Adobe Spyware Reveals Again the Price of DRM: Your Privacy and Security

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/adobe-spyware-reveals-again-price-drm-your-privacy-and-security

by sinak • 12 years ago

504 166 12 years ago

spodek• 12 years ago

As our friend Cory Doctorow has been explaining for years, DRM for books is dangerous for readers, authors and publishers alike.

Richard Stallman explained it a decade earlier in a piece worth reviewing now and then -- https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html.

oceanstone• 12 years ago

Some of Stallman's predictions were spot on.

In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.)

xnull2guest6• 12 years ago

It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

Not quite there, but almost (wrt PCs).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module#Critic...

http://rt.com/news/windows-8-nsa-germany-862/

dchest4• 12 years ago

Except, even if Stallman didn't realize this, the story is mostly about state violence ("you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books", "free operating systems ... were they illegal") where DRM is used as a tool to control and monitor people.

DRM itself is not good or bad. As everything else, it can be abused, as Sony and Adobe showed us, or can be used for good (or neutral), for example, to allow indie shareware developers to let us try their software before purchasing a little registration code (I know, not free software, but let's not start this debate for now).

It's a logical error to say that DRM itself is evil when some of the instances of it are evil.

DRM is a "smart contract", a protocol for enforcing a contract without laws or violence. When you read that a person goes to prison for breaking DRM, realize that it has nothing to do with DRM, it's about state using violence to protect a failed smart contract, which is the opposite of the purpose of such smart contract.

idlewan3• 12 years ago

It's a logical error to say that DRM itself is evil when some of the instances of it are evil.

All of the instances of DRM are evil, because all of the instances of DRM'ed stuff prevents practical and unlimited sharing.

In the digital world, any limitations on copying bits are akin to virtual restraints and locking information away. It prevents you from doing anything else than what the golden prison allows.

voyou• 12 years ago

"DRM is a "smart contract", a protocol for enforcing a contract without laws or violence."

No it isn't, because DRM fundamentally cannot enforce the contract it is supposed to; you can't allow people to view something while preventing them from copying it. DRM only "works" if circumventing DRM is made illegal; DRM is an attempt by copyright holders to introduce legal restrictions on fair-use copying and on copying devices with substantial non-infringing use. DRM is entirely legal and political, not technical.

Karunamon5• 12 years ago

DRM itself is not good or bad. As everything else, it can be abused

We're going to have to disagree on this. DRM, any DRM, no matter how benign, places the computer in an adversarial role against its user and owner. There is no circumstance in which this is a healthy relationship, and there is further no circumstance in which DRM is added to something that DRM couldn't be removed entirely and therefore enhance the value of whatever it's attached to.

This is one of the things I fully agree with RMS on. DRMing something means it's broken by design.

Karunamon5• 12 years ago

One can only hope this blows up for Adobe the same way that Sony's music rootkit did. The sooner companies understand that DRM is a universally hated technology, the sooner we can all move on.

gear54rus• 12 years ago

Don't you think they already know that?

Abolishing DRM will require new breed of company. Only a few can still be profitable without it (Mozilla, anyone?). Those who can't should also be abolished together with DRM as outdated and obsolete (especially the worst offenders like Amazon or Adobe).

krasin• 12 years ago

I have to add that Mozilla is now shipping DRM too: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...

That's very sad. :(

Turing_Machine5• 12 years ago

The publisher chooses to add DRM on Kindle books. Amazon doesn't require it; it's a checkbox in the publishing portal.

There are plenty of Kindle books that have no DRM.

uptown• 12 years ago

Sony's response to their rootkit fiasco ... specifically Thomas Hesse's statement that: "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" changed my buying behavior in a major way. I absolutely avoided spending money on Sony products and services wherever possible. It's a small way of showing disapproval, but it was one that worked for me, and took a little less revenue away from Sony.

userbinator3• 12 years ago

That's an unusually direct move, as usually companies won't be so upfront about essentially saying "we want to keep you uninformed about our technology, so we can leverage it to control you better." The more common approach is to make a doublespeak-laden statement about "better experience", "convenience", and "security".

techrat• 12 years ago

It changed my behaviour, too. Between the rootkit, what they did to Lik Sang and the Other OS issue with PS3... I have boycotted Sony and will not reconsider after the third strike.

It also made me question what I bought from other people. Instead of generally accepting some limitations, I now will not buy anything that does not allow me to use what I purchased however I see fit. That now includes software. Fortunately Humble Bundle and GOG stepped up to be suitable alternate sources of gaming entertainment.

I find I don't even miss the more restrictive services anymore. Most of the spending there ended up being habit rather than desire.

higherpurpose3• 12 years ago

Good thing Google, Microsoft and Apple aren't supporting DRM in their machine now - oh wait!

Also, Firefox - oh, Firefox - guess where it gets its DRM protection from now? Ok, I'll just say: Adobe.

kuschku2• 12 years ago

Lucky that I compile Firefox from source anyway, even if it was originally to get proper Qt support.

In the future we’ll have to use IceWeasel then :/

perlgeek• 12 years ago

Did the Sony rootkit have any measurable impact on any of Sony's business metric? (revenue, profit, ...)

J_Darnley• 12 years ago

Probably only a minor ding but then only through the lawsuit it spawned.

steve19• 12 years ago

Fortunately Kindle DRM is so trivial to remove. I wish it had none but at least I know my books are mine forever and my reading habits are not being actively tracked if I use free non-Amazon ebook software.

Amazon seems to turn a blind eye to it, probably because so few readers can be bothered using de-drm software.

NolF• 12 years ago

I learned to de-DRM my Amazon books due to the concerns of their licencing. Now I can put them on my phone and listen to the books with TTS. The kindle App for Android doesn't have the feature...

nyolfen• 12 years ago

if the kindle app for ios is the same it does, highlight speech and tap the speaker icon at the bottom right

betacat3• 12 years ago

It's also pretty easy to ignore a paper contract... until you get caught. Then, the level of triviality of circumvention doesn't mean crap in court.

majormajor• 12 years ago

Where does the DRM part come into play? The description sounds like it could be applied to just about any automatic sync-your-progress-across-devices feature, which is a hugely desirable feature IMO (my Kindle would be worth a huge amount less without it, since books almost always take multiple reading sessions to finish), and it's also very useful for movies/TV...

mrj• 12 years ago

Well, one reason: because if we had the freedom to use any ebook reader we wanted, then we wouldn't have to rely on Adobe spyware. DRM prevents that.

llasram• 12 years ago

Two ways: (1) the uploaded information appears to include book licence details; if the book-scanning aspect is true then this amounts to scanning for DRM-stripped or otherwise out-of-licence material. (2) Details are light on the new DRM scheme Adobe introduced in DE3, but some are claiming it to involve requiring always-on network connectivity; if that is true, then this information leak may be linked, or at least may not be blockable w/o also preventing access to DRMed books.

walterbell8• 12 years ago

Processor-level support for DRM will make future cases more interesting, https://www.virusbtn.com/virusbulletin/archive/2014/01/vb201...

"If software and hardware could be ‘sealed’ in some way to prevent an attacker from examining data in main memory, even if the attacker had administrator level privileges on the machine, not only could the confidentiality and integrity of data in the cloud be protected, but the algorithms and design of cloud hosted applications could also be hidden from prying eyes."

Canada2• 12 years ago

So far I've seen very little evidence that this will work. Unless some true mechanism can be found for remotely verifying that you are loading your code into a known environment then there's no way to know that you're running in a secure enclave in the first place.

The best attempt I've seen is sending a computation to be performed by the remote side and trying to infer the state of the CPU cache based on how long it takes to answer. If the timing is off then the cache must have been in an unexpected state and therefore unexpected code must have been executing on the machine. It's clever, but not practical.

What has Intel come up with that's any better? What's described in your link could simply be emulated in software. How would the remote side know the difference?

wmf• 12 years ago

In SGX, each processor will have a non-extractable private key and certificate. The certificate isn't emulatable.

walterbell8• 12 years ago

There's a long technical discussion in the first reference given in the article. Remove the space in the link.

comex• 12 years ago

SGX includes microcode-based crypto which allows an enclave to both sign and encrypt things using keys based on a hash of the contents of the enclave and some master private key locked away in the CPU. I haven't looked into exactly how this works (although I'd love to defeat it some day when it's released...), but it can't be emulated in software unless you manage to extract the private key.

https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/article/41393...

click170• 12 years ago

So long as we can insert a [Xen] Hypservisor between the OS and the processor, I'm confident someone will find a way to make it do what someone else doesn't want it to.

Hypervisors aren't just for virtualizing servers, you can use them for all sorts of things, like intercepting system calls.

walterbell8• 12 years ago

The cited SGX analysis was written by a Qubes/Xen developer:

"Intel SGX is essentially a new mode of execution on the CPU, a new memory protection semantic, plus a couple of new instructions to manage this all. So, you create an enclave by filling its protected pages with desired code, then you lock it down, measure the code there, and if everything's fine, you ask the processor to start executing the code inside the enclave. Since now on, no entity, including the kernel (ring 0) or hypervisor (ring “-1”), or SMM (ring “-2”) or AMT (ring “-3”), has no right to read nor write the memory pages belonging to the enclave."

userbinator3• 12 years ago

the device ID, which is a 128-bit unique number tied to the processor.

15 years ago Intel tried this, and there was enough opposition that they removed the feature in later models: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III#Controversy_about_p...

When SGX gets implemented in a future processor, will the users once again fight strongly against it, or will they submissively accept it without resistance, looking only at the claimed "security benefits"? I really hope it'll be the former.

Reading the rest of that article and the linked Intel documents just... gives me a very bad feeling about the direction things are heading.

walterbell8• 12 years ago

Devil is in the details, e.g. in all processors or optional? Can hardware owners set root keys? How will enclaves interact with client Hyper-v, Yosemite OS X hypervisor, html5 drm, open-source virtualization & crypto, etc.

silon5• 12 years ago

It seems like virtualization is about to become useless in the future and CPU-emulating+jit compiling systems are the future, because SGX can't be virtualized.

kabdib• 12 years ago

It's a double-edged sword.

I work for a company that has to deal with a fair number of online cheaters and fraud. It would be great if we could know who we were really dealing with for our financial transactions, or failing that, have a secure execution environment for our code so we'd have a solid place to stand on. Unfortunately the state of security on PCs is so miserable that they simply cannot be trusted.

Game consoles actually do this kind of thing; the security architecture is rooted in hardware, partly to maintain the paywalls for entry to the console's market, and partly to ensure that the environment is secure against bad guys.

Of course the moment you have system like this on a commodity PC you also enable a bunch of tracking, DRM and lockout stuff that is near trivially exploited by state-level actors and companies to whom you are just chattel to be sold or rented out. And that sucks really hard.

I don't expect the masses to make good choices about security systems; they can be mislead, outright fooled, or simply drawn into poor decisions by trinket-class rewards. It's depressing.

visarga2• 12 years ago

If software and hardware could be ‘sealed’ in some way to prevent an attacker from examining data in main memory, even if the attacker had administrator level privileges on the machine

1. all it takes is one DRM free copy on bittorrent to make this scheme fail

2. how would they prevent me from grabbing images on the screen and turning them back into books? Or scanning a physical book.

3. blind people need to do this conversion anyway, to run the text through text to speech

Remember, it only takes one DRM-free copy on filesharing to make the DRM invasion a useless failure.

jurassic• 12 years ago

Adobe is taking a pummeling this week. This news is nicely timed for the launch week of Affinity Designer, a serious competitor to Illustrator on the Mac App Store for casual and not-so-casual users who don't use Adobe products heavily enough to justify the cost of a monthly subscription. I tried it yesterday and was ready to cancel my Creative Cloud single-app subscription after about 20 minutes of experimentation. It's more than sufficient for my vector graphic needs as an indie developer.

13• 12 years ago

I don't mind Affinity Designer at all, but it's still missing a lot of functionality I've become used to in Photoshop. I enjoy the speed and the interface, but the lack of in depth bitmap transform tools was a bit disappointing. They were however very responsive in the Beta and I imagine they'll keep that momentum up. If they manage it they might be a very capable alternative to Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

michaelbuddy• 12 years ago

Yup, I'm stoked on Affinity Designer. It also nicely promotes Serif software as an alternative to the Creative Suite. Serif has a lot of educational customers and casual users and probably would have more if people knew about them and their prices. I'm going to revisit their stuff. It's been about 10 years since I checked out their page layout program. But Affinity is fantastic. They put in a lot of great ideas into it in the UI. Xara on Windows and Affinity on Mac will be my go-to apps for vector drawing. Illustrator for me is basically just an app for conversion to make sure a file is ready to share. I hate working in it, clunky app.

estefan• 12 years ago

There are also loads of great serif fonts. I've been using them for a while now. It's really great to see them moving into software.

devindotcom• 12 years ago

Given the scale of incompetence required to have your 'spyware' transmitting common and expected book data and metadata in plaintext, I have to say we should employ Hanlon's Razor here, and not attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

That said, there's probably a little malice in there, too. And either way, this is probably a crippling blow to this branch of Adobe.

Crito2• 12 years ago

When a drunk driver crashes into somebody, we do not care that they had no ill intent. Why should it matter here?

Sufficiently advanced incompetence might as well be malice.

higherpurpose3• 12 years ago

Second, sending this information in plain text undermines decades of efforts by libraries and bookstores to protect the privacy of their patrons and customers.

Someone needs to sue Adobe over this. That way we can stop such future invasions of privacy from DRMed machines in the future.

Also, Microsoft will do much of the same with Windows 10, collecting data not just on ebooks, but any file you might open, and even characters you may type. Digital Editions is one app. Windows 10 is a whole OS, which makes the whole thing a lot scarier:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2373838/microsofts-...

walterbell8• 12 years ago

Is that only for the preview or also for GA? Why would any corporate customer agree to this policy? Maybe it's only for the free version of Windows 10, the one targeted at $200 Chromebook clones?

The private equity members of Microsoft's board have been advocating for more focus on cloud services and less on Windows, e.g. recent moves to support Apple devices.

RubyPinch• 12 years ago

sans file monitoring (though windows has been offering to send heuristics and file signatures though windows defender for a while now)

isn't that stuff that most already have signed away on? iOS's autocorrection for their keyboard, and cloud processing for siri? and same for android's TTS, STT engines (both are cloud-based by default if I'm not mistaken)? (and the google keyboard)

without asking the user to agree to such things, microsoft can't enter the mobile device arena to the same degree as competitors

MiddleEndian• 12 years ago

Not that I think it's good that mobile OSes spy on you, Windows 10 will a desktop operating system. Desktop OSes have not traditionally been known to spy on you.

k-mcgrady2• 12 years ago

> "iOS's autocorrection for their keyboard"

I'm pretty sure nothing you type leaves the device on iOS unless you give permission (which you can do with third party keyboards).

gldsmth5• 12 years ago

I play pirated copies of games I bought and own on steam because I don't want steam to know how many hours I play my games, when I play them, from what place etc. I consider that is not anyone's business.

Adobe's spyware isn't that different from what gamers have accepted with Steam unfortunately. Will book readers accept it, the way gamers did, or will they fight back? Unlike video games, there are alternatives, that are still popular (buying books on paper). I don't ever intend on spending any $ on a drm'd book when I can have it on paper for the same price without DRM.

k-mcgrady2• 12 years ago

> "I play pirated copies of games I bought and own on steam because I don't want steam to know how many hours I play my games, when I play them, from what place etc. I consider that is not anyone's business."

Just a hypothetical:

If the developer was giving you a discount on Steam because they could collect this information would you still buy it from Steam and then pirate it (getting the discount but not providing the information) or would you pay full price somewhere else? Not judging, just curious.

gldsmth5• 12 years ago

I buy games because I support the developers. I've spent full price money online on games that could've been bought for cheaper in physical form (amazon.fr is almost always cheaper than steam prices actually unless Steam is going through a sale. Regular prices on steam are always more expensive than getting the box delivered at your door). So, no. I wouldn't trade my privacy for cheaper prices, since the one reason that makes me "honest" and buy games in the first place is spending my money on things I like. I bought all the classic RPG I liked, and already owned in physical forms, on gog.com, just to show an interest in what I saw as a dying genre. Plus the fact that they are the only gaming platform that is DRM-free. Then I supported the kickstarter renaissance (Wasteland, Torment etc).

I've put my steam profile on private, but if you could see it, you would see almost no game past 1hour of play because I never play games from steam. I only buy them on steam, then I download a copy that will not violate my privacy. Because for as long as I breath I will not let anyone intrude on my privacy. Also, when given the choice between steam and gog, I obviously chose gog.com.

chipotle_coyote2• 12 years ago

God love the EFF, but they're using this as a platform to talk about one of their favorite hobby horses, and that's kind of obscuring the problem. Read the original article in which this was discovered -- this has nothing to do with DRM.

http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users-...

Adobe is collecting data about every ebook on your system, regardless of whether it's using DRM and even regardless of whether it's even being managed by the Adobe Digital Edition reader. (And for an added security bonus, they're sending it in plain text.) If you install and launch the new version of ADE, it's going to do this whether or not every single ebook you have on your system is DRM-free.

This is certainly an electronic privacy issue, but it's not a DRM issue just because Adobe Digital Editions supports Adobe DRM, and the EFF's headline is a little disingenuous. Adobe's rationale for this collection is indeed claimed to be related to licensing, but the biggest problem is how wide a net they're casting and how intrusive this information is -- ironically enough, if it was only sending this information about DRM-encumbered books, it'd arguably be much less of a scandal. (Although the fifty-eight people in the world using Adobe DRM would still have every right to be pissed.)

dmix• 12 years ago

Since Adobe is not selling books, how do they benefit from parsing this data? If not for DRM-style tactics?

Are they selling it to third parties? Unless this is the case, then I'd say their obsession with DRM and rights management is the primary issue. Without of course discrediting that digital surveillance is the new standard.

chipotle_coyote2• 12 years ago

As I said (well, quoted), it is for licensing -- Adobe is apparently trying to support some kind of "metered licensing," in which you might pay by how long you keep a book out or even by how far you read in it. Is that the same as DRM? In practice, mostly, since it's hard to see how that particular scheme would work without DRM. (But licensing is not the same as DRM, right? I buy a lot of DRM-free tech books, but that doesn't give me license to put those books up for free on my web site.)

But I'd nonetheless argue that the primary issue is not that Adobe is implementing new licensing schemes of dubious value. It's that Adobe implemented them in an exceedingly invasive way. I don't use Adobe Digital Editions unless I absolutely have to, but until now that's been because the software is awful, not because it's philosophically objectionable.

I'd also argue that it may not be entirely fair to describe Adobe as "obsessed with rights management"; they're providing a platform for publishers, and using DRM -- or not -- is the publishers' choice. The chances are high that the "metered licensing" concept was borne of publisher request, not an Adobe plan to make everyone's life difficult. Making everyone's life difficult is just Adobe's standard execution plan.

biehl• 12 years ago

I think the reasonable link to DRM is that the only reason you would ever consider Adobe Digital Edition reader is if it is forced upon you by DRM requirements.

If not for DRM you could chose a different not-crappy platform.

hawleyal• 12 years ago

It's a DRM issue because their spyware is required software for their products.

vlunkr• 12 years ago

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that DRM is useless. People who like to pirate will pirate, no matter what safeguards you put in place, it's been proven over and over. It's just a nuisance for people who want to obtain media legally. If I paid for something, why can't I use it on any device I own with any software? It makes the purchase so much more valuable.

userpasswd• 12 years ago

We do what we must

Because

We can

Adobe Spyware Reveals Again the Price of DRM: Your Privacy and Security

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