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LaGrande, TCPA, and Palladium
An anonymous reader writes "Intel's Paul Otellini gave a talk to developers where Intel's project called "LaGrande" was mentioned. This project is aimed to create a "safer computer environment", that would consist of an advanced TCPA implementation. Some of the features it has deal with physically "protected execution, protected memory, and protected storage". When talking on LaGrande, Otellini said "it's a core technology that things like the Microsoft Palladium initiative can take advantage of to build much more stable platforms.""
However the most negative single feature of TCPA and Palladium is the nature of Palladium and the philosophy that has driven Microsoft's development and promotion of Palladium. I think this is probably the scariest part of the whole deal. They recognize what could happen but they press forward regardless.
Most people who hear about these projects don't really understand how little control or privacy these projects will leave us. As far as stable, thats just funny...These projects will not give us more stable software, just buggy software that will let us do less. Next they will be telling us about CPUs and HDs that require MS to work correctly. and I have the first coherent post on this subject :)
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In case you haven't noticed, most of the big attacks that really impact ordinary users seem to be with code that the user has agreed to run--be it an email forwarding virus or spyware, the user instructed the computer to run the offending code. So how is Palladium supposed to help? If it blocks non-Microsoft endorsed code, it's as evil as Slashdot claims it is. If it runs the offending code, as instructed to by the Outlook or Internet Explorer user, then all of that fancy hardware security added up to exactly nothing.
Theoretically, if anyone doesn't like this-or-that DRM enabled feature of a product, they just shouldn't buy the product. But there's a flaw in this reasoning--just as everyone here who screams bloody murder about TCPA is probably going to have to buy a TCPA computer at some point (because that's the only kind they'll sell). Large well-organized corporations simply have vastly more negotiating power than individual consumers in deciding these sorts of things. You deciding not to buy the latest songs from the record companies doesn't phase them, but if large corporations decide not to sell products with feature X, then you'll just do without feature X, period.
Which means, left to its own ends, the marketplace will encourage software/hardware suppliers to set anti-fair use restrictions once DRM is common. Basically they'll turn their paper EULAs into draconian DRM restrictions.
Now, one can get on a high horse and just say "well I'll just run Linux and not purchase DRM content and never have to put up with any of that!" Yeah, we'll see how long that makes sense once all music, all movies, and many e-mails require Palladium. Most people use computers for communication--so if they refuse to buy the kind of computer that allows them to send and receive information from the kinds of computers other people buy, then your computer is going to become very useless. Palladium has far more potential to make this a reality than Microsoft Office file formats or Internet Explorer ever could. Remember, in a world of network effects, you're only as free as your neighbor.
So, while it may be true (if we're lucky) that TCPA can be used from any OS (though as you say, applications and content would need to be re-written to support it), from a utilitarian view things are going to start sucking for ordinary users unless one of two things takes place:
1. The government or some other entity outside the marketplace has veto power over allowable DRM policies, and uses it liberally.
2. We can encourage all consumers to say "palladium is the devil!", because even with the advantages you describe, it would still be a very bad thing from the users point of view.
You have obviously never been denied entry to a site because you are not using IE. What happens when you become a second class citizen on the net - because your machine is not TCPA enabled? The Open source development model that you describe is all well and good but what happens when I want to recompile my kernel? How is that possibly going to be compatible with a palladium like service? But I don't think that's enough of a reason to pull back from this stuff. If you break your own spine, you will probably never walk again, but don't let that knowledge cause you to 'pull back from this stuff'!
It will not stop your MP3s from playing. They'll just play in a protected address space. Or maybe they won't depending on your player software.
I think you misunderstand the use of the protected area. Your MP3s will be encrypted. the keys to decrypt them will be stored in the protected area. Only "trusted" programs will be allowed access to the protected area, so only "trusted" programs will be able to get the keys and decrypt the MP3s. One requirement for "trust" will be that the player provides no way to save the unencrypted datastream anywhere. Possibly it might not even send the stream to a sound card unless that sound card was also "trusted".
The fundamental problem isn't even the word "trust", it's who can trust the computer. This whole thing isn't intended to insure that you can trust your computer or the software on it. It's to insure that other people (eg. the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft) can trust your computer. Trust it, that is, to do only what they tell it it can do and nothing else. If you wonder why MS would want that, think back a couple of years to their floating of the idea of annual subscriptions for Windows licenses. Now imagine the glee when they discover a way to guarantee that, if they impose that, you the user can't do a thing to bypass their check of whether you've paid or not because the hardware won't let you touch that data.