NeoWin has an alleged leaked Palladium whitepaper. [Hack the Planet]

Dig the irony.  If your computer was equipped with Palladium, it would prevent you from reading this leaked document.

I know now why they call it "spin."  The doublespeak, prevarication, and veiled half-truths in this document are making my head spin. 

This document is (purportedly) from the Microsoft Content Security Business Unit.  "Content security" == DRM.  As you read it, keep telling yourself, "it's all about the copy protection."  It's not about killing GPL or Linux, it's not about protecting you from viruses, it's not about locking up file formats.  Those are side effects.  Palladium is not about anything but making the PC safe for Hollywood.  It's a technical means to extend the Entertainment Oligopoly onto your home computer.  That's the goal.

8:23:24 AM   

The Idea Basket: On Rendezvous, TiVo, and Parliamentary Titles: An Exclusive Interview with Stuart Cheshire. [Hack the Planet]

Totally neat interview!  Apple is taking a very open, standard approach to this nifty new technology they're putting together.  Instead of taking Apple-proprietary stuff and layering it over IP, they engaged the IETF in a discussion to determine how to make Apple's stuff more IETF-friendly.  As a result, it'll be easier for other vendors to interoperate with Apple.  Yay!

A great quote from the article about how this stuff will be used in non-computer applications: "Rendezvous is not just about making current networked devices easier to use. It is also about making it viable to put networking (i.e. Ethernet) on devices that today use USB or Firewire, and it is also about making it viable to use networking in areas that you wouldn't have even considered before Rendezvous. Imagine a future world where you connect your television and amplifier and DVD player with just a couple of Ethernet cables, instead of today's spaghetti mess of composite video, S-Video, component video, stereo audio, 5.1 Dolby, Toslink optical audio cables, etc."

I want this.  I want every piece of consumer electronics I buy to have a Zeroconf stack in it. 

I've often wondered why Sony and other consumer electronics heavyweights are off inventing proprietary connectors and protocols when it would be so much easier to just use standard Ethernet and IP.  Knowing there's an open standard infrastructure underneath these new products will make it much easier for me to adopt this new technology.  If it's standard and open, you know it'll have legs.

7:45:20 AM   

Consensus at Lawyerpoint: Hollings: Broadcast flag now, by FCC mandate. I suspected they'd try this technique. [Hack the Planet]

It seems that Senator Hollings is frustrated with the legislative process.  Poor guy -- he's just trying to exercise his God-given power over us ignorant peons.  But whenever this pet legislator introduces one of the bills written by his masters in Hollywood, all these annoying citizens find out about it and spoil his plans!  What a pain these citizens are, with their demands to be represented and to be allowed to participate in the decision-making process.  When are they going to learn to shut up and be governed?

So at the behest of his owners in the Entertainment Oligopoly (who, after all, bought and paid for him fair and square), he's bypassing legislation altogether and going directly to the FCC, ordering it to mandate industry adoption of technology designed specifically to steal our fair use rights.  There aren't any elected representatives at the FCC, so this should go much more smoothly than having to deal with that whole "representative democracy" thing.  What a bother.

7:25:13 AM