to go out and deinstall Acrobat Reader or whatever we're using to read PDFs and buy Office 11 (changing to XP to do it) because all the terabytes of PDF only content are going to magically morph into XDocs.

Yeah, right.

Even if the format is in fact superior, PDF is so much a part of Internet and print and other technologies that it would be years before XDoc content became noticeable enough to make it worth the trouble for end users to download and install a reader.

A company who makes its docs available in XDoc format only means that only Office 11 users will be able to read it. All that company will get as a result will be trouble from angry users. People aren't going to upgrade to Office 11 just to read some company's docs.

However, it does present an investment opportunity for making money off the stupid who are unloading Adobe because they actually believe this bullshit, just like the pre-announcement of the MS antitrust decision did... people snapped up $93 million in MS stock in response to that pre-announcement, including the slashdot readers who got to the pre-announcement from here.

I was wondering who the "pundits" cited in this article were. That's a word that only marketdroids and a few hack journalists that know no better use. The original of this article which was posted without attribution at Linux format can be found here.

Well, the "pundits" exist, a search on XDocs at google reveals this.

Here's a somewhat better article hereWell, the same investor analysts whose stock hyping and premature panic that drove the rise and fall of the bubble are in hype mode now. Apparently, since their understanding isn't past the buzzword level, they just don't get how embedded PDF technology is in American business and particuarly industrial segments like printing.

With the right apps, I can send a PDF file to a printer that can be turned into a gigantic print run without human intervention. If XDocs is all that Microsoft hopes for and enjoys the results that Microsoft wants and comes out on time, I might be able to do the same with XDocs by 2010 or so.

Remember this next time you're tempted to make an investment decision based on what a "pundit" says. Then check the facts yourself, you might make a lot more money by doing the opposite.

For all you guys trying to read the article and cannot, here some more infos: The actual announcement is about a month old. Here's one story on internetnews (ty to /. this) covering this; and a follow-up. An alternative story can be found at Betanews.

BTW, creating XML-documents out of M$-Word-documents is not a new idea. Check out icoya WordXML (click solutions, than icoya WordXML). It is a high performance extension for Microsoft Word in order to convert content easily into the open, format-neutral and manufacturer-independent XML format.

For all you guys trying to read the article and cannot, here some more infos: The actual announcement is about a month old. Here's one story on internetnews (ty to /. this) covering this; and a follow-up. An alternative story can be found at Betanews.

BTW, creating XML-documents out of M$-Word-documents is not a new idea. Check out icoya WordXML (click solutions, than icoya WordXML). It is a high performance extension for Microsoft Word in order to convert content easily into the open, format-neutral and manufacturer-independent XML format.

An article on News.com mentions that "the new working group could have some competition from IBM and Microsoft, which have promoted a separate standard known as SIMPLE". This also has a IETF working group - here's the charter

Meanwhile a group of users in finance industry are pushing for exactly this sort of integrated solution. Called FIMA they "say it is non-partisan, and is open to any company that wishes to promote Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) IM standards and protocols within the financial services community. By endorsing IETF instant-messaging standards, FIMA wants to promote "interoperability and beneficial competition among instant-messaging vendors."

There is an air of enevitability about the integration of protocols - but it may not be based on Jabber.... but SIMPLE doesn't sound all that hot...

Not so sure about that. They have had their marketing come back and bite them in the ass before. One I remember is the whole Novell customer targeted marketing when they told many Novell Netware users that Novell was dead. I think they also made some ads a while back where they showed a person painted into a corner (and the paint color was Sun's color)

Anyway, my point is that I don't think they either

1. don't pay attention to their marketing drones
2. get off on causing contoversy (no such thing as bad press?)
3. are so out of touch with reality that making up fictional switch stories sounded like a good plan
4. All of the above

I think this should be treated the same as any invitation to submit questions to an interviewee.

MS, in this case.

It's disappointing to see the flamage herein. Yep, Slashdot may be homogenizing, as some have asserted - becoming bland, grey, doubleplusungood sameness in all directions. Personified by Prolific Puking Proselytizing Punks!?!

Yet ---- on the flip side, there are too many superficial questions asked, which by their phrasing or their supposed "subtlety" or "indirection" will somehow be "sprung" upon the erstwhile MS drones standing under the bright lights.

Sigh.

This is a very rare opportunity, if indeed someone will represent "our" interests at this forum (and assuming the chance to speak).

We should be asking all the questions that have come up before, but that have not yet been answered: in Salon by Bruce Perens ('Perens is convinced that Palladium will let Microsoft decide which applications can run on a machine and which are simply too unsafe for public consumption -- such as programs written by open-source hackers. Perens even thinks that's the point of Palladium: "It's designed to kill off open-source development."') and in Dan Gillmor ("Microsoft has launched its Palladium initiative, a hardware-software system designed to make computing more secure from viruses and malevolent hackers. Palladium, unfortunately, could also be used by intellectual-property owners to lock down copyrighted materials in ways that would damage users' rights. Critics have also suggested that Palladium could be used to freeze out open source software -- and they make a compelling case.")

A few example questions:

1. What special considerations will be given to corporations whose desktop computers may not have live access to "verification" servers or other real-time "authorization" mechanisms?
2. What will prevent the "considerations" given to corporations from being subverted for use by non-corporate users?
3. From Robert Cringely (here): "Under Palladium as I understand it, the Internet goes from being ours to being theirs. The very data on your hard drive ceases to be yours because it could self-destruct at any time. We'll end up paying rent to use our own data!"

   What is Microsoft's response to Cringely's allegation that data will no longer be "permanently readable" - a characteristic of computing that is taken for granted today?

4. From Digital ID World:

   DIDW: Because Palladium will have an installed public/private key for at least bootstrap purposes...
   Juarez: Which is never revealed to anybody, including you.
   DIDW: But it raises the questions, all the old Clipper Chip issues, of will the government pressure you for key escrow and things like that?
   Juarez: We are talking to the government now, and maybe this is where we get some advantage from having a broad industry initiative. Our fundamental goal is "let's do the right thing." We have pretty strong feelings about what the right thing is on terms of making sure that things are truly anonymous and that key escrow kinds of things don't happen. But there ARE governments in the world, and not just the U.S. Government.
   

   What are Microsoft's present commitments to governments regarding key escrow? U.S.? England? France? Germany? Afghanistan? Iraq/Iran?

5. From InternetNews.com: "The big question from everyone is," says Elias Levy, a computer-security expert and CTO of Security Focus, "who is going to have control - is it going to be in the hands of the user or Microsoft?"
6. From InternetNews.com: "But by integrating Palladium with its Windows operating system (OS), Microsoft is taking another strike at Linux users. Juarez won't rule out Palladium ever being available for alternative operating systems, but it won't be initially."

   What is Microsoft's position today on this issue?

7. As noted in BSDVault, a patch to MS Media Player to address security bulletin MS02-032 includes the following EULA language:

   * Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

   Is this DRM part of (or related to) Palladium? In any event, what recourse will users have when (if) their existing software ceases to function as a result of these new "features"?

Search Google, read all the material, find the unanswered questions - and it won't matter that Microsoft sees this slashdot thread. Ask the questions that MS knows about, but has not been able or willing to answer...

I think this should be treated the same as any invitation to submit questions to an interviewee.

MS, in this case.

It's disappointing to see the flamage herein. Yep, Slashdot may be homogenizing, as some have asserted - becoming bland, grey, doubleplusungood sameness in all directions. Personified by Prolific Puking Proselytizing Punks!?!

Yet ---- on the flip side, there are too many superficial questions asked, which by their phrasing or their supposed "subtlety" or "indirection" will somehow be "sprung" upon the erstwhile MS drones standing under the bright lights.

Sigh.

This is a very rare opportunity, if indeed someone will represent "our" interests at this forum (and assuming the chance to speak).

We should be asking all the questions that have come up before, but that have not yet been answered: in Salon by Bruce Perens ('Perens is convinced that Palladium will let Microsoft decide which applications can run on a machine and which are simply too unsafe for public consumption -- such as programs written by open-source hackers. Perens even thinks that's the point of Palladium: "It's designed to kill off open-source development."') and in Dan Gillmor ("Microsoft has launched its Palladium initiative, a hardware-software system designed to make computing more secure from viruses and malevolent hackers. Palladium, unfortunately, could also be used by intellectual-property owners to lock down copyrighted materials in ways that would damage users' rights. Critics have also suggested that Palladium could be used to freeze out open source software -- and they make a compelling case.")

A few example questions:

1. What special considerations will be given to corporations whose desktop computers may not have live access to "verification" servers or other real-time "authorization" mechanisms?
2. What will prevent the "considerations" given to corporations from being subverted for use by non-corporate users?
3. From Robert Cringely (here): "Under Palladium as I understand it, the Internet goes from being ours to being theirs. The very data on your hard drive ceases to be yours because it could self-destruct at any time. We'll end up paying rent to use our own data!"

   What is Microsoft's response to Cringely's allegation that data will no longer be "permanently readable" - a characteristic of computing that is taken for granted today?

4. From Digital ID World:

   DIDW: Because Palladium will have an installed public/private key for at least bootstrap purposes...
   Juarez: Which is never revealed to anybody, including you.
   DIDW: But it raises the questions, all the old Clipper Chip issues, of will the government pressure you for key escrow and things like that?
   Juarez: We are talking to the government now, and maybe this is where we get some advantage from having a broad industry initiative. Our fundamental goal is "let's do the right thing." We have pretty strong feelings about what the right thing is on terms of making sure that things are truly anonymous and that key escrow kinds of things don't happen. But there ARE governments in the world, and not just the U.S. Government.
   

   What are Microsoft's present commitments to governments regarding key escrow? U.S.? England? France? Germany? Afghanistan? Iraq/Iran?

5. From InternetNews.com: "The big question from everyone is," says Elias Levy, a computer-security expert and CTO of Security Focus, "who is going to have control - is it going to be in the hands of the user or Microsoft?"
6. From InternetNews.com: "But by integrating Palladium with its Windows operating system (OS), Microsoft is taking another strike at Linux users. Juarez won't rule out Palladium ever being available for alternative operating systems, but it won't be initially."

   What is Microsoft's position today on this issue?

7. As noted in BSDVault, a patch to MS Media Player to address security bulletin MS02-032 includes the following EULA language:

   * Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

   Is this DRM part of (or related to) Palladium? In any event, what recourse will users have when (if) their existing software ceases to function as a result of these new "features"?

Search Google, read all the material, find the unanswered questions - and it won't matter that Microsoft sees this slashdot thread. Ask the questions that MS knows about, but has not been able or willing to answer...

October 14, 2002
Will Big Business Dictate Public Interest?
By Jim Wagner

When you make a bold claim like that, you should provide a link. I didn't believe you until I looked it up myself.