4 ms·

> but if I buy ebooks, i'll just go ahead and strip their DRM without giving a damn who says no Yeah, dream on. How long do you think this option will stay av

by patrec 5y ago

> but if I buy ebooks, i'll just go ahead and strip their DRM without giving a damn who says no Yeah, dream on. How long do you think this option will stay available to you? I sometimes get the impression that intelligent technical people on HN can't see ahead 5 minutes into the future, because being a peon without rights is something that conflicts with their self image as some technical sophisticate not subject to the same insults by our overlords as lowly non-techies. But your relative technical sophistication just means you'll lose some basic control over your privacy, data and possessions at t+ε rather than t.

Kye 5y ago
Asking as a non-sophisticate who has a mental block on most math education beyond 2nd grade: what does t+ε mean? edit: HN would rate limit me if I tried to reply to each explanation with thanks, so: thanks!
- cyberbanjo 5y ago
  Time + Elapsed Time. AKA not now, but eventually
  - oleganza 5y ago
    Epsilon stands for a "arbitrarily tiny bit" in calculus.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Current (t)ime plus some hand-waiving (ε) Epsilon of change in time.
- patrec 5y ago
  t = some point in time t+ε = some point in time a tiny fraction later
nemetroid 5y ago
> Yeah, dream on. How long do you think this option will stay available to you? For as long as my reader can decrypt ebooks locally.
- patrec 5y ago
  Fahrenheit 451 style, right? Because local vs cloud doesn't matter squat if all the devices your have locally are locked down completely and controlled by someone else.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    For books the analog hole is probably widening with better ocr now than ever.
    - patrec 5y ago
      The last remaining analog hole may soon be people. Recording devices are basically already digital, and there is no fundamental difficulty in embedding enough pattern recognition to ensures that you don't replicate material that's either thoughtcrime or the valuable IP of Elsevier, RIAA or some similar benefactor of humanity. Photoshop reportedly already refuses to work on scenes that contain money.
      - dv_dt 5y ago
        Money is one thing, but you can’t exactly autoblur all text without a mass uproar. And at least for now I don’t think it’s feasible to keep enough updated storage and processing around photo devices to recognize temporary pics of all copyrighted texts either - even with heavily optimized hashes. But, I could be wrong in this assumption.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> How long do you think this option will stay available to you? This is a significant concern. We're seeing more and more non-free hardware in the market. Hardware designed to stop us from having access to data and from running our own software. Our computing freedom must be sacrificed in order to have any hope of enforcing these antiquated laws.
vageli 5y ago
As long as the content is presented to a human for consumption, I think it will be possible to duplicate it, even if it is just recording the screen with a camera or something. Even "unpublished" works can be recreated by those with talent, like Mozart and Allegri’s Miserere.
- patrec 5y ago
  > As long as the content is presented to a human for consumption, I think it will be possible to duplicate it, Why do you think so? If you can tell the difference between a family scene and a screening of a Hollywood film, why can't your camera? It doesn't have to perfect, and you can gradually tighten things down, which is exactly what has been happening for some time.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    > If you can tell the difference between a family scene and a screening of a Hollywood film, … That's a big "if". I wouldn't guarantee to always be able to tell the difference. And there is a lot of non-Hollywood content which looks a lot more like something out of a Hollywood film than just "family scenes". (People do make their own films, you know, not just recordings of family events.) > … why can't your camera? That's asking a lot out of the kind of computing hardware you can reasonably fit into a camera. Even if you assume something like a smartphone with much more computing capacity than a standalone DSLR or mirrorless camera (and a correspondingly higher power budge / shorter battery life), you're not going to be able to train it to recognize every bit of Hollywood content and reliably distinguish it from non-Hollywood content offline. (Online recognition where the camera can upload content to the server for pattern recognition is a different matter, but something like this would presumably be done offline anyway.) The information requirements would be on the order of having all that content downloaded to the phone—never mind the processing involved.
- StillBored 5y ago
  Until you have a camera that detects watermarks and refuses to record. Its already there with cinavia which I guess has functional workarounds now, but it took, what 3-4 years (?) before a remover showed up that didn't garble the audio. Its not at all hard to believe that in 20-30 years when all the non-drm'ed version are sitting in landfills the analog "hole" will be closed because capture or playback devices will simply refuse to function when they detect watermarks when interacting with unsecured channels. I acted when ultra-hd was "cracked" and grabbed one of the friendly drives, but its not been particularly useful because there seems to be far less effort in the public to assure that ultrahd disks are readable (look up the details) so its more likely to "miss" these days. The point being that its a giant game of back and forth, and while the "crackers" win everytime they crack something, they are mostly hobbiest fighting against corps with billions to employ engineers who spend their entire day coming up with ways to make it more difficult. Given few of us have electron microscopes and giant supercomputers, it seems really likely they will eventually win given that they learn to compensate every time something is cracked. Plus, in the past it was pretty easy to buy PC's/etc that gave you full control, these days even with secure boot disabled, you might not be able to get into the lower levels of firmware because the machine simply refuses to accept unsigned updates. Flash it by hand and the bootstrap code integrated on the CPU die refuses to accept it.
logfromblammo 5y ago
Forever. DRM is created under the cryptographically insane belief that one can treat a person as an eavesdropper at any time after they have been an authorized recipient. That is the unsolvable problem that guarantees DRM will never be able to create a perfect protection device that allows the company to stuff the genie back into the bottle, or the cat back into the bag, at will.
helloworld11 5y ago
Well, I can't predict the future, but so far I've managed to bypass every bullshit DRM control I've come across for text content and ebooks without too much trouble. It's mainly a question of choosing your mediums and hardware a bit more selectively. This doesn't make me blind to anything beyond the next 5 minutes and personally, i'm far from a technical person. Yes, the tech and media giants will keep looking for ways for screw people into becoming captive consumers who "buy" things that they don't even really own, but technology has so far done a remarkably good job of counteracting much of these attempts if one bothers to use it with a bit of creativity. edit: clarity

by patrec 5y ago

Kye 5y ago

Asking as a non-sophisticate who has a mental block on most math education beyond 2nd grade: what does t+ε mean? edit: HN would rate limit me if I tried to reply to each explanation with thanks, so: thanks!

cyberbanjo 5y ago
Time + Elapsed Time. AKA not now, but eventually
- oleganza 5y ago
  Epsilon stands for a "arbitrarily tiny bit" in calculus.
moron4hire 5y ago
Current (t)ime plus some hand-waiving (ε) Epsilon of change in time.
patrec 5y ago
t = some point in time t+ε = some point in time a tiny fraction later

nemetroid 5y ago

> Yeah, dream on. How long do you think this option will stay available to you? For as long as my reader can decrypt ebooks locally.

patrec 5y ago
Fahrenheit 451 style, right? Because local vs cloud doesn't matter squat if all the devices your have locally are locked down completely and controlled by someone else.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  For books the analog hole is probably widening with better ocr now than ever.
  - patrec 5y ago
    The last remaining analog hole may soon be people. Recording devices are basically already digital, and there is no fundamental difficulty in embedding enough pattern recognition to ensures that you don't replicate material that's either thoughtcrime or the valuable IP of Elsevier, RIAA or some similar benefactor of humanity. Photoshop reportedly already refuses to work on scenes that contain money.
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      Money is one thing, but you can’t exactly autoblur all text without a mass uproar. And at least for now I don’t think it’s feasible to keep enough updated storage and processing around photo devices to recognize temporary pics of all copyrighted texts either - even with heavily optimized hashes. But, I could be wrong in this assumption.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> How long do you think this option will stay available to you? This is a significant concern. We're seeing more and more non-free hardware in the market. Hardware designed to stop us from having access to data and from running our own software. Our computing freedom must be sacrificed in order to have any hope of enforcing these antiquated laws.

vageli 5y ago

As long as the content is presented to a human for consumption, I think it will be possible to duplicate it, even if it is just recording the screen with a camera or something. Even "unpublished" works can be recreated by those with talent, like Mozart and Allegri’s Miserere.

patrec 5y ago
> As long as the content is presented to a human for consumption, I think it will be possible to duplicate it, Why do you think so? If you can tell the difference between a family scene and a screening of a Hollywood film, why can't your camera? It doesn't have to perfect, and you can gradually tighten things down, which is exactly what has been happening for some time.
- nybble41 5y ago
  > If you can tell the difference between a family scene and a screening of a Hollywood film, … That's a big "if". I wouldn't guarantee to always be able to tell the difference. And there is a lot of non-Hollywood content which looks a lot more like something out of a Hollywood film than just "family scenes". (People do make their own films, you know, not just recordings of family events.) > … why can't your camera? That's asking a lot out of the kind of computing hardware you can reasonably fit into a camera. Even if you assume something like a smartphone with much more computing capacity than a standalone DSLR or mirrorless camera (and a correspondingly higher power budge / shorter battery life), you're not going to be able to train it to recognize every bit of Hollywood content and reliably distinguish it from non-Hollywood content offline. (Online recognition where the camera can upload content to the server for pattern recognition is a different matter, but something like this would presumably be done offline anyway.) The information requirements would be on the order of having all that content downloaded to the phone—never mind the processing involved.
StillBored 5y ago
Until you have a camera that detects watermarks and refuses to record. Its already there with cinavia which I guess has functional workarounds now, but it took, what 3-4 years (?) before a remover showed up that didn't garble the audio. Its not at all hard to believe that in 20-30 years when all the non-drm'ed version are sitting in landfills the analog "hole" will be closed because capture or playback devices will simply refuse to function when they detect watermarks when interacting with unsecured channels. I acted when ultra-hd was "cracked" and grabbed one of the friendly drives, but its not been particularly useful because there seems to be far less effort in the public to assure that ultrahd disks are readable (look up the details) so its more likely to "miss" these days. The point being that its a giant game of back and forth, and while the "crackers" win everytime they crack something, they are mostly hobbiest fighting against corps with billions to employ engineers who spend their entire day coming up with ways to make it more difficult. Given few of us have electron microscopes and giant supercomputers, it seems really likely they will eventually win given that they learn to compensate every time something is cracked. Plus, in the past it was pretty easy to buy PC's/etc that gave you full control, these days even with secure boot disabled, you might not be able to get into the lower levels of firmware because the machine simply refuses to accept unsigned updates. Flash it by hand and the bootstrap code integrated on the CPU die refuses to accept it.

logfromblammo 5y ago

Forever. DRM is created under the cryptographically insane belief that one can treat a person as an eavesdropper at any time after they have been an authorized recipient. That is the unsolvable problem that guarantees DRM will never be able to create a perfect protection device that allows the company to stuff the genie back into the bottle, or the cat back into the bag, at will.

helloworld11 5y ago

Well, I can't predict the future, but so far I've managed to bypass every bullshit DRM control I've come across for text content and ebooks without too much trouble. It's mainly a question of choosing your mediums and hardware a bit more selectively. This doesn't make me blind to anything beyond the next 5 minutes and personally, i'm far from a technical person. Yes, the tech and media giants will keep looking for ways for screw people into becoming captive consumers who "buy" things that they don't even really own, but technology has so far done a remarkably good job of counteracting much of these attempts if one bothers to use it with a bit of creativity. edit: clarity