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AMD's New DRM
DefectiveByDesign writes "Remember how AMD said they'd make use of ATI's GPU technology to make better technology? Well, not all change is progress. InfoWorld's Tom Yager reports that AMD plans to block access to the framebuffer in hardware to help enforce DRM schemes, such as allowing more restricted playback of Sony Blu-Ray disks. They can pry my Print Screen key from my cold, dead fingers."
The drooling masses will eat up the slop fed to them so they can watch their DRM'd BluRay edition of Friends and Threes Company.
Trolling is a art,
Given the choice between two identically performing chips, one of which restricts your ability to do something, I'd bet most people would choose to get the unrestricted one
In time mass acceptance by the techno-illiterate will destroy any choice. There are are only two major PC CPU manufacturers, both are big fans of limiting your control of what you buy.
Trolling is a art,
It's probably to help them with PC builders like Dell, HP, etc. If those companies wanted DRM on the chip, it would be a powerful influence for AMD to do so.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
From the article: '...ATI's new GPU ... will ship with software that plays movies on Blu-ray discs. The AMD rep ... said that the new chips will "block unauthorized access to the frame buffer." In short, that means an unauthorized party can't save the contents of the display to a file on disk unless the content owner approves it.'
Looks like things are going the same (unhappy) way that the HD-TV did. The web's full of dire stories about people suffering from IBM (Incompatible Bits of Machinery) - most of it shiny new and very expensive.
Imagine Vista on this... *shudders*
How long after release before DVD-Jon or someone else breaks this? Not long. It's just piss of the legit, non-expert user, like most DRM.
Still not convinced. Dell / HP / etc are like AMD - they build / put together hardware. They're not content producers, they just want to sell metal stuff to the public. They know there's no benefit to the public for DRM, so what's their business benefit in doing this?
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
The fear of the competitor implementing it somehow and then having a marketing edge: "Only DELL computers can play back Blu-Ray!"
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
As TFA points out, it's not just the content providers who can benefit. Businesses want to be sure that their internal and client communications are secure. This would allow sending, for example, PDFs of sensitive documents that couldn't be easily copied by a rogue employee and sent off to a competitor. If you think corporate spies aren't a fact of life, you're either wrong or not in a successful enough enterprise to be worth spying on. Now, your rogue employee still might actually photograph their screen, if they're authorized to at least view the document. But that's not nearly as convenient as doing a screen capture, and can't be automated to run in the background.
If you're a major corporation with any trade secrets at all (which is to say, any major corporation), your obvious best choice is to buy systems with this technology. As home users we may have an ethical right to total root access to our personal systems; but when we go to work, if our sysadmins aren't locking down our systems from spying (which can be between divisions in a corporation, too), then they aren't doing their jobs. And you'd probably rather that the IRS were using security measures along these lines, too. This is good tech in a business or government context.
We just need laws regarding hardware ownership clarified so that it becomes illegal to implement restrictions on equipment which the equipment owner - whether person or corporation - can't disable at will. That wouldn't interfere with corporate- and government-owned systems being properly locked down, while preserving the property rights of individuals.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Just as audio has the Analog Hole that can never be plugged, framebuffer access restrictions can't continue once it gets out of the DVI cable.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
I think it's fairly obvious that it's about AMD Live! versus Intel's Viiv. Each of those two brands is trying to be the ultimate living room multimedia PC. I think that customers haven't really caught on (why would we... who needs an expensive fully decked-out hot and noisy desktop PC masquerading as a media appliance in their living room?), but they seem convinced that this is where the market is going with or without the consumer. I think the whole media center PC has very little thought for the customer, and this AMD DRM issue highlights that very well.
It's funny how Vista is being hailed as the future for the media PC... I used to be able to watch DVDs perfectly well on my P3 (600MHz, 128 MB RAM) back when it was running Windows 98. But a few years ago I "upgraded" to XP, and now it won't play the same DVDs. It has a very hard time with most video content. But MS (along with AMD and Intel) wants us to believe that we need the next super-shiny version of their software, which gets less and less efficient with each release, in order to keep up with the time and have the media experience of the future. Sure, HD content requires more horsepower to decode and display, but if they didn't keep fattening up the OS, and the player software, and the whole Media Center environment, it wouldn't need that much more horweposer. From my experience, my 2.6Ghz P4 with 2GB of RAM can't even play videos in the Vista Media Center at all. Any PC related living room media devices should be small, quiet, run cool, and be inexpensive, and not have lots of bright lights. But of course all the hardware manufacturers want to push the latest hot, fast hardware... because it's the fastest. They want your attention to be drawn to the PC so you know how cool it is. Lame.
So to make a long story short, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and all the rest want to cram the media experience down our throats... This seems to me like it's the equivalent of Circuit City's DIVX, only the players involved are much bigger, and mostly working together to make an inescapable dragnet. They want to make their own brands successful (Win MCE, AMD Live! Viiv), and they know that the average consumer doesn't even know why he or she would care about Viiv or Live. So they want to make all PCs move in this direction, and if they can't get the consumers excited about it, they can at least get the content providers excited about it, so they don't have the same fate as DIVX.
Customers aren't going to be really aware of any problems. Try reading the article summary to you mother or your sister, or some non-techie friend. They'll say "Wha? Huh? What are you talking aboout?" Then explain it to them in terms of how it limits what they can do with media. At least half of them will probably say "Why would I want to do that?".
Now take away the explanations, and tell them that AMD is coming out with some super awesome new AMD MegaLIVE!++ media PC that will automagically buy and download every movie and TV show they ever wanted to watch, and will let them listen to music and watch movies everywhere they go, and it will cure cancer, stop global warming, end our dependence on foreign oil, and bring about world peace. They'll say "That sounds cool, I don't really need it, but if it could be included in the next computer I was going to buy anyway, maybe I'd like that.
The marketing hype isn't going to mention the drawbacks, and it will be louder than any outcry from pissed-off Slashdot-reading customers.
Implementing DRM functions in the CPU is not cowtowing to Vista, it's responding to the same rights management pressures that VISTA had to accommodate. VISTA's DRM is there to satisfy the demands of the content providers so that Vista can play back DRMed media from those providers. I know you want to blame MS for all the ills of the World, but you'd do better directing your misplaced anger at things like the BluRay consortium which make the DRM demands that Vista meets.