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[ via Slashdot ] QuantumG put up notes on IBM’s talk on the dreaded CPRM at Stanford yesterday. This looked to be a damage control effort on IBM’s part from the description in Stanford’s announcment:

Recently, articles have appeared in the press that CPRM will be

standardized on all PC hard drives. This has fueled Orwellian mages of a Big Brother chip on your PC that will decide whether your files are worthy of being copied. This is complete nonsense. CPRM would never be standardized, nor have we ever proposed such a thing. CPRM strength is portability and interchangeability and it is mismatch for fixed hard drive. It is completely passive, requires no hardware, and can only be exploited by newly-designed applications. It cannot possibly affect existing files or

applications. How these myths came about, and persist, was an object lesson for a media-naive researcher.

QuantumG’s notes are more of an analysis of CPRM, and the resulting arms race between gatekeepers and hackers, than a report on the talk.

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