I don't think in this very case it has anything to do with digital rights management. It detects an Intel SATA SSD, SSDSCKJF360A5L a disk that supports ATA Trusted Send/Receive commands used to interface with on-disk encryption features. Specifically 5B to 5F (reference: https://wiki.osdev.org/ATA_Command_Matrix).
To make things even more confusing, kernel refers to the command between 5C and 5F with the acronym TPM, and requires `libata.allow_tpm=1` command line parameter to be passed to allow issuing them. (kernel source reference: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v6.12/drivers/ata/lib...), which has _nothing to do_ with the trusted platform module TPM, just another TLA clash.
Here's the original commit from 2008. The naming is very likely through misassociation. TCG: Trusted Computing Group is most known for creating TPM specification. Another thing they work on is the OPAL specification for self encrypting drives. Author possibly clumped them into the same thing. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ae8d4ee7ff429136c8b...
> Content Protection for Recordable Media and Pre-Recorded Media (CPRM / CPPM) is a mechanism for restricting the copying, moving, and deletion of digital media on a host device, such as a personal computer, or other player. It is a form of digital rights management (DRM) developed by The 4C Entity, LLC (consisting of IBM, Intel, Matsushita and Toshiba).
That's for compact flash cards. Based on the kernel message from the StackExchange post we can tell it isn't a CF. So it's not coming from the line you linked, but 11 lines below.
I wonder whether the "owning" argument against DRM and streaming media can be solved with physical media which you can still own.
Although, realistically we'll just end up with a drive that locks the user out of critical parts of the operating system and system data to ensure lock-in, which is related to the "restrictions" and "freedom" part of DRM.
I truly hate how the battle against DRM is slowly being lost, and I predict that in the near future it will be very difficult to use many apps (or even websites) while running on custom non-commercial builds of your operating system because "your" hardware will collude with the service provider to deny you access.
This should simply be illegal and considered a human rights violation. At least hardware vendors should not be able to claim that they sell you the hardware and that you own it, they should be upfront about it being a rental agreement, and you should be able to cancel that agreement and return the hardware with a full refund at any time.
I was so happy when HDMI caught on that the troubles with VGA ports in meeting rooms were finally a thing of the past.
But now I randomly get "HDCP not supported" messages when trying to make a presentation because... I have no idea why. It's just a giant fuck you from the recording industry.
I could download a torrent of any movie I want, so the tech is obviously not preventing piracy.
It's just making random things in life harder than they should be.
HDMI licensing is a pain in the ass. There's charges per device for simply providing connectors, and the HDMI forum refuse to let open source GPU drivers implement HDMI 2.0 or above.
> I could download a torrent of any movie I want, so the tech is obviously not preventing piracy.
But you couldn't manufacture your own monitor/projector/media player without permission from and tribute to the HDMI lobby. Well, you could, but it would fail commercially due to incompatibility. In other words, DRM is an anti-competitive cartel.
In my experience, the cables and dongles were prone to loose connections. You had to fiddle with the plugs to make sure they had a proper connection.
Selecting the right resolution was also problematic. Sometimes the native resolution of the projector didn't work for some reason, leading to blurry images.
I remember one time there was a weird issue where only half the image was shown. Another time, the image showed up with wrong colors (not sure how that happened).
HDMI isn't all rosy either, poor cables also cause connection issues. I had one cable that only worked in one direction. That was very odd. But in my experience HDMI connections are way more reliable than VGA connections.
(Maybe projectors and laptops also became more reliable, can't say for sure)
HDMI is a pain in different ways, and these are just examples in my house. Keeping track of version 1-2.2b has become a small chore. Perhaps it is time I burn it all down to claim insurance and start over.
As soon as you go past 1080p@60Hz, as you pointed out, you can't just grab any cable. I suffered a great deal from this moving to 4K screens. Sparkles, drops, and black screens are usually a connection problem. Some smarter device/driver combos will work around a bad connection by dropping colour information to fit into the available bandwidth, some won't.
I have one 4K display where HDMI 1 is, well, HDMI version 1. HDMI 2 (as in the second port) is HDMI version 2 and will actually display 4K@60Hz.
I have TVs that need fiddling to get the proper native resolution and framerate. Some need game or PC mode to disable overscan and show the whole image.
Currently on my desktop connected to a 4K TV, if I try to set a game to 1920x1080, the driver seems to pick something strange and I get no image at all. I'm not sure who to blame here.
I still have devices that won't do 4K@60Hz, they're limited to 30Hz. It's a device limitation, fine. A Raspberry Pi 4 will output 4K@60Hz but not by default. You have to enable it in the firmware config.
VGA can show wrong colors when one of the pins isn't completely connected, which can happen if you're used to needing to use force to get it connected and you just jam it on and bend a pin. Some pins control specific color domains, one time I bent and pin and blue completely disappeared from my monitor. Thought it was a gamma gun going bad until I noticed the pin.
For what it's worth, the second letter of the d-sub naming convention indicates the width of the shell. A DB15 would be excessively wide for the number of pins. The correct name for the classic three row VGA port is DE-15 and it uses the same width shell as the DE-9 often used for serial ports.
Note, old Mac's used a wider, two row DA-15 at one point.
The DE-15 is occasionally called an HD-15 and the correctness of that is widely debated on internet forums.
Being PnP doesn't imply any hot-plugging capability.
DDC allows digital means of changing data and letting the OS know what the monitor can do. It doesn't allow/enable hot-plugging.
Since the interface doesn't support hot plugging by design, there's no standard way to detect a new VGA peripheral. However, manufacturers flexed the standard to try to enable hot-plug, but it doesn't work reliably, as we seen for years.
Similarly, PS2, SATA, PCI are not hot-plug by default, even if they're PnP. PS2 required standards bending, SATA had to wait AHCI, and PCI had to wait PCIe to gain hot-plugging support. To add to the list, IDE drives required special hardware, and RAM requires chipset and board support to be hot-pluggable. RAM has myriad of ways of identifying itself, making it truly PnP out of the box.
So, being PnP doesn't mean anything, from a hot-plug perspective. They're very different things.
VGA D-SUB actually is hot-plug. You can connect or disconnect a monitor or projector at any time with no risk of damage.
SATA is also hot-plug for connect, but it requires firmware support for disconnect (safe eject, more precisely, because it will detect a forced disconnect). It won't support hot-plug if used in IDE compatibility mode, because IDE was not hot-plug.
PCI is also hot-plug, but not the desktop connector.
PS/2 never was hot-plug. It's a serial port with interrupt assigned at boot if there's a device connected there. It's not possible to assign the the resources after the system is booted.
I can't remeber what Win95 could do, but I'm sure that Win98 had support for dual monitor - I used that a lot. I could turn on my second monitor at any time. That's because of PnP. Win311 was not PnP and required a restart to make changes to display configuration.
I'm not sure what you belive "hot-plug" means. Possibly you wanted it to auto-change the default output configuration when something was connected/disconnected? I was very happy it didn't do that! But it was short-lived. The auto-bullshit stuff was introduced by Radeon and Nvidia drivers, independent of OS, and I absolutely hated it when the driver auto-reverted to 60Hz on my 120Hz Trinitron! Many 3rd party tools were written to fix that. I remember using RefreshLock.
Software support for hotplug can be added or removed as desired. That's an OS feature. You could absolutely reconfigure the interrupts without rebooting, if you felt like it. But hot-plug support starts in hardware, as an attribute of the connector. Being able to safely make and break connections while the circuits are electrically "hot", without damaging the circuitry on either side.
Generally, this can be done two ways:
The first is by having circuitry that moves so little power, or moves it in such a way, that it can't be damaged by the connections being made or broken in random order. For example, plugging a light into an outlet. It doesn't matter if the line or neutral conductor makes contact first, since the light either receives power or it doesn't, and neither state is unsafe. (Don't touch the blades of the connector. That's another matter entirely.)
The second is by having a connector design where some circuits are guaranteed to be connected before others. This is typically called a "make first / break last" scheme. At its simplest, the metal shell of a D-sub connector is really really likely to make contact before any of the pins, and in practice is effectively a make-first. But all the other pins make contact in random order. Compare to something like the SATA power connector, where the grounds are longest, power pre-charge after that, and main power at the very end. This is unconditionally safe to plug and unplug while hot.
VGA is hotplug-safe in practice because while the connector isn't really designed for it, as long as ground makes first, the analog video signals aren't picky at all (they're capacitively coupled and have no DC component), and the DDC data lines have enough short-circuit protection to tolerate whatever. (Because the D-sub connector also isn't "scoop-proof" -- it's possible to touch the male pins with the shell of another connector during clumsy mating, all circuits have to tolerate shorts to ground.)
RS-232 by the way, which was designed for D-sub connectors, contains language in the spec requiring that all circuits be tolerant of indefinite shorts to any other pin or to ground. It doesn't have to function in that state, but it's not allowed to sustain damage.
PS/2 isn't hot-plug safe even if you preassigned the interrupt (or booted the machine with the keyboard connected and then unplugged and replugged it later), because the pins aren't sequenced, and the circuits aren't designed to tolerate random mating order. If the power and data lines connect before the ground, you can get a CMOS latchup situation in the controller silicon that can only be cleared by total power removal. In practice this was fairly rare because the ground usually made first, and before I understood about this, I only smoked 2 motherboards' PS/2 ports despite hundreds of hot-plugs of keyboards and mice.
The canonical example of a terrifyingly-hotplug-unsafe connector is the TRS phone plug and jack. They change order during the mating process. Some old guitar effects pedals used this connector for power, and you were virtually guaranteed to smoke a transistor if you hotplugged it. These connectors were meant for telephone signals (which can tolerate polarity reversal and indefinite shorts to ground, by design), and some idiot decided to put power over them.
Note that there are no drivers or interrupts being assigned to a guitar pedal. Software support is entirely unrelated to the electromechanical phenomenon of hot plugging.
> It's just a giant fuck you from the recording industry.
I eagerly await the moment when AI folks will just buy a bill to abolish copyright and send the content industry packing to do something more useful than sitting on swaths of human culture and clipping coupons.
Spoiler: Academic publisher Taylor & Francis recently sold many of its authors’ works to Microsoft for $10 million, without asking or paying the authors — to train Microsoft’s large language models!
Yeah, theoretically, this battle should already have happened, the moment Disney realized there was mouse IP in DallE's, Stable Diffusion's etc trainsets and people were using it to create unauthorized content.
In practice, they seemed too interested in using the technology themself to care.
I predict IP law will just become fully hypocritical, with your protection as a creator and consumer depending on your status and connections.
> Yeah, theoretically, this battle should already have happened, the moment Disney realized [...]
The fact that it has not yet happened makes me very hopeful about the outcome. Basically content industry knows it's gonna lose and just sits really still to feed as long as still possible before the inevitable end.
> I predict IP law will just become fully hypocritical, with your protection as a creator and consumer depending on your status and connections.
That's exactly how it always worked, at least for as long as I'm alive.
Well, in most cases they won't be able to get Microsoft PC certification, so it's not going to happen. Hardware vendors are the wrong tree to bark at. Most of these requirements are passed down by Microsoft and content lobbies.
If they require your PC to be tinkerable/repairable; higher end devices will come with a "toolbox loaded with high quality tools to ease and improve the experience", "for no additional charge", as a selling point.
You can't officially sell the computer as "Windows Compatible", and won't be able to sell it with Windows preinstalled with an OEM license, which is basically (i.e. heavily discounted) free to you as the OEM.
Plus, it doesn't protect you from Microsoft making Windows incompatible with your specific system "by accident" (See Dr.DOS incident), or sue you to oblivion by a very small clause in their licenses.
Two can play at that game. If bundling Internet Explorer was found illegal, this should be too, and the US and EU can start fining MS billions until they stop these underhanded anti-competitive tactics.
Well, just notice that this isn't "two playing that game". It's the government explicitly kicking the scammers out of the place and freeing the victims.
It's less about control and more about unhindered capitilism. Something a lot of people have blinders on about this is about capitilism and the world is fast moving towards a big fracture between the haves and have nots.
It's both - i.e. control is means to an end, which is setting up the rules so that we are forced to live on their terms, which mostly boils down to paying them for the stuff they want us to pay.
DRM is fundamentally an attempt to rewrite reality, or at least the computing aspects of it, in ways that are not possible to do with laws of physics in general. An idealized DRM setup establishes a faux reality, a virtual environment running on top of reality, in which bits have extra rules to it - codifying the weaker attempt of what IP regulations are doing to information in general, i.e. establishing a faux legal reality, in which bits carry colour, and with it restrictions and consequences.
The worst part is, the forces that push us to this direction are shielded in plausible deniability and good intentions, as DRM and cybersecurity are, in the limit, the same thing, so the unhindered capitalism control freaks get to hide behind fear of cyber criminals, while secretly using tools of protection against us.
> The worst part is, the forces that push us to this direction are shielded in plausible deniability and good intentions, as DRM and cybersecurity are, in the limit, the same thing, so the unhindered capitalism control freaks get to hide behind fear of cyber criminals, while secretly using tools of protection against us.
Neither in politics nor in corporate announcements was there ever a shortage of "good reasons". People are creative when it is about power and/or money.
No, they're very much the same - only for the people pushing DRM, you are the threat actor in the secure system.
This is direct in case of media companies; for banks, you may be a "valued customer", but your phone is considered a threat actor; their excuse is that your phone (or you) could be pwnd. And then, in general, service providers see potential competitors as threat actors, too.
Security tech is, by its very nature, a tool of control. Whether that's good or bad for you, depends on who's in control.
"Any time" might be a stretch, but I've had no problems returning hardware which, after unboxing and/or setting it up, I found violated basic expectations and didn't have those limitations listed in the specs (no, I'm not buying and maintaining an un-rooted Android AND granting location services and other such permissions just to set up your special snowflake printer, and if your OBD-II control app works via a webview and one day starts requiring a subscription for the device I "purchased" then that's going straight back to the store/manufacturer even years later, ...).
Regarding the printer comment, I've bought HP printers that have stickers covering the USB port with a "NO" symbol, and removing the sticker the port works just fine. I'd like to think there is an engineer in the belly of the beast ensuring this stuff slips past the marketing team.
Don't give them ideas. 99 dollars per month to use your/their laptop. 49 extra to unlock the performance cores. 99 more for the discrete graphic card. 39 for the AI chip.
I think they'll push for something even worse: all computing to slowly become remote, turning local machines into dumb terminals as in the mainframe era, like the last 60 years of IT development never happened. Cloud, SaaS and vGPU are examples of this tendency.
Dumb terminals will be much cheaper: less resources, less (virtually no) storage, therefore many people will take this road to save money (ChromeOS anyone?), although in many cases they'll be forced to pay a lot more with time.
If it will happen it will be probably championed because of security and law enforcement: automatic virus prevention, parental care, OS upgrades, content scans, piracy prevention, etc.
Intel® Xeon® family processors with support for Intel® On Demand (formerly known as Software Defined Silicon or SDSi) allow the configuration of additional CPU features through a license activation process.
In the B2B world where everything is being converted into yoy roi/roe it makes perfect sense for both parties, especially if you can pay for your cpus out of opex budget instead of capex.
You get data center CPUs at half the price, and doubling your CPU throughput doesn't require paying someone to swap out hundreds or thousands of CPUs anymore.
As long as they don't raise the prices of equivalent products that don't have this feature, I don't see the problem. Intel is the one at risk here, because if their license code ever leaks out or is found to be vulnerable, they've just sold their high-end hardware for mid-range prices.
The first generations of Raspberry Pi had the same with video codecs, IIRC MPEG and h264, to keep the price down for educational users but make it usable for people doing stuff with video.
h.264 was licensed out of the box, but MPEG2 was not, you had to buy a license tied to your board (or processor) serial number to accelerate DVD playback on these systems.
I recently swapped from Debian to OpenSuse and before the first zypper dist-upgrade, verified non OSS was enabled.
Then I proceeded to edit videos in openshot, which couldn't recognize the most common formats. Man, I scratched half me hair off me ed after seeing VLC handle everything right beside it. No simple solutions were to be found on forums until after a eureka, I specifically searched with word "codecs".
Turned out I had to install the packman-easentials repo, then grab the forbidden codecs. Reminded me of the early 2000s, where things were pretty finicky gettin a functional setup in Linuxland.
> Turned out I had to install the packman-easentials repo, then grab the forbidden codecs. Reminded me of the early 2000s, where things were pretty finicky gettin a functional setup in Linuxland.
Windows world wasn't much better with "codec packs" that led to all sorts of shenanigans - version mismatches that led to issues with games, people spicing up codecs and packs with malware, people mixing and matching stuff from various versions and sources haphazardly for "better performance", quite a few weren't freeware but shareware or paid and subsequently cracked, legitimate installers that distributed adware, download sites injecting adware ('member Sourceforge? [1]), SEO and DDoS wars between mal/adware spreaders...
Yeah and vagueries of much more; Asio For All, AOL, Soundforge, Fruityloops, Spyhunter, endless other things and my 700mhz Celeron powered Pandora's box of disease and hacked productivity tools that all seemed great at the time.
Don't give them ideas. 99 dollars per month to use your/their laptop. 49 extra to unlock the performance cores. 99 more for the discrete graphic card. 39 for the AI chip.
Microsoft was talking publicly about pay-per-minute Windows use way back in 1999/2000, but the technology didn't exist then.
They probably shouldn't have called it "DRM" here. It can be used for DRM, but it can also be used to secure your own data, and calling it "DRM" is unclear on what feature it is. What standard does it follow?
The technology that can prevent a thief from getting all your data from your computer is the same that prevents you from ripping media files, the only difference is who owns the keys, but that part is out of scope for a SSD.
A typical attack scenario here would be something like:
1. You leave your laptop in a hotel room.
2. Criminals / police break in and clone the drive.
3. They install a (physical) keylogger between your keyboard and the rest of the computer.
4. You return, turn the computer on and enter your password, which the keylogger transmits to your attackers.
They now have both the drive contents and the password needed to decrypt them.
You can mitigate this by using a TPM and storing the key there instead of deriving it from the password, but even then, an attacker is able to clone the drive first and get the key later.
With this feature on, you can't clone the drive until you get that key.
Attackers with that level of sophistication could most likely bypass any protective measures the SSD has or find some other way to exfiltrate data, like installing a transmitter on your RAM.
If that's your threat model, then an adversary getting physical access to your device even once should mean it's now unusable anyway, regardless of how secure you think it is. There's just way too many attack vectors.
This seems like such a contrived scenario. If the police want your info, they just request it from all the tech companies. If they want something on your laptop, they will just arrest you and have you unlock it.
They aren't action movie style disassembling your laptop and installing a key logger on the keyboard ribbon cable. They would need a custom one for every laptop and you could hardly fit something with wireless capabilities in there. When the $5 wrench works fine.
But if the data is encrypted in the drive they can't either, unless the tech company has deployed a backdoor in their trusted software stack.
In this scenario you're somewhat more protected, because the attack vector is just the vendor backdoor rather than the panoply of RCE infesting modern systems, and one would hope that access to the backdoor is closely regulated by laws and judicial oversight.
It all goes out of the window (pun intended) when your foe is a soverein actor but let's be honest, all we really want is a decent lock for our front-door.
I could also have it show me one set of data on my secured machine, but a completely different filesystem + data if stolen and run on some other system, or booted under duress, etc.
This seems like a neat feature for some weird use cases.
Yes, the technology is not inherently evil, but some applications of it are. We shouldn't put bans on the tech, but we should put bans on usages of it which takes away personal freedom.
Using it to implement secure vaults for your personal data is a way to actually improve personal security, and I can get behind that.
Using it to prevent software from even running on your device claims to improve personal security, but actually it is mainly about asserting control over you. Yes, it improves security as a side effect, but it does so by taking away your freedom.
I'm not sure this is true. I've studied trust models in some depth now
and I think that cryptographic enclaves are at best an analgesic and
sedative. Don't fall for any myth of symmetrical technology that can
be used "for evil or good".
The purpose of this technology is to assert logical ownership over
computation under remote physical control of another. That would serve
your interests and rights iff you purchase a cloud computing resource
you want to make secure in an untrustworthy data-centre.
Sadly "security" gets used as a bare noun.
One must always ask three questions:
- security for who?
- security against who or what?
- security to what end?
DRM is a generally a net loss to security of the physical machine
owner, since it is a way to hide code and functionality within the
perimeter of ownership and control. It's no worse than blobs or
treacherous silicon, but any security conscious operator should avoid
or remove it. It is opaque "security" for vendors/content-publishers,
and "security" against the owner and operator.
I think it makes sense in very narrow use cases such as hardware security modules for key management, giving the user a somewhat strong guarantee that there is a one-to-one correspondence between control of the key and physical ownership of the HSM. This is an example where limitations of what you can do with the hardware is the primary feature of the hardware and the reason the user acquired it in the first place. It is analogous to physical locks being hard to pick by design.
Any use of enclaves for DRM are unethical though, and solutions such as Play Integrity API is a commingling of security guarantees and totalitarian control over the user. Instead of proving to a service provider (such as your bank) that your whole phone is running a verified software and hardware stack, it suffices to communicate with a HSM with which you verify that the transaction to be authorized (1) comes from your bank, and (2) has a description which aligns with what you expect. The HSM can be built into the phone or be an external device with a small screen, but it should never ever enforce how you use the rest of the phone, it should only solve the narrow security issue of authorizing critical transactions.
> cryptographic enclaves are at best an analgesic and sedative
Cryptographic enclaves let you securely use passwords that are otherwise very easy to break.
For example, a random 4-digit pin can be broken in seconds, minutes at most, even with really strong PKDF functions.
With a cryptographic enclave that destroys your key after 10 unsuccessful attempts, attackers only have a 0.1% chance of breaking that PIN. This is an acceptable security level for many users.
In theory, better security than that is possible by using a complex passphrase. In practice, the passphrase ends up being "exampleDotOrgWinter25!", which is still very easy to brute force.
For many users, that random 4-digit PIN plus an enclave will end up being more secure than the long and complex password.
But that doesn't really work because "wallet voting" is very different from democratic voting. As part of a small minority you can be very sure that your wallet votes will be firmly ignored whereas well-designed democratic systems will at least let you vote for someone to represent your opinion. Wallet voting works very badly for protecting those who are in the minority.
When you're a small enough minority politically speaking, your ballot votes will also effectively be ignored. I voted for a third-party candidate in a heavy red state, so my vote was purely symbolic, it had zero chance of having any effect.
> I voted for a third-party candidate in a heavy red state
Oh, yeah, US politics. You need to fix your electoral system.
Democratic politics is not a "the largest party takes it all" system. It's a complex, nuanced system that protects different interests differently and full of methods for reasonable minorities to get what they want.
AFAIK, you get some if this on your primaries. Well, when the primaries exist and the results aren't set by some behind-the-doors agreement.
While I can totally relate to the sentiment, I strongly differ in the view that the battle against DRM is being lost. It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix. Don't like it, don't buy it. Vendor didn't stick to their promise? Sell the hardware to someone who wants it and submit a review or a comment..
I don't like DRM either for many use cases but it's not often that I feel violated to use or buy a product against my will.
Capitalism and free market forces are not a magic bullet that will automatically optimize for your preferred utility function. They will optimize for profit and nothing else. This is why we need regulation to guide the market forces so we don't compromise the common good.
I cannot buy a smartphone which allows me to run my operating system of choice and use my national identity as an app. It just doesn't exist. I can either buy an expensive Apple device which promises to not track me but which is also decidedly a walled garden by design and hence a capitulation; or, I can buy a phone running a commercial Android build which promises to do all it can to track me because that is literally the primary business model of the vendor. The latter option allows me to install another operating system without the built-in tracking, but at the expense of disallowing me to use the phone for what I actually wanted to use it for, and hence it is a disguised walled garden.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people are not aware of the situation and/or have no interest in running other software. Relying on capitalism to "fix" the issue literally just results in tyranny of the masses, or worse; indifference of the masses which allows tyranny of the tech giants.
Free market could fix this, however unrestrained capitalism is, at it's core, anything but free.
> Don't like it, don't buy it
In practice DRM and majority of content go hand in hand, therefore the DRM compromise places majority of content on the compromise scale. Don't like DRM, don't buy access to entertainment. That's a much tougher sell than it might seem at a first glance.
Unless the dominant majority shares your sentiment regarding DRM, you are on a losing side of the battle.
> It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix. Don't like it, don't buy it.
It's hard to buy alternatives when they literally don't exist, nobody is willing to provide them, and those who would maybe like to provide them, are quickly shut down by the industry's self-regulation mechanisms.
Or, "honest trade" (as a solution), I may say. I pay, I get files. I may pay more for higher grade files.
With this model, I legitimately paid for:
- Sidologie: A C64 game soundtrack tribute album, in lossless audio.
- OK COMPUTER NOT OK: Reissue of Radiohead's OK COMPUTER album, in 24 bit studio masters (post mastering).
- Too many albums from Bandcamp, in lossless form.
- Apple iTunes, in acceptable quality AAC files.
So it's possible, albeit less profitable (ERR_NOT_ENOUGH_VAL_XTRCT), so frowned upon.
BTW, I used to play in an orchestra, so making music/art is not like writing code. It's way more abstract and painful to create.
This model doesn't really exist for movies / tv series. Closest you can get are DRMed discs which which you can then rip into DRM-free files ... thanks to friendly pirates sharing the keys needed to access what you bought.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for DRM-free purchases where most of the money goes to the artists. BitTorrent is a way to handle the fact when there is no such option (and put economic pressure so that options exist)
> The solution is file sharing (via BitTorrent & co), which is very much not capitalism.
You'd be surprised, how many laissez faire capitalists regard "intellectual property" to be an anti-capitalist artificiality.
The whole raison d'etre for private property is that two people cannot use the same good for different purposes at the same time, it is rivalrous. Property ownership is the mechanism that resolves any potential conflicts arising from this rivalrousness. The owner gets to decide what to do with the good.
The same is not true for information, because we can both e.g. watch the same movie at the same time without interfering with each other, therefore there is no conflict that needs resolving. Therefore "intellectual property" is not a thing. (The reasoning goes further, but that is the simplest version of the most important argument I think.)
I don't think it's bringing up intellectual property is all that useful when talking about DRM.
DRM is a technological means to enforce private control independent of the (limited) legal monopoly from copyright.
It's legally enforced by the DMCA (in the US) and similar laws in other countries, which "criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself" (quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...).
If copyright were to disappear tomorrow, there would still be DRM.
> Laissez faire capitalists still want a government
No, not as a rule, they don't.
Some may, but even those must be against government interference in the market, as that's the definition of laissez faire. The only relevant dividing point is if they regard "IP" as a valid form of property.
"Advocates of laissez-faire capitalism argue that it relies on a constitutionally limited government that unconditionally bans the initiation of force and coercion, including fraud."
with an example:
"A more recent advocate of total laissez-faire has been Objectivist Ayn Rand, ... Rand believed that natural rights should be enforced by a constitutionally limited government."
More historically:
"The Physiocrats proclaimed laissez-faire in 18th-century France ... they advised the state to restrict itself to upholding the rights of private property and individual liberty, ..."
"Gournay held that government should allow the laws of nature to govern economic activity, with the state only intervening to protect life, liberty and property. ..."
"To the vast majority of American classical liberals, however, laissez-faire did not mean "no government intervention" at all. On the contrary, they were more than willing to see government provide tariffs, railroad subsidies, and internal improvements, all of which benefited producers". ..."
Getting rid of government but keeping capitalism would be more like anarcho-capitalism, not laissez-faire capitalism.
My observation is that DRM is essentially independent of copyright or intellectual property, so bringing up the existence of that dividing point really doesn't matter.
> the large majority of laissez-faire capitalists still want a government
That may be true, but even a majority doesn't make it true that "Laissez faire capitalists still want a government". You'd have to prepend a "most".
> anarcho-capitalism, not laissez-faire capitalism
All anarcho-capitalists are laissez-faire capitalists, only not all laissez-faire capitalists are anarcho-capitalists.
> My observation is that DRM is essentially independent of copyright or intellectual property
You say "DRM is a technological means to enforce private control independent of the (limited) legal monopoly from copyright. It's legally enforced by the DMCA".
I say "Without government force to back it up, who would care?". The DMCA - Digital Millenium Copyright Act - is a market intervention designed to produce artificial scarcity where naturally there would be none, in order to generate money for government cronies.
I don't care about that level of penny-ante pedantry. That's turns every forum into hyper-correctionalist tedium.
As I already quoted, the DMCA DRM clause holds even when there is no copyright infringement. Pointing to the title of the act as evidence is like saying the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democracy because it has "Democratic" in the name.
> designed to produce artificial scarcity where naturally there would be none
Sure, absolutely. But it isn't due to intellectual property.
We have an artificial scarcity of nuclear weapons too. Just not due to intellectual property laws.
> I don't care about that level of penny-ante pedantry. That's turns every forum into hyper-correctionalist tedium.
And I don't care for sloppy thinking. It leads to all kinds of bad conclusions.
> As I already quoted, the DMCA DRM clause holds even when there is no copyright infringement.
The reason for this is still to protect copyright. Only because the law is so intrusive as to criminalise the step preceding a potential copyright infringement does not change that that is the rationale behind it! [1] [2]
The goal is to simplify enforcement for copyright holders. That under the DMCA, copyright owners do not need to prove that actual infringement occurred, but only need to demonstrate that circumvention of access controls took place, lowers the burden of proof for copyright owners and allows them to take action more swiftly against potential copyright violations. [3]
"If someone breaks the technologies used to protect against copyright infringement the copyright owner need not prove that an infringement took place; all the owner needs to prove is that a violation of the Anti-Circumvention provisions occurred".
> We have an artificial scarcity of nuclear weapons too. Just not due to intellectual property laws.
I don't know, I view capitalism mostly as a way to allow people who have money to make more money without providing work or value from people who do work.
I feel that intellectual property (which in my language, French, is simply translated as "author's right"), by making intellectual work ("art of the mind") a normal merchandise, allows platforms, labels, editors, etc to make money from the artists work, so is favorable to capitalism.
Note that DRM makers are the main winners from this shit, as they capture value created by the artists, and they provide no value of their own since DRM has never prevented piracy.
> I don't know, I view capitalism mostly as a way to allow people who have money to make more money without providing work or value from people who do work
Well, that's not how capitalists view it, quite the opposite. In a free market economy, which relies on voluntary interactions, the only way to make money is to generate value for others. Take me buying a loaf of bread: To me the bread has more value than the money I give to the baker, otherwise I would not agree to the interaction. To the baker OTOH the money has more value than the bread, otherwise he would not agree to the interaction. Free markets are a positive-sum game.
The trick is that a very small number of people confiscated most of the wealth and their "added value" is releasing some of that wealth to those who were not lucky enough to have any wealth. I think I could be fine with a capitalist system where wealth is spread evenly (which should involve abolishing inheritance for example, but not only)
Free market capitalism doesn't really exist. The baker is the only baker in town, and could choose to increase prices and become filthy-rich (but doesn't, because he's a nice person). There are government regulations preventing me from setting up my own bakery without jumping through hoops – which is just as well, because if I could set up a bakery, I'd be selling people flavoured mud, sawdust, and plaster dust (zero-calorie bread: tastes just like the real thing!).
Mutually-beneficial transactions are a good description of what's happening, but that's not a description we can use to do systems-level thinking, because it's not what's "really" going on.
When there's a one ring to bind them all (Microsoft PC platform certification), and everybody needs to cater to it, you can't do anything besides allowing your PC to play nice with Linux kernel, if you want to sell that device and make some money.
OTOH, it's greatly helpful that Lennart Pottering of systemd is working squarely for Microsoft, enabling more and more of SecureBoot and TPM functionality in systemd to protect the users and systems' integrity in the face of adversarial attacks, so the PC can be TiVo-ized once and for all, after all.
What a great era to be alive.
BTW, this is exactly Capitalism, functioning as intended: extract value from a market for the shareholders of a company or an entity.
I don't think in this very case it has anything to do with digital rights management. It detects an Intel SATA SSD, SSDSCKJF360A5L a disk that supports ATA Trusted Send/Receive commands used to interface with on-disk encryption features. Specifically 5B to 5F (reference: https://wiki.osdev.org/ATA_Command_Matrix).
To make things even more confusing, kernel refers to the command between 5C and 5F with the acronym TPM, and requires `libata.allow_tpm=1` command line parameter to be passed to allow issuing them. (kernel source reference: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v6.12/drivers/ata/lib...), which has _nothing to do_ with the trusted platform module TPM, just another TLA clash.
Here's the original commit from 2008. The naming is very likely through misassociation. TCG: Trusted Computing Group is most known for creating TPM specification. Another thing they work on is the OPAL specification for self encrypting drives. Author possibly clumped them into the same thing. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ae8d4ee7ff429136c8b...
> I don't think in this very case it has anything to do with digital rights management.
From your kernel source link
> DVR type users will probably ship with this enabled for movie content management.
Indeed where the DRM error message comes from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/ffd294d346d185b70e28b...
> CPRM may make this media unusable
CPRM?
> Content Protection for Recordable Media and Pre-Recorded Media (CPRM / CPPM) is a mechanism for restricting the copying, moving, and deletion of digital media on a host device, such as a personal computer, or other player. It is a form of digital rights management (DRM) developed by The 4C Entity, LLC (consisting of IBM, Intel, Matsushita and Toshiba).
How can we be sure which CPRM it is though? Ah the kernel maintainers actually had an argument about it at the time https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5091 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5092
> Indeed where the DRM error message comes from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/ffd294d346d185b70e28b...
That's for compact flash cards. Based on the kernel message from the StackExchange post we can tell it isn't a CF. So it's not coming from the line you linked, but 11 lines below.
The S in SD stands for secure, and can be used for DRM purposes as well.
Windows Phone 7 is the only one I know of that used it: https://web.archive.org/web/20110219215401/http://support.mi...
Once the SD card was bonded to your phone it was not reuseable elsewhere.
Some Garmin Marine units use SD cards for map updates (Bluechart), which also seem to use the S in SD
OP is about SSD, 2 Ss, so twice as secure ;)
Super Secure Drive
just like homo sapiens sapiens is ehhh ... nevermind
Basically the idea of hardware/software attestation.
This is the "security" people try to sell you with secure boot mechanisms and signed software.
Don't use media that relies on it for your own sake.
So... one more reason to not buy the content and pirate it instead.
Drives for/from Digital Cinema Packages?
I wonder whether the "owning" argument against DRM and streaming media can be solved with physical media which you can still own.
Although, realistically we'll just end up with a drive that locks the user out of critical parts of the operating system and system data to ensure lock-in, which is related to the "restrictions" and "freedom" part of DRM.
I truly hate how the battle against DRM is slowly being lost, and I predict that in the near future it will be very difficult to use many apps (or even websites) while running on custom non-commercial builds of your operating system because "your" hardware will collude with the service provider to deny you access.
This should simply be illegal and considered a human rights violation. At least hardware vendors should not be able to claim that they sell you the hardware and that you own it, they should be upfront about it being a rental agreement, and you should be able to cancel that agreement and return the hardware with a full refund at any time.
I was so happy when HDMI caught on that the troubles with VGA ports in meeting rooms were finally a thing of the past.
But now I randomly get "HDCP not supported" messages when trying to make a presentation because... I have no idea why. It's just a giant fuck you from the recording industry.
I could download a torrent of any movie I want, so the tech is obviously not preventing piracy.
It's just making random things in life harder than they should be.
HDMI licensing is a pain in the ass. There's charges per device for simply providing connectors, and the HDMI forum refuse to let open source GPU drivers implement HDMI 2.0 or above.
> HDMI forum refuse to let open source GPU drivers implement
What? How can an entity "refuse" to let others implement something?
It seems to me that the HDMI forum does not have any say in what someone decides to implement.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
Well, good thing that we are slowly moving everything into DP.
But it's a bad thing that it's so slow.
> I could download a torrent of any movie I want, so the tech is obviously not preventing piracy.
But you couldn't manufacture your own monitor/projector/media player without permission from and tribute to the HDMI lobby. Well, you could, but it would fail commercially due to incompatibility. In other words, DRM is an anti-competitive cartel.
> the troubles with VGA ports in meeting rooms
please elaborate
fwiw vga is plug and play, but multi-monitor support in operating systems was indeed a pia
In my experience, the cables and dongles were prone to loose connections. You had to fiddle with the plugs to make sure they had a proper connection.
Selecting the right resolution was also problematic. Sometimes the native resolution of the projector didn't work for some reason, leading to blurry images.
I remember one time there was a weird issue where only half the image was shown. Another time, the image showed up with wrong colors (not sure how that happened).
HDMI isn't all rosy either, poor cables also cause connection issues. I had one cable that only worked in one direction. That was very odd. But in my experience HDMI connections are way more reliable than VGA connections.
(Maybe projectors and laptops also became more reliable, can't say for sure)
HDMI is a pain in different ways, and these are just examples in my house. Keeping track of version 1-2.2b has become a small chore. Perhaps it is time I burn it all down to claim insurance and start over.
As soon as you go past 1080p@60Hz, as you pointed out, you can't just grab any cable. I suffered a great deal from this moving to 4K screens. Sparkles, drops, and black screens are usually a connection problem. Some smarter device/driver combos will work around a bad connection by dropping colour information to fit into the available bandwidth, some won't.
I have one 4K display where HDMI 1 is, well, HDMI version 1. HDMI 2 (as in the second port) is HDMI version 2 and will actually display 4K@60Hz.
I have TVs that need fiddling to get the proper native resolution and framerate. Some need game or PC mode to disable overscan and show the whole image.
Currently on my desktop connected to a 4K TV, if I try to set a game to 1920x1080, the driver seems to pick something strange and I get no image at all. I'm not sure who to blame here.
I still have devices that won't do 4K@60Hz, they're limited to 30Hz. It's a device limitation, fine. A Raspberry Pi 4 will output 4K@60Hz but not by default. You have to enable it in the firmware config.
VGA can show wrong colors when one of the pins isn't completely connected, which can happen if you're used to needing to use force to get it connected and you just jam it on and bend a pin. Some pins control specific color domains, one time I bent and pin and blue completely disappeared from my monitor. Thought it was a gamma gun going bad until I noticed the pin.
VGA/DB15 is not a hot-plug connection by default.
That part started with DVI.
For what it's worth, the second letter of the d-sub naming convention indicates the width of the shell. A DB15 would be excessively wide for the number of pins. The correct name for the classic three row VGA port is DE-15 and it uses the same width shell as the DE-9 often used for serial ports.
Note, old Mac's used a wider, two row DA-15 at one point.
The DE-15 is occasionally called an HD-15 and the correctness of that is widely debated on internet forums.
Interesting, thanks!
No, it started with DDC and was used since Win95, the first PnP OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel
Being PnP doesn't imply any hot-plugging capability.
DDC allows digital means of changing data and letting the OS know what the monitor can do. It doesn't allow/enable hot-plugging.
Since the interface doesn't support hot plugging by design, there's no standard way to detect a new VGA peripheral. However, manufacturers flexed the standard to try to enable hot-plug, but it doesn't work reliably, as we seen for years.
Similarly, PS2, SATA, PCI are not hot-plug by default, even if they're PnP. PS2 required standards bending, SATA had to wait AHCI, and PCI had to wait PCIe to gain hot-plugging support. To add to the list, IDE drives required special hardware, and RAM requires chipset and board support to be hot-pluggable. RAM has myriad of ways of identifying itself, making it truly PnP out of the box.
So, being PnP doesn't mean anything, from a hot-plug perspective. They're very different things.
You have it all wrong.
VGA D-SUB actually is hot-plug. You can connect or disconnect a monitor or projector at any time with no risk of damage. SATA is also hot-plug for connect, but it requires firmware support for disconnect (safe eject, more precisely, because it will detect a forced disconnect). It won't support hot-plug if used in IDE compatibility mode, because IDE was not hot-plug.
PCI is also hot-plug, but not the desktop connector.
PS/2 never was hot-plug. It's a serial port with interrupt assigned at boot if there's a device connected there. It's not possible to assign the the resources after the system is booted.
I can't remeber what Win95 could do, but I'm sure that Win98 had support for dual monitor - I used that a lot. I could turn on my second monitor at any time. That's because of PnP. Win311 was not PnP and required a restart to make changes to display configuration.
I'm not sure what you belive "hot-plug" means. Possibly you wanted it to auto-change the default output configuration when something was connected/disconnected? I was very happy it didn't do that! But it was short-lived. The auto-bullshit stuff was introduced by Radeon and Nvidia drivers, independent of OS, and I absolutely hated it when the driver auto-reverted to 60Hz on my 120Hz Trinitron! Many 3rd party tools were written to fix that. I remember using RefreshLock.
You're mixing up two related concepts.
Software support for hotplug can be added or removed as desired. That's an OS feature. You could absolutely reconfigure the interrupts without rebooting, if you felt like it. But hot-plug support starts in hardware, as an attribute of the connector. Being able to safely make and break connections while the circuits are electrically "hot", without damaging the circuitry on either side.
Generally, this can be done two ways:
The first is by having circuitry that moves so little power, or moves it in such a way, that it can't be damaged by the connections being made or broken in random order. For example, plugging a light into an outlet. It doesn't matter if the line or neutral conductor makes contact first, since the light either receives power or it doesn't, and neither state is unsafe. (Don't touch the blades of the connector. That's another matter entirely.)
The second is by having a connector design where some circuits are guaranteed to be connected before others. This is typically called a "make first / break last" scheme. At its simplest, the metal shell of a D-sub connector is really really likely to make contact before any of the pins, and in practice is effectively a make-first. But all the other pins make contact in random order. Compare to something like the SATA power connector, where the grounds are longest, power pre-charge after that, and main power at the very end. This is unconditionally safe to plug and unplug while hot.
VGA is hotplug-safe in practice because while the connector isn't really designed for it, as long as ground makes first, the analog video signals aren't picky at all (they're capacitively coupled and have no DC component), and the DDC data lines have enough short-circuit protection to tolerate whatever. (Because the D-sub connector also isn't "scoop-proof" -- it's possible to touch the male pins with the shell of another connector during clumsy mating, all circuits have to tolerate shorts to ground.)
RS-232 by the way, which was designed for D-sub connectors, contains language in the spec requiring that all circuits be tolerant of indefinite shorts to any other pin or to ground. It doesn't have to function in that state, but it's not allowed to sustain damage.
PS/2 isn't hot-plug safe even if you preassigned the interrupt (or booted the machine with the keyboard connected and then unplugged and replugged it later), because the pins aren't sequenced, and the circuits aren't designed to tolerate random mating order. If the power and data lines connect before the ground, you can get a CMOS latchup situation in the controller silicon that can only be cleared by total power removal. In practice this was fairly rare because the ground usually made first, and before I understood about this, I only smoked 2 motherboards' PS/2 ports despite hundreds of hot-plugs of keyboards and mice.
The canonical example of a terrifyingly-hotplug-unsafe connector is the TRS phone plug and jack. They change order during the mating process. Some old guitar effects pedals used this connector for power, and you were virtually guaranteed to smoke a transistor if you hotplugged it. These connectors were meant for telephone signals (which can tolerate polarity reversal and indefinite shorts to ground, by design), and some idiot decided to put power over them.
Note that there are no drivers or interrupts being assigned to a guitar pedal. Software support is entirely unrelated to the electromechanical phenomenon of hot plugging.
Especially silly because the HDCP master key got leaked back in 2010.
> It's just a giant fuck you from the recording industry.
I eagerly await the moment when AI folks will just buy a bill to abolish copyright and send the content industry packing to do something more useful than sitting on swaths of human culture and clipping coupons.
Nah, that won't happen. AIBros will just pay them to get the medium for peanuts money.
Just like this: https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113221679747517432
Spoiler: Academic publisher Taylor & Francis recently sold many of its authors’ works to Microsoft for $10 million, without asking or paying the authors — to train Microsoft’s large language models!
Yeah, theoretically, this battle should already have happened, the moment Disney realized there was mouse IP in DallE's, Stable Diffusion's etc trainsets and people were using it to create unauthorized content.
In practice, they seemed too interested in using the technology themself to care.
I predict IP law will just become fully hypocritical, with your protection as a creator and consumer depending on your status and connections.
> Yeah, theoretically, this battle should already have happened, the moment Disney realized [...]
The fact that it has not yet happened makes me very hopeful about the outcome. Basically content industry knows it's gonna lose and just sits really still to feed as long as still possible before the inevitable end.
> I predict IP law will just become fully hypocritical, with your protection as a creator and consumer depending on your status and connections.
That's exactly how it always worked, at least for as long as I'm alive.
Well, in most cases they won't be able to get Microsoft PC certification, so it's not going to happen. Hardware vendors are the wrong tree to bark at. Most of these requirements are passed down by Microsoft and content lobbies.
If they require your PC to be tinkerable/repairable; higher end devices will come with a "toolbox loaded with high quality tools to ease and improve the experience", "for no additional charge", as a selling point.
> Microsoft PC certification
Why is that a thing to begin with? What happens if a PC doesn't have it? It's not like Windows would refuse to run on it.
You can't officially sell the computer as "Windows Compatible", and won't be able to sell it with Windows preinstalled with an OEM license, which is basically (i.e. heavily discounted) free to you as the OEM.
Plus, it doesn't protect you from Microsoft making Windows incompatible with your specific system "by accident" (See Dr.DOS incident), or sue you to oblivion by a very small clause in their licenses.
Two can play at that game. If bundling Internet Explorer was found illegal, this should be too, and the US and EU can start fining MS billions until they stop these underhanded anti-competitive tactics.
Well, just notice that this isn't "two playing that game". It's the government explicitly kicking the scammers out of the place and freeing the victims.
idk, losing access to preinstalled OEM license?
It's a thing because people want to control other people. This is what it all boils down to, sadly.
It's less about control and more about unhindered capitilism. Something a lot of people have blinders on about this is about capitilism and the world is fast moving towards a big fracture between the haves and have nots.
It's both - i.e. control is means to an end, which is setting up the rules so that we are forced to live on their terms, which mostly boils down to paying them for the stuff they want us to pay.
DRM is fundamentally an attempt to rewrite reality, or at least the computing aspects of it, in ways that are not possible to do with laws of physics in general. An idealized DRM setup establishes a faux reality, a virtual environment running on top of reality, in which bits have extra rules to it - codifying the weaker attempt of what IP regulations are doing to information in general, i.e. establishing a faux legal reality, in which bits carry colour, and with it restrictions and consequences.
The worst part is, the forces that push us to this direction are shielded in plausible deniability and good intentions, as DRM and cybersecurity are, in the limit, the same thing, so the unhindered capitalism control freaks get to hide behind fear of cyber criminals, while secretly using tools of protection against us.
> The worst part is, the forces that push us to this direction are shielded in plausible deniability and good intentions, as DRM and cybersecurity are, in the limit, the same thing, so the unhindered capitalism control freaks get to hide behind fear of cyber criminals, while secretly using tools of protection against us.
Neither in politics nor in corporate announcements was there ever a shortage of "good reasons". People are creative when it is about power and/or money.
> DRM and cybersecurity are, in the limit, the same thing
Huh? They are the opposite - someone from another country can remotely control my phone/computer/car. Seems like a trojan
No, they're very much the same - only for the people pushing DRM, you are the threat actor in the secure system.
This is direct in case of media companies; for banks, you may be a "valued customer", but your phone is considered a threat actor; their excuse is that your phone (or you) could be pwnd. And then, in general, service providers see potential competitors as threat actors, too.
Security tech is, by its very nature, a tool of control. Whether that's good or bad for you, depends on who's in control.
Do you think the USSR and China (around the great leap forward time) were less controlling?
> return the hardware at any time
"Any time" might be a stretch, but I've had no problems returning hardware which, after unboxing and/or setting it up, I found violated basic expectations and didn't have those limitations listed in the specs (no, I'm not buying and maintaining an un-rooted Android AND granting location services and other such permissions just to set up your special snowflake printer, and if your OBD-II control app works via a webview and one day starts requiring a subscription for the device I "purchased" then that's going straight back to the store/manufacturer even years later, ...).
Regarding the printer comment, I've bought HP printers that have stickers covering the USB port with a "NO" symbol, and removing the sticker the port works just fine. I'd like to think there is an engineer in the belly of the beast ensuring this stuff slips past the marketing team.
Don't give them ideas. 99 dollars per month to use your/their laptop. 49 extra to unlock the performance cores. 99 more for the discrete graphic card. 39 for the AI chip.
I think they'll push for something even worse: all computing to slowly become remote, turning local machines into dumb terminals as in the mainframe era, like the last 60 years of IT development never happened. Cloud, SaaS and vGPU are examples of this tendency.
Dumb terminals will be much cheaper: less resources, less (virtually no) storage, therefore many people will take this road to save money (ChromeOS anyone?), although in many cases they'll be forced to pay a lot more with time.
> all computing to slowly become remote
If it will happen it will be probably championed because of security and law enforcement: automatic virus prevention, parental care, OS upgrades, content scans, piracy prevention, etc.
Phones are more or less already there right now.
Welcome to Intel On-Demand, formerly called Software Defined Silicon (SDSi): https://github.com/intel/intel-sdsi
From the README:
Intel® Xeon® family processors with support for Intel® On Demand (formerly known as Software Defined Silicon or SDSi) allow the configuration of additional CPU features through a license activation process.
In the B2B world where everything is being converted into yoy roi/roe it makes perfect sense for both parties, especially if you can pay for your cpus out of opex budget instead of capex.
Absolutely abysmal for the consumer though.
This one ended just great for Intel, didn't it?
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-finalizes-intel-on-d...
That's horrifying.
You get data center CPUs at half the price, and doubling your CPU throughput doesn't require paying someone to swap out hundreds or thousands of CPUs anymore.
As long as they don't raise the prices of equivalent products that don't have this feature, I don't see the problem. Intel is the one at risk here, because if their license code ever leaks out or is found to be vulnerable, they've just sold their high-end hardware for mid-range prices.
The first generations of Raspberry Pi had the same with video codecs, IIRC MPEG and h264, to keep the price down for educational users but make it usable for people doing stuff with video.
h.264 was licensed out of the box, but MPEG2 was not, you had to buy a license tied to your board (or processor) serial number to accelerate DVD playback on these systems.
I recently swapped from Debian to OpenSuse and before the first zypper dist-upgrade, verified non OSS was enabled.
Then I proceeded to edit videos in openshot, which couldn't recognize the most common formats. Man, I scratched half me hair off me ed after seeing VLC handle everything right beside it. No simple solutions were to be found on forums until after a eureka, I specifically searched with word "codecs".
Turned out I had to install the packman-easentials repo, then grab the forbidden codecs. Reminded me of the early 2000s, where things were pretty finicky gettin a functional setup in Linuxland.
> Turned out I had to install the packman-easentials repo, then grab the forbidden codecs. Reminded me of the early 2000s, where things were pretty finicky gettin a functional setup in Linuxland.
Windows world wasn't much better with "codec packs" that led to all sorts of shenanigans - version mismatches that led to issues with games, people spicing up codecs and packs with malware, people mixing and matching stuff from various versions and sources haphazardly for "better performance", quite a few weren't freeware but shareware or paid and subsequently cracked, legitimate installers that distributed adware, download sites injecting adware ('member Sourceforge? [1]), SEO and DDoS wars between mal/adware spreaders...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31110206
>remember Sourceforge?
Yeah and vagueries of much more; Asio For All, AOL, Soundforge, Fruityloops, Spyhunter, endless other things and my 700mhz Celeron powered Pandora's box of disease and hacked productivity tools that all seemed great at the time.
Don't give them ideas. 99 dollars per month to use your/their laptop. 49 extra to unlock the performance cores. 99 more for the discrete graphic card. 39 for the AI chip.
Microsoft was talking publicly about pay-per-minute Windows use way back in 1999/2000, but the technology didn't exist then.
It does now.
That’s vintage Mainframe playbook
They probably shouldn't have called it "DRM" here. It can be used for DRM, but it can also be used to secure your own data, and calling it "DRM" is unclear on what feature it is. What standard does it follow?
The technology that can prevent a thief from getting all your data from your computer is the same that prevents you from ripping media files, the only difference is who owns the keys, but that part is out of scope for a SSD.
OTOH, it allows you to implement secure vaults for your personal and most important data.
It all depends on how access to these privileged interfaces is managed.
Why would that be implemented by the SSD rather than the OS? I can't see any realistic reasoning for this but DRM.
To prevent disk cloning.
A typical attack scenario here would be something like:
1. You leave your laptop in a hotel room.
2. Criminals / police break in and clone the drive.
3. They install a (physical) keylogger between your keyboard and the rest of the computer.
4. You return, turn the computer on and enter your password, which the keylogger transmits to your attackers.
They now have both the drive contents and the password needed to decrypt them.
You can mitigate this by using a TPM and storing the key there instead of deriving it from the password, but even then, an attacker is able to clone the drive first and get the key later.
With this feature on, you can't clone the drive until you get that key.
Attackers with that level of sophistication could most likely bypass any protective measures the SSD has or find some other way to exfiltrate data, like installing a transmitter on your RAM.
If that's your threat model, then an adversary getting physical access to your device even once should mean it's now unusable anyway, regardless of how secure you think it is. There's just way too many attack vectors.
This seems like such a contrived scenario. If the police want your info, they just request it from all the tech companies. If they want something on your laptop, they will just arrest you and have you unlock it.
They aren't action movie style disassembling your laptop and installing a key logger on the keyboard ribbon cable. They would need a custom one for every laptop and you could hardly fit something with wireless capabilities in there. When the $5 wrench works fine.
But if the data is encrypted in the drive they can't either, unless the tech company has deployed a backdoor in their trusted software stack.
In this scenario you're somewhat more protected, because the attack vector is just the vendor backdoor rather than the panoply of RCE infesting modern systems, and one would hope that access to the backdoor is closely regulated by laws and judicial oversight.
It all goes out of the window (pun intended) when your foe is a soverein actor but let's be honest, all we really want is a decent lock for our front-door.
I could also have it show me one set of data on my secured machine, but a completely different filesystem + data if stolen and run on some other system, or booted under duress, etc.
This seems like a neat feature for some weird use cases.
Yes, the technology is not inherently evil, but some applications of it are. We shouldn't put bans on the tech, but we should put bans on usages of it which takes away personal freedom.
Using it to implement secure vaults for your personal data is a way to actually improve personal security, and I can get behind that.
Using it to prevent software from even running on your device claims to improve personal security, but actually it is mainly about asserting control over you. Yes, it improves security as a side effect, but it does so by taking away your freedom.
> a way to actually improve personal security,
I'm not sure this is true. I've studied trust models in some depth now and I think that cryptographic enclaves are at best an analgesic and sedative. Don't fall for any myth of symmetrical technology that can be used "for evil or good".
The purpose of this technology is to assert logical ownership over computation under remote physical control of another. That would serve your interests and rights iff you purchase a cloud computing resource you want to make secure in an untrustworthy data-centre.
Sadly "security" gets used as a bare noun.
One must always ask three questions:
DRM is a generally a net loss to security of the physical machine owner, since it is a way to hide code and functionality within the perimeter of ownership and control. It's no worse than blobs or treacherous silicon, but any security conscious operator should avoid or remove it. It is opaque "security" for vendors/content-publishers, and "security" against the owner and operator.I think it makes sense in very narrow use cases such as hardware security modules for key management, giving the user a somewhat strong guarantee that there is a one-to-one correspondence between control of the key and physical ownership of the HSM. This is an example where limitations of what you can do with the hardware is the primary feature of the hardware and the reason the user acquired it in the first place. It is analogous to physical locks being hard to pick by design.
Any use of enclaves for DRM are unethical though, and solutions such as Play Integrity API is a commingling of security guarantees and totalitarian control over the user. Instead of proving to a service provider (such as your bank) that your whole phone is running a verified software and hardware stack, it suffices to communicate with a HSM with which you verify that the transaction to be authorized (1) comes from your bank, and (2) has a description which aligns with what you expect. The HSM can be built into the phone or be an external device with a small screen, but it should never ever enforce how you use the rest of the phone, it should only solve the narrow security issue of authorizing critical transactions.
> cryptographic enclaves are at best an analgesic and sedative
Cryptographic enclaves let you securely use passwords that are otherwise very easy to break.
For example, a random 4-digit pin can be broken in seconds, minutes at most, even with really strong PKDF functions.
With a cryptographic enclave that destroys your key after 10 unsuccessful attempts, attackers only have a 0.1% chance of breaking that PIN. This is an acceptable security level for many users.
In theory, better security than that is possible by using a complex passphrase. In practice, the passphrase ends up being "exampleDotOrgWinter25!", which is still very easy to brute force.
For many users, that random 4-digit PIN plus an enclave will end up being more secure than the long and complex password.
just do not use them. actually vote with your wallet.
But that doesn't really work because "wallet voting" is very different from democratic voting. As part of a small minority you can be very sure that your wallet votes will be firmly ignored whereas well-designed democratic systems will at least let you vote for someone to represent your opinion. Wallet voting works very badly for protecting those who are in the minority.
When you're a small enough minority politically speaking, your ballot votes will also effectively be ignored. I voted for a third-party candidate in a heavy red state, so my vote was purely symbolic, it had zero chance of having any effect.
> I voted for a third-party candidate in a heavy red state
Oh, yeah, US politics. You need to fix your electoral system.
Democratic politics is not a "the largest party takes it all" system. It's a complex, nuanced system that protects different interests differently and full of methods for reasonable minorities to get what they want.
AFAIK, you get some if this on your primaries. Well, when the primaries exist and the results aren't set by some behind-the-doors agreement.
In theory this works, but when you have 4 banks in your country, and all 4 require this, you're basically fscked.
While I can totally relate to the sentiment, I strongly differ in the view that the battle against DRM is being lost. It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix. Don't like it, don't buy it. Vendor didn't stick to their promise? Sell the hardware to someone who wants it and submit a review or a comment.. I don't like DRM either for many use cases but it's not often that I feel violated to use or buy a product against my will.
Capitalism and free market forces are not a magic bullet that will automatically optimize for your preferred utility function. They will optimize for profit and nothing else. This is why we need regulation to guide the market forces so we don't compromise the common good.
I cannot buy a smartphone which allows me to run my operating system of choice and use my national identity as an app. It just doesn't exist. I can either buy an expensive Apple device which promises to not track me but which is also decidedly a walled garden by design and hence a capitulation; or, I can buy a phone running a commercial Android build which promises to do all it can to track me because that is literally the primary business model of the vendor. The latter option allows me to install another operating system without the built-in tracking, but at the expense of disallowing me to use the phone for what I actually wanted to use it for, and hence it is a disguised walled garden.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people are not aware of the situation and/or have no interest in running other software. Relying on capitalism to "fix" the issue literally just results in tyranny of the masses, or worse; indifference of the masses which allows tyranny of the tech giants.
> It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix.
Free market could fix this, however unrestrained capitalism is, at it's core, anything but free.
> Don't like it, don't buy it
In practice DRM and majority of content go hand in hand, therefore the DRM compromise places majority of content on the compromise scale. Don't like DRM, don't buy access to entertainment. That's a much tougher sell than it might seem at a first glance.
Unless the dominant majority shares your sentiment regarding DRM, you are on a losing side of the battle.
> Don't like DRM, don't buy access to entertainment.
Basically, that's a Hobson's Choice [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice
> It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix. Don't like it, don't buy it.
It's hard to buy alternatives when they literally don't exist, nobody is willing to provide them, and those who would maybe like to provide them, are quickly shut down by the industry's self-regulation mechanisms.
I feel capitalism here is the problem, not the solution. The solution is file sharing (via BitTorrent & co), which is very much not capitalism.
Or, "honest trade" (as a solution), I may say. I pay, I get files. I may pay more for higher grade files.
With this model, I legitimately paid for:
So it's possible, albeit less profitable (ERR_NOT_ENOUGH_VAL_XTRCT), so frowned upon.BTW, I used to play in an orchestra, so making music/art is not like writing code. It's way more abstract and painful to create.
This model doesn't really exist for movies / tv series. Closest you can get are DRMed discs which which you can then rip into DRM-free files ... thanks to friendly pirates sharing the keys needed to access what you bought.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for DRM-free purchases where most of the money goes to the artists. BitTorrent is a way to handle the fact when there is no such option (and put economic pressure so that options exist)
> BitTorrent is a way to handle the fact when there is no such option (and put economic pressure so that options exist).
I fully agree. I just wanted to point that it's not that black and white, and there're a small number of grays in between.
> The solution is file sharing (via BitTorrent & co), which is very much not capitalism.
You'd be surprised, how many laissez faire capitalists regard "intellectual property" to be an anti-capitalist artificiality.
The whole raison d'etre for private property is that two people cannot use the same good for different purposes at the same time, it is rivalrous. Property ownership is the mechanism that resolves any potential conflicts arising from this rivalrousness. The owner gets to decide what to do with the good.
The same is not true for information, because we can both e.g. watch the same movie at the same time without interfering with each other, therefore there is no conflict that needs resolving. Therefore "intellectual property" is not a thing. (The reasoning goes further, but that is the simplest version of the most important argument I think.)
I don't think it's bringing up intellectual property is all that useful when talking about DRM.
DRM is a technological means to enforce private control independent of the (limited) legal monopoly from copyright.
It's legally enforced by the DMCA (in the US) and similar laws in other countries, which "criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself" (quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...).
If copyright were to disappear tomorrow, there would still be DRM.
The legal backing for DRM comes out of copyright legislation. Without that legal backing DRM is much less of an issue.
Without government force to back it up, who would care?
Laissez faire capitalists still want a government, so I don't see the point of following your tangent.
> Laissez faire capitalists still want a government
No, not as a rule, they don't.
Some may, but even those must be against government interference in the market, as that's the definition of laissez faire. The only relevant dividing point is if they regard "IP" as a valid form of property.
Certainly it means the government should stay out of the market, but the large majority of laissez-faire capitalists still want a government.
The following quotes are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire#Capitalism and elsewhere in that page:
"Advocates of laissez-faire capitalism argue that it relies on a constitutionally limited government that unconditionally bans the initiation of force and coercion, including fraud."
with an example:
"A more recent advocate of total laissez-faire has been Objectivist Ayn Rand, ... Rand believed that natural rights should be enforced by a constitutionally limited government."
More historically:
"The Physiocrats proclaimed laissez-faire in 18th-century France ... they advised the state to restrict itself to upholding the rights of private property and individual liberty, ..."
"Gournay held that government should allow the laws of nature to govern economic activity, with the state only intervening to protect life, liberty and property. ..."
"To the vast majority of American classical liberals, however, laissez-faire did not mean "no government intervention" at all. On the contrary, they were more than willing to see government provide tariffs, railroad subsidies, and internal improvements, all of which benefited producers". ..."
Getting rid of government but keeping capitalism would be more like anarcho-capitalism, not laissez-faire capitalism.
My observation is that DRM is essentially independent of copyright or intellectual property, so bringing up the existence of that dividing point really doesn't matter.
> the large majority of laissez-faire capitalists still want a government
That may be true, but even a majority doesn't make it true that "Laissez faire capitalists still want a government". You'd have to prepend a "most".
> anarcho-capitalism, not laissez-faire capitalism
All anarcho-capitalists are laissez-faire capitalists, only not all laissez-faire capitalists are anarcho-capitalists.
> My observation is that DRM is essentially independent of copyright or intellectual property
You say "DRM is a technological means to enforce private control independent of the (limited) legal monopoly from copyright. It's legally enforced by the DMCA".
I say "Without government force to back it up, who would care?". The DMCA - Digital Millenium Copyright Act - is a market intervention designed to produce artificial scarcity where naturally there would be none, in order to generate money for government cronies.
> You'd have to prepend a "most".
I don't care about that level of penny-ante pedantry. That's turns every forum into hyper-correctionalist tedium.
As I already quoted, the DMCA DRM clause holds even when there is no copyright infringement. Pointing to the title of the act as evidence is like saying the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democracy because it has "Democratic" in the name.
> designed to produce artificial scarcity where naturally there would be none
Sure, absolutely. But it isn't due to intellectual property.
We have an artificial scarcity of nuclear weapons too. Just not due to intellectual property laws.
> I don't care about that level of penny-ante pedantry. That's turns every forum into hyper-correctionalist tedium.
And I don't care for sloppy thinking. It leads to all kinds of bad conclusions.
> As I already quoted, the DMCA DRM clause holds even when there is no copyright infringement.
The reason for this is still to protect copyright. Only because the law is so intrusive as to criminalise the step preceding a potential copyright infringement does not change that that is the rationale behind it! [1] [2]
The goal is to simplify enforcement for copyright holders. That under the DMCA, copyright owners do not need to prove that actual infringement occurred, but only need to demonstrate that circumvention of access controls took place, lowers the burden of proof for copyright owners and allows them to take action more swiftly against potential copyright violations. [3]
"If someone breaks the technologies used to protect against copyright infringement the copyright owner need not prove that an infringement took place; all the owner needs to prove is that a violation of the Anti-Circumvention provisions occurred".
> We have an artificial scarcity of nuclear weapons too. Just not due to intellectual property laws.
And?
[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Intellectual_Property_and_the_...
[2] https://myadultattorney.com/services-item/digital-millennium...
[3] https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai...
I don't know, I view capitalism mostly as a way to allow people who have money to make more money without providing work or value from people who do work.
I feel that intellectual property (which in my language, French, is simply translated as "author's right"), by making intellectual work ("art of the mind") a normal merchandise, allows platforms, labels, editors, etc to make money from the artists work, so is favorable to capitalism.
Note that DRM makers are the main winners from this shit, as they capture value created by the artists, and they provide no value of their own since DRM has never prevented piracy.
> I don't know, I view capitalism mostly as a way to allow people who have money to make more money without providing work or value from people who do work
Well, that's not how capitalists view it, quite the opposite. In a free market economy, which relies on voluntary interactions, the only way to make money is to generate value for others. Take me buying a loaf of bread: To me the bread has more value than the money I give to the baker, otherwise I would not agree to the interaction. To the baker OTOH the money has more value than the bread, otherwise he would not agree to the interaction. Free markets are a positive-sum game.
The trick is that a very small number of people confiscated most of the wealth and their "added value" is releasing some of that wealth to those who were not lucky enough to have any wealth. I think I could be fine with a capitalist system where wealth is spread evenly (which should involve abolishing inheritance for example, but not only)
That's called liberalism. Literally liberalism.
Capitalism posit that capital owners, not labor, decide what should be produced by a company, and how it should be produced. That's all.
Free market capitalism doesn't really exist. The baker is the only baker in town, and could choose to increase prices and become filthy-rich (but doesn't, because he's a nice person). There are government regulations preventing me from setting up my own bakery without jumping through hoops – which is just as well, because if I could set up a bakery, I'd be selling people flavoured mud, sawdust, and plaster dust (zero-calorie bread: tastes just like the real thing!).
Mutually-beneficial transactions are a good description of what's happening, but that's not a description we can use to do systems-level thinking, because it's not what's "really" going on.
When there's a one ring to bind them all (Microsoft PC platform certification), and everybody needs to cater to it, you can't do anything besides allowing your PC to play nice with Linux kernel, if you want to sell that device and make some money.
OTOH, it's greatly helpful that Lennart Pottering of systemd is working squarely for Microsoft, enabling more and more of SecureBoot and TPM functionality in systemd to protect the users and systems' integrity in the face of adversarial attacks, so the PC can be TiVo-ized once and for all, after all.
What a great era to be alive.
BTW, this is exactly Capitalism, functioning as intended: extract value from a market for the shareholders of a company or an entity.
> It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix.
This is what capitalism looks like.