Tuesday, May 13, 2008
One of the reasons there's been little debate about Trustworthy Computing is that no one -- including most Microsoft employees -- seems to know what it is. Even the company's public relations experts have trouble conveying Mundie's vision. But for those willing to wade through it, his white paper details the big picture in depth: "Trustworthy Computing is a label for a whole range of advances that have to be made for people to be as comfortable using devices powered by computers and software as they are today using a device that is powered by electricity."
That's a tall order, and a mission statement that could be extended to almost anything vaguely related to computing -- Mundie's paper includes regulatory issues along with technical ones. But besides fixing the notorious security holes in its Web servers and virus-prone desktop clients, the company is also pushing hard on a front that goes beyond its traditional role: Digital rights management, or DRM. A trustworthy DRM system would extend Microsoft's role where pundits focused on Web services and wireless gadgets least expect -- right under their noses, on the PC.
DRM technologies aim to block unlicensed distribution or use of copyrighted material. Movies, music, books, software -- any intellectual property that can be put into 1's and 0's and passed around the Internet for free. On the consumer side, similar worries abound over credit card numbers, passwords, account information, even mail -- all of it easily pilferable from the wide-open architecture of today's PC. Not just by crackers, but by your kids.
It's no secret in a post-Napster world that nothing digital is safe from being copied once it's on a PC. While individual users worry about storing sensitive personal information or sending it across the Net, corporations fear their valuable intellectual property will become worthless once released into the digital wild. Enter Microsoft, offering to tame these Internet-spawned threats -- by pushing its Windows operating system back into the center of every digital transaction.
"They're trying to get the PC back into the stream of e-commerce," says Lark Allen, VP of business development for Wave Systems, a Massachusetts company that supplies software and hardware to hold data securely inside a PC. "Today it's just a browser. We've moved all the important applications back off the desktop and onto the server, which is the only thing that's trusted today." Adding secure systems onto the PC, he says, could be "like the original PC era, where you start moving things back onto people's desks."
But at the same time consumers are worrying about having their personal data stolen, Hollywood studios are worrying about consumers. Studios have balked at releasing movies and music online until they're sure the PC users who pay to download them won't be able to give out a million free copies. Why should Microsoft care? Because if a solution can be found, downloadable movies might be the biggest boon to PC sales since the Web caught on nearly a decade ago: To play them, you'll want a PC even more powerful than the new crop of 2.4GHz machines with their 80-gigabyte disks. "It's going to be the biggest, fattest client you've ever seen," says Allen. "You'll want terabytes of storage."
Engineers like to keep intellectual property locked up behind firewalls and server room doors. But it seems to be basic human psychology that consumers prefer to have their stuff right in front of them on their computer. That's why Microsoft filed for a patent on a "digital rights management operating system" in 1999. The patent was granted this past December -- #6,330,670. If the company builds it and ships it, there's no doubt what it will be called: Windows.
It's also no coincidence that the proposed antitrust settlement cooked up by Microsoft and the Department of Justice conveniently excuses Microsoft from having to share any information related to digital rights management and encryption technology with its competitors.
So what's wrong with all this? If the answer wasn't obvious before last September, it is now: A ubiquitous box that holds everyone's personal information is the world's most tempting target for thieves and terrorists alike. Computer scientists call it "the monoculture problem," drawing a parallel to the frailties of single-strain crops described in Paul Raeburn's 1995 book "The Last Harvest" and its precursor of a decade earlier, Jack Doyle's "Altered Harvest." As Doyle wrote, "What appears to be a genetic godsend and an economic bonanza for the company today could become an economic nightmare for them tomorrow ... should one tiny organism find a genetic window of virulence in the Russet Burbank potato ... If that happens McDonald's will have contributed mightily to the spread of a genetic epidemic." In the early '90s, as Raeburn documented, a single strain of blight knocked out crops from Maine to British Columbia.
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