REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 20, 2003 -- The academic experts assembled at the Microsoft campus today have their work cut out for them. As members of the new Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, they've been asked to give scrutiny and advice on an ambitious company-wide initiative that aims to provide safe, private and reliable computing experiences for everyone.

To learn the why and what-for behind the group and its first two-day meeting, PressPass convened a group of its own. Joining the roundtable discussion are David Ladd, manager of external research programs for Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft Research, and two advisory board members, Dr. Fred B. Schneider, a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and Dr. Neeraj Suri, a professor at TU Darmstadt University in Darmstadt, Germany, near Frankfurt.

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Microsoft Corp. said today that it is developing add-on security technology for its forthcoming Windows Server 2003 operating system software that will allow organizations to implement rights-management protections on corporate documents such as e-mail messages and data files.

The Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) will be able to enforce protection policies by controlling which users can access specific content and what access rights they are granted. Companies will, for example, be able to restrict content copying, forwarding and printing in applications such as portal, e-mail and word-processing software.

"What this really is about is having customers trust their platform more when they're using it to manage sensitive internal business information such as financial reports and business plans inside the organization," said Mike Nash, vice president of Microsoft's Security Business Unit.

The rights management features will be built into the Office 2003 versions of the Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook applications, according to Amy Carroll, group manager of Microsoft's Windows Trusted Platform Technologies group.

However, only users of Microsoft's most recent products will be able to fully take advantage of the technology. RMS relies on the proposed Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML) standard, an XML-based language that is heavily backed by Microsoft but has yet to attract broad industry support. While Office 2003, Microsoft's Office update scheduled for mid-2003, supports XrML and will work with RMS, older versions of Microsoft Office, including the currently available Office XP, won't work with the technology.

[Privacy Digest]

Yet another technology that gets in the way of preserving electronic records.

Still wondering too how Microsoft will fix the Year 2030 Bug that affects its Microsoft Office products and Windows 2000. This is a screenshot of the problem that's buried in Control Panel > Regional and Language Options for Windows XP Home Edition. Some of you may recognize this as Microsoft's solution to the Y2K Bug which is no solution at all in this archivist's opinion. The fix merely advances the bug another 30 years and allows it to continue advancing a year at a time. Microsoft disavowed any future liability with Y2K by transferring the issue to its customer base. A search for "Year 2000" in the Title field of records in the Microsoft Product Support Services Web shows 102 articles (out of a possible maximum limit of 150 articles). because the company considered the problem solved from its perspective, Microsoft decommissioned its own Y2K Bug Web site:

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