I recently found out about this project MS is looking into, more info here http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/25940.html, called Palladium. If you don't know that much about it in basic its MS and intel (maybe AMD if they decide to join) designing some sort of chip that will detect whether the software your running is legal. There is already working versions that work on the motherboard called fritz chips but they are planning on making a chip thats imbeded in the processor so it cant be deactivated.
The way it decides if the software is legal it does this by something like the MS certificates and a comitee will be set up to decide what software should be allowed to run on computers with these chips (ie new ones).
I don't think I need to tell you that this spells quite a bit of disaster for programmers who just want to make small programs to share with there friend and so on.
Does anyone else know any thing else about this or have any opinions?