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This is personal, so bear with the hyperbole. In this instance, it just may be deserved. Ever since I've been writing on the Internet, I have been railing against the excesses of the world's largest software company. I've called them evil, then been convinced they were not, just huge and irresponsible. After reading Bob Cringley's latest column about Palladium, Microsoft's new "security" technology, I have reverted to the Mother of All Evil hypothesis. Microsoft must die. Make a voodoo doll disk out of your MS Office CD, burn sage, do whatever you can. Prayer might help. Otherwise Apple may be doomed, and Microsoft will own the Internet of the future.

Palladium is really a scheme to replace TCP/IP with something that Microsoft will own and license to PC manufacturers, software developers, and virtually the entire world. Here are the basics:

"This week, Microsoft announced Palladium through an exclusive story in Newsweek written by Steven Levy, who ought to have known better. Palladium is the code name for a Microsoft project to make all Internet communication safer by essentially pasting a digital certificate on every application, message, byte, and machine on the Net, then encrypting the data EVEN INSIDE YOUR COMPUTER PROCESSOR. Palladium compatible hardware (presumably chipsets and motherboards) will come from both AMD and Intel, and the software will, of course, come from Microsoft. That software is what I had dubbed TCP/MS.

The point of all this is simple. It may actually make the Internet somewhat safer. But the real purpose of this stuff, I fear, is to take technology owned by nobody (TCP/IP) and replace it with technology owned by Redmond. That's taking the Internet and turning it into MSN. Oh, and we'll all have to buy new computers.

This is diabolical. If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn't choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It's a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love."

I urge you to read this column and then sit back and take stock of the kind of world envisioned by those who would propose such a thing. One tends to resist comprehendingthat fellow human beings could really be acting in this manner, for if it is so, then something must be done about it. All right, TCP/IP hasn't gone anywhere yet, but Microsoft obviously has the market clout to move in the directly Cringely hypothesizes. I don't know what anyone can do at this point, but if Levy's article misses the real point of Palladium as Cringlely implies, that's just another reason to look for the truth where most people don't.

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