Trust Me, I'm Microsoft - The Palladium Project
Before I talk about the implications, let me explain a little about how TCPA and Palladium will work if they are implemented. TCPA is the hardware component of the system. It consists (in the first instance) of a special chip - dubbed the 'Fritz chip' which takes control of your computer on boot up and makes sure you only have things it thinks you should have in your computer. It's called the Fritz chip in honour of Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina who has been tireless in his efforts to get laws passed restricting the use of computers. Once Fritz has checked your hardware and software it hands over to the software component - Palladium. Needless to say, Fritz checks Palladium before it fires it up to make sure it hasn't been altered. From then on Fritz and Palladium between them make sure that you can only run authorised software on your computer. Even more alarming if Fritz/Palladium find something on your hard drive they believe to be illegal, they will delete it. There is no appeal against the decision, it is just deleted without any authority from you. At the heart of all this is the fundamental question - who owns your computer? Is it you or is it the big software and content companies? The answer from Microsoft, Intel and the media companies has always been the latter, although most computer owners would profoundly disagree. But this is not just about allowing copyright owners to assert that they still own the CDs and DVDs they purchased. There is also the question of lock-in, which I mentioned in my discussion of Microsoft's new corporate license here. One of the things Fritz/Palladium can do is to give applications - say Word - sole control of the files they create by encrypting the files. This means that the file can't be read by other applications, even if they are running on the same computer. How then would you move to Open Office or AbiWord if you couldn't read any of the existing files? Quite a lock-in for the owner of the application. You don't even own your own data files - they belong to company you got the program from... Then there is the question of censorship. The whole system is just made for government censorship and snooping since it is designed to delete 'pirate' material. But of course, once you can delete specified material on remote command, anything can be deleted. No doubt it would start off with a DA getting an order against something - perhaps a pornographic picture involving children. Then, once the precedent is established, maybe a litigant in a copyright case will get an order against a document. And so it will go on as more and more people realise they can control what is allowed in your computer. Another area that would be seriously affected by the Fritz/Palladium combo is open source software. You could still have open source software in the sense of software that you have access to the source, but since you couldn't change it without Fritz/Palladium rejecting it, the whole point of having open source software is undermined. No doubt Microsoft is not unaware of this, from their point of view, added bonus. So what advantages is Microsoft touting for the system? Well, it can't very well say outright that the advantages are all for the producers against the owners, so it has come up with a few suggested advantages for the owner, but most of them don't stand up on close examination. The two main claims are virus protection and spam blocking. Since viruses usually rely on insecure scripting languages built into Microsoft's programs - usually Outlook or Outlook Express - making the applications secure would go a long way to defeating viruses without the need for Fritz/Palladium. And spam? It's difficult to see how Fritz/Palladium could protect you against spam. Even Microsoft say 'eventually'. Presumably 'eventually' you wouldn't be able to use your machine at all since it would be spending all it's time checking for 'illegal' programs and data and would have no processing power left to download mail. Yes - I guess you wouldn't get any spam then! The fact is that to the media companies and even to the big software companies like Microsoft, the general purpose computer is a genie, and bringing general purpose computing to the desk top was letting the genie out of the bottle. Because if it is general purpose you can do what you like with it. Now they are trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle. What they really want us to have is a television without a remote control. They control what's on it, and they control what it is used for. Sounds paranoid? Perhaps. And perhaps the whole thing will die in a welter of protest. I certainly hope so. But it's time to realise that with the bursting of the dot com bubble personal computing and the Internet have grown up. The politicians and the big corporations now know what its strengths and its weaknesses are, and they will seek to incorporate it into their own agendas. Whether, or to what extent, they succeed is dependant on how well the users of personal computers understand what is going on. One thing I can say for sure is that, sadly, things are never going to return to the laid back way they used to be now that computing and networking have grown up.
Much of this article was based on a very good Frequently Asked Questions by Ross Anderson. There is far more in it than I had space to write about here. I really recommend reader go and look at it. It's very readable and it's at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html |
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