Power Technology thinks it can do Intel one better with its new chip identification technology.
The firm introduced a chip identification scheme Friday that it says will offer all the anti-piracy features of Intel's controversial Pentium III, without the privacy snags. Intel said that its technology was designed for entirely different purposes.
"The ID we do is statistically pretty strong, but not so strong that we have a 100 percent guarantee that the ID belongs to that particular individual," said Paul Titchener, Power Technology's president.
Intel's identification technology is built into the processor itself. But Power Technology's as-yet unnamed version uses a "software-only" approach. The plan is intended to allow chipmakers, PC manufacturers, and software vendors guard against piracy.
The firm's as-yet unnamed technology creates a unique machine ID for each end user's Pentium and motherboard combination. It doesn't target each individual system, Titchener said, and therefore isn't unique to each user. Rather, it links a software application to a pool of possible machines.
"You can set how unique you want this technology to be," he said. "By its nature you couldn't do it as uniquely as Intel has proposed -- it's still leaving some doubt compared to Intel's built-in ID."
In a rapid-fire series of events beginning late last week, Intel announced plans to include a unique identifier on its forthcoming Pentium III chips. Following that announcement, privacy activists called for a boycott of the chips. On Monday, Intel said it would revise the chip to disable the identification by default, so the user would have to choose to activate it.
Privacy advocate Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters, remained skeptical of Power Technology's software.
"The people making the decisions -- making the trade-off where privacy prevention and financial interest should be drawn -- are the ones who have no interest in privacy and have every financial incentive to extract the maximum amount of information about consumers," Catlett said. "Copyright owners want registration and absolute identification so they can prosecute people who infringe. And that level of information is intrusive to everybody."
Intel spokesman Tom Waldrop declined to comment on the Power Technology product. But he did draw a distinction between the two.
"Our processor serial number capability is intended for an entirely different thing," Waldrop said. "It's not intended for software piracy protection.... It's intended for the consumer to have a secure transaction over the Internet."
Power Technology, headquartered in Brisbane, California, develops music software. It initially came up with the identification technology to protect its own software against piracy. The technique has all but eliminated unlicensed use of Power Technology's software, the company said.
The proprietary technology will work with all current Pentium and Pentium-clone processors, as well as Pentium IIIs. The company plans to target PC manufacturers, chip manufacturers, and software vendors -- any of whom could add the technology to a user's PC.
