Oh man, a lengthily read, but well worth it. How can Bill Gates expect to get away with this? I read most of it, but left out a little, did it say anything about the time when this TCPA is going to be introduced? Or when Senator Fritz Hollings is likely to win his case in congress? One thing's for sure, Microsoft will lose a hell of a lot of customers for this outrage. Doesn't this just make you want to pie Bill Gates again?

9. Why call the monitor chip a `Fritz' chip?

In honour of Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, who is working tirelessly in Congress to make TCPA a mandatory part of all consumer electronics.




Those scheming bastards...

Time to start downloading linux, everyone!

I wonder how long it'll take before there's a soft workaround for it...

Not too long after it's released if I don't miss my guess...

That, Mr G., is what I said to my good friend and co-worker Richard today.

Every time someone develops something they think is going to stop piracy forever, they always completely fail to realise that there is an equal and opposite counter force of intelligent computing people trying to render useless their efforts to do so.

I remember when CSS was meant to ensure that the DVD format would not be pirated - the decryption key was leaked more or less instantly that DVDs became popular, and DeCSS was born. Now we have divx for encoding the rips to smaller but suitable quality files for trading over the internet.

Even if you design a chip that fits on a computer motherboard that functions to detect media piracy on a hardware level, which your PC will not boot without, someone will just write a firmware patch that disables this, because the source code for this technology will be leaked, and someone will use that code to create a countermeasure.

As long as there are programmers, and system administrators, and hackerz and computer scientists, there will always be a way to beat this kind of thing because some geeky person somewhere will care enough to work on a way to beat it.

You can't ever stop this force and it will endure forever. Nothing can stop it ; computing will always be free.

...Or at least, I hope it will......

This honestly makes me sick to my stomach.

If the technology must exist, then we should have the ability to turn it off.

I liked the idea that only certain flavours of linux would support it, or perhaps what would be good would be if under linux it was an option whether or not to compile your kernel with support for it, which I think is likely what will happen if it takes off.

Like a lot of these kinds of things, they sound pretty scary but once they actually materialise (like the CSS I mentioned), they turn out to be a lot more harmless.

However, I take your point about the CPU support. But its also may be the case that a lot of possbilities that the article mentions will fail to materialise.

But as an attempt my Microsoft to control the flow of information into and out of the PC, yes its scary. They have absolutely no right to take over the PC platform like this. I think this technology may be Microsoft's downfall. Its also possible that another IA32 or IA64 compatible CPU maker might choose to bring out a chip that does not include Palladium support, or has the ability to turn it off. Motherboards may also have a jumper to disable it, even for the Intel and AMD chips.

Hey, I just had a thought -

What if there is always the option NOT to use Palladium tech on any file that you create, and you can even set this by default.

Maybe you can have the ability to read Palladium enabled media if you want, but you have the option to create your own without it.

I am sure that, if this is not the way its gonna be already, then after MS is dragged to the courts AGAIN (urgh!), it will be made to do that.

That would mean that there would be nothing to stop me from creating mp3s, divx rips, etc and choosing NOT to use palladium on it.

The article mentions that to use Palladium even at all, one must accept that pirated software is not an option. But it seems like there is some flexibility regarding other types of information such as video and audio media.

I think that MS wants this technology primarily to stop the extensive computer piracy in China. It wants the largest nation on Earth to get its act together and start paying for MS products. In the final analysis, it comes down to making more money for Bill, and that's that. He can get into bed with the Digital Millenium Copyright Bill Nazi Anti-pirate-till-you-bleed RIAA folks of this world, but only as a form of amusement and to suit his own ends. Bill wants to tackle piracy of MS products through Palladium, I think so.

Its possible that something good will come from Palladium, but I think that any self respecting hacker/programmer/modder/computer-tech-head will want to try to run an operating system in such a configuration that it complelely ignores it, at least as part of a dual-boot scenario.

hello, I just want to throw in some comments.

-css was weak from the very beggining, it was more of a "consumer pay me more strategy". also, they key was never leaked afaik, it was a brute force hack.

-xbox already has some good protection on it, take a look at this http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/articles.php?aid=20030051051044
but let me quote
"Ridiculously strong crypto on the applications (2048 bit RSA, double the keylength many banks use) means that only Microsoft programs can be run - MICROSOFT ONLY

the fact that it is only a market gig, doesn't means they can't come with something similar for PC in the future. (we produce our own PCs, we can put what we want on them blah blah blah....)

-do not forget, that mod chip makers are under attack as of right now, and hackers see xbox and a palladium test bed.

-also, don't forget how badly m$ wants open source and gpl to be dead.


I don't want to start a flame war, but a view from the "whole" paint is need to understand how m$ and get thru with this.

Very, very intresting...but why on earth would you want to run Linux on an XBOX? cuz your anti-M$? why'd you ever get one!?! Plus, (i know about 0/Zero about linux) dont you have to type in like code and stuff to get it to do things?

I think you all missed one big point here. Its bad enough that they could make whatever they wanted with your computer. They could dele files they decide is illegal and stuff. What if a manufacturer would make an Office clone for instance, and microsoft just happend to by mistake delete a file of that software making it crash? would that right be good in anyones hands? like who are they to think they can judge what we/i can do and not do with my computer. They say its for getting payed for their hard work, well if they would have a resonable price and realy good products i think ppl would pay. But with widows it always seems that you always get a beta. once the version gets completed its already outdated and another version beta is out

anyways its a lot of power to put in anyones hands, and i dont think anyone in this world is both smart enough and is fair enough to others to claim that kind of power.

A little off topic, sorry ...

But in countries like Russia thats what the dovernment was doing MASSIVLY until a few years and continues doing that a little bit now ... Same in some African countries & stuff ... :dead: