Stop Palladium!

To:  TCPA - Trusted Computing Platform Alliance

Quote: "The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, or TCPA, was formed by Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft. All five companies have been individually working on improving the trust available within the PC for years. These companies came to an important conclusion: the level, or "amount", of trust they were able to deliver to their customers, and upon which a great deal of the information revolution depended, needed to be increased and security solutions for PC's needed to be easy to deploy, use and manage. An open alliance was formed to work on creating a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform."

This sounds so promising does it? don't you just feel safe? NO!
Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for "improved" trust in the PC platform.' Palladium is software that Microsoft says it plans to incorporate in future versions of Windows; it will build on the TCPA hardware, and will add some extra "features".

So what does it do?
It provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with the vendor. The obvious application is digital rights management (DRM): Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a Palladium platform, but which you won't be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.
TCPA / Palladium will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software. Pirate software can be detected and deleted remotely. It will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buying it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created. For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: Palladium could be the answer to his prayer.

There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists. Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.

There is a downside too (and many of them). There will be remote censorship: the mechanisms designed to delete pirated music under remote control may be used to delete documents that a court (or a software company) has decided are offensive - this could be anything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders. Software companies can also make it harder for you to switch to their competitors' products; for example, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor.
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So actually you are giving total strangers FULL ACCESS to your computer, and i mean FULL ACCESS!
They can delete files, not allow you to play specific mp3s, not allow you to install specific software, make you use only microsoft products to do specific tasks, automatically download USELESS patches for microsoft products which will make your life even more misruble (like a patch for Windows Media Player, that will delete all "pirated" mp3s from your computer)

I think that WE must stop this nonsense before it takes over YOUR computer!
So please, let's prevent World Domination from our dear friend, Mr. Bill Gates the III :)

Oh and don't believe anything that these trolls will try to tell you. This is totally garbage. These trolls will try to convince you that Palladium will prevent your computer from hacker attacks. We'll i think that we have all seen how good Microsoft can protect our computers against hacker attacks (flawed patches, patches that cause stability issues, more security issues, etc..)

You can read more about Palladium at it's official website if you want, but i bet that it's all rainbow and sunshine in there, so don't fall for it.
http://www.trustedcomputing.org

I rest my case.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The Stop Palladium! Petition to TCPA - Trusted Computing Platform Alliance was created by Anyone who uses a PC and a WindowsOS and written by Michael Velbaum.  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no express or implied endorsement of this petition by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. The petition scripts are created by Mike Wheeler at Artifice, Inc.  For Technical Support please use our simple Petition Help form.

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