Maybe Palladium is also necessary to deal with the eventual demise of Moore's Law.  What happens to all these BigCos when the technology treadmill -- that seemingly endless cycle of upgrading -- comes to a screaching halt?  What happens when your application reaches near perfection, to the point that there are no compelling new features you can add?  Well, by that point, maybe you have in place an infrastructure that facilitates software subscriptions.  Or music subscriptions.

Even then, I don't know to what extent the impact of the death of Moore's Law can be mitigated.  Let's face it, once Moore's Law becomes a thing of the past, it will be a very different world.

2:01:54 PM   

Palladium: Safe or Security Flaw?. Microsoft's new project could offer virus protection, control over personal information, even spam blocking. Or maybe it's a giant boondoggle. By Paul Boutin. [Wired News]

If people complained so much about the unique ID that Intel wanted to put into the Pentium III, why would anyone think that people will accept the Fritz chip?

Who needs Pallidium?  Big software companies need it.  Once you have saturated your market, how do you continue to grow your revenues?  Well, if you have little competition, you can raise your prices.  But that can anger your user base.  However, to grow your revenues, you absolutely must get more revenue per user.  How do you do that without raising prices?  You tinker with the licensing terms and enforcement.  You make sure that a user buys your software twice if he wants to run it on his desktop computer and his laptop computer.  The problem is, no matter what you do to grow per-user revenues, you make your user base angry.  It helps to spin your case by emphasizing the benefit to users: namely better security.

Media companies also need Pallidium.  They also need to grow per-consumer revenues.  If you are a media company, how do you do that?  Well, you make sure that consumers must buy a CD for their home and for their car.  You make sure that they can't make a backup copy of a CD, so that they will eventually have to replace the CDs they play the most frequently.  And you spin your case by claiming you are fighting illegal distribution over the Internet.

All this discussion gets to what I think is the heart of the matter.  User/consumers want to pay less for their computer/entertainment needs over time.  They want to reap the benefits of improvements in technology by paying less.  So when BigCos take steps to get more per-user revenue, it just makes them all angry.

1:54:54 PM   

Canning spam without eating up real mail. Blacklists have become a key weapon in the war against unsolicited bulk e-mail, leading some companies to turn a blind eye when they toss out legitimate messages with the trash. [CNET News.com]

I don't understand the dogged persistence of spammers.  If people don't want to receive spam, why try so hard to force it on them?  I mean, some individuals are working so hard to stop the spam from coming into their own inboxes.  If they work so hard, doesn't that mean that they really -- I mean really -- don't want it?  So why do the spammers work equally as hard to send spam to those who really don't want it?  And are the businesses who choose to advertise via spam so naive as to think that they will get a positive response from those who work so hard to not receive spam, and yet receive it anyway?

I expect that in the future, one technique for fighting spam will be to slow the delivery of spam.  What if edge routers were set up to allow only so much outbound traffic on TCP port 25 before they start dropping IP packets?  (Note: You could use a similar slowing technique at the application layer if you required all port 25 traffic to go to the ISPs mail server.  At the application layer, it would be much simpler to implement.)  The dropping of IP packets would cause the TCP flow control mechanism to automatically slow the flow of outbound IP packets.  The idea behind this, is that if spammers could send only 100,000 emails per day, it could really alleviate the spam problem.  Now I must admit that I really don't like this idea.  Why should edge routers have to bear the additional burden of filtering?  But it appears that the age of innocence may be over as far as the Internet is concerned.  Unscrupulous spammers have done their part to spoil it.

1:18:37 PM