Adding an encryption chip may prevent the piracy from those who can afford it, but like something for nothing. Now they'll be forced to pay up if they really want the game.
Back in the real world this will make no difference at all to the "pirate", but will make it more likely that your game, music, movie, etc will fail for a customer.
It''s a no-brainer win situation for the developers.
It's actually a lose, since instead of developing and supporting a game, you have to develop and support a game plus the DRM for said game.
The principle problem I have is the companies and how they want it both ways. When you purchase software you're not buying it, you're "licensing" it. But if something happens to the media your licensed software came on, like it was scratched or broken and rendered unusable, you have to purchase another media at full price, despite the fact you've already "licensed" it.
Which dosn't just apply to games. The whole situation of "format shifting" audio & video is effectivly the same issue. Indeed even more so when there is no "upgrade path" from cassette/record to CD or DVD to Blue Ray...
Sure they have, but that doesn't affect the cost of doing business. They are losing customers if they don't keep making advances to try to prevent theft.
Adding any kind of "copy protection", is going to add to the cost of doing business. Because it will cause problems to customers. The company will need provide support to prevent negative publicity.
There are a lot of people out there who would pay money for a game but choose not to because they can get it for free. If I'm not mistaken, that's what they are trying to prevent -- losing the "would-be" customers to piracy, not those who never had any intention of purchasing it in the first place.
There is actually a third situation of people who either buy the whatever or encourage other people to buy, because they were able to "pirate" and evaluate it. These people's "world of mouth" may be more valuable than that of paid reviewers. It's also rather hard to know who are actually "potential customers" in the first place. Which can include those who would buy at a lower price or would buy if you would actually sell to them. As opposed to those who would just do without if they couldn't pirate, these people were never potential customers in the first place. This situation is a good example of "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." All forms of technically clever "copy protection" were popular 20-25 years ago, with much the same results as now.
This is completely true and I fail to see the benefit of doing this kind of stuff in hardware, I happen to work for one of the many semiconductor companies actively losing money trying to sell this TPM crap. Our largest volume TPM chip is on its tenth design rev because it keeps getting cracked. Every time this happens we get to eat our stack of old rev chips and scrap the wafers inline past the mask that needs to be fixed. On top of the risk of getting hacked the gross margins are crap to begin with, so I can only hope we will exit this business soon.
Maybe your company should try making magic wands instead. Whilst they won't work any better there might still be customers for your old designs even if you bring out a new one.
Encryption can be very much uncrackable, given certain conditions, such as the assumption that no viable quantum computers exist yet.
It's only as strong as the weakest link. A specific implication of encryption which can be mathematically shown to be secure may not actually be that secure in practice.
The confusion arises from assuming encryption can be applied to copy protection. It can't. That fails the second test above -- the "attacker" is the end-user, and if they didn't have a working key in some form, they couldn't play the game. Because they have the key, they can copy the game, full stop.
It might take awhile, but it's not the encryption that's flawed, it's the very concept of DRM.
Especially the concept that hacking cryptography will "work".
EULA's should be illegal. It is possible there are illegal even today (although it depends on the country your in, of course).
Or more likely "null and void". If they were actually illegal either those writing them would face prosecution or you could sue whoever provided you with one.
Once you've bought the product, the supplier have no authority for adding new restrictions. It might be different if you'll sign the EULA before buying the product.
In many cases the supplier isn't even the other "party" to an EULA. If you buy a computer from Dell then Microsoft isn't a party to that sale. If you were to buy a Dell computer from Alice's Computer then Dell isn't a party to the sale. Part of the theory behind EULA's is that they are some sort of "viral contract". Even if an EULA was something which you had to "sign before buying" it would still be subject to the "law of the land".
Basically, this is an issue of "doing things against the wishes of copyright holders is illegal" after our equilevant of the RIAA strongarmed a law through.
Most likely doing things against a small selection of copyright holders. Given that it would be hard to find an actual person aged over about two and any corporate person who isn't a "copyright holder". It would not be suprising if the majority of copyright holders (or at least the majority of those prepared to express an opinion) were opposed to all sorts of DRM.
What's the difference between encrypting and encoding? Is passwordless encryption anything more than a mere encoding of the data?!
What many people insist on calling "codes" are actually ciphers anyway. The difference is that actual codes are linguistic whereas ciphers are mathematical. Anything which uses a machine has to be some sort of cipher...
Let's just call ASCII a way to cipher text!
It would be more accurate to have this mean "American Standard Cipher for Information Interchange" since it's a simple subsitution cipher. As is EBCIDIC, unicode, baudot, even morse "code".
It also means that they can stagger the release of a movie around the world, and then stagger the DVD release whilst keeping people from getting DVDs from one of the earlier regions into one of the other regions whilst the movie is still in the theatres there (thus creating extra ticket sales from the people who just have to see the movie more than once and can not get it on a DVD yet)
Or at least that is the theory. In practice most of the planet has region free DVD players, which are not catching on in the US now that TV series are appearing on DVD. Some countries have even declared the whole region coding system to be illegal. Finally just about everything is likely to be available free of any DRM as soon as it's been made available anywhere...
The CEO bit is some misinformation, though -- part of the point of a corporation is to limit liability. If a corporation was responsible for criminal acts, the investors and most employees (at least, those not directly involved in the wrongdoing) would be free of liability.
The original idea was that the investors wouldn't be liable for the debts of a failed company. The worst that could happen is that they'd lose the money they had put in. Even if most employees and all shareholders were not party to a criminal act by a CEO it would make no sense to sheild them from the effects of a criminal investigation.
My issue in this case is not with the RIAA, but with the US government being hijacked by corporations for the benefit of a few.
Not just the US government, many of the same corporations are trying (with varying degrees of sucess) to get these kind of laws everywhere on the entire planet. The other problem is that these laws are often useless against large corporations themselves. (Criminal law especially, corporations can be sued, but they can't be jailed). Otherwise something drastic would have happened to Sony when they put a "rootkit" on what were allegedly music CDs.
Sony has plenty of money, and continues to make plenty of money even with the "rampant piracy" that happens today.
Also in a time where many businesses are finding their costs increasing due to economic factors outside of their control, such as the rising price of oil and the resulting increase in the price of all oil derived products.
Sure, their aging business model is starting to have diminshing returns, but that's life. Progress happens. Technology improves and outdated methods go the way of the horse and buggy.
A sensible company in such a situation either looks to change their business model or ceases trading. In both cases whilst they are still "in credit".
This law is a clear demonstration of the government being in the pockets of the corporations. It gives way too much power, and eliminates virtually all of the real benefits of copyright (aside from the single purpose of diverting money from the people into the hands of a few corporations).
In many cases these same corporations have zero respect for the copyright of anyone outside their own group. There even appear to be cases, such as the "mainstream media", where copyright infringment is almost routine. As well as soliciting material from readers and viewers, then hiding somewhere in the terms and conditions that by doing so you are transfering copyright to them, even if they don't broadcast/print it. As opposed to somthing like, "We won't pass it to any third party, it we use it we will credit it as yours and pay you X amount of money. Unless you wish to apply different terms and conditions to our using your work, if we don't agree with them then we won't publish your work."
It is hard to design laws to be adaptable to every possible situation. They had to pick a point and.08% is what they determined. Maybe you are fine driving at 0.1 or higher, but that makes you an exception. There are probably some people who are dangerous well below that level, but they can still legally drive. If you are driving period, you are risking your life and the lives of others. Adding further impairment to the situation (such as drinking, drugs, being tired, distractions) makes the risk even worse.
Maybe what's needed instead is simply a law against "dangerous driving", regardless of the reason.
The overall situation would still be an improvement. A lot of alcohol consumption would be *replaced* by pot usage if pot were legal. Alcohol is a powerful drug that tends to cause belligerent, violent and reckless behavior a large percentage of its users.
As well as some of the users requiring medical treatment for both short and long term effects. Ethanol has a fairly narrow "theraputic index". However alcohol prohibition appears to be a far worst alternative to legal (and regulated) alcoholic beverages. Buy a legal alcholic beverage and you can be sure that what you are getting is what you expect. With any illegal drug you'd need an extensive chemistry lab to have any idea what you were actually getting.
only because it's outlawed and you can't just smoke it freely. make it legal and increase it's use 10x then get back to me. bottom line is misuse of any drug will cause social problems, and if you make it more obtainable than you'll have more problems.
It needs to be remembered that prohibition causes a whole set of social problems. Including drug dealers fighting actual shooting wars between themselves and the police. Also prohibition has effects on how the drug in question is used, effects which tend to encourage misuse. Including "binging" due to uncertainty of supply and/or quality of product.
Here's something I would really like to see: Drug tests for every elected office holder, every day. Make the results public as soon as they're available.
Which drugs would the tests be for? If the tests were for everything currently illegal there might be a long wait for all of the results...
that all the problems these days can be solved either by litigating or by making laws enabling the government to collect more and more personal information.
This being something which fools believe, though increasing taxation appears to go along with this. Probably to pay for all the increased paperwork and spying.
You could always move all your servers to Canada and not have those unnecessary insecure servers in the US. Seems like someone made a bad decision setting up your infrastructure having them in the US to begin with seeing as you have global clients.
If they have global clients then they may not be able to have all their servers in one country. For just this kind of reason. Though they certainly don't want to locate many servers in a country which most of the rest of the planet is likely to object to having data sent to. The US is definitly likely to be on a list of such countries. Whereas Canada isn't.
The Canadian government trying to keep things in Canada is very standard practice. I didn't RTFA and I'm sure it mentions the Patriot Act, but I really doubt the Patriot Act is the sole reason that they won't outsource hosting companies to the US. Their policy is most likely that they can not outsource anything to anywhere outside of Canada unless they have no choice.
Thus you could call Canada's actions a "patriot policy" or even a "patriot act":) Being reluctant to outsource anything outside one's country undoubtedly is patriotic.
It's not even about sensitivity. It's simply the uncertainty that the US government deems it their right to, at any time, for any harebrained reason, snoop into your data. No sane company or even governmental institution would accept that. It's like legalizing industrial (and other) espionage.
If you were from somewhere with data protection laws then it's most likely to be illegal to store certain kinds of data anywhere which dosn't have at least similar laws and/or the appropriate treaties in place.
Oh I parse it just fine, the point I'm trying to make is that what innocently and with good intentions started out to mean man-made chemicals has unfortunately tarnished the word chemical. You talk about chemicals in the body and they'll shy away as if its a bad thing - though you may be talking about haemoglobin. You will hear people talking who have missed the point that carbon dioxide/monoxide levels are bad and instead choose to believe that carbon is one of the evils of the world and comes from exhaust pipes. Never mind that we are all carbon based ourselves, along with most of our diet.
All you have to do would be to get these people to abstain from "di-hydrogen monoxide". That should show results within a week.
Still, all-natural cobra venom will kill you dead, but if you have to choose between fresh organically-certified fruit and fruit with added chemicals, I'd go with the first option.
Assuming the first fruit wasn't toxic to humans, as several are.
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Adding an encryption chip may prevent the piracy from those who can afford it, but like something for nothing. Now they'll be forced to pay up if they really want the game.
Back in the real world this will make no difference at all to the "pirate", but will make it more likely that your game, music, movie, etc will fail for a customer.
It''s a no-brainer win situation for the developers.
It's actually a lose, since instead of developing and supporting a game, you have to develop and support a game plus the DRM for said game.
The principle problem I have is the companies and how they want it both ways. When you purchase software you're not buying it, you're "licensing" it. But if something happens to the media your licensed software came on, like it was scratched or broken and rendered unusable, you have to purchase another media at full price, despite the fact you've already "licensed" it.
Which dosn't just apply to games. The whole situation of "format shifting" audio & video is effectivly the same issue. Indeed even more so when there is no "upgrade path" from cassette/record to CD or DVD to Blue Ray...
Sure they have, but that doesn't affect the cost of doing business. They are losing customers if they don't keep making advances to try to prevent theft.
Adding any kind of "copy protection", is going to add to the cost of doing business. Because it will cause problems to customers. The company will need provide support to prevent negative publicity.
There are a lot of people out there who would pay money for a game but choose not to because they can get it for free. If I'm not mistaken, that's what they are trying to prevent -- losing the "would-be" customers to piracy, not those who never had any intention of purchasing it in the first place.
There is actually a third situation of people who either buy the whatever or encourage other people to buy, because they were able to "pirate" and evaluate it. These people's "world of mouth" may be more valuable than that of paid reviewers.
It's also rather hard to know who are actually "potential customers" in the first place. Which can include those who would buy at a lower price or would buy if you would actually sell to them. As opposed to those who would just do without if they couldn't pirate, these people were never potential customers in the first place.
This situation is a good example of "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." All forms of technically clever "copy protection" were popular 20-25 years ago, with much the same results as now.
This is completely true and I fail to see the benefit of doing this kind of stuff in hardware, I happen to work for one of the many semiconductor companies actively losing money trying to sell this TPM crap. Our largest volume TPM chip is on its tenth design rev because it keeps getting cracked. Every time this happens we get to eat our stack of old rev chips and scrap the wafers inline past the mask that needs to be fixed. On top of the risk of getting hacked the gross margins are crap to begin with, so I can only hope we will exit this business soon.
Maybe your company should try making magic wands instead. Whilst they won't work any better there might still be customers for your old designs even if you bring out a new one.
Encryption can be very much uncrackable, given certain conditions, such as the assumption that no viable quantum computers exist yet.
It's only as strong as the weakest link. A specific implication of encryption which can be mathematically shown to be secure may not actually be that secure in practice.
The confusion arises from assuming encryption can be applied to copy protection. It can't. That fails the second test above -- the "attacker" is the end-user, and if they didn't have a working key in some form, they couldn't play the game. Because they have the key, they can copy the game, full stop.
It might take awhile, but it's not the encryption that's flawed, it's the very concept of DRM.
Especially the concept that hacking cryptography will "work".
Sometimes companies are blinded by the promises of DRM to boost up their profit, and they don't consider that sometimes piracy actually helps sales.
Or that making a product which is more likely to break is likely to annoy their customers and potentially cost them money.
Sometimes companies are blinded by the promises of DRM to boost up their profit, and they don't consider that sometimes piracy actually helps sales.
Thus were never potential customers in the first place.
All game developers get is the satisfaction that they make it harder for people to play without paying.
Actually harder for anyone to play...
EULA's should be illegal. It is possible there are illegal even today (although it depends on the country your in, of course).
Or more likely "null and void". If they were actually illegal either those writing them would face prosecution or you could sue whoever provided you with one.
Once you've bought the product, the supplier have no authority for adding new restrictions. It might be different if you'll sign the EULA before buying the product.
In many cases the supplier isn't even the other "party" to an EULA. If you buy a computer from Dell then Microsoft isn't a party to that sale. If you were to buy a Dell computer from Alice's Computer then Dell isn't a party to the sale. Part of the theory behind EULA's is that they are some sort of "viral contract". Even if an EULA was something which you had to "sign before buying" it would still be subject to the "law of the land".
Basically, this is an issue of "doing things against the wishes of copyright holders is illegal" after our equilevant of the RIAA strongarmed a law through.
Most likely doing things against a small selection of copyright holders. Given that it would be hard to find an actual person aged over about two and any corporate person who isn't a "copyright holder". It would not be suprising if the majority of copyright holders (or at least the majority of those prepared to express an opinion) were opposed to all sorts of DRM.
What's the difference between encrypting and encoding? Is passwordless encryption anything more than a mere encoding of the data?!
What many people insist on calling "codes" are actually ciphers anyway. The difference is that actual codes are linguistic whereas ciphers are mathematical. Anything which uses a machine has to be some sort of cipher...
Let's just call ASCII a way to cipher text!
It would be more accurate to have this mean "American Standard Cipher for Information Interchange" since it's a simple subsitution cipher. As is EBCIDIC, unicode, baudot, even morse "code".
It also means that they can stagger the release of a movie around the world, and then stagger the DVD release whilst keeping people from getting DVDs from one of the earlier regions into one of the other regions whilst the movie is still in the theatres there (thus creating extra ticket sales from the people who just have to see the movie more than once and can not get it on a DVD yet)
Or at least that is the theory. In practice most of the planet has region free DVD players, which are not catching on in the US now that TV series are appearing on DVD. Some countries have even declared the whole region coding system to be illegal. Finally just about everything is likely to be available free of any DRM as soon as it's been made available anywhere...
The CEO bit is some misinformation, though -- part of the point of a corporation is to limit liability. If a corporation was responsible for criminal acts, the investors and most employees (at least, those not directly involved in the wrongdoing) would be free of liability.
The original idea was that the investors wouldn't be liable for the debts of a failed company. The worst that could happen is that they'd lose the money they had put in.
Even if most employees and all shareholders were not party to a criminal act by a CEO it would make no sense to sheild them from the effects of a criminal investigation.
Yup, they were originallyintended to target the big fish, but the last several years have shown the targeted fish becoming smaller and smaller.
Probably because the "big fish" include the likes of SCO, the MPAA, Microsoft, Fox News, CNN, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, etc
My issue in this case is not with the RIAA, but with the US government being hijacked by corporations for the benefit of a few.
Not just the US government, many of the same corporations are trying (with varying degrees of sucess) to get these kind of laws everywhere on the entire planet.
The other problem is that these laws are often useless against large corporations themselves. (Criminal law especially, corporations can be sued, but they can't be jailed). Otherwise something drastic would have happened to Sony when they put a "rootkit" on what were allegedly music CDs.
Sony has plenty of money, and continues to make plenty of money even with the "rampant piracy" that happens today.
Also in a time where many businesses are finding their costs increasing due to economic factors outside of their control, such as the rising price of oil and the resulting increase in the price of all oil derived products.
Sure, their aging business model is starting to have diminshing returns, but that's life. Progress happens. Technology improves and outdated methods go the way of the horse and buggy.
A sensible company in such a situation either looks to change their business model or ceases trading. In both cases whilst they are still "in credit".
This law is a clear demonstration of the government being in the pockets of the corporations. It gives way too much power, and eliminates virtually all of the real benefits of copyright (aside from the single purpose of diverting money from the people into the hands of a few corporations).
In many cases these same corporations have zero respect for the copyright of anyone outside their own group. There even appear to be cases, such as the "mainstream media", where copyright infringment is almost routine. As well as soliciting material from readers and viewers, then hiding somewhere in the terms and conditions that by doing so you are transfering copyright to them, even if they don't broadcast/print it. As opposed to somthing like, "We won't pass it to any third party, it we use it we will credit it as yours and pay you X amount of money. Unless you wish to apply different terms and conditions to our using your work, if we don't agree with them then we won't publish your work."
It is hard to design laws to be adaptable to every possible situation. They had to pick a point and .08% is what they determined. Maybe you are fine driving at 0.1 or higher, but that makes you an exception. There are probably some people who are dangerous well below that level, but they can still legally drive.
If you are driving period, you are risking your life and the lives of others. Adding further impairment to the situation (such as drinking, drugs, being tired, distractions) makes the risk even worse.
Maybe what's needed instead is simply a law against "dangerous driving", regardless of the reason.
The overall situation would still be an improvement. A lot of alcohol consumption would be *replaced* by pot usage if pot were legal. Alcohol is a powerful drug that tends to cause belligerent, violent and reckless behavior a large percentage of its users.
As well as some of the users requiring medical treatment for both short and long term effects. Ethanol has a fairly narrow "theraputic index".
However alcohol prohibition appears to be a far worst alternative to legal (and regulated) alcoholic beverages. Buy a legal alcholic beverage and you can be sure that what you are getting is what you expect. With any illegal drug you'd need an extensive chemistry lab to have any idea what you were actually getting.
only because it's outlawed and you can't just smoke it freely. make it legal and increase it's use 10x then get back to me. bottom line is misuse of any drug will cause social problems, and if you make it more obtainable than you'll have more problems.
It needs to be remembered that prohibition causes a whole set of social problems. Including drug dealers fighting actual shooting wars between themselves and the police. Also prohibition has effects on how the drug in question is used, effects which tend to encourage misuse. Including "binging" due to uncertainty of supply and/or quality of product.
Here's something I would really like to see: Drug tests for every elected office holder, every day. Make the results public as soon as they're available.
Which drugs would the tests be for? If the tests were for everything currently illegal there might be a long wait for all of the results...
that all the problems these days can be solved either by litigating or by making laws enabling the government to collect more and more personal information.
This being something which fools believe, though increasing taxation appears to go along with this. Probably to pay for all the increased paperwork and spying.
It's the start of a national database, where everyone's fingerprints will be on file.
With certain exceptions, including police, politicans, elite criminals and terrorists.
This is just a political statement. "You can't host government data anywhere outside national boundaries."
However it's one which actually makes sense in terms of "patriotism" and "national security"
You could always move all your servers to Canada and not have those unnecessary insecure servers in the US. Seems like someone made a bad decision setting up your infrastructure having them in the US to begin with seeing as you have global clients.
If they have global clients then they may not be able to have all their servers in one country. For just this kind of reason. Though they certainly don't want to locate many servers in a country which most of the rest of the planet is likely to object to having data sent to. The US is definitly likely to be on a list of such countries. Whereas Canada isn't.
The Canadian government trying to keep things in Canada is very standard practice. I didn't RTFA and I'm sure it mentions the Patriot Act, but I really doubt the Patriot Act is the sole reason that they won't outsource hosting companies to the US. Their policy is most likely that they can not outsource anything to anywhere outside of Canada unless they have no choice.
:) Being reluctant to outsource anything outside one's country undoubtedly is patriotic.
Thus you could call Canada's actions a "patriot policy" or even a "patriot act"
It's not even about sensitivity. It's simply the uncertainty that the US government deems it their right to, at any time, for any harebrained reason, snoop into your data. No sane company or even governmental institution would accept that. It's like legalizing industrial (and other) espionage.
If you were from somewhere with data protection laws then it's most likely to be illegal to store certain kinds of data anywhere which dosn't have at least similar laws and/or the appropriate treaties in place.
Oh I parse it just fine, the point I'm trying to make is that what innocently and with good intentions started out to mean man-made chemicals has unfortunately tarnished the word chemical. You talk about chemicals in the body and they'll shy away as if its a bad thing - though you may be talking about haemoglobin. You will hear people talking who have missed the point that carbon dioxide/monoxide levels are bad and instead choose to believe that carbon is one of the evils of the world and comes from exhaust pipes. Never mind that we are all carbon based ourselves, along with most of our diet.
All you have to do would be to get these people to abstain from "di-hydrogen monoxide". That should show results within a week.
Still, all-natural cobra venom will kill you dead, but if you have to choose between fresh organically-certified fruit and fruit with added chemicals, I'd go with the first option.
Assuming the first fruit wasn't toxic to humans, as several are.