To say that Kasparov is no longer #1 is a bit rash; he'll rise again.
I doubt it. He is not that young anymore and cannot handle the psychological stress of a chess tournament as well as he could 10 years ago. He himself said in a recent interview that he thought that he'd be able to stay on top for maybe another 4-5 years tops. Looks like he overestimated his abilities.
I mean, I would love to have an electric powered car, right? Where would I charge it? Just about only at my house! What would I charge it in?
The biggest problem with electric cars is that there is no where near enough electricity to power even a small fraction of the cars that we have in this country. (remember all the power outages that we've been having lately?) We would need to probably double/triple the number of power plants we have to accomodate such demand and that's not easy to do not only because of the cost factor, but also because no one likes living right next to one (even if it's not nuclear).
But as far as I know, ANY software encryption is breakable.
Absolutely ANYTHING is breakable and it is doesn't matter whether the implementation is in software or hardware, except when it's a One-Time Pad and no one but the two parties know the keys.
If you can see how the decode process works, you can duplicate it.
Actually, you are talking about enCODING, not enCRYPTION. Encryption implies that you know EVERYTHING about the process except for the plaintext and the key but you would still need to either brute-force or use some more optimized cracking algorithm (the more inefficient, the better of course) to break it. DES, Triple DES, Blowfish are examples of symmetric ciphers that exhibit this behavior. RSA, ECC are assymetric or public-key algorithms.
There are very few details (no information about the encryption algorithm, for example) but my assessment of it is that it's absolutely useless in a Gnutella-like environment.
Basically, the file is encrypted with a symmetric (single key) encryption and you are then required to buy that key to decrypt the file. It is not clear whether Microsoft's media servers encrypt the file with a different key for each person requesting that stream (which would be the only way to do it to have at least SOME protection against piracy), but it is clear that even if it does that, it would be impossible to duplicate this behavior on Gnutella. You would be able to share only one file for each movie, so only one unique key can decrypt it. Thus, keys for such movies offered on Gnutella would start popping up on IRC channels, FTP and Web sites in no time, IMHO.
In fact, it would probably only facilitate piracy, since its a lot better to download a large movie from a fast connection from this company then from some warez FTP site that might go down at any time. Then you would need to go on that FTP site only to download the key.
People (or more importantly these companies) need to understand that encryption is NOT a solution for copy-protection (in fact, the only solution is not to give it away to anyone, if you don't want people to copy it) because it can only protect your information from unwanted eyes ONLY if both parties agree not to share it with anyone. If that is not the case, it is irrelevant whether you encrypt it or not - people are still gonna copy it.
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To say that Kasparov is no longer #1 is a bit rash; he'll rise again.
I doubt it. He is not that young anymore and cannot handle the psychological stress of a chess tournament as well as he could 10 years ago. He himself said in a recent interview that he thought that he'd be able to stay on top for maybe another 4-5 years tops. Looks like he overestimated his abilities.
I mean, I would love to have an electric powered car, right? Where would I charge it? Just about only at my house! What would I charge it in?
The biggest problem with electric cars is that there is no where near enough electricity to power even a small fraction of the cars that we have in this country. (remember all the power outages that we've been having lately?)
We would need to probably double/triple the number of power plants we have to accomodate such demand and that's not easy to do not only because of the cost factor, but also because no one likes living right next to one (even if it's not nuclear).
But as far as I know, ANY software encryption is breakable.
Absolutely ANYTHING is breakable and it is doesn't matter whether the implementation is in software or hardware, except when it's a One-Time Pad and no one but the two parties know the keys.
If you can see how the decode process works, you can duplicate it.
Actually, you are talking about enCODING, not enCRYPTION. Encryption implies that you know EVERYTHING about the process except for the plaintext and the key but you would still need to either brute-force or use some more optimized cracking algorithm (the more inefficient, the better of course) to break it. DES, Triple DES, Blowfish are examples of symmetric ciphers that exhibit this behavior. RSA, ECC are assymetric or public-key algorithms.
Here is the description of Microsoft's DRM System: http://www.microsoft.co m/windows/windowsmedia/en/wm7/drm/drm.asp
There are very few details (no information about the encryption algorithm, for example) but my assessment of it is that it's absolutely useless in a Gnutella-like environment.
Basically, the file is encrypted with a symmetric (single key) encryption and you are then required to buy that key to decrypt the file. It is not clear whether Microsoft's media servers encrypt the file with a different key for each person requesting that stream (which would be the only way to do it to have at least SOME protection against piracy), but it is clear that even if it does that, it would be impossible to duplicate this behavior on Gnutella. You would be able to share only one file for each movie, so only one unique key can decrypt it. Thus, keys for such movies offered on Gnutella would start popping up on IRC channels, FTP and Web sites in no time, IMHO.
In fact, it would probably only facilitate piracy, since its a lot better to download a large movie from a fast connection from this company then from some warez FTP site that might go down at any time. Then you would need to go on that FTP site only to download the key.
People (or more importantly these companies) need to understand that encryption is NOT a solution for copy-protection (in fact, the only solution is not to give it away to anyone, if you don't want people to copy it) because it can only protect your information from unwanted eyes ONLY if both parties agree not to share it with anyone. If that is not the case, it is irrelevant whether you encrypt it or not - people are still gonna copy it.