M$ to manage your computer (Palladium discussion part 3)

[Calum]

quote:MS Palladium protects IT vendors, not you - paper
By John Lettice
Posted: 28/06/2002 at 10:27 GMT

Ross Anderson of Cambridge University has published a lengthy and informative paper/FAQ on Palladium, the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), their relationship and their implications. His take is that Microsoft's Palladium, soft-announced by the company earlier this week, will be built on TCPA hardware, adding some extra features as it goes along. Some of these features, he notes, will the there in order to make the package look more attractive, while some of the components of Palladium are already shipping in Xbox and WinXP.

TCPA itself provides for a monitoring component to be included in future PCs. In phase one Anderson expects it to be an add-on chip on the motherboard, but further down the line it will be in the CPU. It's more crackable as an add-on, as you could conceivably get around it by monitoring bus traffic, but once it's in the CPU this becomes a lot harder, and he speculates about the likely effects in the event of TCPA/Palladium being to all intents and purposes uncrackable.

Aside from providing the music business with workable DRM, it would also allow software companies to lock in their users. The more Palladium/TCPA-enabled apps there are, the more this will be the case, and it will also have the tendency to favour existing players while locking out new entrants.

Anderson refers to the chip as the "Fritz" chip, after senator Fritz Hollings who has been "working tirelessly" to make TCPA compulsory. On boot, Fritz "checks that the boot ROM is as expected, executes it, measures the state of the machine; then checks the first part of the operating system, loads and executes it, checks the state of the machine; and so on. The trust boundary, of hardware and software considered to be known and verified, is steadily expanded. A table is maintained of the hardware (audio card, video card etc) and the software (O/S, drivers, etc); if there are significant changes, the machine must be re- certified. The result is a PC booted into a known state with an approved combination of hardware and software. Control is then handed over to enforcement software in the operating system - this is presumably Palladium if your operating system in Windows."

Read the article here and read the full document here[/b]

[ June 28, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[voidmain]

They might as well waste some more tax payer dollars and start another anti-trust trial now as to get a head start on this thing. I just can't believe the audacity of these companies!!  Wait, yes I can....

[choasforages]

goddamnit. i think the FSF needs to get a fucking petetion out on this one

[psyjax]

quote:Originally posted by choasforages:
goddamnit. i think the FSF needs to get a fucking petetion out on this one

Is this really happening?

I mean seriously folks, do you think this thing will fly?

No one will switch, if anything this is the death of M$. No one will buy new hardware and old stuff will be at a premium. Tons of 3rd party folks will spawn overnight making non-palladium stuff and users will flock to Linux and MacOS.

If they are serious about this, M$ is signing their death certifacate. Because even if Palladium fails and M$ goes back to their old ways, their rep will be soooo tarnished in consumers mind, who the hell would buy their shitty products.

Just a thought. I don't think it will work. People like freedom, epecially in the US.

[choasforages]

if we were only taking inteligent people into acount microsoft would have been gone a long time ago, you failed to think about all the fucking morons out there


idiot:"wow dudes, with my new pallidium system, i don't get virus's!"

me:"can you run anything other then M$ software?"

idiot: "other then M$ software, like M$ is the only thing never mind those macintoshs, they suck!!"

never underestimate the power of idiots, especially large groups of them

[Calum]

anderson has this to say :  

quote:13. So economics are going to be significant here?

Exactly. The biggest profits in IT goods and services markets tend to go to companies that can establish platforms (such as Windows, or Word) and control compatibility with them, so as to manage the markets in complementary products. For example, some mobile phone vendors use challenge-response authentication to check that the phone battery is a genuine part rather than a clone - in which case, the phone will refuse to recharge it, and may even drain it as quickly as possible. Some printers authenticate their toner cartridges electronically; if you use a cheap substitute, the printer silently downgrades from 1200 dpi to 300 dpi. The Sony Playstation 2 uses similar authentication to ensure that memory cartridges were made by Sony rather than by a low-price competitor.

TCPA appears designed to maximise the effect, and thus the economic power, of such plays. Given Microsoft's record of competitive strategic plays, I expect that Palladium will support them. So if you control a TCPA-enabled application, then your policy server can enforce your choice of rules about which other applications will be allowed to use the files your code creates. These files can be protected using strong cryptography, with keys controlled by the Fritz chips on everybody's machines. What this means is that a successful TCPA-enabled application will be worth much more money to the software company that controls it, as they can rent out access to their interfaces for whatever the market will bear. So there will be huge pressures on software developers to enable their applications for TCPA; and if Palladium is the first operating system to support TCPA, this will give it a competitive advantage over GNU/Linux and MacOS with the developer community.

[lazygamer]

I sure hope all you electronics hackers are reading this shit. Please for the love of god, take this as a challenge and beat Microsoft at their own "super secure game" just because... you can. I mean hackers love proving themselves and taking on challenges right?

[SpeeDFreaK]

Apple powerbook G4, here I come!

Something I just thought of...

 

quote: No one will switch, if anything this is the death of M$. No one will buy new hardware and old stuff will be at a premium.

So, since not too many people are buying hardware and pre-built PCs anyway, wouldn't this boost their profits anyway? I can see MS going this low and spreading stuff to do this. Watch them come up one day..."Oops. Palladium was a bad idea after all. We decided to scrap it. Sorry about making you buy all of that expensive hardware(not!)...)

[Refalm]

I dunno... the people at my school that know computers are saying: "If the new Windows sucks, I'll  just stick to Windows XP."

And the people not so involved in computers, want to brag to their friends that they have the latest Windows version, because this was also the case when Windows XP came out. Most people aren't involved in computers, and I think they don't care what OS they got, as long as it's working, and if they can get the latest, they buy it.

I always catagorize computer users:

1. Productive users --> They include most non-Windows users and ICT people

2. Computer know-how --> They know what their buying when they buy software... mostly, they make the choice between Windows ME, Windows 2000 or Windows XP. (these also include some non-Windows and ICT people)

3. Simple users --> Don't care what they're running, as long as its good for them. And if it's not, they buy a new thing.

4. Trendy people --> They have a computer, and they want to have the latest and most used thing so they can brag about it to their friends. This is Windows XP at the moment.

[ July 01, 2002: Message edited by: Refalm ]

[Calum]

quote:Originally posted by Refalm:
I dunno... the people at my school that know computers are saying: "If the new Windows sucks, I'll  just stick to Windows XP."

this statement speaks for itself. windows xp already sucks, did those people stick with windows 2000 as a result? no. windows millenium sucked, did they stick with windows 98? no. windows 95 sucked (as did 98 and 98se), did they stick with windows 3.11? no. Why should they not mindlessly go out and buy 'palladium'?
 

quote:
2. Computer know-how --> They know what their buying when they buy software... mostly, they make the choice between Windows ME, Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

Out of yr 4 categories i fit closest into this group. Personally i would not choose between winME, windows 2000 or windows P if i could possibly help it. If i needed to dual boot as i do now (due to flaky hardware) i would choose win2000, at the moment my hardware is much flakier on win2000 than it even is in linux, so i have had to go to second choice of windows 98. I can safely say that given the choice between win98 and mandrake 8, i would choose mandrake, and that's even considering the bullshit hardware support for mandrake...

[lazygamer]

quote:1. 31337 users --> They include most non-Windows users and ICT people

DUDE! Nirvana indeed. How do we reach such a state of intellect and /skill?  

[dishawjp]

Here's another interesting link on Palladium.  M$'s bid to make the internet M$ property

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020627.html

[Ice-9]

All this shit is scary, very scary!
If all of this comes true we'll probably have to stick with our older hardware.
But I'm pretty confident that it won't take long for people to hack into whatever M$'s pathetic security measures will be.

[para_fms]

quote:Originally posted by psyjax:


Is this really happening?

I mean seriously folks, do you think this thing will fly?

No one will switch, if anything this is the death of M$...

i wouldn't be so optimistic about MS's demise. quite obviously they are marketing god's and  know FAR better than us exactly what can be shoved down the average throat. in general, people are nothing but a bunch of cabooses being led by an engine. the guy at the wheel is the one with the best sales pitch, NOT the best product.

[mobrien_12]

How much you wanna bet that this breaks SAMBA?