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Intel Adds DRM to New Chips
Badluck writes "Microsoft and the entertainment industry's holy grail of controlling copyright through the motherboard has moved a step closer with Intel Corp. now embedding digital rights management within in its latest dual-core processor Pentium D and accompanying 945 chipset.
Officially launched worldwide on the May 26, the new offerings come DRM -enabled and will, at least in theory, allow copyright holders to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard rather than through the operating system as is currently the case..." The Inquirer has the story as well.
Maybe this will be in the next gen consoles as well? It seems about the right time to reveal technology going in them and "forget" to mention this. Could outright kill mod chipping and pirated games.
I like muppets.
What if the systems have to be retrocompatible ? The re must be a flag to detect if the processor is a 945, and if not, software decoding happens. By making the system believe the processor is pre-945, there must be a way to circumvent the protection (does not work of course if a 945 is required, but this will need another three to five years).
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
from TFA: Additionally, AMT also features what Intel calls "IDE redirection" which will allow administrators to remotely enable, disable or format or configure individual drives and reload operating systems and software from remote locations, again independent of operating systems. Both AMT and IDE control are enabled by a new network interface controller.
lots of fun to be had with this I think..
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
It's actually quite interesting.
They're not only talking about on-chip DRM, they're also talking about a "feature" called Active Management Technology in their new chipsets.
By the sounds of it, it's a firmware-level mini-OS that allows an administrator (or presumably anyone with the password, or the appropriate exploit) to, and I quote:
"remotely enable, disable or format or configure individual drives and reload operating systems and software from remote locations, again independent of operating systems
Frankly, that worries me quite a bit more than the DRM.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
If they announce that they are, I'm going to buy the fastest non-DRM-infested available chip they have and then I'm done with all this bullshit.
Maybe buy a little cabin and become a fisherman. Fuck the technology industry. The "content moguls" have fucking ruined it for everyone with their whining control-freakery.
I hope they dig their own graves with this one.
I remember that. This is different IMHO. Back then it was all about "Intel is going track everything you do on the net!". People freaked out about that. This is about moving DRM restriction from software to hardware and will only affect people trying to "break" DRM on songs and movies they buy. This is only going to affect people who buy from napster.com etc. People who don't use those services won't see any difference and the same goes for people who do.
So while I may be wrong I think this feature will go unoticed except by those who download DRM software and then are trying to break it. Even then it may be no different unless its harder. If vendors are going to rely on this and this only, hope they have forceably updatable micro code in that chipset otherwise they are in for trouble.
Oh and in the nonDRM world easynews continues to only cost $9 for 10GB.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
happens when every embedded device is an agent of law enforcement. You can bet that if this goes mainstream, the end of Western Civilization is at hand. The term Ubiquitous Law Enforcement was invented by by noted science fiction author and computer scientist Vernor Vinge.
there would be no motivation to copy things if copyright law was in the least bit reasonable
Completely untrue. Most people will pirate what they want if they can do so. Low-price and other reasonable terms are largely red herrings, they don't really change things. Seen it all before with software sold in university bookstores. A textbook comes with a coupon for a heavily discounted commercial software package, one that has no anti-piracy. Sales of the software are negligible. The publisher then adds trivially defeated copy-protection, sales of the software approaches the number of textbooks sold. As long as a DOS "diskcopy" command could copy the software it was pirated, when a crack was need sales jumped wildly.
Yeah, sure. We've heard that one before. If highly parallel operations were some kind of silver bullet, then Thinking Machines wouldn't have gone out of business a decade ago.
Once you have it, the performance gains for many tasks are 1,000 fold.
Maybe some "highly crucial" tasks, like rendering textures in yet another FPS game. However, it doesn't look like the general-purpose decision making logic, which dominates a lot of applications, has been beefed up much at all vs. a conventional CPU.
Who's going to make them though? The cost of entering the market with a new company to produce chips is just plain incredible. The Trusted Computing Group already consists of Intel, AMD, Sun, IBM, NVIDIA, ATI, Sony, Transmeta, HP and everyone else. So who will make these chips? The Trusted Computing cartel will make it extremely hard for them to do so. And, to boot, the total perentage of the population who even cares about DRM is probably similar to the total percentage of the population that goes to Slashdot, which isn't very much.
Don't get your hopes up. DRM is coming to every consumer "general purpose"(with DRM installed, Trusted Computing has broken the general purpose aspect) computing device in the future. You're going to be stuck using today's, and the very near future's, technology for a long time if you don't want DRM. And why not have the ISPs out there not let computers connect to the internet if they're not "Trusted?" Even your old machines will probably be marginalized to a permamnently offline life.
You might as well live up the internet and the computing platforms we have now. Soon these platforms and these protocols will be permamnently broken to make way for Trusted Computing.
Some bloated apps are still annoyingly CPU bound. OOo startup, for example. Many server apps are also CPU bound.
Games and media (playback and encoding, as I believe the latter is efficiently parallelisable) will benefit greatly, and this is usually the reason people upgrade their chips.
Games and media are already accelerated in the GPU on the graphics card. Moving it into the main CPU would simply be a change in packaging strategy, not the orgasmic revolution in computing that the OP was talking about.