Virtualization May Break Vista DRM

Nom du Keyboard writes "An article in Computerworld posits that the reason Microsoft has flip-flopped on allowing all versions of Vista to be run in virtual machines, is that it breaks the Vista DRM beyond detection, or repair. So is every future advance in computer security and/or usability going to be held hostage to the gods of Hollywood and Digital Restrictions Management? 'Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy? Not anytime soon, say analysts. One of the main obstacles is the massive size of VMs. Because they include the operating system, the simulated hardware, as well as the software and/or multimedia files, VMs can easily run in the tens of gigabytes, making them hard to exchange over the Internet. But DeGroot says that problem can be partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even supplied by Microsoft itself.'"

Comments

devil's advocate

[TheSHAD0W]

It would be possible for Vista's DRM to be (relatively) secure if the virtualization software also supported DRM; this potentially opens the way for Microsoft to specify some virtual environments as "acceptable" for use with the Vista home versions.

Re:devil's advocate

[Tuoqui]

Well the problem is that with virtualization. A guest OS is only as secure as its host OS. Which is why I presume that they don't want any WinXP or other machines that are lacking in the DRM department to be running Windows Vista virtual machines.

Another potentially real problem would be that vista as an actual OS in a computer runs slow as hell. People using virtual machines to 'test' Vista would end up with an even slower crummier machine and thus taint their perceptions for the negative. Nothing kills a product faster than the good old 'Word of Mouth' and there has been plenty badmouthing of Vista by all levels of tech support (not sales people though they gotta sell those Vista pieces of crap any way they can.

In short, the only 'acceptable' virtual environment for Vista would probably be Vista itself. They want to lock you into this crappy and crazy DRM scheme that they probably cooked up with Hollywood and hardware vendors to keep people on the upgrade treadmill indefinitely. (since if you cant watch the latest movies you need to upgrade to a computer that can run Vista, which means probably buying a whole new computer which means whole new hardware...)

Re:devil's advocate

[Darundal]

Correction: The only acceptable virtual environment is the one in which Vista itself isn't an overdone load of junk, ATI has totally open source drivers that have full support for all of the built in features of their cards, Steve-O Ballmer wins the US a gold Olympic medal for chair tossing, a car with a built in label saying "Kia" isn't a mistake (in every sense of the word), George Bush actually decides to place partisanship aside and actually work with congress, and pigs fly. In that order.

Re:devil's advocate

[eonlabs]

Clearly, all these problems would be solved if the RIAA and MPAA sued Microsoft over their use of zip compression and its aiding in the piracy of audio... :D
Damn that's hard to say with a straight face.

Re:devil's advocate

[larry bagina]

George Bush actually decides to place partisanship aside and actually work with congress

Like illegal immigrant amnesty? George Bush want it. Congressional leadership want it. If that's bipartisanship, I don't want it.

Re:devil's advocate

[Yaztromo]

Another potentially real problem would be that vista as an actual OS in a computer runs slow as hell. People using virtual machines to 'test' Vista would end up with an even slower crummier machine and thus taint their perceptions for the negative. Nothing kills a product faster than the good old 'Word of Mouth' and there has been plenty badmouthing of Vista by all levels of tech support (not sales people though they gotta sell those Vista pieces of crap any way they can.

I have as much reason to hate MS's operating systems as the next guy. No, scratch that, I have vastly more reason to hate MS's OS's than the next guy, having watched them attempt to undermine and destroy OS/2 back in the early 90's, back before it become fashionable to hate MS OS's. I remember having to put up with the constantly shifting Win32s extensions for Windows 3.1, which were modified for the sole purpose of breaking OS/2 compatibility. Or their (then new) "per-processor license agreements". I haven't run a Windows machine as my desktop since 1992, having run OS/2, Linux, and Mac OS X (in that order) since that time.

As such, it really pains me greatly to say -- Vista under virtualization is surprisingly decent and well behaved. I've been running the 64-bit Business Edition of Vista inside VMware Fusion on a new 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB of RAM, and it's surprisingly quick and agile. Sure, I don't get Aero (which just looks bad to me anyhow -- honestly, how is an alpha-blended window title a good thing?), and I'm not using it to play games, and I don't use it to browse the web or do e-mail or digital media, but overall it has been very well behaved, and has been surprisingly quick to boot and run. I've even experimented with it running digital video, and the performance has been very good.

Now of course, I can see why they'd be worried about their DRM stance. As the VMware audio and video go through a virtualized driver/device to the Mac's hardware, it would be easy to use readily available tools to hijack the stream (like Rogue Amoeba's excellent Audio Hijack Pro.

Now there is no way in hell I'd ever run Windows as my primary OS -- still think their UI scheme is garbage, and don't like the fact they have both systematically loaded their systems with crap to appease other corporations while punishing their own end-users (DRM), and that they've frequently promised features they've never delivered (anyone else remember when they promised a stand-alone MS-DOS v7? Or when they promised an OODBMS-based filesystem for Cairo starting back in 1996? That same filesystem they didn't deliver with Vista? Or how about when they finally decided it was time to introduce a new filesystem for the 9X line that instead of using a well-designed FS they owned all the rights to, like HPFS or NTFS, they instead exacerbated the problem with a band-aid solution and invented FAT32?). It's still not what I look for in a desktop OS, but as much as it pains me to say it, on a modern machine (and the latest MacBook is hardly top-of-the-line, although it's certainly quite a capable system), under virtualization, Vista actually runs pretty acceptably. If I had to use it as my day-to-day system (and I don't use it much at all -- it's there to support a development toolset for some embedded programming I'm peripherally involved in), it certainly wouldn't be slow or painful to use -- it's instantly responsive, and has so far behaved very well (i.e.: it hasn't crashed yet).

Strange but true.

Yaz.

Re:devil's advocate

[legallyillegal]

I've been running the 64-bit Business Edition of Vista inside VMware Fusion on a new 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB of RAM, and it's surprisingly quick and agile. Sure, I don't get Aero (which just looks bad to me anyhow -- honestly, how is an alpha-blended window title a good thing?), and I'm not using it to play games, and I don't use it to browse the web or do e-mail or digital media, but overall it has been very well behaved, and has been surprisingly quick to boot and run.

So, basically, you don't do anything with it except stare at a classic interface. Wait, what was the purpose again?

Re:devil's advocate

[Yaztromo]

So, basically, you don't do anything with it except stare at a classic interface. Wait, what was the purpose again?

To run the ATMEL development suite primarily, which I can't run otherwise, to program an ATMEL AT90USB microcontroller. It runs an IDE, compilers/linkers, AT90 simulator environment, Subversion, and the FLiP microcontroller board programmer.

I've experimented with a number of other applications, including IE7, WMP, and several of the other built-in tools. I still don't like how they organize their OS, or the crappy UI, but system responsiveness has not been an issue.

I don't advocate anyone use this as their gaming or media environment -- hell, I don't avocate anyone use Vista for anything. But in response to the GP's claim that someone might want to evaluate Vista under a VM and get a poor opinion of its performance, Vista 64-bit actually stands up quite well under virtualization, at least on my system.

(I will note here that the 64-bit version of Vista appears to run slightly quicker than the 32-bit version on my MacBook, both under VMware Fusion, but I suppose YMMV).

Any other questions?

Yaz

Re:devil's advocate

[WarJolt]

Microsoft has made all their money striking deals with hardware manufacturers. As soon as you use a VM Microsoft loses control. What can Microsoft do that other OSes can't? I'm pretty sure more hardware is supported by windows then any other OS.

Re:devil's advocate

[Eustace Tilley]

You are mistaken. DRM cannot be secure.

The task is "allow A to send a message to B such that B can read it, but C cannot."

Under DRM, B and C are the same person.

Q.E.D.

The claim that a process will allow a customer to manage digital rights are akin to claims that a chemical process will allow a customer to change lead to gold. They are the claims of a fool, a charlatan, a newborn, or someone desperate. Or a devil's advocate.

Re:devil's advocate

[Dan Ost]

It's my understanding that Linux supports more hardware than any OS, but a lot of that hardware is pretty specific-use stuff that no consumer is interested in. Most consumer hardware has vendor-written drivers for windows at time of release and Linux gains support later.

Windows does have the edge in consumer hardware, but with the exception of high end 3D video acceleration, Linux has excellent support for at least one major player in each consumer hardware category (which is why Linux is now a real contender).

Re:devil's advocate

[TheSHAD0W]

Please note my "(relatively)". ;-)

Re:devil's advocate

[gmplague]

Well the problem is that with virtualization. A guest OS is only as secure as its host OS. Which is why I presume that they don't want any WinXP or other machines that are lacking in the DRM department to be running Windows Vista virtual machines. This is the problem that "Trusted Computing" is supposed to solve. The TCG (formerly TCPA) has an entire architecture for this laid out, that enables a "trusted boot" process, in which only a computer (or platform in TCG parlance) which has exactly the right hardware and boots exactly the right BIOS, bootloader, and OS in exactly the right sequence is allowed access to certain content, DRM keys, etc.

This system does have a number of problems (and in its current state is still victim to virtualization), and as mentioned above is very difficult to implement, but Microsoft and others are pushing very hard to make it work.

Re:devil's advocate

[Loundry]

You suck dick. ...not that there's anything wrong with that!

Re:devil's advocate

[DavidTC]

Someone is, one of these days, going to have to explain why 'amnesty' is such a horrible idea.

We want to stop illegal immigration. I'm somehow failing to see how barring people who came here illegally from coming here again is at all useful. Those are, after all, the people who want to be here and who already know how to function here.

And if this 'No amnesty' crap is just a way to say 'Cut off all immigration', then say that, because right now your position makes no sense at all. If you mean 'Seriously crack down on illegal immigration and don't have any sort of guest worker or residency program', well, that at least makes sense, although the agriculture industry will crucify you. Saying 'have a guest worker program...that excludes the people who've been doing it for decades', that's completely incomprehensible.

It's akin to legalizing prostitution...except for anyone who's ever been arrested for it before. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

And saying 'They're criminals, we don't want them.' is stupid. The punishment for coming here illegally is to be deported. All proposed immigration reforms require they do that,and pay a rather large fee. Aka, they 'served their time'.

Re:devil's advocate

[Eustace Tilley]

I noted your "(relatively)." I disagree with the usage. I believe a coin made from lead that has been soaked in extra-sticky yellow paint is not (relatively) closer to being a coin made from gold than is a coin soaked in extra-degradable yellow paint, and I suspect you'd agree. Lead cannot be turned to gold by chemical or mechanical processes, full stop. No chemical or mechanical process makes lead "relatively" more golden than any other.

DRM can make it very inconvenient and very onerous for A to send a message to B, but it can never secure that message against interception by C where B and C are the same person. Telling worried rights-holders that one protocol is "less insecure", when security is impossible under all protocols, is a way to prey upon those worries and can be profitable, but never correct.

Re:devil's advocate

[ccp]

The task is "allow A to send a message to B such that B can read it, but C cannot."

Under DRM, B and C are the same person.

Q.E.D.

I've heard this bromide repeated time and again, and still can't believe people takes it seriously.
Or it is a mind trick to lull the anti-DRM camp into complacency?

With digital media, A sends a message to B, which is a piece of hardware. Then, B decodes the message, and shows the result to C.

The said piece of hardware, B, may be easy or hard to crack, but B and C are definitevely not the same person.

Cheers,
CC

Re:devil's advocate

[johanw]

They probably prefer "we want to keep them illegal so we can keep explioting this bunch of pseudo-slaves". But they don't dare to say it that openly.

Re:devil's advocate

[Anonymous Coward]

"Any other questions?"
Yes actually, though it's a bit off-topic.

What version of OS X are you running? Is it a mix of 32 and 64-bit or is it Leopard Beta (all-64)? Is running a 64-bit OS under virtualization an issue on a non-64-bit host OS?

(sorry to post AC, but I moderated in this thread before stumbling across your post)
Thanks.

Re:devil's advocate

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, your core2duo IS top of the line. Don't let the gigahertz fool you--it is twice as fast as a previous generation athlon or pentium of the same clock speed.

As a gamer, I know this, because I have the same cpu and get twice the framerate as my old Athlon, which is actually clocked higher!

Re:devil's advocate

[Yaztromo]

Actually, your core2duo IS top of the line. Don't let the gigahertz fool you--it is twice as fast as a previous generation athlon or pentium of the same clock speed.

Okay -- the processor family is top-of-the-line, but I certainly don't have the fastest one, and there are other components on the system which aren't top-of-the-line. As a gamer, I'm sure you wouldn't want to do a ton of gaming with the Intel shared memory GMA 950 built into this MacBook (although for the types of things I typically use the system for it hasn't been an issue).

I was talking about overall system specs, and not just the core CPU, but re-reading my own post I may not have made this all that clear. Hopefully this clarifies things.

Yaz.

Re:devil's advocate

[mrchaotica]

Sure, I don't get Aero (which just looks bad to me anyhow -- honestly, how is an alpha-blended window title a good thing?)

It's not, except that it also has the background blurred so that you get the fancy effect, yet the title still remains readable. This is something I wish would be implemented on Linux and OS X (especially for things like terminal backgrounds), as I like my eye-candy but want to maintain usability as well.

Incidentally, I responded because this is one of the very few things about Vista that I actually like (the other two are the fact that MS gave the home directory a sane name without spaces ("Users" instead of "Documents and Settings") and that it has good Tablet PC support).

Re:devil's advocate

[mrchaotica]

Sure, DRM is "security through obscurity," but, when fully implemented, Vista's Treacherous Computing stores the keys in hardware. When it requires a logic probe to get the key, I consider it to be pretty damn obscure!

In other words, even though DRM is mathematically insecure, it can still be "good enough," and that makes it dangerous.

Re:devil's advocate

[Yaztromo]

Yes actually, though it's a bit off-topic.

What version of OS X are you running? Is it a mix of 32 and 64-bit or is it Leopard Beta (all-64)? Is running a 64-bit OS under virtualization an issue on a non-64-bit host OS?

10.4.10, and no, running a 64-bit OS under Tiger does not present any problems -- but you do have to run it on a Core 2 Duo with VT-x (which includes all current Macs, excepting the Mac mini). Your processor needs to be able to support 64-bit mode of course(which is why the C2D is mandatory), but the host OS itself doesn't need to be fully 64-bit for this to work (Tiger is fortunately partly 64-bit already, which I imagine helps when it comes to being able to allocate large amounts of memory within a single address segment).

It's interesting to note from the Wiki article that VMware doesn't use VT-x for 32 bit OS's -- only 64 bit OS's. They (apparently) claim that their 32 bit code is already sufficiently optimized that using VT-x would actually slow them down, but this difference may explain my perceived speed boost running Vista 64 as opposed to my original Vista 32 install.

Yaz.

Re:devil's advocate

[fuliginous]

The quoted lump gave me the impression that the bypass to DRM was you distribute the OS with player and the item of media is keyed to that OS. So surely the simple step is then to just distribute the media to be played on the one off distributed virtual hosted instance of the OS?

Or did I miss something that means I should read the whole article.

Re:devil's advocate

[Abcd1234]

Another potentially real problem would be that vista as an actual OS in a computer runs slow as hell.

You know, I have *no* idea where this comment is coming from. In my experience, Vista is no faster or slower than Windows XP. Granted, I'ved turned off Aero and SuperFetch (it's a laptop... grinding the hard disk isn't really great for battery life), but overall, everything is perfectly functional, and this is on a 2 Ghz Core2Duo with 2GB of RAM... not exactly a blow-your-hair-back, top-of-the-line machine.

Granted, given my choice, I'd prefer Linux... I'm far more familiar with the toolset, I like the flexibility of the command-line, etc, but for web browsing, checking email, and other run-of-the-mill activities, Windows does the job just fine. Yes, I know, blasphemy!

Meanwhile, on my new laptop, in Linux, the sound drivers cause a kernel panic, the wireless worked but only after I built a new set of drivers from source (and I was forced to install Ubuntu Gutsy... on Feisty, which uses an older 2.2.16 kernel, IIRC, I got oopses), I can't change the display brightness, and sleep/hibernate doesn't work at all (hangs on wakeup, though I suspect the nVidia drivers may be to blame for this). Granted, this laptop is a very new model, so I didn't expect things to work right away, and in time, I'm sure these issues will be sorted out. But, in the mean time, I use Vista, because at least it works.

Re:devil's advocate

[Abcd1234]

Err... make that 2.*6*.16 kernel... talk about dating myself. :)

Re:devil's advocate

[DavidTC]

That's the only reason I can think of for trying to derail the whole thing.

There is one question that people in the immigration debate can differ on: How many, and under what rules, will we allow workers into the country?

Everything else is basically a non-issue. We obviously need to crack down on employers hiring people illegally, we'll worry about a damn fence if we need one after changing the rules (Um, duh. It's stupid to build fences that you don't end up needing.), trying to compel English is an idiotic politic stunt, etc.

Anyone raising other questions besides 'We don't need that many (or 'we need more') guest workers.' or 'They should or should not be eligible for citizenship.' is a fool trying to derail immigration reform so they can continue to exploit people.

Especially the 'amnesty' people, who think they're doing it because they're racist idiots who don't want any immigration. Yes, you read that right. They think they're doing it because it will magically get rid of the dirty Mexicans, but they are actually doing it because big business wants to continue to exploit people.(1) So the right, puppets all of them, are parroting some inane and nonsensical objection to 'amnesty' which doesn't make a damn bit of sense. The end result, of course, will be continuing exactly the absurd situation we have now.

But, hey, as long as that 'amnesty' gibberish continues to tear the Republican party apart, I'm all for it. If it actually does get derailed, hey, we can fix it in a year and a half.

1) Something like half the issues on the right are like this. They claim it's for one reason, they secretly think it's for another reason, but in actuality it's for a third. Like objecting to government health care: They claim it's because they want a small government and it won't work, they think, secretly, it's a good way to keep the poor poor, but in actuality it's because the health insurance industry wants to continue to exist.

Re:devil's advocate

[enjerth]

Pay a rather large fee? Have you any idea what it costs to immigrate the LEGAL way? Compared to that, it's not a large fee by any means.

I'll tell you what's so horrible about amnesty. Every immigrant doing it the legal way still has to face the difficulties of the system and some will no doubt be deported for crap as insignificant as undelivered mail (which they tried to do to my wife) while politicians try to "fix the problem" by giving illegal immigrants the right to stay.

It may have been easier if my wife had entered illegally. And that's just what I can't stand, the fact that they're making it easier and arguably better to do it the wrong way. Just this one time, again.

Immigration is not a problem. Unchecked immigration is.

Re:devil's advocate

[DavidTC]

Pay a rather large fee? Have you any idea what it costs to immigrate the LEGAL way? Compared to that, it's not a large fee by any means.

What the hell are you gibbergabbering about? That is the fee to enter legally. The fee they would pay to enter legally is the fee required to enter legally. What is this, some sort of anti-tautology argument?

I'll tell you what's so horrible about amnesty. Every immigrant doing it the legal way still has to face the difficulties of the system and some will no doubt be deported for crap as insignificant as undelivered mail (which they tried to do to my wife) while politicians try to "fix the problem" by giving illegal immigrants the right to stay.

If 'every' immigrant doing it the legal way will face that, then ones who previously attempted to enter illegally, but are now here legally, would also be facing it. Duh.

And Z visas have almost no chance of passing the House, and, if they do, they'll probably have a touchback requirement attached. But, more to the point, guest workers only get to be here three years in a row regardless, so it's not any sort of permanent residency.

Of course, as of this moment, the bill hasn't passed the house, and who knows how the differences will be ironed out. But the Democrats aren't going to go along with the Republicans more silly suggestions, although pretending the Republicans all want amnesty is just craziness.

It may have been easier if my wife had entered illegally. And that's just what I can't stand, the fact that they're making it easier and arguably better to do it the wrong way. Just this one time, again.

Well, don't blame the Republicans for trying to pass this bill for the insane backlog and hoops to jump through for legal immigrants, blame the people who have, for the last two decades, consistently underfunded immigration servi...oh, nevermind. You got the right people after all.

Re:devil's advocate

[enjerth]

What the hell are you gibbergabbering about? That is the fee to enter legally. Read the context (the post I replied to). The bill provides a fine of $2000 for an illegal immigrant to make their status legal. That fee, compared to what it costs to immigrate the legal way is NOT a large fee.

More than that, the fees for legal immigration must be paid upfront (and even before you are granted permission to work in the US) while the fine for illegal immigrants may be deferred a number of years.

If 'every' immigrant doing it the legal way will face that, then ones who previously attempted to enter illegally, but are now here legally, would also be facing it. Duh. That's great justification. Now explain it to others who have been deported for returned mail that illegal immigrants will face the same kind of crap in their process to change their status to legally resident. I'm sure that'll make it all better.

The point is that "the system is broken", but Washington is focused on giving millions of residing illegal immigrants legal status as some form of "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" rather than fixing the damned system! Just a guest worker program.

Re:devil's advocate

[Darby]

If that's bipartisanship, I don't want it.

Given that "bipartisanship" means, "hey, we both have a way to fuck the people with this one", you've made a wise choice ;-)

Re:devil's advocate

[Darby]

Every immigrant doing it the legal way still has to face the difficulties of the system and some will no doubt be deported for crap as insignificant as undelivered mail (which they tried to do to my wife)

Heh, my wife's first *two* Green Cards were "undelivered mail". Still not sure if they never were sent or if they were just stolen out of the mail, but thank the INS for making me pay for replacement green cards for 2 illegals because they couldn't be bothered to let me pay for registered mail.

Re:devil's advocate

[Eustace Tilley]

Is not the thrust of the article that virtualization obviates hardware keys, thus making "pretty damn obscure" not obscure at all?

wow

[superphreak]

Analysts say what probably happened behind the scenes is that Microsoft or one of its media partners decided at the last moment that encouraging consumers to use virtualization would, at least symbolically, be at odds with its attempts to enforce DRM.

"Microsoft doesn't want the music labels, TV networks and movie studios to come back to them and say that you are enabling this ability to move content around," said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Not allowing virtualization because someone can share a multi-GB VM via Bittorrent and "break" DRM? Uh, I think there are easier ways to break it, but I stay away from DRM, so I could be wrong...

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick solution: Distribute a "base-line" VM consisting of nothing but the OS. Then distribute diffs between that baseline and any application. Each diff should be the same size as the installed app/game.

Re:wow

[tor528]

Maybe it's because you could play a DRM'd movie in Vista running in a virtual machine on a Linux host while capturing it using XVidCap or recordMyDesktop.

Re:wow

[arminw]

....Not allowing virtualization because someone can share a multi-GB VM.....

Other than a useless EULA, is there any technical method they could implement to prevent their OS from running in a VM? EULA's are meaningless unenforceable garbage anyway. Are they going to send the cops around to see if I have VISTA installed running under Parallels on my Mac?

Huh??

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is .zip going to be usefull *at all* in compressing a fucking multi-gigabyte VM??

Re:Huh??

[Anonymous Coward]

A remedial lesson in file compression is in order for you.

Re:Huh??

[Mathinker]

You're probably right, but "zip" might do a stellar job on the patch file which is the binary difference of the VM vs. a vanilla VM immediately before installing the media.

bsdiff (yes, that is the correct link, I didn't pick the domain name, just Google "binary diff" to check) doesn't seem quite right for creating the patch file, considering its memory requirements, but I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to work something up...

Re:Huh??

[Brian Gordon]

Or for you- he has a point, it would be absolutely ridiculous to add 5GB onto a 5MB song or 700MB movie just to defeat DRM.. nobody would have enough space for a collection, and it would be prohibitive to try to make a "mix" VM. Host-VM file transfer is notoriously difficult to set up for windows.

Re:Huh??

[Brian Gordon]

You mean delta compression?

Re:Huh??

[Anonymous Coward]

What moron modded this a troll? File compression does exactly that - it compresses files. If someone doesn't get that, then it is clear they need a lesson in what exactly file compression is.

Re:Huh??

[Mathinker]

Not exactly, if you had read the whole comment, you'd see I was pushing for delta encoding followed by standard compression (zip, bzip2, 7zip).

Thanks for the link, via it I found xdelta{,3}.

Re:Huh??

[neomunk]

You don't need a 5GB VM for every song (hell, the 5GB number is twink anyways, but whatever) you need ONE VM for your whole library, to run the OS that'll let you play the video while the OS that's actually on the bottom REALLY running the show does all those dirty things the boys at the RIAA and MPAA have nightmares about.

Re:Huh??

[AngelofDeath-02]

Virtual Machines tend to compress really well as a matter of fact.

A few stations at work have 4-8gb vm images (static hd capacities tend to run better...) that compress to about 2.5

Most of window's files are very compressable, and then you've got all that extra disk space that's basically nothing.

Anyway - the actual media wouldn't compress well, and adding 2.5 gigs onto that is some serious overhead - but we are living in an era of broadband. If we can reasonably keep the broadband providers from doing traffic shaping - 2.5gigs isn't an insurmountable amount.

Re:Huh??

[ZachPruckowski]

In fact, when you look at piracy, it's not everyone who has to have a 5 GB VM, it's the one guy "cracking" the DRM. Once said DRM is cracked and the file is up on the Interwebs, it's available to all without the need for a VM.

Re:Huh??

[DavidTC]

Yeah, the whole thing is stupid, because people aren't thinking.

Someone would crack DRM. This wouldn't require an OS image, that would be a damn stupid way to distribute anything. It would be a crack that installs in a guest VM. Copyright violators would install a copy of Windows (Which they surely already have.) inside a VM, run the crack, and have a 'DRM-enabled' VM.

They'd then attach to the sound and video of it and rip copies from that.

This is, of course, assuming that there's a DRM crack that lets a non-protected machine validate, but somehow not then allow the interception of the streams. In actuality, I rather doubt that, and I suspect copiers would just install the crack in their actual OS and rip the content from there. Using a VM might make a crack slightly easier to write, but not by much, and I suspect it would be harder in many ways.

But, either way, once it's ripped, DRM is a complete non-issue. You don't have to distribute a whole OS, you don't have to distribute a crack, you don't have to distribute anything but the media file.

Re:Huh??

[HiThere]

When you ACTUALLY look at piracy ... someone from one of the studio's will leak a copy before the copy protection is ever put on.

Well....I'm overstating the case. I've only seen a few cases where that mode of transmission has been proven.

What next?

[Anonymous Coward]

How long will it be until no one is allowed to run any executable at all that hasn't been signed by Microsoft, incase it's a DRM-breaking program?

Re:What next?

[Anonymous Coward]

a long, long time

unless you're on a windows box, i guess

Re:What next?

[Brian Gordon]

Until about 2096, at least according to Richard Stallman. Eerily similar to what you just suggested.

Re:What next?

[nurb432]

I am guessing in about 5 years. "for national security" reasons of course.

Re:What next?

[jshriverWVU]

Pretty close considering in Vista even some MS software get's complaints "Are you sure you want to run this untrusted application" warning. "Do you wish to run?" that's just one step from "Sorry this program hasn't paid MS for a trusted computing license key, not able to load"

Said before

[mcrbids]

Encryption allows Alice to send a message to Bob that can't be viewed by Jack. The problem with DRM is it uses encryption such that Bob and Jack are the same person.

Think about it.

Alice (the publisher of the song) is using encryption to ensure that you and only you (Bob) can recieve the message. But Jack (also you) is being prevented from viewing the message.

The only reason that DRM is making any kind of headway is because of the hand-waving around terms like "dual key cryptography" and "license management". When you get right down to it, the content producers exist to deliver content to me. Once I get it, the only thing limiting my distribution of that content is legal in nature - I'm afraid of getting sued or prosecuted, so I don't.

Speakers can be recorded, screens can be videotaped. DRM can make it more difficult to copy content, but it will NEVER make it impossible. And the sad part is, DRM frequently makes it more difficult to VIEW content legitimately.

As a good example, I just set up a Windows XP laptop for one of my sales associates. I spent an ungodly amount of time going thru "Genuine Advantage" this and "Genuine" that, along with some dozen or more reboots. It's riduculously annoying, especially when updating a new CentOS system takes a single line:


yum -y update; shutdown -r now;


Microsoft has it wrong, and it may well be their undoing to find this out.

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

"Encryption allows Alice to send a message to Bob that can't be viewed by Jack."

Wait, "Jack"? Who uses Jack? It's usually Alice and Bob communicating with each other and Eve (short for Evesdropper) that wants to listen in. I've also occasionally seen people use Chris, but never Jack.

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

> "Encryption allows Alice to send a message to Bob that can't be viewed by Jack. The problem with DRM is it uses encryption such that Bob and Jack are the same person."

That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack. I don't care how much cybernetics has progressed, we're not televisions yet, and we as human beings can't assimilate, store, and regurgitate digital content with any kind of quality.

> "Speakers can be recorded, screens can be videotaped."

Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material? (For this paragraph, forget that you are a geek when I use words such as "quality" and when I presume you're a pirate - I'm talking about average users).

> "DRM can make it more difficult to copy content, but it will NEVER make it impossible."

Doesn't need to.

Or to frame the absurdity of that argument in an analogy that I feel works well: "Police can make it difficult to commit crimes (and not get caught), but they'll never make it impossible. Therefore we police are futile. When will they learn?"

> "And the sad part is, DRM frequently makes it more difficult to VIEW content legitimately."

No argument. We should be thankful that they have as difficult a time picking a DRM standard as they do. Fragmentation impedes their progress in locking everything down: CDs versus DVDs for instance.

Re:Said before

[mcrbids]

That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack. I don't care how much cybernetics has progressed, we're not televisions yet, and we as human beings can't assimilate, store, and regurgitate digital content with any kind of quality.

But it's not hard to create a rig that does.

Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy,

Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy. Anyway, we're talking about the grey/black market, in which quality matters much less than price.

Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents?

See above points - it's not some guy with a camcorder of his TV, it's the "pro-sumer" guy who has good quality equipment that can kill DRM.

Police can make it difficult to commit crimes (and not get caught), but they'll never make it impossible. Therefore we police are futile. When will they learn?"

You are completely missing the point. For 200 years, merely PRINTING "Copyright NNNN - all rights reserved" has resulted in a reasonable protection for copyright holders. So why is it that all of a sudden, new technology is needed to enforce what is, at its core, a human problem?

Look at copyright laws circa 1975, when the Xerox copier was really starting to take hold for an EXCELLENT parallel.


No argument. We should be thankful that they have as difficult a time picking a DRM standard as they do. Fragmentation impedes their progress in locking everything down: CDs versus DVDs for instance.

A statement which largely undermines the rest of your post. Are you arguing that DRM is effective? Are you arguing that it's effective but bad? Are you arguing that it's good? Your point suddenly becomes unclear.

I simply argue that it's ineffective. Some DRM can be useful to discourage blatant piracy, but relying on it excessively is just dumb.

Re:Said before

[timmarhy]

your an idiot and fail to understand the classic bob and alice encryption example. bob and alice are 2 seperate people divided over the internet, your TV is right there in your living room for you to disassemble. THAT is why drm fails, because you have both keys at hand.

also your police vs crime analogy is a moronic over simplification of the situation - police prevent many many different crimes, which one are you reffering to that we should give up on? ok i'll pick for you - someone carrying a small amount of cannabis, we won't ever stop it and it's very low impact (just like copying a movie) so yes police should stop worrying about pety crap like that.

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

yum -y update; shutdown -r now;

Don't you mean:
yum -y update && shutdown -r now

Re:Said before

[mcrbids]

Don't you mean:
yum -y update && shutdown -r now

Other than the fact that your way turns both into a single return (for error checking) is there any particular difference? Both get the job done, both result in a fully updated CentOS. (or RHEL or Scientific Linux or Fedora Core) And, what kind of error-checking are you going to meaningfully get on a system reboot?

Pedanticism for its own sake is wasteful. There are many, many, MANY ways to skin a cat. But in the end, the only thing that matters is whether the cat has skin on it when you are done. And, a cat-skinner gets paid based on how many cats get skinned, not on how he goes about it.

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

"your an idiot"

Apparently he isn't the only one. For future reference, if you intend to call someone moronic and an idiot, try not to lose all credibility in the first three words of your post.

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless its Schrödinger's cat. The cat could be both skinned & unskinned at the same time.

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

try not to lose all credibility in the first three words of your post.

The first three words? The guy can't even spell his own name.

Re:Said before

[taniwha]

I think his point is that it doesn't matter, breaking the crypto is hard, there are easier ways - I can pull apart my LCD TV - oooh looky here 2000 odd wires along the top, 100 odd along the bottom, that and 3 8-bit A/Ds and I can recover an HD signal good enough to play back at full quality on another TV - doesn't even break and access method in the dmca sense since it's just sample data as it is - that's a fun weekend project for a bored hardware hacker, and a business proposition for a pirate

Point is it's not hard, IMHO crypto as a means to avoid piracy is a joke, there's no point until we DO get that encrypted tap straight into the brain - the reason it's there is to piss off and control the customer

Re:Said before

[node 3]

Wow, are you secretly trying to *promote* DRM by making the anti-DRM argument look retarded?

But it's not hard to create a rig that does [capture DRM limited digital data]. Then where is all this hardware? How do you plan to capture HDCP content with a "not hard to create rig"? The whole point is that DRMing the whole system leaves only analog methods, or exploiting flaws.

Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy. So an analog copy of a digital file is superior to a *perfect*digital*copy*? How did that make enough sense to you for you to type this?

See above points - it's not some guy with a camcorder of his TV, it's the "pro-sumer" guy who has good quality equipment that can kill DRM. How? Ok, you get your HD cam out and record a plasma screen viewing of a Blu-ray disc. This is going to "kill drm"? No, this is going to result in poorer quality. This poorer copy is not going to kill drm. It gets around DRM, but people will still want the superior DRMed version.

You are completely missing the point. For 200 years, merely PRINTING "Copyright NNNN - all rights reserved" has resulted in a reasonable protection for copyright holders. So why is it that all of a sudden, new technology is needed to enforce what is, at its core, a human problem? Because for the first time, virtually any copyrighted work can be perfectly copied at the click of a button, and distributed with close to zero effort. Without DRM, you could make a fully perfect copy of an HD movie in less than an hour. Prior to mass-market digital technology, it took a lot of time and/or a lot of money to make a copy of something, and that copy was almost certainly going to be of lesser quality, and distribution beyond people you have physical contact with was quite expensive and/or time consuming.

Look at copyright laws circa 1975, when the Xerox copier was really starting to take hold for an EXCELLENT parallel. No, it makes an extremely poor parallel. You could not copy a film or recording with a Xerox machine. You could not make a perfect copy of *anything* with a Xerox machine. Operating a Xerox machine is timely and significantly more expensive than copying a digital file.

A statement which largely undermines the rest of your post. Are you arguing that DRM is effective? Are you arguing that it's effective but bad? Are you arguing that it's good? Your point suddenly becomes unclear. He's arguing that it's effective but not being fully utilized. And no, his point was not unclear at all.

I simply argue that it's ineffective. DRM makes piracy *harder*. Not impossible, just harder, and that's all it takes to be effective.

The problem with DRM is that it's not only effective at slowing piracy, it's effective at locking consumers out of their own content.

Some DRM can be useful to discourage blatant piracy Wait a minute! Didn't you just say, *in the preceding sentence* that DRM is ineffective? If it discourages some piracy, it's effective. That's the only reason it still exists. The various labels and studios (except EMI) do not yet realize that DRM hurts more than it helps.

but relying on it excessively is just dumb. That is, in fact, 100% true.

Re:Said before

[dgatwood]

Big difference. The shell doesn't evaluate additional arguments of an "and" directive if the first argument evaluates to false. Thus, using && guarantees that the shutdown will not occur if the update fails. That's a good thing for any command in which a failure could potentially leave your system in an unbootable state (e.g. an OS update).

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

Speakers can be recorded, screens can be videotaped. Well, the next step will be that you won't be able to play the song or video at all.

Oh wait... that's already the case.

Re:Said before

[physicsnick]

Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? Hi, I live in Canada. Recently, the MPAA has banned pre-screenings in theaters across *our entire country* because they think they lose too much business to camrips done in Canada.

Take a look at this: http://www.torrentspy.com/search?query=cam

There are thousands upon thousands of people pirating some guy taping the movie theater screen. Yes, people really do want to watch camrips. If DVDs couldn't be digitally ripped, then people would just tape their TVs, and pirates would absolutely download that; the only reason you don't see camrips still being downloaded for movies about to be released on DVD is because DRM DOESN'T WORK!

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

For decades, we Mac users haven't really given a shit what was happening off in PC land. Every few years we'd hear about a new version of Windows, and we'd glance into the abyss just long enough to remind ourselves of Microsoft's eternal cluelessness. Other than that, I think our closest brush with Windows was Word 6, and that was a decade and a half ago.

So what makes Windows suddenly relevant to us now? Who are all these "Mac users" clamoring for aberrations like "Macintosh Explorer"? Are these the same "Mac users" on VersionTracker writing glowing reviews of Firefox and Azureus? Who let them in, anyway?

If you're some sort of tragic square who needs to run Windows, maybe you should have thought of that before you bought a Mac. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to just round up these so-called "Mac users" and send them all on trains to Redmond.

Re:Said before

[nmb3000]

yum -y update; shutdown -r now;

Slightly off-topic, but I'd suggest changing that to yum -y update && shutdown -r now. Using "&&" in leiu of ";" will prevent the system from rebooting if the call to yum isn't successful (can't contact a server, whatever). On many systems you can even replace "shutdown -r now" with simply "reboot".

Re:Said before

[Gogo0]

Iv always been under the impression that ; means the second command will run no matter what happens during the first command, and && will not execute anything further unless the first command exited without errors.

Using &&, if yum errored out because your internet is down, you dont reboot your system needlessly.

And I agree, the original "correction" was completely unnecessary.

Re:Said before

[RightSaidFred99]

Many audiophiles may disagree, but they'd be demonstrating abject stupidity to do so. An analog copy of digital content cannot in any universe match the quality of a given digital representation of said content.

Now, I know there are still a few crackpots who think their vinyl sounds better, but this is a different proposition from saying that an analog copy of an existing digital performance can match the quality of the digital.

Re:Said before

[drsmithy]

Using &&, if yum errored out because your internet is down, you dont reboot your system needlessly.

More importantly, if yum crashed and you ended up with a corrupted RPM database or half-installed package that might render the system unbootable, you won't shutdown your system in a potentially unrestartable (or otherwise broken) state.

The correction is not only unnecessary, it is demonstrably a poorer method.

Re:Said before

[dangitman]

Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy,

This is clearly nonsense. It's entirely possible to make a quality analog recording. How do you think they made music recordings before digital audio? That's right, they used analog magnetic tape, which can asound much better than the digital audio on a CD. How do you think they made those "digitally remastered" CD editions of Dark Side of the Moon? They used the analog master tapes, of course.

Likewise, motion picture film is ana analog medium, and it has far greater quality than even digital High Definition video can manage. Long story short, digital is not always superior to analog - and with the proper techniques, an analog copy can be extremely good quality.

Re:Said before

[Alioth]

. It gets around DRM, but people will still want the superior DRMed version.

The millions of people pirating 128kbit crummy sounding MP3s and horribly compressed DivX copies of movies would seemingly be in complete disagreement with that statement. People downloading pirated content don't care so much about quality. Those who care about quality tend to also be the kind of people who also prefer legitimate copies, DRM or not.

Re:Said before

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

How? Ok, you get your HD cam out and record a plasma screen viewing of a Blu-ray disc. This is going to "kill drm"? No, this is going to result in poorer quality. This poorer copy is not going to kill drm. It gets around DRM, but people will still want the superior DRMed version. Have you looked at any of the DVD rips floating around the net? 99.99% are reduced quality from the original. Most of the time it is a full-blown re-encode down to ~700MB (size of one CD), if you are lucky it is re-encoded down to 1.4GB (size of 2 CDs) and if you are in the midst of quality freaks, then it is just re-encoded down to 4.3GB (size of a single-layer DVD).

At the rate technology is progressing, somebody with a HD projector, a HD camcorder and a few extra lenses and filters will be able to do an analog capture that easily satisfies the average guy with a 50" LCD display.

It sure helps that even today all of the satellite HD signals are highly degraded, often re-encoding from 1920x1080 to 1280x1080 and the vast majority of the viewers don't give a damn. Even the broadcast networks do shitty job, Fox is bitrate starved for no good reason, running their stuff at roughly 10Mbps when the available bandwidth over the air is just under 20Mbps. NBC and ABC are only a little bit better. Only CBS seems to give a crap about the quality of their broadcasts.

So, either consumer standards are going to have get a LOT higher or pricing on DRM'd products is going to have get a LOT cheaper if they want to compete with the quality level available via "free."

All that assumes that no bored grad students ever take an electron-tunneling microscope to the "tamper-proof" chips in these DRM systems and extracts the keys necessary to do the decrypt at the digital level. Nowadays that's not particularly expensive to do.

Re:Said before

[swilver]

Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing.

Actually, you are wrong here. Analog copying could be a problem when in the process an analog copy was made multiple times and the content would degrade a bit further each time. However, the first analog copy will be more than acceptable (and might well be indistinguishable from the original by a set of viewers doing a double blind test).

So, if you can make a good analog copy, then digitize that in a format that is not DRM encumbered then it can be copied an infinite number of times without degradation. If it is close enough to the original that people can't tell whether it is the original or just a very good copy, then it doesn't matter anymore -- the damage will have been done, the copy will have spread over the internet and people will have enjoyed it thinking it was a digital rip.

It really is ridiculous to say that only a digital copy is acceptable when it is possible to make very accurate analog copies, take for example my 1600x1200 TFT screen which is connected with an ANALOG VGA cable -- the display automatically tunes itself to this signal and I donot notice the difference between using the analog VGA cable and my digital DVI cable -- that's how accurate an analog copy could be. In other words, even if they manage to close the digital hole it will be pointless without closing the analog hole as well.

Re:Said before

[Charcharodon]

The Genuine Advantage always seemed like a $100 fix to a $5 problem. I don't understand why they just don't offer the customers at retail they same price they offer companies like Dell for the license or even something at 2-3x times the price. You would find people a lot less willing to pirate Windows if it costs $40 instead of $220. They could get rid of all those people they have for licensing support and whole sections of their software engineers, I'm sure that would make up a large portion of the $180 difference licensing price.

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, are you secretly trying to *promote* DRM by making the anti-DRM argument look retarded?

But it's not hard to create a rig that does [capture DRM limited digital data]. Then where is all this hardware? How do you plan to capture HDCP content with a "not hard to create rig"? The whole point is that DRMing the whole system leaves only analog methods, or exploiting flaws.

Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy. So an analog copy of a digital file is superior to a *perfect*digital*copy*? How did that make enough sense to you for you to type this? Get high-def digital audio/video hardware. Start tapping the wires direcly. Re-encode. Upload to tpb. This thing is gonna sound just as good and look just as good as the origial source. You can also check for watermarks and other stuff while re-encoding.

Re:Said before

[vic-traill]

. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material?

A programme I attended at a Canadian east coast university had high international enrollment. One of the guys was from Chechnya. We had a pretty good instructional technology setup in one of the lecture spaces, so we could snag a movie off the Internet and take a break at two in the morning to watch said movie while scarfing popcorn and pop.

We had End of Days* up on the screen one early morning when the Chechnyan Dude comes in and exclaims that 'this is like going to the theatre back home!'. The movie was, of course, a handheld cam-cord copy.He said this was par for the course everywhere east of Romania, at the time (obviously my sample is a little small here, but let's just say that he had no reason to be b/s'ing us on the matter).

So while I do understand and appreciate your point, if quality rips become scarce enough, entire countries will start watching hand held copies. So, the question is, were copies legally available (i.e for lease/purchase/rental, etc.) and if so, why did theatres go for the pirate version over the quality version?

* This just goes to show that there are entirely different lengths to which people will go when quality is in short supply.

Re:Said before

[bit01]

Because for the first time, virtually any copyrighted work can be perfectly copied at the click of a button, and distributed with close to zero effort.

This applies equally to the vendor. Nothing stopping them improving the efficiency of their distribution channels to match pirates.

Copying is a tool; it applies equally to vendor, consumer, pirate, whatever and does not suddenly justify DRM which messes the balance by making the average citizen guilty until proven innocent.

---

DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.

Re:Said before

[arevos]

DRM makes piracy *harder*. Not impossible, just harder, and that's all it takes to be effective.

The problem with DRM is that it's not only effective at slowing piracy, it's effective at locking consumers out of their own content. I'd disagree with this. The cost of breaking DRM is a one time fee for pirates; once an unprotected version of the data has been released, the proverbial genie is out of the proverbial bottle. Large content holders, like the organisations that make up the MPAA, want the benefits of distributing their data across a large range of devices, and to the greatest possible proportion of the public, whilst trying to keep a small set of keys secret and hidden. We have problems securing even dedicated data centres from attack; how likely is it that the MPAA et all can pull off their DRM with flawless security even as they are franchising out the algorithms to dozens of third-party hardware manufacturers?

I doubt that DRM can significantly slow down piracy. Historically, DRM schemes tend to be cracked rather more quickly than the average life-cycle of a storage format, or even the latest summer blockbuster. Indeed, the presence of DRM may even encourage piracy in some quarters; a while ago a game I bought stopped working because I had swapped in a new DVD drive, and rather than mess around with tech support trying to get a new key, it was easier and faster to download a cracked copy of the game over bittorrent.

Re:Said before

[Bert64]

"Because for the first time, virtually any copyrighted work can be perfectly copied at the click of a button, and distributed with close to zero effort. Without DRM, you could make a fully perfect copy of an HD movie in less than an hour. Prior to mass-market digital technology, it took a lot of time and/or a lot of money to make a copy of something, and that copy was almost certainly going to be of lesser quality, and distribution beyond people you have physical contact with was quite expensive and/or time consuming."

So your saying that, new technology exists which makes distribution of content much cheaper...
And yet content producers want to charge the same or more for this cheaper to distribute content? While also restricting the customer more than they did with earlier distrbution methods? It looks like their business model is becoming obsolete, and theyre just trying to shore it up by restricting their own customers.

Why not sell a product/service that cannot be easily reproduced, such that your actually providing value for money... Movies shown in a cinema spring to mind, the cost of a cinema size screen and sound system is beyond the means of most people. And then there's live concerts for music.
You cant clone a live concert, because you cannot produce exact replicas of the artists (yet?) and the cost of setting up a bootleg cinema would be too high to be worth the hassle.
If you want to sell movies on dvd, they need to be priced such that copying them is not viable, and yes that is possible. Movie companies have access to factories where DVDs are mass produced at a cost of 1 or 2 cents each, no pirate group would be able to obtain blank media that cheaply, let alone the time and effort needed to write to it.

In short, piracy only exists because the original media is disproportionately priced compared to its production cost. DRM exists not as a solution to piracy, but as a method to wring more money out of their paying customers.

Re:Said before

[Antique Geekmeister]

Can I hire you to replace the Perl programmers my clients keep using before I arrive? Fancy degrees, exciting resumes with lots of recommendations from their little CPAN spewing peers, and they've never heard of checking for error conditions before proceeding merrily down their paths of database destruction. Or having case statements that report that they didn't understand what they were trying to process.

Actually checking that something worked before proceeding to the next and dangerous step seems to be wildly ignored in numerous modern programming styles. It helps keep me employed, but it wastes a lot of my time and my client's money.

Re:Said before

[DarkOx]

That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack. I don't care how much cybernetics has progressed, we're not televisions yet, and we as human beings can't assimilate, store, and regurgitate digital content with any kind of quality. No this is where you are wrong, you and your television are the same person because its your hardware and you control it. If the content industry somehow could actually keep people out of the hardware you might have a point, but so far they can't.

Even with things like HDCP at some point it still has to get decrypteded. Hell you can scrape the image off the VRAM chip as it does screen updates if you have to do it that way.

Let me remind you how this actually works anyway:

1. Joe1337 figures out how to connect to the bus in the TV/DVD/BDPlayer/Whatever and grab the decrypted data. He can do this because he has losts of time knowlege and nobody can tell what he is doing to his TV in his basement. Joe1337 makes it work and posts anonymously to some usenet group.

2. N00b sees it and understands only what it does not how it does it or how to do it. He writes it up as OMG *IAA IS FOOBAR and publishis it to his crapy hardware review site.

3. John51|\/|1337 finds sees the review and finds the original post. He did not know enough to do the original work but has enough electronics knowlege to follow it, and repeat the process. He discovers it actally works and write a better howto that other mortals could follow.

4. A few hundred mortals see John51|\/|1337's better howto that he posted to N00b's message board. They build the things and then begain sticking their ripps on pirate bay.

5. Bob CLUESS and Everyone else in the world gets access.

Re:Said before

[DrgnDancer]

Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material?

You lose a lot of quality if you film the screen or record the speakers, but until DRM is end to end (i.e. not decoded until it hits the actual screen or speakers) it will be possible to make near perfect recordings off of the analog wires. If I run a short, high quality, cable from the speaker out on my high quality sound card, and another from the S-video port on my high quality video card and send both into a high quality digital recording device how much have I seriously lost? The signal was analog for two feet of good A/V cable, do you really think a non-professional is even going to notice? Do you really think that even a pros is going to care when the content is available for "free samples"?

If they decide to do DRM from end to end it could be a problem, but that's years down the line. Everybody just bought brand new HDTVs (at no small cost), do you think all those people are going to be willing to run out and buy another new TV? Especially since the only way to justify this idea to the consumer would be to give them another quantum leap in quality? Look how long the "HD Revolution" is taking to filter down the non-early adopters... You think they'll buy ANOTHER new TV so they can see even MORE pimples on the anchorman's face? Until very recently we still had NETWORK hold outs on HD technology in this market. They basically switched at midnight on the day they had to by law.

S-video is 576i, the same quality as "normal" broadcast TV. As people get spoiled by HD and Blueray, they MIGHT decide that isn't good enough (though for backups or "piracy" it's not bad), but how long before there are HD out and in cards to allow new computers to get HD cable signals? It's a tad more complicated than just playing your Blueray disk on your computer and recording it, but the quality loss is minimal.

Re:Said before

[FireFury03]

Then where is all this hardware? How do you plan to capture HDCP content with a "not hard to create rig"?

HDCP was cracked a long time ago - you've been able to buy HDCP strippers for ages. Also, it's better to extract the content at the source - for example, by cracking AACS (again, already done to a great extent).

So an analog copy of a digital file is superior to a *perfect*digital*copy*?

If the analogue copy is of sufficiently high quality that it is indistinguishable from the digital copy to the average person then what does it matter which is technically superior?

Without DRM, you could make a fully perfect copy of an HD movie in less than an hour.

You _could_, and indeed some people would. However, you are also harming the legitimate users:

• When I buy music I want to be able to play it on all of my devices and store it on several computers that I (and only I) use. It's increasingly hard to do this with legitimately purchased content, but an illegal copy lets me do all this.
• When I buy a video, I want to be able to watch it, fast forward, rewind, copy for personal use, etc. When I put a legitimately purchased DVD in a DVD player I get to set through 5 minutes of unskippable content telling me that I shouldn't be copying it. If I get an illegal copy instead then all that is removed.

Currently, I choose to just ignore the DRM'd content and buy the un-DRM'd stuff. However, if the un-DRM'd content is abolished then the only choices left are to either completely ignore music, video, etc., or illegally copy the content. It's got to the point where (price aside) the illegally copied content is _better_ for the end users than the legitimate content. Even if the illegal copies are marginally lower quality, at least you can actually use them.

The extremely oppressive DRM techniques are only going to work if people can't actually get hold of the un-DRM'd content. And I'm afraid you're *never* going to be able to stop at least one un-DRM'd copy being published. From what I can tell, DRMing content isn't going to stop the professional copyright infringers and will end up pushing people who would ordinarilly be buying the content legitimately towards buying the illegal copies instead.

DRM makes piracy *harder*. Not impossible, just harder, and that's all it takes to be effective.

Completely wrong. If I can't copy the content I just bought I'll just download it instead - someone else will have already posted it online since, as you said, it's not impossible. And as mentioned above, if I'm forced to download illegal content _despite_ having legitimately paid for the content anyway I'm going to be less inclined to pay for it next time.

Re:Said before

[An Onerous Coward]

So in your analogy, Alice is the movie studio, Bob is your television, and Jack is a guy who not only sits there, reading the message as Bob does, but also can hook Bob up to any device he likes to try and figure out the key Bob is using to crack the encryption.

In the end, what the media execs are doing is handing out millions upon millions of devices, each of which contains all the information needed to decrypt every single "secret message" that they're selling. A sufficiently technical and motivated person will find a way to extract the key. It only needs to happen once, and then all those millions of dollars spent developing the "bulletproof" DRM is for naught.

It will never work. You hand the ciphertext, the algorithm, and the keys to the same individual, millions of times over, you should have a window of a few weeks before bit-perfect copies of the message show up on the Tubes, and a window of a few hours for every message you send thereafter.

Re:Said before

[Bert64]

It's been going on for a lot longer than that, actually...
A lot of games on the Amiga required code wheels or that you entered some text from a particular point in the game's manual... Being a kid, i often lost the manual or the codewheel in amongst all the other junk i had, so i quickly found out that pirate copies didn't suffer from this inconvenience.

Similarly, floppies would easily get damaged, so i always made backups for my own use, some copy protected games prevented me from doing that so if i damaged the disks i lost the game, again pirate copies never prevented me making backup copies (and the replacement cost was lower anyway).

Finally, games that could be installed to HD but still required that you have the original media, completely defeat the purpose of installing to HD... It also makes such games impractical for me to play on my laptop (i work away a lot, and like to keep some games installed to play when im sitting in a hotel bored)... Again, nocd cracks help me here, while legitimate buyers suffer.

I would buy games, but as a pirate i get a better experience.

Oh, and games that rely on an online subscription to be playable should be downloadable for free, or obtainable for nominal cost... It makes no sense to rip people off on buying the media when you need to buy an ongoing subscription anyway, and giving the game away with a nominal single player "practice" mode but needing a subscription to be fully playable might encourage users... Especially if you can offer a short term subscription, to see if you like it.
I wont plunk down full price for world of warcraft on the off chance i might enjoy it, but i'd be perfectly happy to pay for a month's subscription. If i dont like it, i can cancel it.

Re:Said before

[mpe]

That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack. I don't care how much cybernetics has progressed, we're not televisions yet, and we as human beings can't assimilate, store, and regurgitate digital content with any kind of quality.

Nor has cybernetics advanced to the point where televisions are sentient entities. "Bob" is a machine owned and controlled by "Jack".

Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material? (For this paragraph, forget that you are a geek when I use words such as "quality" and when I presume you're a pirate - I'm talking about average users).

There are many digital codecs which are lossy. Thing is that the average viewer (including most "geeks") dosn't care too much about the technical quality of television. The picture has to be quite awful before most people's brains will give up.

Re:Said before

[mpe]

Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy.

Most people arn't video/audiophiles in the first place

Anyway, we're talking about the grey/black market, in which quality matters much less than price.

It's a combination of price and availability. It's rather hard to make a pirate DVD which costs more than an airline ticket, especially if you factor in all the stress involved with "security".
Being able to just download a movie or TV episode is also very convenient. Even if it is not "on demand" it's often close to it, likely to be quicker than mail order video rental and with better choice than a physical video library.

Re:Said before

[Microlith]

In short, piracy only exists because the original media is disproportionately priced compared to its production cost.

Correction: It exists because people are cheap, and will pay exactly zero if they can get away with it. I like your post, it's full of missteps I see often in slashdot posts. For instance:

And yet content producers want to charge the same or more for this cheaper to distribute content?

The expense ISN'T in the distribution. It's in the initial production but recouped at distribution time.

Why not sell a product/service that cannot be easily reproduced, such that your actually providing value for money.

So only physical things have value? Anything that can be copied easily has a value of zero? Please, go tell all the artists and production companies out there that their work is worthless, please.

Movies shown in a cinema spring to mind, the cost of a cinema size screen and sound system is beyond the means of most people. And then there's live concerts for music.

Congratulations, the old "concert" defense. That only works for music. And what's this I hear about people hating cinemas because they're a bad environment. People like to set up home theaters with their own equipment. Never mind that it'd be a real hassle going out to watch a 30 minute or hour showing of something (and good luck if what you like isn't hugely popular, those theaters will be showing American Idol every night...)

DRM is a poorly planned, knee-jerk reaction to a very obvious message from the internet community, namely that they will treat the internet like a Hong Kong market where everything and then some is warezed. Making DRM unnecessary would require effort on both parts, which considering the attitude of most slashdotters who love to suck The Pirate Bay's cock I doubt is forthcoming.

Re:Said before

[Myopic]

Encryption allows Alice to send a message to Bob that can't be viewed by Jack.

What!? I thought it was Alice, Bob, and Trudy! Who's Jack?

Re:Said before

[DavidTC]

DRM makes piracy *harder*. Not impossible, just harder, and that's all it takes to be effective.

DRM doesn't make piracy one bit harder for the average user:

Without DRM: User goes online and downloads pirated work.
With DRM: User goes online and downloads pirated work.

Yeah, I can see how DRM is really helping there.

DRM makes the creation of the work a bit harder, but it's a one time cost, and, actually not even that. It's a one time cost to set up a rig that breaks DRM, and from then on it's automatic.

And people saying 'No, they wouldn't do that', are sorta ignoring the fact pirates already do. They have nice TV recording setups hooked to their digital cable, they clip out commercials, etc. Yes, cracking some DRM schemes would appear to need specialized hardware, but unless that hardware costs thousands of dollars, you're still at a price that pirate groups are willing to spend.

The great irony is, right as they've finally coming out with 'encrypted all the way to the screen' DRM, the price of such hardware is getting low enough that, by the time people actually want all that data that in their rips, which will be in about ten years, they'll be cheap enough for pirate groups to rip apart.

Right now, people are more than happy at HD resolution ripped off digital cable, about 3 megs a second.

Re:Said before

[CastrTroy]

Apparently Hollywood is so scared of the analog hole that they got the Canadian government to pass laws against "camcordering" movies in theatres. The analog hole is good, just look at all the cam/telesync movies available for download. People would rather download this, then pay $11 for a theatre ticket, or $6 for a movie rental. In university, I knew people who downloaded asf files, with really bad quality. Some times it's nice to have HD uber high quality stuff. But if the movie is just about the story line, then it really doesn't matter to most people.

Re:Said before

[Richy_T]

Camrips also scare the theater chains. They used to be fairly scared that home viewing (VCR, DVD) would damage their business but could always rely on people visiting the cinema for the experience that just wasn't available at home. Now you can get all the experience of people coughing, standing up in front of you and mobile phones ringing right in your own living room...

Now if the pirates could just come up with a way to simulate the "shoes sticking to the carpet" sensation...

Rich

Re:Said before

[Richy_T]

One of the early DVDs I watched was "Blade" I was most impressed by the blocky quality of the sunrise in one scene. The quality of what people are accepting from the originators already is pretty awful (and was even worse with VHS).

Rich

Re:Said before

[node 3]

So your saying that, new technology exists which makes distribution of content much cheaper... Yes, I am. I can get a $2,000.00 computer shipped to me from across the planet for $40. That does not mean the computer should cost $40.

A film (or CD, or book, or whatever), costs something to create, costs something to manufacture, costs something to promote, and costs something to ship. Due to technology, the highlighted items are, or can be, very close to zero (cents, or fractions of cents). The other costs still exist.

The problem is that, once the other costs are paid, *anyone* can just step in and perform the highlighted steps. This is taking advantage of costs paid for by others and is just as wrong (or at least, similarly wrong) to when corporations do the exact same thing to *us*. For example, corporations not paying taxes, but driving on roads the rest of us paid for; a buggy MS operating system which requires users to spend money on antivirus software, or to suffer downtime, data loss, and IT expenses; a factory which dumps toxic waste into the environment, transferring the cost of dealing with it from the company to the people who now have severe medical conditions.

At this point, I realize you have probably taken my post as being pro-DRM. It's not. It's anti-stupid-anti-DRM posts. DRM *works*. There can be absolutely *no* *doubt* *whatsoever* that people who *would* have copied a DVD or iTunes track haven't, due to the DRM. But the problem is that DRM does the exact same thing that DRM is meant to protect against--specifically, it transfers a cost to an innocent party.

DRM is, as many have posted, a flawed system, and it's doomed to eventual failure in the long run, and I *do* oppose it fully, and believe we will see more EMI's in the next few years, and should even see film and television content drop DRM sometime eventually as well, but this will *only* happen if there is an influential figure fighting against DRM. The reason for this is that *DRM works*. Just like dumping toxic waste into the nearest river *works*. It takes a counter-force to get people to stop doing a wrong thing that works. The first step in fighting DRM is to fully and honestly understand DRM. If you don't, media executives will just hear your lies, and know them to be lies, and dismiss your *entire* argument.

Pointing out the flaws in DRM is proper. Stating DRM is offensive is noble. Stating DRM does not work is a lie.

Re:Said before

[sjames]

Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing.

peopl,e find MP3s perfectly acceptable even though it is a lossy compression. It's lossy enough that I can make a CD to tape copy that sounds better, certainly CD->analog audio->digital would work as well.

The same principle can be applied to video. MOST people (not geek super-ultra-HD video freaks) would be happy enough with a DVD out over svhs->"video stabilizer"->digital recording if it's done with quality hardware. The limit on sharing has always been the fading from multi-generation copies. One generation was never a big deal.

Re:Said before

[pjmburg]

I personally do. I only get music that's 192 kbs or higher, but I can find it just fine.

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

> "But it's not hard to create a rig that does."

Then this rig would be Jack, not Bob, and thus limited to analog content if the system works correctly. Remember that, although the industry was always concerned about copying, they became really obsessed once digital media became the standard. There's a reason for that.

If you're talking about creating a rig that captures digital content, then we can discuss Jack attempting to intercept the signal and whether or not the current methods are successful in preventing him. Specifically, if the reading device and display device are tamper resistant to protect their keys, and the link between them is properly encrypted, then Jack has a tough job ahead of him. He can look for implementation flaws as he has done in the past, but that will become more difficult with time. His principle advantage is that once he discovers a key, a significant chunk of the system is compromised, but a better system would mitigate the damage so that the cost far outweighs the benefit.

> "Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy."

I don't think they're referring to analog copies of digital content, as the (alleged) damage, loss of quality, is already intrinsic to the source material. Unless you're saying that inserting noise and the like is an improvement over the digital content. And even in that case, with a digital copy you're always free to go analog at any time, but it's not true the other way around.

> "Anyway, we're talking about the grey/black market, in which quality matters Amuch less than price."

Depends on the consumer. The higher the quality, the more people will go black market. They'll never eliminate the market for people who don't care about quality at all, but they can still try to fight piracy's mainstream appeal.

> "See above points - it's not some guy with a camcorder of his TV, it's the "pro-sumer" guy who has good quality equipment that can kill DRM."

I like my copies to be unflawed. If there's a skip or a gap, that's normally enough to make me seek another source. I don't know enough about the process of digitally compressing analog recordings of digital content to say what kind of additional flaws would be introduced, but I imagine I would prefer the actual product. (Assuming of course that I, as a consumer, have a means to access it without the DRM! But that's another matter.)

> "You are completely missing the point. For 200 years, merely PRINTING "Copyright NNNN - all rights reserved" has resulted in a reasonable protection for copyright holders."

Er... Forgive me, but I think you are missing the point, or we're talking about very different things. That kind of protection is for other businesses and organized pirates. That stops one well-established company from ripping another one off, in broad daylight when all paperwork is filed and legal departments and government regulations are involved. Or it works to give sufficient warning to black-market commercial pirates that they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

What we're talking about here is a use of copyright in a totally different manner - against individuals, consumers, people who likely have no commercial aspirations or the legal resources to make sense of this complicated field of law. The past few decades have seen an extreme expansion in power from the first interpretation of copyright to the second. In short, the industry has bigger and better ambitions in suppressing unauthorized enjoyment, ambitions that require more than a copyright notice.

> "So why is it that all of a sudden, new technology is needed to enforce what is, at its core, a human problem?"

Because the playing field is technological. Analogy: "People managed to kill each other long before gunpowder was invented, so why do we need bullet-proof vests?" It's simply technological escalation.

> "A statement which largely undermines the rest of your post. Are you argu

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

Partly. Some people have higher standards for quality than others, and if they can lower it so the only readily accessible versions are below most people's thresholds...

Also, what happens when the high-quality versions are ubiquitous because everyone's bandwidth increases and the original media isn't sufficiently locked down?

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

> "If the analogue copy is of sufficiently high quality that it is indistinguishable from the digital copy to the average person then what does it matter which is technically superior?"

How high are we talking? Keep in mind that it's probably a lot harder to compress an analog replica of material that is already compressed - wouldn't there be artifacts, like when you convert from ogg to mp3 rather than from flac?

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

> "your an idiot"

Point noted.

> " and fail to understand the classic bob and alice encryption example. bob and alice are 2 seperate people divided over the internet,"

Alice and Bob are two parties who are each capable of possessing knowledge that the other doesn't have. The physical implementation of their communication is not fundamental. I don't care if they're separated by an IP network, telephone line, tin cans and a piece of string, line of sight, or are in each other's faces; it's still fine to use the names Alice and Bob when describing the situation. In this case, the digital television or display device is capable of knowing something that the human being watching it does not: the actual digital contents. The analog contents have to be shared between them, although there are of course attempts to close the analog hole or severely degrade its quality when transmitting to a non-human party is attempted.

> "your TV is right there in your living room for you to disassemble. THAT is why drm fails, because you have both keys at hand."

That's what tamper-resistance is for. The media reader, display device, and human viewer, are each separate Alice/Bob entities because they do not necessarily share knowledge. We can talk about one party breeching the security model and obtaining keys that he shouldn't know - note that I didn't say "tamper-proof" above.

> "also your police vs crime analogy is a moronic over simplification of the situation - police prevent many many different crimes, which one are you reffering to that we should give up on?"

Simplification or generalization? I decided not to name a particular crime because I figured someone like you would complain that I'm unfairly comparing the severity of digital piracy and a more traditional offense.

> "ok i'll pick for you - someone carrying a small amount of cannabis, "

But I guess I didn't count on someone like you picking your own strawman substitute for my generality... Sigh.

> "we won't ever stop it and it's very low impact (just like copying a movie)"

The impact of the crime is irrelevant to the debunking of that argument. The claim was (as I phrased it, which may be itself a strawman simplification) that if you cannot prevent something entirely, then it is useless to even make an attempt. The fallacy in that reasoning is the assumption that no progress is made from the attempt.

> "so yes police should stop worrying about pety crap like that."

Take your drug rants elsewhere, we're talking copyright and DRM here.

Thank you, come again.

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

The point is that the camrip can't compete with the original for the segment of the market that actually wants the product as opposed to a substitute. For instance, I would be pretty pissed off if I purchased an official, legitimate dvd, and it was actually produced as a camrip, and I'm sure you would be too. This illustrates that there is in fact a difference. Now it's just a matter of degree, a matter of what proportion of the population will purchase* a dvd when dvd quality is not available illegally.

(* I think it's interesting to compare this mentality: purchase as a result of the unavailability of pirated copies; to the (MP|RI)AA's preferred mentality: piracy detracting from purchase. The first way (correctly) implies that some people who can't pirate may turn to legitimate copies, while the second implies that every instance of piracy is a lost sale.)

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

I agree. But I was referring specifically to the analog hole as a means to copy consumer media. There are no master tapes, and it's unlikely that the consumer-pirate will have the means to produce an analog copy that is very close in quality to the original digital one. Certainly I'll grant it's possible, I just don't imagine it happening on a regular basis for the majority of small-time pirate-users. Also there's the matter of distribution, and since that will probably happen over bittorrent, recompression may be a problem. I don't know enough about the technical details to comment on that but I would imagine it'd be more difficult than compressing a direct digitally-copied version.

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

You make a good case. Someone before you brought up the reminder that analog degradation is mostly an issue when it's done multiple times from copy to copy, and you're right that that would not be the case here.

The resulting damage to my argument is that protecting analog content is more important than I had assumed - important enough that it should be protected (from the companies' perspective) with DRM. And now we can come back to the original point that DRM is futile, and this time the television and the viewer are the same entity as far as analog goes.

Yeah, that's pretty futile, unless you really go crazy and ban all sorts of analog recorders that don't respect do-not-copy bits or aren't themselves tamper-resistant. But that's only one faucet of a war against technological freedom.

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

> "No this is where you are wrong, you and your television are the same person because its your hardware and you control it."

Woah. Where's that coming from? In the mass-media-controlled disutopia we're talking about, you don't control jack (or bob, I should say). If we were talking about a system where you were meant to have control, you'd be playing your hddvds on linux without having to go through hacks, and you'd be patching and reflashing your tivo until it grew sentience. But that's not the situation. We're talking about tamper-resistant boxes that are not designed to be flexible and hackable. Now you may argue that this isn't the case yet, but we're talking about the feasibility of DRM in the long run. And it's not like the media industry doesn't already realize that they have more power if they take control of the hardware from you.

> "If the content industry somehow could actually keep people out of the hardware you might have a point, but so far they can't."

That's what each generation of their DRM standards is designed to address. They're evolving towards the goal, they're just not there yet.

> "Even with things like HDCP at some point it still has to get decrypteded. Hell you can scrape the image off the VRAM chip as it does screen updates if you have to do it that way."

But they can make it damn uncomfortable and difficult and error prone. If they're unethical, they might even make it dangerous and then disclaim liability for deaths resulting from tampering. And moreover, they can redesign the system such that compromising one piece of content or one device does not compromise the entire system. When that happens the costs will far outweigh the benefits.

> "1. Joe1337 figures out how to connect to the bus in the TV/DVD/BDPlayer/Whatever and grab the decrypted data. He can do this because he has losts of time knowledge and nobody can tell what he is doing to his TV in his basement. Joe1337 makes it work and posts anonymously to some usenet group."

In this day and age, anonymity is becoming a luxury many of us don't have. The TV is a passive broadcast receiver right now, but the trend is towards interactive phone-home devices. And some legal maneuvering could trace Joe1337 if he's not careful.

> "4. A few hundred mortals see John51|\/|1337's better howto that he posted to N00b's message board. They build the things and then begain sticking their ripps on pirate bay."

That assumes A) that the hack that worked for Joe1337 will work for everyone else, which is probably valid in most cases; and B) that a number of mortals are willing to go through a process that could still be somewhat difficult and dangerous despite John|V|1337's guide.

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

Well, I was speaking in the context of first-world western countries where we're surrounded by culture and have high standards (Err.. Fox and the others notwithstanding). The economic realities of countries where it is common for camrips to be shown in actual theaters are obviously different, but I think that's a matter of degree and not principle. I still believe that there exists, for the real version, a non-zero price difference above that of the pirated version, that will cause most people to prefer the legitimate one.

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

> "If they decide to do DRM from end to end it could be a problem, but that's years down the line."

What do you think HDCP is? The television and the source are communicating over the line using encryption. The issue is the ability to extract keys from tamper-resistant hardware. Someone a few posts above you claimed that HDCP is cracked, I don't know if it is or not but another technology will take its place regardless.

> "Everybody just bought brand new HDTVs (at no small cost), do you think all those people are going to be willing to run out and buy another new TV?"

What do you think people have been complaining about HDCP for, besides its DRM?

> "but how long before there are HD out and in cards to allow new computers to get HD cable signals?"

Those cards will be required by the licensing authority, if not eventually by the government, to lock down capture to authorized platforms only.

Re:Said before

[Workaphobia]

> "So in your analogy, Alice is the movie studio, Bob is your television, and Jack is a guy who not only sits there, reading the message as Bob does, but also can hook Bob up to any device he likes to try and figure out the key Bob is using to crack the encryption."

Jack's ability to dissect Bob is limited by Bob's allowable features and defenses against tampering. If breaking Bob's defenses is sufficiently expensive, and if the damage done by compromising Bob's key can be mitigated to not destroy the whole system, then I'd say that's a pretty good system (technically, not ethically).

> "In the end, what the media execs are doing is handing out millions upon millions of devices, each of which contains all the information needed to decrypt every single "secret message" that they're selling. A sufficiently technical and motivated person will find a way to extract the key. It only needs to happen once, and then all those millions of dollars spent developing the "bulletproof" DRM is for naught."

That was the case for CSS. CSS contained key revocation but it was never used because it would brick millions of units. AACS uses broadcast encryption, so individual player keys can be revoked, but it still leaves thousands of discs compromised in the process. It is reasonable to imagine that in the future they'd refine the system to drastically reduce the amount of content at risk from a single breach. Players that phone home will assist in this effort, as at least the players if not the discs can be reprogrammed.

> "You hand the ciphertext, the algorithm, and the keys to the same individual"

Ciphertext, check. Algorithm, that is slightly obfuscated and will take a little time. Keys, totally dependent on hardware and implementation, and may not work for all content.

Re:Said before

[Drantin]

I'd argue that the company didn't know what the 'D' in DRM stands for if they tried to go that route...

Re:Said before

[Bert64]

"Correction: It exists because people are cheap, and will pay exactly zero if they can get away with it. I like your post, it's full of missteps I see often in slashdot posts. For instance:"

Yes, people will pay zero if they can get away with it - Welcome to capitalism.

"The expense ISN'T in the distribution. It's in the initial production but recouped at distribution time."

And there you have a flawed business model, that simply cannot exist in an open market.

"So only physical things have value? Anything that can be copied easily has a value of zero? Please, go tell all the artists and production companies out there that their work is worthless, please."

Yes, welcome to capitalism.
Artists have existed for thousands of years, long before it was even possible to make recordings of music or live performances, and they got along just fine. They actually had to work for their money, rather than producing one work and reaping benefit from it endlessly. Very few people got into it for the money, they got into it because they enjoyed making music, or acting. And many of their works are still being enjoyed today, and reproduced freely... Just look at shakespeare.
The artificial ability to perform once, and make millions of dollars selling copies of that performance attracts lazy and greedy individuals who have little or no talent, and no real passion for anything other than the acquisition of money. Stop letting such people have an easy ride, and support the real artists who want to perform and have you enjoy their performance.

As for cinemas being a bad environment, there you have an opportunity, go make a better cinema.

American idol is different, television works differently, and you can make recordings from your television to watch later anyway. Television provides entertainment, and intersperses this with advertisements that pay for the TV company to acquire the content. If the content were cheaper, you could have more movies and less ads. TV also provides useful services like news.
Infact, many movies make all their money from being sold to various TV stations, they dont get sold on DVD nor shown in a cinema.

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack.

Ok, so you want to send a movie to my TV, that only my TV can view, and I can't. That should be doable. But what's the point? Normally, movies are distributed to earn money, but my TV has no money, and I'm not going to pay for something I'm not allowed to view.

Re:Said before

[delt0r]

At the rate technology is progressing, somebody with a HD projector, a HD camcorder and a few extra lenses and filters will be able to do an analog capture that easily satisfies the average guy with a 50" LCD display. This would not be required. Now the frequencys are pretty high, but not out of the range of modern hobby electronics. I can use my own A/D converters on the raw signal. Somewhere in *any* complient HD system there will be the raw signal. Sometimes the raw digital signal --game over. But even if its analog I can get very fast 8-16 bit flash A/D converters. I can make up some sigma delta coverters, I can run the thing many times to fill errors etc. Getting something thats close will be easy. And then game over.

But i think people are missing why its game over. Because I went digital to analog to digital. I only need to do this *once* I get no futher quality reduction when I copy it. Now i can make copies of copies..... The lost from one analog step is not much. For most people thay wouldn't be able to tell the difference (aka not a handy cam rip here). Note that the grenral qualtiy of 700MB moive is totaly below VHS is some cases and yet they are by far the most common bit torrent size. 4.3 gig rips are ok most of the time... But this is DVD quality. Getting that from a bluRay would be easy.

Re:Said before

[Abcd1234]

A film (or CD, or book, or whatever), costs something to create, costs something to manufacture, costs something to promote, and costs something to ship. Due to technology, the highlighted items are, or can be, very close to zero (cents, or fractions of cents). The other costs still exist.

And, ignoring books for the moment, as they are a genuinely different animal, the cost of marketing and production for movies is recouped during the theatre run, and for CDs, during the concert tours (merchandising, merchandising!). Thus, there's no reason to continue to overprice these products, other than to increase profits, in which case you can expect some consumers will opt for piracy, given the odds of being caught are so low, while the cost savings is high.

Re:Said before

[Anonymous Coward]

At the rate technology is progressing, somebody with a HD projector, a HD camcorder and a few extra lenses and filters will be able to do an analog capture that easily satisfies the average guy with a 50" LCD display.

That's why we need HD projectors to emit a humanly-undetectable "watermark" that the HD camcorder will pick up on and shut itself off.

Be sure to mention me in the patent application-- that's "Coward" with one "w".

Whats more likely

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, what is more likely: The DRM boogeyman has struck again, or computerworld is trolling slashdot with rediculous reasoning to drum up hits and ad revenue?

Seriously, there's a lot of real reasons to hate DRM, but it's not to blame for everything wrong in the world. DRM does not kill babies. DRM was not responsible for the holocaust, and DRM was not the second gunman on the grassy knoll.

Re:Whats more likely

[SEMW]

computerworld is trolling slashdot with rediculous reasoning to drum up hits and ad revenue [...] DRM does not kill babies. DRM was not responsible for the holocaust Personally, I thought the bit about the Holocaust and the baby-killing was the best part of TFA.

Re:Whats more likely

[timmarhy]

no, but DRM is the reason my $7000 has a broken hdmi port - firmware error because of an errornous signal sent by a digital TV channel and hdcp shit itself and disabled my port. so i've got 7000 reasons to be pissed off over having to wait 2 months for a new board to be sent from japan to fix it.

JVC hdtv, name and shame.

Re:Whats more likely

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to your tv sucks, but I think blaming it on DRM is a bit dumb. HDCP cannot "shit itself and disable an hdmi port", at least not permanently. That's not how HDCP works if it is correctly implemented. The HDCP should reset itself when something is plugged into the HDMI port; if it doesnt, then there is a either a hardware problem, or a problem with how the HDCP was implemented. Both would be JVC's fault.

On a separate note, if you paid $7000 for an JVC tv (in US, Canadian or Austrailian dolars, anyway) then you probably spent way, way too much.

Re:Whats more likely

[beyondkaoru]

if it is correctly implemented some protocols are easy to implement, some aren't. drm is likely to be by far the most complicated component in the raw video transfer. it's too bad hdmi couldn't just be, you know, a data stream plus little headers describing aspect ratio or whatever. you'd think people wouldn't have too much difficulty making a secure channel though these days... but they do.

Re:Whats more likely

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if a signal is sent that the TV or other device interprets as a signal to permanently revoke (brick) the device's HDCP capability. The same thing could happen if a corrupted HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc is played, assuming revocation lists aren't checksummed and signed.

Re:Whats more likely

[Anonymous Coward]

This is incorrect. The HDCP spec DOES NOT include the capability to permanently disable a device, period.

It is possible that content providers can blacklist/revoke the encryption key for a HD-DVD or Bluray player, but this would only brick the disc player, not a TV.

In short, no signal - either junk or deliberate - can permanently disable the hdmi port on a tv unless there is something wrong/faulty with the tv design itself.

Re:Whats more likely

[dangitman]

no, but DRM is the reason my $7000 has a broken hdmi port

Your money has an HDMI port? Which currency is this, Sealand's?

Re:Whats more likely

[313373_bot]

Taking together the parent and the great-grandparent post (which I assume are by the the same author), he answers himself why DRM is a bad idea: even if there weren't nothing wrong morally (restriction of legitimate fair use) or technically (no capability to permanently disable a device) with it, yet DRM *may* be poorly implemented. It becomes one more point of failure in every design that includes it, thus an unfair burden on a consumer who has to pay more for a more restrictive and failure-prone product.

Re:Whats more likely

[revengebomber]

DRM was not responsible for the holocaust Digital Race Management?

Re:Whats more likely

[Anonymous Coward]

>The HDCP spec DOES NOT include the capability to permanently disable a device, period.

Yes, but Vista will only use HDCP hardware with "tilt bits". When the tilt bits get set, Vista refuses to use the hardware. Think of it like HDCP+. :D

Re:Whats more likely

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh don't misunderstand, I do think DRM is a stupid idea and should be abolished completely. I was simply pointing out the error that the original poster committed by immediately blaming DRM for his broken TV.

In truth I don't see how the HDCP spec could be implemented so poorly as to accidently disable a port, but I certainly wouldnt say it's impossible. However if I spent $7000 on a tv (an absurd amount, btw) and it broke because of *anything* incorrectly implemented - drm or otherwise - I would place my blame squarely with the manufacturer of the product.

Why should this be opposed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft clamping down on virtualization and DRM limiting Vista's usefulness... why are these conditions we want to remedy?

More market share for everyone else. Everyone wins. I mean, except Microsoft.

Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would the file have to be so large? There's no need to exchange the entire VM file... just swap the key file which is produced after authentication. To explain, if two VMs are set up as identical (e.g. same HDD size, same virtual processor, same virtual RAM, same video card, etc.) they will produce the same hardware "hash". Once an authentic software ID has been used to unlock the first file, a file will be written to disk which contains an encrypted signature which authenticates the software and thus "unlocks" it. That same key, copied elsewhere to an otherwise identical environment, will also authenticate the other environment. Put another way, one key will unlock them both.

I'm sure there's a legal use for this. I just can't think of one...

Re:Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[Brian Gordon]

Well you'd still have to distribute the actual file that's encrypted, but you're absolutely right in that you don't have to send around gigantic files. And isn't an 80,000 bit license key a little overkill? :) Authenticating based on the hardware is a stupid idea anyway, the only way to somewhat reliably control access is to keep all files on the server and stream them only to a trusted program that authenticates with a user account/pass tied to what songs they own.

Re:Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[Keeper]

Virtualization software isn't an emulator. Software running in a VM can "observe" the processor changing between different machines (which is one of the reasons why VM save states can't be "shared" between Intel and AMD processors, for example...).

Re:Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[myxiplx]

huh? That's news to me. You can download vmware appliances from their site and run them on any machine with vmware player. VMware includes a virtual cpu, the host cpu is irrelevant.

I don't know whether it's technically an emulator or not, but it's close enough for me.

Re:Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not always the case, compile a Linux kernel an Intel Core 2 Duo (include a feature the AMD does not such as SSE3) and then try and run it on an AMD. It will fail.

Re:Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad example. I happen to be sitting on a machine with an AMD CPU, which supports SSE3.

VMs like VMWare do expose (much of) the CPU to the VM though. Every other piece of hardware is emulated, but the code runs on the actual CPU. So a VM might be able to detect that you're running on a different machine, but likely won't be able to distinguish that from changing the physical CPU.

You can easily move VMs around to machines with different CPUs (I have a couple of Linux images that originated on a Core 2 Macbook, and have also been run on several AMD machines). You can't reliably move saved states between machines with different CPUs, because the new CPU may have different capabilities than the old one, so any programs (OS included) that are using those CPU capabilities may crash. They may not. But who in their right mind is going to try distributing a saved state, when they could just shut down the VM first?

Besides, changing only the CPU (by moving the VM) isn't enough to trip most copy protection systems that tie to the hardware, WGA included.

Re:Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that running Vista on a VM enables "debugging" in a way Microsoft does not really like. Under Vista debuggers are not allowed to run simultaneously with applications that deal with protected content.

If Vista runs on a VM, the debugger can run on the host OS, completely under the radar for Vista, looking at everthing it wants (AACS keys anyone :))

Re:Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[mevets]

shhhh. Its better if they think it isn't feasable.

Re:Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[darkjedi521]

What the parent was refering to where virtual machines that had been suspended using VMware. Those machines are host CPU dependent. Any VM can be booted on either platform, but once its running, its state is tied to the host CPU's capabilities.

Re:Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

[Man Eating Duck]

VMware includes a virtual cpu, the host cpu is irrelevant.

I just wondered: How does it work that you can install a 64 bit OS on a VM, but only if the physical processor is 64 bit? This works even if the host OS is 32 bit, as long as you have the right hardware (I've tried).

As far as I know VMWare isn't capable of emulating a 64 bit CPU if you have a 32 bit one in your computer, doesn't that disagree with your scenario?

No way

[Strange Ranger]

Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy?

No way. I told my mom and my aunt not to trade those VMs and they listen to me.

I don't want to see them in jail.

Yeah? And??

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck should it be OUR problem?

Re:Yeah? And??

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people continue to run this crap. Nobody forced them, most told them "oh god no, not vista!". While Bill Gates and his wife fight disease and malady of the helpless afar, on the homefront; well, you know... business is business.

Man just the blurb drives me nuts

[aztektum]

Want DRM free computing???

www.ubuntu.com

Re:Man just the blurb drives me nuts

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is great for lots of things, but since it doesnt have any DRM the odds that I'll be able to play my bluray movies through linux anytime soon are slim.

On the other hand my Sony laptop with vista plays bluray movies just fine. And contrary to what I hear on slashdot, the DRM hasnt tried to burn down my house or kill my first born (yet).

Re:Man just the blurb drives me nuts

[Workaphobia]

> "the DRM hasnt tried to burn down my house or kill my first born (yet)."

Very well. But just in case that changes, remember that you can temporarily stun it by uttering 09 f9.

(Note: I didn't include the full number above because I felt it would not have helped the rhythm of the sentence at all, and that the joke itself of inserting it everywhere was by now overdone. But since I care whether people question my geekdom ("I care! I care plenty! I just don't know how to make them stop!"), here it is for google cache and the others.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Is that what you wanted? Is that what I had to spend 5x the content of my post explaining?)

Re:Man just the blurb drives me nuts

[aztektum]

You completely missed the point of my comment. The article is all about the *potential* of PITA work arounds to escape DRM. Why put up with that crap?

Re:Man just the blurb drives me nuts

[Simon80]

slim? my understanding is that the DRM is already cracked badly enough that it would be technically possible to transparently decode the DVDs on Linux, it's just that nobody has bothered to make it that simple yet. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormat s/BluRayAndHDDVD

Re:Man just the blurb drives me nuts

[zcat_NZ]

But not as slim as you might think.. the first decryption key was posted before most people had even heard of blueray, and only revoked months later. The new key was made public afaik before they had even got the next batch of disks out to the stores.

Re:Man just the blurb drives me nuts

[ultranova]

slim? my understanding is that the DRM is already cracked badly enough that it would be technically possible to transparently decode the DVDs on Linux, it's just that nobody has bothered to make it that simple yet.

I can watch DVD's on Linux by writing "xine dvd://" or, if I have the DVD image ripped, by writing "xine dvd:///path/to/dvd/image.iso". Is that what you meant ?

Re:Man just the blurb drives me nuts

[Antique Geekmeister]

You cannot include DVD playing Xine in a default distribution in the US, due to restrictions on libdvdcss. libdvdcss happened becuse the DVD software vendors absolutely refused to write any usable DVD software for Linux, so it had to be reverse engineered. This causes legal difficulties if you're in an office or university environment and get caught using Linux to play your DVD's.

Sad, but true.

Re:Man just the blurb drives me nuts

[Simon80]

Sorry for overlooking my unclear wording in that sentence, but I did include a link that makes it pretty clear that I'm talking about AACS and not CSS. You can watch regular DVDs just fine using GUI applications that are usable to the average person. What I meant was that I think it's possible to decrypt HD DVD and Blu-ray discs that transparently, but nobody has bothered to write the code, so as it is now, you have to pop open a terminal, decrypt to a file, and then watch the file.

What are they even pirating?

[Foktip]

Thats what i dont get. They talk about it like people are going to copy and spread a Vista VM, thats 10Gigs, and would let people run the VM (use Vista) without paying for Vista.

Then somehow, magically, this has something to do with Music/Movie DRM? Are they talking about cracking the DRM on media files from within the VM (which would give you the normal file-size minus the DRM part)? Or are they talking about distributing the Vista-VM (which would apparently be really huge for unknown reasons)?

Re:What are they even pirating?

[Yaztromo]

Then somehow, magically, this has something to do with Music/Movie DRM? Are they talking about cracking the DRM on media files from within the VM (which would give you the normal file-size minus the DRM part)? Or are they talking about distributing the Vista-VM (which would apparently be really huge for unknown reasons)?

It sounds like there is a lot of confusion, and admittedly, I'm not going to read the article, because it seems to come from there.

Vista apparently requires an authenticated path from the digital media all the way through the audio and video output devices to play a DRM data file. The kernel and system drivers are configured so as to prevent hooks form intercepting the data once it has been decrypted, making it difficult to get around the DRM on a Vista-installed system, short of a brute-force key cracking (all of this is theoretical, of course -- knowing MS the system is probably filled with more holes than swiss cheese, but I'll ignore that for a moment).

In a VM environment, however, the OS doesn't have direct access to the hardware -- th software VM environment emulates all of the hardware including the display and audio hardware. If you run Vista inside a VM on an OS that doesn't restrict digital data capturing (like say Linux or Mac OS X), you can easily capture the data Vista is decoding within th host OS layer.

I'll give you an example. On my MacBook I'm running VMware Fusion beta 4.1, with a 64-bit Windows Vista Business Edition virtual machine (an an Ubuntu, Debian, and Solaris VMs -- I'm a bit of a VM junkie). Under Vista, I can play Microsoft DRM'ed audio files without an problems -- they go through MS's protected media player and the protected Vista kernel, through the properly signed audio driver, to VMware's virtualized audio device (I believe it emulates one of the Sound Blaster series cards), which simply outputs the audio through Mac OS X's audio subsystem.

OS X's audio subsystem can be easily hijacked using third-party tools, which simply grab the digital audio stream from the specified application, optionally cruns it through a user-specified codec, and writes it to disk. Presto -- I can take MS DRM'd audio files and strip them of their DRM quickly and painlessly, in full digital quality.

The same can conceptually be done for video, although with certain added complexity (as I'd need to capture just a region of the display, and not the entire display itself. I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time, along with the audio that accompanies it -- but that's something easily solved by either storing everything temporarily in uncompressed form (if the HDD can keep up), or by waiting a few years for faster/more parallelized hardware which can do these task simultaneously).

Of course, if MS had any backbone they'd stand up for their end-users and say no to the media conglomerates, and remove DRM limitations from their products, but the likelihood of that happening appears to be virtually zilch. But that's no skin off my nose, and just gives Linux yet another way to gain a foothold into the enterprise.

Yaz.

Re:What are they even pirating?

[ultranova]

The same can conceptually be done for video, although with certain added complexity (as I'd need to capture just a region of the display, and not the entire display itself.

You could simply capture only the portion of the screen which is "protected" from capture by the guest OS. That's where the interesting stuff is going to be.

I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time, along with the audio that accompanies it -- but that's something easily solved by either storing everything temporarily in uncompressed form (if the HDD can keep up), or by waiting a few years for faster/more parallelized hardware which can do these task simultaneously).

Why would you need to do this in real time ? Just pipe the video stream to the encoding process using blocking IO. After all, the real-time clock the guest OS sees is just as virtual as every other device in the emulated environment.

Re:What are they even pirating?

[swilver]

That 10 GB also contains a movie that works in said Vista environment. So someone buys a movie legally, copies it to Vista and is allowed to play it. That person than zips up the entire VM (including the movie) and makes a torrent out of it.

End result, everyone can run the VM and watch the movie, then discard the VM again.

I guess that's what they fear. What they really should be worried about though is that they've put themselves in a position they can never hope to win by using DRM.

Re:What are they even pirating?

[pla]

The same can conceptually be done for video, although with certain added complexity (as I'd need to capture just a region of the display, and not the entire display itself. I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time

With a VM, you'd probably have the easiest time using virtual screen captures (no need to look at the real screen, just look at the right spot in the player's decoded memory). In your described case, you don't need to bother with such a mess - You could just use a virtual display driver that either writes the raw data directly to HDD for later recompression, or acts as a buffered frameserver for something like VirtualDub. Both of those require rather fast hardware (HDD in the first case, CPU in the second), so you'd probably lose frames.

A VM does gives you an obvious solution to the performance bottleneck... Suspend the VM after every frame (or whenever a rather large buffer fills would probably work better) and wait for the HDD or compressor to catch up. You may also need to deal with forcing clock slew or tricking the player into never skipping frames to keep up, but once you can debug a process (which DRM basically cannot ever tolerate) without it knowing, any amount of "gotchas" just lead to a straightforward sequence of behind-the-scenes corrections to the running player.

Re:What are they even pirating?

[mpe]

I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time, along with the audio that accompanies it -- but that's something easily solved by either storing everything temporarily in uncompressed form (if the HDD can keep up), or by waiting a few years for faster/more parallelized hardware which can do these task simultaneously).

Another alternative would be to have a different piece of hardware doing the capturing and encoding. Linked by 1G ethernet...

Re:What are they even pirating?

[Man Eating Duck]

I can take MS DRM'd audio files and strip them of their DRM quickly and painlessly, in full digital quality.

A little nitpicking:
It's probably originally a compressed, lossy format, and you capture the decompressed signal. If you recompress to any lossy format, you'll degrade the quality significantly. Lossy compression removes information, and applying it twice will give poor results. You could go with lossless formats like Monkey's Audio, but that would not be as good as it increases the file size for the same quality.

Then again, people DO watch cam rips, maybe it's not that important to most.

Ideally you'd want to strip off just the encryption, leaving the original data intact as wma or whatever. This could be very difficult with the advent of TPM chips and friends, I must admit that I'm not too knowledgeable in that field. It would be interesting if someone who knows more would care to comment?

Re:What are they even pirating?

[Yaztromo]

Ideally you'd want to strip off just the encryption, leaving the original data intact as wma or whatever

Speaking personally with my own tiny nit-pick, ideally you don't only want to strip off just the encryption, but to store the data in a standard format that is more portable than a Windows-specific format.

Personally, if I'm re-encoding lossy data, I prefer to encode it in a lossless format, so as to preserve the existing loss (as opposed to making it worse).

Yaz.

Re:What are they even pirating?

[Yaztromo]

With a VM, you'd probably have the easiest time using virtual screen captures (no need to look at the real screen, just look at the right spot in the player's decoded memory). In your described case, you don't need to bother with such a mess - You could just use a virtual display driver that either writes the raw data directly to HDD for later recompression, or acts as a buffered frameserver for something like VirtualDub. Both of those require rather fast hardware (HDD in the first case, CPU in the second), so you'd probably lose frames.

Just to clarify my previous post -- I'm working under the assumption that changing the VM itself to facilitate the capture isn't possible, and that it's done through software buffer hijacking at the host OS layer.

With a good OSS VM solution, of course, this assumption goes right out the window, as anyone could modify the VM to implement the producer side of the Producer-Consumer problem, and have producer-level blocking whenever the buffer has been filled with data.

Yaz.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people are sheep, and will take this blatant invasion square up their ASS as they always do. C'mon! Don't be such a naive retard! :(

Not the whole story

[earlymon]

I believe that there's more to Microsoft's dislike of VM than simply DRM, and I think that they're hoping to be shielded by a bit of DRM FUD.

Last year I was in Taiwan running WinXP under VirtualPC - with the appropriate upgrades after Microsoft had bought the product from its creators - and I had zero trouble.

This year, I'm in Taiwan again, but this time I'm running WinXP under Parallels. Shortly after my use of the machine here on the internet, I got this message telling me that my hardware had significantly changed since the original installation and that I needed to re-validate - I don't recall the rest of the message, but it involved Genuine Advantage and suggestions of unusability. So, even though I'm not carrying my original box around with the keycode (would you??), I decided to be brave and tapped on the warning from the tray as instructed. Took me right to an MS page at what appeared to be Microsoft-Taiwan, and it was quite persistent that I should continue to be routed to some Chinese language page. Long story short, I got some embedded wizard launched, got the MS phone number for the USA (Bangalore notwithstanding), called in, got re-validated and woot, woot, woot.

It seems - very strongly to me - that the only thing that Microsoft could have detected was my location in a way that didn't make sense to them, and I think I triggered something that decided I had a pirated copy. I really haven't had any use of my machine or anything change in any other way to cause me to suspect anything else.

So, how long before business travellers - and we fill a lot of 747s, virtually all running Windows - picking up VM for one reason or another start pitching fits when they discover that they can go into a full-screen presentation and be tagged publicly as potential software pirates?

I couldn't understand why MS had a real problem with Vista under VM, but if the cause I posited is in fact true, then the problem Microsoft is worried about goes back to the XP codebase. Say anything about Vista's new codebase, but it's all from the same company..... so, I think DRM is a specious explanation but it allows them to hide behind something where they can try to claim some innocence regarding VM - when in fact the OS may be more seriously broken w.r.t. VM than they're admitting.

Re:Not the whole story

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably very few business men run virtualization. So, non-issue in that context.

Re:Not the whole story

[earlymon]

You may be right. But for many semiconductor dudes (like me), the reasons are many and varied. To name a few:

* use OS X and need Windows
* use Linux/laptop and need Windows
* need or desire to partition an entire OS so that during a presentation, if casually called away from laptop, fewer worries about "innocent" snooping

Business guys adopt tomorrow what the propellerheads did yesterday. Last time I had trouble w/ a net connection for Windows in a hotel in the Bay Area and the drogue started to give me dos-window instructions, I sighed - and got the immediate response: "My apologies. From your reaction you're obviously running VMWare - may I ask if you're on Linux or some other 'nix?"

I think that VM is coming in a big way. ymmv

Re:Not the whole story

[Keeper]

Virtual machines are not emulators, and the non-virtualized "hardware" is not the same across VM software. Windows activation keys off of a number of hardware components, and it shouldn't come as a shock when different VMs running on different pieces of hardware "look" like completely different pieces of hardware to the software running in it.

Re:Not the whole story

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why I don't use windows if I can help it. When I want to work, I want to work, and when I give money for a work machine, I expect it to work, and not tell me that I can work until I give it more money, either in real monies or opportunity costs.

I have had to use windows again lately, and have come to the conclusion that MS has made the work situation worse, not better.

Re:Not the whole story

[earlymon]

OK, sorry for the confusion in my post. I'll clarify.

The VirtualPC WinXP I spoke of was separately purchased and licensed and is still in use on that previous laptop.

The WinXP under Parallels was a completely separate purchase at full retail (US $300 or so afair for the XP alone) - and has been performing very nicely on my MacBook Pro (Intel-based) for a number of months. Nothing on this system has materially changed in these months of being just okey dokey - until I met the trouble mentioned.

I hate retail prices, I hate paying that kind of freight, I hate paying Microsoft - but I hate software piracy a whole lot more, and don't even wade into the gray areas, lest I find myself over my head. So a few hundred clams was a good investment - and certainly was instrumental in my WinXP still running here - or so I believe - as I got okey dokey support (I have had to call MS a number of times for machine rebuilds and so forth, and I'm under the impression that they have some record of me having had to re-install..... (maybe)) - but new install or re-install wasn't involved here. As I said, the other thing I can tie to the transient was going onto the net from Asia.....

I don't do anything but security upgrades to either the host or the VM OS when on travel - when it's your livelihood on the line, an unrecoverable "upgrade" puts too much at stake. So, nothing in this laptop's profile should have been at play.

Re:Not the whole story

[DannyO152]

Maybe Microsoft's problem with virtualization is that Microsoft is behind and so, and I don't where they learned this trick, they are using their licensing to slow down the market until they have things in place.

Re:Not the whole story

[myxiplx]

I thought the whole point of VMware was that it made the virtual machines hardware independant. One of the benefits of it is that if a server dies you can replace it with anything and can still run the original image without having to reinstall drivers, etc...

Re:Not the whole story

[orin]

Not sure why this was modded insightful, but as someone who has travelled and used Virtual Machines under Parallels, VMWare and Virtual PC/Server in Australia, Japan and Russia I know that you don't get a reactivation trigger from changing location. If location changes triggered reactivation, it would happen to the host OS as well as any virtualized OS. You can get a reactivation trigger if you switch VM software. For example, if you take a Virtual PC image and open it in VMWare. Also be careful about switching product editions, if you have a VM you created in a really old version of VMWare workstation that you open in a brand new version of VMWare server, you may trigger reactivation.

Re:Not the whole story

[volsung]

It seems a number of programs, like WinXP Genuine Advantage (talk about newspeak...) and Mathematica, like to use the MAC address of the network interface as part of their computer fingerprinting algorithm. While debugging a networking problem in a guest OS, I removed and re-added the virtual ethernet device in the VM configuration. Parallels generates a new MAC address for every ethernet device you create, so the new device was distinguishable from the old one. XP immediately complained that something had changed, and I would need to reactivate my installation. Thankfully it worked, but now I write down the MAC address of my virtual machines so I don't accidentally do that again.

Re:Not the whole story

[Keeper]

The whole point of VMware is that you can have multiple machines hosted on a single server. If you switch out the hardware, odds are your original image will continue to work without problems -- however, a programmer CAN detect a change in the CPU he wants to.

I hope *IAA keeps wasting thier money on DRM

[symbolset]

These jerks think they define popular culture. They don't.

DRM doesn't work. People steal the stuff before it's encoded with the DRM. The key is always distributed with the content or recoverable.

DRM can't work. Their attempts are hilarious. In order to be perceived by a human it has to be rendered in analog format, at which point capturing and encoding it in an open format is trivial in all cases.

DRM shouldn't work. If they won't sell me the content for the device I want to play it on when I want to play it where I want to play it, I'll convert it and to hell with what they think I should be allowed to do. Fair use.

DRM is a security risk. I will not surrender control of my PC to render your content.

The more they annoy people, the more visibility worthy indie acts get. People will listen to their popmart derivative garbage less.

I am personally opposed to straight pirating the stuff but I have to admit my conviction on the subject is wavering at this point.

Re:I hope *IAA keeps wasting thier money on DRM

[fade-in]

Doesn't it strike you as interesting the way these fat white CEOs address piracy the same way the Bush administration addresses terrorism?

Did I say interesting? I meant scary.

Re:I hope *IAA keeps wasting thier money on DRM

[trimbo]

The more they annoy people, the more visibility worthy indie acts [Harvey Danger] get.

I don't mean to burst your bubble, but Harvey Danger got big while they were signed with Sire records, which is part of Warner-Electra-Atlantic last I checked. It's easy for you to say they're "indie" now, but they can swing that because they had a top 25 hit in 2000 when they released "King James Version" on a major label owned by WEA. And let's be honest here, they're just not that great and weren't even when they were on Sire.

Granted, some indie bands can still make a go of it completely on their own, but Harvey Danger is the norm, rather than the exception. Most bands get signed to major labels, THEN go off and create their own label once they have gotten the exposure. The record companies still control the ability of bands to get airtime. That's just how it continues to be today.

Re:I hope *IAA keeps wasting thier money on DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

oh grow up, your tired ramblings about the evil DRM don't impress anyone. why don't you just BUY music you like? rather than stealing it? I find that my life is way simpler, and I don't have any problems with a DRM, just pathetic sniveling little thieves like you.

Re:I hope *IAA keeps wasting thier money on DRM

[wvmarle]

The more money they waste on DRM, the less money they have to pay out to the people who deserve it: the artists. At least, that's what they claim where all the money goes (you and I know how true that is of course). But notwithstanding: money wasted on DRM (and the piracy-related lawsuits and so) is less money available for pay-out to their artists. And that is IN NO WAY a good thing.

Wouter.

Re:I hope *IAA keeps wasting thier money on DRM

[TheRaven64]

Having the major record labels pay the artists less is an excellent thing. It removes the major incentive for bands to sign with them, and gives indie labels that are embracing modern distribution channels an advantage.

You want irony?

[Mr Jazzizle]

I use "Microsoft Plus! Analog Recorder" to record albums from Yahoo! Unlimited with the cable from line-out to line-in trick, effectively ignoring Microsoft DRM with their own software.

Re:You want irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using two separate computers, this hole should stay open for now.

On the same computer, it's just a matter of time before the output sound is automatically removed from the input sound. This will be sold as "echo-cancellation", or some equally useful term.

(Alternatively, they might just disable the line-in socket all together while DRMed content is playing.)

Hazards of monopoly

[Crashmarik]

Microsoft feels it has covered its baases. It owns the user base and it must move forward locking out any possible competitor. So they chase the chimera of secure distribution. At some point we can only hope linux's usability and market share provides a real challenge.

Re:Hazards of monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft feels it has covered its baases. It owns the user base and it must move forward locking out any possible competitor. What the fuck is a baase?

Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood

[gig]

> So is every future advance in computer security and/or usability going to be held hostage to the gods of Hollywood
> and Digital Restrictions Management?

Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood. There are waiters in Hollywood who have forgotten more about movies than anyone at Microsoft will ever know. Even the accountants use Macs here in California.

Microsoft does not even make a movie player that plays the standard format. Calling Windows Media Player or Zune a movie player is like saying Microsoft Word is a Web browser because it can also display text and images. That is a very unsophisticated view that you can't sell to someone who actually knows how the Web works. Well, in Hollywood, they know how movies work. MPEG-4 was coming for many years, then it was standardized, then it became the format in iTunes+iPod, then the iPod took off. MPEG-4 is also HD DVD and Blu-Ray and AppleTV and iPhone and PSP. MPEG-4 is also the standardization of the QuickTime format which all the content creation tools are built around, even those like Avid that compete with Apple, so it arrived already having mature development tools. One day there was a QuickTime update and all of my tools could now generate MPEG-4 H.264 as if they had always known what it was. Further there is a free open source MPEG-4 streaming server that runs on every Unix and also Windows, it also has no streaming tax. Finally, most of all, MPEG-4 has no "content tax" while Microsoft's Windows Media business model depends on a content tax and everybody in both music and movie industry already knows better than that. All this happened already with sheet music and player pianos 100 years ago. Nobody is going to use an encoder that spits out a file which you can't copy or share without paying a tax to Microsoft, because everybody wants their movie or album to sell 100 million copies (even if it actually has no chance) so when Microsoft says aw it's only a penny per copy, people do the math and say no you are raping me with that, I can buy an MPEG-4 encoder for $20 and use it to make all the copies I want and not owe anybody anything why don't I just do that? And MPEG-4 just happens to already be integrated into all my tools and integrated into the hardware of consumer video playback so there was never any there there with Microsoft and movies. Even if they built a technically sound system or one that had a cost advantage, they would have to overcome the fact that nobody wants to work with the evil typewriter company.

All you are seeing here is another way that Windows sucks. Core computing functionality that customers use and want and even need to stabilize their Windows software on a real operating system is falling victim to Microsoft's lack of focus and hopeless star fucking. Why isn't Windows ready to be a good typewriter today? Because of its magic DRM.

Re:Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Another Microsoft tightening of the grip. The sand still flows.

Re:Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

I live under a rock.

...there is a free open source MPEG-4 streaming server that runs on every Unix and also Windows, it also has no streaming tax.

And it's name is ... ?

Re:Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood

[Gallech]

Well, I'm not a waiter in Hollywood, but I do have a few firing neurons, so...

> MPEG-4 has no "content tax"

Really? How about that licensing fee that all MPEG-4 use requires? The folks who own the MPEG-4 patents fully intend to make you pay for their use. Personally, I'd call that a "content tax", since anyone who sells an encoder or any device that embeds an MPEG-4 decoder (E.G.: a BluRay player) has to pay it.

> there is a free open source MPEG-4 streaming server

Really? I'd love to know what it's called. And does it do live streaming from real-time encodes?

Digital Rights Management is in Windows, in BluRay, and in iTunes because the copyright owners (MPAA/RIAA, but more importantly the mega-studios) won't allow their content on a box that doesn't have it. Microsoft can be blamed for bowing to the pressure from these copyright holders more willingly than they should have. But don't blame Microsoft for DRM itself- that's all the fault of Hollywood and the lawyers that slither there.

Microsoft's decision to reverse releasing their updated virtualization licensing may or may not have anything to do with DRM. Saying that the decision was DRM related is, at least for the moment, pure speculation.

Re:Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood

[fermion]

The windows machines as typewriter is an interesting analogy. Certainly for the majority or the population, it is a best a typewriter, while in reality it has become a way to download pron, either pictures of cats or pictures of naked people, depending on what floats your boat. But for business, mostly it just types memos, or enter sales orders, or the like. A few people use a vertical application like Autocad or some other historical MS only tool.

What I find most interesting about the analogy though, is how much more accessible a typewriter was. I could go to the library and for a few quarters type a paper. Ray Bradbury say he wrote a book on the library typewriter. Now, you can go to the library and use a computer for free, for a limited amount of time, if you find one that is not being used to download cat pictures, but where is the typewriter? If the machine is so useful, why can't we have dedicated computers that can be used for $1 an hour, for the purpose of real research and writing. Where is todays creative person going to get their start. Surely video cameras and the like are more accessible than ever, but are we going to be doomed to a world full of reality shows and cookie cutter books because no one will know how to write?

Re:Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood

[jez9999]

This just sounds wrong. You said you can use computers for free at the library... so computer+word processor = better typewriter. Assuming you also have it attached to a printer. Personally, I find the most annoying part of using public computers to be printing stuff out. There's invariably a per-page fee, and a complex system of topping up your 'account', all because a few utter morons would otherwise abuse the system. Sigh. Screw utter morons.

Re:Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC I believe.

Re:Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

>Really? I'd love to know what it's called. And does it do live streaming from real-time encodes?

Darwin Streaming Server ?

BZZZT!

[superbus1929]

Saying it's because of what the MAFIAA will say is a fucking cop-out. Why would you want anyone to virtualize your $100 - $400 operating system when they can just buy a new one? Especially with their Draconian licensing agreements. They want to pass the buck, plain and simple, and the MPAA/RIAA are more than willing to take that buck and run with it.

"Content provider revolt" is a pitiful excuse that no one with a brain really buys.

What about Vista Business or Vista Ultimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently Vista Business and Vista Ultimate are immune to DRM issue, as their EULA does allow them to be run under VM. I smell a fish here.

Re:What about Vista Business or Vista Ultimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct. There are 4 possible options
1) The products are identical, and MS is just trying to gorge the consumer
2) The upper end products DO NOT contain the same DRM components, or they have been neutered
3) The upper end products don't contain broken drivers so feeble, they dont work with VM
4) Both are broken, but somehow MS figures corporate types less of a risk, or not bound by undisclosed legal considerations.

Vulcan logic concludes the product is either faulty/enfeebled, or the supplier is being evasive and consumer hostile - enough to say 'NO DEAL', and not buying it.

Also bear in mind, todays VM products are primitive, and load up everything. If shared paging was possible (IBM Mainframe VM has) then images could be very small indeed. Until the load module differences and setting differences are enumerated, best to avoid all contact,

Re:What about Vista Business or Vista Ultimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use Business or Ulitmate you are most likely a pirate. No one pays that much for an operating system. I don't think Microsoft wants your money if your going to use a VM.

Why would this matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, the pirates that would trade in VMs would probably have no qualms of pirating a virtualization-capable copy of vista

AH HAH! More hardware

[HockeyPuck]

I was originally floored by the amount of hardware required to run Vista. So now with all the eye candy brought on in Vista, I was wondering...

"What could MSFT do next to require me to once again throw out my computer and buy the latest and greatest hardware in 2008 or 2009?"

Virtualization. MSFT Vista 4.0 or 3.51 or 95/98 or 2009... Would require:

Min of 1GB of RAM.
1TB HD (supplied by FibreChannel disk).
Quad Core CPU
Dual Core GPU.

All I wanted was to be able to surf the web and play Civ. I now require the computational power of an IBM p590.

Re:AH HAH! More hardware

[drsmithy]

Using &&, if yum errored out because your internet is down, you dont reboot your system needlessly.

You were floored because by a ~1Ghz P3, 768M RAM and a $30 video card ? A ~6 year old PC you can get basically for free because companies throw them out ? Specs that are basically the same as those for equivalent OSes ?

Disappointing

[SleepyHappyDoc]

I thought the article might have something to do with virtualizing HDCP to fool Vista-VM into thinking the DVR connected to it was a proper protected video path. Now that would have been interesting.

Come On...

[Kennego]

Ok, I know we bash Microsoft all the time, but...

"that problem can be partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even supplied by Microsoft itself" ???

Come on, that's the most worthless statement I've heard in like a month. What the fuck was the point of that little jab? Microsoft makes compression tools... that can be used to compress something that Microsoft doesn't like! And some compression tools... run on WINDOWS, a Microsoft PRODUCT even! Holy crap they must be so pissed at themselves right now for going along with that whole compression thing. How blind could they have been!?

In other news, people can use their brains to think of shit they don't wanna think about! They don't want to think about it and yet their brains are being used to think of it anyway! That's just so ironic...

Re:Come On...

[Repossessed]

I think it's mostly a matter of being amused at the idea of using Microsoft tools to pirate Microsoft media. Not some kind of attack on Microsoft itself.

you don't have to see them in jail

[r00t]

Why would you? I never visit my mom or aunt.

Re:you don't have to see them in jail

[beyondkaoru]

Why would you? I never visit my mom or aunt. remember where you are. there is a large basement representation here. :)

Re:you don't have to see them in jail

[Anonymous Coward]

What do large basements have to do with slashdot?

:)

Ridiculously annoying, and sometimes impossible

[lullabud]

As a good example, I just set up a Windows XP laptop for one of my sales associates. I spent an ungodly amount of time going thru "Genuine Advantage" this and "Genuine" that, along with some dozen or more reboots. It's ridiculously annoying...

Being a generous IT worker, when an employee's machine goes bad I'll sometimes give them my own machine if they need something fast. Last time I did this, a copy of Vista which I purchased directly from Microsoft's website suddenly became "not genuine". Not wanting to fuss with it, hoping I'd be able to get my machine back and make my copy of Vista genuine again, I ended up passing the time frame (30 days?) allotted for using the OS, then was locked out with a red screen saying "this copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Business is not genuine". This statement was clearly a lie if taken literally, but discussing vocabulary destruction through marketing would be quite a digression.

So, I went back to using my dual-boot linux partition and another spare PC for my day-to-day work.

Fast forward a few weeks...

Last Friday I got my laptop back, put the hard disk back in, and what's this? Vista still said it was not genuine. I tried to re-activate online but it said I couldn't do that because that key had already been activated. (Gee, you think? Maybe when I bought it?) So, taking the only course left, I called Microsoft on the phone and entered a series of numbers about 30 digits long. When the computer couldn't validate my install it forwarded me to some Indian call center, a place I'm familiar with because I've had to do this process more than a few times.

But this time was different... (Don't get your hopes up, it wasn't different in a good way. I was on the phone with a Microsoft offshore call center, remember?) Not only was my personal system down, but apparently their whole call center system was down. They were unable to validate my install and told me I'd need to call back later after they got their system back up and running. Apparently there was no other backup call center online, I simply had to hang up and call back another time when their system was back up.

Back to my trusty dual-boot Linux partition with its `sudo bash -c 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && reboot'`, or my Mac with its `sudo bash -c 'softwareupdate -i -a && reboot'`

Oh, and Jim Allchin can kiss my ass. "It's rock solid and we're ready to ship." Rock solid as in paper weight. What good is a stable OS that won't let you use it?

Re:Ridiculously annoying, and sometimes impossible

[KwKSilver]

What good is a stable OS that won't let you use it?

It should be pretty good for Microsoft's bottom line. If they can force you and eveyone else to rebuy their "O/S" 3 to 6 times over the lifetime of the box/lapbox at $100-400 or more, how can that not help MS's bottom line. That ought to make the stock analysts and the Mini-microsofts of the world happy. Besides, think of Steve Ballmer's starving children! You want them to be warped for life because they don't have two different Mercedes-Benz cars for every day of the month? Don't be so selfish!

Besides if you can't use it, it won't be corrupted, will it?

Re:Ridiculously annoying, and sometimes impossible

[Antique Geekmeister]

I think you misspelled:

sudo -H -c "yum update"

You reboot only if the kernel changes.

Re:Ridiculously annoying, and sometimes impossible

[Ant P.]

Same thing happened to my XP Home install a few years ago. I installed SP2, rebooted, instantly lost access to my legit Windows installation.
I didn't bother fixing it, just booted into whatever distro I had installed at the time (I think it was Slack 9) and got all my important stuff off the windows partition. Then I turned it into swapspace.

Re:Ridiculously annoying, and sometimes impossible

[Emetophobe]

But this time was different... (Don't get your hopes up, it wasn't different in a good way. I was on the phone with a Microsoft offshore call center, remember?) Not only was my personal system down, but apparently their whole call center system was down. They were unable to validate my install and told me I'd need to call back later after they got their system back up and running. Apparently there was no other backup call center online, I simply had to hang up and call back another time when their system was back up.

I had this exact same problem trying to activate a copy of XP over the phone a couple months ago. The automated system never works, I always enter the long series of numbers, it fails and I get forwarded to a live indian tech support. One time I was told to "call back in 30 minutes" because their systems were down at the time.

Re:Ridiculously annoying, and sometimes impossible

[Courageous]

It should be pretty good for Microsoft's bottom line. If they can force you and eveyone else to rebuy their "O/S" 3 to 6 times over the lifetime of the box/lapbox at $100-400 or more, how can that not help MS's bottom line.

That would be utterly disastrous to their bottom line, because they can't "force" consumers to do that, they can only try.

Re:Ridiculously annoying, and sometimes impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian doesn't use yum. You're wrong.

DeGroot?

[azav]

Who is DeGroot? His name appeared in the article without ever mentioning who he was.

Re:DeGroot?

[infiniphonic]

I believe the DeGroots were a group of research scientists who founded the Dharma initiative.

Choose something else

[symbolset]

Ok, you've got many PCs most of which run Windows XP. They've been crashing every Exploit Wednesday since October. Every one has a license that was paid for three times (six times under Software Assurance). You have seventeen core apps. Some of them are paid for several times. Some have a licensing server so that some people can use them when other people aren't, and come with a utility so that priority users can kick off nonpriority users. A couple of them are free. Four of them are nagware that came with your PCs or that you thought were a good idea at the time. One is an in-house app that only runs in a DOS box and accesses dBase files stored on your server. Every month a couple get pwned for no detectable reason.

Even if they don't run Windows you've paid over and over. You have to because they've made it happen what "enforcement" will happen if you don't.

Every software vendor you buy from makes it clear the software you bought is being split into "basic" versions that include most of the features you use, and an "Enterprise" version that includes must have features you can't live without. Both new versions will be annual subscriptions instead of purchases. Naturally, the Premium version you require will cost many times what you already paid and the cost will be annual rather than once each. Of course they're entitled to this conversion of your purchase into a "revenue stream" because they've upgraded their product from an application to a "platform framework" that "optimizes" your "TCO".

You're thinking about investigating this multicore thing that people are talking about, but it seems impossible to reconcile the software licenses with multiple "cores" on one or more CPUs. You want to do server consolidation, but every server app has to be evaluated both by a professional enginner and by a hideously expensive team of lawyers who also want to audit every piece of software you've purchased since 1974. Your CPA wants to know why you licensed the same software 3-6 times for each PC, and why you're buying licenses for software that won't run on the PCs they're purchased for. And what's this entry for "SCO Linux licenses"? You live in dread of being audited by jack-booted thugs, not because you're pirating but because the danger of a paperwork snafu that destroys your budget is nearly certain and the slightest discrepancy is going to get you canned.

I have one question: What the hell are you thinking? Get off the train to crazy town. The free stuff isn't just good, it's better. So much better that you're not going to believe you put up with this crap. If it's truly free you don't have to account for each copy/user/use/year/processor/incidence. It's not free because it's less worthy: it's free because you're not the first person to be disgusted by the experience you're having. Pay for support. Nobody ever got sued for terminating their support contract. Figure it out. The world has changed. The future is open.

Re:Choose something else

[jimicus]

Firstly, let me say that I agree with more or less everything you said.

Though you did miss out the bit that the wording of most commercial software licenses is incredibly hard to follow - I sincerely believe that 90% of them are written by lawyers who are briefed to make sure it's practically impossible to understand them, much less follow them to the letter.

However, there remains just one practical problem: IT works for the business, not the other way around.

When you have a free, real alternative to Sage MMS (which handles multi-user, multi-company, multi-currency accounting and payroll, following the legal/tax requirements of the country or countries of my choice), a free alternative to Photoshop which won't have artists baying for my blood (unfortunately that rules out the Gimp, despite the fact that it's perfectly capable 99% of the time), a free, real alternative to the combination of Exchange and Outlook which integrates with PDAs and does not suck big floppy donkey dick AND a free, real alternative to all the other boring as hell business related software that you or I in IT do not understand, but is nevertheless demanded by various departments within the company, let me know.

I don't debate for one minute that a migration is possible. However, to paint Free software as being a panacea is in my opinion neither wise nor correct.

Re:Choose something else

[owlstead]

Insightful maybe, incredibly off topic as well. Do we want rants like this modded insightful each time they appear. I think not.

xkcd has to be mentioned here..

[zcat_NZ]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/alice_and_bob.png

Re:xkcd has to be mentioned here..

[baboonlogic]

Come on! Why not link to the xkcd page itself? There is an alt text to those comics which will be missed if you directly link to the png.

Windows? Isn't that for flabby old men?

[paulm]

who cares.

Re:REPLY TO THIS COMMENT WITH A TROLL, PLEASE!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ron Paul.

Apt analogy

[Rix]

The police analogy is more apt than I think you realize. Like all victimless crimes, it's nearly impossible to enforce, because there's no one to complain to police.

Re:Apt analogy

[Ravnen]

You can't say copyright violation is a victimless crime, and remain both rational and honest in your argumentation. Reflecting the broader views of the socieities which have ratified it, the Berne Convention (BC) recognises both economic and moral rights of a copyright holder.

The economic rights of a copyright holder have long been recognised throughout the West, but moral rights are less clear. They have been recognised in continental Europe since the late 19th century, with the BC dating from 1886, but have not generally been recognised in Common Law countries (mostly the UK and former colonies). However, insofar as they are protected by the BC, they must still be protected in Common Law countries that are parties to it (including the UK since 1886 and the USA since 1989 -- the USA took more than a century to ratify because of disagreements over moral rights).

If you violate copyright law, you are not only violating the economic right of the owners of the relevant works to compensation for your use of those works, but also their moral right to control public access to their works, and potentially other rights as well. The owners are the victims of infringement, and most certainly do complain to the police when their rights are violated. Needless to say, there is an enormous difference between individual piracy and piracy on an industrial scale, especially for commercial gain, but neither is in any sense victimless.

Re:Apt analogy

[cpt kangarooski]

Reflecting the broader views of the socieities which have ratified it, the Berne Convention (BC) recognises both economic and moral rights of a copyright holder.

I don't think that that's true. I think that society should be prepared to grant rights to authors but only where it is the self-interest of society to do so, and then only to the minimum degree that provides the maximum benefit to the society in question. But I don't recognize that authors or others to whom the authors have transferred them innately have rights which could be recognized, nor do I think that moral rights are publicly beneficial or even real -- everyone who supports them is being hypocritical, IMO. Though it's far from the worst thing about Berne, and not the only reason why the US sensibly rejected it for so long.

I would dance the jig of happiness if the US did the sensible thing and pulled out of TRIPS, Berne, and all the other copyright treaties, and instead implemented whatever system was best for us. And I would be pleased to see other countries do likewise. The only international cooperation that is a good idea vis a vis copyright is for countries to unilaterally have national treatment (since, after all, the nationality of authors has nothing to do with whether or not it will benefit your people to incentivize them to create and publish works), and to work together informally so as to avoid conflicts between their laws (e.g. formalities) which would force authors to choose between copyrights in two different countries, since there would be no possible way to get them in both.

If you violate copyright law, you are not only violating the economic right of the owners of the relevant works to compensation for your use of those works, but also their moral right to control public access to their works, and potentially other rights as well.

That strikes me as somewhat of a tautology; you're saying that when you break the law, you break the law which is bad, so the law should be against that. While I don't like people violating copyright law, I have no qualms whatsoever with legalizing their current piratical behavior so that, for example, noncommercial file sharing amongst natural persons would be perfectly okay. Copyright law is purely and solely utilitarian (when not corrupt) and should generally conform to social norms. Society is speaking and is apparently happy with non-commercial piracy. The law should reflect this. C.f. Prohibition in the US.

Re:Apt analogy

[Ravnen]

If the Berne Convention goes against the views of US society, why did the US government ratify it?

I don't recognize that authors or others to whom the authors have transferred them innately have rights which could be recognized, nor do I think that moral rights are publicly beneficial or even real ...

What do you mean by not real? If it is the view of society that one has moral rights over what one creates, how is this less real than, for example, a similar view that one has a right to own property?

... everyone who supports them is being hypocritical, IMO.

In what way?

I would dance the jig of happiness if the US did the sensible thing and pulled out of TRIPS, Berne, and all the other copyright treaties, and instead implemented whatever system was best for us. And I would be pleased to see other countries do likewise.

If intellectual property is allowed to be transferred from one country to another, it seems quite sensible to me to cooperate in treatment of it. You're of course free to oppose cooperating with other countries, but fortunately this view does not seem to be official US policy, in at least this particular area.

That strikes me as somewhat of a tautology; you're saying that when you break the law, you break the law which is bad, so the law should be against that.

Not at all. I am arguing that it is the view of most societies that authors have economic and sometimes moral (as in my society) rights to their works. Those who violate laws designed to protect these rights are not committing victimless crimes, they are violating what society views as the rights of the authors of the works involved. An individual who does not share the views of the broader society cannot simply ignore those views, at least not when they are expressed through law.

Copyright law is purely and solely utilitarian (when not corrupt) and should generally conform to social norms.

To those who believe in moral rights of authors, the matter of how those rights are protected isn't quite so simple. You've said you're against them, but you don't speak for everyone else.

Society is speaking and is apparently happy with non-commercial piracy. The law should reflect this. C.f. Prohibition in the US.

If society is speaking, I would expect the laws to be changed. However, this is merely a detail, similar to the question of public access to the countryside. Allowing public access does not invalidate the rights of property owners, and expanding the scope in which copying is allowed does not invalidate the rights of authors and/or copyright holders.

Re:Apt analogy

[cpt kangarooski]

If the Berne Convention goes against the views of US society, why did the US government ratify it?

Congress has basically been controlled by special interests with regard to copyright law for, oh, about a century. It's been getting worse in the past 40 years. The USTR isn't particularly helpful either. Traditionally, in the US, copyright law has been quite obscure and outside of the notice of most people. This hasn't meant, however, that people don't have various internalized norms. Traditionally, those norms and the law have pretty much been in agreement. But as the laws have changed, and as technological progress has proceeded, they've been getting increasingly at odds.

What do you mean by not real?

I don't see any way to reconcile the idea of an inherent right of free speech, which is inclusive of the right to repeat the speech of others, and to be associated with it, or to alter it in ways which might be opposed by the originator of that speech, and a right to prevent others from doing so. I think that if there is any such thing as an inherent right, it is far more likely to be the former than the latter. If they're artificial, then as a form of copyright, they're going to need to be utilitarian. But the supposed basis for moral rights is anything but utilitarian, though I suppose that the hypocritical implementation of them arguably is.

a similar view that one has a right to own property?

Actually, property rights beyond your ability to personally defend things have long been known to be utilitarian in nature, and indeed, there are lots of limits on real property ownership that derive from this. But it developed organically, so it was a long time before people actually realized this.

In what way?

Why do the rights expire? Why are they sometimes waivable? Why is it that they don't always apply? They are, in fact, just another kind of economic right, but a particularly bad one, in that there's so little economic value involved and so much public cost.

If intellectual property is allowed to be transferred from one country to another

Perhaps something is changing in the EU, but generally and traditionally, they cannot be. Berne, for example, involves reciprocity: if the US grants a US copyright to an author for a work, the UK has to grant a UK copyright to the author for the work, the French have to grant a French copyright to author, etc. The copyrights are all still territorial: a US copyright has no effect outside of the US, and foreign copyrights have no effect within the US.

Those who violate laws designed to protect these rights are not committing victimless crimes, they are violating what society views as the rights of the authors of the works involved. An individual who does not share the views of the broader society cannot simply ignore those views, at least not when they are expressed through law.

Yes, but you are assuming that the laws always reflect societal views. I argue that this is not always so. Sometimes society is in the wrong -- e.g. laws against racial discrimination were a good idea, despite the widespread support for discrimination. But this is not terribly common, and generally involves matters of great importance. Copyright is quite trivial compared to civil rights matters. It's a public convenience, but not anything more. It isn't appropriate for it to conflict with social norms. People who violate laws which are at odds with social norms are not acting wrongly, and should in fact be aided by changing the laws to make their already legitimate behavior actually lawful. US Prohibition was a great example of this. It's also an instructive example because when you have laws that are not in the natural tendency of people to follow, and which are fairly trivial, lawlessness is common, and this can result in widespread disrespect for many laws, support for organized crime, etc. Had alcohol not been banned in the US, the Mafia would have had less opportunity to grow here, there would'v

Re:Apt analogy

[Workaphobia]

As the other replies to your comment addressed the question of whether or not it's really victimless, I'll just chime in to say that the industry is certainly complaining to anyone who will listen and quite a few people who won't. That's why we have the DMCA after all.

Re:Apt analogy

[Ravnen]

Your post is too long to address entirely through quoting, so I'll address some of the points without quoting.

• The US government is not representative of US society, at least in the matter of authors' rights, and the current laws are likely to gradually change

I'll take your word on this, but are you suggesting that you think the USA will withdraw from the Berne Convention?

Do you consider other laws which are frequently violated, such as rules governing driving, to be against social norms? Alternatively, do you suppose the ones violating these laws support them in principle, but believe there are cases where other priorities override them?

• The question of whether or not moral rights are 'real'

You included some points about utilitarianism, which I don't see as being connected to the question of whether or not moral rights are 'real', but the following is I think the kernel of your argument:

I don't see any way to reconcile the idea of an inherent right of free speech, which is inclusive of the right to repeat the speech of others, and to be associated with it, or to alter it in ways which might be opposed by the originator of that speech, and a right to prevent others from doing so.

This strikes me as rather an extraordinary point of view. Do you view laws protecting individuals from defamation, incitement and so on as being inherently opposed to the right of free speech too? An author's rights apply only to a specific work, not to the underlying ideas. There is absolutely no question of authors' rights preventing open discussion of anything.

Essentially, you seem to be saying that moral rights of authors are not 'real' because you think they conflict with certain other rights which you view as 'real'. This is surely a very common situation, as for example with the conflict between public access rights and private property rights. If you take the extreme view that any fundamental right is absolute, and cannot be overruled in any cases by conflicting rights, your position will rapidly become untenable, and even absurd.

• The suggestion of hypocrisy

Why do the rights expire? Why are they sometimes waivable? Why is it that they don't always apply? They are, in fact, just another kind of economic right, but a particularly bad one, in that there's so little economic value involved and so much public cost.

Why do an author's rights expire some decades after the author has died? Surely this is obvious: the author is dead. As for the rights being absolute, rarely are any rights absolute, as I've already pointed out. There are all sorts of examples where one right overrides another, and by your standard, one could quite easily argue that supporters of nearly every right are thus hypocrites. Even the right to life is not absolute in the USA, where the state still lawfully kills people.

• International transfer of intellectual property

I pointed out the need for coordination, if intellectual property is to be transferred amongst countries. You replied that copyrights are still national, which as far as I can see is irrelevant. If an author creates a work which is protected under German law, for example, it is certainly proper for it to be given similar protection under French law, if transferred to France. The fact that national law applies in both cases is irrelevant, insofar as that law conforms to the Berne Convention. That is in fact the very reason for harmonisation.

• The issue of natural rights and societal views

As far as I can tell, what you've written amounts to saying, 'I believe the right to own property is natural, but an author's moral rights to his or her works are not.' That's all very well for you, but not everyone agrees with this view. In "Von der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks" (1785), for example, Imannuel Kant argues that authors have innate personal rights over their works, and development of th

Re:Apt analogy

[cpt kangarooski]

I'll take your word on this, but are you suggesting that you think the USA will withdraw from the Berne Convention?

If you've been reading Slashdot for long, you'll have seen the many complaints about term length, and indeed, term length is the most common complaint about copyright law (which I consider a bit dangerous to concentrate on, actually, since there are other important issues too). Currently, the US generally uses life+70. For most works, Berne requires a minimum term length of life+50 for works which fall under it. If we went back to the minimum Berne-compatible term, I don't think the people calling for reform would be appeased.

If the single greatest complaint about US copyright law is going to be addressed, it's going to require that we pull out of Berne. And since other big problems about our current law require pulling out of Berne, e.g. re-implementing formalities, there's really very little chance that any possible reform will see us not pull out.

Do you consider other laws which are frequently violated, such as rules governing driving, to be against social norms? Alternatively, do you suppose the ones violating these laws support them in principle, but believe there are cases where other priorities override them?

No, you're right in that there is a category of laws where people believe in them, but tend to break them anyway (for example, in the city where I live, everyone jaywalks). However, part of the calculus is also the degree of enforcement. A law which is acceptable in principle, and which is widely broken without serious harm, and not seriously enforced, is tolerable. If, say, enforcement became heavy-handed and common, people's attitudes would likely change. This is why things like DRM are making people upset with copyright law; people traditionally have believed in copyright law, or at least been tolerant of it, but haven't much felt it to be applicable to them as they make a mix tape, or something. Make it impossible for them to make a mix tape, and they'll start to get upset. On a similar note, the oppressiveness of complete enforcement is why traffic enforcement by camera is so opposed here.

Do you view laws protecting individuals from defamation, incitement and so on as being inherently opposed to the right of free speech too?

Yes. And like a lot of people, I have a tough time trying to reconcile the practical benefits of those sorts of laws with the very attractive position of absolute free speech, which is, after all, what the Constitution actually says. Don't think this is a fringe view, either. Consider, say, Supreme Court justices like Douglas or Black who also had this view.

An author's rights apply only to a specific work, not to the underlying ideas. There is absolutely no question of authors' rights preventing open discussion of anything.

So? Free speech applies to the literal expression, as well as the underlying idea. I'm well aware of the idea/expression dichotomy, it's just not relevant for this discussion.

Surely this is obvious: the author is dead.

Just because he's dead doesn't mean that his reputation, which is subject to injury, is dead too.

Even the right to life is not absolute in the USA, where the state still lawfully kills people.

And I'm opposed to that too. Lots of people are, and it's being worked on. The US is far from perfect, as is everywhere else, really. Copyright law just happens to be my pet issue.

I pointed out the need for coordination, if intellectual property is to be transferred amongst countries. You replied that copyrights are still national, which as far as I can see is irrelevant.

"Intellectual property" is a nonsensical, dishonest term. But if anything is IP, then it is things like copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc., rather than the underlying works, inventions, business reputations, etc. to which those pertain, or copies, embodiments, goods, etc. in which they may be found. So when you said that IP

Re:Apt analogy

[Ravnen]

Yes. And like a lot of people, I have a tough time trying to reconcile the practical benefits of those sorts of laws with the very attractive position of absolute free speech, which is, after all, what the Constitution actually says. Don't think this is a fringe view, either. Consider, say, Supreme Court justices like Douglas or Black who also had this view.

How can you reasonably argue that it's right for someone to be allowed to destroy your reputation by lying about you? If someone like Rupert Murdoch, for example, decides he doesn't like you, good luck trying to defend your reputation against his resources. How can it be right to allow a demagogue to incite a crowd to murder someone?

This view that absolute free speech is inherently good, and must necessarily trump all (or most) other fundamental rights is simply baffling to me. What possible social benefit is there in allowing defamation and incitement?

So? Free speech applies to the literal expression, as well as the underlying idea.

Why is this necessary? If freedom of speech is about the right to express any opinion or idea openly, and without fear of censorship or legal reprisal, why do you need the right to precisely duplicate someone else's words? If you can understand their argument, surely you're capable of presenting it in your own words, even if they refuse to allow you to present their work.

A law which is acceptable in principle, and which is widely broken without serious harm, and not seriously enforced, is tolerable. If, say, enforcement became heavy-handed and common, people's attitudes would likely change. This is why things like DRM are making people upset with copyright law; people traditionally have believed in copyright law, or at least been tolerant of it, but haven't much felt it to be applicable to them as they make a mix tape, or something.

You may be right about this, but there's also a compelling argument in the opposite direction. A recent study at Keele University in the UK, for example, found that 61% of individuals in the sample had committed a serious criminal offence. This included things like defrauding their insurance companies and stealing stationery from their employers. To take this last example, virtually nobody who steals stationery from their employer would be willing to walk into a post office and steal stationery from it. Why? Because it's harder, they're more likely to get caught and the clear information about the price makes it more obvious that they're stealing.

Recent technological developments have made it far easier to violate laws protecting the rights of authors than it's ever been before, with the result being a substantial rise in the violation of authors' legal rights, both economic and moral. Judging by the example of theft from employers versus theft from shops and post offices, if DRM makes it more difficult to violate laws protecting authors' rights, and more obvious to those who do that they're breaking the law, it might actually have the effect of convincing many of them to obey it. It doesn't have to be perfect either, as long as it's enough of a nuisance to convince the average user that it's easier to obey the law.

Needless to say there are activists who oppose the legal protection of authors' rights, but they generally represent a fringe, and not mainstream thought. Most people who violate laws protecting authors' rights arguably do it because it's easier than obeying them, and they view the harm to the author as small enough not to be particularly burdensome. Only time will tell, but if a convenient DRM scheme leads to low-cost and legal copying of works (e.g. ebooks, music, films), I think you'll find most of the current complaints will evaporate, particularly if such schemes allow blank media taxes, for example, to be repealed.

"Intellectual property" is a nonsensical, dishonest term. But if anything is IP, then it is things like copyri

Re:Apt analogy

[cpt kangarooski]

This view that absolute free speech is inherently good, and must necessarily trump all (or most) other fundamental rights is simply baffling to me. What possible social benefit is there in allowing defamation and incitement?

It's safer than allowing the power of the government to be used against people merely because of their speech. Remember, I did say that while I find the idea of an absolutist right of free speech attractive, I do struggle with it for basically the sorts of reasons you mention.

If freedom of speech is about the right to express any opinion or idea openly, and without fear of censorship or legal reprisal, why do you need the right to precisely duplicate someone else's words?

Why should the precise content of speech have to be justified to anyone? If people are going to have freedom of speech, then that means that they have the freedom to choose what speech they want to engage in. If it's identical, then it's identical. Who cares?

Intellectual property refers to works.

That's clearly not the case. First, if works were property, if they could be property, we wouldn't need copyright law to simulate to some extent what it would be like if they were property. Ordinary personal property laws would suffice. Secondly, a copyright and a work to which a copyright pertains are distinct entities. And when a copyright expires, the work does not. But the work is no longer anyone's property at that point, it is free to the public. Copies, the third kind of distinct entity, are clearly ordinary personal property; a book is no different than a comb or a table, so it can't be that.

If the term 'intellectual property' has any real meaning, then it must refer to the exclusive rights, and not to the subject of those rights, or copies in which those subjects are fixed.

You're using the term in a meaningless and confusing way. This is why I object to it altogether; it doesn't help understanding of these issues in the least, and it strives to confuse laypeople into thinking of whatever vague thing happens to be called 'intellectual property' today as being basically the same as real or personal property, so that they'll use those norms in relation to it, and not others.

Everything that falls under that umbrella is basically sui generis, not just as a group, but even within that group. It is maliciously deceptive to try to wrestle in norms regarding property, and I don't tolerate it.

For example, a literary work is the property of its author, and can quite obviously can be transferred amongst different countries with individual laws concerning the author's rights.

Actually, if it's had some manner of public release, a work can't really be transferred; that would require movement. You can't, say, publish a book in the US and then expect to move the intangible work, which is fixed in every copy, and present in other places too, and just up and move everything to Canada. You can stop publishing in one area and start publishing in another, but you're just expanding where the work is present, not moving it. And whatever remains in the US would remain subject to US law, regardless of what you're doing in Canada. Plus, you'll have difficulty in preventing the work from moving across national borders, so even if you did somehow manage against all odds to transfer the work to a different jurisdiction, it'll just come back again.

This is basically the meaning of the aphorism 'information wants to be free.' It has nothing to do with price, it has to do with movement. Just as you can't put toothpaste back in the tube, information will tend to spread, and not tend to contract. Only if the information -- in this case a whole work -- has not been spread widely, will there be much of a chance of controlling it. But the copyright industry depends on publication. An author only makes money when there are many thousands of copies floating out there, being bought up, lent, resold, etc. You can't do that and then expect to counter it when it be

Re:Apt analogy

[Ravnen]

[Absolute free speech is] safer than allowing the power of the government to be used against people merely because of their speech. Remember, I did say that while I find the idea of an absolutist right of free speech attractive, I do struggle with it for basically the sorts of reasons you mention.

It still doesn't make sense to me. There's no need to group defamation and incitement with the free expression of ideas. They're different things, just like kicking a football and kicking another person are different things. People should naturally be free to kick footballs, but not other people.

Why should the precise content of speech have to be justified to anyone? If people are going to have freedom of speech, then that means that they have the freedom to choose what speech they want to engage in. If it's identical, then it's identical. Who cares?

Why does walking across a plot of land have to be justified to anyone? The answer is because walking across someone else's land without their permission can be said to infringe their right to their land, with various exceptions. Using someone else's creative works without permission can be said to infringe their right to those works, also with various exceptions. The issue is simply whether or not the respective rights are considered by society to exist, and to be protected by law.

[It is] clearly not the case [that intellectual property refers to works].

According to the WIPO, Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.

First, if works were property, if they could be property, we wouldn't need copyright law to simulate to some extent what it would be like if they were property. Ordinary personal property laws would suffice.

To the extent that different forms of property differ in their nature, the rights associated with them differ, and hence so must the laws regulating those rights. Laws regulating the rights associated with land ownership, for example, tend to be different from those relating to ownership of personal belongings.

Secondly, a copyright and a work to which a copyright pertains are distinct entities. And when a copyright expires, the work does not. But the work is no longer anyone's property at that point, it is free to the public. Copies, the third kind of distinct entity, are clearly ordinary personal property; a book is no different than a comb or a table, so it can't be that.

If the term 'intellectual property' has any real meaning, then it must refer to the exclusive rights, and not to the subject of those rights, or copies in which those subjects are fixed.

You seem to be suggesting that 'intellectual property' and 'intellectual property rights' are synonymous. They are in fact different things, just as land and the rights associated with land are different things.

You're using the term in a meaningless and confusing way. This is why I object to it altogether; it doesn't help understanding of these issues in the least, and it strives to confuse laypeople into thinking of whatever vague thing happens to be called 'intellectual property' today as being basically the same as real or personal property, so that they'll use those norms in relation to it, and not others.

Everything that falls under that umbrella is basically sui generis, not just as a group, but even within that group. It is maliciously deceptive to try to wrestle in norms regarding property, and I don't tolerate it.

It certainly isn't meaningless, nor arguably is it confusing. As for the notion that it's deceptive, the view that rights to intellectual property are property rights can be found in law dating from the 18th century, at least in continental

Re:Apt analogy

[cpt kangarooski]

The issue is simply whether or not the respective rights are considered by society to exist, and to be protected by law.

Yes, but if there are other, conflicting rights which are also considered to exist and which are protected, the issue of which has priority, and why, and under what circumstances becomes an issue.

According to the WIPO, Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.

Yes, and WIPO is at the center of this bit of disinformation. In any event, such a meaning doesn't make sense, as I've pointed out before.

To the extent that different forms of property differ in their nature, the rights associated with them differ, and hence so must the laws regulating those rights. Laws regulating the rights associated with land ownership, for example, tend to be different from those relating to ownership of personal belongings.

Certainly. However, there are two problems with this. First, there basically are only two property regimes: real property for land, and personal property for pretty much everything else. If creative works were capable of being property at all, they'd be personal property, as I've said. The trouble is, they're incapable of being property, in large part due to their non-rivalrous nature. Copyrights, OTOH, are an artificial monopoly which is related to a work, but distinct from it, and which is rivalrous and is likely property. And copies are property too, but that goes without saying. You can buy or sell copies, and you can buy or sell copyrights, but you can't buy or sell works. Copyrights are a stand-in for what it would be like if works were property. And certainly, copyrights are just another kind of personal property, not particularly different from a brick.

You seem to be suggesting that 'intellectual property' and 'intellectual property rights' are synonymous. They are in fact different things, just as land and the rights associated with land are different things.

I am saying for a fact that they are synonymous, because there is no other reasonable or logical meaning for them.

However, improvements in DRM technology may do something to mitigate that.

Of course, the problem is that DRM is just self-help and is a mechanism for evading the portions of copyright law which happen to be meant to benefit the public from whom the authority for such laws is drawn anyway. DRM is incapable of only protecting the rights of the copyright holder without infringing on the rights of the public. It doesn't expire at the end of the term, it doesn't permit fair uses and other excepted uses while prohibiting those which may be prohibited, etc. And there's the problem of perfect enforcement, which I have discussed before. Control over DRM is another problem, e.g. if I personally make a DVD and apply CSS to it without working with the DVDCCA (which is likely possible, as there's no law against it, and CSS doesn't seem to be patented or anything), can I authorize DeCSS to be used on my DVD and expressly not authorize commercial DVD players, and have my choice be meaningful, or will people still get in trouble for trafficking in DeCSS? In other words, are some copyright holders more equal than others? Likewise, if I create original sound recordings and tape them onto DAT, will a consumer DAT player allow me, the copyright holder, to make multiple generations of copies, or will it arbitrarily prevent me from doing what I have a legal right to do merely because the recording industry can afford professional DAT decks and I can't?

If courts routinely struggle with whether a particular use is lawful or not, and over questions of licensing, and so forth, then I have no faith whatsoever in a mere machine to handle these same sorts of issues. Nor do I appreciate the idea that a lawless activity should be impossible to engage in from the start, rather than being capable of being broken, with enforcement coming after

Re:Apt analogy

[Ravnen]

[If] there are other, conflicting rights which are also considered to exist and which are protected, the issue of which has priority, and why, and under what circumstances becomes an issue.

There are almost always other, conflicting rights, hence the need for specifics statutes and/or case law in specific cases. It is a red herring to suggest this is in any way unique to the rights associated with intellectual property.

WIPO is at the center of this bit of disinformation [the view that IP refers to creations of the mind]. In any event, such a meaning doesn't make sense, as I've pointed out before.

As I pointed out, the view that intellectual property is a form of property, with associated property rights, is based on centuries of legal tradition in Europe, with the Berne and Paris conventions dating from the 19th century, and national statutes considerably older. It is well understood, and cannot reasonably be called disinformation simply because you disagree with it.

[There] basically are only two property regimes: real property for land, and personal property for pretty much everything else.

This is the fundamental, and perhaps insurmountable, area of disagreement. In European tradition, there are at least three forms of property, including land, personal property and intellectual property. There is no need to try and coerce intellectual property into the category of personal property, any more than there is to try and coerce land into personal property, or vice-versa.

As I see it, your argument runs as such:

(1) Assumption: There are only two forms of property which are qualitatively different, namely land and personal property

(2) Deduction: Given (1), if intellectual property is property, it must be defined as either land or personal property

(3) Observation: Intellectual property is qualitatively different from land

(4) Observation: Intellectual property is qualitatively different from personal property

(5) Deduction: Given (3) and (4), intellectual property is neither land nor personal property

(6) Conclusion: Given (2) and (5), intellectual property is not in fact property

The obvious flaw in this argument is (1), which is an assumption, not a fact. Without this arguably incorrect assumption to hold it together, the entire argument falls apart.

I am saying for a fact that [intellectual property and intellectual property rights] are synonymous, because there is no other reasonable or logical meaning for them.

Yet this opinion is at odds with that of the WIPO, the organisation charged with overseeing international IP treaties, inspired by earlier national laws, which have been in force in many countries for more than a century, and have been signed by virtually every country in the world. Why is your opinion more authoritative than that of the WIPO?

Of course, the problem is that DRM is just self-help and is a mechanism for evading the portions of copyright law which happen to be meant to benefit the public from whom the authority for such laws is drawn anyway.

DRM is simply technology that makes it more difficult to violate an author's rights, as a reaction to technology that has made it easier to do so. Technological improvements often include side effects which make it easier to violate the law, e.g. developments in transport and explosives in the 19th and 20th centuries made it easier to rob banks. These were then countered by other technologies, e.g. the use of stronger materials to construct vaults.

DRM is incapable of only protecting the rights of the copyright holder without infringing on the rights of the public.

Are you suggesting that the transition from analogue to digital storage/transmission of data has created new rights? DRM does not stop me reading a passage from a book and t

Re:Apt analogy

[cpt kangarooski]

There are almost always other, conflicting rights, hence the need for specifics statutes and/or case law in specific cases. It is a red herring to suggest this is in any way unique to the rights associated with intellectual property.

I suggested that it was unique?

As I see it, your argument runs as such:

(1) Assumption: There are only two forms of property which are qualitatively different, namely land and personal property

(2) Deduction: Given (1), if intellectual property is property, it must be defined as either land or personal property

(3) Observation: Intellectual property is qualitatively different from land

(4) Observation: Intellectual property is qualitatively different from personal property

(5) Deduction: Given (3) and (4), intellectual property is neither land nor personal property

(6) Conclusion: Given (2) and (5), intellectual property is not in fact property

Actually, my argument is that there are certain minimum requirements for anything to be property of any sort: 1) it has to be capable of being used by the owner; 2) it has to be capable of being lendable in some fashion to others, and recoverable by the owner, and; 3) it has to be capable of being disposed of by the owner, by destruction, sale, or other means. In 99.44% of cases, a creative work doesn't meet the requirements of 2 or 3. I don't care that a creative work is merely unlike land. I care that it has attributes which preclude exclusive use without the addition of artificial things such as copyrights.

Why is your opinion more authoritative than that of the WIPO?

Honesty. I'm not the one making an appeal to existing emotions and norms about property for something which is sui generis. I'm willing to call a spade a spade. This is why, while I'd certainly like it if copyrights were not considered property for Takings Clause purposes if that would interfere with retroactively reducing the term and scope of the right, I'm fully prepared to acknowledge that it is unlikely and will simply have to be lived with. I don't want to try to redefine things to suit my purposes.

DRM is simply technology that makes it more difficult to violate an author's rights, as a reaction to technology that has made it easier to do so.

Yes, but it doesn't stop there. In practice, it makes it more difficult to do things which do not violate an author's rights, but which may make the author unhappy. An unhappy author who lacks rights to stop a particular bit of conduct can go screw, as far as I'm concerned; I don't like him being able to enforce his will beyond the degree to which the law has already granted.

DRM does not stop me reading a passage from a book and typing in a copy of it, nor creating an analogue copy of audio/video material.

Yet.

In the case of text, an exact duplication is possible, it simply requires more effort, just as it did in the past. With respect to audio/video material, analogue copies are still possible, again, just as they were in the past.

So you're saying that the public should not be able to reap the benefit of improved technology, but that authors should be able to reap the benefit of it for themselves, and also be able to stop its use by others? That's like saying that authors ought to be allowed to use DTP software, but that the ordinary public ought to be required to write longhand just to ward against the danger that they'll engage in piratical typesetting. Or, looking forward, if we invented the replicators from Star Trek, that we should not be allowed to use them to end world hunger because it would put the farmers and the chefs out of business.

New technologies can radically alter what the best copyright balance can be. Just because we put up with crappy technology in the past, and our abilities were limited as a result, doesn't mean that we should tolerate this in the future. I'm reminded of what J. Brandeis wrote in the Olmstead case (which dealt with wiretapping, b

Re:Apt analogy

[Ravnen]

I suggested that it was unique?

Without the implication that it is unusual or unique, there is no reason to mention it. If all or nearly all fundamental rights conflict in certain circumstances with others, then why mention this when attacking a particular right?

Actually, my argument is that there are certain minimum requirements for anything to be property of any sort: 1) it has to be capable of being used by the owner; 2) it has to be capable of being lendable in some fashion to others, and recoverable by the owner, and; 3) it has to be capable of being disposed of by the owner, by destruction, sale, or other means. In 99.44% of cases, a creative work doesn't meet the requirements of 2 or 3. I don't care that a creative work is merely unlike land. I care that it has attributes which preclude exclusive use without the addition of artificial things such as copyrights.

This is only a minor modification, expanding upon the initial assumption. Your three requirements appear to have been derived from examining the attributes of land and personal property.

Honesty. I'm not the one making an appeal to existing emotions and norms about property for something which is sui generis. I'm willing to call a spade a spade. This is why, while I'd certainly like it if copyrights were not considered property for Takings Clause purposes if that would interfere with retroactively reducing the term and scope of the right, I'm fully prepared to acknowledge that it is unlikely and will simply have to be lived with. I don't want to try to redefine things to suit my purposes.

What is the basis of this definition? Why is it more honest than the definition of the WIPO, which coincides with the definition in my English dictionary? Have they all got it wrong, or is your definition out of step with the common understanding?

Your argument is like claiming a schipperke isn't actually a dog because you know dogs have tails, and schipperkes (generally) haven't. Your usage is completely at odds with the norm, and you can't reject standard usage as somehow incorrect simply because you disagree with it.

[DRM] makes it more difficult to do things which do not violate an author's rights, but which may make the author unhappy.

Bank security makes lawful banking activity more difficult and cumbersome that it would otherwise be, but it prevents criminal activity.

DRM does not stop me reading a passage from a book and typing in a copy of it, nor creating an analogue copy of audio/video material.

Yet.

If one can read a book, how do you suggest DRM can ever prevent one manually copying passages from it?

So you're saying that the public should not be able to reap the benefit of improved technology, but that authors should be able to reap the benefit of it for themselves, and also be able to stop its use by others?

No, not at all. You are suggesting punishing (or perhaps in your view refusing to reward) authors who take advantage of technology to enforce their rights. Would you propose punishing banks using the latest technology to secure their vaults, because it makes it more cumbersome for you to legally access assets held in such banks?

New technologies can radically alter what the best copyright balance can be. Just because we put up with crappy technology in the past, and our abilities were limited as a result, doesn't mean that we should tolerate this in the future.

By 'not tolerate', you mean coerce authors into avoiding technology they would otherwise use to protect their works. If their legal rights were being respected, they would not have the need to use DRM. DRM is a result of the failure (or inability) of the state to enforce laws protecting those rights.

[By] means of carefully shaped policy, we can non-coercively influence tho

Re:Apt analogy

[cpt kangarooski]

This is only a minor modification, expanding upon the initial assumption. Your three requirements appear to have been derived from examining the attributes of land and personal property.

Actually, it is an attempt to look at property ontologically. If you have a better suggestion for a test for determining whether or not something is property, feel free to let me know. So far it appears that you're just picking what you do and don't want to be property and saying that they're property because that's what you've picked. I don't see rhyme or reason to it.

If one can read a book, how do you suggest DRM can ever prevent one manually copying passages from it?

I don't know. But you don't know how to get cold fusion to work, but you seem confident that if it's possible, someone will figure it out. There's all manner of technologies yet to be invented which can challenge our present imaginations.

No, not at all. You are suggesting punishing (or perhaps in your view refusing to reward) authors who take advantage of technology to enforce their rights. Would you propose punishing banks using the latest technology to secure their vaults, because it makes it more cumbersome for you to legally access assets held in such banks?

Refusing to reward is correct. As for banks, if I were the customer of such a bank, and I found the bank's procedures to be cumbersome, I might take my business elsewhere. The bank wants my business, since I give it something of value, but I'm only going to do so where what I get is of greater value to me than what I give. The copyright situation is similar: if artists want the government to grant them copyrights, it needs to provide sufficiently good benefit. Otherwise the government can stop giving them copyrights, or give out lesser copyrights instead. Unlike with the bank, which can at least rely on other customers to keep it in business, the government can easily be the only copyright-granting authority in the country. So it has excellent bargaining power, if opts to use it.

By 'not tolerate', you mean coerce authors into avoiding technology they would otherwise use to protect their works.

What is copyright by a way to coerce authors (using only rewards, not punishments, mind you) to creating and publishing works which they otherwise would not have? There's nothing odd about this kind of coercion here.

If their legal rights were being respected, they would not have the need to use DRM. DRM is a result of the failure (or inability) of the state to enforce laws protecting those rights.

I disagree with you. I think that they would use DRM anyway, partially to guard against the mere possibility, even if that possibility were wholly unreasonable, that there might be an infringement; and partially to prevent legal unauthorized uses of their works which do not infringe on the rights of the copyright holder, but which the copyright holder nevertheless dislikes. Indeed, most, if not all DRM systems I'm aware of go well beyond merely protecting the rights of the copyright holder and infringe on the rights of the public as well. If the DRM-user is unwilling to respect my legal rights, why should I be even slightly sympathetic to him?

Also, the state shouldn't be involved with enforcement. Copyright law should be purely civil.

They will use whatever technology they feel it is in their interest to use.

Sure. And I aim only to arrange matters so that it is in their interest to not use DRM. I would never prohibit them from doing so, but I have no qualms about stacking the deck.

Do you actually think authors/artists using DRM now would give it up in exchange for copyright protection which has been shown to be largely impotent with respect to unprotected works?

Yes. Even if we stipulate that copyright is "largely impotent," though I think you underestimate the power of a strongly worded letter, events have proven DRM to be utterly impotent. Consider DeCSS or AACS. If people are

Re:Apt analogy

[Ravnen]

Actually, it is an attempt to look at property ontologically. If you have a better suggestion for a test for determining whether or not something is property, feel free to let me know. So far it appears that you're just picking what you do and don't want to be property and saying that they're property because that's what you've picked. I don't see rhyme or reason to it.

Property is simply that which can be owned, as determined by the public will. In simplified terms, anything created by an individual, or acquired from nature through the efforts of that individual, is by default the property of that individual, and can generally be exchanged with or given to others. The rest of property springs from this simple basis, with of course various qualifications and exceptions which vary from one society to another.

Refusing to reward is correct. As for banks, if I were the customer of such a bank, and I found the bank's procedures to be cumbersome, I might take my business elsewhere.

Refusing to do business with a bank whose procedures you disapprove of, or an artist using DRM, is perfectly reasonable. However, would you favour a policy by which the state refuses to guarantee the property rights of such banks? This is what you are suggesting in the case of artists using DRM.

[Most], if not all DRM systems I'm aware of go well beyond merely protecting the rights of the copyright holder and infringe on the rights of the public as well. If the DRM-user is unwilling to respect my legal rights, why should I be even slightly sympathetic to him?

How do they infringe on your rights? Do you believe you have an inherent right to the thoughts expressed by another? If you dislike the way in which others choose to express their thoughts, you are absolutely free to ignore them. They are not harming you by not sharing the expression of their thoughts with you, or by sharing them only in a way you disapprove of. By default you have no access to these expressions.

[Events] have proven DRM to be utterly impotent. Consider DeCSS or AACS. If people are interested in the content, it is inevitable that they'll break or otherwise circumvent the DRM somehow. Often in ways which the DRM designers didn't anticipate. After all, DRM has to work every time; if the attackers get around it, even only once, that's all they need to start making DRM-free copies.

I agree with this in the specific case of nerds, but disagree with it in the general case. Most people still buy DVDs, for example, because it's easier than copying them. A growing number of people are also buying and downloading music protected with DRM, because it is actually easier for them than illegally downloading music that is not protected by DRM.

That's wrong, actually. Remember, whenever an author writes, he is using his right of free speech to do it. All else being equal, the state cannot tell him that he can express his ideas, but that his free speech right doesn't protect his specific expression of them. And likewise, when his idea is in the public domain, and I reprint them, I use the exact same right he did initially. Copyright is a temporary, limited, restriction on free speech, the burden of which is willingly shouldered by the people who give up their right in order to create the copyright. But they're only going to do so if it benefits them. Otherwise, they're just not going to do it.

Perhaps the view of whether it's 'right' or 'wrong' depends on the perspective. In constitutional legislation I am familiar with here in Europe, across a number of countries, the right to freely express ideas/thoughts/opinions is expressly recognised.

I'm saying that there is no fundamental right to postage, nor a fundamental right to a copyright.

Again, authors' rights are considered fundamental by many in Europe, and are not precisely equivalent to copyright in the common

Re:Apt analogy

[cpt kangarooski]

Property is simply that which can be owned, as determined by the public will. In simplified terms, anything created by an individual, or acquired from nature through the efforts of that individual, is by default the property of that individual, and can generally be exchanged with or given to others. The rest of property springs from this simple basis, with of course various qualifications and exceptions which vary from one society to another.

That sounds rather needlessly complicated to me. I'm reminded of the attempts to square the geocentric model with observational data.

However, would you favour a policy by which the state refuses to guarantee the property rights of such banks? This is what you are suggesting in the case of artists using DRM.

Not at all. Remember, I believe that there is no pre-existing right, and that any such right is stemming from the government to begin with. The government can condition whether or not it will dole out such rights, just as it does with its other spending and concessions. Copyright can be thought of, to a degree, in the nature of a bargain: an artist can get one, if his work meets certain minimum standards, and he undertakes a few minor formalities. If one such formality is to not use, nor authorize his licensees to use, DRM, then that's fine.

Do you believe you have an inherent right to the thoughts expressed by another?

I have no inherent right to access it initially. I cannot force someone to publish. However, if they do publish, whether because they would have anyway, or because I have incentivized them to, then yes, I do have an inherent right to it. I may forgo this right temporarily and to a limited extent, if it suits me to do so, but I'm not obligated to.

If you dislike the way in which others choose to express their thoughts, you are absolutely free to ignore them. They are not harming you by not sharing the expression of their thoughts with you, or by sharing them only in a way you disapprove of.

I agree. But I needn't give them any monopolies over those works. I should not have to bear the cost of bolstering a means of sharing those works in a manner in which I disapprove. Let them bear the whole burden. If they want me to subsidize them, then I they're going to need to make me willing to.

By default you have no access to these expressions.

Yes, if they have been hidden away from everyone other than the author. But this makes them moot as far as a discussion of copyright goes. If your work has never been shared with anyone, if no one else has access, then you don't need a copyright. Nor is it in the public interest to encourage this sort of behavior. Only if your work is being accessed by others is a copyright at all useful. And it is in the public interest to encourage authors to let others engage in that initial access.

Most people still buy DVDs, for example, because it's easier than copying them. A growing number of people are also buying and downloading music protected with DRM, because it is actually easier for them than illegally downloading music that is not protected by DRM.

I agree, but I don't think that DRM has a role in this. People have various internal norms regarding copyright. While casual non-commercial piracy is certainly widely viewed as being pretty acceptable, everyone is agreed that authorizedly-made copies are legitimate to buy. If they're convenient enough and inexpensive enough as compared to alternatives, people will buy them, often with their conception of legitimacy playing a significant, though not always decisive role. OTOH, DRM can often impair convenience, and pirated works are often available at a very low cost these days. So, when people run into some especially obnoxious DRM (e.g. on a computer video game) it's apt to get circumvented a lot.

CSS has been broken for years, and certainly plenty of DVDs get ripped and shared around. But it wasn't lawsuits against the purveyors of various circumvention tools that

Nesting VMs

[Bones3D_mac]

"It would be possible for Vista's DRM to be (relatively) secure if the virtualization software also supported DRM; this potentially opens the way for Microsoft to specify some virtual environments as "acceptable" for use with the Vista home versions."

Most likely, this could be defeated by simply adding an additional layer of virtualization beyond the said "approved" virtual machine hosting the OS in question. This is actually not unlike some theoretical viruses proposed a while back that would install themselves between the bootloader and the primary OS on a computer and then host the OS within their own VM while they execute whatever malicious tasks they're designed for, completely transparent from the hosted OS and the end user.

Re:Nesting VMs

[Antique Geekmeister]

DRM is really one of the core components of Vista. It makes virtualization easier to defeat than you may realize. Go look up Palladium, renamed "Trusted Computing". It's hardware level authentication and software access control, and it's specifically designed to weld host authentication to file access. Those keys are hardware stored, on the motherboard, not software stored. And the encryption chips or CPU based encryption is not directly accessible to emulation, not without paying a genuinely unacceptable performance penalty in use.

Re:Nesting VMs

[Sique]

I thought the point in Virtualization would be that there is NO direct hardware access, instead every system call to the hardware is caught and evaluated in an emulation? So even Palladium had to be virtualized.

So that creates two possible scenarios:

1. No software emulation of Palladium ever gets signed by the Palladium consortium, and thus every check against a Palladium key fails. Thus no stuff (DRM or otherwise) relying on Palladium runs in the VM.
2. There is an emulation of Palladium that gets a valid certificate. Thus you can endlessly copy this emulation, and all virtual machines using this emulation look identical to the DRM. Thus nothing bound to the identity of a Palladium chip will be ever able to tell on which instance of said emulation it is running, making Palladium meaningless.

Re:Nesting VMs

[tepples]

So that creates two possible scenarios:

1. No software emulation of Palladium ever gets signed by the Palladium consortium, and thus every check against a Palladium key fails. Thus no stuff (DRM or otherwise) relying on Palladium runs in the VM. This is the scenario that most imagine.

2. There is an emulation of Palladium that gets a valid certificate. Thus you can endlessly copy this emulation, and all virtual machines using this emulation look identical to the DRM. Thus nothing bound to the identity of a Palladium chip will be ever able to tell on which instance of said emulation it is running, making Palladium meaningless. You forgot 3. An emulation of a Trusted Platform Module generates a valid certificate based on that of the underlying Trusted Platform Module. Every check against a key will be a check against the pair (underlying TPM, emulated TPM).

Re:Nesting VMs

[hab136]

And the encryption chips or CPU based encryption is not directly accessible to emulation, not without paying a genuinely unacceptable performance penalty in use.

I've used Windows on Intel emulated under PPC (the old VirtualPC for Mac). At that point you're translating the entire instruction set. It was acceptable for web browsing and Quicken. QEMU emulates an x86 chip on multiple platforms, and can either translate instructions (for like x86 on PPC or SPARC) or virtualize them (x86 on x86).

Computers these days have a lot of power left over - it wouldn't surprise me to see a DRM video running realtime on an emulated CPU.

Re:Nesting VMs

[Antique Geekmeister]

Virtualizing Palladium is non-trivial. Like most encryption technologies, it's designed to be computationally expensive, which makes emulation awkward for file-based decryptions, and will make doing it in emulation painful indeed. Also, numerous of its technologies are patented: this makes it very difficult indeed to get it built into licensed software form the US, or to import commercial software that supports it.

Second, Palladium is based on phoning back to the mother ship. *Every single Palladium key* is revocable, and replaceable by the registered key owners or their upstream signatories, including Microsoft itself. The upgrade and shift to new keys is designed to be vendor controllable. This makes a single signed key of limited usefulness and limited lifespan.

Re:REPLY TO THIS COMMENT WITH A TROLL, PLEASE!!!

[neomunk]

Ron Paul isn't a troll. Necromancer maybe, or Icke style Reptoid or something, but no troll. Probably a necromancer.

Honestly though, doesn't Michael Chertoff look like a necromancer? Google him and find a picture (the first one on wiki is nice) and picture him holding up a skull commanding the zombie hoards. Makes me giddy like a schoolgirl, but I have issues. ;-)

June 29

[afc_wimbledon]

Is when the iPhone is released, which effectively does just that.

Re:June 29

[RealSurreal]

Wow. Now the trolls are on crack too.

Can not figure why Microsoft forbids VM

[rsbroad]

Virtualization May Break Vista DRM I can not figure out why Microsoft forbids having a Virtual Machine running some versions of Vista, but permits other versions of Vista to indeed be run by a VM. All of the anti-virus companies ( Symantec, Mcaffee, ZoneAlarm ) are working on VM anti-virus. This is because Microsoft has locked them out of modifiying the "kernel" of "Windows Vista 64-bit" . The process will be: turn on machine boot bios boot Super Norton Anti-virus Virtual Machine boot Windows Vista It is not clear to me that using a VM makes the defeat of DRM any easier than the current approach of defeating DRM. DRM hacks are in the news weekly. The hackers do not need a VM for anything. The real organized state (with an army and airforce and everything) has more than enough resources to copy and counterfeit any DRM protected software. If this cost is millions of dollars then that is just spent in the research and development budget. DRM only defeats home users in North America and Europe. The rest of the world would find the concept of paying full price for movies (or software) a silly joke. The obvious use of a Vista VM would be as a sandbox for safe internet browsing. This would be a tremendous benefit to users, from beginners to experts. Why forbid running some versions of Vista in a Virtual Machine and then not explain the reason?

Re:Can not figure why Microsoft forbids VM

[The MESMERIC]

they don't prohibit but just charge much more now - you need a special license to run Windows Vista on a VM.

The truth

[Anonymous Coward]

DRM at this point is nothing more than a complete failure that Microsoft seem determined to sink with. The real issue here is that virtualization changes the entire marketplace and Microsoft do not yet have a strategy to deal with it. If a user can run the same single VM image from a network share or external drive on any computer with suitable software, that user no longer has to pay the windows tax on new machines. That's tough luck for Microsoft, unfortunately they're going to stir up an unholy shit-storm as their business model fails. The Bush administration are largely to blame here for not following through with the DOJ antitrust proceedings.

Its about content path, no VM images

[QX-Mat]

Gah.

Is stupidity abound or something? The comment from the article about copying multi gigabyte images is ludicrous and makes one ask if the guy has ever used a VM let alone knows anything about the basics of DRM.

First things firsts. Virtualization means that the physical hardware and virtual hardware are not linked. That means, in no simpler language, if you want to use a TV, monitor recording device or whatnot to view your VM: you can, and the VM doesn't know. This is a technological threat to DRM implementations inside a VM, because they cant guarentee the path outside the VM.

Why you would copy potentially dangerous VM images from one PC to another when you could simple capture the output, i don't know.

Once upon a time NES ROM carts implemented their own I/O multiplexing - the vast majority still aren't emulated today because it's tedious work. Guest OSes inside VMs will continue to find ways of obfuscating their data (after all the guest inside a VM doesn't even have to be the same architecture as the host!)... its anybody's game once you're outside of the Guest.

MS don't want people to virtualize their software for the same reason DRM is a CEOs best friend: they can charge more for less restrictions.

If you have to pay $100 extra for the Ultimate or Pro versions of Vista to get virtualization, and people want virtualization, it can be seen as a valuable extra. Extras, not to be confused with added value, increase price premiums through added cost to the purchasing party.

However, the meat of the issue is not that people spoke out about DRM in such obvious and clear cut language, touting the anti-competitive stance MS has taken, but bloggers and writers are steering the focus to Linux which is offering a mirad of virtualizations for free. The only sensible stance is to do the same - just like MS did with VirtualPC... MS can't afford to be completely leapfrogged in any area.

The thing the irks me is that people are constantly barking up the wrong tree with regards to industry ties with companies and DRM. The "MAFIAA" (as it's been put) is convincing companies to make DRM provisions, but they can't force the implementation on to end users if companies can't/don't want to/disagree. MS allowing virtualization is nothing more than a technology response to Linux. No one is warming to DRM, DRM is not dying any time soon. This is market forces at work. Granted market forces are slow, and cause no end of problems for us now...

The advantage of digital for piracy

[Skapare]

The advantage of digital for piracy is not that you can get a perfect copy. Perfection is not the goal in piracy. In many cases a camcorder shooting a screen is fine. Instead, the advantage of digital is that the quality is not degraded further as an infinite number of generations are made. Traditional pirates were limited to making 2 to 5 generations of VHS tapes because after that, almost nothing was left of the original movie. But an analog ripped (not cracked) MPEG file can be traded all over the world without any further single bit errors (although some of that will happen at times). The internet scares the content industry because of the speed (the latest release can be in the hands of millions before the big opening). Digital scares them because it enables the multi generational sharing as we already see in P2P. The problem is, they are fixated on encryption, which is at best going to prevent the average Joe from making a perfect copy and sharing with his neighbor across the street. When Joe finally figures out how to make an analog rip or just shoots it off his screen with a camcorder, his neighbor might reject it because it's not perfect, but you can bet the world will eat it up via the internet.

Re:The advantage of digital for piracy

[CTachyon]

But in a world where content is ultimately digital, even the "analog hole" can be acceptable, with good equipment.

For instance, any audio that comes off a CD ultimately derives from 16-bit linear samples recorded at 44.1 kHz. A high-quality analog-to-digital converter can easily record the analog signal coming out of the speaker/headphone wires and convert that back to equivalent bits. (The bits probably won't be identical, because the input sampling is probably not in phase with the digital-to-analog converter in the CD player. But human ears don't hear phase, so it's really the same sound.)

Because you can perfectly recover a digital signal by sampling its analog equivalent using the same sampling parameters, infinite analog-analog copies are possible without further degradation if you resample between each pair of analog copies. (It's the same principle by which all digital circuits are built using only analog components, like transistors.)

What's more, since the second digital copy has no DRM silliness, you can just copy that directly. Only the first person in the chain has to own a high-quality analog-digital converter. Even unbreakable DRM, if it were possible to exist, would ultimately fail.

Which puts us exactly where the piracy scene is today. (Do you honestly think the pirate scene would actually say, "Harry Potter 7 is only available on HD-Ray? Gosh darn it, that DRM system isn't broken yet, so we'll just have to skip that one"?)

Re:The advantage of digital for piracy

[Skapare]

Because you can perfectly recover a digital signal by sampling its analog equivalent using the same sampling parameters, infinite analog-analog copies are possible without further degradation if you resample between each pair of analog copies. (It's the same principle by which all digital circuits are built using only analog components, like transistors.)

I never thought about that before, but you are right. It's not analog you get out of a digital system; it's quantized analog.

Only need the VMs once...

[CharonX]

The reasoning "It's not feasible to copy and distribute media that way because you need to distribute the VMs too" is flawed. If you wanted to re-emulate the entire viewing, then yes, you'd need the VMs etc. But what you want is the media - and since you already have that data sitting inside your VM plus the snapshop (remember that the VM needs to simulate everything) it should be possible to either record the thing with an authentic (read simulated hardware behaves as if it had DRM) VM and then use a modified VM (which is nearly identical in behaviour, when it comes to input from the Guest OS, but lacks the DRM protection) or use an already "misbehaving" VM (which pretends to have DRM protection, but does not) to run the Gues OS in the first place - and then extract the media from the snapshop/running system. More complex? Yes. Impossible to do for us geeks. Hell, no!

Virtualization enables easier migration

[Skapare]

Once such virtualization (assuming it is sealed against any DRM exploits and doesn't provide for mobilization of a VM) is allowed, that creates a situation where Microsoft doesn't have control of the hardware. Then another OS could be easily run side by side (since virtualization can create multiple virtual machines). And people might try some free operating system, discover that it almost meets their needs, and will have an opportunity to gradually migrate over to using that free operating system for all their needs (something they can't do if they just replace Windows with some free operating system directly on a machine running one OS at a time).

But the DRM issue is just as real. The underlying virtualization system, or the operating system underneath it, if there is one, could tap into the decrypted content the Windows DRM-enabled media software thinks it is delivering strictly to hardware. Transfers of pixels to video card frame buffers, and transfers of audio samples to a sound card, can be captured along the way without anything added inside Windows that Windows might have a chance to detect.

What Microsoft fears more than the movie and music industry, though, is just losing control. If the software can be tapped virtually, they know the content producers will eventually move to a pure hardware DRM model where the encrypted content is just copied as is over to special new hardware that does the decryption in sealed tamper resistant chips. In the case of video, the video card won't even be decrypting it, but instead, will just ship it out to an HDCP enabled video monitor that acts as the sealed decryption device.

Of course we know those forms of DRM won't really stop piracy since the analog hole (shoot the screen with a camcorder) is still there, and multiple generations of that one lossy copy will lose no further as it reaches the computers of millions of internet users world wide. And Microsoft may well know that, too. But Microsoft is very fearful that the content industry will still move to that step of doing DRM in hardware. Microsoft fears that step because doing so takes away their market advantage by allowing a free operating system to do the same shuffling of still-encrypted data from storage to DRM-enabled hardware.

Huh?

[afc_wimbledon]

It's trolling to point out that Apple are already doing what was suggested would be bad in MS were to do? The RDF is strong in this one :-/

Re:Huh?

[Goaway]

It's probably because there is no "blithering idiot" moderation option.

So what?

[fastest fascist]

Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy? No, because DRM doesn't hinder piracy in the first place.

Xbox

[tepples]

How long will it be until no one is allowed to run any executable at all that hasn't been signed by Microsoft, incase it's a DRM-breaking program? That happened in 2001 when Microsoft introduced Xbox.

Re:Xbox

[baadger]

Yeah I wonder what we'll do when this happens with desktop PC's...

*Looks at GentooX and XBMC running on his Xbox*

Dont forget Application Virtualization

[nurb432]

SVS and Softgrid can also be used to get around a lot of the DRM and registration nonsence.

a rig that does

[ancientt]

I wonder occassionally why this seems so hard. I could easily set up a MythTV system (see http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html) and use it with any number of cards (http://www.wifi.com.ar/english/hw-pvr.html) as a way to turn output into input. Then I could use my DVD player or CD player or even my main computer as my player. It could be considered an audio hole, but it would be a pretty high quality system, not relying on something like a hand held camcorder or audio recorder. Sure someday it might be hard to buy that equipment, but I doubt it and of course the software could be made harder to get, but probably neither will be impossible in my lifetime and the hardware available now can handle it and I can't see it being unlikely to handle the same types of recording 20 years from now.

Back on topic with Vista and DRM, I personally think the best bet for virtualizing Vista is on a Xen based installation using the hardware based virtualization. I cannot see how Vista could even identify that it was running in virtualization. With that said, something like using LVM snapshotting would allow someone to set up a base installation, which could be reused anywhere the hardware was a close enough match to handle the Xen config. People wouldn't need to redistribute the base install but once, and the customizations would be the diff files (or partitions to mount and reg files to add.) For example, say that I have my Vista install set up the way I want, with the base install, and I want to create an install with a working IIS setup. I set up a snapshot, enable/install/configure then take another snapshot and then run a diff on the two, saving it as 'post IIS vX.x.x'. Now the VM application of IIS is a 'patch' that could be distributed to anybody who already has the base VM.

A shoplifted copy of Vista, a blockbuster card or a store that allows returns of CDs bought with cash would be sufficient for any of these to be done anonymously. That takes it from gray to black, but then if you're going to those lengths you're probably not worried about the morality. I believe the problem of piracy is insurmountable with technology, and the only hope of dealing with it is through instilling ethics. You can't legislate to force people to be ethical but you can legislate to make them afraid to act otherwise and you can legislate to change a society's norms. Why legislate? I suspect it is the only way to change the behavior of large numbers of people.

None of this addresses the question of whether it should be illegal. I'm not up to that debate.

Re:a rig that does

[gartogg]

Why legislate? I suspect it is the only way to change the behavior of large numbers of people.
Morality is a meme which has been largely supplanted in todays culture, because of our shallow education and understanding. Basically, people really think that morality is a completely negative personal trait, so that the only real ethic is "don't get caught," or at least balance the reward and the risk - being a person who doesn't violate a code of ethics isn't valued in itself, so morality is legislated (which is never a good idea, and rarely even is effective.)

A central finding of modern game theory is that a group is frequently better off following certain types of morality. Religion and societal norms once filled this function, but with the advances we have seen, these have largely fallen by the wayside. Currently, we have an environment falling apart and a government that is unresponsive to its citizens, but so few people are willing to do anything but locally maximize their utility that any change is unreasonable. If we want changes in copyright law, or limitations on corporate power, or anything else in the public realm, one of the central concerns should be understanding and teaching while morality is important, even in absence of god, or even a society that values it.

Behavior changes when we need it to, and this is about as important an issue as exists right now. Stealing from musicians or Hollywood is externalizing the costs of entertainment, and leaving the producers with less motivation for making quality entertainment. The personal costs of not having integrity are much higher than the costs of the music and movies that are pirated, but our consumerist society doesn't tend to recognize that fact. An understanding of ethical theory would be a good start towards changing norms without coercive legislation.

Feed the troll

[ancientt]

Most of us deal with the average Joe computer user at some point. Their perspective often surprises me. They don't care about licensing except that they don't want to break the law or just don't want to get caught, depending on the individual. I'm curious how common this troll's opinion is. Do most people see this as a DRM prevents theft, "only someone who wants to steal dislikes DRM?"

What is your average Joe experience? Mine is limited since I (very very) rarely buy music or videos and don't share that common interest with those who do.

I've done this

[fireheadca]

Wanting a VM of Vista, I've installed it on a 15gb vm then changed to the disk to a dynamic
disk, compressed it, then compressed it again to a .sfx to an overall size of just over 3Gb.

Small enough to fit on a dvd-r for a portable vm of vista.

Now I have to extract it onto the host computer but it doesn't extract to over 5Gb.

An 8Gb memory stick would be even better.

Better alternative to virtualization

[MobyDisk]

I use virtual machines regularly, but I use them to compensate for bad software uninstallation process. And that some software requires manual changes at the system-level (IIS or database settings). Hopefully, VMs will be limited to very specialized cases (server software farms? QA testing?) in the future instead of desktop environments.

I always thought a better solution is some sort of option where a process got an set of directories. For example, it think it is writing files to c:\windows and registry entries to wherever -- but they would really go into a local registry and directory tree just for that application. The OS would merge the two at runtime, so I could just delete one directory and the application would be gone. Or I could have the application think that a system-level configuration was set to whatever way it liked.

Re:Better alternative to virtualization

[julesh]

Yes, I've had the same idea in the past. Kind of like a difference disk image without the emulated hardware, just done at an API level. Install software anywhere just by copying its files. Protect conflicting apps from each other by having them in separate filesystems. It's a promising idea...

Alternatives are available

[symbolset]

I'm glad my post got to its intended audience at least a little bit.

When you have a free, real alternative to ...

I'm going to talk about some non-free methods for solving this problem because it's a chicken and egg problem. You think you can't migrate because you have critical apps that run on Windows only. Just by saying this you admit that you're trapped and that's not a good place to be. Being open and free is a desirable goal you should willing to journey toward rather than insist on being teleported to. Once you admit to yourself that the destination is worth the journey the route to migration is pretty visible. Let me show you the way to the promised land:

To start with, let's talk about Citrix and all the other application servers out there. The workers can run GNU/Linux on their desktop and open applications on the server and use whatever software they must have running native on whatever OS it needs to be running on and it can be secured, maintained and accounted for most easily. The end users don't even need to know the application isn't running locally on their machine if you set it up right. The critical windows app objection is dead.

For workers on the go virtual machines are a good choice. You install Windows and whichever apps they need in the VM, and make the VM part of the image for the users who must have it -- but you keep as much as possible native to the Open environment. When the Windows environment fails in the VM at the critical moment, just like it always does on real hardware even for Bill Gates, your road warrior can still give their presentation from the F/OSS solution in their native environment because -- hey -- it's compatible. They'll discover this is like driving on the highway spare and keeping the good tire in the trunk. The road warrior objection is gone.

If you must have exchange and Outlook to synch with your PDAs (and I know what a hassle it can be to get a reluctant Blackberry to synch) keep it and use Outlook Web Access for your desktop mail. It works fine in Firefox on Linux. Remember that already ubiquitous cellular data coverage and powerful handheld platforms means you need to turn your PDA off to get away from your email. In the future it only gets harder to get away from it. Hey, we're almost there.

The idea is that you introduce people to being unchained, and they will like it. When people get used to the rich benefits of the F/OSS environment you can wean them off of other stuff one application at a time. You find free and open solutions that replace your non-free solutions gradually and test them thoroughly -- it's no more painful than the endless version march you're currently on. In the Free world when the package becomes mature the version march tends to end because there's no motivation to keep you coming back for a new version. Eventually the IT department gets away from overcoming the crippled platform and converts to actualizing the end user's potential. Along the way you quit paying people to preserve their revenue stream by crippling your software and start paying for someone to actually help you when you have issues and you still save money. Now we're free and open, and hey, once you're here you won't believe the cornucopia of free and commercial applications that work well and plug right into each other like they're going home to momma.

You see, it is possible to get off the train to crazy town.

Mod Parent Up...

[cyclocommuter]

I believe that was what the article was really about. In effect that Vista Basic Virtual Machine takes up 1.5 Gigs at most of the 10 GB VM. The remaining 8.5 Gigs could take up compressed copies of Video and Audio with or without DRM.

Letter reshuffling

[DrYak]

With digital media, A sends a message to B, which is a piece of hardware. Then, B decodes the message, and shows the result to C.

Yeah, but in that perspective, isn't the whole point of cryptography to make sure that C can't get the content ? Then why at the end let him have it anyway ?

You can put which ever letter you want and change denomination as you like. The problem remains the same with DRM : it is supposed to deliver content to SOMEONE and at the same time HIDE THE KEYS from anyone, INCLUDING THE ONE SEEING THE MEDIA. No matter what, the fundamental precepts of cryptography (A and B trust each other ; No one else can get the content) are violated.

Re:Letter reshuffling

[ccp]

Yeah, but in that perspective, isn't the whole point of cryptography to make sure that C can't get the content ? Then why at the end let him have it anyway ?

Well, in fact C never gets the content. C gets to see or hear the content, which is a wholly different beast.

My point is that we're just a few congress-critter's bribes away from having DRM-only hardware legislated upon us.
If we get lulled into complacency, secure in our belief that DRM'd hardware can't work, and don't fight politically with all we got, some day we'll awake to the fact that it can be made to work, and is mandated by law.

And yes, some of the hard core will keep trading their analog versions somehow, but the vast mass of the public will just give up.

Cheers,
CC

Re:Letter reshuffling

[Eustace Tilley]

Well, in fact C never gets the content. C gets to see or hear the content, which is a wholly different beast. Please, how does being able to see and hear the content differ from getting the content?

Re:Letter reshuffling

[arminw]

..... secure in our belief that DRM'd hardware can't work......

DRM can never work, whether based in hardware of software or any other "ware". DRM is security by obscurity, that is secrets. I send you an encrypted message which I want you to read. So I send you the key by which you are able to read it. Now while you are reading it I try to make sure nobody is looking over your shoulder and also reading it and even taking a picture of it. Now the message is readable by anybody, anywhere.

In a few years DRM will be dead. EMI is already learning that the new DRM free material they have made available on iTunes is selling rather well. Soon the other content providers will figure it out also. When the VCR was invented the movie moguls tried to get declared illegal. That failed and they all have since made mountains of money from selling and renting recorded movies. The Internet is just another distribution system. They'll figure that out sometime and make another mountain of cash.

Re:Letter reshuffling

[ccp]

Please, how does being able to see and hear the content differ from getting the content?

Imagine that I have a book you want to read. I could lend it to you, but, being the greedy bastard that I am, I send my cousin Vito with the book. Vito will let you read it, at one cent per page.
I am A, you're C, and Vito is B, the DRM-enabled harware.

Right, you could hit Vito in the head and steal the book, but that move would be very bad for your future health.
And guess what? The vast, vast majority of people won't do it. They'll even refuse to look at the book when you try to show them. And someone will rat your whereabouts to Vito's family. It's human nature. Fear works this way.
So, why bother? At one cent per page, the damn read is three bucks. Better, and safer, just to pay.

And we can even patent the scheme. Let's find a fancy name, like... PROTECTION RACKET! I guess nobody thought of it before...

Cheers,
CC

Re:Letter reshuffling

[ccp]

I send you an encrypted message which I want you to read. So I send you the key by which you are able to read it. Now while you are reading it I try to make sure nobody is looking over your shoulder and also reading it and even taking a picture of it. Now the message is readable by anybody, anywhere.

My friend: the industry couldn't care less about you showing the message to every guy in your dorm. They freak out when you make a torrent and share with your 100.000 best friends.

And, if they succeed in making DRM-enabled hardware mandatory by law, they will know it was you who spilled the beans. Hope your dad is a lawyer.

Maybe you think it can't happen, I beg to differ. I'm afraid our camp is in denial, and has been suckered into bringing a technological weapon to a political fight.
It must have something to do with us being generally more comfortable with machines than with people.

As always, YMMV.

Cheers,
CC

Re:Letter reshuffling

[arminw]

........They freak out when you make a torrent and share .........

It only takes ONE person to put a decrypted copy on line. There will always be at least one person who is able to do this, no matter what technical or legal means are employed.

There was a little thing called prohibition in the first part of last century. It did not work and there we were dealing with a physical matter, which is much more easily discoverable than some ephemeral bits traversing invisibly through cyberspace. Laws have never prevented people from getting what they want. Look at the drug or gun laws. Anybody who wants *any* illegal substance or weapon can get one. If the new equipment prevents people from getting what they want, there will arise a thriving market in used computers and players. Also, the new crippled hardware will still be bypassed by someone and the content will appear in unencumbered form in cyberspace. Look at the complicated new DRM applied to the HD formats. It has already been broken and decrypted content is already available. Something that cannot work in theory can not be made to work in practice.

The makers of DRM technology have sold a bill of goods to the technically ignorant media executives who in turn have sold it to the politicians. Anyone here on /. who knows or has friendly contact with influential people in the industry should make an effort to educate these folks on the futility of DRM. iTunes has shown that there are plenty of people who are wiling to pay for content that can use pretty much as they want. There is still DRM, but it is not the DRM in itself that upsets the average Joe/Jane, as long as the content will play in the devices he/she wants. There are a number of tools currently illegal in the US, that allow anyone who wants to, put any DVD onto their iPod. If there is a demand for that sort of ability, no amount of DRM or laws will stop that demand from being met.

Re:Letter reshuffling

[Eustace Tilley]

I send my cousin Vito with the book. Vito will let you read it, at one cent per page. If I understand your example correctly, Vito won't pay you anything, and does not read the book himself, so it seems strained to say you are sending your message to Vito. I am the one who you hope will read the book, since only someone who is interested in reading the book will have any motivation to compensate you for producing the book.

To continue with your example, I can, as I read the book while Vito holds it, and as I pay him a cent to turn the page, memorize it, or write it down. If my interest in the book is bibliophilic rather than a desire to learn its contents, then of course I will need to keep Vito around to hold the book; but if my interest is in the content, I can dismiss Vito once I'm done making my copy.

No matter how many henchmen are sent, the enterprise must fail, because the end-user is, indeed, the desired recipient of the message, and is thus destined to get it.

Re:Letter reshuffling

[ccp]

If I understand your example correctly,

Sorry, you don't. Maybe it has something to do with English not being my first language.

Cheers,
CC

Re:Letter reshuffling

[ccp]

Laws have never prevented people from getting what they want. Look at the drug or gun laws. Anybody who wants *any* illegal substance or weapon can get one.

Agreed. but my point is that while everybody can, very few actually do.
Regular people flinch at taking the risk, or associating with some vaguely unsavory character. They just plainly don't care enough, and prefer to pay.
You must realize that here in /. we're a rather particular demographic, full of kids of every age fantasizing about being part of some underground cyber-resistance, fighting against THE MAN. Let's just say real life isn't so.
For anyone interested in what happens when the two worlds collide, I always recommend the classic: The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling.

Cheers,
CC

So let me get this straight..

[Anonymous Coward]

Now there is no way in hell I'd ever run Windows as my primary OS -- still think their UI scheme is garbage, and don't like the fact they have both systematically loaded their systems with crap to appease other corporations while punishing their own end-users (DRM), and that they've frequently promised features they've never delivered (anyone else remember when they promised a stand-alone MS-DOS v7? Or when they promised an OODBMS-based filesystem for Cairo starting back in 1996? That same filesystem they didn't deliver with Vista? Or how about when they finally decided it was time to introduce a new filesystem for the 9X line that instead of using a well-designed FS they owned all the rights to, like HPFS or NTFS, they instead exacerbated the problem with a band-aid solution and invented FAT32?). It's still not what I look for in a desktop OS, but as much as it pains me to say it, on a modern machine (and the latest MacBook is hardly top-of-the-line, although it's certainly quite a capable system), under virtualization, Vista actually runs pretty acceptably. If I had to use it as my day-to-day system (and I don't use it much at all -- it's there to support a development toolset for some embedded programming I'm peripherally involved in), it certainly wouldn't be slow or painful to use -- it's instantly responsive, and has so far behaved very well (i.e.: it hasn't crashed yet). LOL, you're upset with Vista and yet you rant about stuff that took place 10+ years ago. I don't see a single point other than DRM which is of recent relevance(which BTW *is* also present in MacOS.. which makes you a hypocrite? .. yeah i know what thats like)
AAAAAND you run Vista when your dev suite also seems to work with XP.
Now, before you dotters start flaming. I dont give a fuck about either OS. But if you want to present an argument at least think first?

Re:So let me get this straight..

[Yaztromo]

LOL, you're upset with Vista and yet you rant about stuff that took place 10+ years ago. I don't see a single point other than DRM which is of recent relevance(which BTW *is* also present in MacOS.. which makes you a hypocrite? .. yeah i know what thats like) AAAAAND you run Vista when your dev suite also seems to work with XP. Now, before you dotters start flaming. I dont give a fuck about either OS. But if you want to present an argument at least think first?

Want to reply? Try my a little reading comprehension first.

Point 1: I didn't say I'm upset with Vista. What I did say is that I don't like the Widows Platform. As such, moving from running my embedded dev tools on XP instead of Vista really makes no difference to me -- I don't like either one, have a free license for 64-bit Vista Business Edition, and so use it in those few instances where I have to.

Secondly, I was defending Vista as actually running quite well under VM. So where do you get the idea that I'm upset with Vista? I dislike Windows because the entire line has been poorly designed, I don't like the UI at all, and MS routinely over-promises and under-delivers (how is WinFS, which was most recently supposed to ship in Vista and was yanked roughly a year ago "10+ years ago"?), but I don't have any particular hatred for Vista beyond it being another flavour of Windows crap.

As for your accusation of hypocrisy, Mac OS X doesn't have anywhere near the level of RM Vista has, and OS X's DRM is pretty easy to avoid: just don't buy songs from the iTunes Music Store. It doesn't have secured pathways that require handshaking with your video display just to play encoded videos, and it doesn't have a kernel you can only plug signed, vendor-validated extensions/drivers into (and which refuses to ply such content if you don't). It simply has a DRM decryption module built into a codec. That's it. It's easy to void and remove, and doesn't impinge developers abilities to develop applications or drivers for the system. Don't like DRM on the Mac? Drag and Drop iTunes to the trash and it's effectively gone. Then go and play your media in VLC.

So, before you post, at least use some reading comprehension first before you go foaming at the mouth?

Yaz.

Re:So let me get this straight..

[Anonymous Coward]

Point 1: I didn't say I'm upset with Vista. What I did say is that I don't like the Widows Platform. As such, moving from running my embedded dev tools on XP instead of Vista really makes no difference to me -- I don't like either one, have a free license for 64-bit Vista Business Edition, and so use it in those few instances where I have to.

Secondly, I was defending Vista as actually running quite well under VM. So where do you get the idea that I'm upset with Vista? I dislike Windows because the entire line has been poorly designed, I don't like the UI at all, and MS routinely over-promises and under-delivers (how is WinFS, which was most recently supposed to ship in Vista and was yanked roughly a year ago "10+ years ago"?), but I don't have any particular hatred for Vista beyond it being another flavour of Windows crap.

There we go with stupid semantics arguments.. "upset" /"dontlike".. whatever.. have it your way.
WinFS? I dont see anything about WinFS in your post, do you? That was my point - You made stupid arguments that are irrelevant and are outdated. Nobody except you gives a fuck about MS not shipping a standalone version of MSDOS 7.

As for your accusation of hypocrisy, Mac OS X doesn't have anywhere near the level of RM Vista has, and OS X's DRM is pretty easy to avoid: just don't buy songs from the iTunes Music Store. It doesn't have secured pathways that require handshaking with your video display just to play encoded videos, and it doesn't have a kernel you can only plug signed, vendor-validated extensions/drivers into (and which refuses to ply such content if you don't). It simply has a DRM decryption module built into a codec. That's it. It's easy to void and remove, and doesn't impinge developers abilities to develop applications or drivers for the system. Don't like DRM on the Mac? Drag and Drop iTunes to the trash and it's effectively gone. Then go and play your media in VLC.

Man youre such an idiot. Avoiding DRM is the same for each OS. It doesnt matter if its MacOS or Windows. Vista isnt going to stop you from playing non-DRM stuff through "secure pathways" or whatever the hell else your ranting about again.
If you want to avoid DRM in vista, dont buy DRM stuff. There isn't anything special about MacOSX in that regard. Except this maybe - http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/01/ 0421248&from=rss

Re:So let me get this straight..

[Yaztromo]

There we go with stupid semantics arguments.. "upset" /"dontlike".. whatever.. have it your way. WinFS? I dont see anything about WinFS in your post, do you?

Yes, I do. WinFS is the Object Oriented File System they were talking about for Cairo, which I did very specifically mention.

You see, it helps to have some idea of what you're talking about before you try to flame me.

None of which changes the fact that I still don't like the way they've designed Windows, and don't like to use it, but can step back enough to see that Vista does indeed run well enough under a virtual machine to be usable and evaluatable to those who do like the Windows platform.

Yaz.

Re:So let me get this straight..

[Anonymous Coward]

Man.. now your getting really nuts. The OOFS project was shelved along with Cairo. And not to mention WinFS is *not* an offshoot of OOFS. (ALSO Not to mention that no way they would even think of reusing that code from so far back) WinFS is based on the RFS on the then planned SQL Server 2000.
But why believe me. Look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS for yourself.

BTW.. nice sidestep on my point. Re: MacOS DRM.

Or you can do this...

[liftphreaker]

Or you can simply switch back to something lighter like Win2K which positively screams and wipes the floor with XP on an older machine with 256megs of RAM... a machine on which vista will not even install.

On a more serious note, Win2K is no longer in production nor is it supported, but you can get win2k real cheap these days, and it's one of their most stable OSes to date. Just be prepared to spend an hour on downloading and installing updates, and you're all set.

Irony

[Enrique1218]

I will call this irony.I have no other word at the moment because I am not privy to the decision makers at MS. I run Mac OSX and I just want the Basic version in Parallells. Aero, I have Aqua. Sidebar- I have Dashboard. Security- I have obscurity. I just want basic windows compatibility and nothing else. Moreover, since I am running one OS already, I want the version with smallest footprint to dedicate more resources to that pesky program that has no OS X port.

Ask RMS

[mrchaotica]

I don't know, but I do know that Richard Stallman predicted such an eventuality 10 years ago, long before Treacherous Computing existed. Perhaps more people should listen to him.

But is it illegal

[fuliginous]

I feel the need to check my local legislation to see if doing this counts as circumvention and if so in what ways? Especially if you have a license for each item of software used and they are the only instances of each that you use.

you say "break DRM" like it was a bad thing

[swschrad]

when in fact there is no higher calling.