Ross Anderson's TCPA / Palladium FAQ is a manditory read. I believe that Microsoft will publish all there APIs for trustworthy computing efforts and DRM APIs as this will gain them more credibility as an industry standard. What they are publishing is just the software layer. Microsoft is targeting another peice of the pie to continue total market domination.

When we buy TCPA hardware and software, we are giving someone else the power to control our new devices. All software has to be certified by the infamous *them* or Master Control Program (MCP) won't let it run. Tron all over again. We are at a stage when everything cool and open about the internet is begining to change. In 4 years HTML, jpeg, mp3, and divx may only exist in the digital getthos. Web browsers may just become shells for Microsoft and Adobe plugins reading documents that can only be authored with their products and which must be "sealed" with a digital certificate for distribution.

Censorship is a heck of a lot easier when you can broadcast a message to the MCP of every host and "arrest" documents. Plenty of info will be echoed back to authorities too document the arrest of the user. Or less dramatically delivery of documents may just fail silently.

Perhaps the TCPA consortium will chmod your critisism of the MCP to read only by you. .Every system you log into will show the document, but everyone else will see "Sorry you don't have the right to access this document.". RMS's paranoia is really hitting the mark! It is becoming even more important to chose free software only, but what happens when there is no free hardware?

What happens when you can't get your free software to interact with the network, because it isn't certified? What happens when 95% of the world is using the TCPA internet? We will have world class free communications software that is locked out and obscure. The techno-elite will have to make an analog phone call to communicate with anyone who choses to use a trusted platform. No IM, no Email, no Blogging, no P2P because you aren't authorized. You are untrusted, cause you haven't given your trust over to a MCP.

Trust can only be automated if the end user is in control. Trust that is regulated by a central authority is called a dictatorship.

Get ready to pay to publish. Get ready to pay to read. Start editing your content so that it won't get flagged for review as un-trustable. Web documents will be binary. Encryption and management will happen in the CPU.