[DMCA-Activists] Register: Intel's Share-Denial Scheme

[Seth Johnson]

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/27065.html

Where art thou Stuckists?
Intel reveals share denial PC scheme

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 11/09/2002 at 09:02 GMT

It was a schizophrenic Intel that faced the world at its
Developer Conference in San Jose yesterday. In the morning
keynote it touted its new multimedia "adaptor" platform,
with glossy lifestyle videos explaining how our "digital
media experience" would become "more convenient". 

In the afternoon it explained why it was embedding digital
certificates into the hardware - and a spokesman from
VeriSign Inc., which is partnering with Intel in this great
adventure, could hardly believe his luck. 

On Thursday, when most of the press will have departed, it
will host a session discussing a variety of share-denial
technologies being funded by, or developed in, Intel's labs.
These include our old favorite CPRM - incorporated into
DVD-Audio players from Panasonic (DMR-E20) and Pioneer
(DVR-3000) - along with DTCP (Digital Transmission Content
Protection, which encrypts air to ground, or cable
transmissions over FireWire) and HDCP (High Bandwith Digital
Content Protection), which encrypts the display
transmissions from your computer to your monitor. 

What an astonishing loss of courage from America's greatest
technology company - and we mean that most sincerely. 

Intel can at least lay a legitimate claim on the crown, as
students of the Victorian era will know. Much of Intel's R&D
goes largely unnoticed - it's spent on manufacturing
improvements that shrink the process size, for example, and
allow unimaginable quantities of processors to be produced
on these processes at low cost. 

Although the great computing pioneer Charles Babbage never
actually completed anything, his R&D into ever more exacting
tools and processes gave Whitworth, amongst others, and an
ungrateful British Empire, a fifty year technology lead.
Thanks to Chipzilla, we don't have to wait this long.
Intel's R&D work feeds directly into finished consumer
goods, which is A Good Thing, and it's doubtful that anyone
else would commit the capital, or have quite the
single-minded devotion to advancing the semiconductor
industry's processes as Intel. 

But under pressure from the Pigopolists who own today's
analog entertainment distribution industry, Intel is
buckling under. It's now devoting its considerable
brainpower to kill the open platform that it nurtured and
popularized. 

Embedded certificates  Intel is to embed certificates into
the processor. Embedded certificates will be a feature of
Banias processors next year. 

That's an extraordinary gambit, considering that Intel
backed down under a hail of fire when in 1999 it introduced,
and then withdrew its processor ID. But certificates are
much worse, as they leave you with little use for your
communications device, unless that is, you want sit there
and recompile vi all day. The audit trail leads right back
to the certificate provider, so shopping and other, typical
retail exchanges are linked to the certification authority.
Verisign Inc. and Intel yesterday boasted how if your laptop
was lost, you could magically revoke the certificate and
render the machine as dead metal. Well, whoopee. 

What are the downsides? You can count them. The business of
ownership of a device suddenly becomes very important indeed
- your PC is tagged at birth, and your choice of operating
system or browser is contingent on the generosity of the
certification authority. Now let's contrast this with the
genius of GSM, which became the world's mobile phone
standard, trumping the technically superior CDMA air
interface, by ensuring that independence was mandated as
part of the specification. In GSM land, you can use your
phone account - your contract - in another device, without
the carrier knowing that you've changed. This guarantees the
consumer a huge amount of freedom, and consumers like this
kind of freedom, and exploit it. Carriers must consequently
compete on better service, and handset vendors must to
compete with ever swishier and more attractive phones.
Members of the free marketeer Taliban consider this an
onerous burden on entrepreneurs, but the results speak for
themselves. 

The certification model announced yesterday seems to be
modeled on the American cellphone lock-down, and all that's
achieved is to assign permanent Developing Nation status to
this fine country's wireless infrastructure. This is a
desperate state of affairs, and all your bases - to tamper a
phrase - belong to VeriSign Inc. 

Education - that's what you need  Intel's true priorities -
or the full extent of its cowardice - are revealed in the
presentation we'll see (or not) on Thursday. The talk, by
Michael Ripley a "content protection architect" is
significant not for the technical information it divulges -
this is already in the public domain, although we're
grateful for listing which DVD players we'll know not to buy
(see above) - but in the language deployed. 

Intel is involved, we learn, to ensure an "expanded
customary use of content by consumers". 

But of course, this isn't the case at all. The customary use
of content we know under existing fair use laws includes
recording TV shows on video for subsequent consumption,
playing music we've bought back to our friends on their
hardware - and Ripley's endeavors are designed to thwart
such "customary use". 

"CP [content protection] should not infringe of customary
use of content", says Intel in the next slide. Much as the
inventor of the guillotine mourned the popularity of
separating the head from the body, no doubt. It gets better. 

CP must allow the revocation of compromised keys and
injunctive relief. A creation of a "protected digital
environment" - note again, the Orwellian language that seals
the "protection" of the copyright holders, not the consumers
- brings a "Need for consumer education... law enforcement,
definition of customary consumer use". 

The telling phrase is "consumer education" - ie, we're too
stupid to appreciate the loss of fair use, and need to be
schooled in the new ways, toot-sweet. 

Stuckist options  Intel is the kingmaker in this equation,
and it's a historic moment for the industry. But with
Chipzilla so obviously captured by outside interests, and
both Europe and American consumers lacking the stomach to
rewrite laws to thwart the pigopolists, we raised the
possibility that China and India could take up the slack.
They can, and they most probably will. 

(Who needs Hollywood, when you have Bollywood?) 

To our now rather naiive summary of a "Stuckist" net - ie,
one in which the hardware and protocols remain open - we
must add one more requirement - an accountable certification
infrastructure. Sorry we missed it first time round, but
good people are working on this as we write. ® 

Bootnote: We shamelessly borrowed the term 'Stuckist' from
the art movement of the same name, which can be found here.
We don't really have anything in common - except that we're
all stuck if this madness ensues. The term was coined by
Charles Thomson.