Ordinarily, Newsweek’s Steven Levy is one of the best tech journalists going, with an inordinately high grasp of low-level technology issues. But Levy really dropped the ball with his puff piece on Microsoft’s Palladium digital rights management (DRM) initiative. Microsoft’s plan is nothing less than to change the architecture of PC hardware to “address the concerns of security, privacy and intellectual property” according to Levy’s breathless piece.
PC chip manufacturers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices reportedly have agreed to produce the special security chips needed to make the system work. “It’s a whole new class of processors not differentiated by speed, but security,” AMD’s Geoffrey Strongin told Levy.
Palladium will reportedly manage the trustworthiness of any piece of data that runs on your computer by verifying where and who it came from. It also uses cryptography to protect the integrity of your documents and protects your system from viruses. The technology will safeguard your privacy through a collection of proxy services and can allow you to avoid spam through credentialed email.
The core of Palladium, however, is being pitched to the entertainment industry as a digital rights management (DRM) system allowing the record labels, publishers, and movie studios to determine how you can use content you license or purchase. To make it more palatable to business users and consumers, Microsoft emphasizes that you’ll be able to use Palladium to “manage” the use of your email and documents, determining who can copy and forward what and creating documents that self-destruct after, say, a month.
Palladium is said to be scheduled to ship in a future version of the Windows operating system, probably sometime in 2004. Microsoft, in a shift in philosophy, plans to publish the source code of the fundamental security component of the system in order to enhance Palladium’s trustworthiness.
To date, the best overview of Palladium is Dylan Tweney’s assessment of the technology. Tweney grasps the implications of the Palladium technology:
“In the early stages, this [Palladium technology] will rely on a so-called ‘Fritz’ chip (named after Sen. Fritz Hollings, the sponsor of a draconian digital rights bill), which verifies that your computer is running an approved combination of hardware and software—before your computer even boots up. Once Fritz certifies the system, it can pass that certification along to third parties, such as Microsoft, Disney, Sony, or AOL/Time Warner. Later, ‘Fritz’ capabilities will be built right into the central processor, making it next-to-impossible to intercept unencrypted data. Everything coming in and out of the CPU will be encrypted and digitally signed.
“The problem is that Palladium requires users to place a huge amount of trust in Microsoft. You don’t get to decide what runs on your computer—Microsoft does. You can’t even open files unless you’ve been authorized by Microsoft, or by a third party. And that puts a huge amount of power into the hands of these corporations.”
The question we need to be asking is just who has asked for Palladium?
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.