www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23387.html -> www.theregister.co.uk/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_pc_ms/
The Microsoft Secure PC: MS patents a lock-down OS By 41 Andrew Orlowski Published Thursday 13th December 2001 16:51 GMT Remember the Microsoft Research Project for a "Secure PC" that 42 we told you about in March? The authors include Secure PC team leader Paul England and distinguished Xerox PARC veteran Butler Lampson, who as well as working on the design of Ethernet and 43 the Alto, has a long history in studying trusted systems, and the application was filed in January 1999. The patent application seeks to protect "a computerized method for a digital rights management operating system comprising: assuming a trusted identity; However the designers have thought of many circumvention tactics likely to be thrown at what they call a "DRMOS", and the patent lists methods of secure access to the page file, of ejecting untrusted applications off the system, and resetting the system clock against a trusted server. The filing also pays attention to the practical difficulties of publishers maintaining huge databases of their consumers' PCs. It represents a work in progress, as regular readers will know. There's no attempt to cloud its intentions behind a smokescreen of law enforcement or national security - although the Secure PC is an advance on current standards. No, it's designed to prevent the "Piracy of digital content, especially online digital content. At which point in the filing, the enormity of the challenge of creating a DRMOS should be evident: it's a mammoth task. But perhaps not as great as the political and social challenge as selling such a proposition to consumers. Microsoft may be a convicted monopolist, but that doesn't make the task any easier. This particular DRMOS architecture doesn't specify any kind of DRM, and when the technology vendors do agree on a magic bullet for copy protection, as they did with opening the door to build CPRM into fixed storage, they found a ready and immediate public backlash. In any case, the amount of privately generated content (home videos, spreadsheets) which could fall foul of a DRMOS, and the amount of existing, unsecured freely shared media (MP3s) also presents an obstacle to consumer acceptance. However the precedent of Microsoft's introduction of its own Windows Product Activation could be viewed as a dry run. It was introduced with fairly strict requirements for how much of a PC's configuration could change, and was gradually loosened.
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