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Microchips With Multiple "Selves"
Stony Stevenson brings news from Rice University about designing integrated circuits with multiple distinct identities, which could be used in new types of hardware-based DRM, among other things. From the news release:
"'With "n-variant" integrated circuits, it is possible to design portable media players that are inherently unique,' said Farinaz Koushanfar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice and principal investigator on the project. 'New methods of digital rights management can be built upon such devices. For example, media files can be made such that they only run on a certain variant and cannot be played by another.' Koushanfar said content providers could also use n-variant chips to sell metered access to software, music or movies because the chips can be programmed to switch from one variant to another at a particular time or after a file has been accessed a certain number of times."
Is there a good use for this technology?
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
So they finally made the MAGI system?
I bet that emulators will defeat this. You could presumably use them to simulate any one of these "unique" processors. Such emulators probably won't work on mobile devices, though.
For me and this technology that number would be 0.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
A System with a multiple personality disorder. I'll never know what it will boot to, a whole new substitute for grub.
If it can play unprotected audio, then all the DRM in the world isn't going to help anything. People will still swap mp3s. If it can't play unprotected audio, no one will ever buy it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
One: is this practical from a manufacturing perspective? If it isn't, this'll never take off the ground.
Two: how much does this complicate programming? Is it possible to program for all variants at once? Can you make an interpreter to do so? If this makes the life of a programmer too goddamn difficult, it won't get off the ground.
Cynical Idealist
Just another thing for bored programmers to play with.
Yet another technology that will be expensive and offer no benefit to consumers whatsoever. I'm sure it will take off just like all of its DRM'd cousins from the past.
So, a system whereby every installation is also a port to a unique platform. I think this deserves a "whatcouldpossiblygowrong".
I suspect that I don't fully understand the proposal; but I'm a bit unclear as to how this is better(or worse, if you are not a sinister IP overlord) than a TPM with an embedded key, or the obfuscated VM from BD+. I'd also be very curious to know how one can, easily enough to use on a commercial scale, generate "content" or binaries for a given unknown unique architecture. Is there some sort of compact way that the chip can send its state to a remote agent(without revealing that state, and making reverse engineering easy)? Does the manufacturer of the device need to disclose the state of all devices to all vendors in order for them to build customized binaries for those devices?
I suspect that people smarter than I am have given the matter some thought; but TFA doesn't give me much to go on.
Now we'll need chip psychiatrists to deal with schizophrenia in integrated circuits.
"Hello, World"
Beginning Countdown until this (like all other DRM schemes) gets cracked.
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
Add a circuit that can detect DRM media and remove it from my hard drive.
I remember when MOD was an audio format, and DOS wasn't a network attack....
Either they are ignorant(doubtful) or liars( probably not) or .. well I wanted to put something positive here, but even I can see the problems and why this can not work in the world as a DRM.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
trolling for research dollars is all this is.
Another day, another retard who thinks that he can make something work which is proved not to.
They are called smart card chips. You can get them packaged as surface mount too. It's got all crypto goodness one needs.
Except management can't comprehend decent crypto, so we'll have a few more decades of encryption keys stored on disk.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I donot care - the present music is crap anyways.
To paraphrase Professor Frink: "Oh, well to be honest, the technology only has evil applications"
tim russert died for your sins and this is how you repay him? can't we have any respect for him?
Why not pass a worldwide law that upon birth (or on the date the law goes into effect), every single person in the world must have an implant that detects whenever that person sees, hears, or otherwise experiences any form of copyrighted material, and on each occurrence, transfers money from their bank account directly into the accounts of the RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft. This would solve the problem of people downloading illegally, as it would become legal to download copyrighted material for free. You would pay each time you hear/see/use the material. This would be a form of Pay-Per-Use, and to the RIAA's, MPAA's, and Microsoft's huge advantage, they'll get to charge you even when you pull up to a stoplight and you hear a song being blasted on the radio of the car next to you. Violation of the law by not having the implant will be punishable by weeks of inhumane torture, followed by the death penalty, without wasting anyone's time with nonsense like trials, legal proceedings, due process, or any of that other pesky stuff.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
> content providers could also use n-variant chips to sell metered access to software, music or movies because the chips can be programmed to switch from one variant to another at a particular time or after a file has been accessed a certain number of times. By switching the chip's identity, wouldn't that disable not only the metered content I've consumed the appropriate amount of times but also all the other content that I may not have consumed yet? Or do I need a separate chip for each song I buy?
Why the hell would I want a chip with multiple personality disorder?
cptnapalm sits down to work at his computer
*a message pops up on the screen*
"Hello, Dave."
cptnapalm: "My name's not... Oh shit..."
"He has multiple personalities... ALL Lincoln"
"I was born in 200 log cabins"
How about we call this an 'FPGA'? Now all we need is a backronym....
This is obviously untrue. If it can be manufactured once, it can be again and it can almost certainly be emulated.
FFS, would it be possible to invent some new technology for the purpose of letting us do NEW things, rather than keeping us from doing the things we used to be able to do (and for free, at that)?
The article seems to be written in Buzzwordian, and while I've got a passing acquaintance with it I'm not at all familiar with the Academentian dialect.
Seriously, what the hell do they mean?
I record music. I wouldn't buy a player that won't let me play my own stuff, or my friend's stuff, just because an authority hasn't signed off on it.
With home recording becoming cheaper and better all the time, I expect that this will be more of an issue in the future, not less. The era of "top-down" music distribution is ending.
It is inherently hostile and it's creators consider you the enemy. The subjective judgment has already been made:
The customer is the "attacker" who might "compromise" the device to exercise their fair use rights or -gasp- share with their friends. Apparently, the device makers think rights, sharing are even their customers are bad.
Vista on schizophrenic hardware...
I think global warming is the small problem here
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity!
This sounds stupid.
we DONT want any kind of "Digital rights RESTRICTION"
Read radical news here
Not.
fuck that
For example, media files can be made such that they only run on a certain variant and cannot be played by another
Sort of like how I can't play Video Tape's on my BetaMax player.
This analogy works even better due to the instant fail of any device that attempts to implement it.
Any machine that "Can't play" will get returned as "broken" by the average joe, just like those who returned HD-DVD's cause they wouldn't play in the DVD player.
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
... on their new Sybil line of computers.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I would expect Rice to know better. No worries about them consuming all the /. bandwidth - they are too busy drinking music industry provided Kool-aid.
The problem is that any DRM system intrinsically raises costs. I don't know why so many executives fail to notice this: physical goods have their own intrinsic copy-protection, yet they cannot be priced higher than the market will bear. Honda doesn't try to sell Civics for the price of Ferraris, even if no one can copy a Civic like you copy a song.
By spending more on copy-protection they are pricing their products further away from the optimum price.
"...the chips can be programmed to switch from one variant to another..." But of course the end user won't be able to make this happen, right? This is finally the infallible, unhackable DRM we've all been waiting for.
> Sure, "to sell metered access to software, music or movies"
> Good is a subjective judgement.
Let's not forget poor struggling shareware authors. "Metered access" could be used to offer the 30 day trial period, so let's not blindly lump it all into the "evil" category.
With the way identity theft and misplaced data is being trumpeted in the media, I feel influenced to ask for something that will protect my data from them.
Can this chip do that?
I could see this being used for nastier things than DRM...how about an iPhone that turns into a crippled iPod Touch when not activated by an approved carrier (and can't be simply unlocked, due to its sudden lack of phone hardware after being remotely told to turn the 3G chip into Mr. Hyde)?
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
"Schema-phrenic"???
"Schema-phrenia"??? LOL!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
which could be used in new types of hardware-based DRM
(cough) It STILL WON'T WORK if I have physical access to the machine... DRM is FUNDAMENTALLY flawed until the day computers start zapping people with laser beams the moment they are "tampered" with.
WHEN will these people understand that you cannot give both the lock AND the key to the "thief" and expect your "method" to be secure. The only thing this does is add yet another layer of smoke, bill corporations for even more useless "DRM" schemes - which we end up paying for - again. After the RIAA and the MPAA's of the world, copy protection pushers are the biggest free-loaders around.
I expect the crack/workaround within a couple months of this "new technology" being in the market.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I've read entire TFA, but I fail to understand what exactly they are talking about. I doubt they understand that either.
Chip with multiple 'selves'? WTF?
Anyway, since it is potentially useless technology even if there is some substance behind it, I discard it as BS.
Transistors may be cheap but electricity is not. These devices should be outlawed. It's bad enough the content will satisfy copyright requirements by making it to public domain. Burning millions of watt-hours a year on it is a crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_curse The use of book curses dates back much further, to pre-Christian times, when the wrath of gods was invoked to protect books and scrolls. In their medieval usage, many of these curses vowed that harsh repercussions would be inflicted on anyone who appropriated the work from its proper owner.
...
For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, & let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails
1. Fair Use of copyrighted works and
2. Copyright creators to encumber their works and
3. The consumer to try and disencumber it and
4. The dissemination of disencumbering tools to be illegal
This is obviously a poor state of affairs for consumers.
But the content producers & copyright owners aren't doing anything illegal.
And I don't think Odder (1288958) deserves to be modded flamebait. Though the grammar could use some work, his basic point that consumers are both the customer and the 'enemy' is perfectly valid. From a neutral point of view, you can't really say "good" or "bad", but I do think that you can declare their actions as "hostile".
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Bring it on assholes. We'll crack it, no problem!
The challenge is nothing more than a crossword puzzle after lunch.
Rights management isn't a new concept, whereas fair use is. ...For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner...
Right. The difference being that back then the OWNER of the book had all the rights.
Today, the OWNER of the book is the one being cursed.
It's not the contents of the post that are being modded down, it's the person. Odder is a sockpuppet of twitter, and the account is regularly used to shill and game the moderation system. The thread that last link goes to, for example, is made up primarily of twitter posting in agreement with himself, and then complaining about being modded down.
I think it's time to have a hippocratic oath and a certification board like the AMA for comp sci.
The amoral and unethical should be stripped of their credentials and cast out of the profession.
No, this is not an overreaction either. To the average joe computers are more mysterious than the workings of the human body, and just as critical to a person's quality of life in the modern age.
Anyone who would work to poison the digital world with this filth does not deserve to be respected or employed in the field.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
A good use for this technology would be to milk the recording industry yet again for millions of dollars up front by promising a new and improved but equally doomed Yet-Another-DRM scheme.
These guys will buy anything if you promise them it will lead to DRM that works that the customer will accept.
They don't even get that most of the pirated product is distributed before the content reaches its final form -- let alone after they've had a chance to encrypt it. Cocaine causes brain damage. They can't help it. I'll bet we could each come up with a fatally flawed DRM scheme that they would gobble up, and make a mint. Here's mine: content distributed on read-once media. A special evolution of SD flash that wipes its content as it disgorges it. Guys, if you're reading this, you can split my check between the FSF and Project Gutenberg - thanks.
The consumers that buy into this junk and wind up buying the White Album again are collateral damage. PT Barnum would value them highly but anybody with an IQ over 80 should eye them with sad contempt.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sounds like Partial Evaluation, whereby applications/content is recompiled to a specialize "machine". The DRM system might consist of: 1) an actual hardware that offers a minimal set of operations (arithmetic, logic, load and store, etc.) and 2) a vendor-definable set of supplementary virtual machine or higher-level operations, composed of the builtin ones, and possibly defined by run-time variables (time-zone, encoding region, internet update, etc.) the supplementary instructions might modify the semantics of the built-in ones as well.
;-)
A resident or off-line translator might then compile a combination of content and the supplementary VMops, and specialize them to the hardware, thereby creating a unique execution environment. Throw cryptography into the mix and you make things a little more interesting.
Compile(VMops, InputContent, Key) ==> UniqueContent
Run(UniqueContent, Key)
In this form, each content input is itself its own virtual machine (i.e. self-running code.) but it is no longer MP3, AVI or any other recognizable file format. As a matter of fact, each song or movie title creates its OWN virtual machine! (with all the performance costs that might imply)
If history is any indicator, a possible attack vector might be the file format of the compiled UniqueContent (assuming we don't have the compiler and thus can't control the plain-text of the content.) Under a sufficient debugging environment, breakpoints might be set and execution paused right about the loading and decryption step, and an attacker can gain insight into the workings of the loader, possibly retrieving decryption keys, or at least dumping the raw decrypted data to disk. (The code and data sections of the loader could be dumped as well, for all your keygening pleasure, if we're really lucky!)
Most likely, a trivial signal-capture attack will be discovered, where anything sent over the I/O buses is captured and replayed with a MIM attack. Last time I checked, I/O hardware was still primitive, compared to CPU
- kk
Remember the Pentium III?
Yeah, there was already an outcry about that and Intel has since not done it again. - at least, no tin the same manner.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
This is software. Reconfigurable hardware is software. A program is an n-variant component of a CPU: it's a set of on/off gates attached to a memory bus. The electronic impulses the CPU follows can be dictated by ROM; one step further, you can construct a semiconductor network specifically to act like ROM burned with a specific contents. RAM works in the opposite direction but does the same.
This chip is what, an FPGA? A chip with a built-in serial number? It's software. You can make it alter itself, its own operations, you can make an emulator for it.
Honestly what's the difference between software and hardware? Think about it for a minute.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
but can't we use it for something benifical to somebody or something other than a failing business model?
Encryption?
Authentication (banks, etc)?
If you can't fake one of these, there's much better and more beneficial ways to use this... rather than making sure Joe doesn't copy your shitty song.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Actually,it is even worse than that. These asshats take our institutes of higher learning,which are making a killing off our federal tax dollars,and then turn right around and make them into "IP farms" for the mega corps. I don't know which ones make me more disgusted,the DRM asshats like this one or the ones that get all these federal grants to research treatments for diseases which they then sell to the drug companies who shaft us. But that is my 02c,YMMV. But I'm really getting sick at these damned asshats trying to find new ways to bleed us dry.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Sounds a bit like the region locked DVD players you used to get in Australia before the major players finally saw sense.
It got to the point where the people were routinely recommending no-name brands from China as the better option than name brands like Sony or Panasonic as they were less likely to be cripple-locked and retailers started putting "region unlocked" on features tags to try to restore product confidence.
It's tragic how these same companies never learn from experience.
"Koushanfar said content providers could also use n-variant chips to sell metered access to software, music or movies"
No. They could offer metered access. Whether or not they actually manage to sell people on such a harebrained scheme remains to be seen. Not likely.
I sure as hell would not buy this!
When are these people going to learn that trying to sell things to people that the people do not want DOES NOT WORK???
I guess about the same day that forcing people to go along via lawsuits stops working.
Except that those curses were for the actual theft of valuable property which had a physical existence. Now the curse is for taking a copy. These are altogether different. I would not want someone to steal my car. I have no objection to someone making a copy of my car.
unfortunately, that is a abuse of moderation, which, after all, is supposed to be a moderation of the reasoning of the post..., While I am mildly offended at Twitter et al assumption that we are all entirely idiots and don't understand what is being done one article to the next, occasionally stupidity and dishonour bite themselves and actually end up benefiting despite being innately detrimental. Occasionally Twitter et al says some sensible things. Oh that the misplaced enthusiasm/reverse psychology* would end. My only question is are they actually one person, or a group that find it amusing to act as though they are one?
* I'm not entirely convinced that the posters aren't a supporter of the supposed enemy.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Stop mucking about with the order of things, please stay away from messing up our well defined chaotic universe by adding overly simplified but highly messed up, commercial and economicly befitting(is that a word) junk to our world.
;)
is it not enough that we have to live in a consumerist society due to our overreliance on "economic principles"?
there is an easier way to get what done what they want.... they even could've done it more than 18years ago, what do I say, 18? Hell even over 64 years ago.
destroy all life on this planet.
ok ok, these days it's easier, given the high powered nukes, we as people have been developing to more easily obliterate our fellow citizens and members of syndicate.
oh btw, I know of your plans to boil off the seas. using high powered microwave beams and overenergized electronic equipment. I give you the go ahead. please do so.
I only have one request, could you test it out on yourself first.
let nature take care of the rest.
thanks
PS. I do have an account here, it's way underused. hell it's probably even been deleted, given the amount of crapola that this site harbours
[wdw]
I would not want someone to steal my car. I have no objection to someone making a copy of my car.
Neither do I. The point about cars, the written word, music art, etc. is that someone invested time and effort designing them (for want of a better term).
I like Free Software and I like to contribute and give my contributions away for free under the GPL/LGPL, however we must make a distinction between the circumstances under which something was produced and the producer's wishes.
It's a balance. In the old system, for example, cars could only be produced using knowledge and experience gained in science and engineering. Much of that was hard to get, artificially, due to money being charged for it and secrets being kept. This was expensive and slowed down development. Things are changing now in engineering. Knowledge is becoming free-as-in speech and beer. Costs are being reduced substantially. If enough free knowledge is about, and people make many small but useful contributions, the costs can effectively be eliminated. (Look and Linux, BSD etc.)
The remaining costs will be in the manufacturing and materials.
For music, video, pictures, writing, reproduction (manufacturing) costs have been virtually eliminated.
Things are changing and I don't think that anyone has figured out yet how to deal with it. The ones who will fall by the wayside are the ones who refuse to accept change and resist it, keeping their heads in the sand.
Stick Men
Notice where this comes from. An university. It's likely that some professor just had the bright idea (also known as a "hallucination") that hey, maybe if we made chips pathologically heterogenous then we'd have workable DRM.
Thing is, Digital Restrictions Management isn't failing because of the technology. Despite it trying to make water not wet, despite all DRM being fundamentally crackable even if that includes taking some innocent children of a DRM root key owner hostage. DRM is failing because no one wants it. One of the few acceptable things about a capitalist economic system is that in general people won't spend money on stuff they find disagreeable.
The only exception is Apple's Itunes, which apparently sells only to technofetishists and monolith-worshippers who especially like to pay for things. That market, as it turns out, is rather static.
How about borroweth and returneth after making thine own copy?