June 1, 2005
Intel adds bolts for Microsoft’s chains
Intel apparently has added “Microsoft-flavored” DRM to its Pentium D and 945 chipset. Hannibal at ArsTechnica guesses:
From what I can tell, DTCP is essentially a protocol that sits on top of TCP/IP and provides DRM by ensuring that both endpoints in an IP connection are trusted before transmitted protected content. I imagine that Intel’s DTCP support is some kind of hardware-level means of enabling the strict enforcement of this endpoint authentication in software. As to what specific form this enablement takes, only further digging on our part and more revelations from Intel will tell.
This would, apparently, prevent unwanted (= malware) programs from being transmitted to your computer, but would also allow DRM to prevent you from moving content to computers it thinks is unauthorized. (The odds are currently 35:1 that I’m getting this wrong.)
DRM will bring some benefits, but I continue to believe that ultimately Microsoft’s driving aim is to turn itself into the dominant delivery mechanism for Hollywood content. It achieves this if Hollywood can be persuaded that only Microsoft has secure players (which used to be known as “computers”). So, we’ll be watching movies at home, playing games, listening to music and reading our newspapers and textbooks all via Microsoft software running on “trusted” hardware. That’s the big win for Microsoft and if that means locking down the formerly open domains of personal computing and the Internet, then that’s a price Microsoft is willing to have us pay. IMO.
This would be an excellent time for some very skeptical and well-informed people to take a look at Microsoft’s “InfoCard identity metasystem“. The very skeptical and well-informed Johannes Ernst (of LID), whose opinion means a lot to me, thinks it makes sense, but when he says “InfoCard will be anchored pretty deeply inside the Windows OS in a secure process space,” I worry how far secure digital ID is going to advance the Microsoft lock-in.
Before you start flaming me for my paranoia and for my downplaying the importance of security, let me counter: It’s all in the trade-offs. By all rights, each one of us should put proximity to a hospital as the main criterion for choosing a place to live, but we don’t — even though we might die because we’re an extra 3 minutes or 3 hours from one — because reduction of risk is not the only value. Likewise for our computing and networking platforms.
(Thanks to Eric Norlin for the link.) [Technorati tags: drm microsoft intel]
