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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 :)
"/. =
In the classic LucasArts adventure game Monkey Island 2, there is a character called Largo LeGrande. When we first meet him, IIRC, he tells Guybrush (the protangonist) that this island isn't safe, and then procedes to turn him upside down and shake all the money out of his pockets. Also, he has an oppressive embargo on the whole island (The Largo Embargo).
:)
Couldn't think of a better name, myself.
Such a price the gods exact for song: to become what we sing - Pythagoras
Bill Gates is my hero!
1. Create an insecure operating system
2. Profit
3. Blame computers for your insecurity
4. Profit
5. Get hardware vendors to make changes to compensate for YOUR buggy software
6. Profit
7. Prevent any software except yours from running securely
8. Profit (by others demise)
9. Take away everyones choice.
10 Profit
11. Blame the computers some more, as you take away more freedom
12. Profit. Profit. Profit.
When there is a wolf guarding the hen hose, why on earth would I need the shotgun named Linux?
I was as afraid of palladium as the next guy before the details started to come out, but I think we ought to try to avoid the knee jerk reaction and think this stuff through more carefully.
A lot of people are opposed to any scheme that can be used to thwart piracy. But in my view that's an extreme and unreasonable position, even when fair use issues are taken into account.
For a long time it's seemed to me that the thing we ought to be working towards is an open system of distribution, one that can't be dominated by large media concerns, something that gives a guy who makes music at home the same sort of access to the market as the big record labels.
To me, the issue is not whether or not my computer is capable of running some sort of protected DRM system -- the issue is whether or not it's capable of running alternative systems, if the existence of a palladium aware media player will break my mp3, ogg, and divx players, or my entire open source operating system. As I read these proposals, that's not the case, they won't break things.
Microsoft has said explicitly that one of the key design goals of palladium was that it shouldn't break existing software.
In my view, these sorts of services are useful, and we ought to be talking more about "how" then "if" they are implemented.
In particular, we ought to be sure that software that will run under linux can provide the same sorts of services as a palladium enabled version of windows. I know that the applications themselves couldn't be truly open source (or at least you'd have to use a signed snapshot of an application that was developed using open source methodologies). But I don't think that's enough of a reason to pull back from this stuff.
There are useful applications for this stuff.
About a decade ago, one of the hot topics among crypto types was digicash -- cryptographic protocols invented by a guy named Chaum that try to mimic cash, especially its anonymity and security.
One of the big problems was how to make microtransactions work when you're disconnected from the net. Imagine two palm os devices doing a transaction over infrared. Chaum's answer was to use tamper proof chips.
Sure, on some level nothing is tamper proof, but it ought to be possible to make tampering difficult enough, expensive enough, and to cap the size of the transactions possible and the rate at which they can be made, in a way that would give people reasonable security. The NSA could hack the micropayment system, but they'd have to spend a million bucks, and all they could get back would be $50, or something like that.
It seems to me that this kind of hardware could be seen as a more flexible kind of tamper proof chip.
I think the goal should be that whatever hardware comes out should work with arbitrary operating systems. The trust chain should be decentralized.
In other words, if I develop an electronic music distribution system, I should be able to develop apps for whatever OSs I choose to support, and I should be able to make my system recognize whatever signatures I feel are trusthworsthy. It ought to be possible for *anyone* to develop such a system, and to use the hooks into the hardware.
The thing that worries me is that if all we say is "no, palladium is the devil" we won't have any voice in this stuff.
for Intel and M$ that nobody has claimed the intelectual property rights on idiocy (yet).
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
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.
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