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I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a l
by DarkShikari 15y ago
I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it
This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip?
But the instant you create exclusive content that everyone wants on such a service, the DRM will be broken faster than you can say "DMCA".
The downside of this is it lets companies delude themselves (and others) into thinking that their DRM is "secure", when in reality it is simply that nobody cares about them.
- shalmanese 15y ago"When StarForce 3.0 was released, it initially provided extremely strong protection - the StarForce 3.0-protected game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was uncracked for 424 days.[11][12] It also marked a significant step up in the effort required to reverse engineer it.[13]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarForce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarForce
- tptacek 15y agoStarforce, for those here not familiar with it, is essentially a very competently designed kernel rootkit: it installs a VM in kernel mode triggered by interrupt handlers, hooks nt!SwapContext to track every execution context on the system, and basically runs as a resident service to decrypt functions in game titles on demand.
- jonny_eh 15y agoNow that Netflix has original exclusive content, can we look forward to someone hacking the Netflix stream?
- easp 15y agoIt'll have to wait for something better than Lillyhammer to come along...
- nthitz 15y agoHey it was a pretty decent show! Did you watch them all?
- haakon 15y agoI've been told there are torrents of exclusive Netflix content.
- daeken 15y agoAre they decrypted from the stream or screencapped and transcoded? If it's the latter, then that's trivial and doesn't require breaking anything, it just causes a good bit of degradation.
- Tuna-Fish 15y agoSince the pirates are going to re-encode anyway, there is no reason they have to do that -- Netflix is software, and they can just grab the image and sound data after the program has decoded them.
- tptacek 15y agoThis hasn't been the case with Blu-Ray, right? We've gone weeks and weeks without breaks in whatever the most recent updates to BD+ are.
- DarkShikari 15y agoBlu-ray is an interesting case; the 'pirates' seem to have gotten quite lazy because SlySoft has been doing all their work for them.
- daeken 15y agoThere's also the odd case where BD was never properly broken, because it's never been needed. People have just depended on broken players, which has worked remarkably well so far.
- mikeash 15y agoI think this is what shows that DRM really is hopeless. For DRM to work, it has to work every time. For DRM to be broken, it only needs to fail once. After one guy has extracted the media, it can then be distributed to the world even if nobody else can break the DRM.
- tptacek 15y agoNot really. The content providers only have to hold the line (a) on high-quality and (b) during the new-release window. It's true that eventual failure is inevitable, but the economic case for DRM doesn't rely on permanent protection.
- Retric 15y agoConsidering it rarely takes a week for a popular games DRM to be broken the window between copy protection and the lack there of does not necessarily mean much. What many people forget is there will always be leechers out there but there are also people who will make the moral choice and buy the content. PS: I will torrent a show I my DVR fills up or something. But, I don't cancel cable and download everything and I still pay to see movies in the theater. Why? Because there is no penalty for downloading it just becomes a moral choice and that's where I draw the line.