An excerpt from the Author’s Note to Richard Stallman’s The Right to Read:
One of the ideas in the story was not proposed in reality until 2002. This is the idea that the FBI and Microsoft will keep the root passwords for your personal computers, and not let you have them.
The proponents of this scheme have given it names such as “trusted computing” and “palladium”. We call it “treacherous computing”, because the effect is to make your computer obey companies instead of you. This was implemented in 2007 as part of “Windows Vista” ; we expect Apple to do something similar. In this scheme, it is the manufacturer that keeps the secret code, but the FBI would have little trouble getting it.
What Microsoft keeps is not exactly a password in the traditional sense; no person ever types it on a terminal. Rather, it is a signature and encryption key that corresponds to a second key stored in your computer. This enables Microsoft, and potentially any web sites that cooperate with Microsoft, the ultimate control over what the user can do on his own computer.
Vista also gives Microsoft additional powers; for instance, Microsoft can forcibly install upgrades, and it can order all machines running Vista to refuse to run a certain device driver. The main purpose of Vista’s many restrictions is to make DRM that users can’t overcome.
The whole story is worth reading. I think it connects to my earlier blog entries about normalcy, Incarceration Makes Me Crabby and Waiting. But it’s got a new twist: a slow evolution to our sense of what is “normal”, and therefore acceptable, can be insidious.
(Tip of the hat to Daring Fireball for the link to Stallman’s article.)
