Rut Roh, says Astro! Me thinks I smell a rat.
Does anyone out there remember when you first heard Bill Gates talk about Secured and/or Trusted Computers? No this is not a pop-quiz. However I'd sure like to know. If you have an idea when and where, I need to hear from you pronto. Thanks. Hit the yellow envelope and email me...
Here's why-- Microsoft was granted for a patent on Digital rights management operating system in Jan 1999 and was granted the patent in December of 2001. (That's pretty fast for the USPTO.) This gives Microsoft the patent rights on encryption to a CPU key. (Nasty little idea, unless you can flash around and reprogram it.;-) In a nutshell the idea is puts the Microsoft Digi-Rights into a two-step with the CPU to authenticate. Intel would have to do the other end of the programming in the CPU and pay Microsoft a license fee.
Now wonder why Senator Hollings was being so nasty to Intel at the hearings Jan 2002? Hmm?
And we wonder why Intel's VP said Hollings Bill would effectively "neuter" the computer?
Here's the Patent # 6,330,670 Abstract
A digital rights management operating system protects rights-managed data, such as downloaded content, from access by untrusted programs while the data is loaded into memory or on a page file as a result of the execution of a trusted application that accesses the memory. To protect the rights-managed data resident in memory, the digital rights management operating system refuses to load an untrusted program into memory while the trusted application is executing or removes the data from memory before loading the untrusted program. If the untrusted program executes at the operating system level, such as a debugger, the digital rights management operating system renounces a trusted identity created for it by the computer processor when the computer was booted. To protect the rights-managed data on the page file, the digital rights management operating system prohibits raw access to the page file, or erases the data from the page file before allowing such access. Alternatively, the digital rights management operating system can encrypt the rights-managed data prior to writing it to the page file. The digital rights management operating system also limits the functions the user can perform on the rights-managed data and the trusted application, and can provide a trusted clock used in place of the standard computer clock. [This is a US and International Patent.]
If someone's got time to dig through the Microsoft Press Releases for the past 18-24 months, and see when Bill first started talking about something like this. I remember something was said at NAB 2001 or Comdex 2000 Fall.
Thanks to Doc for pointing me to the Linux & Main site.
5:10:24 AM
|