Saturday, November 09, 2002

News: MS Palladium: A must or a menace?

At the USENIX Security Conference held here recently, Microsoft developers touted the company's upcoming Palladium architecture as technology that would enhance privacy, stymie piracy and increase a corporation's control over its computers.

Others, however, see a more nefarious role for the security software.

Instead of just keeping hackers out, critics say programs like Palladium could also block computer users from certain data. For example, the technology could be used as a policing mechanism that bars people from material stored on their own computers if they have not met licensing and other requirements.

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and co-founder of the GNU project for creating free versions of key Unix programs, lampooned the technology in a recent column as "treacherous computing."

"Large media corporations, together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you," he wrote. "Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal."

He and others, such as Cambridge University professor Ross Anderson, argue that the intention of so-called trusted computing is to block data from consumers and other PC users, not from attackers. The main goal of such technology, they say, is "digital-rights management," or the control of copyrighted content. Under today's laws, copyright owners maintain control over content even when it resides on someone else's PC--but many activists are challenging that authority.

Microsoft denies that Palladium is designed as a mechanism to police consumers' use content. The company plans to release the technology in 2005, as part of a major update to Windows. "We get very strong feedback from our customers about the freedom for data migration," said Peter Biddle, a Microsoft product manager pushing the initiative. "We are not going to use Palladium to make our customers--our favorite people--angry at us."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-964876.html

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