Peter Nicholas Biddle (born December 22, 1966) is a

software evangelist A technology evangelist is a person who builds a critical mass of support for a given technology, and then establishes it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects. The word ''evangelism'' is borrowed from the context ...

from the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

. His primary fields of interest include content distribution, secure computing, and encryption.

Career

Biddle joined

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

in 1990 as a Support Engineer. He was one of the first authors to describe the concept of

darknet A dark net or darknet is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social ne ...

,. an early participant in the

Secure Digital Music Initiative Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) was a forum formed in late 1998,Leonardo ChiariglioneRiding the Media Bits. Opening content protection chiariglione.org, 2003 composed of more than 200 IT, consumer electronics, security technology, ISP and re ...

(SDMI), Copy Protection Technical Working Group, and

Trusted Computing Platform Alliance The Trusted Computing Group is a group formed in 2003 as the successor to the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance which was previously formed in 1999 to implement Trusted Computing concepts across personal computers. Members include Intel, AMD, I ...

, an early

technical evangelist A technology evangelist is a person who builds a critical mass (sociodynamics), critical mass of support for a given technology, and then establishes it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects. The word ''evangelism ...

for DVD and

digital video recorder A digital video recorder (DVR) is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SSD or other local or networked mass storage device. The term includes set-top boxes with direct to ...

technology, the founding leader of Microsoft's Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (code named Palladium) initiative, and was responsible for starting Microsoft's

Hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

development efforts. Biddle built and led the engineering team that shipped

BitLocker Drive Encryption BitLocker is a full volume encryption feature included with Microsoft Windows versions starting with Windows Vista. It is designed to protect data by providing encryption for entire volumes. By default, it uses the AES encryption algorithm i ...

, a Trusted Platform Module-rooted

disk encryption Disk encryption is a technology which protects information by converting it into unreadable code that cannot be deciphered easily by unauthorized people. Disk encryption uses disk encryption software or hardware to encrypt every bit of data that ...

for

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

. Bitlocker continues to be used by Microsoft today, having been shipped with certain versions of Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2008 and later. In 1998, Biddle publicly demonstrated real-time consumer digital video recorder functionality using an inexpensive

MPEG2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, w ...

hardware encoder, at the WinHEC conference during a speech by

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

. Biddle was the author of the diagram on page 13 in the SDMI specification, which enabled the playback of unknown or unlicensed content on SDMI-compliant players, and was a vocal proponent within SDMI for the external validation of

digital watermarking A digital watermark is a kind of marker covertly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal such as audio, video or image data. It is typically used to identify ownership of the copyright of such signal. "Watermarking" is the process of hiding digital in ...

. On August 8, 2007,

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

-based company Trampoline Systems, a company exploring what they called The Enterprise 2.0 space announced Biddle would be moving to London to join them as Vice President of Development after leaving Microsoft. While at Trampoline, Biddle ran all product development and engineering efforts. In 2008, Biddle joined

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

Corporation as a director of the

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

program office. During his tenure at Intel, he also served in other positions, including evangelist and General Manager of Intel's AppUp digital storefront, which was shuttered in 2014 after four years' operation, Director of the Intel Atom Developer Program, described as "...a framework for developers to create and sell software applications for netbooks with support for handhelds and smart phones available in the future", and General Manager of Intel's Cloud Services Platform. In 2009 he became a surprise witness in the

RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Association, Inc. ''RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Association, Inc.'', 641 F. Supp. 2d 913 (2009), is a United States District Court case involving RealNetworks, the movie studios and DVD Copy Control Association regarding the Digital Millennium Copyrigh ...

case where, as one of the drafters of the CSS license, he served as an expert on certain CSS licensing issues at the heart of the case. For more than 3 years during Biddle's tenure at Intel, he hosted the podcast "MashUp Radio", an online publication sponsored by Intel. In 2014, Biddle founded TradLabs, a company using technology to make rock climbing safer and more accessible.

Personal life

Biddle is a member of the

Biddle family The Biddle family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is an Old Philadelphian family descended from English immigrants William Biddle (1630–1712) and Sarah Kempe (1634–1709), who arrived in the Province of New Jersey in 1681. Quakers, they had emi ...

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since ...

and is a descendant of Nicholas Biddle, whose name he bears as his middle name. Other notable Biddles include

Charles Biddle Charles Biddle (December 24, 1745 – April 4, 1821) was a Pennsylvania statesman and a member of the prominent Biddle family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Early life Biddle was born to a wealthy old Quaker family on December 24, 1745, in Phil ...

, Vice President of Pennsylvania and

Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans (February 21, 1920 – January 25, 2012) was an American heiress, activist, politician, and philanthropist. She was the granddaughter of Benjamin N. Duke and the great-granddaughter of Washington Duke, both to ...

an American heiress and philanthropist.

External links

Plucky rebels: Being agile in an un-agile place - Peter Biddle at TED@Intel

Mobile Insights Radio with Peter Biddle

Twit.tv - This week in Law 213

The Darknet & the Future of Everything* - Keynote Address Gov 2.0 L.A.

Tradlabs

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Biddle, Peter 1966 births Living people Peter Microsoft employees Microsoft Windows people