From: Martin Minow <minow@apple.com>
I'm not sure if I can answer this but, at last week's SF cypherpunks meeting, an Intel engineer asked whether there might be any interest in a computer chip with some sort of encryption mechanism built into the chip. As I understand it, this chip would process an encrypted instruction stream. I.e., it could not execute a program unless the "key" for that program was first loaded into the chip.
An interesting idea: does anyone have more information?
This sounds like something which might be used in a set-top-box or "information appliance" application where pay-per-use programs would be loaded from a CDROM or network connection. People have been dreaming about pay per use software for many years. It is a similar idea to the "mini application" concept which would replace the monolithic super-apps, the Microsoft Words and the giant do-everything web-browsers/newsreaders/mail-clients, with small, single function utilities. This is part of the idea behind Apple's OpenDoc and Microsoft's OLE. In the same way, instead of buying a big program for hundreds of dollars, you'd just download and use the functionality you needed for a small fee. Yet in practice it is not clear whether either of these trends will have any market success. Monolithic applications seem to be doing very well, with more integration being the trend, not less. And the whole idea of introducing metering to a market which is used to paying just once for access is one which is bound to meet resistance. Look at AOL which is going to single-charge unlimited access to the net. So in both cases the trend looks to be going in the opposite direction. Another possible application for the built in encryption is software piracy protection. You'd unlock software for your CPU but it would not run on anybody else's without a different key code. Here again there is not much benefit to the end user, unless software prices come down dramatically when this device is used. But otherwise the computer manufacturers are selling computers which have features which will limit the powers of the buyers, and having to sell them more expensively to boot because of the special chip. In these days of razor thin profit margins in the PC business it is hard to see how this will sell. Hal