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I figured this was probably going on, but the following article is my
first confirmation.
WAVE, some of you might remember, was started by a former NatSemi
Chairman back before the internet got popular. It was going to be a
dial-up book-entry-to-the-screen content control system with special
boards and chips patented to down to it's socks. Sort of like 3Com,
I'm sure. First I heard about it was, ironically, in a 1990-ish Peter
Huber article in Forbes, touted as the Next Big Thing. (Convergence,
don'tcha know...) This is same Peter Huber who wrote the Geodesic
Network, which, along with bearer financial cryptography, is a
cornerstone of the way I look at the universe. Paradoxes abound, boys
and girls.
In the meantime, WAVE Systems stock has been listed, then de-listed,
then re-listed, and, God only knows what it is now.
I even got an offer from that Chairman and Grey Eminence of WAVE to
come speak to FC97, if we comped him, of course. As General Chair of
the conference I had to gently let him know that FC was a
peer-reviewed conference, and if his tech people wanted to send a
paper and it got accepted by the Program Committee, (a whole bunch of
top-drawer cryptographers, lawyers, and bankers), they were perfectly
welcome, and, he, like I, could sit in the audience, watch the talks,
and hit the beach in the afternoon with everyone else. Never got
anything back for some reason. :-). We even got the DivX guys
presenting papers that first (and second) year, so content control
was never an issue, though I expect that trade-secret skullduggery
certainly was.
Which makes sense. WAVE's stockholders, called WAVEoids by themselves
and others, are practically millennial in their belief that WAVE will
conquer the world and the company's failure to date is due to a giant
short-seller's conspiracy of some kind. Lots of Secret Sauce there,
somewhere...
If BillG has swallowed this stuff, hook, line, and sinker, as someone
has noted before, then, frankly, he must have access to better drugs
than most of us. It also means that he's grasping at conceptual
straws, economically, and if he persists in following this folly to
the bitter end, his dream of software-kudzu world domination will
finally choke his company once and for all.
So, be careful what you wish for, Bill. On a geodesic network, no
central node can route all the information. Like Gilmore says about
censorship on the same network, any putative top of an internet
pyramid chokes instead, and the network simply routes around it.
The paradox in all of this is that only way that crypto to the screen
is going to work is if the screen is literally *buying* the content
shown on that screen, for cash, in a raw commodity market of some
kind. And, if *that's* really the case, there's no need for IP law in
what amounts to information commodity market in perfect competition,
not a monopolistically competitive market requiring brands, patents,
and copyrights. Finally, such a system cannot use a
book-entry-to-the-device system, because the cheapest cash will be
done without identity at all.
In such a world digital rights management, and content control
are contradictions in terms, if not preposterous notions on their
face.
Cheers,
RAH
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http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998,a=28570,00.asp
ExtremeTech
Palladium Clues May Lie In AMD Motherboard Design
June 26, 2002
By: Mark Hachman
A two-year-old whitepaper authored by AMD and encryption firm Wave Systems
may offer additional clues to the design of PCs incorporating Palladium,
Microsoft's new security initiative.
Wave, based in Lee, Mass., has partnered with Microsoft rival Sun
Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Verisign and RSA Data Systems, among others,
in creating the EMBASSY verification system, originally pitched as a tool
for e-commerce. In August of 2000, Wave and AMD authored a whitepaper on
how the solution could be integrated into a motherboard using AMD's Athlon
microprocessor, which a Wave executive said is now entering field trials
overseas.
Wave and AMD are developing a Trusted Client reference platform to enable
trust and security to be delivered to the PC, the whitepaper reads. By
integrating Wave's EMBASSY Trusted Client system into AMD's Athlon
motherboard reference design, we will deliver a template for building cost
optimized Trusted Client PCs.
The paper is authored by researchers Kevin R. Lefebvre and Bill Chang of
Wave, and Geoffrey Strongin, who is spearheading AMD's Palladium work.
Strongin said Monday that the company had begun work on a Palladium-type
solution before Microsoft approached the company. AMD and Wave announced a
partnership in March 2000.
Wave's board of directors includes George Gilder and Nolan Bushnell, the
founder of Atari.
The whitepaper,