The recent publicity about the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) and Microsoft's Palladium security initiative have portrayed them as Microsoft's latest weapon against the software industry. This is incorrect. What they really represent are Hollywood's latest weapon against the personal computing industry. In this article, the author, who worked at Microsoft for ten years, left in April 2000, explains the real scope of the Palladium project ( today called NGSCB, Next-Generation Secure Computing Base ).