"Palladium" and TCPA

[Ross Anderson]

According to my spies in the hardware industry, Palladium is TCPA - with
some M$ software enhancements.

BTW it seems to have been my paper at the Open Source Software Economics
conference last week that prompted the announcement. (It's at the top of
my web page.)

Quite apart from the usual issues, like escrow, there are censorship
issues - policy servers might be instructed by a court to download applets
to search for and destroy EVIL.DOC - and potentially very severe antitrust
issues - application owners appear to be able to control compatibility of
their data with other applications using crypto mechanisms, rather than the
usual messing about with file formats. In theory, at least, M$ could ensure
that while Word docs can be read by Excel, they can't be read by StarOffice.

If Palladium works - or even if vanilla TCPA works - it will create some
novel and very poweerful tools. We need to think carefully about not just
the good uses, but the bad ones

Ross