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Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

367 points by waffle_ss 12y ago

pbprabhuram 12y ago
Just use a camera to take a shot
- mercurial 12y ago
  You completely missed the point of the article. "Trusted computing" is back with a vengeance. The fact that your computer runs complex firmware (your coprocessor's firmware can run a webserver?) which bypasses anything above it is the problem. It means you don't own your computer anymore: your overlords grant you the right to use it under certain conditions.
  - pbprabhuram 12y ago
    Nope I did'nt that is one way to bypass the problem
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - geon 12y ago
      The problem is that you don't own your computer. You can't bypass that with a camera. Who cares about movie piracy? Copy protection has always been broken and will always be. It isn't a problem.
- pm24601 12y ago
  go ahead and try that
Pyxl101 12y ago
Are chips with this feature sold in consumer devices? I'm planning to buy a new computer soon. How can I avoid or boycott the chips in question? Or can the feature be definitively disabled through the BIOS? If I buy a computer, then I want to own it completely and not have arbitrary DRM bullshit remove capabilities. If I wish to take a screenshot of copyright content and share it with friends (fair use), then I should be able to do that, and I will be seriously pissed if my own machine gets in the way. Does anyone know which chips include this feature, and/or whether it can be disabled?
- pm24601 12y ago
  thats the point. It helps Hollywood, at your expense. You as the purchaser of the computer are not "entitled" to being able to use the computer exactly as you want.
- redstripe 12y ago
  I believe this is part of "vPro" in intel marketing speak. Yes, many consumer CPUs have it. Intel provides pretty good feature lists by CPU if you want to avoid it: e.g. http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&FamilyText=4th%20Generation%20Intel%C2%AE%20Core%E2%84%A2%20i5%20Processors&VProTechnology=true http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&FamilyText=4th%20Ge...
  - rasz_pl 12y ago
    Chipsets, not CPUs, but that is a moot distinction as Intel stopped licensing their ISA, so you have no choice but to use intel chipset with spyware buildin
- pgeorgi 12y ago
  All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. There's a reason why the "reclaim your freedom" notebook is still a Lenovo X60. Some of them come with larger firmware (5MB, making up vPro and AMT), others with the smaller one (1.5MB) that merely does the DRM stuff, but all of them have the full hardware access detailled in the article. AMD is clean on the chipset side until kaveri/kabini. After that, they come with a "platform security processor". I think the GPU has some DRM features (mostly concerned with adding Macrovision noise to the output signal), but I'm not into GPUs very much. Contemporary ARM stuff mostly comes with TrustZone, which can typically be used for DRM as well. AMD adopted the TrustZone model for their current CPUs, too. Since Protected A/V Path and similar DRM systems require OS cooperation, the easiest way to stay clear of them is to use Open Source media players, on an Open Source OS. If you want to avoid supporting proponents of such hardware assisted DRM systems, plain ARM systems that ship without fixed operating system (eg. the cuBox series, rPI & follow ups) are your best bet.
  - 12y ago
markdown 12y ago
Did you read that blog post about how RMS picks his nose and has silly opinions about some unrelated thing?
- yzzxy 12y ago
  Breaking news: extremists on both sides of issue are seen as controversial figures.
Drakim 12y ago
What I don't really understand is how this could be used to stop piracy. Sure, you could stop recording on a machine with Intel Management Engine, but wouldn't pirates simply use a computer without Intel Management Engine to rip media? Unless the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine (sounds unlikely, how would you explain that to customers), how does it prevent anything?
- rewqfdsa 12y ago
  > the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine That's why Intel management keeps greenlighting this project. Intel thinks that it if it can convince content producers to distribute media as blobs encrypted with Intel's public key (and maybe, say, Samsung's or Apple's), then we can transition to a world where consumer video files do work on most consumer hardware, but can't be decrypted outside the protected media path and ripped. There's no reason this scheme can't work. OEMs and content producers just haven't been able to cooperate well enough to piece it together yet. Once they do, game over, except for the analog hole. This scheme also has the side effect of creating a "moat" around existing OEMs. Sure, a new player can begin fabricating new CPUs, but existing media files won't be encrypted for these CPUs. It is literally a conspiracy against the public.
  - rando289 12y ago
    Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    - rewqfdsa 12y ago
      In our universe, the "debugging tools" that could defeat this scheme are ones that can depackage an Intel chip and read its EEPROM directly. What do you even use for that, a scanning electron microscope?
deleted 12y ago
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- dtech 12y ago
  That was a totally different problem, where the screenshot tool is not aware of the video acceleration. This post explains why it is impossible for software to take a video screenshot on a modern computer with a certain piece of Intel DRM.
  - taspeotis 12y ago
    You're right, and if I'd read more closely I would have been able to come to that conclusion by myself.
rando289 12y ago
What is Rosyna? Googled it and came up blank.
- danshapiro 12y ago
  The second footnote in the article is a twitter post from a user, @rosyna, who said that she couldn't take a screenshot of Netflix. https://twitter.com/rosyna/status/550702351703875584 https://twitter.com/rosyna/status/550702351703875584
MichaelGG 12y ago
The other downside is that you can't use custom software to fix up video. Netflix has a fairly poor player - more than one I've had to go torrent something I was trying to watch in Netflix due to one playback issue or another. From brightness to subtitles, to frame positioning (shifting the whole playback area down to fit better on my wall when projecting very wide formats) - Netflix offers nothing. Even worse for audio, where I often pump center channel dialog and perform normalization. It's sad how advanced the tech is compared to how limited our use is. (For instance, it's technically trivial, but usably difficult to add Rifftrax (MST3K reborn) to a movie on Netflix.) Edit: The really nasty part is that this technology in general isn't bad. I love TPMs, for instance. Gives me a fairly easy way to get relatively strong security, say, to store my disk encryption keys, without memorizing a passphrase. Trusted computing can allow the user to remain in control. But slipping in DRM gets people understandably upset. OTOH, I can't find details on exactly how this video stuff works. Wikipedia points at the GPU part, making it seem like it's just the same HDCP-kinda stuff that's been around for a while. (Annoying, but ultimately a decision of your kernel to enable. As in, media isn't encrypted at the source to some Intel key.)
- userbinator 12y ago
  Trusted computing can allow the user to remain in control. Only as long as it's really the user the computer is trusting, and not some other entity. Personally, I don't really like TPMs or any of the other "safe computing" technology. In theory (and this is what everyone usually refers to when they advocate it) they can help the user, but in practice they're almost always being used to do the opposite and the path to freedom is insecurity (e.g. jailbreaking, running homebrew software, etc.) As the saying goes, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is." OTOH, I can't find details on exactly how this video stuff works That's sort of the point of DRM in general - you're not supposed to know how it works, because then you would be in a much better position to break it. It's no surprise that the details would be kept secret, and other security technologies are likely being used for this purpose - e.g. DRM'd PDFs.
jrockway 12y ago
This is all ultimately pointless because it's not like the video decoder checks the integrity of its own code or the CPU running it or the compiler that compiled it or that the OS it was tested against is actually running. (Reflections on trusting trust.) Nothing actually cares about secure boot or end-to-end code validation; Apple doesn't even include equipment on their mainboards to do this anymore. Meanwhile, if you're going to grab pixels to pirate video, that's easy: HDCP is broken, so just grab it at the link layer. The key you need is on Pastebin! Consumer DRM has always been a hardware-selling maneuver as far as I can tell. "You need HDCP in order to watch this video." "I do? But HDCP is broken." "Just buy a new monitor anyway." The Management Engine sounds like a similar scheme. "You need an Intel Management Engine to watch this video." "I do?" "Yes, it's very convenient for us that you need to buy a new computer even though your current computer works fine otherwise." Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad.
- stingraycharles 12y ago
  > Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad. And it's even more sad that the most computer illiterate, "honest" people are the most vulnerable to this strategy. People that want an honest way to watch movies have the most problems watching them.
  - jrockway 12y ago
    Yes, this is truly the sad part of DRM: the people that actually pay for content are the ones whose experience is most degraded. Pirates don't have to buy monitors with HDCP. Pirates can watch their collection when the authorization servers are down. Pirates can back up their media. Pirates can take screenshots. (Though I've never had this particular problem even with "DRM'd" media on Linux.) The list goes on. The content industry wonders why they can't stop piracy. Maybe they could start by providing a product that's as good as what the pirates get.
juliendorra 12y ago
Just a note on the discourse: the point "I own it, I should be able to use it the way I want" feels like not really effective (as a rhetoric) in many part of the western world and in many social circles. I really feel for example in France it would be easily brushed off using analogy to construction permits or driver licenses, or just put the person in some crazy-libertarian box ("the kind that want to print firearms at home"). There might be ways of framing the issue that fit better in a socio-democrat context (Europe, etc.). Ideas?
- thomasahle 12y ago
  I'm not sure either. But at least in by country the leftish parties seem the most interested in protecting consumer rights, which might be a way to go. The libertarians seem more worried about protecting the company's "intellectual property" and include management engines in "their own" products.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Maybe stress that the computer is a creative tool and should not have artificial limits put in place? Compare this to a hammer and imagine that one weekend you wanted to finish that cupboard you're building in your garage, but your hammer starts throwing exceptions because your nails are not Apple iNails or otherwise MAFIAA-certified ones. "How dare you buy generic nails in a mom&pop shop around the corner?" General-purpose computer is a tool that should be able to execute arbitrary code its users want to. I think Cory Doctorow summed it up the best: http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Europe has strong consumer protection rights. The angle to take is that media is sold misleadingly. When I buy a DVD / Bluray I am paying for a physical disc and a licence to use the contents of the disc. That licence is restrictive and restricts my rights more than law. Thus, I am not allowed to extract a short extract to use in an educational setting (fair dealings; fair use). Packaging and marketing of DVD / Bluray is unclear about this and gives the impression that you are "buying a movie", not buying some plastic and a licence.
jsdir 12y ago
Years ago, I remember trying to screenshot video on a Microsoft XP box. When I tried to paste the screenshot inside any image editing program, the video region would remain blank. If I correctly positioned the image editor window over the window with the video source, the video would show through this region, but the video remained positionally fixed to the screen. I cannot remember if this happened for all video sources though. Could this have been caused by DRM?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- akx 12y ago
  No -- that was using video overlays for hardware acceleration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay
- geon 12y ago
  It was because of how HW accelerated video decoding worked. You would specify the coordinates of a rectangle on the screen where to play the video. Then you'd display a rectangle of a certain color (#010000, I believe), to be used as a mask. The window manager could show windows on top of the video, and the masking would work even though the video decoding HW knew nothing about window management and vice versa.
buro9 12y ago
My partner is an academic, a lecturer in film theory. She watches a lot of films, and needs to make a lot of short clips for her lectures, and to take a lot of screenshots for her papers. This task is becoming increasingly difficult as time goes by. The most reliable method (for her skill level) is now to rip DVDs, removing various bits of protection, before playing the film using VLC on Windows and using VLC to take the screenshot. This is a pain, as she now uses a Mac primarily (as most academia seems to be doing so almost exclusively because it makes presentations easier - connecting to projectors turns out to be the killer feature). For a lot of films though, she pauses a film and uses a camera directed at the TV. Or worse, she'll record the clip on a camera (using the camera's microphone). Aside from things like Box of Broadcasts (which is for UK broadcast TV), there are few to no resources for academics to resort to for sources of film that will enable dissemination to students through materials and presentations. All clips are short (10-30s), papers feature only a few screenshots when published. Regardless of the studio and technology company desire to lock things down and control distribution, there remains a very legal exception to their controls: education. And of course, education has resorted to alternatives to these locks. There exists private torrent sites that are collections of obscure, international and predominantly non-Hollywood productions. Like torrent sites pre-Netflix, these are actually the most reliable sources of films that academics use for sources. Even when an academic owns a DVD (as nearly all do for future presentation and citation purposes), the torrents deliver files that the academic can use to create clips and screenshots. As much as possible, I try and help my partner avoid such sites. They are good, but in the hard world of academia I'm not sure her career will survive trying to argue any form of legitimacy of downloading content for academic purposes for already owned DVDs. There is a very real and present danger that copy protections will harm libraries and education. They already are.
- juliangregorian 12y ago
  Curious why VLC/screenshot doesn't work on Mac?
  - sjwright 12y ago
    It certainly does work -- I use it frequently. The VLC snapshot tool works perfectly, and the system screen shot (cmd-shift-3/4) works too, at least on the H264 video I just tested with. Not sure what the issue could be.
psk 12y ago
I don't know much about HDMI, but couldn't I just run the video/movie in fullscreen and then capture the output from the HDMI and save the raw output to a disk?
- userbinator 12y ago
  Yes, HDCP has been broken for a long time and even if it wasn't, you could still capture the LVDS signal that drives the LCD panel itself. But the problem is that those are very high-speed signals(1920x1080 24bpp at 60FPS is around 350MB/s+) that require suitable hardware to capture, basically uncompressed video, and recompression would introduce more artifacts than the original. That's why pirates don't usually go this route; the result is only slightly better than pointing a good camera at the screen.
  - w0utert 12y ago
    I always assumed most movies were ripped using exploits at various points in the playback software stack? At some point the unencrypted bitstream needs to be available to decode, if you hacked the player or GPU driver code to dump it at that point, it would be possible to re-assemble it into an unencrypted video file, right? You would use a computer without any of the DRM features the article is about of course.
deleted 12y ago
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hippich 12y ago
This is what I call bullshit job - zero value for humankind created, tons of human hours wasted. (I would even say negative value since security holes will be found if not already in this microcontroller firmware)
- tacoman 12y ago
  I stumbled upon this PAVP thing in an old Thinkpad just last week. My first thought after reading about it was basically this. Somewhere, some very talented software developers probably spent years working on this obscure, essentially useless thing.
gear54rus 12y ago
I only hope is that as bullshit like this becomes more and more prominent, people will become more and more educated in what is acceptable and what is not (since it will bite them more and more). Eventually, public opinion would shift into more and more negative outlook on corporations who practice such things. Offenders' influence would then decline and people will become smarter, everyone wins.
- userbinator 12y ago
  and people will become smarter Unfortunately, my impression is the opposite - people are slowly being dissuaded from discovering these restrictions by the promises of convenience, and when they do run into them, they're faced with heavy rhetoric to the effect of "it's for your security" so they (reluctantly) accept it. Incidents like this appear isolated and are downplayed by the majority, who will continue to use the very services that restrict them, purely out of convenience. Corporations are diverting people's actions of sharing information into their own channels so they can exert more control over them - witness all the "share on Twitter/Facebook/etc" buttons appearing everywhere (I personally block them, but I know they exist); they sure are convenient to use, and as a side-effect of their use, it reduces the amount of people who will "manually" and directly share with others (and thus know more about the transfer of information themselves.) The same is happening with other types of media too, as evidenced by all the efforts to hide the filesystem of devices from users, since one of the most open ways to share data with someone is to give them a copy of a file. They are even trying to discourage linking to a resource, with browser vendors thinking of hiding URLs or parts of them. Ultimately, they are pushing for a world in which no one owns their (tightly locked-down) computing devices or has any knowledge of how they work (except for a few "specialists"), and all communication between individuals happens via some corporate intermediary. This makes it easier to censor and manipulate the users (probably to squeeze $$$ out of them), which is what the whole idea is about.
  - gear54rus 12y ago
    A comment so accurate it makes me sad :C There isn't much one can do though as favoring convenience over not-so-obvious benefits of (abstract, for them) freedom seems to stem from the very human nature... I used to think RMS' ideas were a bit far fetched, but with each such revelation that comes to light in the form of post on some relatively unknown blog those ideas seem more and more appropriate.
eeZi 12y ago
http://www.slideshare.net/codeblue_jp/igor-skochinsky-enpub http://www.slideshare.net/codeblue_jp/igor-skochinsky-enpub It even has an embedded Java runtime.
based2 12y ago
http://recon.cx/2014/slides/Recon%202014%20Skochinsky.pdf http://recon.cx/2014/slides/Recon%202014%20Skochinsky.pdf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813029
dmm 12y ago
The Librem 15 project is trying to talk intel into letting them disable the management engine. It's the last non-free part of the system. https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop
nercury 12y ago
DRM is a placebo against technology.
dghughes 12y ago
It's bizarre foreign movie and music corporations (I'm Canadian) are dictating actual physical changes to computing hardware. It's as bizarre to me as if US car corporations dictated I could only use premium fuel from Shell and monitored it in real-time.
jandrese 12y ago
The best part is that it is only a matter of time until the IME is cracked and root kits come with bits that you will never be able to clean without getting a whole new computer. Did you know the IME can send and recieve IP without the host processor ever seeing it? It's the ultimate way to own a machine.
- zaroth 12y ago
  I would assume the larger purpose of IME is actually exactly as a platform for persistent undetectable system compromise. Purpose built for TAO? As conspiracy theories go it's hard to explain the existence and full capabilities of IME in this decade without some NSA involvement.
  - acdha 12y ago
    Please take the conspiracist nattering somewhere else. As explained in the second paragraph of the article, the features of IME were requested by large corporate IT departments and pushed mainstream by marketing pressure, with the addition of DRM bits as requested by the large tech vendors who need them to negotiate licenses with members of the copyright cartel. You look at this and see a secure rootkit. A corporate IT worker looks at this and thinks that they can image a workstation remotely no matter what's currently installed. A security person looks at this and sees secure base platform starting from TPM on down which can be setup to keep malware from irrecoverably compromising the system (remember the recent Thunderstrike discussion noting that TPM would protect against that firmware exploit?). All of these have tradeoffs which can be debated but it's just silly to pretend that the NSA is centrally directing the entire industry.
    - zaroth 12y ago
      What impressed me the most was how it's not only hard-coded, but that it can still reliably halt the system even when forcibly disabled. If only it could be fully and truly disabled in the BIOS, or even better, isolated as a separate SKU, then I would be much less irate about it's existence. You can literally wipe all configuration from NVRAM and the platform is still available for "zero-touch remote configuration". This truly is a PC beside the PC. The level of complexity is astounding; they built everything but a way to turn it off.
frik 12y ago
What about graphic cards from Nvidia/AMD? What about the ARM CPUs from various vendors like Apple, AppliedMicro, Atmel, Broadcom, Freescale Semiconductor, Nvidia, NXP, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments? Do they have similar DRM features too?
michaelbuddy 12y ago
not much info at the top of the searches for Rosyna, what consumer processors is it in / going to be in? is it easy enough to just not buy it?

367 points by waffle_ss 12y ago

pbprabhuram 12y ago

Just use a camera to take a shot

mercurial 12y ago
You completely missed the point of the article. "Trusted computing" is back with a vengeance. The fact that your computer runs complex firmware (your coprocessor's firmware can run a webserver?) which bypasses anything above it is the problem. It means you don't own your computer anymore: your overlords grant you the right to use it under certain conditions.
- pbprabhuram 12y ago
  Nope I did'nt that is one way to bypass the problem
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - geon 12y ago
    The problem is that you don't own your computer. You can't bypass that with a camera. Who cares about movie piracy? Copy protection has always been broken and will always be. It isn't a problem.
pm24601 12y ago
go ahead and try that

Pyxl101 12y ago

Are chips with this feature sold in consumer devices? I'm planning to buy a new computer soon. How can I avoid or boycott the chips in question? Or can the feature be definitively disabled through the BIOS? If I buy a computer, then I want to own it completely and not have arbitrary DRM bullshit remove capabilities. If I wish to take a screenshot of copyright content and share it with friends (fair use), then I should be able to do that, and I will be seriously pissed if my own machine gets in the way. Does anyone know which chips include this feature, and/or whether it can be disabled?

pm24601 12y ago
thats the point. It helps Hollywood, at your expense. You as the purchaser of the computer are not "entitled" to being able to use the computer exactly as you want.
redstripe 12y ago
I believe this is part of "vPro" in intel marketing speak. Yes, many consumer CPUs have it. Intel provides pretty good feature lists by CPU if you want to avoid it: e.g. http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&FamilyText=4th%20Generation%20Intel%C2%AE%20Core%E2%84%A2%20i5%20Processors&VProTechnology=true http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&FamilyText=4th%20Ge...
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  Chipsets, not CPUs, but that is a moot distinction as Intel stopped licensing their ISA, so you have no choice but to use intel chipset with spyware buildin
pgeorgi 12y ago
All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. There's a reason why the "reclaim your freedom" notebook is still a Lenovo X60. Some of them come with larger firmware (5MB, making up vPro and AMT), others with the smaller one (1.5MB) that merely does the DRM stuff, but all of them have the full hardware access detailled in the article. AMD is clean on the chipset side until kaveri/kabini. After that, they come with a "platform security processor". I think the GPU has some DRM features (mostly concerned with adding Macrovision noise to the output signal), but I'm not into GPUs very much. Contemporary ARM stuff mostly comes with TrustZone, which can typically be used for DRM as well. AMD adopted the TrustZone model for their current CPUs, too. Since Protected A/V Path and similar DRM systems require OS cooperation, the easiest way to stay clear of them is to use Open Source media players, on an Open Source OS. If you want to avoid supporting proponents of such hardware assisted DRM systems, plain ARM systems that ship without fixed operating system (eg. the cuBox series, rPI & follow ups) are your best bet.
- 12y ago

markdown 12y ago

Did you read that blog post about how RMS picks his nose and has silly opinions about some unrelated thing?

yzzxy 12y ago
Breaking news: extremists on both sides of issue are seen as controversial figures.

Drakim 12y ago

What I don't really understand is how this could be used to stop piracy. Sure, you could stop recording on a machine with Intel Management Engine, but wouldn't pirates simply use a computer without Intel Management Engine to rip media? Unless the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine (sounds unlikely, how would you explain that to customers), how does it prevent anything?

rewqfdsa 12y ago
> the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine That's why Intel management keeps greenlighting this project. Intel thinks that it if it can convince content producers to distribute media as blobs encrypted with Intel's public key (and maybe, say, Samsung's or Apple's), then we can transition to a world where consumer video files do work on most consumer hardware, but can't be decrypted outside the protected media path and ripped. There's no reason this scheme can't work. OEMs and content producers just haven't been able to cooperate well enough to piece it together yet. Once they do, game over, except for the analog hole. This scheme also has the side effect of creating a "moat" around existing OEMs. Sure, a new player can begin fabricating new CPUs, but existing media files won't be encrypted for these CPUs. It is literally a conspiracy against the public.
- rando289 12y ago
  Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
  - rewqfdsa 12y ago
    In our universe, the "debugging tools" that could defeat this scheme are ones that can depackage an Intel chip and read its EEPROM directly. What do you even use for that, a scanning electron microscope?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dtech 12y ago
That was a totally different problem, where the screenshot tool is not aware of the video acceleration. This post explains why it is impossible for software to take a video screenshot on a modern computer with a certain piece of Intel DRM.
- taspeotis 12y ago
  You're right, and if I'd read more closely I would have been able to come to that conclusion by myself.

rando289 12y ago

What is Rosyna? Googled it and came up blank.

danshapiro 12y ago
The second footnote in the article is a twitter post from a user, @rosyna, who said that she couldn't take a screenshot of Netflix. https://twitter.com/rosyna/status/550702351703875584 https://twitter.com/rosyna/status/550702351703875584

MichaelGG 12y ago

The other downside is that you can't use custom software to fix up video. Netflix has a fairly poor player - more than one I've had to go torrent something I was trying to watch in Netflix due to one playback issue or another. From brightness to subtitles, to frame positioning (shifting the whole playback area down to fit better on my wall when projecting very wide formats) - Netflix offers nothing. Even worse for audio, where I often pump center channel dialog and perform normalization. It's sad how advanced the tech is compared to how limited our use is. (For instance, it's technically trivial, but usably difficult to add Rifftrax (MST3K reborn) to a movie on Netflix.) Edit: The really nasty part is that this technology in general isn't bad. I love TPMs, for instance. Gives me a fairly easy way to get relatively strong security, say, to store my disk encryption keys, without memorizing a passphrase. Trusted computing can allow the user to remain in control. But slipping in DRM gets people understandably upset. OTOH, I can't find details on exactly how this video stuff works. Wikipedia points at the GPU part, making it seem like it's just the same HDCP-kinda stuff that's been around for a while. (Annoying, but ultimately a decision of your kernel to enable. As in, media isn't encrypted at the source to some Intel key.)

userbinator 12y ago
Trusted computing can allow the user to remain in control. Only as long as it's really the user the computer is trusting, and not some other entity. Personally, I don't really like TPMs or any of the other "safe computing" technology. In theory (and this is what everyone usually refers to when they advocate it) they can help the user, but in practice they're almost always being used to do the opposite and the path to freedom is insecurity (e.g. jailbreaking, running homebrew software, etc.) As the saying goes, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is." OTOH, I can't find details on exactly how this video stuff works That's sort of the point of DRM in general - you're not supposed to know how it works, because then you would be in a much better position to break it. It's no surprise that the details would be kept secret, and other security technologies are likely being used for this purpose - e.g. DRM'd PDFs.

jrockway 12y ago

This is all ultimately pointless because it's not like the video decoder checks the integrity of its own code or the CPU running it or the compiler that compiled it or that the OS it was tested against is actually running. (Reflections on trusting trust.) Nothing actually cares about secure boot or end-to-end code validation; Apple doesn't even include equipment on their mainboards to do this anymore. Meanwhile, if you're going to grab pixels to pirate video, that's easy: HDCP is broken, so just grab it at the link layer. The key you need is on Pastebin! Consumer DRM has always been a hardware-selling maneuver as far as I can tell. "You need HDCP in order to watch this video." "I do? But HDCP is broken." "Just buy a new monitor anyway." The Management Engine sounds like a similar scheme. "You need an Intel Management Engine to watch this video." "I do?" "Yes, it's very convenient for us that you need to buy a new computer even though your current computer works fine otherwise." Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad.

stingraycharles 12y ago
> Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad. And it's even more sad that the most computer illiterate, "honest" people are the most vulnerable to this strategy. People that want an honest way to watch movies have the most problems watching them.
- jrockway 12y ago
  Yes, this is truly the sad part of DRM: the people that actually pay for content are the ones whose experience is most degraded. Pirates don't have to buy monitors with HDCP. Pirates can watch their collection when the authorization servers are down. Pirates can back up their media. Pirates can take screenshots. (Though I've never had this particular problem even with "DRM'd" media on Linux.) The list goes on. The content industry wonders why they can't stop piracy. Maybe they could start by providing a product that's as good as what the pirates get.

juliendorra 12y ago

Just a note on the discourse: the point "I own it, I should be able to use it the way I want" feels like not really effective (as a rhetoric) in many part of the western world and in many social circles. I really feel for example in France it would be easily brushed off using analogy to construction permits or driver licenses, or just put the person in some crazy-libertarian box ("the kind that want to print firearms at home"). There might be ways of framing the issue that fit better in a socio-democrat context (Europe, etc.). Ideas?

thomasahle 12y ago
I'm not sure either. But at least in by country the leftish parties seem the most interested in protecting consumer rights, which might be a way to go. The libertarians seem more worried about protecting the company's "intellectual property" and include management engines in "their own" products.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Maybe stress that the computer is a creative tool and should not have artificial limits put in place? Compare this to a hammer and imagine that one weekend you wanted to finish that cupboard you're building in your garage, but your hammer starts throwing exceptions because your nails are not Apple iNails or otherwise MAFIAA-certified ones. "How dare you buy generic nails in a mom&pop shop around the corner?" General-purpose computer is a tool that should be able to execute arbitrary code its users want to. I think Cory Doctorow summed it up the best: http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html.
DanBC 12y ago
Europe has strong consumer protection rights. The angle to take is that media is sold misleadingly. When I buy a DVD / Bluray I am paying for a physical disc and a licence to use the contents of the disc. That licence is restrictive and restricts my rights more than law. Thus, I am not allowed to extract a short extract to use in an educational setting (fair dealings; fair use). Packaging and marketing of DVD / Bluray is unclear about this and gives the impression that you are "buying a movie", not buying some plastic and a licence.

jsdir 12y ago

Years ago, I remember trying to screenshot video on a Microsoft XP box. When I tried to paste the screenshot inside any image editing program, the video region would remain blank. If I correctly positioned the image editor window over the window with the video source, the video would show through this region, but the video remained positionally fixed to the screen. I cannot remember if this happened for all video sources though. Could this have been caused by DRM?

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akx 12y ago
No -- that was using video overlays for hardware acceleration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay
geon 12y ago
It was because of how HW accelerated video decoding worked. You would specify the coordinates of a rectangle on the screen where to play the video. Then you'd display a rectangle of a certain color (#010000, I believe), to be used as a mask. The window manager could show windows on top of the video, and the masking would work even though the video decoding HW knew nothing about window management and vice versa.

buro9 12y ago

My partner is an academic, a lecturer in film theory. She watches a lot of films, and needs to make a lot of short clips for her lectures, and to take a lot of screenshots for her papers. This task is becoming increasingly difficult as time goes by. The most reliable method (for her skill level) is now to rip DVDs, removing various bits of protection, before playing the film using VLC on Windows and using VLC to take the screenshot. This is a pain, as she now uses a Mac primarily (as most academia seems to be doing so almost exclusively because it makes presentations easier - connecting to projectors turns out to be the killer feature). For a lot of films though, she pauses a film and uses a camera directed at the TV. Or worse, she'll record the clip on a camera (using the camera's microphone). Aside from things like Box of Broadcasts (which is for UK broadcast TV), there are few to no resources for academics to resort to for sources of film that will enable dissemination to students through materials and presentations. All clips are short (10-30s), papers feature only a few screenshots when published. Regardless of the studio and technology company desire to lock things down and control distribution, there remains a very legal exception to their controls: education. And of course, education has resorted to alternatives to these locks. There exists private torrent sites that are collections of obscure, international and predominantly non-Hollywood productions. Like torrent sites pre-Netflix, these are actually the most reliable sources of films that academics use for sources. Even when an academic owns a DVD (as nearly all do for future presentation and citation purposes), the torrents deliver files that the academic can use to create clips and screenshots. As much as possible, I try and help my partner avoid such sites. They are good, but in the hard world of academia I'm not sure her career will survive trying to argue any form of legitimacy of downloading content for academic purposes for already owned DVDs. There is a very real and present danger that copy protections will harm libraries and education. They already are.

juliangregorian 12y ago
Curious why VLC/screenshot doesn't work on Mac?
- sjwright 12y ago
  It certainly does work -- I use it frequently. The VLC snapshot tool works perfectly, and the system screen shot (cmd-shift-3/4) works too, at least on the H264 video I just tested with. Not sure what the issue could be.

psk 12y ago

I don't know much about HDMI, but couldn't I just run the video/movie in fullscreen and then capture the output from the HDMI and save the raw output to a disk?

userbinator 12y ago
Yes, HDCP has been broken for a long time and even if it wasn't, you could still capture the LVDS signal that drives the LCD panel itself. But the problem is that those are very high-speed signals(1920x1080 24bpp at 60FPS is around 350MB/s+) that require suitable hardware to capture, basically uncompressed video, and recompression would introduce more artifacts than the original. That's why pirates don't usually go this route; the result is only slightly better than pointing a good camera at the screen.
- w0utert 12y ago
  I always assumed most movies were ripped using exploits at various points in the playback software stack? At some point the unencrypted bitstream needs to be available to decode, if you hacked the player or GPU driver code to dump it at that point, it would be possible to re-assemble it into an unencrypted video file, right? You would use a computer without any of the DRM features the article is about of course.

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hippich 12y ago

This is what I call bullshit job - zero value for humankind created, tons of human hours wasted. (I would even say negative value since security holes will be found if not already in this microcontroller firmware)

tacoman 12y ago
I stumbled upon this PAVP thing in an old Thinkpad just last week. My first thought after reading about it was basically this. Somewhere, some very talented software developers probably spent years working on this obscure, essentially useless thing.

gear54rus 12y ago

I only hope is that as bullshit like this becomes more and more prominent, people will become more and more educated in what is acceptable and what is not (since it will bite them more and more). Eventually, public opinion would shift into more and more negative outlook on corporations who practice such things. Offenders' influence would then decline and people will become smarter, everyone wins.

userbinator 12y ago
and people will become smarter Unfortunately, my impression is the opposite - people are slowly being dissuaded from discovering these restrictions by the promises of convenience, and when they do run into them, they're faced with heavy rhetoric to the effect of "it's for your security" so they (reluctantly) accept it. Incidents like this appear isolated and are downplayed by the majority, who will continue to use the very services that restrict them, purely out of convenience. Corporations are diverting people's actions of sharing information into their own channels so they can exert more control over them - witness all the "share on Twitter/Facebook/etc" buttons appearing everywhere (I personally block them, but I know they exist); they sure are convenient to use, and as a side-effect of their use, it reduces the amount of people who will "manually" and directly share with others (and thus know more about the transfer of information themselves.) The same is happening with other types of media too, as evidenced by all the efforts to hide the filesystem of devices from users, since one of the most open ways to share data with someone is to give them a copy of a file. They are even trying to discourage linking to a resource, with browser vendors thinking of hiding URLs or parts of them. Ultimately, they are pushing for a world in which no one owns their (tightly locked-down) computing devices or has any knowledge of how they work (except for a few "specialists"), and all communication between individuals happens via some corporate intermediary. This makes it easier to censor and manipulate the users (probably to squeeze $$$ out of them), which is what the whole idea is about.
- gear54rus 12y ago
  A comment so accurate it makes me sad :C There isn't much one can do though as favoring convenience over not-so-obvious benefits of (abstract, for them) freedom seems to stem from the very human nature... I used to think RMS' ideas were a bit far fetched, but with each such revelation that comes to light in the form of post on some relatively unknown blog those ideas seem more and more appropriate.

eeZi 12y ago

http://www.slideshare.net/codeblue_jp/igor-skochinsky-enpub http://www.slideshare.net/codeblue_jp/igor-skochinsky-enpub It even has an embedded Java runtime.

based2 12y ago

http://recon.cx/2014/slides/Recon%202014%20Skochinsky.pdf http://recon.cx/2014/slides/Recon%202014%20Skochinsky.pdf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813029

dmm 12y ago

The Librem 15 project is trying to talk intel into letting them disable the management engine. It's the last non-free part of the system. https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop

nercury 12y ago

DRM is a placebo against technology.

dghughes 12y ago

It's bizarre foreign movie and music corporations (I'm Canadian) are dictating actual physical changes to computing hardware. It's as bizarre to me as if US car corporations dictated I could only use premium fuel from Shell and monitored it in real-time.

jandrese 12y ago

The best part is that it is only a matter of time until the IME is cracked and root kits come with bits that you will never be able to clean without getting a whole new computer. Did you know the IME can send and recieve IP without the host processor ever seeing it? It's the ultimate way to own a machine.

zaroth 12y ago
I would assume the larger purpose of IME is actually exactly as a platform for persistent undetectable system compromise. Purpose built for TAO? As conspiracy theories go it's hard to explain the existence and full capabilities of IME in this decade without some NSA involvement.
- acdha 12y ago
  Please take the conspiracist nattering somewhere else. As explained in the second paragraph of the article, the features of IME were requested by large corporate IT departments and pushed mainstream by marketing pressure, with the addition of DRM bits as requested by the large tech vendors who need them to negotiate licenses with members of the copyright cartel. You look at this and see a secure rootkit. A corporate IT worker looks at this and thinks that they can image a workstation remotely no matter what's currently installed. A security person looks at this and sees secure base platform starting from TPM on down which can be setup to keep malware from irrecoverably compromising the system (remember the recent Thunderstrike discussion noting that TPM would protect against that firmware exploit?). All of these have tradeoffs which can be debated but it's just silly to pretend that the NSA is centrally directing the entire industry.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    What impressed me the most was how it's not only hard-coded, but that it can still reliably halt the system even when forcibly disabled. If only it could be fully and truly disabled in the BIOS, or even better, isolated as a separate SKU, then I would be much less irate about it's existence. You can literally wipe all configuration from NVRAM and the platform is still available for "zero-touch remote configuration". This truly is a PC beside the PC. The level of complexity is astounding; they built everything but a way to turn it off.

frik 12y ago

What about graphic cards from Nvidia/AMD? What about the ARM CPUs from various vendors like Apple, AppliedMicro, Atmel, Broadcom, Freescale Semiconductor, Nvidia, NXP, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments? Do they have similar DRM features too?

michaelbuddy 12y ago

not much info at the top of the searches for Rosyna, what consumer processors is it in / going to be in? is it easy enough to just not buy it?