Microsoft intros Anti-Trustworthy Computing

THERE MUST BE some confusion about what digital rights management (DRM) means. Steve Ballmer has decided that people need to know more about the topic, even though it has been with us for a good few years now, he has sent out an email missive to the masses. The Vole itself kicked off its own efforts four years ago in the realm of media DRM.

The trick in trying to persuade people of something that is completely made up is to start off with facts, move onto plausible spin and finally introduce stuff that's completely made up. Ballmer's email is a classic. As with so much that comes out of the Vole, most of the effort needs to be put into sorting out the spin from the facts, the made up stuff stands out a mile. Ballmer starts well, "e-commerce in music and movies has been slowed, because artists and publishers have been concerned about protecting their copyrighted works from illegal use." Which is fair enough, there's our fact. "More broadly, businesses don't exchange digital information with customers and partners as freely as they might, because they fear it could fall into the wrong hands," he continues. There's our spin.

Standing out a mile from all the rest is the idea that companies need DRM for documents. The idea is that, all of a sudden, documents can be protected from prying eyes. It means, for instance, being able to send confidential product information to a supplier that can't be printed, copied and pasted or even forwarded. The catch is that everyone must be running Microsoft software.

A good while ago it was pointed out that file formats were Microsoft's Achilles heel. What has happened in the intervening time is that the Vole has well and truly woken up to this while the rest of the industry sat around picking its collective nose. So now Microsoft is pushing hard to persuade firms that switching to using encrypted files is a good idea. It means the competition won't be able to open those files. Scratch OpenOffice.org and Star Office from the picture.

But why stop at Office productivity suites? With emails that can be encrypted to stop them from being forwarded or printed, there's only one company's email clients that will be able to open them. Unless you're running Outlook or Outlook Express, forget receiving information from some people. You can be certain that some companies will fall in love with the idea and will make it policy to send emails that way. Meaning if you want to work with them, you'll have to be running one of the Microsoft email clients. And not an old one either. You'll have to buy the latest one with all of the DRM stuff built in.

And why stop at email, why not go the whole hog and do web pages too? That's right, Ballmer says the firm will release, "a rights management add-on for Internet Explorer will extend these protections to Web content." So you can forget any more episodes of the browser wars, Microsoft wants to make sure that everyone is running Internet Explorer.

Once again we're seeing the results of the ridiculously lenient anti-trust settlement. Microsoft top brass knows that it will be years before anyone could get a replay into court and by then it will be far too late. Many companies will blindly adopt the new measures and that will cause a domino effect.

Make no mistake, this initiative is aimed squarely at open source. Microsoft knows that it is the biggest threat that it faces. It has now found its first major way to cut off the air supply.

Microsoft has called this whole initiative "Trustworthy Computing." A far more fitting title would be "Anti-Trustworthy Computing." µ