Seth on TCPA at Defcon/Usenix

John Gilmore gnu at toad.com
Sun Aug 11 14:15:28 EDT 2002


> It reminds me of an even better way for a word processor company to make
> money: just scramble all your documents, then demand ONE MILLION DOLLARS
> for the keys to decrypt them.  The money must be sent to a numbered
> Swiss account, and the software checks with a server to find out when
> the money has arrived.  Some of the proposals for what companies will
> do with Palladium seem about as plausible as this one.

Isn't this how Windows XP and Office XP work?  They let you set up the
system and fill it with your data for a while -- then lock up and
won't let you access your locally stored data, until you put the
computer on the Internet and "register" it with Microsoft.  They
charge less than a million dollars to unhand your data, but otherwise
it looks to me like a very similar scheme.

There's a first-person report about how Office XP made the computers
donated for the 9/11 missing persons database useless after several
days of data entry -- so the data was abandoned, and re-entered into a
previous (non-DRM) Microsoft word processor.  The report came through
this very mailing list.  See:

  http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@wasabisystems.com/msg02134.html

This scenario of word processor vendors denying people access to their
own documents until they do something to benefit the vendor is not
just "plausible" -- it's happening here and now.

	John





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