Remember Palladium? That was Microsoft's summer fun announcement this year--security add-ins for Windows that turn it into a 'trusted system'. In other words, both data and software running on your computer will be able to guarantee that it--and you--are what they claim to be, and deny access to anything that hasn't been approved. Not in itself a bad thing even if Microsoft insist on selling it as some sort of super antivirus package, entirely intended to make the lives of the users better. Predictably, there's been a lot of fuss about Palladium. For some reason, people find the thought of Microsoft setting itself up as the creator and arbiter of trusted systems risible. Perhaps it's the idea of trusting a company that piously intones "we're doing what's right for the users" while religiously making 85 percent profit from those users. And it's true that Palladium could easily be used for very heavy-handed rights management, with the creator of a program or data being able to restrict or destroy your access even after you've bought and registered it. Microsoft says that what people do with it is up to the users and the applications writers and not the company itself--a tad disingenuous, given the company's history of writing most of the important Windows applications.