Gates and Lasser on Palladium

A rather funny juxtaposition this morning - Bill Gates or someone with his signature stamp sent a spam-gram to pretty much everyone who receives any sort of Microsoft email: Bill only mentions Digital Rights Management in one throw-away sentence. And like most other spam, he promises it's a one-time mailing. On the other hand, Jon Lasser of Think Unix fame takes a harsher look at Microsoft's vision of a world where your computer is trusted against you.

Comments

Re:Palladium is E-V-I-L

[Telastyn]

Until of course the remote server is comprimised and suddenly explorer.exe is an untrusted binary and every windows machine in the world shits a brick.

Mistake only from our perspective...

[jjn1056]

I just attended a private focus group on this subject. All the attendees were Director level IT folk who are constantly hassled by security problems. Some of them came from a management background and some from a technical background. Almost all of them thought this would be a good idea. In fact they thought it was such a good idea that they would be willing to pay $25 to $400 more per server or desktop just for the chance to have this technology.

I think this shows just how far along this idea has gone. None of these people in the room cared a wit about privacy, open source, the ability to compile your own apps, etc. because the vast majority of people don't do even know what they could be missing. All they care about is a golden pill to solve all there security problems.

So we shouldn't all be thinking that somehow this idea will be MS shooting themselves in the foot. That won't happen unless we get the word out.