Vitanuova for 2005 June 10

"The user ... is the enemy" -- since 1999

Remember the Processor Serial Number fight? I forgot about this, but an engineer who's been around the security world for a while reminded me that David Aucsmith (then at Intel) said some things that sound pretty familiar today:

"This is a new focus for the security community," said David Aucsmith, security architect for chip maker Intel. "The actual user of the PC -- someone who can do anything they want -- is the enemy."

His comments came at the Intel Developers Forum here Thursday as the company outlined its security plans. The discussion included Intel's controversial chip ID registration technology in the new Pentium III microprocessor.

Aucsmith said that more and more, software companies and content creators are targeting users as a major threat to security.

The reason: With a few keystrokes, users could freely distribute "bits that have value," said Aucsmith -- copying such content as software, DVD video and other valuable data.

Aucsmith pitched the problem as one in which Intel's processor serial number scheme can help. "Security enforces trust," he said. "We want to ID the machine that holds this data to be able to protect it."

Sugar subsidy question

What kind of subsidies to sugar production does the U.S. provide? What effect do they have on the price of sugar?

I understood the nutritionist Marion Nestle to have been complaining that U.S. sugar subsidies make sugar cheaper, so that we tend to eat too much of it (and so that processed food producers use added sugar as a substitute for the quality of their ingredients or the defects in their cooking processes). If that's right, then getting rid of the subsidies should make sugar more expensive and tend to make Americans healthier.

I ran this theory by Fred, and he thought that the U.S. sugar subsidies were making sugar more expensive, rather than cheaper. So getting rid of the subsidies would have just the reverse effect -- we would start eating more of it.

Both kinds of subsidy exist in the world. For example, you can have a subsidy by just paying the farmers cash (which would tend to lower prices). Or you can have a subsidy by restricting imports (which would tend to raise prices). I'm sure there are much more exotic forms of subsidy than these, but there isn't necessarily only one direction in which subsidies push prices. So which kind of effect do the U.S. subsidies to sugar have?