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Palladium Details

Time: 01:01 EST/06:01 GMT | News Source: E-Mail | Posted By: Robert Stein

Here are some MS Palladium details (notes) that were dropped our way, there is a lot of information but if you read through it all you will get a lot out of it. These are dated from Friday, so they are still fresh. We believe the notes are authentic. Here is a short excerpt:

Peter Biddle at Microsoft began thinking around 1997 about how to protect his bits when they were on someone else's computer. (He was Microsoft's representative at CPTWG and in the DVD-CCA, and was somewhat skeptical of the technical efficacy of software-based DRM.)
His view, and the view of some of his colleagues, was that they ultimately did not know how to enforce a policy for the use of information when it was kept and used on somebody else's PC. The PC platform did not seem to support this.
In thinking about this, he decided that "a blob is a blob". ["Blob" is a database term for "binary large object", and roughly means "file", "data structure", or "sequence of bits whose internal structure is unanalyzed".] So, it was not appropriate to think about protecting some bits more than others, or enforcing some kinds of policies but not others. So the protection of privacy was the same technical problem as the protection of copyright, because in each case bits owned by one party were being entrusted to another party and there was an attempt to enforce a policy. Technologically, this could not be done securely with software alone.