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Intel Claims No DRM
pallmall1 writes "The Inquirer has an official statement from Intel claiming the Computerworld Today Australia story from May 27th was incorrect, and the Pentium D and the 945 chipsets do not have unannounced DRM technology embedded in them. The statement says Intel products support or will support several copy protection schemes such as Macrovision, DTCP-IP, COPP, HDCP, CGMS-A, and others. The statement concludes: 'While Intel continues to work with the industry to support other content protection technologies, we have not added any unannounced DRM technologies in either the Pentium D processor or the Intel 945 Express Chipset family.' The Intel Chip with DRM story has been previously reported on Slashdot. Update: 06/05 20:12 GMT by Z : Fixed the Macrovision link.
Also, I think everybody should look at this roadmap. If you look at the chips for the upcoming socket M2, and also the X2 processors that will be shipping in the coming weeks, they are all supposed to have the Presidio "security technology." Isn't that a euphamism for the same thing we're accusing Intel of putting in their chips? I would like it if somebody would get to the bottom of this.
This entire slashdot news post is misleading.
Intel's press release is based on the fact on that Computerworld's article claims that Intel is adding unnounced DRM features to their new line of Pentiums. If anyone actually read the article, it does not say ANYWHERE anything about unannounced DRM features. In fact, I would say that the Computerworld article and the Intel press release are saying basically the same thing, with their respective biases present. Honestly, the only thing newsworthy here is that Intel announced the specific DRM implementations in their chipsets.
Lastly, an opinion... DRM is not something I really would like to see implemented on the CPU-level. I don't think "THE MAN" should be controlling what I can or can't do with media that exists on my computer.
Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths....
Actually corporations would be the first to balk. If a virus writer gets his hands on the DRM-layer keys, he could whipe out all the hard drives on all the computers in a corporation, make the hardware prevent installation of any media, and use the corporate computers as a distributed spam bot. Alternately, the same technology that can be used to format hard drives remotely (without the knowledge of sysadmins) can be used to plant copyright infringing files on computers. If those files are kiddie porn, someone is going to be seriously in trouble. If the sysadmin is able to log the time when the porn was added and how it got there, the company may escape procecution, but if now, some's head is going to roll. Of course, it works both ways, if the RIAA accuses you of having copyrighted material, you can always claim that the RIAA put it there after you proved to them that "Madonna - Rain.mpg" was a shot of "La Madonna in Italy taken during the rainy period". The RIAA simply put it there because they didn't want to get counter-sued by you.
This is very dangerous technology. After DeCSS, you'd think that the media corps would have realized that keys can be cracked. After Nimda, you'd think that people would have learned how dangerious unpatchable systems (like the Intel system) would be.
Mr. Stallman's science fiction short story isn't the only depiction of what could happen in a full "Trusted" Computing paradigm. I linked to it as an accessible description of the consequences of Treacherous Computing. Here are some more factual descriptions: #1 #2 #3. Please read them and compare TCG's platform as described to what could enable the situation depicted in the story.
I don't understand the answer to this, and perhaps somebody more knowledgable can explain it to me.
Why are the electronics and software people so keen to add DRM? It's an added expense in research and development (especially if they're after secure DRM, which would presumably require much more development). Unlike the television analogy, the general public is the customer in all of these cases - they're paying for the computer, processor, and/or Windows.
Are these companies getting kickbacks or something? It seems to me that the logical thing to do if you were a lobbiest for the electronics industry is to tell the PDTAA (Public Domain Theft Associations of America) to go shove it, and tell the manufacturers you represent to boycott DRM so their customers don't raise a big stink when they realize their new purchase is crippled.
Perhaps because they feel there are too many people out there...misappropriating...their content?
That makes perfect sense if you sell CDs and DVDs, but not if you sell computers. Take Dell. They don't create intellectual property, they create tools to use it. Their products are valuable because of their versatility, and voluntarily integrating DRM serves to reduce that versatility.
Shareware authors, who used to release fully functional versions of their applications, no longer do so, even though that change in tactics may have reduced their income (IANASWA).
I would argue that the best software sold under the shareware concept is still uncrippled, except possibly for a nag screen. At the moment, I have no shareware installed except for mIRC and WinRAR. Both are uncrippled except for nag screens, and I've purchased both of them. WinZip is another great example of this.
I would argue that the cream-of-the-crop shareware has morphed not into crippleware or adware, but an evolution of the shareware concept I'm going to call "personalware." Examples of this genre are Ad-Aware, ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall, AVG Free, and much more. Each of these programs comes with a license that says "feel free to download and install me, but for personal use only. If you're a business, pony up." You can tell that these programs are polished and that a lot of work went into them. The missing features in these free versions are so minor that most businesses could do without them, if they were so inclined to cheat. The companies behind these products seem to be in good shape, if the fact that their web sites are still up is any indication.
You now have to put money in the box to get a newspaper, whereas before, you could just take one and then deposit your money. That additional machinery contributes to the extra cost of your newspaper.
And yet, these boxes still have a relatively lightweight door that could be forced open without too much trouble, and a design that permits a dishonest person to easily take more than one copy. If we were to "DRM-ize" these boxes, they would be more like a soda machine: you put in your credit card and one copy of a newspaper (printed on special fast-fading paper to ensure you don't share it with somebody else) rolls out.
I'm kind of getting of track, so I'm going to stop here, but I just wanted to point out that in each of these instances, putting further restrictions on the product doesn't translate into more revenues.