World Domination Release 4.0

My Observer column about Palladium — the latest instalment in the story of Microsoft’s endless quest for World Domination — is on the Net.

More on Palladium. Microsoft climbs into bed with the copyright thugs

Excellent piece by Dylan Tweney. Some quotes:

“Microsoft’s newest project, code-named Palladium, is supposed to make computing safer, by building encryption and authentication technology into the hardware of your computer, right down to the level of the CPU. For example, data will be encrypted as it passes from your keyboard to the computer, to prevent wiretapping. It will be encrypted before it’s stored on your hard disk. Files and documents can be digitally signed to ensure their authenticity. And your computer can defend itself against viruses and hacker attacks, because unauthorized programs won’t even run on your computer without Palladium’s permission.

Windows XP has some rudimentary self-protection technologies built in, but Palladium won’t appear full-blown until the next major release of Windows in a couple of years. That’s because Palladium depends on specialized chips being developed by Intel and AMD, which will handle the encryption and authentication. In the early stages, this will rely on a so-called “Fritz” chip (named after Sen. Fritz Hollings, the sponsor of a draconian digital rights bill), which verifies that your computer is running an approved combination of hardware and software — before your computer even boots up. Once Fritz certifies the system, it can pass that certification along to third parties, such as Microsoft, Disney, Sony, or AOL/Time Warner. Later, “Fritz” capabilities will be built right into the central processor, making it next-to-impossible to intercept unencrypted data. Everything coming in and out of the CPU will be encrypted and digitally signed.

The problem is that Palladium requires users to place a huge amount of trust in Microsoft. You don’t get to decide what runs on your computer — Microsoft does. You can’t even open files unless you’ve been authorized by Microsoft, or by a third party. And that puts a huge amount of power into the hands of these corporations.”

Wireless telecoms: Four disruptive technologies

Excellent Economist survey of emerging technologies that promise to render not only the next wave of so-called 3G wireless networks irrelevant, but possibly even their 4G successors. This may be of interest to anyone foolish enough to hold on to their Vodafone shares.

Pissed off by pop-up ads?Who isn’t. But here’s how to get rid of them.

Software Subscriptions: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come
A nice piece by the “NYT”‘s David Pogue outlining Microsoft’s outrageous licensing plans. Quote:

“But this much I’m sure of: for companies that don’t automatically buy every new version of Windows and Office that comes down the pike, the new program is a bad deal. The Gartner Group research firm estimates that the new program will raise prices for these companies between 33 and 107 percent.

Companies that sign up for Software Assurance are, in essence, committing in advance to buying every upgrade — without knowing whether it will be any good, or even whether or not Microsoft will, in fact, release any upgrades at all during the three-year contract.

“In the old days, a company could buy one version of Office,” a Microsoft spokesperson told me. “They could run it for 50 years, and then tell us, [OE]I want the newest version, and I want the upgrade price.[base ‘] For Microsoft, this income stream was uneven and unpredictable.”

On that we can agree: the beneficiary of the new program is Microsoft, not the customer. ” Amen!

What does the Worldcom collapse mean for Joe Public?

Useful analysis by The Motley Fool. Basically, it matters to anyone with an investment-based pension.

Nathan Myhrvold on software defects. It’s all the user’s fault, apparently.

“The classic dilemma in software is that people continually want more and more and more stuff,” says Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft. Unfortunately, he notes, the constant demand for novelty means that software is always “in the bleeding-edge phase,” when products are inherently less reliable. In 1983, he says, Microsoft Word had only 27,000 lines of code. “Trouble is, it didn’t do very much” — which customers today wouldn’t accept. If Microsoft had not kept pumping up Word with new features, the product would no longer exist.        ”Users are tremendously non-self-aware,” Myhrvold adds. At Microsoft, he says, corporate customers often demanded that the company simultaneously add new features and stop adding new features. “Literally, I’ve heard it in a single breath, a single sentence. ‘We’re not sure why we should upgrade to this new release — it has all this stuff we don’t want — and when are you going to put in these three things?’ And you say, ‘Whaaat?'” Myhrvold’s sardonic summary: “Software sucks because users demand it to.”[Source.]

Why is software so bad?

“What’s surprising — astonishing, in fact — is that many software engineers believe that software quality is not improving. If anything, they say, it’s getting worse. It’s as if the cars Detroit produced in 2002 were less reliable than those built in 1982.”

[…]

‘ Microsoft released Windows XP on Oct. 25, 2001. That same day, in what may be a record, the company posted 18 megabytes of patches on its Web site: bug fixes, compatibility updates, and enhancements. Two patches fixed important security holes. Or rather, one of them did; the other patch didn’t work. Microsoft advised (and still advises) users to back up critical files before installing the patches. Buyers of the home version of Windows XP, however, discovered that the system provided no way to restore these backup files if things went awry. As Microsoft’s online Knowledge Base blandly explained, the special backup floppy disks created by Windows XP Home ‘do not work with Windows XP Home. ” [more…]

The author believes that the problem will only be solved when a software company is successfully sued for a problem arising from its malfunctioning software. Could this be the first time in history that lawyers were the solution to a problem?

First major book on ICANN?

MIT Press has published Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace, a new book by Milton Mueller, ICANNWatch.org editor and director of the graduate program in telecommunications and network management at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. Salon’s Andrew Leonard’s review provides a brief yet illuminating narrative description of ICANN’s relatively short history and its current challenges.

Nice quote from Francis Bacon about the difficulty of explaining complex stuff to a bemused public

” Those whose conceits are seated in popular opinions, need only but to prove or dispute; but those whose conceits are beyond popular opinions, have a double labor: the one to make themselves conceived, and the other to prove and demonstrate. So that it is of necessity with them to have recourse to similitudes and translations [that is, metaphors] to express themselves.”