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Jeremy Allison On Why DRM Will Never Work
eldavojohn writes "At the ZDNet site, Jeremy Allison (a well-known employee of the Google corporation) goes on a hilarious rant against Digital Rights Management. He compares the access restriction technology with underwear gnomes & Star Trek while ending with: 'Believing in a DRM business model is like joining Star Fleet security, putting on your red shirt, and volunteering to beam down to the new unexplored planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Someone will be coming back from that mission, it's just not likely to be the security guard. Always a true engineer, Scotty had the good sense to stay safely on board the ship.'"
Easy answer: Attacker and receiver being the same person, and (and that's at least as important), one side of the deal, the receiver, does not want encryption to happen at all.
/., so I'll make it brief: Encryption relies on sender and receiver having the keys, so when the person receiving is also the one attacking, it's quite trivial to hack it.
The first part has been explained time and again at
But it all would not happen if the receiver at least had some kind of benefit from the encryption. If it's only that his neighbor can't "steal" his pay-tv, some would already welcome the "feature". But that's not even the case. I should be kinda thankful that the content industry has been selfish enough so far to make DRM a tool that only they benefit from, with no gain whatsoever for the receipient.
Hard to market something that gives you a decisive advantage over your business partner.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why is it the editors never seem to notice what they're posting. I mean... just put in the summary that this is Jeremy Allison of the Samba team... not just Joe Blow Google Employee #3248 writing the article... sheesh.
Oh, never mind it was Zonk.
Kirk has your back and he's got fucking proton torpedo's and an itchy trigger finger.
<PEDANTIC;>
Actually, Luke Skywalker had the proton torpedos. Kirk had photon torpedos.
</PEDANTIC;>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
With iTunes, re-downloading is not really allowed. If you give 'em a SOB story, they may relent, and you can always backup the shitty DRM-infected files to any medium you want (but they will still only play on approved players).