Previous post notwithstanding, I’m disturbed to discover that I had literal nightmares about Palladium last night. And sensible ones too (in the sense that they didn’t consist of Steve Ballmer chasing me across a landscape made of giant naked librarians).
I’m still clarifying my thoughts on this, but Palladium appears to involve sacrificing liberty (the liberty to choose what runs on my computer) for some temporary security. And the more I think about it, the more I don’t like it. Ryan Lackey, in more forthright terms, agrees.
In his fascinating summary of what is to be done, Ryan discusses mass public rejection of Palladium, and I currently see this as the best solution. But I’m still trying to bring together my thoughts to convey why – and I worry that many geeks don’t instinctively understand the risks.
Before they were slapped into wakefulness by the wet trout of legislation, many knowledgeable people assured me that information could never be controlled, because the PC was, de facto, an open system.
Worse, there was a tacit assumption by a lot of (especially software) folk that over time, everything was an open system – that people wouldn’t stand for anything else, and that if nothing else the ingenuity of the black market would guarantee our freedoms. As someone who has watched Rupert Murdoch succesfully introduce a completely closed, cryptographically secure, digital content-provision system to 40% of UK households, I know that isn’t true. There’s a lot of (illicit) money to be made cracking the Sky Digital box, and it hasn’t been yet. Open systems are the exception, not the rule.
Palladium would install a closed environment on every usable desktop on the planet. Who entered and what exited that environment would not be controlled by the owner. Your programs would not run there, except at the behest of Microsoft. Software that did run there would be hidden from your sight by strong cryptography, so there would be no way of knowing what it was doing in the Palladium. And all the vital parts of your computer – the low-level hardware, a chunk of your RAM, a slice of your harddrive, even perhaps a sizeable amount of your networking capability – would only be accessible from within the Palladium. The Palladium is like Shakin’ Stevens “Green Door”. You don’t know what they’re doing, but they certainly are laughing a lot behind it.
Cory talks about the universal Turing machine as a unique object, that differs from the rest of our consumer electronics. Intel exec Leslie Vadasz warns of “neuter[ing] the personal computer to be nothing more than a videocassette recorder”. But the hardest part of this fight will be explaining to the media and the politicians (and maybe the public, although I think they have a better grasp than the rest) what the difference is. And why putting this tiny little poisoned and closed chalice into every PC destroys what has driven so much of the innovation of the last thirty years.