New info on Palladium

[Anonymous]

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.

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