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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Saturn V who wrote (72155)	1/26/1999 3:42:00 PM
From: Burt Masnick	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

There is good paranoia and bad paranoia. Good paranoia is running a company like Intel and frequently, energetically and wisely hypothesizing what could go wrong with your business plans. The next step is to bullet-proof your plans so that even if unhelpful events occur your response is rapid, practical and effective. I've seen managers do this in several well run organizations and, at least to date, it appears to me to be a very shrewd way to run an enterprise. Bad paranoia is the "conspiracy out to get ME" attitude that is so evident on this board lately. Bad paranoia has a patina of respectability because "organized" and presumably respectable privacy rights groups pound the desk on behalf of fanning the fears of "big brother". But at the end of the day, bad paranoia is bad paranoia. I live in a suburb of New York City. Bridges, tunnels and toll highways in the area now use something called EZPass which is an electronic identifier, velcroed to a car windshield, that lets you zip through a toll plaza in EZPass Only Lanes with barely a slowdown. At crowded toll plazas, EZPass saves 10-fifteen minutes of useless delay each way. A relative of my wife adamantly refuses to use it because then "they" will know when he passes through. "They" don't care! All they want is their toll collection scheme to work efficiently. Same individual buys nothing on the internet ("They" will abscond with his credit card number, etc). Bad Paranoia crimps your lifestyle needlessly - in extreme cases, it can paralyze folks with fear.

To: Saturn V who wrote (72155)	1/26/1999 4:11:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

How does a computer id change anything? It's fairly obvious that the first use of the id would be by Microsoft to limit how installations of their software can take place. You will probably have the wonderful choice of wiping your disk down to the level of a low level format as the penalty for moving a disk drive with MSFT's OS to another system!! Other software companies would follow en masse. Upgrading a system could be a nightmare. You could also be REQUIRED to register for all software you purchase. No more option of saying no to all of those obtrusive questions. For the software to work, you have to go on line and your computer id gets read into the data base and you have to answer all of the questions. What should disturb you is not only this Intel addition to the "current situation" but the fact that you seem to have adjusted to a "current situation" which intelligent people find rapidly eroding civil liberties. Don't you ever ask yourself who should control your digital identity? Once all of the pieces of information about you accumulated out in cyberspace become more readily available (as they will over the next few years of internet commerce) it is going to be more difficult for you to prove who you are to anybody to their satisfaction. Inevitably you will have to disclose more and more information to prove to somebody you are the loyal employee, and the person whom you say you are in order to purchase the expensive product. Perhaps you have had the experience of needing to use a credit card that has hit some computerized stop payment even though you are not over your credit limit? How much info are you willing to disclose? Unfortunately the computer ID Intel wants to build in is another attempt to get another piece of information about you rather than an attempt to introduce a secure identity. In this case it's to satisfy Microsoft's need for more security in the distribution of its products. Expect many more such intrusions until you wake up to the need for a secure digital identity that YOU CONTROL and not big brother.