I think Google's good conduct is an essential component of their role within their industry. I think there was actually a surprisingly large untapped market for a "reputable" search service - one that wouldn't do payola results, sell your "video rental history" to the highest bidder, and be frightened into censoring you at the drop of a legal hat.
I think providing good results in a clean interface was absolutely key to Google's success, but I also think their technique is not earth-shattering and has already been copied by Microsoft and Amazon and others. One of the key things that will keep people with Google from here on out is their distinctive corporate ethics, which will make people feel safe and secure sticking with them, and distrustful of their competitors. You can make as mundane a comparison as the lucrative organic food market, where the internet is disproportionately full of picky eaters. But I think it's more basic than that, I think that reputation propagates down from trend setters and opinion makers, and many many people "get it." I think this is vital to Google's survival, and I think they know it.
IIRC, the practice of payola search results was rampant at most search engines, and Google's refusal to do it was a large part of their success. They just focused on providing the best results humanly possible and segregated their marketing activities very clearly on the page - for that matter, not doing that much of it, by the standards of the day. It must have deeply bothered their greedier competitors that this approach was so vastly more successful.
You would probably look at this as another advertising revenue source that happens to come from Google, rather than a split of Google, or for that matter, others' overall revenues from the indexing of your content.
I'm not sure how it's only retailers who suffer from this problem; it's any online business that converts traffic into money somehow.
Of course, every business has this ROI equation with marketing. The issue being raised here is about a perceived disproportionate power held by the search engines. They're seen, rightly or wrongly, as the only place to buy traffic, whereas in the B&M world there are more ways to reach potential customers in your geographic area, such that none can command such a percentage of your profits...
We just need a sane and balanced approach. The false dilemma between the content trust demanding absolute and open-ended copyright powers, as well as exceptions for civil liberties and human rights to enforce them, and copyright anarchists who want to abolish copyright, is ridiculous.
Notice, though that big companies and big money lobby for the former every day in Washington and abroad, whereas comparatively few/.'ers want the latter - many if not most would be happy with the pre-DMCA pre-UCITA rules that have served us well enough for many years. Why is it "radical" to want to stay the same or only slightly reduce copyright powers, and not radical to want to wildly change the rules to benefit a cartel? There's no contradiction or even confusion there.
People have just inherently sensed what is right - that stopping speech or eliminating judicial protections to go after P2P is wrong, but limited and well-defined copyright powers are OK; that software patents are wrong, but patents in general can be useful... and so forth...
The author's point is, in a nutshell, that web business are reducible to the cost of their traffic and the revenue it can generate.
His example is something like this: 100 users with a 1% conversion rate for a $4 net profit means you pay $3.99 to the Search Engine for traffic to make 1 cent. Since the search engines are effectively a traffic auction, you always pay exactly as much as your competitors are willing to pay plus a small amount...
I find fault with this argument, because search engines are not a traffic auction, exactly. Google sells adwords but it primarily gives users what they ask for, not what others pay for. Still this is the reality and the mindset of many online businesses, if there are 10,000 other companies like yours, you can only be seen by buying traffic.
His concern is that the search engines' position is too strong - they're the bottleneck, and they price like it. They've created a market where they take most of the profits from any online enterprise. If web businesses find a way to increase margins then it instantly translates into increased search engine fees rather than increased profits, and google earns it by sitting back and "doing nothing."
Of course, they do something, but just like Sony and Tower records, their indispensability may have been converted into a disproportionate amount of the profits of global enterprise.
From 20,000 feet, thinking in a way we seldom do anymore, we could consider alternate regulatory regimes that might tinker with the market. For instance, if you accept that this state of affairs may not be optimal (a few megagiants and millions of small businesses beholden to them), you could flatten it by reinterpreting things like copyright, so that the search engine is not entitled to list anything without splitting a cut of the profits of that enterprise with the content creators.
I'm not actually suggesting this, just trying to seed discussion. One thing that this vaguely reminds me of is the Neal Stephenson concept of the free-market encyclopedia, where anyone can write anything and upload it into the system, and then you get paid, more or less directly, for traffic... presumably by redistribution of fees paid into the system to view content. It's appealing in the way it incentivizes creation of content, especially in such an egalitarian way.
We've got an all-you-can eat model where you pay for access and others pay to publish and writers can pay the rent with advertising or subscriptions... and of course, we have a free market for search services... I like it well enough, but I do sympathize with content creators, who still seem to struggle to realize the value of their intellectual works.
If you'd like a litany of failures of regulation on the part of the government, including those which cost lives and billions of dollars, I could certainly oblige. But then again, so can google news. Who knows? Perhaps you don't read the news.
You say, "It's not clear what the effects would be if it does happen" - now that's a pretty good example of trollish comment. It's quite clear what will happen - and I go so far as to say it takes a sub-human level of intelligence to be genuinely cavalier about such a dramatic structural change in a vital communications medium.
You also say, "It's arguable that this is not a responsibility of government in any case" - of course, there are some people who cannot be persuaded much of anything is the government's responsibility. It's quite fashionable these days not to trust the government to do anything other than warantless searches. However, once again, this is a shocking disconnect from reality as far as the U.S.'s, and indeed the first world's, communications regulatory regimes operate. No one else is going to bring you another phone line, and there are only three, intensely regulated, options for acquiring broadband service, assuming you can get phone, cable, and satellite. The one thing you can absolutely, concretely not rationally argue is that this is most certainly a government matter... until the day the FCC closes its doors and you can open your own phone company. In other words, until never.
So in short? Your comment, accusing me of trolling? Yes, basically trollish itself. Last word is yours... Bye...
I'm tired of this discussion. You believe what you want to believe.
Ahh... let's be real here. I can explain and defend my reasons for believing what I believe. Don't make it out like you could but you just don't feel like it. I can summarize your argument thusly:
WM* is unbroken (wrong, goofy)
Satelite is unbroken (wrong, goofy)
There are uncracked games (but you won't say which)
OK, fine, these are the games (OK, they were cracked)
Well I really just meant the copy protection lasted a little longer than usual... (ok, haha)
But the new consoles will definitely succeed anyway where every other device in history has failed (want to bet?)
No hard feelings, though.
the difference between taking a year to crack and never being cracked.
OK, let's start over, smart guy.
Show me a game that took a year to crack.
I'm willing to bet lasting one quarter as long on the PC is some kind of world record.
So it has succeeded by the game publishers measure.
Yes, I fully grant you that even a relatively short delay probably justifies some non-trivial amount of effort.
It's irrelevant to my original point, which is about DRM, but it is an interesting caveat.
when you had to point your camcorder at the screen to "copy" it.
Frankly this is a strange thing to say in the days when the net is absolutely lousy with screeners taken in movie theaters. But regardless I take it from how absurd your example is that you realize people will have many easier and more direct ways to capture the decrypted output once it leaves your black box (be it hardware or software).
Just face it. Anyone can fire up their P2P client and see what to make of your claims about satelite security. And you said WM* hasn't been broken, that was really beyond the pale, even foolish thing to say... You're entirely busted on it. Give up. DRM is DOA - audio and video are unprotectable. The software discussion is more interesting anyway...
Most of those instructions either don't work,
Ahh... whatever.
You're just talking out your ass now.
There's no generic software crack for StarForce and never has been.
In practice companies like Starforce love to toot their own horns, but in reality everyone is on a budget of both money and time, and nobody is going to reinvent the wheel for every game. They are going to reuse work, and that reuse reduces the time to crack each new release.
It doesn't matter if they want to install a dozen device drivers. The drivers are checked for by software code, and those checks can be patched. They can use every stupid trick in the world to stop ida from working. Do you think any piece of software can make disassembly or RE that difficult?
You can spend lots of time and effort doing lots of custom engineering for each game. I'm sure if you are willing to do this enough, you can delay the inevitable. It is only a delay. Without a hardware chain of trust it's frankly a joke.
Sooner or later the software must actually run, and if it runs it can be taken apart and examined. If it encrypts itself, the first thing it must do is decrypt itself.
But you really make my eyebrows go up with this comment:
Even if you could decrypt the game content, the crack would be the same size as the original game, posing problems for distribution.
What kind of problems exactly? It's not a statement someone really knowledgable could make.
You're aware the world has broadband now, right? Feature length movies are now often packaged in 1.4GB rather than 700MB, just because they can... I see 3,4,5GB packages all the time... it's routine.
There is no longer any such thing as a "distribution problem" for digital media anymore. That's the whole point here. That's what keeps Sony up at night, writing rootkits.
I have excellent knowledge of the underlying engineering issues.
So, apparently not.
There are various lists of uncracked games
Or as you say, games that were cracked... and Starforce calls itself proud because they delayed the inevitable for some number of weeks...
Your Starforce fanboy was lying through his teeth, and probably knew it.
Then again, that's basically a requirement for going into the software copy protection racket. If you can't give your customers a totally unjustifiable sense of security, that's something of a non-starter.
I've explained how WM was cracked along with every single other similar media DRM system, and your satelite providers, smart-cards regardless. It's quite simple. You seemed to just ignore what I said. Did you not understand? In either case you wait 'till this elaborate black box does the decrypting for you (since it must, since that's its purpose), and you capture the data...
I did your google search, smirking all the while. No surprise, it doesn't give the results you claim, and for the most part says exactly the opposite. It's full of instructions for cracking starforce protected games. Of course if you're not ignorant of the underlying engineering issues you wouldn't be surprised... Perhaps you think if you find someone writing somewhere that they think it's "uncrackable" you can point to that as "evidence?" You might not know this is an old story, where every new kid in the "copy protection racket" touts themselves as "uncrackable" to the press, meanwhile their stuff is cracked on the net in no time... and they're honestly proud if it takes a few weeks after release to happen.
If you would be so kind as to name an actual game you think hasn't been cracked...
make ridiculous assertions
I never said this, as anyone can clearly see.
Xbox was cracked by a college student (and a very smart one); I didn't say anything else beyond that, except to point out that people said it wasn't going to happen - and look, they were wrong.
False sense of security is a natural result of ignorance.
I'm saying that when done correctly it's so difficult nobody will bother.
Bother what? Using a Microphone? Or a capture card?
You can easily make services "copy proof" since you can't "copy" a service, and you can make software difficult to steal with a chain of trust, that's all. How difficult? Who knows.
Despite your lie, I didn't claim any kid will crack all hardware chains of trust. You know who I did say might?
Well... maybe if you read again more carefully you could notice...
Certainly we can always revert to analog. I think in practice even decrypted digital data just in front of the D/A will be on the table in any consumer-priced device.
Pirate hunting becomes practical.
I can't imagine how. Watermarking? It's a joke. Use a stolen licence or player. Distribution? You can't stop the current P2P d00ds and that's without upping the ante so everyone starts perfecting and using more impractical systems like Freenet.
Shit, we can't stop traffic in arms or heroin - which are vastly more amenable to "practical" law enforcement techniques.
Microsoft's "Windows Media" DRM was cracked before it even came out. It's a joke. There are widely known driver-level utilities that can capture the output of the WM* once it's been decrypted. This is in a large part why some PC DRM systems don't even bother to get cracked in the more embarassing way - slicing out the player keys or decoding routines or just plain cracking the encryption. You don't even need to.
The same basic principle goes for any digital cable or satellite security system - the stream can trivially be stolen once it's been decrypted. The cable and satellite guys are big on smart cards, I hear, which is clever for them but still ultimately quite futile. By the way, I see HD-quality satellite rips from the UK all the time on P2P - including for shows that aired the day before.
Where can they hide the key? In the TV? Inside each pixel of the TV? Inside your D/A converter? the coil of your amplifier?
What you can do is protect a service - things like google.
Another thing you can do is make cracking a software application more difficult/expensive. A piece of software never needs to expose itself to the user to work, and you can at least make it a hardware problem. if you can manage to establish a hardware chain of trust.
I would like to believe the myth of hardware security has been debunked pretty conclusively by now. People said the first Xbox wasn't going to be cracked because it would be "too hard" or "too expensive" and some kid at MIT did it with a bus sniffer he built out of FPGAs for a few grand... for fun.
Thinking hardware can protect you is just a function of ignorance of hardware.
By the way - what's the name of that game you're alluding to that's never been cracked? I'm just curious.
I'm betting the reason why you didn't know off the top of your head is that there isn't one, unless you count a 360 title.
So, hiding the key in hardware raises the cost of entry, but again, content only needs to escape once. If MS is able to make a cheap consumer device that would cost a million dollars and take six months to crack, a staggering feat, pirates in Asia make big money cracking systems like the 360, bootlegging the games and selling mod-chips. The million will be spent and recouped by the 7th month.
Even among the game consoles, which are virtual playgrounds of every DRM fantasy you can imagine, every system until now has been cracked, and I don't think you'll bet much against me that this round will go the same way.
Microsoft is very smart, though. They realize that you can protect a service, and it's one big reason why Live plays such a big role for them. You're not going to be playing your cracked games on Live. It's the same reason Valve got rich off Half-Life, because nobody could copy a CD-Key, and their servers weren't going to talk to you without one.
Yet even then it was possible - just more difficult. To go into even more painful detail, I have seen cracked Q3A (which used the same scheme) played over the internet, for instance - you need to get the master server and the game server to also be in cahoots. Not too difficult; in fact, it was just unpopular because matchmaking is a centralized service that the pirates or their users would now have to do on their own. But it was done, and you can download the code to do it off P2P to this day...
It is not going to be a "complicated" engineering task.
It is an "impossible" engineering task.
Repeat after me.
There is no such thing as DRM.
There is no such thing as DRM!
There has never been a functional DRM system, and there never will be, because it is impossible to create one. You can cripple your products, annoy or even imprison your customers, and shut out OS/FS competitors from compatibility, but you cannot "manage" your "digital restrictions." Not in this universe.
It's a jail. Things only need to escape once. Once they escape they're on the internet in open formats and the game is over.
Just pust what's good. Don't let this issue influence your judgement about what to show.
As far as I can see, the conspiracy theories about various/. personalities - be they you, Katz, Michael, or the plethora of submitters - run in a smooth continuum through moderation system whiners and/.-herd posters all the way down to ordinary FP and OT trolls.
Some people are just brats. They said something and it got modded down, or they submitted a story and it got ignored and (gasp) some other submission got in that looked similar, and then they decide to hate/. personally, rather than simply move on. It can manifest in all kinds of ways, overt or quite subtle, and this is one of them.
That said, I'm certain that it's possible to trick, scam or abuse slashdot's editors with story submissions. I've certainly seen some questionable writeups go by over the years. It doesn't take anything away from the site, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
For the most part, the system works. Stories come and go, the comments are generally good, and moderation doesn't always do what we wish, but nothing else really compares to the results. If occasionally something looks questionable people will question it, just as always.
It can be alarming how sophisticated some haters can be, but frankly I haven't seen anything here that even deserves your response. It's good to clear the air, but anyway, I wouldn't worry about it.
If you want a project, think about an interesting way to reorganize, prefilter and/or score story submissions...
Has there ever been a single successful hardware DRM system?
No.
Will there ever be one?
No.
Why?
Content only needs to escape once.
It doesn't matter if America's millions of teenagers can't break it without leaving their desks. It just takes one professional pirate in Asia somewhere to crack open the hardware and read out the signal right as it gets to the screen or the D/A converter for the amp. Sooner or later you have to decrypt it. If you made the devices cost $3,000 each to pay for all the security you could imagine, there is still a place in that box where the data is in plaintext, right before it's rendered to your screen or fed to your amp - and no amount of black plastic can keep you out of there.
No such system has ever been invented, nor will such system ever be invented, because it is impossible to create such systems.
What google can do is annoy and harrass customers with purposely crippled software, and thanks to DMCA, perhaps hopefully get some of them imprisoned as well. They cannot protect their content anymore than they can end rainstorms with umbrellas. No one ever has, and no one ever will.
Google cannot "manage" restrictions on digital media in the wild anymore than Bill Gates or Howard Stringer.
Also, this whole "slashdot loves this, slashdot hates that" is ridiculous. What is it about people that makes them so offended when an audience is even slightly above the lowest common denominator, and can chafe when they're lied to/abused/wronged, and also respect an individual or business when they do well? If someone who does something good, also does something bad, will our brains explode? Come on, what do you think this is, the South Beach Diet forums?
Sorry for the double-post; slashdot did something I've never seen before. It said "comment submitted" but didn't display the reply immediately, so I mistakenly thought the first was lost.
If I really am wrong--factually, not ideologically--go right ahead and point it out. I'm just not interested in your ideological debate.
I already did.
In painful detail.
You didn't get it, I guess that's why you're still blustering and condescending. I'm sorry all this isn't interesting enough to you - perhaps if these details had only been more interesting you might have engaged more fully and could have written a treatise and avoided some embarrassment.
If I really am wrong--factually, not ideologically--go right ahead and point it out. I'm just not interested in your ideological debate.
The problem with you is that I already have.
In painful detail.
Sorry if all this isn't interesting enough for you to be fully engaged. If only I had been more interesting, I'm sure you would be able to write a treatise to explain yourself, instead of being brief and ill-mannered (and now - humorously - attempting to condescend) and could have avoided some embarrassment.
You made a bunch of mistakes in your posts, were obnoxious about it, and got amply busted for it.
What do you expect people to believe? That you're really a delicate genius who just hasn't been able to find the time to explain why your ridiculous posts actually make sense?
For what it's worth I don't even think you're a zealot; you're too ignorant about it to fit the mold. I think you just don't have the balls to admit when you're wrong.
I guess this is your version of an apology. That's hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Google's good conduct is an essential component of their role within their industry. I think there was actually a surprisingly large untapped market for a "reputable" search service - one that wouldn't do payola results, sell your "video rental history" to the highest bidder, and be frightened into censoring you at the drop of a legal hat.
I think providing good results in a clean interface was absolutely key to Google's success, but I also think their technique is not earth-shattering and has already been copied by Microsoft and Amazon and others. One of the key things that will keep people with Google from here on out is their distinctive corporate ethics, which will make people feel safe and secure sticking with them, and distrustful of their competitors. You can make as mundane a comparison as the lucrative organic food market, where the internet is disproportionately full of picky eaters. But I think it's more basic than that, I think that reputation propagates down from trend setters and opinion makers, and many many people "get it." I think this is vital to Google's survival, and I think they know it.
Ah... 2 years ago?
This stock was at $5 not so long ago... :D
IIRC, the practice of payola search results was rampant at most search engines, and Google's refusal to do it was a large part of their success. They just focused on providing the best results humanly possible and segregated their marketing activities very clearly on the page - for that matter, not doing that much of it, by the standards of the day. It must have deeply bothered their greedier competitors that this approach was so vastly more successful.
You would probably look at this as another advertising revenue source that happens to come from Google, rather than a split of Google, or for that matter, others' overall revenues from the indexing of your content.
I'm not sure how it's only retailers who suffer from this problem; it's any online business that converts traffic into money somehow.
Of course, every business has this ROI equation with marketing. The issue being raised here is about a perceived disproportionate power held by the search engines. They're seen, rightly or wrongly, as the only place to buy traffic, whereas in the B&M world there are more ways to reach potential customers in your geographic area, such that none can command such a percentage of your profits...
We just need a sane and balanced approach. The false dilemma between the content trust demanding absolute and open-ended copyright powers, as well as exceptions for civil liberties and human rights to enforce them, and copyright anarchists who want to abolish copyright, is ridiculous.
/.'ers want the latter - many if not most would be happy with the pre-DMCA pre-UCITA rules that have served us well enough for many years. Why is it "radical" to want to stay the same or only slightly reduce copyright powers, and not radical to want to wildly change the rules to benefit a cartel? There's no contradiction or even confusion there.
Notice, though that big companies and big money lobby for the former every day in Washington and abroad, whereas comparatively few
People have just inherently sensed what is right - that stopping speech or eliminating judicial protections to go after P2P is wrong, but limited and well-defined copyright powers are OK; that software patents are wrong, but patents in general can be useful... and so forth...
The author's point is, in a nutshell, that web business are reducible to the cost of their traffic and the revenue it can generate.
His example is something like this: 100 users with a 1% conversion rate for a $4 net profit means you pay $3.99 to the Search Engine for traffic to make 1 cent. Since the search engines are effectively a traffic auction, you always pay exactly as much as your competitors are willing to pay plus a small amount...
I find fault with this argument, because search engines are not a traffic auction, exactly. Google sells adwords but it primarily gives users what they ask for, not what others pay for. Still this is the reality and the mindset of many online businesses, if there are 10,000 other companies like yours, you can only be seen by buying traffic.
His concern is that the search engines' position is too strong - they're the bottleneck, and they price like it. They've created a market where they take most of the profits from any online enterprise. If web businesses find a way to increase margins then it instantly translates into increased search engine fees rather than increased profits, and google earns it by sitting back and "doing nothing."
Of course, they do something, but just like Sony and Tower records, their indispensability may have been converted into a disproportionate amount of the profits of global enterprise.
From 20,000 feet, thinking in a way we seldom do anymore, we could consider alternate regulatory regimes that might tinker with the market. For instance, if you accept that this state of affairs may not be optimal (a few megagiants and millions of small businesses beholden to them), you could flatten it by reinterpreting things like copyright, so that the search engine is not entitled to list anything without splitting a cut of the profits of that enterprise with the content creators.
I'm not actually suggesting this, just trying to seed discussion. One thing that this vaguely reminds me of is the Neal Stephenson concept of the free-market encyclopedia, where anyone can write anything and upload it into the system, and then you get paid, more or less directly, for traffic... presumably by redistribution of fees paid into the system to view content. It's appealing in the way it incentivizes creation of content, especially in such an egalitarian way.
We've got an all-you-can eat model where you pay for access and others pay to publish and writers can pay the rent with advertising or subscriptions... and of course, we have a free market for search services... I like it well enough, but I do sympathize with content creators, who still seem to struggle to realize the value of their intellectual works.
Thank you, this was a very interesing explanation. One of those moments when you wish you could go back and edit a post... :)
But at least I get the thing I've always really wanted in a new elevator:
More "comfortable."
Wow, this baby's got legs.
Hardly.
If you'd like a litany of failures of regulation on the part of the government, including those which cost lives and billions of dollars, I could certainly oblige. But then again, so can google news. Who knows? Perhaps you don't read the news.
You say, "It's not clear what the effects would be if it does happen" - now that's a pretty good example of trollish comment. It's quite clear what will happen - and I go so far as to say it takes a sub-human level of intelligence to be genuinely cavalier about such a dramatic structural change in a vital communications medium.
You also say, "It's arguable that this is not a responsibility of government in any case" - of course, there are some people who cannot be persuaded much of anything is the government's responsibility. It's quite fashionable these days not to trust the government to do anything other than warantless searches. However, once again, this is a shocking disconnect from reality as far as the U.S.'s, and indeed the first world's, communications regulatory regimes operate. No one else is going to bring you another phone line, and there are only three, intensely regulated, options for acquiring broadband service, assuming you can get phone, cable, and satellite. The one thing you can absolutely, concretely not rationally argue is that this is most certainly a government matter... until the day the FCC closes its doors and you can open your own phone company. In other words, until never.
So in short? Your comment, accusing me of trolling? Yes, basically trollish itself. Last word is yours... Bye...
If you think what I wrote is a troll, yeah, please foe me.
It's been fun, guys, but it looks like the net finally actually is dead.
I mean, seriously, the service providers are about to start openly extorting the content providers.
In a normal country, regulators would put a swift end to this kind of silliness, but we live in the USA...
Ahh... let's be real here. I can explain and defend my reasons for believing what I believe. Don't make it out like you could but you just don't feel like it. I can summarize your argument thusly:
No hard feelings, though.
the difference between taking a year to crack and never being cracked.
OK, let's start over, smart guy.
Show me a game that took a year to crack.
I'm willing to bet lasting one quarter as long on the PC is some kind of world record.
So it has succeeded by the game publishers measure.
Yes, I fully grant you that even a relatively short delay probably justifies some non-trivial amount of effort.
It's irrelevant to my original point, which is about DRM, but it is an interesting caveat.
when you had to point your camcorder at the screen to "copy" it.
Frankly this is a strange thing to say in the days when the net is absolutely lousy with screeners taken in movie theaters. But regardless I take it from how absurd your example is that you realize people will have many easier and more direct ways to capture the decrypted output once it leaves your black box (be it hardware or software).
Just face it. Anyone can fire up their P2P client and see what to make of your claims about satelite security. And you said WM* hasn't been broken, that was really beyond the pale, even foolish thing to say... You're entirely busted on it. Give up. DRM is DOA - audio and video are unprotectable. The software discussion is more interesting anyway...
Most of those instructions either don't work,
Ahh... whatever.
You're just talking out your ass now.
There's no generic software crack for StarForce and never has been.
In practice companies like Starforce love to toot their own horns, but in reality everyone is on a budget of both money and time, and nobody is going to reinvent the wheel for every game. They are going to reuse work, and that reuse reduces the time to crack each new release.
It doesn't matter if they want to install a dozen device drivers. The drivers are checked for by software code, and those checks can be patched. They can use every stupid trick in the world to stop ida from working. Do you think any piece of software can make disassembly or RE that difficult?
You can spend lots of time and effort doing lots of custom engineering for each game. I'm sure if you are willing to do this enough, you can delay the inevitable. It is only a delay. Without a hardware chain of trust it's frankly a joke.
Sooner or later the software must actually run, and if it runs it can be taken apart and examined. If it encrypts itself, the first thing it must do is decrypt itself.
But you really make my eyebrows go up with this comment:
Even if you could decrypt the game content, the crack would be the same size as the original game, posing problems for distribution.
What kind of problems exactly? It's not a statement someone really knowledgable could make.
You're aware the world has broadband now, right? Feature length movies are now often packaged in 1.4GB rather than 700MB, just because they can... I see 3,4,5GB packages all the time... it's routine.
There is no longer any such thing as a "distribution problem" for digital media anymore. That's the whole point here. That's what keeps Sony up at night, writing rootkits.
I have excellent knowledge of the underlying engineering issues.
So, apparently not.
There are various lists of uncracked games
Or as you say, games that were cracked... and Starforce calls itself proud because they delayed the inevitable for some number of weeks...
Chaos Theory... cracked.
Trackmania Surprise... cracked...
King Kong... cracked...
Etc. etc. etc...
Anything else?
Your Starforce fanboy was lying through his teeth, and probably knew it.
Then again, that's basically a requirement for going into the software copy protection racket. If you can't give your customers a totally unjustifiable sense of security, that's something of a non-starter.
You seem confused.
I've explained how WM was cracked along with every single other similar media DRM system, and your satelite providers, smart-cards regardless. It's quite simple. You seemed to just ignore what I said. Did you not understand? In either case you wait 'till this elaborate black box does the decrypting for you (since it must, since that's its purpose), and you capture the data...
I did your google search, smirking all the while. No surprise, it doesn't give the results you claim, and for the most part says exactly the opposite. It's full of instructions for cracking starforce protected games. Of course if you're not ignorant of the underlying engineering issues you wouldn't be surprised... Perhaps you think if you find someone writing somewhere that they think it's "uncrackable" you can point to that as "evidence?" You might not know this is an old story, where every new kid in the "copy protection racket" touts themselves as "uncrackable" to the press, meanwhile their stuff is cracked on the net in no time... and they're honestly proud if it takes a few weeks after release to happen.
If you would be so kind as to name an actual game you think hasn't been cracked...
make ridiculous assertions
I never said this, as anyone can clearly see.
Xbox was cracked by a college student (and a very smart one); I didn't say anything else beyond that, except to point out that people said it wasn't going to happen - and look, they were wrong.
False sense of security is a natural result of ignorance.
I'm saying that when done correctly it's so difficult nobody will bother.
Bother what? Using a Microphone? Or a capture card?
You can easily make services "copy proof" since you can't "copy" a service, and you can make software difficult to steal with a chain of trust, that's all. How difficult? Who knows.
Despite your lie, I didn't claim any kid will crack all hardware chains of trust. You know who I did say might?
Well... maybe if you read again more carefully you could notice...
Certainly we can always revert to analog. I think in practice even decrypted digital data just in front of the D/A will be on the table in any consumer-priced device.
Pirate hunting becomes practical.
I can't imagine how. Watermarking? It's a joke. Use a stolen licence or player. Distribution? You can't stop the current P2P d00ds and that's without upping the ante so everyone starts perfecting and using more impractical systems like Freenet.
Shit, we can't stop traffic in arms or heroin - which are vastly more amenable to "practical" law enforcement techniques.
It clearly is true.
Microsoft's "Windows Media" DRM was cracked before it even came out. It's a joke. There are widely known driver-level utilities that can capture the output of the WM* once it's been decrypted. This is in a large part why some PC DRM systems don't even bother to get cracked in the more embarassing way - slicing out the player keys or decoding routines or just plain cracking the encryption. You don't even need to.
The same basic principle goes for any digital cable or satellite security system - the stream can trivially be stolen once it's been decrypted. The cable and satellite guys are big on smart cards, I hear, which is clever for them but still ultimately quite futile. By the way, I see HD-quality satellite rips from the UK all the time on P2P - including for shows that aired the day before.
Where can they hide the key? In the TV? Inside each pixel of the TV? Inside your D/A converter? the coil of your amplifier?
What you can do is protect a service - things like google.
Another thing you can do is make cracking a software application more difficult/expensive. A piece of software never needs to expose itself to the user to work, and you can at least make it a hardware problem. if you can manage to establish a hardware chain of trust.
I would like to believe the myth of hardware security has been debunked pretty conclusively by now. People said the first Xbox wasn't going to be cracked because it would be "too hard" or "too expensive" and some kid at MIT did it with a bus sniffer he built out of FPGAs for a few grand... for fun.
Thinking hardware can protect you is just a function of ignorance of hardware.
By the way - what's the name of that game you're alluding to that's never been cracked? I'm just curious.
I'm betting the reason why you didn't know off the top of your head is that there isn't one, unless you count a 360 title.
So, hiding the key in hardware raises the cost of entry, but again, content only needs to escape once. If MS is able to make a cheap consumer device that would cost a million dollars and take six months to crack, a staggering feat, pirates in Asia make big money cracking systems like the 360, bootlegging the games and selling mod-chips. The million will be spent and recouped by the 7th month.
Even among the game consoles, which are virtual playgrounds of every DRM fantasy you can imagine, every system until now has been cracked, and I don't think you'll bet much against me that this round will go the same way.
Microsoft is very smart, though. They realize that you can protect a service, and it's one big reason why Live plays such a big role for them. You're not going to be playing your cracked games on Live. It's the same reason Valve got rich off Half-Life, because nobody could copy a CD-Key, and their servers weren't going to talk to you without one.
Yet even then it was possible - just more difficult. To go into even more painful detail, I have seen cracked Q3A (which used the same scheme) played over the internet, for instance - you need to get the master server and the game server to also be in cahoots. Not too difficult; in fact, it was just unpopular because matchmaking is a centralized service that the pirates or their users would now have to do on their own. But it was done, and you can download the code to do it off P2P to this day...
It is not going to be a "complicated" engineering task.
It is an "impossible" engineering task.
Repeat after me.
There is no such thing as DRM.
There is no such thing as DRM!
There has never been a functional DRM system, and there never will be, because it is impossible to create one. You can cripple your products, annoy or even imprison your customers, and shut out OS/FS competitors from compatibility, but you cannot "manage" your "digital restrictions." Not in this universe.
It's a jail. Things only need to escape once. Once they escape they're on the internet in open formats and the game is over.
Just pust what's good. Don't let this issue influence your judgement about what to show.
/. personalities - be they you, Katz, Michael, or the plethora of submitters - run in a smooth continuum through moderation system whiners and /.-herd posters all the way down to ordinary FP and OT trolls.
/. personally, rather than simply move on. It can manifest in all kinds of ways, overt or quite subtle, and this is one of them.
As far as I can see, the conspiracy theories about various
Some people are just brats. They said something and it got modded down, or they submitted a story and it got ignored and (gasp) some other submission got in that looked similar, and then they decide to hate
That said, I'm certain that it's possible to trick, scam or abuse slashdot's editors with story submissions. I've certainly seen some questionable writeups go by over the years. It doesn't take anything away from the site, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
For the most part, the system works. Stories come and go, the comments are generally good, and moderation doesn't always do what we wish, but nothing else really compares to the results. If occasionally something looks questionable people will question it, just as always.
It can be alarming how sophisticated some haters can be, but frankly I haven't seen anything here that even deserves your response. It's good to clear the air, but anyway, I wouldn't worry about it.
If you want a project, think about an interesting way to reorganize, prefilter and/or score story submissions...
Has there ever been a single successful hardware DRM system?
No.
Will there ever be one?
No.
Why?
Content only needs to escape once.
It doesn't matter if America's millions of teenagers can't break it without leaving their desks. It just takes one professional pirate in Asia somewhere to crack open the hardware and read out the signal right as it gets to the screen or the D/A converter for the amp. Sooner or later you have to decrypt it. If you made the devices cost $3,000 each to pay for all the security you could imagine, there is still a place in that box where the data is in plaintext, right before it's rendered to your screen or fed to your amp - and no amount of black plastic can keep you out of there.
Then it's on the internet...
There is no such thing as DRM.
There is no such thing as DRM.
No such system has ever been invented, nor will such system ever be invented, because it is impossible to create such systems.
What google can do is annoy and harrass customers with purposely crippled software, and thanks to DMCA, perhaps hopefully get some of them imprisoned as well. They cannot protect their content anymore than they can end rainstorms with umbrellas. No one ever has, and no one ever will.
Google cannot "manage" restrictions on digital media in the wild anymore than Bill Gates or Howard Stringer.
Also, this whole "slashdot loves this, slashdot hates that" is ridiculous. What is it about people that makes them so offended when an audience is even slightly above the lowest common denominator, and can chafe when they're lied to/abused/wronged, and also respect an individual or business when they do well? If someone who does something good, also does something bad, will our brains explode? Come on, what do you think this is, the South Beach Diet forums?
Sorry for the double-post; slashdot did something I've never seen before. It said "comment submitted" but didn't display the reply immediately, so I mistakenly thought the first was lost.
If I really am wrong--factually, not ideologically--go right ahead and point it out. I'm just not interested in your ideological debate.
I already did.
In painful detail.
You didn't get it, I guess that's why you're still blustering and condescending. I'm sorry all this isn't interesting enough to you - perhaps if these details had only been more interesting you might have engaged more fully and could have written a treatise and avoided some embarrassment.
If I really am wrong--factually, not ideologically--go right ahead and point it out. I'm just not interested in your ideological debate.
The problem with you is that I already have.
In painful detail.
Sorry if all this isn't interesting enough for you to be fully engaged. If only I had been more interesting, I'm sure you would be able to write a treatise to explain yourself, instead of being brief and ill-mannered (and now - humorously - attempting to condescend) and could have avoided some embarrassment.
You made a bunch of mistakes in your posts, were obnoxious about it, and got amply busted for it.
What do you expect people to believe? That you're really a delicate genius who just hasn't been able to find the time to explain why your ridiculous posts actually make sense?
For what it's worth I don't even think you're a zealot; you're too ignorant about it to fit the mold. I think you just don't have the balls to admit when you're wrong.
I guess this is your version of an apology. That's hilarious.