Bill Gates sent an e-mail to a lot of people bitchen about M$'s new security vision (Palladium).
You can read about it here http://slashdot.org/articles/02/07/1....shtml?tid=109 and here http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26292.html or straight from the horses mouth here http://microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2002/07-18twc.asp

The point to this thread is not to debate weather Uncle Bill should spam people because he is rich and can do what ever the hell he wants. I'm more interested on your thoughts on palladium. When I first herd about palladium I thought my god m$ has gotten the hint about security. But then I started to see articles about how it would be integrated with hardware, Stop you from pirating mp3's, only allow you to run programs approved by M$ and other wise only existed so m$ could own your computer and therefore extend there monopoly. Of course palladium is still along way off and most of what you read is idle speculation. It never hurts to be cautious. If someone had told me several years ago that computer programs would spy on you for big corporations I would have dismissed that person as paranoid. Now days the only thing keeping the spy ware at bay is ad-aware.

For those of you who want to catch up on palladium.
http://www.epic.org/privacy/consumer...palladium.html
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stor...873826,00.html
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Jun26.html