Slashdot Mirror
A Lucid Explanation of Palladium
buro9 writes "Last week on the WMTalk list a heated debate raged on the rights of a consumer to rip their DVD's locally for more convenient playback later. As the debate started to border on a flameware an anonymous user managed to give the most clear description of Palladium and its implications to us as both users and developers."
Pretty interesting article. ;-) MS publicily saying that they will make some association / trustee company, including people from FreeSoftware community, competitors, and so on, which would review software & sign it. Would that be acceptable ?
Even if the poster is obviously against MS & Palladium, (s)he does point out one of the most critical things : MS has to sign everything secured.
Now the question is: imagine (or dream
Though of course having a program / driver signed would prolly require money, and thus disrupt many FreeSoftware projects....
Also interesting the bit on the boss / email, good point to. Needs to be thought really clearly before implementing.
Now of course the big question is whether all those Palladium / security thingy are really required for personal computers. Of course it'd be cool to have the guarantee that the OS doesn't get destroyed by a virus thanks to the built-in safeguards, on the other hand MS's system seems to take away too much from users....
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
Why not just get and update antivirus? What MS is saying is they will protect your system against virus's (who knows, maybe they are hiring people to write the dang things in the first place to scare everyone) in exchange for complete control over your media and how you use the information on your PC.
No thanks, I will upgrade up to the last chip before DRM, and then keep what I got. I can just see all 28,000 MP3's on my system 'expiring' and getting locked out of them... *shudder*
No I didnt spell check this post...
Remeber the days when software vendors attempted "strong" copy protection with key disks and dongles and bizarre installation gymnastics? Consumers rejected these schemes, and they disappeared.
I see this example trotted out from time to time, but never has anybody using it seemed to consider that the consumers of computer software at the time were far more sophisticated and knowledgeable. They knew how to get around copy protection and make it a losing proposition for software vendors. They didn't boycott protected titles, they hacked them.
That wouldn't happen today. Most consumers aren't talented enough to break it themselves and aren't aware of tools to obtain hacked copies. It's no guarantee that today's market will reject these new protections, and if a significant number of people accept these systems, it will become harder for the rest of us.
I was among the legendary "consumers of computer software at [that] time" and believe me, we weren't all that sophisticated. What we rejected was crap like paying $500 for a software package and then not being able to use it after misplaced the &@^%&! thingamabob required to use OUR OWN software. Resentment, especially among commercial buyers, was great, giving the companies that didn't worry about these things a competitive advantage.
:).
Even now -- and just one example -- the difference between "activating" OS X (press "install") and activating Windows XP is noticed, and this is traded on at my neighborhood Apple Store (more than half their walk-ins are PC users, and they like this stuff). The most restricted product I have is Photoshop, which quite mildly use serial numbers to make sure another copy isn't running elsewhere on the network. Pretty convenient, although easy to hack (post serial #'s on the internet). They are the premier product, yet they do just fine without Palladium.
In my original note, I should have emphasized that huge fraction of "consumers" that are savvy institutional and corporate buyers. They are going to look at Palladium long and hard, and say forget it -- this benefits you far more than us.
What happens down at Best Buy with the newbies won't decide the outcome. For Pd to succeed, everyone needs to sign on, and any holdouts such as Macintosh, not to mention the many millions of legacy machines of all types, will destroy the interoperability the market segments require.
Sure it could happen, but I think it's implausible that it will, and will stake money on that ($50?
I still have a VCR that records, for time-shifting -- don't you? :) The VCR won't go away (until there's affordable recordable DVD) so long as there's demand and profit -- plain old boring market forces.
The only really acceptable policy would be to allow for multiple signing authorities. The use should be able to control who they trust to write and update their system software.
The problem with this is that it could open a hole in DRM that you can drive a truck through. The essence of the problem is that DRM has the goal of implementing a system that third parties can trust, not the users. It would be very difficult to maintain the chain of trust necessary for a content vendor to maintain control unless you can control all of the drivers, but I can see how it would be possible to make sure that managed content is only handled by managed drivers. On the other hand, this would be pretty complex. The content provider has to have a way to specify acceptable signing authorities, and the system must keep track of the "trust domains" in the system as well as the "trust requirements" (or level?) of any content (data).
Hearing this makes me glad that I'm finally getting around to building my own computers. That way I can buy older hardware. I'll gladly miss out on the fastest cpu to avoid that garbage. It's almost like buying pre-ban gun parts - wonder if the unprotected cpu's will jump in price when these come out....
Although, it's probably already in my new Dell, just waiting to be enabled...... Bastards
Something else crammed down everyone's throats by Microsoft... People will actually buy it too. Ugh.