Slashdot Mirror
MS Palladium Patent
Concerned Citizen writes "cryptome has Microsoft's patent for Palladium. Including such gems as: 2. The computerized method of claim 1, wherein protecting the rights-managed data comprises:
refusing to load the untrusted program into memory. 14. The computerized method of claim 1, further comprising:
restricting a user to a subset of available functions for manipulating the rights-managed data.
And I'm sure we'll all be coerced to agree to Palliadium during a future security patch agreement."
If nobody trusts this system, it will not get into widespread use. Amazingly, Micro$oft does not succeed at everything.
"The computerized method of claim 1, wherein protecting the rights-managed data comprises: refusing to load the untrusted program into memory."
;-) For instance, with Unices I can restrict the user to reading the data, writing the data, executing the data or some combination thereof... Thus Unix has been able to restrict 'a user to a subset of available functions for manipulating the rights-managed data'.
Hmmm. Seems to me that this 'art' has been around since the beginning of Unix. Hell, Microsoft has been providing a form of this 'art' with NT and 2000 for quite sometime. It's called permissions! And what would you call the recent advent of the NSA's Secure Linux? Administrators have been 'refusing to load the untrusted program into memory' for quite sometime to protect data... The only thing different about this scheme is Microsoft will be instituting a system where the company itself is root/administrator and the previous system admins are relegated to subordinate positions.
"The computerized method of claim 1, further comprising: restricting a user to a subset of available functions for manipulating the rights-managed data."
Ahh, this has also has seemingly been done since time began
Cheers!
There is definitely something to be said about remaining informed and trying to inform everyone else.
There's one giant problem with it though:
The desktop OS market is being dominated by a monopoly. MS makes updates (XP and WPA are a good example) and the bulk of the consuming public doesn't know and/or care. They merely get the latest version when they buy their new PC. MS really doesn't need to market their OS's, they just slowly become dominant by default (installation).
DivX failed because DVD's were already on the market and the cost of the DVD player was dropping rapidly. People were able to evaluate this as a pure cost/benefit issue and everyone realized that the DivX duck wouldn't hunt.
There will be no such evaluation with MS's latest and greatest OS.
Questions that MS needs to answer: How will Palladium treat those home videos that everyone's starting to create. (I just bough a digital camcorder myself.) How will Palladium treat home recordings? (I have a friend who is slowly putting together his own album. What if he wanted to mail around MP3's of his songs?)
This is where we can maybe corner MS. They need to answer how the "untrusted" (really uncopyrighted or copyrighted by an individual) content is treated.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
The more you expose the consumer to strict DRM rules the more they will come to reject it. I honestly don't believe people will keep investing in computer hardware when it doesn't let them play their favorite burned CDs or permit them to hear their own MP3 collection. The quicker it is implemented on a large scale, the quicker it will be destroyed.
The problem here is the same as it's alway been. Fair use is largely the intent of the person making the copy. Until technology can read minds (fate forfend!) there won't be a DRM that won't abridge fair use in some way. As long as DRM abriges fair use, popular adoption of DRM technology won't happen willingly. This is an attempt to ram it down on an unwilling consumer population.
That said, the backlash that might build will depend largely on how intrusive Joe Six-Pack is going to find this new DRM technology. The second J.S.P. gets pissed off about it is the second elected officials are going to feel the heat. When they feel the heat, no amount of payola from ??AA is going to save it. MS is walking a fine line between control of content and pissing off J.S.P.
Until Joe Six Pack starts screaming not much is going to change. Unfortunatly, this might be after the Fritz chip is in most consumer electronics, and it will be too late to do much about it.
Don't forget that J.S.P. doesn't give a fart in the wind for the best technology. If he did, we'd have Betamax insted of V.H.S. We'd still have a Tucker auto, and not (fill in your most hated car). Zip and Jazz drives would be moldering in the dump, and we'd be using optical disks.
Is this new technology from MS a Open Source Killer? That's going to depend on someone making MoBo's available without the Fritz chip. Sure, those systems won't be able to run XP, but there are an awful lot of people out there running systems that don't run MS products. I can't quite see (at this point, maybe in the future?) a MoBo that flat won't allow a non-DRM OS to run, just that it won't run in the "Fritz here, you can control this system" mode.
That being the case, then I don't see Plaidium being quite the Open Source killer it is being painted. Not to say that it won't hurt Open Source, but it may not kill it. That's for the next evoloution of DRM. Which might be why MS is sending a sacrifice to Linux Expo. Calm down the Open Source zelots enough to get Fritz installed, don't use all of it's control capibillities until you reach market saturation, THEN whack those commie programmers when it's too late for them to save themselves. GAMEOVER.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
He's entitled to. He's an established expert with credentials in the industry, and it's quite possible that his understanding and information on this subject is ahead of most people's, including the MS guy posting on this thread.
It's nothing of the sort; it's a very real issue. If you provide a means to lock people out of data -- which is essentially all DRM is -- and then appoint MS as the effective custodian of that data, what is to stop them abusing the technology to stop you loading a document you created in MS Word with, say, a translator for OpenOffice? As those crying "FUD" are shouting so loudly here, there is precious little solid information available and even fewer guarantees, and MS has a demonstrated history of abusing any power it gets through its dominant position in the market. A little caution is more than justified here. It's only paranoia if they're not all out to get you.
It's also a market where critics could potentially be stopped from using controlled material in a legitimate way. Worse, that potential is controlled by whoever owns the DRM controls -- MS in our current scenario -- and not by a suitable legal system. This is not in the interests of the common consumer of these products.
This is a bad caveat, because I doubt anyone here would have any sympathy if a child pornographer got screwed to hell; the ability to do this in such cases is a definite plus point of the proposed approach. The problem is that the same technology could be used to prevent the distribution of, for example, information certifying that Microsoft's accounting practices are highly dubious (such as is currently freely available on the web), and once again, the control is in the hands of the DRM guys, not the duly appointed government.
There are far fewer applications currently available for Linux, and hence you are limited in what you can do with it. If you can't see the parallels to the DRM scenario, and the problems potentially created, I'm afraid you really aren't looking very hard.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.