Friday 31/1/2003A quick end of week quiz: What is Microsoft's Palladium initiative?

1 An open initiative to develop trustworthy computing, with input from the rest of the industry.

2 An attempt to put Microsoft in charge of all computers and digital media everywhere

3 About to take over the nominally independent Trusted Computing Platform Alliance

4 Temporarily unavailable due to SQL Slammer in the code database.

5 Palladium? Never heard of it, guv.

The correct answer, of course, is 5. It might have been 3, if Palladium still existed, but of course it doesn't. No, the whole thing has been Windscaled and is now called the Next Generation Secure Computing Base. All of which, one presumes, now belong to Microsoft and not us at all.

It's a good rule of thumb that if you want the world to know about something, you give it a snappy name. Doing the opposite -- and NGSCB sounds like some semi-governmental organisation from the 70s -- usually means either you're terrible at marketing or you want people to stop talking about it. So we should immediately come up with a better expansion of the acronym and keep the ball in play: NoGoodnik Seattle CowBoys? Nobody's Gonna Steal Corporate Binaries? Now Grovel, Says Controller Bill?

You can do better than that. You'll have to. Send in your suggestions to the usual address, and there'll be a ripped DVD full of Microsoft XP source code for the winner. (*)

(*) Only kidding.