DRM does not require you to give the cryptographic keys to the user. DRM requires you to give the cryptographic keys to a system which will be conducting the decryption, which is not the user.
I mentioned that in my last paragraph, in which I said "I"m not sure allowing them to enter the debate will alleviate that in any way".
In any case, the debates are not held until very late in the campaign- in this case, late September and early October when the election is going to be held in November and the 'campaigning' has been going on for at least twelve months.
The debates are merely the icing on the cake, so to speak. The electorate is probably close to 75-90% spoken for by the time the debates roll around, and changes a very small percentage of those people's minds.
To have a reasonable presence in the election, by the time debates roll around one must already be well known. An excellent example is Ross Perot, who during some polling periods in June or July of 1992 was receiving almost 40% of the popular vote. His presence in the debate was stated to give his campaign a boost, but he was already very well known by the time of the debates.
That is the reason why a candidate must have 15% of the popular vote in polling before going into the debates. Because really, the debates are far too late in the campaigning seasons to take somebody like, say, Bob Barr, who's currently polling at between 3-6%, and turn them into a national superstar.
Did you just claim that those three candidates have sufficient ballot presence to win? You mean, what, win the election? Because they really don't.
I suppose, if by that, you mean they technically appear on sufficient state ballots that were they to, through a stunningly miraculous coincidence win the electoral college votes of sufficient states to be declared president, perhaps.
However, none of those candidates has any chance whatsoever of winning, and I'm not sure allowing them to enter the debate will alleviate that in any way. If I recall correctly, the requirement to enter the debate is 15% of the popular vote prior to it. That seems fair enough, I suppose.
FCC: The Electorate probably couldn't even tell you what FCC stands for and what it regulates.
E-Voting: Electorate simply doesn't care.
Space Exploration: Unpopular unless it's phased into some sort of nationalist program; the Electorate things space exploration is boring, expensive, and dangerous.
Patents: Electorate couldn't tell you even in broadly simple terms how the patent system works; why would they know or care about reforming it?
Open Source Adoption: The electorate couldn't pick Linus Torvalds out of a crowd, expand the EFF's acronym, or define the GPL. They really don't care.
In most cases, I bet that the politicians in power don't have a plan for any of those things because it's not necessary. The system works, and the system will make internal incremental changes so that it continues to work. Unless the electorate or lobbyists decide to get up in arms, the politicians are not going to interfere with, say, the FCC, or copyright, or net neutrality, or open-source adoption.
The only extent to which they will interfere in the rest is to cut budgets for programs that have little, if any, popular support.
DRM is not designed to protect against plaintext theft. Notice it's called 'DIGITAL rights management'.
Moreover, your argument that there will always be a digital point at which the information will be extractable cleartext is fallacious. That's simply a matter of correct systems design, nothing more complicated.
My point is that, in reply to the original post, which said:
"There is no cryptographic solution to the problem in which the attacker and intended recipient are the same person"
I am simply pointing out that that is not a problem that cryptosystems are designed to solve.
Of course there's no solution- you're looking at the wrong problem.
DRM, exactly what it says (Digital Rights Management) is a complicated cryptographic problem that can be solved technologically with correct systems design.
There are a handful of tricks one can use in the vein of analog management, but they're just that- tricks, and not really secure systems.
That's not necessary. We exist in a 'twisted communist system' whereby all physical property is owned by the government, and individuals and businesses simply hold licenses to use 'their' computers, MP3/CD/DVD players, books, etc. within the terms specified by their government masters.
You don't believe me? Go ask a lawyer about fee simple and alloidal title.
You miss my point. Encryption is about securing a communication between two points. The consumer, however, is not a 'point' because the consumer cannot decrypt the information (we do not all have built in decryption hardware in our brains).
This is true of all modern cryptosystems, without exception. Rather, the system that conducts the decryption is the end-point.
A cryptosystem is not designed to defend against an attack on the plaintext; that is, a cryptosystem does not exist that protects information that has already been decrypted.
This is true of anything, though. Once plaintext information falls into the hands of a biological entity, it is at risk, and it doesn't matter how trusted that entity is (rubber-hose cryptanalysis) or anything else.
DRM that fulfills the purpose of any modern cryptosystem is not inherently any more difficult than any other kind of cryptography.
In short: Cryptosystems rely on machines, not people. No encryption extant can protect against plain-text theft, and it is not designed to do so. Neither is DRM.
I think that depends on how you define 'attacker' and 'intended recipient'.
For example, logic would dictate that with conventional DRM schemes, the 'intended recipient' is not the person who bought the material, but rather the system which is authorized to receive it.
That creates a different paradigm, to which there are many cryptographic solutions but similarly, to which there are dozens of attack vectors due to having the decryption hardware essentially in enemy hands.
However, that's not to say it's at all impossible; it's just practically difficult. The solution is to create a ground-up secure system which relies on hardware tamperproofing, among other things.
Actually, piracy of Microsoft's IP also drives sales of Windows. Microsoft is just for piracy all around, when you get right down to it.
As an incumbent and market leader, people are likely to pirate their products even when there are free alternatives available. By allowing this piracy to continue with minimal efforts to check it, more people use their software and the cycle continues. They extract revenue by targeting those same people, who have come to expect their software, when they join large, fat, slow-moving targets (like corporations).
In the same way, actually, NBC Universal, Viacom, and the Songwriter's Guild of America (well, maybe not so much them, but the RIAA, certainly) probably secure their footholds in no small part due to piracy.
Imagine such a thought experiment: Piracy was magically impossible, of music, of software, of anything. To whom do you flock? Would you flock toward the RIAA if you had to buy their products or do without? Probably not.
I don't see any reason why a company should be required to give you money when you refuse to do what they ask you to do. See, the job consists of money (and benefits) in exchange for services. Unless both sides agree on what the services and compensation are, the only logical course of action is for the relationship to cease. The very notion that the government can require me to continue giving you money when you aren't providing me something that I consider equally valuable is an affront to liberty.
The reason is because this is a society, and as a result, for the benefit of society, government can impose responsibilities on one or both sides of the equation.
And it does. In response for the requirement that you don't get to define exactly to your specifications the services and remuneration, as well as a little bit of cash, the government gives you roads, and police, and all those other nice things that we as a society consider valuable.
Unfortunately, we do not get to go around doing whatever we want all the time, regardless of how much liberty would be had by all. Freedom to and freedom from are both freedoms.
And that's not inherently a bad idea. See the negative income tax. An ideal implementation would dramatically simplify the tax structure and integrate it with the welfare system in such a way as to drastically reduce overhead and cruft, especially in the administration of both tax programs and welfare programs- both of which require legions of staff in order to determine who owes what and who gets what, respectively.
I mean, we have nuclear bombs. We have the pusher-plate technology. We might have to assemble it, and draw up the plans; I don't claim that they have exact schematics sitting in a drawer that they can order constructed at a moment's notice, and they'd need to get the nukes from somewhere (I believe the suggestion was that they'd come from the active weapons stockpile as part of a de-armament campaign, but that might not be viable at this point) but the design does not utilize technology we cannot construct.
Hell, it doesn't utilize technology they couldn't make in the 60s.
During the cold war, I could understand the hesitancy to utilize nuclear-pulse propulsion; if anything were to make the other guy antsy, it'd be that.
Dyson's research suggests that each launch would have generated sufficient fallout to kill between 0.1 and 1 people per launch due to radiation effects. That's nothing; the fallout effect is insignificant.
It also doesn't take into account the use of minimized-radiation weapons.
There's no technological reason to discount the Orion design; it's probably the most efficient and cost-effective design we have by a wildly large margin and will continue to be for a long while yet.
I was referring to the project Orion from 1958; the version that used nuclear pulse propulsion. You know, the design that the project team felt could build an eight million tonne spacecraft- capable of making Pluto and back in a single stage in less than a year- with the materials and design processes available in 1958, let alone today.
(Hence my statement about 'has existed for decades', as opposed to the new Orion, which is far less than a decade old)
People can not reasonably be held to be under obligation to submit to any condition of society that would cost them their life. Since weapons are easily obtained, improvised or made by criminals, all citizens have the right to any weapons that would reasonably be required for personal defence against an armed assailant.
Um, no.
Firstly, the State has always reserved the right to kill citizens. Depending on where and when you happen to be, this varies, but, for example, many states have the death penalty.
Secondly, the fact that the criminals have access to weapons does not give you the right to have equally deadly (or more deadly) weapons for self-defense; in no way does that follow. The criminals are breaking the law, and that's the point.
If "society" requires me to lay down my life to outlaws, then "society" will have to get along without my cooperation.
Please. We'll be better off without you.
So I see this from another post of yours. You're either trolling or you're the type of person that makes it necessary for the rest of us to retain the right to bear arms.
I'm not sure I see your point; it's not like this is a terribly new idea.
Individuals are not, by themselves sovereign; sovereignty is a state apparatus. Sovereignty essentially means that one has no higher power. Hence, individuals only have rights that the sovereign body grants them.
Thomas Paine was an idiot. If 'rights' were an inherent part of human nature, everyone would have them.
It is self-evident that this is not the case; it is equally self-evident that the rights of people are enforced and handed down by the State which holds sovereignty over the area in which they live.
You say that 'just because our current government routinely infringes our rights does not mean that we don't have them'.... I'm not sure what else it means.
The fact that your 'rights' are routinely being violated means, in fact, that you have no such rights.
I understand that, but a good example usually has something to do with the case at hand. Yours goes so far beyond exaggeration that it couldn't possibly be used to make any sort of point.
In what way? A nuclear destruct device is an armament designed to deter the opponent from killing you on the risk that he himself will be killed.
A firearm, presumably, operates on much the same principles of deterrence.
You do if your attacker is bigger and stronger than you, or has a weapon of some sort themselves.
Really? Are you saying that a smaller person cannot overcome a larger one? That a weaker person cannot overcome a stronger one?
I think you'll find those things to be pretty common in assault and home invasion cases. The attackers kind of like to have the upper hand. Home invasions are generally less common in places where people can legally own guns than they are in places where guns are banned. Again I'm speaking of the U.S. and ymmv in other countries.
Despite what you might like to believe, home invasions are very rare; home invasions in which people are killed, even rarer. Murders are very rare, and are more often than not they are committed by people who know each other, by a great margin. In fact, You seem to be under the belief that in fact, attackers choose their victims; this is rarely the case.
I am minded of a case a while back in which a man was sleeping in his house when police, serving a drug warrant, burst through his door, and he shot one of them. His excuse, of course, was that he did not realize they were police. A logical entity would conclude this belief is preposterous; the number of home invasions conducted by well-trained, squad-sized criminal elements carrying assault weapons and wearing police body armor is a ridiculously small proportion of the home invasions committed, itself a very small proportion of all crimes; and the belief at that point that such an operation would go to such great lengths in order to kill you, when there are far simpler ways to do so if one were so minded and had access to the necessary equipment (as was obviously the case) boggles the mind.
In any case, the point of that anecdote amongst others was to indicate that there is a perenial belief extant that one is surrounded by huge masses of well-armed, well-trained, and well-armored criminals, all of whom are apparently willing to conduct offensive maneuvers that would put Delta Force to shame at the drop of a hat in order to steal what petty cash someone might happen to have on their nightstand.
Really, the restrictions that come into play with regard to self-defense in most jurisdictions rely on the fact that statistically speaking, the vast majority of self-defense situations do not involve one being attacked by special operations commandos, and therefore the force necessary to repel the attack is in fact far more limited than most people would at first imagine. Given that individuals do not have the ability to personally enforce the law and execute individuals they believe to be criminals, (as such is an abrogation of the rights of the State), it is further unreasonable to allow, legally, individuals to wander around executing petty vagrants for such offenses as trespassing.
One of the primary motivations for restrictions on guns, amongst the usual attempts to limit their access by the criminal element, is to stop frightened individuals from wildly overreacting as they are so prone to do.
Slashdot Mirror
DRM does not require you to give the cryptographic keys to the user. DRM requires you to give the cryptographic keys to a system which will be conducting the decryption, which is not the user.
This is a non-trivial difference.
I mentioned that in my last paragraph, in which I said "I"m not sure allowing them to enter the debate will alleviate that in any way".
In any case, the debates are not held until very late in the campaign- in this case, late September and early October when the election is going to be held in November and the 'campaigning' has been going on for at least twelve months.
The debates are merely the icing on the cake, so to speak. The electorate is probably close to 75-90% spoken for by the time the debates roll around, and changes a very small percentage of those people's minds.
To have a reasonable presence in the election, by the time debates roll around one must already be well known. An excellent example is Ross Perot, who during some polling periods in June or July of 1992 was receiving almost 40% of the popular vote. His presence in the debate was stated to give his campaign a boost, but he was already very well known by the time of the debates.
That is the reason why a candidate must have 15% of the popular vote in polling before going into the debates. Because really, the debates are far too late in the campaigning seasons to take somebody like, say, Bob Barr, who's currently polling at between 3-6%, and turn them into a national superstar.
It may be best, but it's the 'best' in a very small class. That doesn't say much about it.
It's one thing to say we need missile defense (in theory), but it's quite another to support this (or any) particular missile defense program...
Did you just claim that those three candidates have sufficient ballot presence to win? You mean, what, win the election? Because they really don't.
I suppose, if by that, you mean they technically appear on sufficient state ballots that were they to, through a stunningly miraculous coincidence win the electoral college votes of sufficient states to be declared president, perhaps.
However, none of those candidates has any chance whatsoever of winning, and I'm not sure allowing them to enter the debate will alleviate that in any way. If I recall correctly, the requirement to enter the debate is 15% of the popular vote prior to it. That seems fair enough, I suppose.
Because they're not hot-button issues and are therefore almost totally irrelevant to the electorate.
Copyright: Electorate doesn't care.
Net Neutrality: Electorate couldn't even tell you what that is.
Science Funding: "Damn scientists, throwing money away!"
FCC: The Electorate probably couldn't even tell you what FCC stands for and what it regulates.
E-Voting: Electorate simply doesn't care.
Space Exploration: Unpopular unless it's phased into some sort of nationalist program; the Electorate things space exploration is boring, expensive, and dangerous.
Patents: Electorate couldn't tell you even in broadly simple terms how the patent system works; why would they know or care about reforming it?
Open Source Adoption: The electorate couldn't pick Linus Torvalds out of a crowd, expand the EFF's acronym, or define the GPL. They really don't care.
In most cases, I bet that the politicians in power don't have a plan for any of those things because it's not necessary. The system works, and the system will make internal incremental changes so that it continues to work. Unless the electorate or lobbyists decide to get up in arms, the politicians are not going to interfere with, say, the FCC, or copyright, or net neutrality, or open-source adoption.
The only extent to which they will interfere in the rest is to cut budgets for programs that have little, if any, popular support.
DRM is not designed to protect against plaintext theft. Notice it's called 'DIGITAL rights management'.
Moreover, your argument that there will always be a digital point at which the information will be extractable cleartext is fallacious. That's simply a matter of correct systems design, nothing more complicated.
My point is that, in reply to the original post, which said:
I am simply pointing out that that is not a problem that cryptosystems are designed to solve.
Of course there's no solution- you're looking at the wrong problem.
DRM, exactly what it says (Digital Rights Management) is a complicated cryptographic problem that can be solved technologically with correct systems design.
There are a handful of tricks one can use in the vein of analog management, but they're just that- tricks, and not really secure systems.
That's not necessary. We exist in a 'twisted communist system' whereby all physical property is owned by the government, and individuals and businesses simply hold licenses to use 'their' computers, MP3/CD/DVD players, books, etc. within the terms specified by their government masters.
You don't believe me? Go ask a lawyer about fee simple and alloidal title.
Why do you conflate 'purchase' with 'own'? The two are not synonymous. Leasing is not necessarily the only alternative, either.
You miss my point. Encryption is about securing a communication between two points. The consumer, however, is not a 'point' because the consumer cannot decrypt the information (we do not all have built in decryption hardware in our brains).
This is true of all modern cryptosystems, without exception. Rather, the system that conducts the decryption is the end-point.
A cryptosystem is not designed to defend against an attack on the plaintext; that is, a cryptosystem does not exist that protects information that has already been decrypted.
This is true of anything, though. Once plaintext information falls into the hands of a biological entity, it is at risk, and it doesn't matter how trusted that entity is (rubber-hose cryptanalysis) or anything else.
DRM that fulfills the purpose of any modern cryptosystem is not inherently any more difficult than any other kind of cryptography.
In short: Cryptosystems rely on machines, not people. No encryption extant can protect against plain-text theft, and it is not designed to do so. Neither is DRM.
I think that depends on how you define 'attacker' and 'intended recipient'.
For example, logic would dictate that with conventional DRM schemes, the 'intended recipient' is not the person who bought the material, but rather the system which is authorized to receive it.
That creates a different paradigm, to which there are many cryptographic solutions but similarly, to which there are dozens of attack vectors due to having the decryption hardware essentially in enemy hands.
However, that's not to say it's at all impossible; it's just practically difficult. The solution is to create a ground-up secure system which relies on hardware tamperproofing, among other things.
Actually, piracy of Microsoft's IP also drives sales of Windows. Microsoft is just for piracy all around, when you get right down to it.
As an incumbent and market leader, people are likely to pirate their products even when there are free alternatives available. By allowing this piracy to continue with minimal efforts to check it, more people use their software and the cycle continues. They extract revenue by targeting those same people, who have come to expect their software, when they join large, fat, slow-moving targets (like corporations).
In the same way, actually, NBC Universal, Viacom, and the Songwriter's Guild of America (well, maybe not so much them, but the RIAA, certainly) probably secure their footholds in no small part due to piracy.
Imagine such a thought experiment: Piracy was magically impossible, of music, of software, of anything. To whom do you flock? Would you flock toward the RIAA if you had to buy their products or do without? Probably not.
The reason is because this is a society, and as a result, for the benefit of society, government can impose responsibilities on one or both sides of the equation.
And it does. In response for the requirement that you don't get to define exactly to your specifications the services and remuneration, as well as a little bit of cash, the government gives you roads, and police, and all those other nice things that we as a society consider valuable.
Unfortunately, we do not get to go around doing whatever we want all the time, regardless of how much liberty would be had by all. Freedom to and freedom from are both freedoms.
...what?
It's not supposed to eradicate poverty, because, you're right, nothing can- poverty is a relative state.
If nobody has a car, the man with a old toyota is king. If everyone has an old toyota, the man with a BMW is king...
And that's not inherently a bad idea. See the negative income tax. An ideal implementation would dramatically simplify the tax structure and integrate it with the welfare system in such a way as to drastically reduce overhead and cruft, especially in the administration of both tax programs and welfare programs- both of which require legions of staff in order to determine who owes what and who gets what, respectively.
Which part of it?
I mean, we have nuclear bombs. We have the pusher-plate technology. We might have to assemble it, and draw up the plans; I don't claim that they have exact schematics sitting in a drawer that they can order constructed at a moment's notice, and they'd need to get the nukes from somewhere (I believe the suggestion was that they'd come from the active weapons stockpile as part of a de-armament campaign, but that might not be viable at this point) but the design does not utilize technology we cannot construct.
Hell, it doesn't utilize technology they couldn't make in the 60s.
During the cold war, I could understand the hesitancy to utilize nuclear-pulse propulsion; if anything were to make the other guy antsy, it'd be that.
But we don't really have that concern anymore.
Dyson's research suggests that each launch would have generated sufficient fallout to kill between 0.1 and 1 people per launch due to radiation effects. That's nothing; the fallout effect is insignificant.
It also doesn't take into account the use of minimized-radiation weapons.
There's no technological reason to discount the Orion design; it's probably the most efficient and cost-effective design we have by a wildly large margin and will continue to be for a long while yet.
All the dislike is political.
Wrong project Orion.
I was referring to the project Orion from 1958; the version that used nuclear pulse propulsion. You know, the design that the project team felt could build an eight million tonne spacecraft- capable of making Pluto and back in a single stage in less than a year- with the materials and design processes available in 1958, let alone today.
(Hence my statement about 'has existed for decades', as opposed to the new Orion, which is far less than a decade old)
NASA's new Orion is nothing more than a joke.
Um, lolwut?
Look up Project Orion. The technology to get to Mars cost-effectively and efficiently has existed for decades.
Um, no.
Firstly, the State has always reserved the right to kill citizens. Depending on where and when you happen to be, this varies, but, for example, many states have the death penalty.
Secondly, the fact that the criminals have access to weapons does not give you the right to have equally deadly (or more deadly) weapons for self-defense; in no way does that follow. The criminals are breaking the law, and that's the point.
Please. We'll be better off without you.
I'm not sure I see your point; it's not like this is a terribly new idea.
Individuals are not, by themselves sovereign; sovereignty is a state apparatus. Sovereignty essentially means that one has no higher power. Hence, individuals only have rights that the sovereign body grants them.
What part of this do you not really understand?
And I don't buy into that belief, because it's self-evidently not true.
Thomas Paine was an idiot. If 'rights' were an inherent part of human nature, everyone would have them.
It is self-evident that this is not the case; it is equally self-evident that the rights of people are enforced and handed down by the State which holds sovereignty over the area in which they live.
You say that 'just because our current government routinely infringes our rights does not mean that we don't have them'.... I'm not sure what else it means.
The fact that your 'rights' are routinely being violated means, in fact, that you have no such rights.
The States hold joint sovereignty with the Federal government.
In what way? A nuclear destruct device is an armament designed to deter the opponent from killing you on the risk that he himself will be killed.
A firearm, presumably, operates on much the same principles of deterrence.
Really? Are you saying that a smaller person cannot overcome a larger one? That a weaker person cannot overcome a stronger one?
Despite what you might like to believe, home invasions are very rare; home invasions in which people are killed, even rarer. Murders are very rare, and are more often than not they are committed by people who know each other, by a great margin. In fact, You seem to be under the belief that in fact, attackers choose their victims; this is rarely the case.
I am minded of a case a while back in which a man was sleeping in his house when police, serving a drug warrant, burst through his door, and he shot one of them. His excuse, of course, was that he did not realize they were police. A logical entity would conclude this belief is preposterous; the number of home invasions conducted by well-trained, squad-sized criminal elements carrying assault weapons and wearing police body armor is a ridiculously small proportion of the home invasions committed, itself a very small proportion of all crimes; and the belief at that point that such an operation would go to such great lengths in order to kill you, when there are far simpler ways to do so if one were so minded and had access to the necessary equipment (as was obviously the case) boggles the mind.
In any case, the point of that anecdote amongst others was to indicate that there is a perenial belief extant that one is surrounded by huge masses of well-armed, well-trained, and well-armored criminals, all of whom are apparently willing to conduct offensive maneuvers that would put Delta Force to shame at the drop of a hat in order to steal what petty cash someone might happen to have on their nightstand.
Really, the restrictions that come into play with regard to self-defense in most jurisdictions rely on the fact that statistically speaking, the vast majority of self-defense situations do not involve one being attacked by special operations commandos, and therefore the force necessary to repel the attack is in fact far more limited than most people would at first imagine. Given that individuals do not have the ability to personally enforce the law and execute individuals they believe to be criminals, (as such is an abrogation of the rights of the State), it is further unreasonable to allow, legally, individuals to wander around executing petty vagrants for such offenses as trespassing.
One of the primary motivations for restrictions on guns, amongst the usual attempts to limit their access by the criminal element, is to stop frightened individuals from wildly overreacting as they are so prone to do.