Sorry. I didnt have cable at the time. I just had the inputs hitched to a nice decent antennae concealed in the frame of a window. A little tweaking and I got 4 over air stations and an HDTV station.
TV is but one puzzle piece. A nice media center like I talked about is an awesome piece of equipment. A triplet of 100 GB hard drives and a fast broadband connection and let's just say I never wanted for entertainment, it was stable and flawless, and it was add-free. The costs were under $300 plus odd and ends I had on hand.
...I had for a time a Dual P3 Myth-TV server that had 5 encoders running on it.
I had to two diskless nodes that netbooted Myth-TV over my wireless network that would display the content. All told I had about 25 GB of music, 150 GB of content, and the ability to record up to 5 shows at a single time.
I looked over the compatibility issues you linked to, and was wondering where in the list of items (which is brief, by-the-way) you belive to be anti-competitive. You called them that - "clearly anti-competitive".
I've been developing with SOAP for a long time, and have several cross-platform products in daily heavy use that use SOAP and XML in general very heavily.
I've found MS's reading of the standard and spec to be spot on virtually every case. I have found that a lot of smaller SOAP servers/clients are sorely lacking and are incompatible with MS's SOAP routines through their own ignorance of the standard, bugs, or willful neglect.
In almost any standard there is room for interpretation.
What specifically do you fault MS for in their handling of SOAP?
Especially their editors.
I code is VS.NET 2003 probably on average 6 hrs a day. My main development machine has no mouse. What exactly is the problem you are having?
MFC was a fiasco from the start: thin OO wrappers around the Windows API.
Exactly. MFC sucks and is a disaster.
.NET is such huge improvement over MFC that it's ridiculous. VS.NET 2003 and the beta of VS.NET 2005 are both excellent environments for all kinds of development.
The whole idea of a bytecode runtime - like Java or NET is to abstract you and the system but in a good way.
Borland has had excellent tools, and I did really like them for a bit. But the quality of their tools does not detract from what MS offers.
MS has really gone - since Ballmer got on board - the extra mile for getting developers good stuff. The death of MFC was a big one.
The really big flaw would have to something like the Nexus Just Doesn't Work, or that it incorrectly calculates a hash or a key or some such thing. A buffer overflow in the firmware maybe could cause it to die.
The mostly like failure is that the Nexus has a hardware flaw. It's essentially a big sandbox. As a comparison, look over at Java's history and see that very few instances of the sandbox being broken has actually occured. Even with MS's spotty record the.NET runtime sandboxing has been suprisingly high quality so far. Luckily, the Nexus is a hardware/firmware combination, so the reality is that MS won't be designing.
If the binary is the key to decrypting the secured storage, and the binary is stored on the disk, then anything with physical access to that disk can decrypt the secured storage area. All you need to decrypt something is the thing that you're decrypting, the algorithm used to encrypt it, and the key. You have all three, so you can read it.
No, I just don't think you are following. The OS and therefore spyware has no physical access to sealed storage. If the encypted data is at location 0 on disk, and the OS asks for location 0, the hardware is told "There is no location 0". An application has to ask the Nexus for location 0. The Nexus knows that only binaries "which are the key" (the key may be stored in the binary, maybe a hash, maybe meta-data who knows - it could be nothing actually; it's not perfectly defined yet the key storage mechanism) have access to a sealed storage. Remember every app has it owns storage.
I tend to doubt that TCPA will actually block the OS from reading data off a drive. There is no need to - if the data is encrypted then there is no benefit to protecting it.
It's key component of the system. The OS is not in control of the resources. It is specifically designed so that a bug in the OS or a bug in the application cannot result in compromised data. Every DRM'd app stores data in its own physically isolated (one draft of the design called for seperate banks of drives/flash ram for sealed storage). If you just relied on encryption you'd be open to man-in-the-middle attacks, bugs in the encryption/decryption routine, memory munging, etc.
I still haven't seen anything that suggests that if spyware were able to gain elevated privs on a TCPA-based machine that it wouldn't be harder to get rid of it as a result.
There isn't such thing as "elevated privelages". You keep missing that. A DRM app does not have special rights. It has *fewer* overall rights, and exclusive rights to a specific bit of memory/disk. That app has no special control over the OS.
Now, you can certainly argue that the spyware would never make it past the Nexus in the first place, and you may be right. However, the general pattern has been that nothing like this has every been bulletproof in v1.0.
You are missing it. If a piece of spyware was run as DRM'd app - which I am sure could happen - it won't be hard to do basically it's just a runtime flag that triggers the Nexus to take over, it'd have access *only* to it's own sealed storage. If you had a web-browser that was DRM'd, it could only operate within it's own little land. Another DRM'd app can't interact with it. A system component can't interact with it. It is an island of isolation.
And the binary is on the disk, and consequently the spyware can access the key stored inside of it.
No. Not at all. The binary is the key. The binary is loaded into memory by the OS, and then asked to run secure. Boom. Nexus jumps in. Decrypts the file using the binary. Now on the application level, I imagine vendors will use another layer of encryption inside, one that stores the key remotely. Regardless, only the Nexus has access to the sealed data, even in encrypted form. Even though it's on the same disk doesn't mean that Windows will have physical access to it.
What is the point of DRM on office machies?
Most data inside an office is meant to stay there. It's the ultimate in data security. The data cannot physically leave the machines.
DRM is about way more than the piddly movie industry. I am sure Enron would loved to be able to prevent people forwarding e-mails, to disappear e-mails permanetly, to disable printing or copying of sensitive incriminating e-mails, etc.
My feeling is that TCPA will be used for uses beyond those advertised by those promoting it...
TCPA is really sound technology. It's a very very well designed system with very loopholes. Even running a virtual system within your system is defeated. Getting access to the sealed storage will require hardware hacking that very few people could successfully handle.
TCPA will probably be attempted for home PCs, but, the bottom line is that it's going to be (1) expensive and (2) restricting to the point that most people will just stay away. There is no incentive to get people to use TCPA. Apps have to specially written for it. Media can already be purchased very cheaply - 99 for a song, $9 on DVD for a movie. It's not like prices will drop with the TCPA encoded media.
TCPA is mainly going to the realm of corporate computing, and the very paranoid. TCPA is extremely useful for protecting stuff you dont want anyone seeing - like the police.
Or, perhaps, instead of resting the fact that the airshp was full of hydrogen on the US embargo, you can look one step deeper into the problem and assign some weight to the fact that US restricted trade with Germany because of the Nazi government.
Spyware could use said hole to gain access to the entire system
No. That's untrue. The nexus even doesn't have access to the secure areas of the various programs without the actual binary being loaded into the secure portion of memory. The binary contains/is the key needed to decrypt the sealed storage. The lone binary is the *only* application that can access the sealed data and memory.
When you went to delete it, the operating system would be denied access since it is no longer trusted to modify the spyware.
You are misunderstanding how the system works. The OS doesn't trust binaries, the binaries trust the OS. If spyware infected the OS, that's fine. The individual binaries can check the hash against theier own internal database (or web based database), and determine if it trusts the OS/Nexus combination. If this is true, the binary allows itself to be loaded by providing the decryption keys directly via an isolated hardware path to the nexus which remember is a piece of hardware. That nexus provides the decryption/encryption for the sealed memory, disk space, and secure input/output path.
The big thing that people misundestand is how the system works. It is largely not based on trust. It is largely based on sandboxing, which is a big step for MS. Not every app will run in "isoloated" or "protected" mode. I can see people running their corporate e-mail in that mode because the IT people require it. No e-mail can be saved, printed, forwarded, etc and all storage of it is tightly encrypted. Even screen shots would be impossible without hardware such as cameras and the like (and btw, with certain monitor filters this can be prevented, as well).
My feeling is that it should be illegal to sell a user anything which contains an embedded key for which the user is not given a copy of all mathematically related keys (ie the associated private/public keys).
The TCPA system does not rely on any embedded key in the OS or hardware. There is a hash which is generated by the Nexus at power-on that describes the system. Everything else - all other keys - are handled by the individual applications that are designed to be run in "isloated" DRM land.
If I own something, I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
The point of TCPA systems is that you don't own (1) the computer (corporate does), (2) the sofware (it is rented), or (3) the data (you are leasing it/renting it). In those cases you can't do whatever you want with it.
The main purpose of TCPA is (1) lock-in. Applicatons that are "isolated" can only store data in isolated areas. No other app can access that data. Period. You are tied to that app. There is no phsyical way to get that data in or out of the system short of transcription. The other main purpose is that applications can decided whether or not to trust the hardware/software combination on the machine. Then the software can load encrypted content and not worry about being ripped or copied. You could have a media player which downloads songs from a secure store at 99/each. Those songs are downloaded from the player by the player, and stored in encrypted form is sealed storage. No other apps can get it.. The media player phones home before every use just to check you still have a license. You can't copy, burn, etc - except maybe in "protected" form to a secure portable player or encrypted data CD maybe. Same thing with DVD style movies etc.
The secure applications are totally immune to spyware. If spyware changes a system component, the hash is invalided and does not match up against approved hashes when the app phones home. It refuses to load until the spyware is removed the hash once again matches the pre-approved list.
The rest of the system suffers the same way it does now. The "Rest of the system" is effectively Windows today. The difference is that you dont have to worry about spyware sending your bank records to Russia if your financial software is an "i
True. I looked at my contract, and it does however expliciltly state that (1) phone calls maybe monitored, and (2) that the contract is not voided by a dissatisfaction with service or pratices.
You have no right to cell phone service, or cable TV, or computer tech support, or whatever. It's agreement - tit for tat.
For the things that are truly considered rights: interaction with government, phone service, etc you can always conduct business like they did fifty years ago. By mail.
What they want to know is: how much crappy service is the average customer willing to put up with before thinking seriously about switching.
Then they aim to provide just above that level.. so they want to know: "What is the least amount of money we can spend to please the largest number of customers just enough to keep thme as customers"
The grandparent poster has no idea even how MS's DRM OS is proposing to work. There is no "master" key garbage.
Software which is "protected" runs in it's own little world: the memory, video path, input path, and file storage areas are encrypted using strong encryption techniques so that only the "owner application" has physical access to a decrypted copy.
An application that wants to use this "technology" does not get validated by the OS, but the other way around. The application validates the OS, probably by way of Internet communication. So it's something like this:
1. Machine boots. The nexus, which is a piece of hardware, takes a hash of the operating system sub-system that handles the DRM, as well as the firmware onboard the security hardned co-processors. This is stored in a piece of memory that is physically hardened and isolated from software: there is no direct access to it. Only the nexus can write to it. The rest of the system can only read from it.
2. OS loads.
3. Application is loaded. Checks the signature generated by the nexus and stored in protected memory. Opens a secure connection back to its "home base" - the maker of the software - to see if it wants to operate with the specified hardware/software combination. If it does, it continues to load. Otherwise, it bombs out or switches into a "non-secure" mode.
4. The nexus provides access to "sealed" resources: resources that are only available to an application with the right key. Any data that the application creates gets stamped with this key and is seperated by way of this encryption from all other data. Other applications that tried to see this data would get only garbage, since the nexus doesn't have the key to decrypt.
This is what is important. If you wanted to create a secure word processor say, which only allowed data to be read and written with that app, did not allow copying, printing, or screen captures and all that you would be golden with this system. When the user started that program it would only see a sealed area of the disk. The "C" drive would be unavailable. OTher secure programs sealed area would be unavailable (and presumably invisible, but regardless, unavailable). Only the program would have access to this area. Not even the OS (aka, Windows) has access to it. ONLY the code that is "trusted" by the Nexus has access to the unencrypted data. Same thing memory. And the video signal, and/or audio, etc.
So this bit about spyware taking over the PC and not allowing it to be uninstalled, thats garbage.
If a piece of spyware got into the OS, it's okay from the trusted apps perspective. The OS does not have access to the sealed data. Ever. The OS doens't have the encryption keys. The key is the application. Now, lets say someone hacked the trusted application. Okay, that' bad for that application. Now a bad application can read/write to that trusted area, but, and this is big: no other part of the system - including the OS or other secure areas. This is very big.
The TCPA or Palladium system has a lot of OSS people very scared because virtually all of the OSS apps that are "work-a-likes" could be damaged. If only Office was allowed to read/write Office files, OpenOffice and its ilk would be very severely hampered.
That's an interesting case. "Crimain threats" amounting to "felony disturbing the peace" is a bit of an interesting comparison though. "Criminal threatening" is generally a pretty serious crime: calling people/stalking people and making sick/murderous threats, "mob" style cornering in an ally, that type of thing. Interesting...
The point isn't about copying. It's about the cost of buying. DVDs are becoming cheaper. People who have the disposable cash to rent also have the disposable cash to own, in this case. The gap is not very wide. This is a bad recipe for a rental industry.
The size of the rental market is shrinking, and the national chains right now are buying each other to stave off failure. Economies of scale and whatnot can only take you so far.
Look into how Blockbusters stock has been doing, and why virtually no industry analysts have a "Strong Buy" or "Buy" rating on a rental business.
I am not sure what about Firefox and Thunderbird allows users to bypass permissions checking. On a normal Win2k/XP system regular users cannot view another users "home" directory. It's been a while since I used Thunderbird, but last time I did mail was stored in a sub-directory from the program location. This would allow any user to see what other users did.
Where I buy DVDs, they are Buy 2, Get 2 free. Typical cost brackets are $7.99, $9.99, $12.99 or $14.99.
That means, like last weekend, I bought the new Harry Potter movie, Shrek 2 while my wife bought two Star Trek movies. We got two for free, ended up paying $20 for 4 DVDs. Rental cost for those same 4 DVDs is $16 at the same location.
For 20% more we can own it, and chances are we'll watch, we'll lend it out a few times, and then watch it again over the next long winter.
Renting DVDs is a bad, bad, bad proposition. Blockbuster's days are limited.
"When everyone tries to rent a DVD"...
Very funny.
News flash dude. If your retirement fund is invested in Blockbuster or one of the other national chains I'd start to think about selling before the end comes...
Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, etc are screwed. Rentals are of course plumeting. Why?
It's not cost effective to pay $4 to rent a $12 movie.
Yes, having a food shortage in the US would be a disaster. A truly awful thing to imagine from a security perspective. We need to be able to grow our own food, even if it is cheaper to simply import it. The ability to fundamentally self-sustain your people is a major hurdle in being a stable nation.
Wheat, corn, sugar, diary, vegetables, berries, nuts, various fruits and other grown products are key to being a stable nation. If all the farmers go out of business due to foreign competition the nation is profoundly weakened. Our economy would be totally controlled by outside forces - which is a diaster.
Imagine. OPEC can mess with our economy by shifting production and raising or lowering prices. Fine. The effect is somewhat delayed: oil produced today doesn't get to my car until a solid 5-6 months have gone by.
Food is different. Much of it spoils. Much of it is needed *exactly* when it is needed, not before and not after. If a nation decided to devalue the US dollar by force, it could collude to with hold food shipments for, say, two weeks. Supermarket store shelves will literally run dry within another week. A run on all kinds of products will ensue, and prices will skyrocket. The average American family is unused to inflation in a dramatic fashion. Food bills going from $100-150 a week to $300 a week will destroy the budget of even affluent households. That difference in money means the family has gone from $150 a week in discrentionary spending to zero, or less than zero. And that could *literally* kill the US economy, depression era style crash. Industry after industry would fail if food prices doubled. Entertainment, okay no big loss. Credit as people default on loans and credit to pay for necessary items. Auto as the amount of car a person can afford decreased. Vacation, tourism, home building/constructio - every aspect of the American economy would be challened by a sudden rise in food prices.
Oil usuage - despite what people tell you - are fairly elastic. Some people need X gallons to function: commuting to work, deliveries, shopping, etc. But a lot of the gasoline and home heating oil used in the country is very much a measure of how much is available.
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Sorry. I didnt have cable at the time. I just had the inputs hitched to a nice decent antennae concealed in the frame of a window. A little tweaking and I got 4 over air stations and an HDTV station.
TV is but one puzzle piece. A nice media center like I talked about is an awesome piece of equipment. A triplet of 100 GB hard drives and a fast broadband connection and let's just say I never wanted for entertainment, it was stable and flawless, and it was add-free. The costs were under $300 plus odd and ends I had on hand.
Well..
...I had for a time a Dual P3 Myth-TV server that had 5 encoders running on it.
I had to two diskless nodes that netbooted Myth-TV over my wireless network that would display the content. All told I had about 25 GB of music, 150 GB of content, and the ability to record up to 5 shows at a single time.
I was pretty happy with it.
I looked over the compatibility issues you linked to, and was wondering where in the list of items (which is brief, by-the-way) you belive to be anti-competitive. You called them that - "clearly anti-competitive".
I've been developing with SOAP for a long time, and have several cross-platform products in daily heavy use that use SOAP and XML in general very heavily.
I've found MS's reading of the standard and spec to be spot on virtually every case. I have found that a lot of smaller SOAP servers/clients are sorely lacking and are incompatible with MS's SOAP routines through their own ignorance of the standard, bugs, or willful neglect.
In almost any standard there is room for interpretation.
What specifically do you fault MS for in their handling of SOAP?
Especially their editors.
I code is VS.NET 2003 probably on average 6 hrs a day. My main development machine has no mouse. What exactly is the problem you are having?
MFC was a fiasco from the start: thin OO wrappers around the Windows API.
.NET is such huge improvement over MFC that it's ridiculous. VS.NET 2003 and the beta of VS.NET 2005 are both excellent environments for all kinds of development.
Exactly. MFC sucks and is a disaster.
The whole idea of a bytecode runtime - like Java or NET is to abstract you and the system but in a good way.
Borland has had excellent tools, and I did really like them for a bit. But the quality of their tools does not detract from what MS offers.
MS has really gone - since Ballmer got on board - the extra mile for getting developers good stuff. The death of MFC was a big one.
Really?
Hmm.. you know, as an actual developer of software, it really actually had it's intended effect.
The tools MS is providing for developers now are really great. Such an improvement to five years ago. The resources available are just pretty great.
Software sells systems, and MS is doing a good job getting and retaining great ISVs for their platform.
The really big flaw would have to something like the Nexus Just Doesn't Work, or that it incorrectly calculates a hash or a key or some such thing. A buffer overflow in the firmware maybe could cause it to die.
.NET runtime sandboxing has been suprisingly high quality so far. Luckily, the Nexus is a hardware/firmware combination, so the reality is that MS won't be designing.
The mostly like failure is that the Nexus has a hardware flaw. It's essentially a big sandbox. As a comparison, look over at Java's history and see that very few instances of the sandbox being broken has actually occured. Even with MS's spotty record the
If the binary is the key to decrypting the secured storage, and the binary is stored on the disk, then anything with physical access to that disk can decrypt the secured storage area. All you need to decrypt something is the thing that you're decrypting, the algorithm used to encrypt it, and the key. You have all three, so you can read it.
No, I just don't think you are following. The OS and therefore spyware has no physical access to sealed storage. If the encypted data is at location 0 on disk, and the OS asks for location 0, the hardware is told "There is no location 0". An application has to ask the Nexus for location 0. The Nexus knows that only binaries "which are the key" (the key may be stored in the binary, maybe a hash, maybe meta-data who knows - it could be nothing actually; it's not perfectly defined yet the key storage mechanism) have access to a sealed storage. Remember every app has it owns storage.
I tend to doubt that TCPA will actually block the OS from reading data off a drive. There is no need to - if the data is encrypted then there is no benefit to protecting it.
It's key component of the system. The OS is not in control of the resources. It is specifically designed so that a bug in the OS or a bug in the application cannot result in compromised data. Every DRM'd app stores data in its own physically isolated (one draft of the design called for seperate banks of drives/flash ram for sealed storage). If you just relied on encryption you'd be open to man-in-the-middle attacks, bugs in the encryption/decryption routine, memory munging, etc.
I still haven't seen anything that suggests that if spyware were able to gain elevated privs on a TCPA-based machine that it wouldn't be harder to get rid of it as a result.
There isn't such thing as "elevated privelages". You keep missing that. A DRM app does not have special rights. It has *fewer* overall rights, and exclusive rights to a specific bit of memory/disk. That app has no special control over the OS.
Now, you can certainly argue that the spyware would never make it past the Nexus in the first place, and you may be right. However, the general pattern has been that nothing like this has every been bulletproof in v1.0.
You are missing it. If a piece of spyware was run as DRM'd app - which I am sure could happen - it won't be hard to do basically it's just a runtime flag that triggers the Nexus to take over, it'd have access *only* to it's own sealed storage. If you had a web-browser that was DRM'd, it could only operate within it's own little land. Another DRM'd app can't interact with it. A system component can't interact with it. It is an island of isolation.
And the binary is on the disk, and consequently the spyware can access the key stored inside of it.
No. Not at all. The binary is the key. The binary is loaded into memory by the OS, and then asked to run secure. Boom. Nexus jumps in. Decrypts the file using the binary. Now on the application level, I imagine vendors will use another layer of encryption inside, one that stores the key remotely. Regardless, only the Nexus has access to the sealed data, even in encrypted form. Even though it's on the same disk doesn't mean that Windows will have physical access to it.
What is the point of DRM on office machies?
Most data inside an office is meant to stay there. It's the ultimate in data security. The data cannot physically leave the machines.
DRM is about way more than the piddly movie industry. I am sure Enron would loved to be able to prevent people forwarding e-mails, to disappear e-mails permanetly, to disable printing or copying of sensitive incriminating e-mails, etc.
My feeling is that TCPA will be used for uses beyond those advertised by those promoting it...
TCPA is really sound technology. It's a very very well designed system with very loopholes. Even running a virtual system within your system is defeated. Getting access to the sealed storage will require hardware hacking that very few people could successfully handle.
TCPA will probably be attempted for home PCs, but, the bottom line is that it's going to be (1) expensive and (2) restricting to the point that most people will just stay away. There is no incentive to get people to use TCPA. Apps have to specially written for it. Media can already be purchased very cheaply - 99 for a song, $9 on DVD for a movie. It's not like prices will drop with the TCPA encoded media.
TCPA is mainly going to the realm of corporate computing, and the very paranoid. TCPA is extremely useful for protecting stuff you dont want anyone seeing - like the police.
It's clearly not just a software package.
It's an entire information system.
Something like that for an entire organization run by the government, naw, $500M is probably just about right.
You need servers, infrastructure, programmers, support people, consultants, all kinds of management..
$500M isn't off the chart.
And that decision to keep us relying on oil for power generation rather than nuclear power has really worked out in the long run, hasn't it?
Or, perhaps, instead of resting the fact that the airshp was full of hydrogen on the US embargo, you can look one step deeper into the problem and assign some weight to the fact that US restricted trade with Germany because of the Nazi government.
Spyware could use said hole to gain access to the entire system
No. That's untrue. The nexus even doesn't have access to the secure areas of the various programs without the actual binary being loaded into the secure portion of memory. The binary contains/is the key needed to decrypt the sealed storage. The lone binary is the *only* application that can access the sealed data and memory.
When you went to delete it, the operating system would be denied access since it is no longer trusted to modify the spyware.
You are misunderstanding how the system works. The OS doesn't trust binaries, the binaries trust the OS. If spyware infected the OS, that's fine. The individual binaries can check the hash against theier own internal database (or web based database), and determine if it trusts the OS/Nexus combination. If this is true, the binary allows itself to be loaded by providing the decryption keys directly via an isolated hardware path to the nexus which remember is a piece of hardware. That nexus provides the decryption/encryption for the sealed memory, disk space, and secure input/output path.
The big thing that people misundestand is how the system works. It is largely not based on trust. It is largely based on sandboxing, which is a big step for MS. Not every app will run in "isoloated" or "protected" mode. I can see people running their corporate e-mail in that mode because the IT people require it. No e-mail can be saved, printed, forwarded, etc and all storage of it is tightly encrypted. Even screen shots would be impossible without hardware such as cameras and the like (and btw, with certain monitor filters this can be prevented, as well).
My feeling is that it should be illegal to sell a user anything which contains an embedded key for which the user is not given a copy of all mathematically related keys (ie the associated private/public keys).
The TCPA system does not rely on any embedded key in the OS or hardware. There is a hash which is generated by the Nexus at power-on that describes the system. Everything else - all other keys - are handled by the individual applications that are designed to be run in "isloated" DRM land.
If I own something, I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
The point of TCPA systems is that you don't own (1) the computer (corporate does), (2) the sofware (it is rented), or (3) the data (you are leasing it/renting it). In those cases you can't do whatever you want with it.
The main purpose of TCPA is (1) lock-in. Applicatons that are "isolated" can only store data in isolated areas. No other app can access that data. Period. You are tied to that app. There is no phsyical way to get that data in or out of the system short of transcription. The other main purpose is that applications can decided whether or not to trust the hardware/software combination on the machine. Then the software can load encrypted content and not worry about being ripped or copied. You could have a media player which downloads songs from a secure store at 99/each. Those songs are downloaded from the player by the player, and stored in encrypted form is sealed storage. No other apps can get it.. The media player phones home before every use just to check you still have a license. You can't copy, burn, etc - except maybe in "protected" form to a secure portable player or encrypted data CD maybe. Same thing with DVD style movies etc.
The secure applications are totally immune to spyware. If spyware changes a system component, the hash is invalided and does not match up against approved hashes when the app phones home. It refuses to load until the spyware is removed the hash once again matches the pre-approved list.
The rest of the system suffers the same way it does now. The "Rest of the system" is effectively Windows today. The difference is that you dont have to worry about spyware sending your bank records to Russia if your financial software is an "i
True. I looked at my contract, and it does however expliciltly state that (1) phone calls maybe monitored, and (2) that the contract is not voided by a dissatisfaction with service or pratices.
What's the dilemna?
You have no right to cell phone service, or cable TV, or computer tech support, or whatever. It's agreement - tit for tat.
For the things that are truly considered rights: interaction with government, phone service, etc you can always conduct business like they did fifty years ago. By mail.
What they want to know is: how much crappy service is the average customer willing to put up with before thinking seriously about switching.
Then they aim to provide just above that level.. so they want to know: "What is the least amount of money we can spend to please the largest number of customers just enough to keep thme as customers"
The grandparent poster has no idea even how MS's DRM OS is proposing to work. There is no "master" key garbage.
Software which is "protected" runs in it's own little world: the memory, video path, input path, and file storage areas are encrypted using strong encryption techniques so that only the "owner application" has physical access to a decrypted copy.
An application that wants to use this "technology" does not get validated by the OS, but the other way around. The application validates the OS, probably by way of Internet communication. So it's something like this:
1. Machine boots. The nexus, which is a piece of hardware, takes a hash of the operating system sub-system that handles the DRM, as well as the firmware onboard the security hardned co-processors. This is stored in a piece of memory that is physically hardened and isolated from software: there is no direct access to it. Only the nexus can write to it. The rest of the system can only read from it.
2. OS loads.
3. Application is loaded. Checks the signature generated by the nexus and stored in protected memory. Opens a secure connection back to its "home base" - the maker of the software - to see if it wants to operate with the specified hardware/software combination. If it does, it continues to load. Otherwise, it bombs out or switches into a "non-secure" mode.
4. The nexus provides access to "sealed" resources: resources that are only available to an application with the right key. Any data that the application creates gets stamped with this key and is seperated by way of this encryption from all other data. Other applications that tried to see this data would get only garbage, since the nexus doesn't have the key to decrypt.
This is what is important. If you wanted to create a secure word processor say, which only allowed data to be read and written with that app, did not allow copying, printing, or screen captures and all that you would be golden with this system. When the user started that program it would only see a sealed area of the disk. The "C" drive would be unavailable. OTher secure programs sealed area would be unavailable (and presumably invisible, but regardless, unavailable). Only the program would have access to this area. Not even the OS (aka, Windows) has access to it. ONLY the code that is "trusted" by the Nexus has access to the unencrypted data. Same thing memory. And the video signal, and/or audio, etc.
So this bit about spyware taking over the PC and not allowing it to be uninstalled, thats garbage.
If a piece of spyware got into the OS, it's okay from the trusted apps perspective. The OS does not have access to the sealed data. Ever. The OS doens't have the encryption keys. The key is the application. Now, lets say someone hacked the trusted application. Okay, that' bad for that application. Now a bad application can read/write to that trusted area, but, and this is big: no other part of the system - including the OS or other secure areas. This is very big.
The TCPA or Palladium system has a lot of OSS people very scared because virtually all of the OSS apps that are "work-a-likes" could be damaged. If only Office was allowed to read/write Office files, OpenOffice and its ilk would be very severely hampered.
That's an interesting case. "Crimain threats" amounting to "felony disturbing the peace" is a bit of an interesting comparison though. "Criminal threatening" is generally a pretty serious crime: calling people/stalking people and making sick/murderous threats, "mob" style cornering in an ally, that type of thing. Interesting...
I did a little research and couldn't find a case that matches what was described..
Anyone have any info on the case mentioned? I'd like to find it for a project I am working on...
Actually, I beg to differ.
The point isn't about copying. It's about the cost of buying. DVDs are becoming cheaper. People who have the disposable cash to rent also have the disposable cash to own, in this case. The gap is not very wide. This is a bad recipe for a rental industry.
The size of the rental market is shrinking, and the national chains right now are buying each other to stave off failure. Economies of scale and whatnot can only take you so far.
Look into how Blockbusters stock has been doing, and why virtually no industry analysts have a "Strong Buy" or "Buy" rating on a rental business.
That sounds right.. it was a long, long time ago. Glad to know they fixed that.. it was a major problem!
I am not sure what about Firefox and Thunderbird allows users to bypass permissions checking. On a normal Win2k/XP system regular users cannot view another users "home" directory. It's been a while since I used Thunderbird, but last time I did mail was stored in a sub-directory from the program location. This would allow any user to see what other users did.
No, DVDs DO NOT COST $25.
Where I buy DVDs, they are Buy 2, Get 2 free. Typical cost brackets are $7.99, $9.99, $12.99 or $14.99.
That means, like last weekend, I bought the new Harry Potter movie, Shrek 2 while my wife bought two Star Trek movies. We got two for free, ended up paying $20 for 4 DVDs. Rental cost for those same 4 DVDs is $16 at the same location.
For 20% more we can own it, and chances are we'll watch, we'll lend it out a few times, and then watch it again over the next long winter.
Renting DVDs is a bad, bad, bad proposition. Blockbuster's days are limited.
"When everyone tries to rent a DVD"... Very funny. News flash dude. If your retirement fund is invested in Blockbuster or one of the other national chains I'd start to think about selling before the end comes... Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, etc are screwed. Rentals are of course plumeting. Why?
It's not cost effective to pay $4 to rent a $12 movie.
Yes, having a food shortage in the US would be a disaster. A truly awful thing to imagine from a security perspective. We need to be able to grow our own food, even if it is cheaper to simply import it. The ability to fundamentally self-sustain your people is a major hurdle in being a stable nation.
Wheat, corn, sugar, diary, vegetables, berries, nuts, various fruits and other grown products are key to being a stable nation. If all the farmers go out of business due to foreign competition the nation is profoundly weakened. Our economy would be totally controlled by outside forces - which is a diaster.
Imagine. OPEC can mess with our economy by shifting production and raising or lowering prices. Fine. The effect is somewhat delayed: oil produced today doesn't get to my car until a solid 5-6 months have gone by.
Food is different. Much of it spoils. Much of it is needed *exactly* when it is needed, not before and not after. If a nation decided to devalue the US dollar by force, it could collude to with hold food shipments for, say, two weeks. Supermarket store shelves will literally run dry within another week. A run on all kinds of products will ensue, and prices will skyrocket. The average American family is unused to inflation in a dramatic fashion. Food bills going from $100-150 a week to $300 a week will destroy the budget of even affluent households. That difference in money means the family has gone from $150 a week in discrentionary spending to zero, or less than zero. And that could *literally* kill the US economy, depression era style crash. Industry after industry would fail if food prices doubled. Entertainment, okay no big loss. Credit as people default on loans and credit to pay for necessary items. Auto as the amount of car a person can afford decreased. Vacation, tourism, home building/constructio - every aspect of the American economy would be challened by a sudden rise in food prices.
Oil usuage - despite what people tell you - are fairly elastic. Some people need X gallons to function: commuting to work, deliveries, shopping, etc. But a lot of the gasoline and home heating oil used in the country is very much a measure of how much is available.