Microsoft apparently got the hint: Palladium, its new scheme to fortify the next Windows operating system, win the ever-escalating virus wars, and knuckle down on users trying to share files, wasn"t exactly causing the great PR buzz it anticipated. Objective folks who had seen the early plans zeroed in on the fact that under this idea, users were going to lose control of their computers due to monumental back-door access controlled by Microsoft. The company called it "trusted computing," and detractors immediately modified that to read "treacherous computing."
Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman, a frequent contributor to these pages, was one of those people in a serious state of alarm. Last year he wrote a detailed article, "Can you trust your computer?" in NewsForge about the myriad dangers Palladium posed, not only to personal privacy but to personal control over individual and networked computers. Never mind simple file sharing; Stallman pointed out a lot more than that -- such as loss of control of e-mail, text documents, graphics -- basically everything, including access to the Internet itself. Follow the above link to his article to see what Microsoft wanted to do a year ago; then continue on here to see how the company portends to have improved upon this plan.