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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/
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.
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.