Prentiss Riddle: Causes

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Is there a Trojan horse in Microsoft's "Trustworthy Computing"?

So Bill Gates wants Microsoft to focus more attention on security. "About damn time!" was my initial response. But on reflection, I wonder how good a job we can expect the fox to do at guarding this particular henhouse. When Gates says "security" whose security is he talking about?

I'm thinking of things like Microsoft's XrML or "eXtensible Rights Markup Language", a standard for "digital rights management". Microsoft wants publishers to be able to attach blobs of XrML to multimedia products which encode rules about who can use them, who gets paid and what they cost. That's not so bad, but then the plan is for those rules to be enforced by an "end-to-end chain of trusted systems" from the multimedia creator to the OS on the end user's desk. Ouch. If my OS will no longer let me look at a file without an okay from Redmond (or Time/Warner/AOL, or the DoJ, or whoever) then who's in charge of this computer, me or them? And even if you consider this a legitimate anti-piracy scheme, imagine what an "end-to-end chain of trusted systems" could be used for in, say, China.

This isn't just speculation about the eventual direction of Microsoft products, either. Slashdot reports that Windows Media Player already contains a unique ID that can be used to track individuals' web access, and Microsoft refuses to disable it. The good nerds at Slashdot have lots of other examples.

causes 2002.01.18 link