4 ms·

Right, but the lower down in the stack they go, the more they deter the "casual" hacker. I think they want to bring down the sheer number of pirates to a level

by yid 15y ago

Right, but the lower down in the stack they go, the more they deter the "casual" hacker. I think they want to bring down the sheer number of pirates to a level where the vast majority of media won't be pirated.

jrockway 15y ago
This doesn't make sense, though. You can just share your account credentials and activate your friends' TVs. Then they can watch all the video they want. Similarly, people don't pirate movies by having a close friend rip Netflix streams. They go on The Pirate Bay and download the torrent. Preventing piracy means you need to prevent people from ripping the disks or streams in the first place... but the people who do that aren't "casual hackers", they are as hardcore as priates get. And if just one person figures out how to do it, it's broken forever. (I assume there are plenty of programs available to rip Blu-Ray disks now, since the key for each disk is known and publicly available. It only takes one person to do that, and then the DRM is nothing but a waste of CPU cycles and engineering talent.)
- dasil003 15y ago
  I wouldn't go authorizing other people's devices with your Netflix account willy-nilly, because I'm pretty sure they'll cut you off pretty quick. To your point about the security of DRM, that's an overly idealistic view of things. It's simply not true that the one person with expertise to break an almost-perfect DRM is going to rip every movie and torrent it. Hell it's trivial to rip any DVD and that's more than Netflix quality already. The studios are not the blundering idiots that the hacker community would like to believe; they realize all this, but they're not just going to roll over and go DRM-free just because of an absolutist argument. Instead they're going to keep pushing the envelope (and paying!) for ever-improved DRM to cut down on piracy as much as they can. It may be a losing battle, but if it is it's lose-lose for them so they'll keep fighting it.
  - veyron 15y ago
    How are the torrent videos made available in the first place? Are people just ripping DVDs?
    - aidenn0 15y ago
      Rips of DVDs and blu-rays are the most common (and high-quality) way for anything that has been put on a disc. Note that this may still be before commercial release, as screeners are made available for critics et. al. For movies that are newly in the theater, the movie is captured with a video camera. This varies in quality from some guy pointing a cam-corder at the screen with a microphone (worst quality) goes up when they hook the audio directly in using the system for the hard-of hearing (often called a telesync, though it's a bit of a misnomer) and is even better when done from a tripod in the projection room. Something that is still done, but is more rare, is to take the film and run it through a piece of dedicated equipment for converting from film to video, caled a telecine.
    - jbk 15y ago
      DVDs or Blu-Rays, or leaking DCP (Digital Cinema Packages) or just with rogue HDMI dongles that don't respect HDCP.
jbk 15y ago
(First, I don't get what part is the low one of stack here...) Then you just need one leak of a movie to have it on all pirates website. Most people don't rip, but only watch what's been ripped by other... And doing so, those days, is just a matter of having a rogue HDMI dongle :D
khafra 15y ago
It's easy to bring it down to a level where the vast majority of media consumers won't break the DRM, but you only need one to do it for each unit of media.

by yid 15y ago

jrockway 15y ago

This doesn't make sense, though. You can just share your account credentials and activate your friends' TVs. Then they can watch all the video they want. Similarly, people don't pirate movies by having a close friend rip Netflix streams. They go on The Pirate Bay and download the torrent. Preventing piracy means you need to prevent people from ripping the disks or streams in the first place... but the people who do that aren't "casual hackers", they are as hardcore as priates get. And if just one person figures out how to do it, it's broken forever. (I assume there are plenty of programs available to rip Blu-Ray disks now, since the key for each disk is known and publicly available. It only takes one person to do that, and then the DRM is nothing but a waste of CPU cycles and engineering talent.)

dasil003 15y ago
I wouldn't go authorizing other people's devices with your Netflix account willy-nilly, because I'm pretty sure they'll cut you off pretty quick. To your point about the security of DRM, that's an overly idealistic view of things. It's simply not true that the one person with expertise to break an almost-perfect DRM is going to rip every movie and torrent it. Hell it's trivial to rip any DVD and that's more than Netflix quality already. The studios are not the blundering idiots that the hacker community would like to believe; they realize all this, but they're not just going to roll over and go DRM-free just because of an absolutist argument. Instead they're going to keep pushing the envelope (and paying!) for ever-improved DRM to cut down on piracy as much as they can. It may be a losing battle, but if it is it's lose-lose for them so they'll keep fighting it.
- veyron 15y ago
  How are the torrent videos made available in the first place? Are people just ripping DVDs?
  - aidenn0 15y ago
    Rips of DVDs and blu-rays are the most common (and high-quality) way for anything that has been put on a disc. Note that this may still be before commercial release, as screeners are made available for critics et. al. For movies that are newly in the theater, the movie is captured with a video camera. This varies in quality from some guy pointing a cam-corder at the screen with a microphone (worst quality) goes up when they hook the audio directly in using the system for the hard-of hearing (often called a telesync, though it's a bit of a misnomer) and is even better when done from a tripod in the projection room. Something that is still done, but is more rare, is to take the film and run it through a piece of dedicated equipment for converting from film to video, caled a telecine.
  - jbk 15y ago
    DVDs or Blu-Rays, or leaking DCP (Digital Cinema Packages) or just with rogue HDMI dongles that don't respect HDCP.

jbk 15y ago

(First, I don't get what part is the low one of stack here...) Then you just need one leak of a movie to have it on all pirates website. Most people don't rip, but only watch what's been ripped by other... And doing so, those days, is just a matter of having a rogue HDMI dongle :D

khafra 15y ago

It's easy to bring it down to a level where the vast majority of media consumers won't break the DRM, but you only need one to do it for each unit of media.