Microsoft To Demo 'Palladium' At WinHEC

1010011010 writes "According to Microsoft Watch, Microsoft will be demonstrating Palladium (also known as 'Next-Generation Secure Computing Base') at WinHEC in May in New Orleans. The 'trusted root' is now called the 'Nexus' by Microsoft. Developers wishing to write 'Nexus-aware' applications will apparently have to pay a licensing fee to do so. The product manager for Palladium, Mario Juarez, says, 'It's important to note that nexus-aware applications will not hinder any apps or anything else running in the regular Windows environment.' I'm sure you can all hear the word 'yet' at the end of that sentence. There's talk of phasing in Palladium, starting with Longhorn Server in 2005. I wonder how Microsoft will convince consumers that loss of control is a good thing, and how long the convincing will take. I, for one, am already planning to transition my company away from Microsoft software. Hopefully that won't get messed up by and dumb mandatory-palladium legislation from the Fritz types."

Comments

Re:The fees!

[Gortbusters.org]

If anything, I think the fees would drive more people to develop their software on free platforms.

If you sell a hardware platform with your application, then the cost of the operating system is in your cost of goods and services for producing your app. I think this is one of the major arguments of Linux + Java. Though my disclaimer is that I'm not a product manager ;)

Surreal

[mao che minh]

It is surreal how easily Microsoft is able to employ such blatant and souless cash grabs without sounding off alarms in the business sector. Microsoft is free to employ monopoly induced moves into various markets, orchestrate forced upgrade procedures, raise prices while limiting support, and engineer horrible licensing schemes without any fear of fall out.

Now MS can candidly tell consumers how they intend on outright controlling all of your data and even charge developers for the "privilage" of being able to conform.

I just can't see how so many pointy-hairs can examine Microsoft and it's products and decide that it would a good idea to spend so much money on it. Microsoft sales people are truly adept at their trade.

how will this protect from viruses ?

[wotevah]

I am just wondering how signing all the executables will protect anyone from viruses. Most viruses today are macro or scripted.

It's worth nothing that the behemoth apps (Outlook, Word, Excel etc) are signed, they will probably keep their embedded superscripting features, so viruses will still happily run on them.

I am curious about buffer overflows. Stack checks are not infallible, code is not read-only and and I can't imagine the palladium system checking the signature for each 4k block as it runs (since if decent encryption is used it will be quite expensive in CPU time). So, will we have signed apps that might still have such bugs ?