3 ms·

You release that blob what stops others just copying it?

by chgs 1y ago

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> You release that blob what stops others just copying it? Obfuscation techniques. Compatibility updates. Hell, hardware-enforced DRM.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  Those things work against hobbyists, sometimes, temporarily, if the hobbyists are busy with other things or not very enterprising. Do they work against Red Hat or Intel or Google or Mozilla, once those organizations can openly distribute the reconstructed code they've assigned full-time people to decompile? For that matter, what stops any government from doing it to any foreign company? Which hardware company is going to build your DRM if there is no law you can use to stop the same company from also selling circumvention tools, or stopping anyone else (including major corporations) from extracting keys and selling them openly?
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    Oh, duh, just run it on your server for SaaS. > Which hardware company is going to build your DRM The ones that build the software. Apple. Oracle.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > Oh, duh, just run it on your server for SaaS. Better hope you never have a single vulnerability or someone's going to post it on the internet. And then you'd have to put it on your servers, not AWS or some other third party with no obligation not to release it or start using it themselves. Meanwhile the open source people have no secrets and can use a commodity CDN or let the users run it locally. > The ones that build the software. Apple. Oracle. For DRM that would attempt to prevent you from running it, that doesn't help. People would install iOS on Samsung phones and Oracle's database on third party commodity hardware. For DRM that would attempt to prevent anyone from making a single copy of the software, when has that worked even today when breaking it is illegal? Meanwhile if it's not illegal you would have to contend with multinational corporations with full on clean rooms and state of the art equipment and if any of them can extract a single key from a single device that's it.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > you would have to contend with multinational corporations with full on clean rooms and state of the art equipment Only if the technology stagnates (or other conditions where a capital advantage proves useless). If it’s a moving target you don’t need any of this. Just basic security measures the likes of which protect the source code of most closed-source software today from everyone but the likes of a handful of nation states. > People would install iOS on Samsung phones and Oracle's database on third party commodity hardware Some people might. Most wouldn’t. Certainly not the vast majority of the people willing to pay for apps and hence the market for devs.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > Only if the technology stagnates (or other conditions where a capital advantage proves useless). That's assuming both that defending requires the same level of resources as attacking and that the company trying to keep the changes a secret has a capital advantage. The current attempts to do these things are performed by multibillion dollar corporations and then cracked by individual teenagers, and now you're adding the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, etc. to the list of attackers. Apple is currently slightly bigger than any one of them but certainly not all of them put together and all of the teenagers and foreign governments in the world. > Some people might. Most wouldn’t. Certainly not the vast majority of the people willing to pay for apps and hence the market for devs. Samsung is a large conglomerate with in-house experience making modern electronics down to having their own fabs and making their own CPUs and flash. They would hand an iPhone to their techs, tell them to extract the code and then offer it as a checkbox to install iOS when you buy one of their phones. Nobody would choose that over the same phone with Android? For that matter Apple would be attempting to use the same system to stop people from copying apps, but then competitors would do the same thing there, and then who is buying an iPhone that tries to charge you for apps that everyone else has extracted and made available for free?

You release that blob what stops others just copying it?

by chgs 1y ago

You release that blob what stops others just copying it?

> You release that blob what stops others just copying it? Obfuscation techniques. Compatibility updates. Hell, hardware-enforced DRM.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
Those things work against hobbyists, sometimes, temporarily, if the hobbyists are busy with other things or not very enterprising. Do they work against Red Hat or Intel or Google or Mozilla, once those organizations can openly distribute the reconstructed code they've assigned full-time people to decompile? For that matter, what stops any government from doing it to any foreign company? Which hardware company is going to build your DRM if there is no law you can use to stop the same company from also selling circumvention tools, or stopping anyone else (including major corporations) from extracting keys and selling them openly?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  Oh, duh, just run it on your server for SaaS. > Which hardware company is going to build your DRM The ones that build the software. Apple. Oracle.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > Oh, duh, just run it on your server for SaaS. Better hope you never have a single vulnerability or someone's going to post it on the internet. And then you'd have to put it on your servers, not AWS or some other third party with no obligation not to release it or start using it themselves. Meanwhile the open source people have no secrets and can use a commodity CDN or let the users run it locally. > The ones that build the software. Apple. Oracle. For DRM that would attempt to prevent you from running it, that doesn't help. People would install iOS on Samsung phones and Oracle's database on third party commodity hardware. For DRM that would attempt to prevent anyone from making a single copy of the software, when has that worked even today when breaking it is illegal? Meanwhile if it's not illegal you would have to contend with multinational corporations with full on clean rooms and state of the art equipment and if any of them can extract a single key from a single device that's it.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > you would have to contend with multinational corporations with full on clean rooms and state of the art equipment Only if the technology stagnates (or other conditions where a capital advantage proves useless). If it’s a moving target you don’t need any of this. Just basic security measures the likes of which protect the source code of most closed-source software today from everyone but the likes of a handful of nation states. > People would install iOS on Samsung phones and Oracle's database on third party commodity hardware Some people might. Most wouldn’t. Certainly not the vast majority of the people willing to pay for apps and hence the market for devs.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > Only if the technology stagnates (or other conditions where a capital advantage proves useless). That's assuming both that defending requires the same level of resources as attacking and that the company trying to keep the changes a secret has a capital advantage. The current attempts to do these things are performed by multibillion dollar corporations and then cracked by individual teenagers, and now you're adding the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, etc. to the list of attackers. Apple is currently slightly bigger than any one of them but certainly not all of them put together and all of the teenagers and foreign governments in the world. > Some people might. Most wouldn’t. Certainly not the vast majority of the people willing to pay for apps and hence the market for devs. Samsung is a large conglomerate with in-house experience making modern electronics down to having their own fabs and making their own CPUs and flash. They would hand an iPhone to their techs, tell them to extract the code and then offer it as a checkbox to install iOS when you buy one of their phones. Nobody would choose that over the same phone with Android? For that matter Apple would be attempting to use the same system to stop people from copying apps, but then competitors would do the same thing there, and then who is buying an iPhone that tries to charge you for apps that everyone else has extracted and made available for free?