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Sony, Intel To Push Content Protection
prostoalex writes "Intel and Sony are trying to please the copyright-alerted content publishers and privacy-aware consumers by supporting and pushing Digital Transmission Content Protection standard. New technology allows the consumer to use the downloaded content, but not distribute it outside of their home. A PDF presentation from an Intel engineer is available on dtcp.com."
It we never be closed. It's far too wide open.
A sad moment in my professional career came a couple of days ago during a demonstration of our software for a customer. I designed the security administration module. As we were showing the software, my supervisor was explaining the system to the customer team. When he got to the security/user administration screen, we created a new user. As I intended, the user defaulted to having rights to all fifteen components of the system. My supervisor explained "in the final system, of course, we will default to the new user having no rights. You will turn them on as you need them."
I immediately questioned this approach, as this was the first I'd heard of it. Inside, my heart was breaking, as I already knew where the conversation would lead--yet there was hope again, for a moment...
In the ensuing discussion, all eight other people in the room (four developers and five customers) readily agreed that we ought to default to no permissions for new users. I dropped the point, resigning once again to allowing others to be paranoid for no reason.
What made this moment so sad is that, once again, our culture demonstrated in clear fashion that we fundamentally do not trust each other. We design systems that express this fundamental distrust, and we do so with enthusiasm, without comprehending the consequences of our assumption.
I write now to point out this hidden assumption, to question aloud for the few out there who will see what I'm saying and rethink their approach to trust. I am pleading with you fellow programmers to consider the consequences of developing systems which a priori do not trust the people who use them. The example I gave above is common: the issue arises at least once per day for me, usually more. Rarely is it so obvious.
My hope is twofold--I will never relinquish the angle I personally hold, and the only other programmer I have ever heard of who recognizes this issue at its deeper levels is a programmer we all know and... trust: Richard Stallman.
I was delighted to find that Stallman's impetus for the GPL and the Free Software Foundation revolved around this trust issue. Early in his career, he worked on a system which had no passwords. For a while, this worked fine. Eventually, the userbase grew to the point that it needed to be more secure. He pleaded to keep the system open, but was overruled, partly because one particular user was deleting other people's files from time to time.
I was excited to find this briefly mentioned in an interview with Stallman, since it is the only time I have ever seen this issue addressed on such a bold level as to propose a system _without passwords!_
Most thoughtful readers already have a half-dozen reasons to object, having been burnt by rogue users, disgruntled employees, and the like. However, I plead with such thoughtful readers to put aside such clear and obvious objections, and to consider the following with an open mind:
The longterm consequences of developing system after system after system which intrinsically distrusts the people who operate the system are harrowing as we consider a not-so-distant future of artificial intelligence. At the present time, operating systems -- even Linux -- are built around the concept that they can be rebooted from time to time. Eventually we'll get to the point where our operating systems are so stable we never consider rebooting. In fact, they'll be so stable they survive power outages, intentional sabotage, and anything else we can throw at them. This is only a matter of time because there is such a huge premium in any system which has an unbreakable uptime, or perfect and graceful recovery from downtime.
If we are still distrusting our users when we reach the day that operating systems never reboot, we will have reached a crossroads... and we will inevitably choose the well-worn path at that time, placing people like me on the fringe and blithely building our own destruction, as prophesied already in popular movies like the Matrix:
The first thing ou