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Gamers, EFF Speak Out Against DRM
Last month, we discussed news that the FTC would be examining DRM to see if it needs regulation. They set up a town hall meeting for late March, and part of that effort involved requesting comments from potential panelists and the general public. Ars Technica reports that responses to the request have been overwhelmingly against DRM, and primarily from gamers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also took the opportunity to speak out strongly against DRM, saying flat out that "DRM does not prevent piracy," and suggesting that its intended purpose is "giving some industry leaders unprecedented power to influence the pace and nature of innovation and upsetting the traditional balance between the interests of copyright owners and the interests of the public." Their full public comments (PDF) describe several past legal situations supporting that point, such as Sony's fight against mod chips, Blizzard's DMCA lawsuit against an alternative to battle.net, and Sony's XCP rootkit.
Why bother to fight DRM? DRM is not the problem, the problem is that distributing DRM workarounds is illegal. Instead, why not go after the root problem, the DMCA?
Palm trees and 8
You're wrong.
DRM circumvention is a trusted-client-subversion problem, not a cryptanalytic problem (which is, indeed, much harder, though not typically impossible).
In DRM scenarios (which is what distinguishes them from securable encryption scenarios), the attacker has the ciphertext and the key, albeit possibly in an obfuscated or hard-to-access form. Given a sufficiently motivated attacker who has the key (in whatever form) under their control, the DRM scheme will always lose. (I've never seen any copy-protection scheme survive a serious attack, and I probably never will.)
The VideoGuard scheme used by Sky is broken in various ways, but the crackers are very secretive, and the breaks are almost unpublished (thanks mostly to heavy crackdowns). The presence of unencrypted transport stream rips of HDTV broadcasts proves the existence. You can't get the cracks easily; but clearly someone must indeed have them.
Please do not confuse DRM with standard encryption techniques. Normally, encryption is used between two or more parties to keep one or more other parties from reading the encrypted material. DRM, or TPM to be more precise, is used to keep the recipient of the material from copying it, while at the same time allow them to read it (otherwise they would never buy it). As such, any DRM that people want cracked will be cracked. I think your example says more about Sky TV than about their encryption technology. :)
DRM is a failure in that it provides the would be attacker with the message, the cypher, and the key. They just try to hide those last two, which is no true basis for protecting material.
The politicians won't listen. Their ears will be plugged with earplugs made out of the lobbying money from the media conglomerates. They won't see a problem because consumers continue to buy and buy regardless of DRM in 90% of cases, and corporations continue to make money. There's nothing wrong with the situation, so far as they can see. That 10% that won't buy DRM'd media? Pirates. All of them. We just haven't caught and convicted them yet.
The only way to shut down the DRM monster is mass boycott. And I mean MASS. I mean you have to get your parents that don't know shit about DRM protesting. You have to get soccer moms, the 14 year old kids vulnerable to media hype and willing to buy anything, the exec with his iPod crammed with DRM'd tunes... get them ALL educated and more importantly angry enough to stop buying for a couple years.
It's difficult enough to appear very close to impossible.
I demonstrated it to my mother when she wanted to play a CD for me. At the time I had no CD player other than my PC. Her CD refused to play. I looked it up online, sure enough it had copy protection preventing us from listening to her CD she paid for. I showed her how to circumvent the protection (a little marker on the outside track), and she became incensed. She's not purchased music for about 5 or 6 years now. She was disgusted that people were treating her, one of the most honest people (to a fault) that I know, like a common criminal even though she gave them money for their product.
Find a way to make people feel that way BEFORE it bites them, and you'll have what we need to win. Until then, good luck. So long as the money flows, they won't hear a damn thing we say.
Not to mention that the DRM that is in these games is costing folks money and time right now. As a PC repairman I can't count the number of times I have had machines brought to me because "it is acting funny" with strange errors, all burns of CD/DVD would fail, drives are killing themselves, etc. And when I found there wasn't an infection I would immediately begin looking for a DRM "infection" and sure enough it would be infected. I have watched Safedisc and SecuROM throw drives into PIO mode(which will burn them up) Starforce cause all kinds of program failures and weird crashes, etc. These programs are often worse than many of the malware apps written today as far as causing trouble.
It has gotten bad enough that I now longer buy games at release date anymore. I wait until they have been out 6 months at least, then I buy the nice box and put it in the closet. Since I have bought the game I then go and download the "safe" version at one of the many sites available. Sad that the "pirate" version is actually better for the consumer than the "legitimate" one huh?
The point is while DMCA really needs to be throw in a fire, with the DRM used today it is costing good hard working folks money right at this very minute. It breaks their machines which are then brought to guys like me which have to be paid to have it repaired. And let us not forget that these DRM "programs" don't support each other, which means I can't count the number of times I have seen machines infected with SecuROM AND Safedisc AND Starforce. Can you say major conflicts boys and girls? I think you can. These programs can cause more damage(especially if you have two or more which seems to be begging for PIO mode) than most of the viruses and trojans out there. There certainly cause more weird and hard to track down errors in this repairman's NSHO. But magically when they are removed the problems just.....go away. Amazing, huh?
Oh, and in case some are wondering what is so bad about PIO mode, PIO mode is a leftover for seriously old legacy drives, like the old serial CD ROMs we used to have. The modern optical drive simply isn't made to operate at that low of a speed and gets too hot if it is left in PIO mode too long. Picture yourself driving down the freeway at 60MPH with the emergency brakes on. That is pretty much PIO mode to a 16x or above drive.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.