MS Patent for DRM OS

[Richard D G Cox]

> There are economic and political reasons militating against such a
> development (namely that a single organisation should control what
> programmes may be executable on the generality of home computing
> devices), but it's by no means inconceivable.

Economic, possibly ... I'm not sure about the political ...

Microsoft appear to have sought, from their approach to the licensing,
precisely that (with the emphasis on the phrase "generality of"), and
that is when the US Government stepped in and litigation followed.

Who knows what unactivated features may exist within various versions
of MS Windows?  Most of us remember the furore when their "NSAKey" was
discovered.  Now we find that Windows XP needs to "call home" ... and
of course there is also the infamous "Windows Update".

Until our lifetimes, most communications went through either a Postal
Service or the telephone system.  Most governments controlled, in one
way or another, the organisations providing those services.  Purchase
by such organisations, of (say) public telecomms switches was restricted
to certain products that met official requirements.

(Even today, to run a phone company in the UK, you need in practice an
exchange that interconnects with BT's system, and BT insists on carrying
out various "compatibility tests" before it will connect your exchange
to the BT Network; those "compatibility tests" are ostensibly to ensure
that all the features on your exchange are compatible with those on the
BT Network; people who work for Marconi (GPT as was) are tight-lipped
about what some of those features are - but that's because they are
"reminded" of their obligations under the Official Secrets Act et seq.)

=46rom "Service Obs" days onwards, intrusion by governments into personal
privacy has always been deniable simply because it existed through other
mechanisms which were far more easily explainable.  Why, for example,
did the UK get "postcodes" when the automated sorting system could work
with hash codes (which the BPO/Consignia uses for mail that carries no
postcodes)?  Some answers to that may lie in an understanding of the
obscurer parts of the software used in the automatic sorting machines!

But today, an increasing number of communications go through computers,
the *generality* of those computers run MS Windows.  So, Mr Gates, what
*exactly* was that deal you did with the DoJ?

Fellow Conspiracy-theorists are hereby wished a Merry Christmas!

--=20
Richard D G Cox <Richard.Cox@mandarin.com>