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Palladium's Power To Deny
BrianWCarver writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has the most detailed article I've yet seen on Microsoft's Palladium architecture. The article discusses the potential Palladium has to give publishers power to eliminate fair use and the potential for software manufacturers to use Palladium to enforce shrink-wrap licenses. Comments from several great sources including, Ed Felten (Freedom to Tinker), Eben Moglen (pro-bono counsel for the Free Software Foundation and recent Slashdot interviewee), and Seth Schoen (Electronic Frontier Foundation) among many others. Key quotations from article: Palladium could create 'a closed system, in which each piece of knowledge in the world is identified with a particular owner, and that owner has a right to resist its copying, modification, and redistribution. In such a scenario the very concept of fair use has been lost.' 'Palladium will "turn the clock back" to the days before online information was widely available.' and 'Microsoft could decide to lock everything up.'"
It saddens me that some US people are spending all this time and energy protesting a war that hasn't happened yet and could give a crap about things happening in their own country in regards to their freedom. And it's not just this story, it's all the freedoms that are being taken away thinks to the events of 2001.
You mean 'The Technology Formerly Known As Palladium' ;)
What is particularly maddening about Palladium is the repeated claims that this offers a security benefit for end users. Microsoft is trying very hard to trojan in this DRM technology as a part of the Trusted Computing initiative. If this is the form of 'trust' they are speaking of then I want nothing to do with it.
Buy your processors now before they are infected with all of this Palladium/TCPA nonsense.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Obviously you can see how, being the folks developing the software, Microsoft can (hell, probably *will* as a software protection feature) program in the ability to encrypt the data into a form that only Microsoft can read, and put a remote based command as the trigger.
... for payment and product activation info"
So you sign in for your latest Windows Update (which you'll have to because if you don't, your encryption will soon be out of synch and nobody will be able to read squat that you make), Windows Update detects that "Hey! This copy of Palladium has been registered in a different computer", not knowing that you've just moved the hard drive over to a newer chassis with more expansion room, and sends the code to lock it all up, so that all you get on bootup is a message to "Call Microsoft at
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
OK, let's say that a big university like MIT implemnts Microsoft Windows Shiny and Secure Palladium Edition 2005. Not only on a workstation, but on _all_ computers; libray computers, dorms, workstations, servers etc.
Then all documents produced inside MIT will become Microsoft DRM enabled. All the papers, tests, research and publications. Right?
Year 2050. MIT want out. Whatever reason they have; they need to get out: The cost of the system is to high or the system don't work according to the promised specification.
Actually the reason they have, don't matter. Maybe Penguin OS v69 has become The OS.It's irrellevant. They want out; and they want it now!
Now what?
Well, for starters just about everything people have done the last 45 years is _potentially_ lost forever unless they manage to get a deal with Microsoft.
All the fileformats are MS Propretary DRM Palladium Edition and can't be read on their new and shiny OS and they would have to deal with the relatives of former employes who "own" information produced on MIT.
What a mess. Such a waste.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Palladium will not: (and I quote into the cauldron..)
.. would face enormous pressures to do so"
- Replace the Windows operating system.
- Search the Internet to detect and delete pirated software, music, and movies.
- Eliminate spam and software viruses.
- Prevent a digital thief from gaining access to a computer in person and disabling its hardware security features.
"The goal, Microsoft officials say, is to make servers and desktop PC's that people can trust." (ha-ha)
Maybe a system that did ALL of these things would be competitive?
--
I think it's only fair these [hopefully nonexistent] publishers are forced to purchase Palladium PCs and use only Palladium-liscensed reference material for which they will pay per byte forever.
"Colleges
Why not instead force publishers to provide text-searchable CDs for free to legitimate book owners because of fair use laws? Safari seems pretty useful.
If every student is networked these days, I think there may be an opportunity for universities to promote a solution to a real (as opposed to hypothetical) problem which happens to appear antithetical to Gates' wet dreams.
- Students spend an awful lot of money on textbooks, and sometimes have difficulty finding them in bookstores and libraries. A significant number might jump at the chance to purchase a digital copy instead of the paper textbook.
- Searching for words in textbooks should be promoted at universities as one of the few clear merits of owning a computer in school. It would be interesting to see legally if universities, or individual students, can promote this to the point of forcing publishers to provide a free fair-use cd of searchable text with every textbook. The bookstore could hand them out when books or purchased.
- Students who have purchased second-hand books also should be able to enjoy the benefits of digital searching.
- Annotation is a second obvious merit of using a computer in school, and it's why the web was born. Students used to surfing the web will readily jump into information organized in am easy to use, interactive format. Researchers should also be able to freely access stores of annotations and digital texts.
- Also annotation as well as the ability to index and navigate by scene or timecode is very useful with film and video. This could be useful in university film, music, television, language, and science courses among others, and universities ought to be able to negotiate with publishers to create free-use zones for scholarship purposes without all this annoying crypto. If enough did it, there would be a smaller potential Palladium market.
- Schools with less funding should be able to invest in personnel and students, and (if there is a suitable alternative) ought to be able to use information technology to reduce the financial barriers. MIT has embarked on an open curriculum and more should be promoted. We need to enable people to apt-get an education and get used to it so they won't let it get taken away.
- It would be interesting to see if projects funded by national governments would be exempt from Palladium
- While MP3 sharing may very well be within the law, it is not as obvious a poster child for fair use as any of the above uses of everything from ascii text to hdtv. I think it would be very interesting to see if the open source and educational communities can relatively quickly develop something demonstrably more useful and open that Palladium, and possibly preempt it.
If Microsoft have these powers, they will abuse them. Microsoft will use it to further force you to do what they want you to do, not what you want to do. Even with the very recent legal difficulties, they are still acting exactly as before. And this has just cost me a couple of hours of my time. Let me explain - bear with me, the gall of MS will amaze you...
I use Windows XP with Mozilla. The software my bank uses is only compatible with the Microsoft JVM (stupid bankers...). I have previously installed the Sun JVM, so in an effort to get the Microsoft JVM working I used the new "Set program access and defaults" option which Microsoft added to Windows XP as part of the settlement. It is supposed to make it easier for you to set the default email, JVM and browser clients. I intended to change my defaults to IE and the MS virtual machine, use my bank's site, and then change them back again to Mozilla(1). To cut a long story short, once I had changed my default browser from Mozilla to IE, it was impossible to change it back again. The new configurator that Microsoft had added as part of the legal settlement had renamed all of the mozilla files so they wouldn't work anymore, replacing their old extention with "new", i.e. so mozilla.exe became mozilla.new. Not only that, it also removed the mozilla icon from the desktop, the "power bar" and the menu. So the only way I could get it working again was to completely reinstall it. And they did this as part of the legal settlement!
F*uck them. I'm going to move to Linux for my desktop. It might have installation hassels too, but at least I'll know that they haven't been designed to be difficult on purpose.
(1) This may seem an odd thing to do, but you can't download the Microsoft JVM from the MS site any more, so I thought this might be a way to reactive it.
Whilst it is true that if it doesn't work at all then it will be shunned, it is not so true if it doesn't work in the interest of the consumer.
If Microsoft start making 'agreements' with vendors like Dell and HP to sell only (or mainly) Palladium'd boxes then people will buy them. Especially if there's some sort of discount price incentive put in place.
It's a sad fact that we often have to face here, that the average person just wants 'a computer', and they don't care about how it works, who's really in control, and why that might be bad. As long as Mom and dad can do their tax, and the kids can play the latest incarnation of Tomb raider or Quake then all is just dandy.
Once again our fate rests with the teenagers. If they can complain just loudly enough to mom and dad that they heard that computers from .* supplier don't work properly (i.e. allow music/video/whatever to be exchanged freely) then maybe nobody will buy them and disaster could be averted.
Sad state of affairs really isn't it?
"There will still be the vast majority who DO NOT UPGRADE and use THE OLD STANDARD. "
This is true -- according to Google's Zeitgeist, the number of people using "obsolete" versions of Windows (95, 98, NT) is almost the same as those using the latest versions (2000 and XP).
"I really can't see how this will effect people who don't use it (now tell me how it will take over the world when people do start to use it and how it will effect the data on the internet and bla bla bal....)"
Easy. If broadband ISPs only allow Palladium-equipped devices (PCs, routers, etc) online, then the Internet will be denied to everyone else. Should Microsoft make their own version of IPv6 that's "secure", it's going to be supported by all the major players. (If the MS-IPv6 protocol can't be altered through software, then any company that doesn't support the corrupted protocol is going to be locked out from all new PCs once IPv6 goes live.)
Even easier: sites that currently "require" Internet Explorer -- but work fine with other browsers -- will require IE plus Palladium. Or your ISP says that only PCs with Palladium are supported.
If Microsoft plays their hand correctly, they'll be in complete control of the x86 platform, and nothing other than a successful anti-trust case will break that hold. If Microsoft fails, they'll alienate enough people that Linux and other OS's will make significant gains.
So I was meeting a very successful entrepreneur and he gave me this insight:
Patents can be used to ward of small competitors to a business. You cannot use a patent to ward of microsoft or ibm or any other large company with a large amount of money in the bank. You can sue them for patent infringement, they would drag the case in court, fight for a year or so and pay you a million bucks at the end. But by that time, they've already done whatever damage they could, and your company is bankrupt.
Of course this doesn't work if the patent holder is a big company such as one of the above.
Moral of the story is: if big players want to infringe smaller players' patents, they could do so and have a good chance of getting away with it for not that much money.
Such are the wonders of capitalism.
As the article points out, what happens if Word requires Palladium to run and encrypt any documents it creates? Then people who don't have Palladium and Word can't read those documents. At least now people can reverse-engineer Word documents and read them via Abiword, OpenOffice, etc. If Palladium is used, you would have to break the Palladium encryption before you could even reverse-engineer the document. And you would probably be charged under the DMCA for breaking the encryption.
Imagine what would happen to Wine if all the new Windows games and applications required Palladium to run. If Wine can't break Palladium encryption, then Wine can't run any new Windows software. This could prevent any sort of Windows emulation or reverse-engineering that is allowable by fair-use. They could effectively prevent people from using any OS other than Windows to run their applications or view documents. As new applications come out and old ones become outdated, Palladium could become the new standard just because all the new software requires it.
Java: Protected by a sandbox. At numberous points in past, some implentation flaw has allowed java apps to get around the sandbox.
DVD: Trotted out to content providers as secure since content could be encrypted and secured on the disk. Then one vendor makes a mistake and includes an unencrypted key in their DVD player, some kid in Europe finds it, and the entire house of cards falls down. If that one vendor didn't screw up, DVD's probably would still be unrippable.
In all technologies, the apologists have pointed to the fact that they are secure by design, but flaws in implementation or procedures caused the faults.
So even if I wanted TCPA/Palladium to be a smashing success, I wouldn't bet my fortune on it. Someone will screw it up...
You're splitting hairs.
It acts like UNIX. It has UNIX-y software in the box. You can get arbitrarily large amounts of UNIX-y stuff and install it.
For anybody who doesn't care about "trademark dilution" of the UNIX brand, it's UNIX.
So are the BSDs. So are the various Linux distros. Get over it.
And, insofar as NT is supposed to be POSIX compliant, there is an argument to be made that you could in fact run a UNIX workalike under NT. Bottom line is, who cares?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yeah. Actually I've been told (by an MS exec) that the demand is mostly coming from normal business. They like the idea of keeping control of internal documents, keeping it secure, all the benefits of DRM etc. I've seen a roundtable discussion at a conference that was discussing the benefits a new age of DRM will bring, these guys were really enthusiastic but they weren't from the MPAA or RIAA. They were just business people (except the blonde in the short skirt, I think she was just there to distract the attendees).