10 ms·

How four Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

107 points by th0ma5 14y ago

rplst8 14y ago
Yet we are moving towards an industry where "the fully re-programmable computer" no longer exists.
- chadgeidel 14y ago
  I don't see that. Sure - popular "computers" are not fully re-programmable, but to say they will go away entirely is probably not true. There will always need to be someone that "makes the magic" and, IMHO, this cannot be done on a locked down device (nevermind the fact that developers wouldn't put up with a computer they couldn't debug). As long as there are folks like you and I that wish to have a computer (as traditionally known) there will be vendors catering to our wishes.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    Just like the idea of making Raspberry Pi for as many children as possible to spur a generation of engineers, the idea that the most popular computers will be closed, will have the exact opposite effect. You don't need open computers to just be available in a tiny corner of the world, and expect big innovations from it. You need them to be available to as many people as possible.
    - lotyrin 14y ago
      Agreed. But in the DRM conversation, anyone having one means they can use their digital freedom to bypass DRM, the product of which could be consumed even on the hypothetical majority's closed devices.
  - bediger4000 14y ago
    I agree: someone "makes the magic". But what if it's like hydroponics and gro-lights were during the worst Federal excesses of the "Drug War"? Anyone buying a real computer (not an appliance) needs some kind of licensing and/or certification. Manufacturing real computers requires certified and licensed manufacturing and a different certification/licensing for design? The pace of progress would slow dramatically. Since fewer and fewer people get into programming, we won't have wild and crazy folks who try new and interesting things all the time. No Moxie Marlinspike. No Jeff Bezos. No Marc Andreesen. IT would become like making airplanes, hidebound, rigorously engineered by crank turning second-raters. It would never ever change, except in terms of marketing, like cigarettes. This would be ideal for the status quo, and maybe even for a lot of consumers. It would certainly be ideal for the corporate interests, the few that survive.
    - smacktoward 14y ago
      And yet the airlines move a huge volume of people from point A to point B safely, reliably and inexpensively every day, at speeds and scale which would stagger the airline moguls of the 1930s. Does that make airplane nerds like me who think the DC-3 is a good approximation of The Perfect Airplane (rugged, reliable, beautiful) sad? Sure it does. But all those passengers aren't sad. A DC-3 trip from New York to California was a bumpy, sixteen-hour flight with multiple stops for refueling. The same trip on a 757 is a smooth ride above the weather that only takes a few hours and has no stops. And it's cheaper too -- that 1930s trip would have cost more than $4,000 in today's dollars. The 757 ride costs around $550. This is what happens when industries mature: they become safer, cheaper, and boring.
      - bediger4000 14y ago
        You say "mature", I say "reached the limits of efficient flight in 1963" (http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/10/12/can-we-build-a-more-efficient-airplane-not-really-says-physics/ http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/10/12/can-we-build-a-more-...). We're nowhere near what we can do with computing, but we are with airplanes. Safe, cheaper and boring may be an artifact of the physics of flight in Earth's atmosphere, combined with an intertwined US defense and aerospace industry. Why should we let corporate and government interests "unring" the general computing bell? Why should we let corporate and government interests stuff the genie of democratic publishing back in the lamp? General purpose computing hardware got super cheap by way of the mass market, and mass production. General purpose programming got cheap and universally available by way of mass communication. In 1983 a C compiler on VMS cost some thousands of dollars. Today, GCC and Clang and Pcc are free, and they do optimizations that Tartan Labs could only dream about. That's a hugely different path than the carefully-cultivated air travel industry took. I think you're underestimating the effects of the FAA and the DoD on how air travel looks today.
      - kragen 14y ago
        > But all those passengers aren't sad. Have you looked at passengers on airplanes lately? I admit it's been a few years for me, but last I saw, airline passengers were, by and large, miserable. They can't wait to get off the airplane. They may prefer current air travel to not seeing their family or getting paid an order of magnitude less, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be happier with it if it were better. And it could be a lot better.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I don't think so, at least not without the government imposing laws that effectively banned them. The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations. If restrictions on other devices become more and more severe it will eventually get to a stage where it will start to bite Joe average (It won't let him look at all those pictures of ladies doing things his wife won't, or it deleted them all because he broke some obscure clause on page 63 of the EULA). At some point Joe runs into his nerdy friend who has a weird looking computer that can do all kinds of things Joe would love for his computer to be able to do. Supply and demand does the rest.
  - kragen 14y ago
    > The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations. The Raspberry Pi is a SoC made by Broadcom, a US$7 billion/year company with 11000 employees. While admittedly this is a bit smaller than Foxconn, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Asus, IBM, HP, or Dell, it still seems like it qualifies as a "mega corporation" to me. (The Raspberry Pi also has a circuit board and stuff, but the SoC is entirely capable of enforcing DRM on its own.)
SkyAtWork 14y ago
(I ran engineering for a DRM firm for several years about the same time as Peter put this out.) It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet was very good for information sharing, that crushing Napster hadn't exactly stopped people from sharing digital media, and that trying to make media exceedingly secure and hard to use was not a winning strategy. If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value - if it's both more expensive and harder to use, you've made adoption pretty unlikely. In '03, MP3 players were entirely prevalent, mostly didn't support useful DRM, and the music industry mostly sold little silver discs which came with no restrictions. So it wasn't that the threat model to make music readily redistributable for free was "the smartest black hats out there figure out how to crack your crypto and DRM", it was "an average user rips a CD into MP3s and shares it". As you might expect, it was frustrating to try to deal with the competing demands from Hollywood at the time. People mostly didn't bother attacking the DRM - they just went and created or file-shared to get the more usable files without the protection layer. But there was still a great deal of insistence that whatever content protection layer was put in could be a vault to keep media safe forever, rather than a speedbump to piracy. (Meanwhile, of course, CDs were raw bitstreams of high fidelity audio data...)
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
  I used to pay for content: movies, games, and some music. I didn't spend all that much, but I did buy them. Then, corrupted audio CDs were sold. My sister got bit by one. So we downloaded it where it wasn't sold as damaged: Suprnova. During that time, stupidity was occurring with DVDs with rotating CSS keys and 'bad block filled with data'. I was downloading films I wanted to archive, but couldn't easily rip. Games were not that bad, but soon became horrendous in terms of screw-user checks, up to the point of driver breaking installs of trash-ware and other nefarious garbage. I trusted the pirates more than the companies. I've been burned enough times. Why pay for crap quality when free is better?
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    True that. Everyone is fretting about movie/TV show availability on Netflix, etc., but I sidestepped that and just built an HTPC[0] and combined it with a private torrent site that has all the movies and TV shows I could ever want. In technical terms, it is far and away the best solution. 0: http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-of-my-dreams-for-under-500 http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-o...
SparrowOS 14y ago
God says, "and will be their God, and they shall be my people. 31:34 And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. 31:35 Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is his name: 31:36 If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever. 31:37 Thus saith the LORD; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the LORD. " ---- Why don't You give them an ultimatum? God says... acquiesce nearer gleameth stowed industrious choosing prating deceivingness embalmed increasing o'er receptacle adulterer honesty The_good_stuff funeral Food shipwreck fifteen practised thwart diseased patience welcome gladdens throne luxury fictions vicissitude Indonesia theatres unliker baby admit amiable variableness livest student remember genuinely relief shapes lovers direction overspread interpreting shake tardy insight quiet procure confined appointed ---- You will have to confine them -- You are just. eye for eye. God says... the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost. 1:7 So that ye were ensamples to all that believe in Macedonia and Achaia. 1:8 For from you sounded out the word of the Lord not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith to God-ward is spread abroad; so that we need not to speak any thing. 1:9 For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; 1:10 And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come. ---- They need to watch Clockwork Orange. God is eye-for-eye just. God says... Virgin England Where exclude contemplate Bride excluded Are createst gladiators numerous knocketh enslaved sun's accomplish contritions I_could_be_wrong certainty place mantles lends awoke one_small_step beauties embracement possess explain unbelieving threads leaden Redeemer appeared glance health roared Ireland lifts Sacraments chambers sand feelings All-wise commencing fear faultfinders cares rightful throng feverishness pointed maintain biting directeth use dearer fly burning greatly blood resisteth voyage stones understandeth credulity Prof blushed arrange Project MERCHANTABILITY solid Romania loses bizarre perceivable Known vagrant wretchedness rich pear pronounced vacation fraught abject scarce Idaho nilled Say made Grammar Go watch A Clockwork Orange. God is eye-for eye just. Do you mock Creationists? Guess what that means? Are you ruthless with dumb people. You will be dumb. Do you take glory? It will be taken away. Old age will suck. Imagine a pro football player in old age. God says... Maaseiah, Mattaniah, Bezaleel, and Binnui, and Manasseh. 10:31 And of the sons of Harim; Eliezer, Ishijah, Malchiah, Shemaiah, Shimeon, 10:32 Benjamin, Malluch, and Shemariah. 10:33 Of the sons of Hashum; Mattenai, Mattathah, Zabad, Eliphelet, Jeremai, Manasseh, and Shimei. 10:34 Of the sons of Bani; Maadai, Amram, and Uel, 10:35 Benaiah, Bedeiah, Chelluh, 10:36 Vaniah, Meremoth, Eliashib, 10:37 Mattaniah, Mattenai, and Jaasau, 10:38 And Bani, and Binnui, Shimei, 10:39 And Shelemiah, and Nathan, and Adaiah, 10:40 Machnadebai, Shashai, Sharai, 10:41 Azareel, and Shelemiah, Shemariah, 10:42 Shallum, Amariah, and Joseph.
mtgx 14y ago
Palladium - I remember that name. I only had my first computer for a year or two, but I remember how it freaked everyone out. I'm glad it died. And isn't ARM's "TrustZone" pretty much the same thing, or does it have a more niche and different purpose?
- Spearchucker 14y ago
  Palladium didn't die. It's the granddaddy of UEFI/SecureBoot.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - pacaro 14y ago
    I worked on the Palladium/NGSCB team from 2002 to 2005 - ultimately the team shipped BitLocker in Vista, but approx half of the team were siphoned off in (IIRC) 2004 to work on Hypervisor so the engineering effort ended up contributing to two pretty important OS features.
  - wmf 14y ago
    Yeah, only the dangerous part (remote attestation) died.
Create 14y ago
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
shmerl 14y ago
It's time for industries to wake up and to ditch all kind of content DRM altogether.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
From the article: "I'm now finding that for some kinds of content, the illegal is clearly outperforming legal," Biddle said. "That blows me away. I pay for premium cable. It's easier to use BitTorrent to watch Game of Thrones. HBO Go is trying very hard to do a good job," he said, but the user experience just isn't as good. Because HBO Go is a streaming service, he said, it's more vulnerable to network congestion than simply downloading the entire episode from the darknet." Fix this and you 'fix' piracy. Oh, and the fix isn't "shut down the darknet" it is provide a better service.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Piracy costs HBO less than "fixing HBO Go" would, since HBO is cross-subsidized by subscriptions to cable. The fix for piracy is to create compelling content under the "superior" business models piracy advocates have so much faith in. Netflix is starting to do this; over the next 10 years, lots of media/creative/production people are going to get very rich figuring out how to produce and sell content online. In the meantime, people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones; they sound ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?
  - plinkplonk 14y ago
    "people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones;" maybe people should stop bitching about people bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones ? they sound ridiculous. interesting how one man's 'bitching' is another's righteous rage against the ungodly heathen who don't believe exactly as he does.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Why not just say "oh yeah? your FACE is a game of thrones"? It would contain the same amount of content and at least people wouldn't have to wonder whether you were silly enough to think you were making a real argument.
      - 14y ago
negativity 14y ago
Loathe as I am to thank Microsoft (as a company) for much of anything, I'm glad to see that rational people actually work for them. It's awesome to see sane-minded people shed light on the realities of what information ultimately is, and how and why we share it. You can't keep clamping down on people for whispering secrets in each other's ears. To do so is to deny an individual of their own humanity. This is especially true, with regard to trivial pastimes, like reading works of fiction and experiencing the recording of music, sounds and abstract noise that we create with the hopes that people will actually listen to them. Hopefully, these aspects of human behavior will be embraced as normal facts of life, rather than rejected as malicious and criminal. People who create content, after all, are really paid thinkers in the Greek sense, and that should be a truth that's understood by all these stubborn rights holders. I hope the reaction to investigations like this will encourage tolerance of file sharing, rather than harden the resolve to purge it from whatever society we find ourselves living in decades from now. Thank you, Peter Biddle, Bryan Willman, Paul England and Marcus Peinado!
groby_b 14y ago
I'm amazed this entire discussion here focuses on "DRM good" vs. "DRM bad". The point is, it does not matter. We have entered a world where for pretty much the first time, the marginal cost of creating a copy of something is zero, for all intents and purposes. We don't have any economic theories (or business models) that can deal with that yet. DRM is simply a symptom of that. The question is not "can (and should) people be prevented from resharing content", the question is, "what does content creation look like in a world where everything is shared"
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  The problem with DRM is that to the casual observer it looks like something is being done. Whilst in reality the main effects of DRM is generally to make usability , security and privacy worse. Once people start putting this crap in the systems it becomes entrenched and more difficult to remove.
- shasta 14y ago
  Books have been around for quite some time. The major change isn't that the marginal cost is now zero. The incentive and techincal ability to use copyrighted works without a license has been present for a long time. The difference is the decentralization. In the past, if you printed a batch of unlicensed books, it was very easy to shut you down or sue you. Now, anyone can make the copy and it's not viable to go after them all.
- cynicalkane 14y ago
  Microeconomic models deal with negligible marginal cost products as a matter of routine. I don't mean to be rude, but you've been taking the wrong economics courses. Another poster identified the issue: decentralized distribution, not low cost of copy, is the sea change. In past times governments responded to low cost of copy by legislating copyright. Now there's no practical way to centralize distribution of convenient copies of data. Honestly, nerds fantasize about a world where all data is free, but information creators just respond by making their data inconvenient to obtain. Institutions of content creation have a high demand product; economically there's no reason to expect them to roll over and give up on making money.
lectrick 14y ago
I thought this was an amazing paper when it came out, especially considering its source. And it's still amazing.
jrochkind1 14y ago
> Outside Microsoft, critics charged that Biddle's project represented the beginning of the end for the PC as an open platform. They feared that Microsoft would use the technology to exert control over which software could be executed on Windows PCs, freezing out open source operating systems and reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice. Nope, it's Apple that got there first with iOS. I think the thesis on how the darknet would defeat DRM was correct... but only assuming OS's and hardware that actually gave owners control of what software they ran on the devices they own. In a world where you void your warranty and possibly make it impossible to upgrade your OS (_and_ possibly break the law in the US!), by 'jailbreaking' your device so that you can install software on it without that software having been given a stamp of approval by the device vendor... I'm not so sure. And I suspect DRM was the real motivation for setting up the ecology this way on iOS -- where Apple managed to succeed, both technologically and in the court of public opinion, where Microsoft had previously failed, in doing exactly what people were scared Microsoft was doing -- reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice. And that's what looks like the future of consumer computing now, no? The idea that a device owner should have the right to install whatever software they want on their device... is going to seem a quaint relic of a bygone age in 10 years, and not just for 'mobile'.
- __alexs 14y ago
  I thought jailbreaking was legal now? [1] It seems to me that both jailbreaking and pirating iOS apps is a pretty common activity even among non-technical people. Obviously OS level DRM like iOS makes it harder for people but people still seem very keen on doing it and the incentive to do so isn't going away. Piracy, just like Shrinkage [2] is a fact of doing business. [1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jailbreaking/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jail... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting)
  - jrochkind1 14y ago
    jailbreaking _phones_ is _possibly temporarily_ legal, as an exception to DMCA by the Librarian of Congress which has to be explicitly renewed every few years. Jailbreaking tablets is not legal. Providing or distributing software intended to help you jailbreak is also illegal, even though jailbreaking may be legal. See the EFF on this (and donate some money to them!): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/2012-dmca-rulemaking-what-we-got-what-we-didnt-and-how-to-improve https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/2012-dmca-rulemaking-w...
marshray 14y ago
I just noticed that Microsoft has an opening for a "Privacy Strategist, Senior - Trustworthy Computing" https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&rw=5&jid=97921&jlang=en https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&#... https://twitter.com/adamshostack/status/274589817776525312 https://twitter.com/adamshostack/status/274589817776525312 I accepted a position at Microsoft a few months ago, and I'm feeling pretty happy about it. I've been a merciless critic of MS in the past, but it appears to me now that MS is one of the few large tech companies in a position to make the consumer's privacy interests a competitive advantage in their products. One of my long-standing criticisms of the whole Trustworthy computing initiative matched what was described in the article: that all this research in computer security and TPM hardware on the motherboard was not being used well in the interest of the consumer. With the very notable exception of Bitlocker, "trustworthy" tended to mean that 3rd party interests could expect the computer to act on their behalf and against the demands of the system's actual owner. If you are or know someone who can articulate good arguments on behalf of the user and privacy, please show them this job posting. Thanks :-)
- yuhong 14y ago
  "Trustworthy" and "Trusted" Computing are different.
  - wmf 14y ago
    Specifically, in MS-speak "trustworthy computing" means having fewer security holes and "trusted computing" is basically DRM.
    - marshray 14y ago
      Yes, it's probably not directly related to TPM DRM per se. But this position reads like it would involve privacy advocacy and strategy in general.
- atesti 14y ago
  It's really sad what happened to the TPM! After all the initial uproar the TPM was designed to not be able to enforce anything. It just sits there passively measuring e.g. your boot loader and BIOS and it only unlocks the secret key to your fully encrypted harddrive if the boot loader is untampered. Great technology! But everyone hates the TPM and it is not in every motherboard nowadays, although it would be great for Bitlocker! But what we got anyway was the Trusted Media path in the Windows kernel, so that only trusted audio drivers could play DRM content. But now with Windows 8 everything is bad and nobody gives a sh*t, after being brainwashed to accept the Apple appstore: We now have the worst enforcement technology: Secure UEFI and locked down hardware which can't even run Linux out of the box! And nobody is protesting against it! It has nothing good (like the TPM did: TPM could store certificates and other secrets and sign data etc.) and only bad things: It enforces what you run. And I bet Microsoft wants this to enforce that no sideloading can happen. So in the future when the Windows desktop is gone a mandatory Windows Defender will delete all your illegal unwanted software and you can only buy through the Windows store and never ever load kernel drives which patch away stupid restrictions in your software. No more games to be conserved in MOMA I guess...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Natsu 14y ago
> Once a popular piece of information—say, a movie, a song, or a software title—"leaks" into the darknet, stopping its spread becomes practically impossible. This, the engineers realized, had an important implication: to prevent piracy, digital rights management had to work not just against average users, but against the most tech-savvy users on the planet. It only takes a single user to find a vulnerability in a DRM scheme, strip the protection from the content, and release the unencrypted version to the darknet. Then millions of other users merely need to know how to use ordinary tools such as BitTorrent to get their own copies. There are quite a few people out there who still don't understand this, who believe that a "speedbump" will work. They see things like SatTV protection schemes that are intact because people want content and they're not going to take the hard way out until they have to. Like how the PS3 got hacked once there was an incentive to. I even remember one specific conversation with a security expert here on HN telling me about how good the PS3's security was DRM working. I predicted it would get hacked when necessary. This was not long before the hack. But it's a fundamentally biased prediction: I only needed on lucky break in the security to be right while they had to be perfect for me to be wrong. That fundamental asymmetry, however, is exactly what makes the part I quoted work.

107 points by th0ma5 14y ago

rplst8 14y ago

Yet we are moving towards an industry where "the fully re-programmable computer" no longer exists.

chadgeidel 14y ago
I don't see that. Sure - popular "computers" are not fully re-programmable, but to say they will go away entirely is probably not true. There will always need to be someone that "makes the magic" and, IMHO, this cannot be done on a locked down device (nevermind the fact that developers wouldn't put up with a computer they couldn't debug). As long as there are folks like you and I that wish to have a computer (as traditionally known) there will be vendors catering to our wishes.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Just like the idea of making Raspberry Pi for as many children as possible to spur a generation of engineers, the idea that the most popular computers will be closed, will have the exact opposite effect. You don't need open computers to just be available in a tiny corner of the world, and expect big innovations from it. You need them to be available to as many people as possible.
  - lotyrin 14y ago
    Agreed. But in the DRM conversation, anyone having one means they can use their digital freedom to bypass DRM, the product of which could be consumed even on the hypothetical majority's closed devices.
- bediger4000 14y ago
  I agree: someone "makes the magic". But what if it's like hydroponics and gro-lights were during the worst Federal excesses of the "Drug War"? Anyone buying a real computer (not an appliance) needs some kind of licensing and/or certification. Manufacturing real computers requires certified and licensed manufacturing and a different certification/licensing for design? The pace of progress would slow dramatically. Since fewer and fewer people get into programming, we won't have wild and crazy folks who try new and interesting things all the time. No Moxie Marlinspike. No Jeff Bezos. No Marc Andreesen. IT would become like making airplanes, hidebound, rigorously engineered by crank turning second-raters. It would never ever change, except in terms of marketing, like cigarettes. This would be ideal for the status quo, and maybe even for a lot of consumers. It would certainly be ideal for the corporate interests, the few that survive.
  - smacktoward 14y ago
    And yet the airlines move a huge volume of people from point A to point B safely, reliably and inexpensively every day, at speeds and scale which would stagger the airline moguls of the 1930s. Does that make airplane nerds like me who think the DC-3 is a good approximation of The Perfect Airplane (rugged, reliable, beautiful) sad? Sure it does. But all those passengers aren't sad. A DC-3 trip from New York to California was a bumpy, sixteen-hour flight with multiple stops for refueling. The same trip on a 757 is a smooth ride above the weather that only takes a few hours and has no stops. And it's cheaper too -- that 1930s trip would have cost more than $4,000 in today's dollars. The 757 ride costs around $550. This is what happens when industries mature: they become safer, cheaper, and boring.
    - bediger4000 14y ago
      You say "mature", I say "reached the limits of efficient flight in 1963" (http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/10/12/can-we-build-a-more-efficient-airplane-not-really-says-physics/ http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/10/12/can-we-build-a-more-...). We're nowhere near what we can do with computing, but we are with airplanes. Safe, cheaper and boring may be an artifact of the physics of flight in Earth's atmosphere, combined with an intertwined US defense and aerospace industry. Why should we let corporate and government interests "unring" the general computing bell? Why should we let corporate and government interests stuff the genie of democratic publishing back in the lamp? General purpose computing hardware got super cheap by way of the mass market, and mass production. General purpose programming got cheap and universally available by way of mass communication. In 1983 a C compiler on VMS cost some thousands of dollars. Today, GCC and Clang and Pcc are free, and they do optimizations that Tartan Labs could only dream about. That's a hugely different path than the carefully-cultivated air travel industry took. I think you're underestimating the effects of the FAA and the DoD on how air travel looks today.
    - kragen 14y ago
      > But all those passengers aren't sad. Have you looked at passengers on airplanes lately? I admit it's been a few years for me, but last I saw, airline passengers were, by and large, miserable. They can't wait to get off the airplane. They may prefer current air travel to not seeing their family or getting paid an order of magnitude less, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be happier with it if it were better. And it could be a lot better.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I don't think so, at least not without the government imposing laws that effectively banned them. The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations. If restrictions on other devices become more and more severe it will eventually get to a stage where it will start to bite Joe average (It won't let him look at all those pictures of ladies doing things his wife won't, or it deleted them all because he broke some obscure clause on page 63 of the EULA). At some point Joe runs into his nerdy friend who has a weird looking computer that can do all kinds of things Joe would love for his computer to be able to do. Supply and demand does the rest.
- kragen 14y ago
  > The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations. The Raspberry Pi is a SoC made by Broadcom, a US$7 billion/year company with 11000 employees. While admittedly this is a bit smaller than Foxconn, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Asus, IBM, HP, or Dell, it still seems like it qualifies as a "mega corporation" to me. (The Raspberry Pi also has a circuit board and stuff, but the SoC is entirely capable of enforcing DRM on its own.)

SkyAtWork 14y ago

(I ran engineering for a DRM firm for several years about the same time as Peter put this out.) It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet was very good for information sharing, that crushing Napster hadn't exactly stopped people from sharing digital media, and that trying to make media exceedingly secure and hard to use was not a winning strategy. If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value - if it's both more expensive and harder to use, you've made adoption pretty unlikely. In '03, MP3 players were entirely prevalent, mostly didn't support useful DRM, and the music industry mostly sold little silver discs which came with no restrictions. So it wasn't that the threat model to make music readily redistributable for free was "the smartest black hats out there figure out how to crack your crypto and DRM", it was "an average user rips a CD into MP3s and shares it". As you might expect, it was frustrating to try to deal with the competing demands from Hollywood at the time. People mostly didn't bother attacking the DRM - they just went and created or file-shared to get the more usable files without the protection layer. But there was still a great deal of insistence that whatever content protection layer was put in could be a vault to keep media safe forever, rather than a speedbump to piracy. (Meanwhile, of course, CDs were raw bitstreams of high fidelity audio data...)

TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
I used to pay for content: movies, games, and some music. I didn't spend all that much, but I did buy them. Then, corrupted audio CDs were sold. My sister got bit by one. So we downloaded it where it wasn't sold as damaged: Suprnova. During that time, stupidity was occurring with DVDs with rotating CSS keys and 'bad block filled with data'. I was downloading films I wanted to archive, but couldn't easily rip. Games were not that bad, but soon became horrendous in terms of screw-user checks, up to the point of driver breaking installs of trash-ware and other nefarious garbage. I trusted the pirates more than the companies. I've been burned enough times. Why pay for crap quality when free is better?
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  True that. Everyone is fretting about movie/TV show availability on Netflix, etc., but I sidestepped that and just built an HTPC[0] and combined it with a private torrent site that has all the movies and TV shows I could ever want. In technical terms, it is far and away the best solution. 0: http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-of-my-dreams-for-under-500 http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-o...

SparrowOS 14y ago

God says, "and will be their God, and they shall be my people. 31:34 And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. 31:35 Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is his name: 31:36 If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever. 31:37 Thus saith the LORD; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the LORD. " ---- Why don't You give them an ultimatum? God says... acquiesce nearer gleameth stowed industrious choosing prating deceivingness embalmed increasing o'er receptacle adulterer honesty The_good_stuff funeral Food shipwreck fifteen practised thwart diseased patience welcome gladdens throne luxury fictions vicissitude Indonesia theatres unliker baby admit amiable variableness livest student remember genuinely relief shapes lovers direction overspread interpreting shake tardy insight quiet procure confined appointed ---- You will have to confine them -- You are just. eye for eye. God says... the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost. 1:7 So that ye were ensamples to all that believe in Macedonia and Achaia. 1:8 For from you sounded out the word of the Lord not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith to God-ward is spread abroad; so that we need not to speak any thing. 1:9 For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; 1:10 And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come. ---- They need to watch Clockwork Orange. God is eye-for-eye just. God says... Virgin England Where exclude contemplate Bride excluded Are createst gladiators numerous knocketh enslaved sun's accomplish contritions I_could_be_wrong certainty place mantles lends awoke one_small_step beauties embracement possess explain unbelieving threads leaden Redeemer appeared glance health roared Ireland lifts Sacraments chambers sand feelings All-wise commencing fear faultfinders cares rightful throng feverishness pointed maintain biting directeth use dearer fly burning greatly blood resisteth voyage stones understandeth credulity Prof blushed arrange Project MERCHANTABILITY solid Romania loses bizarre perceivable Known vagrant wretchedness rich pear pronounced vacation fraught abject scarce Idaho nilled Say made Grammar Go watch A Clockwork Orange. God is eye-for eye just. Do you mock Creationists? Guess what that means? Are you ruthless with dumb people. You will be dumb. Do you take glory? It will be taken away. Old age will suck. Imagine a pro football player in old age. God says... Maaseiah, Mattaniah, Bezaleel, and Binnui, and Manasseh. 10:31 And of the sons of Harim; Eliezer, Ishijah, Malchiah, Shemaiah, Shimeon, 10:32 Benjamin, Malluch, and Shemariah. 10:33 Of the sons of Hashum; Mattenai, Mattathah, Zabad, Eliphelet, Jeremai, Manasseh, and Shimei. 10:34 Of the sons of Bani; Maadai, Amram, and Uel, 10:35 Benaiah, Bedeiah, Chelluh, 10:36 Vaniah, Meremoth, Eliashib, 10:37 Mattaniah, Mattenai, and Jaasau, 10:38 And Bani, and Binnui, Shimei, 10:39 And Shelemiah, and Nathan, and Adaiah, 10:40 Machnadebai, Shashai, Sharai, 10:41 Azareel, and Shelemiah, Shemariah, 10:42 Shallum, Amariah, and Joseph.

mtgx 14y ago

Palladium - I remember that name. I only had my first computer for a year or two, but I remember how it freaked everyone out. I'm glad it died. And isn't ARM's "TrustZone" pretty much the same thing, or does it have a more niche and different purpose?

Spearchucker 14y ago
Palladium didn't die. It's the granddaddy of UEFI/SecureBoot.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pacaro 14y ago
  I worked on the Palladium/NGSCB team from 2002 to 2005 - ultimately the team shipped BitLocker in Vista, but approx half of the team were siphoned off in (IIRC) 2004 to work on Hypervisor so the engineering effort ended up contributing to two pretty important OS features.
- wmf 14y ago
  Yeah, only the dangerous part (remote attestation) died.

Create 14y ago

http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

shmerl 14y ago

It's time for industries to wake up and to ditch all kind of content DRM altogether.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

From the article: "I'm now finding that for some kinds of content, the illegal is clearly outperforming legal," Biddle said. "That blows me away. I pay for premium cable. It's easier to use BitTorrent to watch Game of Thrones. HBO Go is trying very hard to do a good job," he said, but the user experience just isn't as good. Because HBO Go is a streaming service, he said, it's more vulnerable to network congestion than simply downloading the entire episode from the darknet." Fix this and you 'fix' piracy. Oh, and the fix isn't "shut down the darknet" it is provide a better service.

tptacek 14y ago
Piracy costs HBO less than "fixing HBO Go" would, since HBO is cross-subsidized by subscriptions to cable. The fix for piracy is to create compelling content under the "superior" business models piracy advocates have so much faith in. Netflix is starting to do this; over the next 10 years, lots of media/creative/production people are going to get very rich figuring out how to produce and sell content online. In the meantime, people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones; they sound ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?
- plinkplonk 14y ago
  "people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones;" maybe people should stop bitching about people bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones ? they sound ridiculous. interesting how one man's 'bitching' is another's righteous rage against the ungodly heathen who don't believe exactly as he does.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Why not just say "oh yeah? your FACE is a game of thrones"? It would contain the same amount of content and at least people wouldn't have to wonder whether you were silly enough to think you were making a real argument.
    - 14y ago

negativity 14y ago

Loathe as I am to thank Microsoft (as a company) for much of anything, I'm glad to see that rational people actually work for them. It's awesome to see sane-minded people shed light on the realities of what information ultimately is, and how and why we share it. You can't keep clamping down on people for whispering secrets in each other's ears. To do so is to deny an individual of their own humanity. This is especially true, with regard to trivial pastimes, like reading works of fiction and experiencing the recording of music, sounds and abstract noise that we create with the hopes that people will actually listen to them. Hopefully, these aspects of human behavior will be embraced as normal facts of life, rather than rejected as malicious and criminal. People who create content, after all, are really paid thinkers in the Greek sense, and that should be a truth that's understood by all these stubborn rights holders. I hope the reaction to investigations like this will encourage tolerance of file sharing, rather than harden the resolve to purge it from whatever society we find ourselves living in decades from now. Thank you, Peter Biddle, Bryan Willman, Paul England and Marcus Peinado!

groby_b 14y ago

I'm amazed this entire discussion here focuses on "DRM good" vs. "DRM bad". The point is, it does not matter. We have entered a world where for pretty much the first time, the marginal cost of creating a copy of something is zero, for all intents and purposes. We don't have any economic theories (or business models) that can deal with that yet. DRM is simply a symptom of that. The question is not "can (and should) people be prevented from resharing content", the question is, "what does content creation look like in a world where everything is shared"

jiggy2011 14y ago
The problem with DRM is that to the casual observer it looks like something is being done. Whilst in reality the main effects of DRM is generally to make usability , security and privacy worse. Once people start putting this crap in the systems it becomes entrenched and more difficult to remove.
shasta 14y ago
Books have been around for quite some time. The major change isn't that the marginal cost is now zero. The incentive and techincal ability to use copyrighted works without a license has been present for a long time. The difference is the decentralization. In the past, if you printed a batch of unlicensed books, it was very easy to shut you down or sue you. Now, anyone can make the copy and it's not viable to go after them all.
cynicalkane 14y ago
Microeconomic models deal with negligible marginal cost products as a matter of routine. I don't mean to be rude, but you've been taking the wrong economics courses. Another poster identified the issue: decentralized distribution, not low cost of copy, is the sea change. In past times governments responded to low cost of copy by legislating copyright. Now there's no practical way to centralize distribution of convenient copies of data. Honestly, nerds fantasize about a world where all data is free, but information creators just respond by making their data inconvenient to obtain. Institutions of content creation have a high demand product; economically there's no reason to expect them to roll over and give up on making money.

lectrick 14y ago

I thought this was an amazing paper when it came out, especially considering its source. And it's still amazing.

jrochkind1 14y ago

> Outside Microsoft, critics charged that Biddle's project represented the beginning of the end for the PC as an open platform. They feared that Microsoft would use the technology to exert control over which software could be executed on Windows PCs, freezing out open source operating systems and reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice. Nope, it's Apple that got there first with iOS. I think the thesis on how the darknet would defeat DRM was correct... but only assuming OS's and hardware that actually gave owners control of what software they ran on the devices they own. In a world where you void your warranty and possibly make it impossible to upgrade your OS (_and_ possibly break the law in the US!), by 'jailbreaking' your device so that you can install software on it without that software having been given a stamp of approval by the device vendor... I'm not so sure. And I suspect DRM was the real motivation for setting up the ecology this way on iOS -- where Apple managed to succeed, both technologically and in the court of public opinion, where Microsoft had previously failed, in doing exactly what people were scared Microsoft was doing -- reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice. And that's what looks like the future of consumer computing now, no? The idea that a device owner should have the right to install whatever software they want on their device... is going to seem a quaint relic of a bygone age in 10 years, and not just for 'mobile'.

__alexs 14y ago
I thought jailbreaking was legal now? [1] It seems to me that both jailbreaking and pirating iOS apps is a pretty common activity even among non-technical people. Obviously OS level DRM like iOS makes it harder for people but people still seem very keen on doing it and the incentive to do so isn't going away. Piracy, just like Shrinkage [2] is a fact of doing business. [1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jailbreaking/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jail... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting)
- jrochkind1 14y ago
  jailbreaking _phones_ is _possibly temporarily_ legal, as an exception to DMCA by the Librarian of Congress which has to be explicitly renewed every few years. Jailbreaking tablets is not legal. Providing or distributing software intended to help you jailbreak is also illegal, even though jailbreaking may be legal. See the EFF on this (and donate some money to them!): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/2012-dmca-rulemaking-what-we-got-what-we-didnt-and-how-to-improve https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/2012-dmca-rulemaking-w...

marshray 14y ago

I just noticed that Microsoft has an opening for a "Privacy Strategist, Senior - Trustworthy Computing" https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&rw=5&jid=97921&jlang=en https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&#... https://twitter.com/adamshostack/status/274589817776525312 https://twitter.com/adamshostack/status/274589817776525312 I accepted a position at Microsoft a few months ago, and I'm feeling pretty happy about it. I've been a merciless critic of MS in the past, but it appears to me now that MS is one of the few large tech companies in a position to make the consumer's privacy interests a competitive advantage in their products. One of my long-standing criticisms of the whole Trustworthy computing initiative matched what was described in the article: that all this research in computer security and TPM hardware on the motherboard was not being used well in the interest of the consumer. With the very notable exception of Bitlocker, "trustworthy" tended to mean that 3rd party interests could expect the computer to act on their behalf and against the demands of the system's actual owner. If you are or know someone who can articulate good arguments on behalf of the user and privacy, please show them this job posting. Thanks :-)

yuhong 14y ago
"Trustworthy" and "Trusted" Computing are different.
- wmf 14y ago
  Specifically, in MS-speak "trustworthy computing" means having fewer security holes and "trusted computing" is basically DRM.
  - marshray 14y ago
    Yes, it's probably not directly related to TPM DRM per se. But this position reads like it would involve privacy advocacy and strategy in general.
atesti 14y ago
It's really sad what happened to the TPM! After all the initial uproar the TPM was designed to not be able to enforce anything. It just sits there passively measuring e.g. your boot loader and BIOS and it only unlocks the secret key to your fully encrypted harddrive if the boot loader is untampered. Great technology! But everyone hates the TPM and it is not in every motherboard nowadays, although it would be great for Bitlocker! But what we got anyway was the Trusted Media path in the Windows kernel, so that only trusted audio drivers could play DRM content. But now with Windows 8 everything is bad and nobody gives a sh*t, after being brainwashed to accept the Apple appstore: We now have the worst enforcement technology: Secure UEFI and locked down hardware which can't even run Linux out of the box! And nobody is protesting against it! It has nothing good (like the TPM did: TPM could store certificates and other secrets and sign data etc.) and only bad things: It enforces what you run. And I bet Microsoft wants this to enforce that no sideloading can happen. So in the future when the Windows desktop is gone a mandatory Windows Defender will delete all your illegal unwanted software and you can only buy through the Windows store and never ever load kernel drives which patch away stupid restrictions in your software. No more games to be conserved in MOMA I guess...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Natsu 14y ago

> Once a popular piece of information—say, a movie, a song, or a software title—"leaks" into the darknet, stopping its spread becomes practically impossible. This, the engineers realized, had an important implication: to prevent piracy, digital rights management had to work not just against average users, but against the most tech-savvy users on the planet. It only takes a single user to find a vulnerability in a DRM scheme, strip the protection from the content, and release the unencrypted version to the darknet. Then millions of other users merely need to know how to use ordinary tools such as BitTorrent to get their own copies. There are quite a few people out there who still don't understand this, who believe that a "speedbump" will work. They see things like SatTV protection schemes that are intact because people want content and they're not going to take the hard way out until they have to. Like how the PS3 got hacked once there was an incentive to. I even remember one specific conversation with a security expert here on HN telling me about how good the PS3's security was DRM working. I predicted it would get hacked when necessary. This was not long before the hack. But it's a fundamentally biased prediction: I only needed on lucky break in the security to be right while they had to be perfect for me to be wrong. That fundamental asymmetry, however, is exactly what makes the part I quoted work.