How four Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/how-four-microsoft-engineers-proved-copy-protection-would-fail/

by th0ma5 • 14 years ago

107 133 14 years ago

rplst8• 14 years ago

Yet we are moving towards an industry where "the fully re-programmable computer" no longer exists.

chadgeidel• 14 years ago

I don't see that. Sure - popular "computers" are not fully re-programmable, but to say they will go away entirely is probably not true. There will always need to be someone that "makes the magic" and, IMHO, this cannot be done on a locked down device (nevermind the fact that developers wouldn't put up with a computer they couldn't debug).

As long as there are folks like you and I that wish to have a computer (as traditionally known) there will be vendors catering to our wishes.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

Just like the idea of making Raspberry Pi for as many children as possible to spur a generation of engineers, the idea that the most popular computers will be closed, will have the exact opposite effect. You don't need open computers to just be available in a tiny corner of the world, and expect big innovations from it. You need them to be available to as many people as possible.

bediger40005• 14 years ago

I agree: someone "makes the magic". But what if it's like hydroponics and gro-lights were during the worst Federal excesses of the "Drug War"? Anyone buying a real computer (not an appliance) needs some kind of licensing and/or certification. Manufacturing real computers requires certified and licensed manufacturing and a different certification/licensing for design? The pace of progress would slow dramatically. Since fewer and fewer people get into programming, we won't have wild and crazy folks who try new and interesting things all the time. No Moxie Marlinspike. No Jeff Bezos. No Marc Andreesen. IT would become like making airplanes, hidebound, rigorously engineered by crank turning second-raters. It would never ever change, except in terms of marketing, like cigarettes.

This would be ideal for the status quo, and maybe even for a lot of consumers. It would certainly be ideal for the corporate interests, the few that survive.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

I don't think so, at least not without the government imposing laws that effectively banned them.

The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations.

If restrictions on other devices become more and more severe it will eventually get to a stage where it will start to bite Joe average (It won't let him look at all those pictures of ladies doing things his wife won't, or it deleted them all because he broke some obscure clause on page 63 of the EULA).

At some point Joe runs into his nerdy friend who has a weird looking computer that can do all kinds of things Joe would love for his computer to be able to do. Supply and demand does the rest.

kragen2• 14 years ago

> The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations.

The Raspberry Pi is a SoC made by Broadcom, a US$7 billion/year company with 11000 employees. While admittedly this is a bit smaller than Foxconn, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Asus, IBM, HP, or Dell, it still seems like it qualifies as a "mega corporation" to me. (The Raspberry Pi also has a circuit board and stuff, but the SoC is entirely capable of enforcing DRM on its own.)

SkyAtWork• 14 years ago

(I ran engineering for a DRM firm for several years about the same time as Peter put this out.)

It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet was very good for information sharing, that crushing Napster hadn't exactly stopped people from sharing digital media, and that trying to make media exceedingly secure and hard to use was not a winning strategy.

If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value - if it's both more expensive and harder to use, you've made adoption pretty unlikely. In '03, MP3 players were entirely prevalent, mostly didn't support useful DRM, and the music industry mostly sold little silver discs which came with no restrictions.

So it wasn't that the threat model to make music readily redistributable for free was "the smartest black hats out there figure out how to crack your crypto and DRM", it was "an average user rips a CD into MP3s and shares it".

As you might expect, it was frustrating to try to deal with the competing demands from Hollywood at the time. People mostly didn't bother attacking the DRM - they just went and created or file-shared to get the more usable files without the protection layer. But there was still a great deal of insistence that whatever content protection layer was put in could be a vault to keep media safe forever, rather than a speedbump to piracy. (Meanwhile, of course, CDs were raw bitstreams of high fidelity audio data...)

TheAmazingIdiot5• 14 years ago

I used to pay for content: movies, games, and some music. I didn't spend all that much, but I did buy them.

Then, corrupted audio CDs were sold. My sister got bit by one. So we downloaded it where it wasn't sold as damaged: Suprnova.

During that time, stupidity was occurring with DVDs with rotating CSS keys and 'bad block filled with data'. I was downloading films I wanted to archive, but couldn't easily rip.

Games were not that bad, but soon became horrendous in terms of screw-user checks, up to the point of driver breaking installs of trash-ware and other nefarious garbage. I trusted the pirates more than the companies.

I've been burned enough times. Why pay for crap quality when free is better?

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

True that. Everyone is fretting about movie/TV show availability on Netflix, etc., but I sidestepped that and just built an HTPC[0] and combined it with a private torrent site that has all the movies and TV shows I could ever want. In technical terms, it is far and away the best solution.

0: http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-o...

tptacek21• 14 years ago

Because the people that sweated and risked their livelihoods to produce these titles didn't actually offer them to you for free; instead, they were coerced into accepting free distribution when their work was illegally copied by companies that fund themselves by viagra and Adult Friend Finder ads.

Meanwhile, almost universally, the offerings nerds entitle themselves to are luxury goods that no person can claim an inherent right to access, so, not only are content producers and financiers coerced into having their return on investment redirected to porn ads and porn ad brokers, but that's happening solely to provide nerds with access to luxuries. Most of which they could trivially have afforded anyways.

But keep telling yourself piracy strikes some blow for justice. I don't know the statistics but I'd have to guess at least 80% of nerds like us pirate content every single week, and nobody wants to think of themselves as an asshole. Rationalize however you need to.

jeremiep2• 14 years ago

I trusted the pirates more than the companies.

Many of us still do, and will for as long as these companies assume most of their users to be thieves. It's also usually the least creative people pushing DRM; Hollywood for instance is not known for its creativity but rather to suck dry the ideas of the handful of creative people it has.

Same reason why open-source is more trustworthy than proprietary in general. These guys aren't trying to bullshit you into buying their product and aren't creating the product for the sole purpose of profits.

jeremiep2• 14 years ago

If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value

And one way to determine if some copyrighted content has value is to pirate it and consume it. It's the very same than me going to a friend's house, watching a movie and buying it afterwards because I liked it.

Then you realize that your pirated copy plays without all the trouble of the DRM copy and you stop buying content altogether, which would cost more because of DRM anyways. People don't like being controlled and will always work very, very hard around this. The more someone is able to think critically for oneself, the least they like being controlled.

The fact that a large portion of today's content is created solely for the purpose of making profits certainly doesn't help. I'm pretty sure if we fired everyone supporting DRM and used their resources to create quality content instead, the problem would simply fade away.

Some of the games I previously bought were impossible to play with DRM; either they refused to start because I had a virtual disc emulator installed (to read linux images, of course!) or the DRM checks made the game slow. Getting the pirated copy gave me a much simpler installation process, no complains about my virtual disc emulator and no performance drops whatsoever.

In the end, DRM really is an anti-pattern.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

Palladium - I remember that name. I only had my first computer for a year or two, but I remember how it freaked everyone out. I'm glad it died.

And isn't ARM's "TrustZone" pretty much the same thing, or does it have a more niche and different purpose?

Spearchucker• 14 years ago

Palladium didn't die. It's the granddaddy of UEFI/SecureBoot.

pacaro• 14 years ago

I worked on the Palladium/NGSCB team from 2002 to 2005 - ultimately the team shipped BitLocker in Vista, but approx half of the team were siphoned off in (IIRC) 2004 to work on Hypervisor so the engineering effort ended up contributing to two pretty important OS features.

wmf3• 14 years ago

Yeah, only the dangerous part (remote attestation) died.

Create• 14 years ago

http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

shmerl• 14 years ago

It's time for industries to wake up and to ditch all kind of content DRM altogether.

ChuckMcM6• 14 years ago

From the article:

"I'm now finding that for some kinds of content, the illegal is clearly outperforming legal," Biddle said. "That blows me away. I pay for premium cable. It's easier to use BitTorrent to watch Game of Thrones. HBO Go is trying very hard to do a good job," he said, but the user experience just isn't as good. Because HBO Go is a streaming service, he said, it's more vulnerable to network congestion than simply downloading the entire episode from the darknet."

Fix this and you 'fix' piracy. Oh, and the fix isn't "shut down the darknet" it is provide a better service.

tptacek21• 14 years ago

Piracy costs HBO less than "fixing HBO Go" would, since HBO is cross-subsidized by subscriptions to cable.

The fix for piracy is to create compelling content under the "superior" business models piracy advocates have so much faith in. Netflix is starting to do this; over the next 10 years, lots of media/creative/production people are going to get very rich figuring out how to produce and sell content online. In the meantime, people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones; they sound ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?

plinkplonk2• 14 years ago

"people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones;"

maybe people should stop bitching about people bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones ? they sound ridiculous.

interesting how one man's 'bitching' is another's righteous rage against the ungodly heathen who don't believe exactly as he does.

DigitalJack2• 14 years ago

"Piracy costs HBO less than ... "

This depends on how risk averse one is. I personally would be afraid of getting on hit list for the movie association (can't remember the acronym now).

illuminate14• 14 years ago

People aren't bitching about "how hard it is to get Game of Thrones", people are bitching because they'd love to pay for it, legitimately, but without subsidizing all the bundled crap .

I have zero interest in ESPN, Disney and "reality" television. I understand fully why HBO is making more money than ever out of the bundlers' desperation, and don't complain that they're "losing" money (which isn't the case) but I would certainly prefer to be given the option to buy the content alone.

"In the meantime, people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones; they sound ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?"

The exact content is as irrelevant as your dislike of it. Dislike for Cable television providers didn't originate with GoT.

ShawnBird• 14 years ago

People just us Game of Thrones as an example because it was popularized by The Oatmeal (and possibly others) for it's status as being easier to pirate than pay for. I think they just use the name as a symbol now because if you mentioned a different piece of content people would wonder why you mentioned that show specifically.

ChuckMcM6• 14 years ago

Wow, unlike you to go ad hominem like that. But setting aside your disdain for their choice of content, what do you base the claim "Piracy costs HBO less than 'fixing HBO Go' would" ? The articles we've seen here and elsewhere suggests there is some unmet demand, if we stipulate that a team to 'fix HBO Go' is relatively small [1] then what is the lifetime value of having that content more widely addressable? My intuition suggests it would be higher than the cost of fixing their distribution strategy.

[1] I'm imagining a team of two lawyers and an manager to negotiate providing their content on other services like NetFlix, Hulu, and paid-Youtube distribution. Maybe $550K over 12 months? A $1M?

CamperBob22• 14 years ago

Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?

If I were involved in creating said soap opera, I'd like to think that I'd care a great deal about user experience.

The mystery is why the content creators don't.

chc8• 14 years ago

> Piracy costs HBO less than "fixing HBO Go" would … people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones

If piracy costs less than "fixing HBO Go" would, then people should stop bitching about piracy, shouldn't they? Because this seems to imply that the impact of piracy is literally negligible.

nathan_long• 14 years ago

I agree, but sadly, the illegal route may always be more convenient, for the simple reason that it has fewer goals.

Bittorrent is designed for efficient distribution, period. Any paid service must be designed for efficient distribution AND charging for access.

You can't optimize for two things simultaneously.

spindritf• 14 years ago

Illegal route also has to optimize for pirates' budgets which are orders of magnitudes smaller than those of legitimate services.

negativity• 14 years ago

Loathe as I am to thank Microsoft (as a company) for much of anything, I'm glad to see that rational people actually work for them.

It's awesome to see sane-minded people shed light on the realities of what information ultimately is, and how and why we share it.

You can't keep clamping down on people for whispering secrets in each other's ears. To do so is to deny an individual of their own humanity. This is especially true, with regard to trivial pastimes, like reading works of fiction and experiencing the recording of music, sounds and abstract noise that we create with the hopes that people will actually listen to them.

Hopefully, these aspects of human behavior will be embraced as normal facts of life, rather than rejected as malicious and criminal. People who create content, after all, are really paid thinkers in the Greek sense, and that should be a truth that's understood by all these stubborn rights holders.

I hope the reaction to investigations like this will encourage tolerance of file sharing, rather than harden the resolve to purge it from whatever society we find ourselves living in decades from now.

Thank you, Peter Biddle, Bryan Willman, Paul England and Marcus Peinado!

groby_b2• 14 years ago

I'm amazed this entire discussion here focuses on "DRM good" vs. "DRM bad".

The point is, it does not matter. We have entered a world where for pretty much the first time, the marginal cost of creating a copy of something is zero, for all intents and purposes. We don't have any economic theories (or business models) that can deal with that yet.

DRM is simply a symptom of that. The question is not "can (and should) people be prevented from resharing content", the question is, "what does content creation look like in a world where everything is shared"

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

The problem with DRM is that to the casual observer it looks like something is being done. Whilst in reality the main effects of DRM is generally to make usability , security and privacy worse.

Once people start putting this crap in the systems it becomes entrenched and more difficult to remove.

shasta• 14 years ago

Books have been around for quite some time. The major change isn't that the marginal cost is now zero. The incentive and techincal ability to use copyrighted works without a license has been present for a long time. The difference is the decentralization. In the past, if you printed a batch of unlicensed books, it was very easy to shut you down or sue you. Now, anyone can make the copy and it's not viable to go after them all.

cynicalkane• 14 years ago

Microeconomic models deal with negligible marginal cost products as a matter of routine. I don't mean to be rude, but you've been taking the wrong economics courses.

Another poster identified the issue: decentralized distribution, not low cost of copy, is the sea change. In past times governments responded to low cost of copy by legislating copyright. Now there's no practical way to centralize distribution of convenient copies of data.

Honestly, nerds fantasize about a world where all data is free, but information creators just respond by making their data inconvenient to obtain. Institutions of content creation have a high demand product; economically there's no reason to expect them to roll over and give up on making money.

groby_b2• 14 years ago

That might well be - thankfully, nobody pays me for my economics expertise :)

What I meant by my statement is that the marginal cost is near-zero for everybody. I've just learned that a better way to say that is "decentralized distribution". I do appreciate you clarifying this. (I really do. It's rather hard to say "thank you" over the Internet without coming across as the most sarcastic person in existence)

And I don't expect content creators to roll over, but I do expect to see a significant shift in the industry. Because no matter how inconvenient the access to the first copy is, the second one is free. At some point, that'll need to be factored in, because it can't be prevented.

altcognito• 14 years ago

Nerds don't just fantasize about data being free. They fantasize about reducing the cost of manufacturing anything, including new intellectual content to zero. (or at least to some minimal amount of energy expediture)

And no, your Micro-economic models do not deal with that, but that's ok, because it's a fantasy. Right?

chimeracoder3• 14 years ago

> The question is not "can (and should) people be prevented from resharing content", the question is, "what does content creation look like in a world where everything is shared"

DRM is an attempt to force rivalry and excludability onto information, which is inherently not a private good[1].

You can try and use a government fiat to legislate the market to behave a certain way, but at the end of the day, if those are at odds with the fundamental laws of economics and reality (ie, one's ability to copy information "for free"), you're playing a losing game from the start.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_good

chc8• 14 years ago

> You can try and use a government fiat to legislate the market to behave a certain way, but at the end of the day, if those are at odds with the fundamental laws of economics and reality (ie, one's ability to copy information "for free"), you're playing a losing game from the start.

How do you quantify "for free"?

If we mean "at no cost to the taker," then it's equal to theft, which is obviously not much of a position to take. I'm guessing this isn't what you mean.

But if we mean "at no cost to the original holder," then that is not really true. There is no marginal cost for copying information, but he has already incurred a potentially very high fixed cost. Excluding that cost from our analysis of the situation leads to a distorted view of economics and reality.

sukuriant2• 14 years ago

"DRM is an attempt to force rivalry and excludability onto information"

And here I thought DRM was trying to make difficult the non-permitted sharing of the results of someone's hard work, for example music an artist created, or books an author wrote, or the years of work a team of actors, cinematographers, move score writers, directors, producers, makeup artists, animators, janitors and all other people that go into making a movie.

The result (the movie) may be easy to reproduce, without these protections, but the artists/etc deserve the money for their trade.

That said, DRM generally gets way the heck too much in the way of everything, and I would much rather a generally honest society where people want to support the artist so that they can continue doing what they love and continue entertaining. I think we live in a society like that in general, and the people that choose not to support the artist's work are just a tragedy of the commons biproduct that we'll never be able to stop -- nor should we try to, because efforts to the contrary just make it harder for paying customers.

But meh. Sorry, my nitpick is with "DRM is an attempt to force [...] onto information." because while technically accurate ('data is just a really big number'!) it's the idea behind the data that gives it worth

jmsduran2• 14 years ago

A while back I was at a friend's house when we decided to watch a movie. My friend mentioned that he could stream The Avengers from his Netflix account, so taking his word on it I was like "Ok awesome"!

It turns out he was wrong. A Netflix search showed that the movie was only available via mail-in DVD, not Instant Watch. I joked that I was impatient and didn't want to wait a couple of days for a DVD to be mailed.

"Not a problem" he said; my friend just hopped onto Usenet and downloaded a Blu-ray copy of the film in about 45-50 minutes, in about the time it took to cook some BBQ for the both of us.

My argument is not about the legality of this scenario; it's that rather decentralized, open networks are doing a better job at distributing high quality content than the very corporations producing and selling this content. Considering that you have to pay anywhere from $10 - $20 a month for Usenet access, people buy into this service not because they want "free" movies/music, they're paying for the ability to download virtually any movie/album they want... at any time they please. It's like Netflix Instant Watch on steroids, at a more affordable price.

incision• 14 years ago

>Considering that you have to pay anywhere from $10 - $20 a month for Usenet access, people buy into this service not because they want "free" movies/music, they're paying for the ability to download virtually any movie/album they want... at any time they please.

Dunno about that.

I'd wager that "free" is a pretty damn big part of it, bigger than the size of the catalog for many folks.

The most prolific Usenet users I know aren't using it for convenience or access to rare content. They're amassing a hoard of utterly mainstream movies (Avengers...) and video games that could be enjoyed conveniently for a reasonable price from any number of sources.

Personally, if I cared to watch Avengers I'd have paid $5 to start streaming it on my Roku from Amazon immediately.

chc8• 14 years ago

> We have entered a world where for pretty much the first time, the marginal cost of creating a copy of something is zero, for all intents and purposes. We don't have any economic theories (or business models) that can deal with that yet.

I'm not sure that's true. It seems to me that SaaS is a business model that directly addresses the situation. Take a look at 37signals' apps, the current #1 video game League of Legends, GitHub, etc. None of them require DRM — they just don't give you anything you can meaningfully "steal." It's an extremely resilient business model, and I will bet you any sum of money you like that the industry will continue heading in the direction of services.

Evbn• 14 years ago

The media analogy is to kill DVD/streaming and revert to movie theater only.

goolulusaurs• 14 years ago

I'm not so sure that's right. We already have a model that works with content like this: research universities. The media content only has to be discovered a single time then it basically stops being scares and can be easily made available to everyone. It's fanciful to imagine but I could see movie or music "universities" popping up to create this kind of content. I wonder how appropriate funding through grants and the like would be though? I think media is usually a lot more splintered than typical academic research but I could also see something like that providing an opportunity for artist who could not otherwise support themselves off of there work.

If anything though we already have a model for dealing with content that is at least similar to what entertainment media is turning into, but its not so much an area business traditionally deals with.

lectrick2• 14 years ago

I thought this was an amazing paper when it came out, especially considering its source. And it's still amazing.

jrochkind12• 14 years ago

> Outside Microsoft, critics charged that Biddle's project represented the beginning of the end for the PC as an open platform. They feared that Microsoft would use the technology to exert control over which software could be executed on Windows PCs, freezing out open source operating systems and reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice.

Nope, it's Apple that got there first with iOS.

I think the thesis on how the darknet would defeat DRM was correct... but only assuming OS's and hardware that actually gave owners control of what software they ran on the devices they own.

In a world where you void your warranty and possibly make it impossible to upgrade your OS (_and_ possibly break the law in the US!), by 'jailbreaking' your device so that you can install software on it without that software having been given a stamp of approval by the device vendor... I'm not so sure. And I suspect DRM was the real motivation for setting up the ecology this way on iOS -- where Apple managed to succeed, both technologically and in the court of public opinion, where Microsoft had previously failed, in doing exactly what people were scared Microsoft was doing -- reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice.

And that's what looks like the future of consumer computing now, no? The idea that a device owner should have the right to install whatever software they want on their device... is going to seem a quaint relic of a bygone age in 10 years, and not just for 'mobile'.

__alexs• 14 years ago

I thought jailbreaking was legal now? [1] It seems to me that both jailbreaking and pirating iOS apps is a pretty common activity even among non-technical people.

Obviously OS level DRM like iOS makes it harder for people but people still seem very keen on doing it and the incentive to do so isn't going away. Piracy, just like Shrinkage [2] is a fact of doing business.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jail... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting)

jrochkind12• 14 years ago

jailbreaking _phones_ is _possibly temporarily_ legal, as an exception to DMCA by the Librarian of Congress which has to be explicitly renewed every few years.

Jailbreaking tablets is not legal.

Providing or distributing software intended to help you jailbreak is also illegal, even though jailbreaking may be legal.

See the EFF on this (and donate some money to them!): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/2012-dmca-rulemaking-w...

bad_user2• 14 years ago

Everything you say is true, however I have my doubts that Treacherous Computing is the future.

Apple succeeded because (1) they practically created new markets and had no competition initially, (2) people treat these devices as appliances but only because they don't realize what these devices are able to do and (3) initially iOS was not a platform, so developers took it as a gift when it happened.

In the meantime however Android came and quickly surged in popularity. On most Android devices you can get root privileges really easy, by installing an app or something similar. It allows third-party sources for apps, it allows apps in Google Play that are banned in iTunes (e.g. call and sms blockers, battery savers), apps that work without avoiding your warranty, it doesn't need permissions from the careers to do tethering, it gives you access to the APN settings and Firefox is allowed, not to mention that it can be forked, being more open than Windows ever was.

The number one complaint I hear from people that own iPads is that iPads are more limited than PCs. And take for instance calls and sms blockers ... people with iPhones don't bitch about the lack of such functionality because they don't realize it is possible. I also remember fondly the day Apple banned Google Voice because it duplicated existing functionality.

People like to claim that Android is more popular because of the support it gets from careers. That's only half the story. The other half is that Android phones are more capable, simply because iOS is defective by design.

As always, the market will decide the future of computing. But Android versus iOS is like the PC versus Gaming Consoles. And if you remember, PCs won for gaming by a wide margin, pushing consoles like the Playstations into forever small niches.

You should also not underestimate the people's need for piracy. They don't need to pirate stuff on their iPads, because their iPads are treated as dumb devices. But take that capability away from their PCs and you'll see real voting with wallets. After all, the Internet was built for pirating porn ;-)

marshray2• 14 years ago

I just noticed that Microsoft has an opening for a "Privacy Strategist, Senior - Trustworthy Computing"

https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&#... https://twitter.com/adamshostack/status/274589817776525312

I accepted a position at Microsoft a few months ago, and I'm feeling pretty happy about it. I've been a merciless critic of MS in the past, but it appears to me now that MS is one of the few large tech companies in a position to make the consumer's privacy interests a competitive advantage in their products.

One of my long-standing criticisms of the whole Trustworthy computing initiative matched what was described in the article: that all this research in computer security and TPM hardware on the motherboard was not being used well in the interest of the consumer. With the very notable exception of Bitlocker, "trustworthy" tended to mean that 3rd party interests could expect the computer to act on their behalf and against the demands of the system's actual owner.

If you are or know someone who can articulate good arguments on behalf of the user and privacy, please show them this job posting.

Thanks :-)

yuhong• 14 years ago

"Trustworthy" and "Trusted" Computing are different.

wmf3• 14 years ago

Specifically, in MS-speak "trustworthy computing" means having fewer security holes and "trusted computing" is basically DRM.

atesti• 14 years ago

It's really sad what happened to the TPM!

After all the initial uproar the TPM was designed to not be able to enforce anything. It just sits there passively measuring e.g. your boot loader and BIOS and it only unlocks the secret key to your fully encrypted harddrive if the boot loader is untampered.

Great technology!

But everyone hates the TPM and it is not in every motherboard nowadays, although it would be great for Bitlocker!

But what we got anyway was the Trusted Media path in the Windows kernel, so that only trusted audio drivers could play DRM content.

But now with Windows 8 everything is bad and nobody gives a sh*t, after being brainwashed to accept the Apple appstore:

We now have the worst enforcement technology: Secure UEFI and locked down hardware which can't even run Linux out of the box!

And nobody is protesting against it!

It has nothing good (like the TPM did: TPM could store certificates and other secrets and sign data etc.) and only bad things: It enforces what you run.

And I bet Microsoft wants this to enforce that no sideloading can happen.

So in the future when the Windows desktop is gone a mandatory Windows Defender will delete all your illegal unwanted software and you can only buy through the Windows store and never ever load kernel drives which patch away stupid restrictions in your software.

No more games to be conserved in MOMA I guess...

Natsu2• 14 years ago

> Once a popular piece of information—say, a movie, a song, or a software title—"leaks" into the darknet, stopping its spread becomes practically impossible. This, the engineers realized, had an important implication: to prevent piracy, digital rights management had to work not just against average users, but against the most tech-savvy users on the planet. It only takes a single user to find a vulnerability in a DRM scheme, strip the protection from the content, and release the unencrypted version to the darknet. Then millions of other users merely need to know how to use ordinary tools such as BitTorrent to get their own copies.

There are quite a few people out there who still don't understand this, who believe that a "speedbump" will work. They see things like SatTV protection schemes that are intact because people want content and they're not going to take the hard way out until they have to. Like how the PS3 got hacked once there was an incentive to.

I even remember one specific conversation with a security expert here on HN telling me about how good the PS3's security was DRM working. I predicted it would get hacked when necessary. This was not long before the hack. But it's a fundamentally biased prediction: I only needed on lucky break in the security to be right while they had to be perfect for me to be wrong.

That fundamental asymmetry, however, is exactly what makes the part I quoted work.

How four Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

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