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Intel Insider DRM Risks Monopoly Investigations
Blacklaw writes "Intel's Sandy Bridge line of processors is impressing the tech community with its power, but a sneaky little feature designed to appease Hollywood has some concerned about Intel's intentions: Intel Insider. If a major video streaming service, such as Lovefilm or the US-based Hulu, were to implement Intel Insider technology on their movie streams — as a way of convincing Hollywood to release films sooner and in high definition without worrying about piracy — it would mean that only those who use Intel's very latest Sandy Bridge CPUs would be able to stream movies. Not only would those using older Intel chips that don't support the technology be cut off from the service, but those on systems featuring CPUs from rival manufacturers such as AMD and low-power specialist VIA would also be excluded."
In a blog post about this new feature, Intel denies that it is DRM.
It has to be decrypted to be displayed. There is always a way to tap into that. DRM fails again.
WP sez:
Digital rights management (DRM) is a term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to limit the usage of digital content and devices.
From TFA:
...it would mean that only those who use Intel's very latest Sandy Bridge CPUs would be able to stream movies.
So Intel Insider could be used to limit the usage of digital content.
Intel, you are dirty, dirty liars.
Sent from my CR-48
And how exactly can it be "sneaky" when Intel makes all this information about this technology public. They even have a webpage all about it. This is about as far from "sneaky" as one can be.
From that link to Intel's website:
So it's not Digital Rights Management, it's just Content Protection. I feel better.
Just another proletarian malcontent.
I will say that Intel Insider is NOT a DRM technology.
So Intel created Intel insider, an extra layer of content protection
Talk about doublethink.
Palm trees and 8
Ars had a nice writeup of this yesterday, referencing a 2006 post of theirs. The basic gist is/was that DRM simply CANNOT be a good sell for tech companies, and given that Intel and the other consumer electronics companies are so massive when compared to production costs, why don't they just buy one? Intel could piss on its shoes and come out with the budget for a dozen major films, which they could then release DRM free, to the joy of all of their customers. Hollywood is big, but there are only six major production houses and a number of smaller ones... all of which are worth far less than the major tech companies. Want more movies on iTunes, Apple? You've got the cash, so BUY a production house.
I didn't mean to editorialize, but I think I started to convince myself by the end there.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Duh? Of course if you are using a CPU that doesn't implement the technology that the service is based on you wouldn't be able to use it. This is like saying that "Intel Faces Monopoly Investigation" because x86 code only runs on... x86 processors.
Congratulations, you just proved the point. Intel DID face monopoly investigations for x86 instruction sets. That's why AMD exists, because Intel was forced to license the i386 instruction set.
If Intel doesn't license out this technology, and it becomes the dominant media distribution platform, they'll likely face the same problems again. However, Intel has learned, and these days AMD and Intel cross-license quite a bit. x86_64, for example, is AMD tech that Intel has licensed.
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I thought that since HDCP was cracked it's possible to make high-def copies via HDMI? So it doesn't matter what encryption exists inside the playback device since if it's going to be output to an HDMI device, it can be captured and recorded?
Or was the HDCP crack mitigated by new keys on new devices? Or is HDMI copying not practical in the real world?
The bigger joke is, pretty soon this DRM-crap will be in just about every new processor. So it'll only be people with older CPU's (read: anything not 1-2 years new) that lack.
Sort of the way that people with Windows Vista or Win7 get fucked for video quality hooking a laptop or HTPC up to a TV or projector that happens to have a VGA input rather than DVI or HDMI.
Welcome to "the future", where DRM is fucking everywhere and your rights as a consumer mean precisely Jack and Shit. And if you wonder how we got there, look no further than the two-party system where both sides are bought out by the same businesses.
Once Intel solved their heat problem and stopped adding latency layers, and thus began beating the pants off of AMD in benchmarks,
At what price point? The $900-per-processor range?
I've been extremely happy as an AMD customer. And every time I run price-for-performance, AMD comes out king even today. They haven't won the "fuck it I'm a millionaire money is no object" speed crown in a while, but I can get a much faster AMD CPU for the same price in the $100-200 range every time.
It has been said before, but it needs to be repeated by high-profile writers until Hollywood listens.
DRM will always be cracked. You are not stopping pirates. You are punishing paying customers by treating them like criminals. Hollywood is convinced (like the music industry was) that no one would willingly pay for digital content if they have the capability to pirate it. The reality is that iTunes is the #1 seller of music, with Amazon #2. People do actually like paying for legal, digital content.
People will pirate. DRM isn't the solution. Finding ways to reward paying customers and treating them well is the solution.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
However, Intel has learned, and these days AMD and Intel cross-license quite a bit. x86_64, for example, is AMD tech that Intel has licensed.
Yes, but that doesn't have anything to do with learning, that has to do with AMD beating Intel to the market with a useful 64 bit instruction set (Itanic is a joke and will always be nothing more than a footnote) and Intel having no choice but to follow AMD's lead. It's an illustration of what happens when you rest on your laurels.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just take a look at Sony - they are even more paranoid about piracy as a result of owning a movie studio.
It has to be decrypted to be displayed. There is always a way to tap into that.
At the cost of millions of dollars to put probes directly into the chip. The point of DRM, as I understand it, isn't to make things impossible to decrypt but to A. make it cheaper to write, film, edit, and promote your own original work than to break a DRM system, and B. provide a hook for a circumvention lawsuit. If you're talking about analog reconversion, this works only for noninteractive media such as movies, not for interactive media such as video games.
Think of it as an armoured truck carrying the movie from the Internet to your display, it keeps the data safe from pirates...
You wouldn't want those nasty pirates to hijack your data and replace little Susie's episode of Dora the Explorer with donkey porn, would you? Think of the children! Dear God, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!! Thank you, Intel, for the safe and secure armored truck of Intel Insider!
That is all.
The tighter you squeeze, the more sand slips through your fingers, Hollywood; the more restrictive you make things, the more you encourage people to find ways to circumvent your systems of control, and the less profitable you become. Why can't these people understand that their business model doesn't work anymore?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
There is nothing really wrong with Itanium. It's a perfectly viable 64-bit instruction set. It's only major fallback was that well, it wasn't x86. Technical problems had little to do with it.
That is a load of dingo's kidneys. Intel can not get anything like the promised performance out of Itanium and where they get close it requires massive code changes because they have not managed to get enough magic into the compiler, which is why everyone and their mom is dropping it. Nobody bought Itanium on purpose, it was all crap like being forced to upgrade to it because the old system is on Alpha and the only upgrade path for the software you are running is to go to Itanium. I saw this happen personally at a community college which is now hosting their student info on an 8-way itanium that is maybe using 10% of its capabilities. A two-processor system would have covered their needs nicely for decades.
AMD basically shoe-horned 64-bit instructions into the x86 architecture. A far less creative and less impressive feat,
That's a load of nonsense because "the x86 architecture" is a meaningless phrase. x86 is an instruction set, full stop. amd64 processors bear no resemblance whatsoever to an i386 except that they can handle processing the same code. Everything that makes Hammer look like an x86 is in the LSU and op-decode.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Incorrect. Itanium's ISA makes much much greater demands of compilers than x86 does. Much of the reason for Itanium's failure is that Intel could not squeeze sufficient performance out of it because of this. Clear technical reason contributing to its failure.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
everyone's forgetting about intel's consumer division Set-Top-Box CPU, which is specifically banned / restricted (by intel themselves) from being sold as a Laptop / Desktop CPU. it's a SoC with an embedded 1ghz Intel Atom Core, combined with PowerVR SGX 3D and 1080p60 HD Video playback, which means that to do HDTV the Intel CPU Core is idling at about 3%. it does NOT use Intel's own GMA Graphics, nor Intel's own MPEG decoder, because they're too crap.
why am i mentioning this CPU? because it only has HDMI 1.4 - absolutely no LVDS, VGA or RGB/TTL out. why is that? it's to *stop* people from bypassing the DRM!
the holywood companies etc. are so paranoid, and so "in control" that even companies like Intel bow to them and create this kind of insane restricted cartel hardware.
i remain deeply unimpressed and i am hoping that the reduced price and the "freedom" afforded by the Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean markets (irony to call the Chinese markets "free" but that's by comparison to what hollywood+intel are up to), results in at least *some* mass-market CPUs being at least open enough to work with.
but, one thing that stops that is the fact that many of these Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean companies have to utilise Linux (because it's not Intel). that means that they are typically ignorant of the GPL; that means that they treat the Free Software Community's hard work and efforts with blatant disregard.
So, for those people reading this who actually want to make a difference: start doing GPL investigations of products and their firmware, get onto the gpl-violations mailing list, help to pressurise these Asian companies to comply, by educating them on their obligations. each person who does that takes up that company's time, to the point where eventually, like Ingenic did and VIA have (finally) and amazingly even Telechips recently, they will get the message and release GPL source code.
Back when MMX extensions first came out Intel set up some deals for content that were only available on processors with the new MMX extensions, but it was insignificant enough that nobody cared. Now they're doing it again, but with bigger content providers so it'll be noticed more.
Lock-in as in: video streaming company getting a "stream" of unsubscribing users because they no longer can use the service...
When you monopolize a market you basically kill it except for yourself. Death of a market means no competition and higher costs. You can also use certain markets to lock out other markets. DirectX is one of them. Most programming is done to Microsoft's tune using their tools. There used to be others such as those product produced by Borland. If you can keep those areas locked down then you can keep your main monopoly alive for significantly longer periods of time.
So, if Intel implements this DRM scheme and it is used by many in Holywood, it means that content only plays on their platform. The hell with Android, or any ARM based CPU. It neutralizes competition from AMD. Any new product such as Tegra2 is a goner before it gets off the ground. It keeps Intel in its monopoly position for another few decades.
Not only that, there's no DRM that's good and none that are friendly to the legitimate end-user. What, every AMD based user is supposed to quit Netflix or Hulu? We are supposed to stop using any video disc technology? No more .MP3s?
By controlling the content you control the markets outside of yours. This is precisely why it was very important to not let Microsoft get a foothold in the DRM market because everything produced would have required that we use Microsoft's product. Bill Gates said very clearly a few years ago: computers are no longer primarily used to generate content. They are used to consume it. Hence, if you control content you control consumers.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
No, you couldn't be more wrong.
AMD produces x86 processors because Intel wanted government contracts with people like the military and NASA. The government doesn't buy important things like processors its entire business is going to depend on if there is only one source.
In order for Intel to get these big deals, they had to license x86 to other companies, such as AMD and Cyrix and the like, so they wouldn't be the only vendor ... allowing NASA to purchase x86 CPUs from Intel because there were multiple sources (preventing Intel from having control over the governments purchasing by being the sole vendor of a required item).
AMD makes x86 chips because NASA said so, not because of some court case.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You message insinuates that the actions of producing a computer chip with some technology is clearly and inexcusably morally wrong.
In this case, that insinuation is considered by many to be correct.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
Once a hugely-powerful system like this is fully-implemented, "stupid DRM tricks" are actually the least worrisome aspect. What government can accomplish in the way of control of everyone's information & digital communications is far more worrisome.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Note that they aren't being charged with anything yet - that's why it's called an investigation. And the reason why it's warranted is because Intel is already in a monopoly position, and so it's far easier for them to affect competition even with relatively small moves.
I have no problems playing from my retail BD-ROM discs. Sorry, but it still sounds like FUD to me. In fact, right now I happen to, on my desktop, be watching Battlestar Galactica, from a Bluray disc, over a VGA cable, at 1080p, on a CRT monitor, in Windows 7. And it's working absolutely 100% fine.