For some updated news about NGSCB, aka Palladium, go to the Microsoft NGSCB newsgroup page at http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.asp?icp=ngscb&slcid=us. This might be a good forum for cypherpunks to ask questions about Palladium. There was a particularly informative posting by Ellen Cram of Microsoft on October 15. Among other things she reveals that the Longhorn pre-release to be distributed at the Microsoft PDC (conference) will include NGSCB technology. It's not clear how this will work without the specialized hardware features, though. Also getting attention is a bizarre attempt at guerrilla marketing, where Microsoft employees are running blogs to promote Longhorn. http://longhornblogs.com/scobleizer/ provides a good example. In "How to Hate Microsoft", Robert Scoble, Longhorn technology evangelist, wants you to tell him everything you don't like about Longhorn. Pull no punches, he begs. So far there are a few comments about DRM but not much specifically about Palladium/NGSCB. On another front, John Walker of AutoCAD fame, who supported a number of quixotic projects through the 80s and 90s, like the ill-fated Xanadu, has a new publication out. The Digital Imprimatur, http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/, presents a dystopian future for the Internet that is heavily based on the potential negative consequences of Trusted Computing technologies like Palladium. In Walker's view, Palladium will spawn a net where you need a certificate to participate, and this will naturally lead to a "fully trusted" network where not only people, but all their transactions and documents will be certified, hence traceable and accountable. An "imprimatur" is a government license to run a printing press, and we will experience the same effect in the Trusted Internet of the future. Although Walker's story is meant to be a cautionary tale, the list of properties of the Trusted Net is so attractive that many readers are questioning why we should oppose these developments: an end to copyright violation, (unauthorized) eavesdropping, scams, security fraud, SPAM, worms and viruses. Walker's architecture also supports search engines that are 100% accurate, with low maintenance. The Trusted Net limits child pornography (and children's access to adult porn), hate speech, employee internet abuse, and tax evasion. It inherently supports DRM, satisfying the concerns of content providers and providing a foundation for wide-scale distribution of copyrighted content. Walker has put an intentionally favorable slant on his presentation in order to demonstrate how plausible it is that people will accept the restrictions of Palladium in exchange for all these benefits. The spam menace is already leading to calls for an Internet Drivers License even from some circles within the pro-freedom crowd, and a Trusted Net would be only a small additional step. While Walker's description of "how to put the Internet genie back in the bottle" is sobering, his track record as a prognosticator is not promising. He was wrong about the net before, and he's probably wrong about it now. A rather dull discussion forum for the essay is running at http://www.fourmilab.ch/wb/digital-imprimatur.pl. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com