Re: Microsoft's plans to kill open source: TCPA

[Johan Ehnberg]

Noah L. Meyerhans wrote:
> [ I've pruned the giant list of innappropriate and off-topic CCs ]
>
> On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 11:57:51PM +0100, Hauke Goos-Habermann wrote:
>
>>Microsoft plans to kill all OpenSource software on hardware level. This
>>technology is called TCPA.
>
>
> FUD! FUD FUD FUD FUD!!! This is completely all wrong. Recently a talk
> was given at MIT by one of the designers of Microsoft Palladium (their
> trusted computing initiative) at MIT. I was at the talk, which received
> lots of coverage on sites like slashdot and arstechnica.
>
> Palladium and TCPA will *NOT* kill open source. I am going to repeat
> that, because some people are too thick-headed to understand. Palladium
> and TCPA will *NOT* kill open source!!!
>
> One of the absolutely fundamental restrictions on Palladium is that
> *all* software that runs on non-Palladium system *must* run on Palladium
> systems. Remember that backward-compatibility is the only reason MS has
> been able to sustain their monopoly. You can still run software written
> for the IBM XT on your WinXP boxes. Microsoft cannot throw that
> backward compatibity away, and they know this.
>
> Hardware support for Palladium will be user-configurable via a BIOS
> setting. It can be completely disabled.
>
> The only negative thing I see comming out of TCPA is that content
> producers (Hollywood, etc) will release copies of their
> movies/music/whatever for download in a format that can only be accessed
> on TCPA systems. This is the major threat. Personally, I would not be
> bothered by this. However, some people might. For this, I think the
> only way to prevent this is to get lots of people to either refuse to
> use Palladium or run systems that don't support it. If the content
> producers can say "well, we'll happily give up the potential customers
> on Linux, MacOS, UNIX, whatever if we can get all the Windows Palladium
> users". They'll only be able to do this if the population of
> non-Palladium-using people is small.
>
> There are other negatives to palladium that I certainly dislike, but I
> think the above is what's going to be most noticable by users initially.
> Palladium is really more about protecting the "rights" of copyright
> holders. You'll be able to run whatever software you want on it. In
> fact, aside from potential patent issues, I didn't hear anything at the
> talk that would prevent anyone from writing an open source
> implementation of the Palladium Nexus (which is the DRM pseudo-OS that
> runs aside the normal OS kernel).
>
> noah
>
Yes, you really sound like you've attended a Microsoft talk. :=).
Congratulations, you have been brain washed.

The fact stands: Linux won't maybe load at all on a TCPA enabled
hardware, eventually. And TCPA can't be completely turned off.

And "non-trusted" clients (read open source) will not be able to read
files created on a "trusted" machine. And so on. There are other people
and organisations who also have talks on this technology. Not all of
them are Microsofts... And we know how much their word counts.

They said Palladium technology stops viruses and spam. Yeah, right.

Cheers,
johan

--
Johan Ehnberg
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Windows? No... I don't think so."



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