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DRM in Real-Time and Embedded Systems
An anonymous reader writes "In this guest column at LinuxDevices.com, Victor Yodaiken speculates on the implications (and potential catastrophic consequences) of Digital Rights Management Passport (DRMP) technology to embedded, real-time, and mission critical computer systems. Quoting from the article: "When a technology gets pervasively embedded in microprocessors, computer boards, and software, it will alter the performance of power turbines, jet engines, medical instruments, cell phones and missile guidance systems. Unfortunately, DRMP technology is incompatible with security and with the kinds of reliability needed in safety critical or mission critical applications.""
The only way drm would be included in embedded systems is by law. No manufactor would voluntary put it in for obvious reasons. Wince devices would be another story.
And for Hollywood, Its not like some hacker is going to go into a hospital and turn a resperator into an internet file swapping server and take down the whole media industry. Come on and get real!
Drm will only be in pallidium systems so Microsoft can make more profits by being the gatekeeper of the internet and all multimedia. Infact pallidium is really not a drm sollution in itself according to their faq but will be used to enforce it. Its already in Windows2000 and WindowsXP.
I am sure Fritz will make an exception for many critical embedded systems if he decides to write another insane and unconstitional law. After all the military can not be bothered by drm when their systems monitor nuclear missles. All he cares about is his big fat paycheck by his employers. OOps I meant contributers.
http://saveie6.com/
You would be surprised what kind of hardware is used in mission critial applications. When it is possible to reduce the costs suits would do anything. Including using inferior hardware and such.
And what about public funded government controlled institutions such as the NASA? They still use the 8086 chips, even though those are consumergrade, in their shuttles. If it functions it's good. Especially if the materials are cheap.
You would think the argument that many of our fancy military weapons might fail to work could be a pretty good one to use with all our "representatives".
AFAIK, big (or small) fancy mission critical things like pacemakers and engine control systems do not use most (any?) of the same chips that run the kind of things DRMP is supposed to control.
Yes, yes, I know he sort of addressed this in the article, but not very well. These sorts of things seem to be specialized enough that if you have to have non-DRMP'd chips and none are available, you spec new ones and have them made. Makes it more expensive, yes, but not prohibitively so.
Gotta go re-read the dratted thing I suppose, but right now looks like flag-waving FUD to me. About DRM. Heh. No wonder slashdot posted it.
AMCGLTD.COM. Where cats, science fictio
The chips it is embedded in will eventually be cheap enough in price to be used in embedded situations. Even wasting the clock cycles on determining that you're not running a DRM application could be key (probably not with the heart monitor, but with flight control definately).
The secret to all of this is that Intel will most likely have a way to completely and absolutely turn off DRM for the chip, because this really would be unworkable for embedded manufactures. Now the task would be for someone to find that capability and distribute it over the internet. This is highly likely to happen.
Is anyone else out there pissed at the fact that they will actually have to log on to the internet to even use their computer? I mean for broadband its ok, but there are a lot of dialup users out there, who don't need to log in right now to listen to music or to watch DVD's.
I think you'd be suprised then at how many QNX machines are running on standard intel in industry critical applications. I don't know about medical, but it's there in manufacturing and engineering.
it will alter the performance of power turbines, jet engines, medical instruments, cell phones and missile guidance systems.
So does this mean that if I'm driving into New York while talking on a GPS enabled cell, the DRMP in my fancy new phone is going to detect that I don't have the right to be driving and disconnect my call?
"If you sell a part to the US military for a system, you must produce that system for 15 more years."
There has been some rumors about NVIDIAs Quardo2 GPU being used in F-22
Quadro2 is only 2.5 years old....
Running virus protection takes processor cycles too, so security == overhead
Yep, and virus-scanners are a big pile of poo too, solving a problem that could better be solved by banning microsoft products.
Ever tried to compile an OS while your virus-checker scans each and every source-file in the entire program, each time you access the file?
DRM would be essentially similar: Although you could get admin on your NT box to turn the virus checker off while you compile, a DRM system would have no such facility (i.e. the administrator would be His Billness) and the system would have that very same requirement of scanning every file you access.
Think about it. Think about how long it will take you to check the certificate of every file in even just the linux kernel. It's some factor-of-ten slowdown or so for a virus checker, and will be similar for DRM.
nurb432 is correct, though perhaps not quite in the draconian way he intimates.
The folk who pay the bills and want to make money in their businesses have a problem with the internet: they require a way to authenticate who people are (or more accurately, who belongs to the money).
The era which people (and their machines) can operate anonymously is coming to a rapid close. (although this may work with psuedonyms). The amount of fraud and cheating that occurs on ebay, on-line gaming and even how well google operates (and how it spoils the benifits of same) are but the tip of the iceberg of the impetus to bring authentication to the internet.
To those that believe that those god-like hackers will always be able to circumvent restrictions are dreaming.
Consider the following scenario: Wireless becomes pervasive, computers become cheaper and more ubiquitous - your typical consumer has a choice between a $0.50 internet connected player that comes as a prize in a cereal box and uses their DCMA account and spending $100 dollars for a hacked player that has to be constantly updated to circumvent the dynamicall downloaded encryption schemes - or playing on hacked on-line game vs a non-hacked DCMA version, or using a version of ebay where users are accountable for their behaviour, or a version of google that indexes only those pages where the source/nature of the content is verifiable?
Which will the typical consumer choose?
Walking into a store with a mask over your head is not acceptable in the real world, it will soon not be acceptable on the internet.
This brave new world also scares the willies out of me...
Was it Frost that wrote:
This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang,
But with a whimper.
P.S. Please tell me that the nurb in nurb432 doesn't stand for Non-Uniform Rational B-spline....