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Palladium/TCPA and DRM Big Brother Everywhere? |
"This is a new focus for the security community, [...] The actual user of the PC - someone who can do anything they want - is the enemy." David Aucsmith, security architect for Intel, as quoted in an article by Robert Lemos of ZD Network News, Feburary 25, 1999 from Trusted Computing: Trusted by Whom? by Eric Smith
Microsoft presents Palladium as a security measure, and claims that it will protect against viruses, but this claim is evidently false. A presentation by Microsoft Research in October 2002 stated that one of the specifications of Palladium is that existing operating systems and applications will continue to run; therefore, viruses will continue to be able to do all the things that they can do today. When Microsoft speaks of "security" in connection with Palladium, they do not mean what we normally mean by that word: protecting your machine from things you do not want. They mean protecting your copies of data on your machine from access by you in ways others do not want. A slide in the presentation listed several types of secrets Palladium could be used to keep, including "third party secrets" and "user secrets" -- but it put "user secrets" in quotation marks, recognizing that this is not what Palladium is really designed for. The presentation made frequent use of other terms that we frequently associate with the context of security, such as "attack," "malicious code," "spoofing," as well as "trusted." None of them means what it normally means. "Attack" doesn't mean someone trying to hurt you, it means you trying to copy music. "Malicious code" means code installed by you to do what someone else doesn't want your machine to do. "Spoofing" doesn't mean someone fooling you, it means you fooling Palladium. And so on. from Can you trust your computer? by Richard Stallman
Germany has little to worry about.
[...] the DMCA will have a non-trivial impact on the conditions under which such research takes place. Specifically, the DMCA will: impose additional hurdles, which researchers must overcome before engaging in and publishing their research; limit the universe of individuals with whom researchers can freely communicate about their research; require disclosure of the intention to engage in research and the fruits of such research to third-parties; affect the content of academic research papers; and limit avenues for publication of the results of such research. Thus, even if academic encryption researchers can continue to conduct and publish their research under the DMCA without significant practical risk of criminal or civil liability, the DMCA will significantly affect the manner in which such research is conducted. [...]