> "Will American people march in the streets against him? very unlikely, they're too busy following the lives of spoiled celebrities."
I just want to get this out there, and your post is as good as any to reply to.
In the 60s, you had people running all over the place screaming about war and civil rights as loudly as they could. They were hippies, they were activists, they were protesters, they were idealists, and they were absolutely committed to their beliefs. So I want to state for the record the official reason why I, and perhaps other members of my generation, do not follow this example: It's not worth my fucking time. 3000+ civilians dead, 3000+ soldiers dead, tens of thousands of Iraqis dead, a government more transparently incompetent than ever before, Newspeak permeating through life as we know it (well, more so a few years ago than now), perpetual war that by definition cannot end ("War on Terror"), unregulated and uncontrollable executive privileges, domesting spying, and election fraud. It seems like never before has it all been so obvious, that never before has a problem or trap been more evident, yet 2004 showed me how fucking powerless we are to do anything about it. So you know what, I don't care that Bush pardoned/commuted/excused/whatever his buddy, I don't care what his administration does anymore, and I don't care that the world's going to Hell in a handbasket; I'm done caring. I'm going to spend my effort worrying about matters with a much greater (importance) * (ability to make a difference) product. Enjoy the scenery in Hell, because I'm keeping my fucking eyes closed.
Is cheating a social problem? I don't see why you can't look at it from a technological viewpoint. The system's policy specifies what should or should not occur. The fact that people are able to defy these expectations are a flaw in the implementation or design of the system, thus a bug that should be fixed.
On the other hand, many systems are beyond consideration for technological perfection, so we just accept that it's up to the users to not exploit the situation. And then it is a social problem, as you say.
> "There were a couple of other posters that suggested that such a thing wouldn't work. One guy even suggested that it would require different routers end to end! This is of course nonsense."
With regard to firewalls, would many of them see a packet containing an unrecognized transport protocol (in general, not this case which may use the same protocol number as normal TCP) and drop it? Is it possible to run your own protocol over IP without also controlling the filters at the endpoints? Or will the average firewall (home router for instance) not care what transport protocol is running and just keep track of what internal IP address sent an outgoing packet to an external host?
> "The primary problem with WIFI networks is that they naturally have a lot more packet loss than normal links. On other links, a lot of packet loss tends to indicate packet congestion, so TCP likes to decrease throughput to try to solve it. Under WIFI, that's of course unnecessary and won't solve the underlying problem."
Can modifying the TCP stack on the client and possibly the access point help, without damaging TCP's ability to sense congestion on the WAN side of the link? If so, how much of an improvement do you think it'd make?
In general, what is the actual limiting factor when I'm trying to get throughput between two endpoints on opposite sides of the world over the public Internet? That is, why do I want to select a download mirror close to where I live? Is it this RTT/congestion issue that comes into play, or is it that intercontinental bandwidth is less accessible (or is that totally inaccurate), or is there some other factor?
Just remember that only the videos directly linked seem to be screened. The ones listed as related in the menu (I guess that's a youtube feature) are as accurate a portrait into human idiocy as ever.
(I'm especially miffed at the guy who took one of the astronomy videos and replaced the music of Holst ("Jupiter") with a 50s-style western theme, calling it better music.)
I reread the summary twice and still couldn't find a massive inaccuracy or uniqueness in the statement.
Off topic: Yesterday I read PC Magazine because it was lying around, and the first paragraph of an article on internet bandwidth stated that a gigabit is 100 times faster than a megabit and 1000 times faster than a kilobit. The same article claims that Verizon FIOS gives you the best speeds... at 300 kilobits per second. I suppose the author and editor that couldn't grasp the SI prefixes also have no concept of the difference between a bit and a byte, but even that doesn't explain those low speeds. Maybe their bandwidth testing server was running off someone's home DSL.
In a world where this kind of crap is acceptable in print publications, I don't understand how this perceived fault in a description of the GPL is remotely news. Or are Internet sources held to higher standards?
> "So in your analogy, Alice is the movie studio, Bob is your television, and Jack is a guy who not only sits there, reading the message as Bob does, but also can hook Bob up to any device he likes to try and figure out the key Bob is using to crack the encryption."
Jack's ability to dissect Bob is limited by Bob's allowable features and defenses against tampering. If breaking Bob's defenses is sufficiently expensive, and if the damage done by compromising Bob's key can be mitigated to not destroy the whole system, then I'd say that's a pretty good system (technically, not ethically).
> "In the end, what the media execs are doing is handing out millions upon millions of devices, each of which contains all the information needed to decrypt every single "secret message" that they're selling. A sufficiently technical and motivated person will find a way to extract the key. It only needs to happen once, and then all those millions of dollars spent developing the "bulletproof" DRM is for naught."
That was the case for CSS. CSS contained key revocation but it was never used because it would brick millions of units. AACS uses broadcast encryption, so individual player keys can be revoked, but it still leaves thousands of discs compromised in the process. It is reasonable to imagine that in the future they'd refine the system to drastically reduce the amount of content at risk from a single breach. Players that phone home will assist in this effort, as at least the players if not the discs can be reprogrammed.
> "You hand the ciphertext, the algorithm, and the keys to the same individual"
Ciphertext, check. Algorithm, that is slightly obfuscated and will take a little time. Keys, totally dependent on hardware and implementation, and may not work for all content.
> "If they decide to do DRM from end to end it could be a problem, but that's years down the line."
What do you think HDCP is? The television and the source are communicating over the line using encryption. The issue is the ability to extract keys from tamper-resistant hardware. Someone a few posts above you claimed that HDCP is cracked, I don't know if it is or not but another technology will take its place regardless.
> "Everybody just bought brand new HDTVs (at no small cost), do you think all those people are going to be willing to run out and buy another new TV?"
What do you think people have been complaining about HDCP for, besides its DRM?
> "but how long before there are HD out and in cards to allow new computers to get HD cable signals?"
Those cards will be required by the licensing authority, if not eventually by the government, to lock down capture to authorized platforms only.
Well, I was speaking in the context of first-world western countries where we're surrounded by culture and have high standards (Err.. Fox and the others notwithstanding). The economic realities of countries where it is common for camrips to be shown in actual theaters are obviously different, but I think that's a matter of degree and not principle. I still believe that there exists, for the real version, a non-zero price difference above that of the pirated version, that will cause most people to prefer the legitimate one.
> "No this is where you are wrong, you and your television are the same person because its your hardware and you control it."
Woah. Where's that coming from? In the mass-media-controlled disutopia we're talking about, you don't control jack (or bob, I should say). If we were talking about a system where you were meant to have control, you'd be playing your hddvds on linux without having to go through hacks, and you'd be patching and reflashing your tivo until it grew sentience. But that's not the situation. We're talking about tamper-resistant boxes that are not designed to be flexible and hackable. Now you may argue that this isn't the case yet, but we're talking about the feasibility of DRM in the long run. And it's not like the media industry doesn't already realize that they have more power if they take control of the hardware from you.
> "If the content industry somehow could actually keep people out of the hardware you might have a point, but so far they can't."
That's what each generation of their DRM standards is designed to address. They're evolving towards the goal, they're just not there yet.
> "Even with things like HDCP at some point it still has to get decrypteded. Hell you can scrape the image off the VRAM chip as it does screen updates if you have to do it that way."
But they can make it damn uncomfortable and difficult and error prone. If they're unethical, they might even make it dangerous and then disclaim liability for deaths resulting from tampering. And moreover, they can redesign the system such that compromising one piece of content or one device does not compromise the entire system. When that happens the costs will far outweigh the benefits.
> "1. Joe1337 figures out how to connect to the bus in the TV/DVD/BDPlayer/Whatever and grab the decrypted data. He can do this because he has losts of time knowledge and nobody can tell what he is doing to his TV in his basement. Joe1337 makes it work and posts anonymously to some usenet group."
In this day and age, anonymity is becoming a luxury many of us don't have. The TV is a passive broadcast receiver right now, but the trend is towards interactive phone-home devices. And some legal maneuvering could trace Joe1337 if he's not careful.
> "4. A few hundred mortals see John51|\/|1337's better howto that he posted to N00b's message board. They build the things and then begain sticking their ripps on pirate bay."
That assumes A) that the hack that worked for Joe1337 will work for everyone else, which is probably valid in most cases; and B) that a number of mortals are willing to go through a process that could still be somewhat difficult and dangerous despite John|V|1337's guide.
You make a good case. Someone before you brought up the reminder that analog degradation is mostly an issue when it's done multiple times from copy to copy, and you're right that that would not be the case here.
The resulting damage to my argument is that protecting analog content is more important than I had assumed - important enough that it should be protected (from the companies' perspective) with DRM. And now we can come back to the original point that DRM is futile, and this time the television and the viewer are the same entity as far as analog goes.
Yeah, that's pretty futile, unless you really go crazy and ban all sorts of analog recorders that don't respect do-not-copy bits or aren't themselves tamper-resistant. But that's only one faucet of a war against technological freedom.
I agree. But I was referring specifically to the analog hole as a means to copy consumer media. There are no master tapes, and it's unlikely that the consumer-pirate will have the means to produce an analog copy that is very close in quality to the original digital one. Certainly I'll grant it's possible, I just don't imagine it happening on a regular basis for the majority of small-time pirate-users. Also there's the matter of distribution, and since that will probably happen over bittorrent, recompression may be a problem. I don't know enough about the technical details to comment on that but I would imagine it'd be more difficult than compressing a direct digitally-copied version.
As the other replies to your comment addressed the question of whether or not it's really victimless, I'll just chime in to say that the industry is certainly complaining to anyone who will listen and quite a few people who won't. That's why we have the DMCA after all.
The point is that the camrip can't compete with the original for the segment of the market that actually wants the product as opposed to a substitute. For instance, I would be pretty pissed off if I purchased an official, legitimate dvd, and it was actually produced as a camrip, and I'm sure you would be too. This illustrates that there is in fact a difference. Now it's just a matter of degree, a matter of what proportion of the population will purchase* a dvd when dvd quality is not available illegally.
(* I think it's interesting to compare this mentality: purchase as a result of the unavailability of pirated copies; to the (MP|RI)AA's preferred mentality: piracy detracting from purchase. The first way (correctly) implies that some people who can't pirate may turn to legitimate copies, while the second implies that every instance of piracy is a lost sale.)
> " and fail to understand the classic bob and alice encryption example. bob and alice are 2 seperate people divided over the internet,"
Alice and Bob are two parties who are each capable of possessing knowledge that the other doesn't have. The physical implementation of their communication is not fundamental. I don't care if they're separated by an IP network, telephone line, tin cans and a piece of string, line of sight, or are in each other's faces; it's still fine to use the names Alice and Bob when describing the situation. In this case, the digital television or display device is capable of knowing something that the human being watching it does not: the actual digital contents. The analog contents have to be shared between them, although there are of course attempts to close the analog hole or severely degrade its quality when transmitting to a non-human party is attempted.
> "your TV is right there in your living room for you to disassemble. THAT is why drm fails, because you have both keys at hand."
That's what tamper-resistance is for. The media reader, display device, and human viewer, are each separate Alice/Bob entities because they do not necessarily share knowledge. We can talk about one party breeching the security model and obtaining keys that he shouldn't know - note that I didn't say "tamper-proof" above.
> "also your police vs crime analogy is a moronic over simplification of the situation - police prevent many many different crimes, which one are you reffering to that we should give up on?"
Simplification or generalization? I decided not to name a particular crime because I figured someone like you would complain that I'm unfairly comparing the severity of digital piracy and a more traditional offense.
> "ok i'll pick for you - someone carrying a small amount of cannabis, "
But I guess I didn't count on someone like you picking your own strawman substitute for my generality... Sigh.
> "we won't ever stop it and it's very low impact (just like copying a movie)"
The impact of the crime is irrelevant to the debunking of that argument. The claim was (as I phrased it, which may be itself a strawman simplification) that if you cannot prevent something entirely, then it is useless to even make an attempt. The fallacy in that reasoning is the assumption that no progress is made from the attempt.
> "so yes police should stop worrying about pety crap like that."
Take your drug rants elsewhere, we're talking copyright and DRM here.
> "If the analogue copy is of sufficiently high quality that it is indistinguishable from the digital copy to the average person then what does it matter which is technically superior?"
How high are we talking? Keep in mind that it's probably a lot harder to compress an analog replica of material that is already compressed - wouldn't there be artifacts, like when you convert from ogg to mp3 rather than from flac?
Partly. Some people have higher standards for quality than others, and if they can lower it so the only readily accessible versions are below most people's thresholds...
Also, what happens when the high-quality versions are ubiquitous because everyone's bandwidth increases and the original media isn't sufficiently locked down?
Then this rig would be Jack, not Bob, and thus limited to analog content if the system works correctly. Remember that, although the industry was always concerned about copying, they became really obsessed once digital media became the standard. There's a reason for that.
If you're talking about creating a rig that captures digital content, then we can discuss Jack attempting to intercept the signal and whether or not the current methods are successful in preventing him. Specifically, if the reading device and display device are tamper resistant to protect their keys, and the link between them is properly encrypted, then Jack has a tough job ahead of him. He can look for implementation flaws as he has done in the past, but that will become more difficult with time. His principle advantage is that once he discovers a key, a significant chunk of the system is compromised, but a better system would mitigate the damage so that the cost far outweighs the benefit.
> "Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy."
I don't think they're referring to analog copies of digital content, as the (alleged) damage, loss of quality, is already intrinsic to the source material. Unless you're saying that inserting noise and the like is an improvement over the digital content. And even in that case, with a digital copy you're always free to go analog at any time, but it's not true the other way around.
> "Anyway, we're talking about the grey/black market, in which quality matters Amuch less than price."
Depends on the consumer. The higher the quality, the more people will go black market. They'll never eliminate the market for people who don't care about quality at all, but they can still try to fight piracy's mainstream appeal.
> "See above points - it's not some guy with a camcorder of his TV, it's the "pro-sumer" guy who has good quality equipment that can kill DRM."
I like my copies to be unflawed. If there's a skip or a gap, that's normally enough to make me seek another source. I don't know enough about the process of digitally compressing analog recordings of digital content to say what kind of additional flaws would be introduced, but I imagine I would prefer the actual product. (Assuming of course that I, as a consumer, have a means to access it without the DRM! But that's another matter.)
> "You are completely missing the point. For 200 years, merely PRINTING "Copyright NNNN - all rights reserved" has resulted in a reasonable protection for copyright holders."
Er... Forgive me, but I think you are missing the point, or we're talking about very different things. That kind of protection is for other businesses and organized pirates. That stops one well-established company from ripping another one off, in broad daylight when all paperwork is filed and legal departments and government regulations are involved. Or it works to give sufficient warning to black-market commercial pirates that they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
What we're talking about here is a use of copyright in a totally different manner - against individuals, consumers, people who likely have no commercial aspirations or the legal resources to make sense of this complicated field of law. The past few decades have seen an extreme expansion in power from the first interpretation of copyright to the second. In short, the industry has bigger and better ambitions in suppressing unauthorized enjoyment, ambitions that require more than a copyright notice.
> "So why is it that all of a sudden, new technology is needed to enforce what is, at its core, a human problem?"
Because the playing field is technological. Analogy: "People managed to kill each other long before gunpowder was invented, so why do we need bullet-proof vests?" It's simply technological escalation.
> "A statement which largely undermines the rest of your post. Are you argu
> "the DRM hasnt tried to burn down my house or kill my first born (yet)."
Very well. But just in case that changes, remember that you can temporarily stun it by uttering 09 f9.
(Note: I didn't include the full number above because I felt it would not have helped the rhythm of the sentence at all, and that the joke itself of inserting it everywhere was by now overdone. But since I care whether people question my geekdom ("I care! I care plenty! I just don't know how to make them stop!"), here it is for google cache and the others. 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 Is that what you wanted? Is that what I had to spend 5x the content of my post explaining?)
> "Encryption allows Alice to send a message to Bob that can't be viewed by Jack. The problem with DRM is it uses encryption such that Bob and Jack are the same person."
That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack. I don't care how much cybernetics has progressed, we're not televisions yet, and we as human beings can't assimilate, store, and regurgitate digital content with any kind of quality.
> "Speakers can be recorded, screens can be videotaped."
Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material? (For this paragraph, forget that you are a geek when I use words such as "quality" and when I presume you're a pirate - I'm talking about average users).
> "DRM can make it more difficult to copy content, but it will NEVER make it impossible."
Doesn't need to.
Or to frame the absurdity of that argument in an analogy that I feel works well: "Police can make it difficult to commit crimes (and not get caught), but they'll never make it impossible. Therefore we police are futile. When will they learn?"
> "And the sad part is, DRM frequently makes it more difficult to VIEW content legitimately."
No argument. We should be thankful that they have as difficult a time picking a DRM standard as they do. Fragmentation impedes their progress in locking everything down: CDs versus DVDs for instance.
True, it's not Internet spawned, but it has the same meme* status as the others, and they're all based on convenient but gruesome phonetic offspring of existing terminology.
(* Please don't nitpick the definition of meme...)
> "and I'd argue is far more annoying than vlog (and I've seen it used about as many times), try . It means what you think, ick."
I felt a physical, out-of-band kind of pain as I read that, like I was being strangled by the dark side of the Force, or I was getting my ass kicked in the Matrix. Please do not do that again.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Will American people march in the streets against him? very unlikely, they're too busy following the lives of spoiled celebrities."
I just want to get this out there, and your post is as good as any to reply to.
In the 60s, you had people running all over the place screaming about war and civil rights as loudly as they could. They were hippies, they were activists, they were protesters, they were idealists, and they were absolutely committed to their beliefs. So I want to state for the record the official reason why I, and perhaps other members of my generation, do not follow this example: It's not worth my fucking time. 3000+ civilians dead, 3000+ soldiers dead, tens of thousands of Iraqis dead, a government more transparently incompetent than ever before, Newspeak permeating through life as we know it (well, more so a few years ago than now), perpetual war that by definition cannot end ("War on Terror"), unregulated and uncontrollable executive privileges, domesting spying, and election fraud. It seems like never before has it all been so obvious, that never before has a problem or trap been more evident, yet 2004 showed me how fucking powerless we are to do anything about it. So you know what, I don't care that Bush pardoned/commuted/excused/whatever his buddy, I don't care what his administration does anymore, and I don't care that the world's going to Hell in a handbasket; I'm done caring. I'm going to spend my effort worrying about matters with a much greater (importance) * (ability to make a difference) product. Enjoy the scenery in Hell, because I'm keeping my fucking eyes closed.
The penalty for treason is hanging. It's the only crime that's actually specified in the Constitution itself.
That's actually how BZFlag got a number of its powerups.
Is cheating a social problem? I don't see why you can't look at it from a technological viewpoint. The system's policy specifies what should or should not occur. The fact that people are able to defy these expectations are a flaw in the implementation or design of the system, thus a bug that should be fixed.
On the other hand, many systems are beyond consideration for technological perfection, so we just accept that it's up to the users to not exploit the situation. And then it is a social problem, as you say.
> "There were a couple of other posters that suggested that such a thing wouldn't work. One guy even suggested that it would require different routers end to end! This is of course nonsense."
With regard to firewalls, would many of them see a packet containing an unrecognized transport protocol (in general, not this case which may use the same protocol number as normal TCP) and drop it? Is it possible to run your own protocol over IP without also controlling the filters at the endpoints? Or will the average firewall (home router for instance) not care what transport protocol is running and just keep track of what internal IP address sent an outgoing packet to an external host?
> "The primary problem with WIFI networks is that they naturally have a lot more packet loss than normal links. On other links, a lot of packet loss tends to indicate packet congestion, so TCP likes to decrease throughput to try to solve it. Under WIFI, that's of course unnecessary and won't solve the underlying problem."
Can modifying the TCP stack on the client and possibly the access point help, without damaging TCP's ability to sense congestion on the WAN side of the link? If so, how much of an improvement do you think it'd make?
Thanks for the explanation. A question:
In general, what is the actual limiting factor when I'm trying to get throughput between two endpoints on opposite sides of the world over the public Internet? That is, why do I want to select a download mirror close to where I live? Is it this RTT/congestion issue that comes into play, or is it that intercontinental bandwidth is less accessible (or is that totally inaccurate), or is there some other factor?
Just remember that only the videos directly linked seem to be screened. The ones listed as related in the menu (I guess that's a youtube feature) are as accurate a portrait into human idiocy as ever.
(I'm especially miffed at the guy who took one of the astronomy videos and replaced the music of Holst ("Jupiter") with a 50s-style western theme, calling it better music.)
I reread the summary twice and still couldn't find a massive inaccuracy or uniqueness in the statement.
Off topic:
Yesterday I read PC Magazine because it was lying around, and the first paragraph of an article on internet bandwidth stated that a gigabit is 100 times faster than a megabit and 1000 times faster than a kilobit. The same article claims that Verizon FIOS gives you the best speeds... at 300 kilobits per second. I suppose the author and editor that couldn't grasp the SI prefixes also have no concept of the difference between a bit and a byte, but even that doesn't explain those low speeds. Maybe their bandwidth testing server was running off someone's home DSL.
In a world where this kind of crap is acceptable in print publications, I don't understand how this perceived fault in a description of the GPL is remotely news. Or are Internet sources held to higher standards?
> "So in your analogy, Alice is the movie studio, Bob is your television, and Jack is a guy who not only sits there, reading the message as Bob does, but also can hook Bob up to any device he likes to try and figure out the key Bob is using to crack the encryption."
Jack's ability to dissect Bob is limited by Bob's allowable features and defenses against tampering. If breaking Bob's defenses is sufficiently expensive, and if the damage done by compromising Bob's key can be mitigated to not destroy the whole system, then I'd say that's a pretty good system (technically, not ethically).
> "In the end, what the media execs are doing is handing out millions upon millions of devices, each of which contains all the information needed to decrypt every single "secret message" that they're selling. A sufficiently technical and motivated person will find a way to extract the key. It only needs to happen once, and then all those millions of dollars spent developing the "bulletproof" DRM is for naught."
That was the case for CSS. CSS contained key revocation but it was never used because it would brick millions of units. AACS uses broadcast encryption, so individual player keys can be revoked, but it still leaves thousands of discs compromised in the process. It is reasonable to imagine that in the future they'd refine the system to drastically reduce the amount of content at risk from a single breach. Players that phone home will assist in this effort, as at least the players if not the discs can be reprogrammed.
> "You hand the ciphertext, the algorithm, and the keys to the same individual"
Ciphertext, check. Algorithm, that is slightly obfuscated and will take a little time. Keys, totally dependent on hardware and implementation, and may not work for all content.
> "If they decide to do DRM from end to end it could be a problem, but that's years down the line."
What do you think HDCP is? The television and the source are communicating over the line using encryption. The issue is the ability to extract keys from tamper-resistant hardware. Someone a few posts above you claimed that HDCP is cracked, I don't know if it is or not but another technology will take its place regardless.
> "Everybody just bought brand new HDTVs (at no small cost), do you think all those people are going to be willing to run out and buy another new TV?"
What do you think people have been complaining about HDCP for, besides its DRM?
> "but how long before there are HD out and in cards to allow new computers to get HD cable signals?"
Those cards will be required by the licensing authority, if not eventually by the government, to lock down capture to authorized platforms only.
Well, I was speaking in the context of first-world western countries where we're surrounded by culture and have high standards (Err.. Fox and the others notwithstanding). The economic realities of countries where it is common for camrips to be shown in actual theaters are obviously different, but I think that's a matter of degree and not principle. I still believe that there exists, for the real version, a non-zero price difference above that of the pirated version, that will cause most people to prefer the legitimate one.
> "No this is where you are wrong, you and your television are the same person because its your hardware and you control it."
Woah. Where's that coming from? In the mass-media-controlled disutopia we're talking about, you don't control jack (or bob, I should say). If we were talking about a system where you were meant to have control, you'd be playing your hddvds on linux without having to go through hacks, and you'd be patching and reflashing your tivo until it grew sentience. But that's not the situation. We're talking about tamper-resistant boxes that are not designed to be flexible and hackable. Now you may argue that this isn't the case yet, but we're talking about the feasibility of DRM in the long run. And it's not like the media industry doesn't already realize that they have more power if they take control of the hardware from you.
> "If the content industry somehow could actually keep people out of the hardware you might have a point, but so far they can't."
That's what each generation of their DRM standards is designed to address. They're evolving towards the goal, they're just not there yet.
> "Even with things like HDCP at some point it still has to get decrypteded. Hell you can scrape the image off the VRAM chip as it does screen updates if you have to do it that way."
But they can make it damn uncomfortable and difficult and error prone. If they're unethical, they might even make it dangerous and then disclaim liability for deaths resulting from tampering. And moreover, they can redesign the system such that compromising one piece of content or one device does not compromise the entire system. When that happens the costs will far outweigh the benefits.
> "1. Joe1337 figures out how to connect to the bus in the TV/DVD/BDPlayer/Whatever and grab the decrypted data. He can do this because he has losts of time knowledge and nobody can tell what he is doing to his TV in his basement. Joe1337 makes it work and posts anonymously to some usenet group."
In this day and age, anonymity is becoming a luxury many of us don't have. The TV is a passive broadcast receiver right now, but the trend is towards interactive phone-home devices. And some legal maneuvering could trace Joe1337 if he's not careful.
> "4. A few hundred mortals see John51|\/|1337's better howto that he posted to N00b's message board. They build the things and then begain sticking their ripps on pirate bay."
That assumes A) that the hack that worked for Joe1337 will work for everyone else, which is probably valid in most cases; and B) that a number of mortals are willing to go through a process that could still be somewhat difficult and dangerous despite John|V|1337's guide.
You make a good case. Someone before you brought up the reminder that analog degradation is mostly an issue when it's done multiple times from copy to copy, and you're right that that would not be the case here.
The resulting damage to my argument is that protecting analog content is more important than I had assumed - important enough that it should be protected (from the companies' perspective) with DRM. And now we can come back to the original point that DRM is futile, and this time the television and the viewer are the same entity as far as analog goes.
Yeah, that's pretty futile, unless you really go crazy and ban all sorts of analog recorders that don't respect do-not-copy bits or aren't themselves tamper-resistant. But that's only one faucet of a war against technological freedom.
I agree. But I was referring specifically to the analog hole as a means to copy consumer media. There are no master tapes, and it's unlikely that the consumer-pirate will have the means to produce an analog copy that is very close in quality to the original digital one. Certainly I'll grant it's possible, I just don't imagine it happening on a regular basis for the majority of small-time pirate-users. Also there's the matter of distribution, and since that will probably happen over bittorrent, recompression may be a problem. I don't know enough about the technical details to comment on that but I would imagine it'd be more difficult than compressing a direct digitally-copied version.
As the other replies to your comment addressed the question of whether or not it's really victimless, I'll just chime in to say that the industry is certainly complaining to anyone who will listen and quite a few people who won't. That's why we have the DMCA after all.
The point is that the camrip can't compete with the original for the segment of the market that actually wants the product as opposed to a substitute. For instance, I would be pretty pissed off if I purchased an official, legitimate dvd, and it was actually produced as a camrip, and I'm sure you would be too. This illustrates that there is in fact a difference. Now it's just a matter of degree, a matter of what proportion of the population will purchase* a dvd when dvd quality is not available illegally.
(* I think it's interesting to compare this mentality: purchase as a result of the unavailability of pirated copies; to the (MP|RI)AA's preferred mentality: piracy detracting from purchase. The first way (correctly) implies that some people who can't pirate may turn to legitimate copies, while the second implies that every instance of piracy is a lost sale.)
> "your an idiot"
Point noted.
> " and fail to understand the classic bob and alice encryption example. bob and alice are 2 seperate people divided over the internet,"
Alice and Bob are two parties who are each capable of possessing knowledge that the other doesn't have. The physical implementation of their communication is not fundamental. I don't care if they're separated by an IP network, telephone line, tin cans and a piece of string, line of sight, or are in each other's faces; it's still fine to use the names Alice and Bob when describing the situation. In this case, the digital television or display device is capable of knowing something that the human being watching it does not: the actual digital contents. The analog contents have to be shared between them, although there are of course attempts to close the analog hole or severely degrade its quality when transmitting to a non-human party is attempted.
> "your TV is right there in your living room for you to disassemble. THAT is why drm fails, because you have both keys at hand."
That's what tamper-resistance is for. The media reader, display device, and human viewer, are each separate Alice/Bob entities because they do not necessarily share knowledge. We can talk about one party breeching the security model and obtaining keys that he shouldn't know - note that I didn't say "tamper-proof" above.
> "also your police vs crime analogy is a moronic over simplification of the situation - police prevent many many different crimes, which one are you reffering to that we should give up on?"
Simplification or generalization? I decided not to name a particular crime because I figured someone like you would complain that I'm unfairly comparing the severity of digital piracy and a more traditional offense.
> "ok i'll pick for you - someone carrying a small amount of cannabis, "
But I guess I didn't count on someone like you picking your own strawman substitute for my generality... Sigh.
> "we won't ever stop it and it's very low impact (just like copying a movie)"
The impact of the crime is irrelevant to the debunking of that argument. The claim was (as I phrased it, which may be itself a strawman simplification) that if you cannot prevent something entirely, then it is useless to even make an attempt. The fallacy in that reasoning is the assumption that no progress is made from the attempt.
> "so yes police should stop worrying about pety crap like that."
Take your drug rants elsewhere, we're talking copyright and DRM here.
Thank you, come again.
> "If the analogue copy is of sufficiently high quality that it is indistinguishable from the digital copy to the average person then what does it matter which is technically superior?"
How high are we talking? Keep in mind that it's probably a lot harder to compress an analog replica of material that is already compressed - wouldn't there be artifacts, like when you convert from ogg to mp3 rather than from flac?
Partly. Some people have higher standards for quality than others, and if they can lower it so the only readily accessible versions are below most people's thresholds...
Also, what happens when the high-quality versions are ubiquitous because everyone's bandwidth increases and the original media isn't sufficiently locked down?
> "But it's not hard to create a rig that does."
Then this rig would be Jack, not Bob, and thus limited to analog content if the system works correctly. Remember that, although the industry was always concerned about copying, they became really obsessed once digital media became the standard. There's a reason for that.
If you're talking about creating a rig that captures digital content, then we can discuss Jack attempting to intercept the signal and whether or not the current methods are successful in preventing him. Specifically, if the reading device and display device are tamper resistant to protect their keys, and the link between them is properly encrypted, then Jack has a tough job ahead of him. He can look for implementation flaws as he has done in the past, but that will become more difficult with time. His principle advantage is that once he discovers a key, a significant chunk of the system is compromised, but a better system would mitigate the damage so that the cost far outweighs the benefit.
> "Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy."
I don't think they're referring to analog copies of digital content, as the (alleged) damage, loss of quality, is already intrinsic to the source material. Unless you're saying that inserting noise and the like is an improvement over the digital content. And even in that case, with a digital copy you're always free to go analog at any time, but it's not true the other way around.
> "Anyway, we're talking about the grey/black market, in which quality matters Amuch less than price."
Depends on the consumer. The higher the quality, the more people will go black market. They'll never eliminate the market for people who don't care about quality at all, but they can still try to fight piracy's mainstream appeal.
> "See above points - it's not some guy with a camcorder of his TV, it's the "pro-sumer" guy who has good quality equipment that can kill DRM."
I like my copies to be unflawed. If there's a skip or a gap, that's normally enough to make me seek another source. I don't know enough about the process of digitally compressing analog recordings of digital content to say what kind of additional flaws would be introduced, but I imagine I would prefer the actual product. (Assuming of course that I, as a consumer, have a means to access it without the DRM! But that's another matter.)
> "You are completely missing the point. For 200 years, merely PRINTING "Copyright NNNN - all rights reserved" has resulted in a reasonable protection for copyright holders."
Er... Forgive me, but I think you are missing the point, or we're talking about very different things. That kind of protection is for other businesses and organized pirates. That stops one well-established company from ripping another one off, in broad daylight when all paperwork is filed and legal departments and government regulations are involved. Or it works to give sufficient warning to black-market commercial pirates that they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
What we're talking about here is a use of copyright in a totally different manner - against individuals, consumers, people who likely have no commercial aspirations or the legal resources to make sense of this complicated field of law. The past few decades have seen an extreme expansion in power from the first interpretation of copyright to the second. In short, the industry has bigger and better ambitions in suppressing unauthorized enjoyment, ambitions that require more than a copyright notice.
> "So why is it that all of a sudden, new technology is needed to enforce what is, at its core, a human problem?"
Because the playing field is technological. Analogy: "People managed to kill each other long before gunpowder was invented, so why do we need bullet-proof vests?" It's simply technological escalation.
> "A statement which largely undermines the rest of your post. Are you argu
> "the DRM hasnt tried to burn down my house or kill my first born (yet)."
Very well. But just in case that changes, remember that you can temporarily stun it by uttering 09 f9.
(Note: I didn't include the full number above because I felt it would not have helped the rhythm of the sentence at all, and that the joke itself of inserting it everywhere was by now overdone. But since I care whether people question my geekdom ("I care! I care plenty! I just don't know how to make them stop!"), here it is for google cache and the others.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Is that what you wanted? Is that what I had to spend 5x the content of my post explaining?)
> "Encryption allows Alice to send a message to Bob that can't be viewed by Jack. The problem with DRM is it uses encryption such that Bob and Jack are the same person."
That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack. I don't care how much cybernetics has progressed, we're not televisions yet, and we as human beings can't assimilate, store, and regurgitate digital content with any kind of quality.
> "Speakers can be recorded, screens can be videotaped."
Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material? (For this paragraph, forget that you are a geek when I use words such as "quality" and when I presume you're a pirate - I'm talking about average users).
> "DRM can make it more difficult to copy content, but it will NEVER make it impossible."
Doesn't need to.
Or to frame the absurdity of that argument in an analogy that I feel works well: "Police can make it difficult to commit crimes (and not get caught), but they'll never make it impossible. Therefore we police are futile. When will they learn?"
> "And the sad part is, DRM frequently makes it more difficult to VIEW content legitimately."
No argument. We should be thankful that they have as difficult a time picking a DRM standard as they do. Fragmentation impedes their progress in locking everything down: CDs versus DVDs for instance.
I so fscking agree.
True, it's not Internet spawned, but it has the same meme* status as the others, and they're all based on convenient but gruesome phonetic offspring of existing terminology.
(* Please don't nitpick the definition of meme...)
> "and I'd argue is far more annoying than vlog (and I've seen it used about as many times), try . It means what you think, ick."
I felt a physical, out-of-band kind of pain as I read that, like I was being strangled by the dark side of the Force, or I was getting my ass kicked in the Matrix. Please do not do that again.