I didn’t really follow the whole Palladium disclosures from Microsoft until a coworker asked me about it the other day. My current take on it is that buying a Palladium-enabled computer would be a bit like drinking Kool Aid at Jonestown(1). They’ll try to tell you it tastes sweet, but the whole thing is pure poison.
Cryptome.Org has mirrored the long press release that Steven Levy wrote about Palladium for Newsweek. Levy buys into Microsoft’s hype that the Internet is on the verge of collapse (or something like that) due to the preponderance of e-mail viruses (thanks largely due to Microsoft’s e-mail client), viruses (thanks in part to bug-ridden versions of MS Windows) and file sharing (no thanks to MS, apparently).
Microsoft’s solution — “Trust us — we’ll control what goes in and out of your computer and you’ll never have another problem ever.” Just drink the Kool Aid and ever-lasting bliss is yours.
But, like cyanide-laced drinks, Microsoft’s solution is much, much worse than the problem. Here’s one of Palladium’s proposed features,
Palladium is all about deciding whatÂ’s trustworthy. It not only lets your computer know that youÂ’re you, but also can limit what arrives (and runs on) your computer, verifying where it comes from and who created it.
Notice that it is not you, the user, who gets to decided what does and does not run on your computer, but rather Microsoft. Load a music file onto your computer that doesn’t have all the right permissions? Sorry, Palladium will decide you can’t run it. Control of your computer no longer resides with you, but with Microsoft who is far more interested in pleasing large corporations than it is in helping end users.
The reality is that for every single use that Microsoft offers as legitimate for this sort of technology, there are already plenty of ways to achieve the end result without such a scheme. Dealing with spam, getting rid of viruses, ensuring that e-mail communications are private — all of these things can be done without handing control of your computer over to Microsoft.
Palladium is simply the latest proposal in a growing trend to turn the personal computer into a high-powered television-like device where what users can do with their machines is highly circumscribed and limited.
I don’t think Palladium will succeed, but it should be a big wakeup call that such a system is even being proposed. In the early late 1970s, the personal PC revolution began. Microsoft, Sony, the RIAA, and others are now actively trying to bring out a counter-revolution to slam the lid on the Pandora’s Box that is the PC.
1. Yes, I know Jim Jones was so cheap that his followers died drinking the knockoff Flavor-Aid.