Software Solution Offered For Intel Boycott

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January 29, 1999 (4:51 PM EST)

By Malcolm Maclachlan,

A small San Francisco company said Friday that it has a software solution to Intel's Pentium III privacy problem.

But leaders of the Pentium III boycott are skeptical.

Intel's problems began last week when it said it would embed unique ID numbers in each Pentium III chip to help fight piracy. This quickly led to a boycott by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and other groups, which said the chips would invade privacy by specifically identifying users.

Power Technology, a three-person company, said it has technology that can be embedded in consumer-software products to prevent piracy. Power makes PC music software called DSP-FX. Since copyright is such a delicate issue in the music industry, the company decided it had to place copyright security directly into the product, said Power president Paul Tichener.

The company built a software ID system into the product that creates a "machine ID" for each copy of the software once it is installed on the machine. Only that machine will be able to use that copy of the software, he said. However, the ID does not identify the particular users, Tichener said, but merely prevents illegal use of the product.

Power is now calling this technology Intellectual Property Cloak, or IP Cloak. Tichener said the company now wants to license IP Cloak to other companies to embed in consumer software. IP Cloak would work on all Pentium chips, Tichener said, not just Pentium IIIs. Users would not be able to turn the feature off.

Jason Catlett, president of the watchdog group Junkbusters, said he was skeptical of the concept. Junkbusters is one of the leaders of the Pentium III boycott. He said that Power has not released any technical information on IP Cloak, adding that it has patents pending on the software.

"It sounds wonderful," Catlett said. "If only we knew what it did."

Catlett said he has been studying the problem for weeks, looking for a potential software solution. Meetings with technical experts from Intel led to the same conclusion -- providing piracy controls of the type Intel wants requires a hardware solution.

There are not enough legal protections preventing companies from putting intrusive technologies into hardware and software, Catlett said. But lawsuits and consumer vigilance can turn back many attempts, as in the case with Blizzard Entertainment. In May, the company was sued over its StarCraft video game, which looked through user hard drives and sent back information to the company.

The important thing, Catlett said, is that users be wary of IP Cloak or any other proposed solutions, because the industry hasn't made privacy their priority.

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy may have voiced an opinion widely held among technology executives at Sun's Jini launch on Monday when he said "You have no privacy, get over it."