"AARG!Anonymous" wrote:
I'd like the Palladium/TCPA critics to offer an alternative proposal for achieving the following technical goal:
Allow computers separated on the internet to cooperate and share data and computations such that no one can get access to the data outside the limitations and rules imposed by the applications.
That is frightfully underspecified. Creating such a system could be very easy or very hard, depending on what range of policies is to be supported, and depending on what your threat model is. At one extreme I might trust an off-the-shelf PC if it were booted from CD by trusted parties in a TEMPEST-shielded room surrounded by armed guards. At the other extreme, making tamper-proof hardware to face unlimited threats is very, very hard -- most likely outside the "PC" price range for the foreseeable future.
In other words, allow a distributed network application to create a "closed world" where it has control over the data and no one can get the application to "cheat". IMO this is clearly the real goal of TCPA and Palladium, in technical terms, when stripped of all the emotional rhetoric.
Well, the "technical terms" are not and should not be the sole focus of the current discussion. There are other questions such as -- what range of policies should be supported -- who gets to set the policy -- who decides who trusts whom -- etc. etc. etc. I agree that there has been too much ad-hominem sewage and emotional rhetoric mixed in with the valid arguments recently.