[Am-info] TCPA / Palladium FAQ

[John J. Urbaniak]

"Fred A. Miller" wrote:

> Long, but VERY good!

I found this gem particularly interesting (emphasis mine):

22. But isn't PC security a good thing?

The question is: security for whom? The average user might prefer not to
have to worry about viruses, but TCPA won't fix that: viruses exploit
the way software applications (such as Microsoft Office) use scripting.
He might be worried about privacy, but TCPA won't fix that; almost all
privacy violations result from the abuse of authorised access, often
obtained by coercing consent. If anything, by *entrenching and expanding
monopolies*, TCPA will increase the incentives to price discriminate and
thus to harvest personal data for profiling.

The most charitable view of TCPA is put forward by a Microsoft
researcher: there are some applications in which you want to constrain
the user's actions. For example, you want to stop people fiddling with
the odometer on a car before they sell it. Similarly, if you want to do
DRM on a PC then you need to *treat the user as the enemy. *

Seen in these terms, TCPA and Palladium do not so much provide security
for the user, but for the PC vendor, the software supplier, and the
content industry. They do not add value for the user. Rather, they
*destroy* it, by constraining what you can do with your PC - in order to
enable application and service vendors to extract more money from you.

...

John


>
>
> Fred
>
> <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html>
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> --
> Fred A. Miller
> Systems Administrator
> Cornell Univ. Press Services
> fm@cupserv.org, www.cupserv.org
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