4 ms·

Recently, there was also a lawsuit against Yout, and that lawsuit (now on appeal) ruled conclusively that YouTube does have legally-protected copy-protection me

Recently, there was also a lawsuit against Yout, and that lawsuit (now on appeal) ruled conclusively that YouTube does have legally-protected copy-protection mechanisms ("technological protection measures" aka TPMs aka DRM). Now, this is the first time I think anyone here will have heard the theory that YouTube has DRM, but legally from that case, they do. And anything that breaks said DRM... I think Piracy is actually much closer to dying than people think. Not just with RarBG going down today and 1337x being the last major player standing; but also Denuvo now being so complicated there is only one person known to be able to crack it who is also schizophrenic (literally); the Xbox One having never been cracked and the PS5 currently uncracked, and the Nintendo Switch having software that has been described as being basically perfectly secure and unlikely to ever have a kernel exploit ever again (if only NVIDIA's code and chip was as well designed), laying the groundwork for a potentially-uncrackable Switch 2 once NVIDIA adds glitching protection and all Switch 2s have the recovery mode patch...

flangola7 3y ago
What stops people from hacking an Xbox? Ultimately all the processing and memory is right in front of you, lots of people have access to sophisticated electronics labs.
Firmwarrior 3y ago
> perfectly secure and unlikely to ever have a kernel exploit ever again -_-
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  It's actually not my words on this one. The Nintendo Switch uses a completely homegrown microkernel, that a single open-source developer (SciresM) was able to reimplement from scratch single-handedly. This would normally have a performance impact, which is partially mitigated by having the Switch permanently reserve 1 core for the OS and many other optimizations. However, the microkernel design is intrinsically much more secure than the monokernels used by Xbox (NT) and PlayStation (BSD). Outside that tiny kernel, everything runs in a sandbox, in userspace and not kernel space. Graphics drivers? USB drivers? The games themselves? All in userspace, confined to minimum functionality, and W^X. Exploits in the USB drivers, WebKit, and games are actually fairly easy to find on the Switch, but useless for launching homebrew from. The last exploit bad enough to launch homebrew in Nintendo's software was over 4 years ago. Some commentary from the developer (SciresM) who reimplemented it from scratch (everything below comes from https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesosphere_opensource_nintendo_switch_kernel_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesospher...): "It is a completely unique microkernel with a cooperative (non-preemptive) scheduler. The kernel is secure -- so far as I can tell (as a reverse engineer and hacker), it has zero security bugs. They throw out years of backwards compatibility (they're not POSIX/UNIX), and they really, really benefit from it from a security and modularity PoV." "Horizon's the only meaningful RTOS with a microkernel that I'm aware of (other than Fuschia). Everything's in userland -- filesystems, gpu (and other device drivers). The OS is capability-based and conceptually all about lots of different processes/drivers ("system modules") that host microservices. The fact that Nintendo designed such a rock-solid, modular, custom operating system for their consoles fascinates me."
nadermx 3y ago
This is the most recent update on the yout case https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66697744/yout-llc-v-recording-industry-association-of-america-inc/#entry-93 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66697744/yout-llc-v-rec...
realusername 3y ago
> the Xbox One having never been cracked and the PS5 currently uncracked, There's just a lack of interest, the Switch has been broken wide open because there's tons of exclusives on it. I don't see any point doing the same on a PS5. And even for the switch, why bother if your goal is piracy? You can just emulate it better than the real hardware itself...
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  > And even for the switch, why bother if your goal is piracy? You can just emulate it better than the real hardware itself... For a hypothetical Switch 2, you can't emulate if you can't decrypt the games. You also can't build an emulator if you can't run homebrew to figure out the hardware.
ravenstine 3y ago
As long as The Pirate Bay is around, piracy will remain alive. Plenty of current stuff gets uploaded there. I too thought that piracy might be on its way out, but I think it will see a second life. More often than previous years have I been resorting to piracy. Why? Well, streaming catalogues have been trimming things because either their rights to an IP expired or for reasons unknown. Regardless, I had to pirate a film the other day because it disappeared from every streaming platform, and I know for a fact that I originally watched it on Netflix. In other cases, I pirate because the "HD" and even "4K" quality toted by these streaming services rarely lives up to its promise. Somehow videos served by a bunch of individuals far exceed the quality of videos I pay for almost every time. Bandwidth on my end has nothing to do with it. Sometimes I just don't want to watch something filmed in 2023 that looks like it was filmed on a potato in 2006, but films and shows can often look like that when streamed in my experience. Sometimes I get lucky, but it's annoying when the streaming quality hits a wall and doesn't improve. And I don't get my money back if the video never looks like HD even if I paid for the HD version. The more these companies crack down, the closer we are to the threshold where piracy seems fun and cool again. Also, pirates will always find a way. Something I watched recently that was pirated was actually a screen recording, and it looked pretty good. If DRM thwards screen recording, then pirates will hack together dummy monitors that encode the input to mkv. And if that doesn't work, there's still the analog hole.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  One thing a lot of the streaming services do is you can buy/rent the 4k/HD/whatever version but if you're watching on a PC with some browsers (I think Edge supports 4k) they will stream in 360p or something. Like what the hell am I paying for then?
kelnos 3y ago
I think your doomsaying is a bit premature. As long as companies want us to be able to see their content, there will be ways to extract it without the DRM gunk. From a security / threat model analysis perspective, DRM can never be 100% secure. And remember, for DRM to work, all these products have to be perfect 100% of the time. Someone trying to break DRM only needs to be lucky once. The idea of all software and hardware reaching some sort of perfect level of security is pretty laughable. From the hardware side, tools get cheaper and cheaper every year. Even today it's a lot more feasible for a motivated group to do things like decapping chips and scanning them to extract keys. This sort of thing will only get cheaper and more accessible over time. Maybe manufacturers will have to start putting HSMs into their products that self-destruct when they detect tampering to try to combat this?
- bitwize 3y ago
  > As long as companies want us to be able to see their content, there will be ways to extract it without the DRM gunk. But it is a federal felony to employ those ways to extract it without the DRM gunk. That's the point of the DMCA: where DRM mechanisms fail, the law kicks in. It's kinda like gun control. Gun control is a good idea not because it prevents a sufficiently motivated person from obtaining or making a gun, but because it vastly reduces the market for gun buyers and helps solve the "gun availability problem": mass shootings happen because there are so many guns around it isn't hard for a crazy person to get their hands on one. The Sandy Hook shooter used his mother's legally purchased rifle. If piracy tools are extra super illegal, and people start visibly going to jail for making, using, or distributing them, then that adds friction to the act of piracy that will make simply paying for the product the easier option. That's why anticircumvention laws exist.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    That's a US law but cracking is global. The high profile jail / make an example route was taken in the 80s, 90s and early 2000. That made anyone technical see the absurdities of the policy and created sympathy that allowed piracy to grow.
than3 3y ago
> I think piracy is much closer to dying than people think it is. I sincerely hope you are wrong because it engenders certain things which would indicate we have a very rough road ahead as a people. Being able to record and save historically significant things and communicate about them when they are not offered to the general public in a way that can be saved for posterity is an incredibly important thing because it documents your history. We are looking at a black hole for at least the last 20 years. There are news pieces that happened which I know and others my age noticed, about which cannot be found anywhere on the internet anymore because of the DMCA being used to remove references to it. These were historically significant and details things which just are no longer available. Without supporting evidence, people with a benefit to do so argue it never happened (deceitfully); when it did. Additionally, while they won't say this, and I am not a lawyer so don't take this as legal advice. The courts and any law passed by congress are required to have a legal authority that is based in one of the fundamental documents, which does not violate those documents (in any way). Many of the judges ruling on the DMCA cases have failed to address the actual coercive and documented abuses this legislation has been used for over the short time its been upheld. The supreme court recently refused to hear a case about it, and the legislation appears to lack legal authority because its being used to thwart innovation, control and limit free speech and discussion and other things, in violation of our first amendment rights as people; and when there is a lack of basis for authority it becomes null and void (as Thomas Paine would say in 1776), or unconstitutional. When its upheld and enforced despite lacking a basis of authority it calls into question important aspects of credibility of the courts and the rule of law, and whether we live in a democracy or actually in a fascist state. Incidentally, enforcing law without basis has been done historically in fascist states like for example East Germany before the wall came down. That in its entirety is very concerning to me because this should never happen except in the latter; and that likely means a lot of death is ahead for almost all of us because those dynamics cause inevitable outcomes, as all intolerable and coercive acts enforced through law do eventually.
bennettnate5 3y ago
Piracy will never die while people can still play movies on devices they have control over. Pirates can still screen capture audio+video from a streaming platform while it's playing; even if a video is never released to Blu-Ray, it can still be screen captured in real time. That being said, console-based piracy has been getting orders of magnitude harder in the past two decades.

flangola7 3y ago

What stops people from hacking an Xbox? Ultimately all the processing and memory is right in front of you, lots of people have access to sophisticated electronics labs.

Firmwarrior 3y ago

> perfectly secure and unlikely to ever have a kernel exploit ever again -_-

gjsman-1000 3y ago
It's actually not my words on this one. The Nintendo Switch uses a completely homegrown microkernel, that a single open-source developer (SciresM) was able to reimplement from scratch single-handedly. This would normally have a performance impact, which is partially mitigated by having the Switch permanently reserve 1 core for the OS and many other optimizations. However, the microkernel design is intrinsically much more secure than the monokernels used by Xbox (NT) and PlayStation (BSD). Outside that tiny kernel, everything runs in a sandbox, in userspace and not kernel space. Graphics drivers? USB drivers? The games themselves? All in userspace, confined to minimum functionality, and W^X. Exploits in the USB drivers, WebKit, and games are actually fairly easy to find on the Switch, but useless for launching homebrew from. The last exploit bad enough to launch homebrew in Nintendo's software was over 4 years ago. Some commentary from the developer (SciresM) who reimplemented it from scratch (everything below comes from https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesosphere_opensource_nintendo_switch_kernel_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesospher...): "It is a completely unique microkernel with a cooperative (non-preemptive) scheduler. The kernel is secure -- so far as I can tell (as a reverse engineer and hacker), it has zero security bugs. They throw out years of backwards compatibility (they're not POSIX/UNIX), and they really, really benefit from it from a security and modularity PoV." "Horizon's the only meaningful RTOS with a microkernel that I'm aware of (other than Fuschia). Everything's in userland -- filesystems, gpu (and other device drivers). The OS is capability-based and conceptually all about lots of different processes/drivers ("system modules") that host microservices. The fact that Nintendo designed such a rock-solid, modular, custom operating system for their consoles fascinates me."

nadermx 3y ago

This is the most recent update on the yout case https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66697744/yout-llc-v-recording-industry-association-of-america-inc/#entry-93 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66697744/yout-llc-v-rec...

realusername 3y ago

> the Xbox One having never been cracked and the PS5 currently uncracked, There's just a lack of interest, the Switch has been broken wide open because there's tons of exclusives on it. I don't see any point doing the same on a PS5. And even for the switch, why bother if your goal is piracy? You can just emulate it better than the real hardware itself...

gjsman-1000 3y ago
> And even for the switch, why bother if your goal is piracy? You can just emulate it better than the real hardware itself... For a hypothetical Switch 2, you can't emulate if you can't decrypt the games. You also can't build an emulator if you can't run homebrew to figure out the hardware.

ravenstine 3y ago

As long as The Pirate Bay is around, piracy will remain alive. Plenty of current stuff gets uploaded there. I too thought that piracy might be on its way out, but I think it will see a second life. More often than previous years have I been resorting to piracy. Why? Well, streaming catalogues have been trimming things because either their rights to an IP expired or for reasons unknown. Regardless, I had to pirate a film the other day because it disappeared from every streaming platform, and I know for a fact that I originally watched it on Netflix. In other cases, I pirate because the "HD" and even "4K" quality toted by these streaming services rarely lives up to its promise. Somehow videos served by a bunch of individuals far exceed the quality of videos I pay for almost every time. Bandwidth on my end has nothing to do with it. Sometimes I just don't want to watch something filmed in 2023 that looks like it was filmed on a potato in 2006, but films and shows can often look like that when streamed in my experience. Sometimes I get lucky, but it's annoying when the streaming quality hits a wall and doesn't improve. And I don't get my money back if the video never looks like HD even if I paid for the HD version. The more these companies crack down, the closer we are to the threshold where piracy seems fun and cool again. Also, pirates will always find a way. Something I watched recently that was pirated was actually a screen recording, and it looked pretty good. If DRM thwards screen recording, then pirates will hack together dummy monitors that encode the input to mkv. And if that doesn't work, there's still the analog hole.

chankstein38 3y ago
One thing a lot of the streaming services do is you can buy/rent the 4k/HD/whatever version but if you're watching on a PC with some browsers (I think Edge supports 4k) they will stream in 360p or something. Like what the hell am I paying for then?

kelnos 3y ago

I think your doomsaying is a bit premature. As long as companies want us to be able to see their content, there will be ways to extract it without the DRM gunk. From a security / threat model analysis perspective, DRM can never be 100% secure. And remember, for DRM to work, all these products have to be perfect 100% of the time. Someone trying to break DRM only needs to be lucky once. The idea of all software and hardware reaching some sort of perfect level of security is pretty laughable. From the hardware side, tools get cheaper and cheaper every year. Even today it's a lot more feasible for a motivated group to do things like decapping chips and scanning them to extract keys. This sort of thing will only get cheaper and more accessible over time. Maybe manufacturers will have to start putting HSMs into their products that self-destruct when they detect tampering to try to combat this?

bitwize 3y ago
> As long as companies want us to be able to see their content, there will be ways to extract it without the DRM gunk. But it is a federal felony to employ those ways to extract it without the DRM gunk. That's the point of the DMCA: where DRM mechanisms fail, the law kicks in. It's kinda like gun control. Gun control is a good idea not because it prevents a sufficiently motivated person from obtaining or making a gun, but because it vastly reduces the market for gun buyers and helps solve the "gun availability problem": mass shootings happen because there are so many guns around it isn't hard for a crazy person to get their hands on one. The Sandy Hook shooter used his mother's legally purchased rifle. If piracy tools are extra super illegal, and people start visibly going to jail for making, using, or distributing them, then that adds friction to the act of piracy that will make simply paying for the product the easier option. That's why anticircumvention laws exist.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  That's a US law but cracking is global. The high profile jail / make an example route was taken in the 80s, 90s and early 2000. That made anyone technical see the absurdities of the policy and created sympathy that allowed piracy to grow.

than3 3y ago

> I think piracy is much closer to dying than people think it is. I sincerely hope you are wrong because it engenders certain things which would indicate we have a very rough road ahead as a people. Being able to record and save historically significant things and communicate about them when they are not offered to the general public in a way that can be saved for posterity is an incredibly important thing because it documents your history. We are looking at a black hole for at least the last 20 years. There are news pieces that happened which I know and others my age noticed, about which cannot be found anywhere on the internet anymore because of the DMCA being used to remove references to it. These were historically significant and details things which just are no longer available. Without supporting evidence, people with a benefit to do so argue it never happened (deceitfully); when it did. Additionally, while they won't say this, and I am not a lawyer so don't take this as legal advice. The courts and any law passed by congress are required to have a legal authority that is based in one of the fundamental documents, which does not violate those documents (in any way). Many of the judges ruling on the DMCA cases have failed to address the actual coercive and documented abuses this legislation has been used for over the short time its been upheld. The supreme court recently refused to hear a case about it, and the legislation appears to lack legal authority because its being used to thwart innovation, control and limit free speech and discussion and other things, in violation of our first amendment rights as people; and when there is a lack of basis for authority it becomes null and void (as Thomas Paine would say in 1776), or unconstitutional. When its upheld and enforced despite lacking a basis of authority it calls into question important aspects of credibility of the courts and the rule of law, and whether we live in a democracy or actually in a fascist state. Incidentally, enforcing law without basis has been done historically in fascist states like for example East Germany before the wall came down. That in its entirety is very concerning to me because this should never happen except in the latter; and that likely means a lot of death is ahead for almost all of us because those dynamics cause inevitable outcomes, as all intolerable and coercive acts enforced through law do eventually.

bennettnate5 3y ago

Piracy will never die while people can still play movies on devices they have control over. Pirates can still screen capture audio+video from a streaming platform while it's playing; even if a video is never released to Blu-Ray, it can still be screen captured in real time. That being said, console-based piracy has been getting orders of magnitude harder in the past two decades.