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Good. The desire to support the unreasonable demands of the film industry here has led to the perversion of the x86 architecture to add all sorts of peculiar D

Good. The desire to support the unreasonable demands of the film industry here has led to the perversion of the x86 architecture to add all sorts of peculiar DRM functionalities, and has precluded firmware components from being made open source; as I have previously written about here [1], which links to forum posts by an AMD engineer: I'm sure I don't have to explain to you that the essense of DRM requirements in the OEM PC market is that the owner must NOT have full control of the machine if that includes being able to tamper with or disable any of the DRM mechanisms. At the end of the day if Intel was going to support this kind of thing AMD also was pretty much going to be required to make such a deal with the devil, or have a product that can't compete with Intel. If Intel is losing interest in supporting video DRM, perhaps due to shifts away from physical media, it's likely to have a positive effect on both Intel's platform as well as other platforms which feel the need to support the same DRM platforms. [1] https://www.devever.net/~hl/intelme https://www.devever.net/~hl/intelme

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bserge 5y ago
elzbardico 5y ago
Film Industry => in about half the time, Sony Entertainment, by far the most aggressive company when it comes to copyrights.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world? Ideally I'd like to see reform of copyright law to favour corporate giants a bit less, but given how much of a hand those same giants seem to have in the laws that get written I'm not hopeful of that any time soon. I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. I'm still a believer at heart that the internet can be a great democratiser of content, that it can bring down the barriers and middlemen between artists and their audience. Art on the internet should be a participatory thing too in my opinion, not the mindless content consumption that the media companies of yesteryear see it as.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising). Which also explains why the studios insist on ridiculously bullshit in terms of DRM - the banks backing these enormous loans want their money back. With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low and so there is no incentive for studios to invest in DRM, it's simply not worth it any more. The real money for musicians is tour tickets and merch... CD/vinyl sales and streaming income isn't much.
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      >In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising). I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time, I've taken far more interest in long-form 'television' (ie streaming series) and independent content creators on YouTube. I know YouTube has deep issues in itself but that's a problem with the platform rather than the medium I think, a much more solvable issue. >With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. It's interesting to compare the sitution for film to that of music, the last few years have genuinely been some of my favourite for music as a whole because of exactly this: the low barrier to entry means a lot of truly talented artists can rise organically to prominence and streaming services can tailor their recommendations to the point discoverability is much easier. In comparison a lot of more traditional music offerings sound stale and risk-averse because they have to be in order for the labels to recoup their enormous investments in artist promotion.
- flyinghamster 5y ago
  And to think that Sony was once on the good side, even going to the Supreme Court to defend the VCR. But once they bought a studio, the Hollywood goons took over.
  - lou1306 5y ago
    They were always on their own side, not the "good" one. They defended VCRs because they were a major producer of VHS home equipment, and the ability to record TV shows helped selling said equipment. The fact that they also held the moral high ground is little more than a happy accident. In general, for corporations of then & now, "being good" only matters as long as it aligns, or at least does not interfere with, their sources of income.
- ticklemyelmo 5y ago
  Here's a friendly reminder that Sony put a rootkit on their audio CDs to enforce copyright. They brought the term "rootkit" into public awareness.
tjoff 5y ago
Strongly disagree with the quote. The owner should still have full control and be able to disable DRM support. If that means you can't play certain movies afterwards that is fine, but the control should be there.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  If you're interested, the original forum post (2018) is here: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-memory/1032782-13-way-ibm-power9-talos-ii-vs-intel-xeon-vs-amd-linux-benchmarks-on-debian/page6#post1033245 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-me... I totally agree with you, for what it is worth.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Having full control means that you could also partially disable DRM support. Say, perhaps, by enabling the part that determines an encryption key and decrypts the video, but disabling the part that checks whether the video is being sent to a compliant display rather than to an unencrypted file. You cannot have effective DRM without taking away full control from the user.
  - ballenf 5y ago
    Being willing and able to lie for the owner is the ultimate test of ownership.
  - tjoff 5y ago
    Of course it would be possible for the application to verify that and disable decryption.
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      What source of information could the application possibly use to check that? Everything the application does is solely by the will of the system's owner. If the application checks a hardware parameter, the result it receives may have been altered by the system's owner. If the application checks its binary for validity, that binary could have been altered since the program started. If the application computes a checksum of its own memory state, the system's owner can alter that checksum after it has been computed. If the application tries to compute 2+2, it will only receive 4 if the system's owner allows it. This is the true definition of the system's owner. The system's owner is whoever must be trusted in order to trust computations on that system. If the application doesn't trust the person who bought the computer, but still wishes to trust computations done on the system, the only solution is to change the system's owner. That is why DRM must either be utterly useless, because I still own my computer and can do as I will on it, or utterly tyrannical, because it asserts ownership over something that I have purchased.
DrBazza 5y ago
Don't forget about this abomination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia "Why has my playback gone silent?"
hulitu 5y ago
IMHO blaming the film industry is a bit much. Intel has the ME since some time and coupled with secure boot is a MPAA or RIAA manager's wet dream.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  "Film industry" stands here for "Hollywood" ? And isn't the IME only a few decades old ? (Of course Microsoft with its "trusted computing" and the NSA with its job to backdoor everything that can be likely had a hand in that too...)
BlueTemplar 5y ago
It doesn't make sense though, unless Intel is replacing its SGX feature by a similar one (that new Microsoft chip ??). Also I don't think that this has an effect on Intel's Management Engine ? BTW, older AMD CPUs (of the Bulldozer line) are still performant enough, and don't come with a likely backdoor in the form of IME / AMD PSP. P.S.: It does really suck the effect that this has on GPU's openness... (and so performance for very specific use cases)
matheusmoreira 5y ago
That quote is amazing. An AMD engineer publicly stating that our machines are owned.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bserge 5y ago

elzbardico 5y ago

Film Industry => in about half the time, Sony Entertainment, by far the most aggressive company when it comes to copyrights.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world? Ideally I'd like to see reform of copyright law to favour corporate giants a bit less, but given how much of a hand those same giants seem to have in the laws that get written I'm not hopeful of that any time soon. I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. I'm still a believer at heart that the internet can be a great democratiser of content, that it can bring down the barriers and middlemen between artists and their audience. Art on the internet should be a participatory thing too in my opinion, not the mindless content consumption that the media companies of yesteryear see it as.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising). Which also explains why the studios insist on ridiculously bullshit in terms of DRM - the banks backing these enormous loans want their money back. With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low and so there is no incentive for studios to invest in DRM, it's simply not worth it any more. The real money for musicians is tour tickets and merch... CD/vinyl sales and streaming income isn't much.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    >In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising). I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time, I've taken far more interest in long-form 'television' (ie streaming series) and independent content creators on YouTube. I know YouTube has deep issues in itself but that's a problem with the platform rather than the medium I think, a much more solvable issue. >With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. It's interesting to compare the sitution for film to that of music, the last few years have genuinely been some of my favourite for music as a whole because of exactly this: the low barrier to entry means a lot of truly talented artists can rise organically to prominence and streaming services can tailor their recommendations to the point discoverability is much easier. In comparison a lot of more traditional music offerings sound stale and risk-averse because they have to be in order for the labels to recoup their enormous investments in artist promotion.
flyinghamster 5y ago
And to think that Sony was once on the good side, even going to the Supreme Court to defend the VCR. But once they bought a studio, the Hollywood goons took over.
- lou1306 5y ago
  They were always on their own side, not the "good" one. They defended VCRs because they were a major producer of VHS home equipment, and the ability to record TV shows helped selling said equipment. The fact that they also held the moral high ground is little more than a happy accident. In general, for corporations of then & now, "being good" only matters as long as it aligns, or at least does not interfere with, their sources of income.
ticklemyelmo 5y ago
Here's a friendly reminder that Sony put a rootkit on their audio CDs to enforce copyright. They brought the term "rootkit" into public awareness.

tjoff 5y ago

Strongly disagree with the quote. The owner should still have full control and be able to disable DRM support. If that means you can't play certain movies afterwards that is fine, but the control should be there.

azalemeth 5y ago
If you're interested, the original forum post (2018) is here: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-memory/1032782-13-way-ibm-power9-talos-ii-vs-intel-xeon-vs-amd-linux-benchmarks-on-debian/page6#post1033245 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-me... I totally agree with you, for what it is worth.
MereInterest 5y ago
Having full control means that you could also partially disable DRM support. Say, perhaps, by enabling the part that determines an encryption key and decrypts the video, but disabling the part that checks whether the video is being sent to a compliant display rather than to an unencrypted file. You cannot have effective DRM without taking away full control from the user.
- ballenf 5y ago
  Being willing and able to lie for the owner is the ultimate test of ownership.
- tjoff 5y ago
  Of course it would be possible for the application to verify that and disable decryption.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    What source of information could the application possibly use to check that? Everything the application does is solely by the will of the system's owner. If the application checks a hardware parameter, the result it receives may have been altered by the system's owner. If the application checks its binary for validity, that binary could have been altered since the program started. If the application computes a checksum of its own memory state, the system's owner can alter that checksum after it has been computed. If the application tries to compute 2+2, it will only receive 4 if the system's owner allows it. This is the true definition of the system's owner. The system's owner is whoever must be trusted in order to trust computations on that system. If the application doesn't trust the person who bought the computer, but still wishes to trust computations done on the system, the only solution is to change the system's owner. That is why DRM must either be utterly useless, because I still own my computer and can do as I will on it, or utterly tyrannical, because it asserts ownership over something that I have purchased.

DrBazza 5y ago

Don't forget about this abomination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia "Why has my playback gone silent?"

hulitu 5y ago

IMHO blaming the film industry is a bit much. Intel has the ME since some time and coupled with secure boot is a MPAA or RIAA manager's wet dream.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
"Film industry" stands here for "Hollywood" ? And isn't the IME only a few decades old ? (Of course Microsoft with its "trusted computing" and the NSA with its job to backdoor everything that can be likely had a hand in that too...)

BlueTemplar 5y ago

It doesn't make sense though, unless Intel is replacing its SGX feature by a similar one (that new Microsoft chip ??). Also I don't think that this has an effect on Intel's Management Engine ? BTW, older AMD CPUs (of the Bulldozer line) are still performant enough, and don't come with a likely backdoor in the form of IME / AMD PSP. P.S.: It does really suck the effect that this has on GPU's openness... (and so performance for very specific use cases)

matheusmoreira 5y ago

That quote is amazing. An AMD engineer publicly stating that our machines are owned.