DRM: How To Boil A Frog

symbolic writes "This article on the Register explains their experience with Creative's first attempt at supporting DRM, and also reviews a sneaky little technique for 'easing' DRM into peoples' lives via a free Costello preview CD. Two of the tracks are free from any DRM, but for the two that are DRM-enabled, you have to activate the right to listen to them (up to four times), by accessing a central server via the net. For those in the know, the doublespeak used to inform users of any actions they need to take to enable their DRM rights might be quite amusing. To wit: 'The content you are accessing requires an additional level of security. In order to play it, you will need to update your Digital Rights Management Installation.' Others, however, will think they're getting something, when they're actually having something taken away from them. It's a matter of time to see if consumers will flat-out reject this new 'enabling' technology, or let it seep into and infect their lives like the disease that it is."

Comments

Crapola

[anthony_dipierro]

It's a matter of time to see if consumers will flat-out reject this new 'enabling' technology, or let it seep into and infect their lives like the disease that it is.

How does this shit get through the editors? timothy, welcome back to my block list (I had you on for several months and put you back hoping you'd gotten better).

Re:Damn...

[billbaggins]

Easy. Re-elect GWB. Secret White House documents indicate that he thinks he hasn't quite put enough of a dichotomy between himself and the previous administration, and so for a next step is planning to offer bonuses to corporations that increase their greenhouse gas emissions. By 2008, the Everglades should reach a nice toasty 212 F (100 C)...

It's a joke. Smile.

Re:Why Elvis?

[Loligo]

>kids are not stupid

You sure about that?

Seen the way they dress these days?

Pull your damn pants up, then tell me you're not stupid. Nobody wants to see your fuckin boxers.

-l

DRM, securing the internet, saving broadband

[renehollan]

O.K. I finally figured it out. I know how to deploy livable DRM, get the ??AAs to stream content saving the broadband providers from their bandwidth glut, secure internet communications, and give the government key escrow on most communications. In short, I can save the American economy.

1. You deploy DRM with little boxes, called "key boxes". They come with their own secret private and public keys of which they expose the latter to secondary key providers. These download those keys to the key boxes, safe in the knowledge that the box knows the key, but the owner of the box doesn't. The key boxes can be trusted because they're public keys are appropriately signed.

These key boxes distribute the private keys they hold to display devices (to a limit), and the public keys to anyone. Private keys can be "returned" from the display device to the key boxes. Appropriately signed public keys create a web of trust all around. Basically, you can receive encrypted content and only display it on approved equipment, but make as many copies as you want.

The key boxes also can hold key pairs where you know the private key, but such keys are useless for protected content because the public keys are not "blessed" by the right signing authorities that the relevant ??AA trusts. Still, they conveniently carry your secure keys for email, etc.

2. The content providers lobby for, and get legislation, to mandate the use of this system. The consumer electronics industry ramps up and leads the charge out of the slump. Conversion boxes are used for legacy analog displays at "reduced" resolution. But, new fangled all-digital secure TVs and speakers start to arrive.

3. Having taken a collective Valium, content provides start releasing content over the net, secure that it can't be redistributed at will. The demand for high-speed internet access heats up, for real this time.

4. People start using these "secret" private keys for email. In the event that such keys get lost, provision is made to permit them to be escrowed for safe keeping in recognized "key banks". Again, a key box can disclose a secret private key to a key bank if the key bank's public key has been properly certified.

The government, of course, to appear to strike "balance" in the call for DRM sets it self up as a key bank that all content providers must trust. People use secret private keys for casual email (because it is now so easy). The government drools over the key escrow by fiat it now has, and boasts that it has "secured the internet" (as most traffic will now be strongly encrypted).

And that's how to save the U.S. economy.

No, it won't satisfy everybody. Yes, the infrastructure build out could probably only be undertaken by government as a "make work" project to get the U.S. out of it's tech depression.

See, I am so valuable to the security of the U.S. They ought to gimme the LC1 Green Card already and let me help them implement this.