DRM From the Viewpoint of the Electronic Industry

mike449 writes "The cover story of the Oct.16 issue of EDN magazine is about the recent trends in DRM. It is not just a technical article. The author tries to convey what people who are supposed to design and implement access restriction measures think about their feasibility and associated economic, legal and moral issues. 'Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM'."

Comments

DRM to prevent virus and worm attacks?

[G4from128k]

I wonder if DRM and trusted computing technologies can be used to prevent virus, worm, and ddos attacks. If only "trusted" executables would run on a computer, then malware would be much harder to perpetrate. DRM for your harddisk could prevent unauthorized executables from reading your e-mail address book, corrupting crucial system files, copyng your files, or logging the keyboard. DRM for personal and system files would prevent them from being copied or modified except by a trusted executable.

I would invision a scheme in which executables must be registered by the creator with a trustworthy third party in a non-anonymous fashion. Code that has not been registered in a publically traceable way would be denied access to system resources or run only within a tightly controlled sandbox. Once a piece of code has been validated, it would be locked in an execute-only state.

Given that most users are too willing to run any old app that comes over the internet, stronger controls on what can and cannot run may be warranted.

Punning with Acronyms

[spiritraveller]

Support for TCP should appear in Microsoft's next version of Windows (formerly known by the code name "Palladium").

Microsoft is moving even more slowly than I thought. Only a monopolist could sell an operating system in today's market without support for tcp.

(shakes head in disbelief)