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Intel to Build DRM into Next-Generation CPUs
mdecerbo writes "The Boston Globe is reporting
that next year's Intel processors will include
hardware support for Microsoft's "Palladium"
DRM system. There are chilling privacy implications. AMD, here I come."
Let's all just keep our current computers.
AMD has already agreed to support paladium.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
I mean if you do not plan to run Palladium, where's the problem? This would not stop you from doing anything you do now. Doesn't the OS have to support DRM also in order for this to have any effect?
The vast majority of people (read; the EULA oblivious) will not adopt it anyway and;
Microsoft will not make it impossible to talk to untrusted machines.
I won't draw any conclusions from this and I won't talk about how the world is going to hell in a digital handbasket, but it's food for thought.
My
Limekiller
or does anyone remember that far back? the pentium III processor architecture was going to allow a special hardware code to be embedded on each processor, unique to each machine so that web transactions would be safer.
however, due to the public backlash about having "big brother" track what their computers were doing, they allowed users to disable that hardware code from being detected.
the hardcoded serial on those pentium III were just a precursor to palladium, however. think of it more of a proof of concept that such a device would work. intel was always heading toward palladium.
This is the most comprehensive read on Palladium available. Forward it to family and friends.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
Intel and Microsoft, between Windows Media Center and the forthcoming Palladium might as well just tack on "if you don't want all this crap, please see www.apple.com" at the end of each ad.
While i've been telling my Windows colleagues that this was coming - none of them believed.
And now - bonus - XP.5 and Intel both, in the same week - prove me right.
God.. its good to buy from the "most dangerous company to Intellectual Property today"
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Did you guys forget the rumors that Microsoft's support of X86-64 was due to AMD standing behind them?
If Intel is doing this, AMD will be right behind them. They'll do anything to preserve their relationship with Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, I love AMD, but they're just as corporate as the rest of the semiconductor industry.
You might want to look at the poll today. At this time only 34% are Linux users and 47% are using 95 thru XP.
Besides, eventually Linux will not be 'allowed' to run on this processor. So you *better* care.
First off, the odds, according to today's poll, are about 30%.
That said, this affects everyone. Mind you, I'm told that Palladium will always be able to be shut off via the BIOS, so you can always buy a Palladium-enabled processor and make it act as if it isn't. That's not the problem, really.
The problem is that Palladium is hardware-embedded Digital Rights Denial. It's paving the way for music and movies that won't play at all unless you have a Palladium-enabled processor. And if you do enable Palladium, you'll be subject to the same restrictive crap that the media cartels have been trying unsuccessfully to push over the last several years. Movies that you can't move to other computers, and that only work as long as you remain subscribed to MovieConglomerate.com or wherever your got them.
Will this all work out in the long run? Well, it depends on how people react. If they continue to reject hightly restricted content, we should be fine. If not, well, say goodbye to the Open Internet. It was fun while it lasted.
I almost forgot - so long Connectix. :-(...
No more Virtual PC - well, not any Virtual PC's which require Le Grange.
Unless they come up with some way to emulate a valid key that changes with each install.
I don't know - how is Connectix going to deal with this? Can they?
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
That article was mostly speculation short on technical details but long on Micro$oft bashing.
Being a geek I got more mileage out of reading the technical details on palladium by a member of the EFF (Seth Schoen) who was at a presentation and TCPA and Palladium: Sony Inside an article on kuro5hin by a former Microserf.
Disclaimer:The opinions expressed in this post are mine and do not reflect the opinions, thoughts, strategies or plans of my employer.
Bob said it much better than I can.
You said it Bob. Thank you.
I suppose they're making a decent effort at reporting on this in an even-handed way, but the Globe missed two important points.
Say what you want about Redhat being the next Microsoft, but they always release their code. I don't see them going into this if there wasn't some non-DRM products coming from AMD.
--
Mike
-- Mike wildcard@illuminatus.org
You're not kidding. I start reading stuff like this and I start wondering if its not too late to go analog and give up on computers and do something else.
I mean, once they hammer all the fun out of it by making it like cable TV what's the fucking point?
Not everyone in the world is enamored with DRM. China already distrusts Microsoft products enough to fully embrace linux as their OS of choice. Will the same thing happen to Intel products in China?
It doesn't seem like a very smart business decision to lock yourself out of the fastest-growing market in the world.
Or buy new computers and turn off Palladium. Or just ignore the Windows people and keep using Linux.
Palladium comes down to copy protection of *Windows* software and music in *Windows*, and can, in any event, be disabled.
Worst case Windows users can crack software to make it play even with Palladium turned off, which is pretty much what people already do to attack copy protection on software.
How does it affect us? Why should we care?
And answering "Because MS will make Windows not talk to Linux and isolate it", as some other poster did in these responses, is not good enough. MS has been trying to keep Windows from talking to Linux for a long time.
May we never see th
As peripherals become locked unless you have MS's DRM Linux or Apple becomes even less of an option. And by peripherals I mean every peripheral: CR-ROM/DVD, Floppy, monitor, video card, printer, the works. What hapens when you can't buy a printer or monitor that won't work with out MS's DRM. THey have the market dominance to make this happen. This is more dangerous than it first looks.
But every single interest group out there will pressure Apple to conform. Do you really think that they would leave a major American manufacturer to be the hole in the wall? They are going to have enough problems with Taiwan/Asian manufacturers as it is.
And isn't Apple rumored to start using x86 chips soon?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Actually, I encourage Microsoft's work on Palladium.
Why?
Because it will herald a great (and much needed) rebirth of "personal computing." It'll launch (IMHO) a fairly comprehensive reassessment and reappraisal of why we use computers in the first place. And it'll most likely start a significant portion of us back on (or near) square one -- the late 1970's where the notion of "personal computing" really took off.
I'm serious. For those of us alive in the late 70's, it was a great time to be a "hobbyist." There weren't geeks and no real "hackers" or "script-kiddies". Just a bunch of people who -- especially here in America -- shared a common passion for building little boxes out of solder, wires, and circuit boards so that -- after everything was assembled correctly -- we could watch a couple lights blink on and off.
Later, once stuff like the TRS-80 and AppleII gained ground, it was really pretty cool. I still remember hanging out in the arcades and trying to write stuff like a TRS-80 version of Pac Man or Donkey Kong in Z80 assembly language with -- what? -- 127 X 47 blocky, black and white graphics.
(Insert snide comment here about old, outdated graphics, but if you do, you miss the point.)
I see this sort of "community hobbyism" in the Linux community (even though they don't call it that) but I think if Microsoft pushes forth this Palladium, we'll see a pretty significant split between those who embrace whatever new technology comes down the pike and those who take a hard look at where we've been and what we've achieved vis a vis Palladium and realize that better technology doesn't necessarily mean much. It means better technology, maybe, but it certainly doesn't herald or promised a better "user experience."
Palladium will also, I think, significant a fairly radical leap in the notion of "personal computing." This DRM technology is not personal computing. It's corporate computing. There's nothing personal about it. There's not much fun about it either. It leaves the "hobbyists" -- now called geeks, I guess -- out in the cold and looking toward all the nifty retro-tech.
The retro-tech movement, I think, will be stronger than ever if Palladium -- or something like it -- comes to pass. What that means -- retro-tech -- I'm not entirely sure, but I think it will be a gradual awareness that "good enough" really is "good enough" and something along the lines of "personal computing is dead, long live personal computing!"
The real question is how obnoxious Microsoft will make the OS restrictions.
Incidentally, we ought to be seeing some Palladium-enabled games soon, ones where modified clients can be detected by the server. That will be how the technology gets debugged.
I agree with you that the computer is becoming an appliance. But Intel and AMD shouldn't be accelerating this process along! They should be doing everything in their power to make sure that the computer is useable as a general purpose device, and the reason for this is simple, they would make a lot less money if computers had 10 upgrade cycles as opposed to 3 year upgrade cycles.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft is happy to switch to the idea of the computer as an appliance because they are tired of forcing their customers along the upgrade treadmill. They want to charge their customers a monthly fee and then pare down their research to a much lower level. As long as the PC remains an open system this isn't likely to work in the long term because Linux will eventually pass them up if they slow down. So Microsoft is using their current market clout to close down the market.
Not that this is likely to work, but that's what is happening.
Microsoft monopoly+Media Monopoly=Palladium for everyone.
Very simply:
1. Palladium-encrypted (broken) content media helps keep Content Industries (contrast with: Artists) alive by giving them control, so they like it.
2. As soon as it's profitable to do so, the CIs will Palladium-encrypt (break) every piece of media they can.
3. When Palladium is available everywhere, it will be profitable for the CIs to digitally Palladium-encrypt (break) every piece of Mass Market Content that they create.
4. Any piece of Palladium-encrypted content--DVD, Music CD, software program--that is not signed will fail to play unless Palladium is there to decrypt it.
5. The MS monopoly (and Intel's and AMD's respective complicity in that monopoly) can make sure that Palladium is available almost everywhere at once.
6. When broken content is the norm, Mac and Linux will not be able to use that content any more without supporting Palladium.
7. Mac and Linux will have to either support Palladium or (illegally!!, in the US) circumvent it to be useful.
8. Linux is not an organization, so it will likely go in both directions at once.
9. Mac is an organization, and it will probably not support circumvention.
This is very, very bad. Our best hope is for a severe Microsoft anti-trust penalty, and for our legislators to wise up and stop passing laws to prop up business plans.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I have a friend who spends lots of time on newsgroups, Kazaa, etc. copying movies. At the same time, I read articles like this, and spend $10 sending certified delivery confirmed letters to congressmen like Mr. Hollings and businesses like Intel and AMD. This is highly counterproductive. My friend saves $10/month on movie rentals, and I spend $10/month on letters.
I've talked to this person and they say "Oh, I just copy movies I wouldn't rent anyway." (I assume because they are too expensive) They have a valid point since some products are just ridiculously expensive. But they are not helping the problem. If they spent their effort protesting, or finding alternatives as they did pirating, we would be in good shape. I would probably be better off paying them $10/month and having them rent the movies, than to spend it writing letters.
What should I do? Do I turn them in? Do I hassle them? Do I pay them to stop doing it? It's my rights they are taking away, but turning them in seems ridiculous. Is there somethnig we can do in mass that could prevent this problem?
Okay, this is something I don't understand about this proposed scheme. Let's say media server A wants to send content to client B. A of course asks B to confirm that B is in secure mode, so that the owners of the content about to be transmitted can sleep well at night knowing that the recipient has paid. What prevents B from running a nonsecure client/OS and reponding "yeah sure, palladium enabled" and receiving the content and storing it unencumbered?
My first thought would be some sort of cryptographic challenge/response would be used to signal this fact. But client B is totally under our control, since we've disabled the secure mode of the CPU, or we're running a non-DRM OS, or we have a legacy CPU, or whatever. So now it appears that we're back to the same situation as the content scrambling system on DVDs. There's some secret key or challenge/response protocol imbedded in the secure OS that's supposed to be running on client B. But we've hacked that software, found the key, whatever. As long as we have the binaries to this OS, someone will eventually find the secret key and that will be the end of that.
In short, how could this form of digital rights management ever work? The situation is almost exactly analogous to DVDs, as far as I can tell -- you have the "trusted" clients (consumer DVD players -> Microsoft's future palladium OS) and the "untrusted" clients (standard PCs with DVD ROMs -> standard PCs running non-DRM OS.)
How does this protect anything? Why go to all the trouble?
I suspect most people got tired very quickly of deciding and just accept all cookies. Now site designers say, "Oh, people don't mind, we never get complaints. Most people have them enabled anyway." They don't complain because once you give in you never know how many cookies you're getting (except by the increase in your spam percentage maybe).
Palladium on the Web will work the same way. Lots of people will leave it off at first, but when half the sites they want to visit (including things like online banking, for example) require PD to be switched on for entry, they'll be worn down into leaving it on all the time.