Trusted Computing Initiative

Short version-- take everything I said about the $25/month club for music and apply it to all of the documents and spreadsheets on your computer. Let's make sure we're on the same page-- this means you'll be paying for continued access to your own content, the stuff you create, not just to the things you buy or rent from others.

How can that be? Long version. The companies who make the artificial brains inside our laptop and desktop computers know that we're having problems with viruses, worms, and all manner of software that somehow gets into our computers and starts running and takes over and does bad stuff like deleting our files or sending all of our keystrokes to the China or stealing our online banking password or sending spam to everybody in our address book. This is a big problem and a lot of big companies are trying to figure out how to solve, by which I mean monetize, this big problem.

Of course, what we, the consumers of this technology, really want is for it to just work better. Stop catching every virus that comes down the web. Give us back control of our property-- let us be the absolute authority over "what software will run on this computer?" But it turns out there's no revenue stream-- no long term sustainable cash flow-- associated with solving that problem. Antivirus companies (of which I note that Microsoft is now one) depend on our continued vulnerability for their continued quarterly earnings. Solving this problem once and for all time makes no economic sense for anybody, it would be like making a razor blade that never got dull-- how would you stay in business?

So we're unlikely to get a solution to our computers' virus problems, well, I mean your computers' virus problems, my homebrew stuff doesn't have virus problems. The solutions offered to us for these kinds of security problems have to be correctly labelled, such as the "Trusted Computing Initiative". We all want our computing to be more trusted, don't we? Well, maybe, maybe not. TCPA will give "big software" the ability to demand royalties from independent software producers who want to market to "big software"'s platform. In other words, to keep us safe from viruses, "big software" will have to know exactly what software our computers should trust. Their only way to do that is if all software we can run is registered (for a fee, naturally) with the whatever company we got our operating system from. Apparently, Microsoft feels they've been losing money every time we buy a game for our Windows computer, unless the game publisher has paid Microsoft a cut of the proceeds. I know this is how the Xbox and Playstation have always worked, but somehow I'm troubled by the change.

But let's talk about your content. I mean your own documents, spreadsheets, things you create. Let me make it clear that "big software" isn't going to try to steal your work or claim joint ownership of it. But what they can do, and will do, is rent rather than sell you the technology you use to create and access your own work. And they'll do this in partnership with "big hardware", so that it'll be super fast and impossible to "work around." If you decline to renew your tithe to your operating system or application suppliers, you could find yourself locked out of your own documents. And if you think you can export them into a more open format before your tithe expires, be careful, they're expecting that. You might be able to export it as an encrypted PDF, fine for viewing and printing but impossible to edit. Listen, though, they don't want much. You pay your other suppliers over and over, don't you? Like your car insurance or your groceries. All your technology vendors want is a cut, a piece of the action. And in exchange for monetizing your activities in perpetuity, they promise to keep you safe.

Yeah, right. So, the reason this hasn't already happened and isn't likely to happen any time this decade is that it's too hard. Just too darned complicated. It's a whole new kind of software, a whole new kind of hardware. It's the holy grail of monetizing human action, and so the folks who want to stand at the receiving end of that cash flow will never give up. But at the moment it appears to be easier to create peace in the middle east or return to a two-party system of government in the United States than to create and debug all that new hardware and new software all at once. Look for it in dribs and drabs. First they'll come for your music. Oops.

(If there's time during Q&A I'll tell you about monoclonal architectures.)