26 June 2002
See also:
http://cryptome.org/tcpa-rja.htm
To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Subject: Re: "Palladium" and TCPA
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 16:48:51 +0100
From: Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk>
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