Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

http://www.alexrad.me/discourse/why-rosyna-cant-take-a-movie-screenshot.html

by waffle_ss • 12 years ago

367 147 12 years ago

pbprabhuram2• 12 years ago

Just use a camera to take a shot

mercurial• 12 years ago

You completely missed the point of the article. "Trusted computing" is back with a vengeance. The fact that your computer runs complex firmware (your coprocessor's firmware can run a webserver?) which bypasses anything above it is the problem. It means you don't own your computer anymore: your overlords grant you the right to use it under certain conditions.

pbprabhuram2• 12 years ago

Nope I did'nt that is one way to bypass the problem

pm246012• 12 years ago

go ahead and try that

Pyxl101• 12 years ago

Are chips with this feature sold in consumer devices? I'm planning to buy a new computer soon. How can I avoid or boycott the chips in question? Or can the feature be definitively disabled through the BIOS?

If I buy a computer, then I want to own it completely and not have arbitrary DRM bullshit remove capabilities. If I wish to take a screenshot of copyright content and share it with friends (fair use), then I should be able to do that, and I will be seriously pissed if my own machine gets in the way.

Does anyone know which chips include this feature, and/or whether it can be disabled?

pm246012• 12 years ago

thats the point. It helps Hollywood, at your expense. You as the purchaser of the computer are not "entitled" to being able to use the computer exactly as you want.

redstripe• 12 years ago

I believe this is part of "vPro" in intel marketing speak. Yes, many consumer CPUs have it. Intel provides pretty good feature lists by CPU if you want to avoid it:

e.g.

http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&FamilyText=4th%20Ge...

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

Chipsets, not CPUs, but that is a moot distinction as Intel stopped licensing their ISA, so you have no choice but to use intel chipset with spyware buildin

pgeorgi7• 12 years ago

All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. There's a reason why the "reclaim your freedom" notebook is still a Lenovo X60.

Some of them come with larger firmware (5MB, making up vPro and AMT), others with the smaller one (1.5MB) that merely does the DRM stuff, but all of them have the full hardware access detailled in the article.

AMD is clean on the chipset side until kaveri/kabini. After that, they come with a "platform security processor". I think the GPU has some DRM features (mostly concerned with adding Macrovision noise to the output signal), but I'm not into GPUs very much.

Contemporary ARM stuff mostly comes with TrustZone, which can typically be used for DRM as well. AMD adopted the TrustZone model for their current CPUs, too.

Since Protected A/V Path and similar DRM systems require OS cooperation, the easiest way to stay clear of them is to use Open Source media players, on an Open Source OS.

If you want to avoid supporting proponents of such hardware assisted DRM systems, plain ARM systems that ship without fixed operating system (eg. the cuBox series, rPI & follow ups) are your best bet.

Audiophilip• 12 years ago

@pgeorgi:

All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine.

Do you have sources for this? I wanted to verify it, but after a few Google searches I could not find anything that states exactly that. I have a Haswell CPU, but I have no Management Engine settings in my BIOS.

How does the vPro feature correlate with the Management Engine? Because not all Intel CPU's come with vPro. Or is that only a firmware difference? Would be nice to see clearer in this issue, but most websites contain only marketing nonsense.

throwawayaway• 12 years ago

hello pgeorgi - you are a mine of information on this stuff. thanks for taking hte time to explain all of it!

can you tell me if the odroid c1 is a good bet?

http://www.cnx-software.com/2014/12/10/hardkernel-odroid-c1-...

The company will provide images for Ubuntu 14.04 or Android 4.4 KitKat with Linux 3.10. I think other people can port os's to it.

I think it's going to be my next computer!

dmm2• 12 years ago

Do you have an opinion on this project: https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop ?

It's a laptop designed to be free software and it's using coreboot.

hrrsn• 12 years ago

Yes. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro 15" Retina and as described in the article, the chip & driver are present in my machine.

$ ioreg|grep AppleIntelMEI | | | | +-o AppleIntelMEIDriver <class AppleIntelMEIDriver, id 0x100000302, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 7>

Corrado• 12 years ago

My mid 2010 MacBook Pro 17" machine does not have the chip & driver (at least ioreg doesn't report anything). Just another data point.

Fuxy• 12 years ago

Intel Xeon processors don't seem to ship with this. Then again intel doesn't expect many people using a xenon on a workstation motherboard as their PC.

I got lucky getting this.

Drakim• 12 years ago

What I don't really understand is how this could be used to stop piracy. Sure, you could stop recording on a machine with Intel Management Engine, but wouldn't pirates simply use a computer without Intel Management Engine to rip media?

Unless the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine (sounds unlikely, how would you explain that to customers), how does it prevent anything?

rewqfdsa3• 12 years ago

the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine

That's why Intel management keeps greenlighting this project. Intel thinks that it if it can convince content producers to distribute media as blobs encrypted with Intel's public key (and maybe, say, Samsung's or Apple's), then we can transition to a world where consumer video files do work on most consumer hardware, but can't be decrypted outside the protected media path and ripped.

There's no reason this scheme can't work. OEMs and content producers just haven't been able to cooperate well enough to piece it together yet. Once they do, game over, except for the analog hole.

This scheme also has the side effect of creating a "moat" around existing OEMs. Sure, a new player can begin fabricating new CPUs, but existing media files won't be encrypted for these CPUs. It is literally a conspiracy against the public.

rando2892• 12 years ago

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

liadmat2• 12 years ago

except for the analog hole

It's a pretty big hole, and it's practically impossible to seal. Which is why I don't think we'll ever see "game over" for piracy, no matter how advanced DRM technology becomes.

At this point, I think censoring the internet is the only way for the movies/music industry to win. Sadly this isn't so far fetched.

thatone• 12 years ago

More importantly, why would software be required to engage in all activity by piping through such a hardware interface. I would expect that open source alternatives and virtualization could easily bypass its necessity.

At first glance, dumping the contents of any source media, or capturing network streams properly, should readily provide the raw, unencrypted content data, which is then decoded by an application that has been implemented without use of those particular hardware features.

Am I being naive?

rewqfdsa3• 12 years ago

the contents of any source media...should readily provide the raw, unencrypted content data

Once this crap becomes ubiquitous, why would companies ship unencrypted bits at all? They could send files encrypted with all the major OEM "protected content" keys. If you're running on non-supported hardware, well, sucks to be you, pirate. I imagine it's rather difficult to extract the private key from DRM hardware.

In the end, big media wins.

MichaelGG4• 12 years ago

The goal is that the decoding is done by trusted hardware, not by software keys. So you can run VMs and open source, but they won't have the keys to decrypt the content.

Same deal with HDCP, where PCIe is treated as an unsafe bus, so data goes encrypted from the kernel to the GPU to the display device (something like that).

It's also why sometimes people have trouble watching Netflix or so on, because some part fails. Apple TV + Toshiba TV at my parents' has this problem maybe 1/10 times we try to play.

But you're right that encrypting a million end user devices is pointless if there is even one unencrypted point. No doubt hardware companies, movie companies, and Netflix are already wetting themselves with the prospect of having no unencrypted holes left. Still seems highly unlikely to actually work - piracy finds a way.

knweiss• 12 years ago

The "stopping privacy" argument could be a red herring.

rando2892• 12 years ago

What is Rosyna? Googled it and came up blank.

danshapiro• 12 years ago

The second footnote in the article is a twitter post from a user, @rosyna, who said that she couldn't take a screenshot of Netflix.

https://twitter.com/rosyna/status/550702351703875584

MichaelGG4• 12 years ago

The other downside is that you can't use custom software to fix up video. Netflix has a fairly poor player - more than one I've had to go torrent something I was trying to watch in Netflix due to one playback issue or another. From brightness to subtitles, to frame positioning (shifting the whole playback area down to fit better on my wall when projecting very wide formats) - Netflix offers nothing. Even worse for audio, where I often pump center channel dialog and perform normalization.

It's sad how advanced the tech is compared to how limited our use is. (For instance, it's technically trivial, but usably difficult to add Rifftrax (MST3K reborn) to a movie on Netflix.)

Edit: The really nasty part is that this technology in general isn't bad. I love TPMs, for instance. Gives me a fairly easy way to get relatively strong security, say, to store my disk encryption keys, without memorizing a passphrase. Trusted computing can allow the user to remain in control. But slipping in DRM gets people understandably upset.

OTOH, I can't find details on exactly how this video stuff works. Wikipedia points at the GPU part, making it seem like it's just the same HDCP-kinda stuff that's been around for a while. (Annoying, but ultimately a decision of your kernel to enable. As in, media isn't encrypted at the source to some Intel key.)

userbinator6• 12 years ago

Trusted computing can allow the user to remain in control.

Only as long as it's really the user the computer is trusting, and not some other entity. Personally, I don't really like TPMs or any of the other "safe computing" technology. In theory (and this is what everyone usually refers to when they advocate it) they can help the user, but in practice they're almost always being used to do the opposite and the path to freedom is insecurity (e.g. jailbreaking, running homebrew software, etc.) As the saying goes, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is."

OTOH, I can't find details on exactly how this video stuff works

That's sort of the point of DRM in general - you're not supposed to know how it works, because then you would be in a much better position to break it. It's no surprise that the details would be kept secret, and other security technologies are likely being used for this purpose - e.g. DRM'd PDFs.

jrockway2• 12 years ago

This is all ultimately pointless because it's not like the video decoder checks the integrity of its own code or the CPU running it or the compiler that compiled it or that the OS it was tested against is actually running. (Reflections on trusting trust.) Nothing actually cares about secure boot or end-to-end code validation; Apple doesn't even include equipment on their mainboards to do this anymore. Meanwhile, if you're going to grab pixels to pirate video, that's easy: HDCP is broken, so just grab it at the link layer. The key you need is on Pastebin!

Consumer DRM has always been a hardware-selling maneuver as far as I can tell. "You need HDCP in order to watch this video." "I do? But HDCP is broken." "Just buy a new monitor anyway." The Management Engine sounds like a similar scheme. "You need an Intel Management Engine to watch this video." "I do?" "Yes, it's very convenient for us that you need to buy a new computer even though your current computer works fine otherwise."

Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad.

stingraycharles• 12 years ago

Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad.

And it's even more sad that the most computer illiterate, "honest" people are the most vulnerable to this strategy. People that want an honest way to watch movies have the most problems watching them.

jrockway2• 12 years ago

Yes, this is truly the sad part of DRM: the people that actually pay for content are the ones whose experience is most degraded. Pirates don't have to buy monitors with HDCP. Pirates can watch their collection when the authorization servers are down. Pirates can back up their media. Pirates can take screenshots. (Though I've never had this particular problem even with "DRM'd" media on Linux.) The list goes on.

The content industry wonders why they can't stop piracy. Maybe they could start by providing a product that's as good as what the pirates get.

ris• 12 years ago

"Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy"

DRM has very little to do with piracy. Hollywood know perfectly well that DRM will not stop a determined pirate and a movie only has to be ripped once to be pirated indefinitely.

It's about control. It's about the studios always having a seat at the bargaining table when new products/devices are being floated. They fear becoming a commodity supplier.

mike_hearn6• 12 years ago

DRM is absolutely to do with piracy, that's the whole point of the technology.

Of course Hollywood knows that any given DRM scheme will be broken at some point. How much they care about this depends a lot on what exactly "at some point" really means. Almost all money from movie sales comes in a spike when the movie is first release, hardly any movies go on to become long-term cult classics that people are still buying years later. If a DRM scheme is so good that it takes three months to crack once disks hit the street, from the movie studios perspectives that's a huge win because during the movie's peak people had to cough up the money to buy it or put up with some truly crappy low quality version.

The same economics holds for other things like video games. Nobody cares if you beat the DRM on a game that's five years old.

So the real question is, can DRM give studios and other content creators such a window of time? The results are mixed. Sometimes the answer has been yes. Other times the answer has been no. It's complicated and depends on a lot of fiddly things.

davidgerard• 12 years ago

Hollywood know perfectly well that DRM will not stop a determined pirate and a movie only has to be ripped once to be pirated indefinitely.

You know, I'm really not convinced they do. Everything I see from these people leads me to think they literally think this stuff is magic, and they want the snake oil so badly they'll believe the people selling it over the people telling them the disappointing truth, every time.

rayiner• 12 years ago

It's about control. It's about the studios always having a seat at the bargaining table when new products/devices are being floated. They fear becoming a commodity supplier.

The only way the studios would become a commodity supplier is if there were numerous other sources of content people would pay money to watch. That's what it means for your product to be a commodity. E.g. consumer PCs are a commodity because if you don't like Dell, you can get an identical product from HP. But with movies, if you want Harry Potter, you have to play ball with Warner Bros., because consumers want that specific movie, not some generic equivalent.

The studios want DRM not because they don't trust consumers, but because they (rightfully) don't trust the tech industry. It doesn't matter that Harry Potter isn't a commodity if you can pirate it without doing business with Warner Brothers. The tech industry sells hardware and software services for consuming content, and it helps its bottom line if piracy is easy and prevalent. See, e.g., Youtube's being built on the back of infringing Viacom's copyrights. DRM gives the studios a toe-hold in the process to deter products that blatantly promote copyright infringement.

wolfgke• 12 years ago

Pirating movies: No hassle with DRM

Buying moving legally: Trouble with DRM (Windows, OS X), often impossible to play on Linux.

Let the customer decide. :-)

rhino3693• 12 years ago

Consumer DRM is about making piracy more difficult. It's not an all or nothing proposition.

Video and Audio DRM will never stop scene pirating. It's easy to just copy the output. But it stops me from just copying movies I rented on Amazon Instant to my brothers PC.

If 10% of the population is pirating you shit, you aren't losing very many sales. Sure it hurts your profit margin a little. But most dedicated pirates are junkies for content.

But if my mom can't figure out how to pirate your content, you are fucked. That's why Napster and the P2P ruined the commercial music industry. It not only took a huge chunk of the revenue, but it changed the perception of the value of music itself. Instead of 12 bucks per album, people wanted 20,000 songs on their IPOD for free.

The fight against piracy isn't a fight to exterminate it, but to keep piracy out of reach of the critical mass.

Some DRM really works. PC multiplayer DRM works great and is the only reason the PC industry is surviving. Movie theatres are the best DRM there is. Not being able to sideload stuff on a nonjailbroken iphone is huge.

higherpurpose2• 12 years ago

I wonder if Intel's SGX will be able to enforce that DRM much more effectively (going from history, probably not).

lelandbatey• 12 years ago

Question about capturing at the link layer:

Does anyone have any resources for capturing HDMI, stripping HDCP and recording on a computer?

fit2rule• 12 years ago

You can't rip movies with an iDevice. The future of movie companies is, ship hardware devices.

juliendorra• 12 years ago

Just a note on the discourse: the point "I own it, I should be able to use it the way I want" feels like not really effective (as a rhetoric) in many part of the western world and in many social circles. I really feel for example in France it would be easily brushed off using analogy to construction permits or driver licenses, or just put the person in some crazy-libertarian box ("the kind that want to print firearms at home"). There might be ways of framing the issue that fit better in a socio-democrat context (Europe, etc.). Ideas?

thomasahle• 12 years ago

I'm not sure either. But at least in by country the leftish parties seem the most interested in protecting consumer rights, which might be a way to go. The libertarians seem more worried about protecting the company's "intellectual property" and include management engines in "their own" products.

TeMPOraL4• 12 years ago

Maybe stress that the computer is a creative tool and should not have artificial limits put in place? Compare this to a hammer and imagine that one weekend you wanted to finish that cupboard you're building in your garage, but your hammer starts throwing exceptions because your nails are not Apple iNails or otherwise MAFIAA-certified ones. "How dare you buy generic nails in a mom&pop shop around the corner?"

General-purpose computer is a tool that should be able to execute arbitrary code its users want to. I think Cory Doctorow summed it up the best: http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html.

DanBC3• 12 years ago

Europe has strong consumer protection rights.

The angle to take is that media is sold misleadingly. When I buy a DVD / Bluray I am paying for a physical disc and a licence to use the contents of the disc. That licence is restrictive and restricts my rights more than law. Thus, I am not allowed to extract a short extract to use in an educational setting (fair dealings; fair use). Packaging and marketing of DVD / Bluray is unclear about this and gives the impression that you are "buying a movie", not buying some plastic and a licence.

Ar-Curunir2• 12 years ago

Exactly, this is the main problem I have with the people who claim in comment sections across the internet that since I'm only paying for a license to play the content, I can't complain about owning it.

Nowhere on the iTunes store does it say, "Click here to purchase license to play video". Not on Amazon or Google Play either.

This is just a case of false advertising by content producers and distributors. If they can cheat me, why shouldn't I be entitled to cheat back?

iSnow• 12 years ago

the point "I own it, I should be able to use it the way I want" feels like not really effective (as a rhetoric) in many part of the western world and in many social circles. I really feel for example in France

I really think that's a complete strawman. People in France (or Europe in general) very much feel like "this is my computer, I use it any way I want". Personally I think even more so than Americans, because usually consumer protection from corporate scheming is better in Europe.

BTW libertarians would be a-ok with corporations defining how your computer works, that's entrepreneurial freedom, after all.

crdoconnor• 12 years ago

BTW libertarians would be a-ok with corporations defining how your computer works, that's entrepreneurial freedom, after all.

Only because they imagine markets ('free') to be entirely defined according to consumers' desires, as opposed to the mess of monopolies, cartels and semi-cartels that exist naturally in the real world.

gbog• 12 years ago

For me in France and Germany the correct angle is that if you do not control your computer, some big crazy American corp do, and can and will do whatever they want with your content, which usually means make money with it.

belorn• 12 years ago

To use it "the way I want" is much smaller priority as to be able to dictate who uses my private property, for what purpose, and when. DRM violates each of those, and as rhetoric goes, the only law we should need is private property laws.

A driver license allow me to drive legally on the public road. It do not grant anyone else to repossess my car, instruct it to not run if someone else is behind the wheel, dictate who might repair or or what parts it will accept.

jsdir• 12 years ago

Years ago, I remember trying to screenshot video on a Microsoft XP box. When I tried to paste the screenshot inside any image editing program, the video region would remain blank. If I correctly positioned the image editor window over the window with the video source, the video would show through this region, but the video remained positionally fixed to the screen. I cannot remember if this happened for all video sources though. Could this have been caused by DRM?

akx• 12 years ago

No -- that was using video overlays for hardware acceleration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay

geon2• 12 years ago

It was because of how HW accelerated video decoding worked. You would specify the coordinates of a rectangle on the screen where to play the video. Then you'd display a rectangle of a certain color (#010000, I believe), to be used as a mask.

The window manager could show windows on top of the video, and the masking would work even though the video decoding HW knew nothing about window management and vice versa.

buro93• 12 years ago

My partner is an academic, a lecturer in film theory. She watches a lot of films, and needs to make a lot of short clips for her lectures, and to take a lot of screenshots for her papers.

This task is becoming increasingly difficult as time goes by. The most reliable method (for her skill level) is now to rip DVDs, removing various bits of protection, before playing the film using VLC on Windows and using VLC to take the screenshot. This is a pain, as she now uses a Mac primarily (as most academia seems to be doing so almost exclusively because it makes presentations easier - connecting to projectors turns out to be the killer feature).

For a lot of films though, she pauses a film and uses a camera directed at the TV. Or worse, she'll record the clip on a camera (using the camera's microphone).

Aside from things like Box of Broadcasts (which is for UK broadcast TV), there are few to no resources for academics to resort to for sources of film that will enable dissemination to students through materials and presentations. All clips are short (10-30s), papers feature only a few screenshots when published.

Regardless of the studio and technology company desire to lock things down and control distribution, there remains a very legal exception to their controls: education.

And of course, education has resorted to alternatives to these locks. There exists private torrent sites that are collections of obscure, international and predominantly non-Hollywood productions. Like torrent sites pre-Netflix, these are actually the most reliable sources of films that academics use for sources. Even when an academic owns a DVD (as nearly all do for future presentation and citation purposes), the torrents deliver files that the academic can use to create clips and screenshots.

As much as possible, I try and help my partner avoid such sites. They are good, but in the hard world of academia I'm not sure her career will survive trying to argue any form of legitimacy of downloading content for academic purposes for already owned DVDs.

There is a very real and present danger that copy protections will harm libraries and education. They already are.

juliangregorian• 12 years ago

Curious why VLC/screenshot doesn't work on Mac?

sjwright• 12 years ago

It certainly does work -- I use it frequently. The VLC snapshot tool works perfectly, and the system screen shot (cmd-shift-3/4) works too, at least on the H264 video I just tested with. Not sure what the issue could be.

higherpurpose2• 12 years ago

The strangest part is that according to the law (fair use) she should be able to do that. This DRM is effectively creating its own "copyright law", just like Cory Doctorow has warned us before.

The whole copyright gang from MPAA to OS vendors and chip makers are using DRM to expand the reach of copyright law. And you can't just say "well I'll just break the DRM, since it's legal for me to take the screenshot" either. Because breaking DRM is illegal...So in order to exercise one of your rights you have to break another law.

mikeryan• 12 years ago

You're conflating copyright law. She is legally allowed to take screenshots and clips from copyrighted material. There's nothing in or about copyright law that requires content providers to make this easy.

buro93• 12 years ago

She is an academic in the UK, I'm not sure fair use applies but something else probably does. She's far more aware of those issues than I, I just advise how to get things done regardless of whatever constraints she may be under. My understanding though is that the constraints are technology based and how they interfere and prevent some things, rather than legally based and whether she is allowed to do something or not.

psk• 12 years ago

I don't know much about HDMI, but couldn't I just run the video/movie in fullscreen and then capture the output from the HDMI and save the raw output to a disk?

userbinator6• 12 years ago

Yes, HDCP has been broken for a long time and even if it wasn't, you could still capture the LVDS signal that drives the LCD panel itself.

But the problem is that those are very high-speed signals(1920x1080 24bpp at 60FPS is around 350MB/s+) that require suitable hardware to capture, basically uncompressed video, and recompression would introduce more artifacts than the original. That's why pirates don't usually go this route; the result is only slightly better than pointing a good camera at the screen.

w0utert3• 12 years ago

I always assumed most movies were ripped using exploits at various points in the playback software stack? At some point the unencrypted bitstream needs to be available to decode, if you hacked the player or GPU driver code to dump it at that point, it would be possible to re-assemble it into an unencrypted video file, right? You would use a computer without any of the DRM features the article is about of course.

hippich• 12 years ago

This is what I call bullshit job - zero value for humankind created, tons of human hours wasted. (I would even say negative value since security holes will be found if not already in this microcontroller firmware)

tacoman• 12 years ago

I stumbled upon this PAVP thing in an old Thinkpad just last week. My first thought after reading about it was basically this. Somewhere, some very talented software developers probably spent years working on this obscure, essentially useless thing.

gear54rus2• 12 years ago

I only hope is that as bullshit like this becomes more and more prominent, people will become more and more educated in what is acceptable and what is not (since it will bite them more and more). Eventually, public opinion would shift into more and more negative outlook on corporations who practice such things.

Offenders' influence would then decline and people will become smarter, everyone wins.

userbinator6• 12 years ago

and people will become smarter

Unfortunately, my impression is the opposite - people are slowly being dissuaded from discovering these restrictions by the promises of convenience, and when they do run into them, they're faced with heavy rhetoric to the effect of "it's for your security" so they (reluctantly) accept it. Incidents like this appear isolated and are downplayed by the majority, who will continue to use the very services that restrict them, purely out of convenience.

Corporations are diverting people's actions of sharing information into their own channels so they can exert more control over them - witness all the "share on Twitter/Facebook/etc" buttons appearing everywhere (I personally block them, but I know they exist); they sure are convenient to use, and as a side-effect of their use, it reduces the amount of people who will "manually" and directly share with others (and thus know more about the transfer of information themselves.)

The same is happening with other types of media too, as evidenced by all the efforts to hide the filesystem of devices from users, since one of the most open ways to share data with someone is to give them a copy of a file. They are even trying to discourage linking to a resource, with browser vendors thinking of hiding URLs or parts of them. Ultimately, they are pushing for a world in which no one owns their (tightly locked-down) computing devices or has any knowledge of how they work (except for a few "specialists"), and all communication between individuals happens via some corporate intermediary. This makes it easier to censor and manipulate the users (probably to squeeze $$$ out of them), which is what the whole idea is about.

gear54rus2• 12 years ago

A comment so accurate it makes me sad :C

There isn't much one can do though as favoring convenience over not-so-obvious benefits of (abstract, for them) freedom seems to stem from the very human nature...

I used to think RMS' ideas were a bit far fetched, but with each such revelation that comes to light in the form of post on some relatively unknown blog those ideas seem more and more appropriate.

eeZi2• 12 years ago

http://www.slideshare.net/codeblue_jp/igor-skochinsky-enpub

It even has an embedded Java runtime.

based2• 12 years ago

http://recon.cx/2014/slides/Recon%202014%20Skochinsky.pdf

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813029

dmm2• 12 years ago

The Librem 15 project is trying to talk intel into letting them disable the management engine. It's the last non-free part of the system.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop

nercury• 12 years ago

DRM is a placebo against technology.

dghughes• 12 years ago

It's bizarre foreign movie and music corporations (I'm Canadian) are dictating actual physical changes to computing hardware.

It's as bizarre to me as if US car corporations dictated I could only use premium fuel from Shell and monitored it in real-time.

jandrese• 12 years ago

The best part is that it is only a matter of time until the IME is cracked and root kits come with bits that you will never be able to clean without getting a whole new computer. Did you know the IME can send and recieve IP without the host processor ever seeing it? It's the ultimate way to own a machine.

zaroth4• 12 years ago

I would assume the larger purpose of IME is actually exactly as a platform for persistent undetectable system compromise. Purpose built for TAO? As conspiracy theories go it's hard to explain the existence and full capabilities of IME in this decade without some NSA involvement.

acdha2• 12 years ago

Please take the conspiracist nattering somewhere else. As explained in the second paragraph of the article, the features of IME were requested by large corporate IT departments and pushed mainstream by marketing pressure, with the addition of DRM bits as requested by the large tech vendors who need them to negotiate licenses with members of the copyright cartel.

You look at this and see a secure rootkit. A corporate IT worker looks at this and thinks that they can image a workstation remotely no matter what's currently installed. A security person looks at this and sees secure base platform starting from TPM on down which can be setup to keep malware from irrecoverably compromising the system (remember the recent Thunderstrike discussion noting that TPM would protect against that firmware exploit?).

All of these have tradeoffs which can be debated but it's just silly to pretend that the NSA is centrally directing the entire industry.

frik• 12 years ago

What about graphic cards from Nvidia/AMD? What about the ARM CPUs from various vendors like Apple, AppliedMicro, Atmel, Broadcom, Freescale Semiconductor, Nvidia, NXP, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments?

Do they have similar DRM features too?

michaelbuddy• 12 years ago

not much info at the top of the searches for Rosyna, what consumer processors is it in / going to be in? is it easy enough to just not buy it?

Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

Related Stories