Re: Hey, what does he know?

[landon dyer <landon@best.com>]

At 08:03 AM 11/22/98, you wrote:
>http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2168153,00.html

  well, no matter wh'appens, microsoft is going to come out of
this smelling like a rose


>"By the time the government's case is done, who knows how the industry will 
>look?" he said. "And furthermore, it could open the door to more government 
>regulation of the technology industry overall."

  putting on my favorite cryptoparanoia hat, over the next five years:


   o	MS gets what it wants -- more regulation, forcing it to stop
	selling OSs with computers.  instead, if you by an MS OS, you'll
	rent it annually.  ["please, janet, don't throw me in that briar
	patch!"]

	to do this, MS has to get intel to put crypto hooks in the
	wintel architecture; microcode burned-in at the chip fab that
	prevents MS operating systems from running on other h/w


   o	intel gets what it wants: no clones.  if you want to run linux
	on your AMD K-10, feel free.  if AMD wants to get in the game,
	they'll have to visit ft. meade


   o	the government gets what it wants, because the crypto hooks
	in the wintel architecture allow KRAP to proceed without any
	pesky legislation -- just behind-doors agreements with MS and
	intel

	a more cynical person than me might note that sun's "java OS"
	that would run anywhere would be a *lot* more difficult to
	suborn at the chip level


  i haven't figured out how the communications infrastructure is going
to be noodled.  maybe it doesn't have to be.  expect ipsec to die a
long, slow death -- a delaying tactic, the best kind for the feds,
because it prevents any sucessors from getting up a head of steam.  [i
don't know beans about the current status of ipsec]


  long about 2020 or so it'll be a federal offense to own an EPROM
burner, a processor with re-flashed microcode, an unlicensed logic
analyzer, or a copy of linux... :-)


  [stay tuned for a short story about the freedom fighters of 2025,
   hacking secure communications on copies of the last architectures
   known not to be compromised ("daddy, what's a PDP-10?"), running ITS
   on souped-up gigahertz pocket portables, getting packets through on
   covert channels involving the coat-tails of the (now ubiquitous) KRAP
   session key negotiations...]


-landon [re-lurking]