Hmm, so that’s what I am… an interesting combination ;-) Here’s today’s quote:

The very skeptical and well-informed Johannes Ernst (of LID), whose opinion means a lot to me, thinks it makes sense, but when he says "InfoCard will be anchored pretty deeply inside the Windows OS in a secure process space," I worry how far secure digital ID is going to advance the Microsoft lock-in.

Thanks, David, for the nice words. May I return the compliment: this description probably fits you pretty well, too ;-)

But back to the subject: what I wanted to express was that if I were Microsoft, this is exactly what I’d be doing, and so in that sense, it makes sense to me (also, keep in mind that as far as I know, InfoCard has not been frozen in terms of spec or implementation, and much of what I wrote on InfoCard thus remains highly uncertain).

Personally, on the whole subject of "trustworthy" and "secure" computing, I’m deeply ambivalent. I am one of those people who, as a teenager, disassembled the entire "OS" of his Z-80 8-bit computer (using a disassembler typed in in hex code, no less), and potentially not being able to do the same thing on any computers I might use in the future is alarming to me.

On the other hand, I also believe that we’re only seeing a very small tip of the iceberg with today’s phishing and pharming and viruses and so forth. There are some scenarios I can think of where things could get really really frightening … I’m not going to provide details because there is no point in giving the crooks a hand. Just think like Tom Clancy for a minute, given that millions of zombie (home) computers seem to be available for remote control to the highest bidder already…

Given this, I would think that some sort of hardened OS with parts that aren’t accessible to the average user is going to be inevitable. That InfoCard would live in such a place is almost a given, because, as Kim always says, this kind of technology will be the most-attacked there is.

I think David’s comment is really not so much about on the inevitability (?) of this kind of computing, whether we like it or not (I don’t like having to lock my front door either) but on whether it can be used by one or a handful of already dominant companies for a massive power grab. I share those concerns: I’ve always thought that choice is good, and thus that competition is good. Dominant market position is something great for the company that has it, but in almost all cases, it is bad for everybody else. This may be even more true in this case… What about making such an infrastructure, if it must exist, open source, usable by anybody? That would alleviate the concerns, won’t it?