There's plenty of other stupidity that people said wouldn't fly that we are now saddled with, including the DMCA. If the corporations behind the politicians want it bad enough, it'll happen. Plus at this point the average PC user doesn't really know or care about the pieces that make up the machine so there will be little resistance in that respect. Jeff -- Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.cchaven.com http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

Yes, but now we're fighting terrorism. Polls show that more than 55% of US citizens surveyed now want to give up their civil liberties to be protected from terrorism. :-( This Palladium stuff is the result of something I've been ranting about for years, the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance. On the surface, "Trusted Computing" sounds good. Until you realize that the buyer of the computer isn't the party that will be able to trust the TPCA equipped machine. Others have pointed out that if this stuff all goes through, people who don't run Windows will lose access to most of the Internet (best case), or possibly have to create another parallel Internet (if it remains legal to do so). But another effect is that non-Palladium hardware will become very expensive. Early Palladium hardware might just involve add-on chips that can easily be disabled (if you don't need to interoperate with other Palladium systems), but the agenda is to build it into the processor, and Intel and AMD both seem willing to do it. Once that happens, you won't even be able to buy a microprocessor without Palladium and still get competitive performance. Non-Palladium processors will exist for embedded applications, but they'll be older, slower technology, just as processors targeting embedded applications generally are now. Fight the Future! performance to the latest Intel and AMD parts

On Thu, 27 Jun 2002, Eric Smith wrote: I say we deport that 55% to Afghanistan and make them work in the poppy fields. The side benefit would be that those people will hopefully become too doped up to ever find their way back to the US and pollute it with their flawed ideals. I am all for creating a parallel internet. It would be a chance to start over, learn from the mistakes of Internet 1, and improve it to the point that it makes people still on Internet 1 long to be on Son of Internet. Then everyone migrates to Son of Internet, Internet 1 dies, Palladium goes with it, Microsoft loses it's grip on the market, and everyone lives happily ever after. THE END Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

Yes, you are missing something. They don't want to improve security in "current products", because if they build it into new products instead, then they can make you pay for it. So instead of real fixes, they just patch a few widely known vulnerabilities. Of course, they wouldn't want to build too much security in all at once, because then they couldn't make you pay for it again the next year, and the next...