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Stopping Palladium?
jbwiv asks: "I've seen many articles/posts/opinions stating that Microsoft's Palladium could put an end to Open Source as we know it, thereby stealing away most of what I enjoy and appreciate about computers. With the big two (Intel, AMD) actively developing Palladium architectures, I'd like to get involved in the effort to combat it. However, I haven't found any person or group actively working to stop Palladium; plenty people are bitching, but no one seems to be doing much about it. Who can one contact regarding this, and are there any groups already involved? What other steps might be taken? It would seem that such an affront to our way of life would be met with more vocal and mobile opposition."
Ok, is Palladium bad? Probably if Microsoft has something to do with it. Can Linux use this tech for good? Is it a Windows only tech? Where are the factions that don't want Windows to rule all of the media? What does IBM think? Sun?
Can this really fight viruses and worms?
The real question is how can I use this to my advantage? What can we do to make this do something useful instead of merely lock up all the media in the world?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"> I don't understand why you think the end user will be annoyed by palladiun. It will be resident and running by default on
> his system and because those services are running, the 'media providers' will allow said movies and music to stream
> to his system.
What on Earth make you think that Microsoft will field a bug-free Palladium? They have enough troubles making the PC work when it's only trying TO work. Now they're going to add a TON of code whose whole purpose is to make the PC NOT work under certain circumstances. It goes a lot further, because when the PC is booting under Palladium, the PC is trying NOT to load its device drivers and other critical OS components, under certain circumstances.
This thing is SOOOOOO rife with possiblities for things to go wrong that I'll be amazed if it doesn't backfire, or have better than a 75% success rate on first release to the real world.
Besides....
What do you do with your PC today? How often do you really use it to view/listen to media? For my own part, most of my media usage is on dedicated media machines, not my PC. I'm not going to "break" my PC so I can play media with it, and I suspect a lot of others won't, either.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
> Repeat after me : We will not win a lobbying/PR war. period.
> So let them (Microsoft, Intel, AMD, RIAA, MPAA) try to please Hollywood : if Joe User has a true alternative to
> the annoyances of Palladium, he will switch in no time.
I agree 100%.
But there is one other thing that we MUST fight for. Palladium MUST always be optional. It MUST always be possible to distribute non-encumbered media through non-encumbered PCs. At the very least, this leaves the door open for a new business model to emerge and compete with the ??AA on it's own content, leaving theirs under DRM.
I'd like to bring back an old analogy I once heard with Clipper Ships and Galleons. Both were shipping and both had piracy problems on the high seas. The Galleons had armaments and even more heavily armed escorts, perpared to fight off any pirates. The Clipper Ships were simply FAST, and couldn't be attacked or boarded by pirates. Both were viable shipping models, and both got the cargo there. But the armed escort of the Galleon did *nothing* beyond make sure the cargo got there. The speed of the Clipper made sure the cargo got there, plus it got there faster, delighting the customer.
Guess which won in the market?
(The steamship, obviously. But in the days of sail shipping, the clipper was IT.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You want theLiberty Alliance Project
Frankly, the Liberty Alliance Project, open or not, sounds like it'll do about as much for my privacy and security as the Patriot Act. Why would I want all commercial services I use to have the same login? It makes for a central point of failure (or security breach.. or gov't intrusion..). I certainly don't want Palladium, but I don't know that I really care for LAP either. We don't need universal logins. We need more intelligent browsers, smart cards, and people who know how to make decent passwords. (-: