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.
>Once the SD card was bonded to your phone it was not reuseable elsewhere
It password-protected the card (using CMD42). You can remove password while erasing the card, but most devices weren't aware of password protection feature at all.
> It password-protected the card (using CMD42). You can remove password while erasing the card, but most devices weren't aware of password protection feature at all.
You could actually use a Symbian device to bring the cards back to life!
Don't use media that relies on it when you're not the one managing it. These features are cool when you control them. Digital signature verification on Redhat is great.
Even if you are managing it, you should still avoid it unless the hardware is designed so that it's inherently impossible for it to be used any other way. Otherwise you're financially supporting the problem.
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.
I've resorted to putting tags on all my HDMI/Display Port cables with the version/anything special cause I was sick of trying to figure out if the problem was the device or the cable being old.
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.
Check with the AV supplier for the venue and you will find that most conference projectors are intentionally lower native resolution than entertainment projectors. They are different types of hardware for different markets.
I like to prepare the presentation using a laptop or monitor having the exact same native resolution as the projector will have from the beginning.
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.
Hotplug needs support at all levels to work. The connector is just one of them.
In case of PS/2, it needs IRQ12 specifically and it doesn't support shared IRQs like PCI does. If PS/2 is not plugged in at startup, IRQ12 is reassigned by BIOS to PCI or ISA PnP cards, so no matter what OS does, it PS/2 can't work without a reboot.
> 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.
It can also be a firmware bug or a momentary brown-out during the connector insertion that glitched the controller, which could happen even if the pins were properly sequenced.
I've read that there are HDMI splitters and other devices like that that incidentally also happen to strip HDCP. Maybe you can scrounge up one of these to carry?
Sure, computer-based displays are supporting various DisplayPort standards more broadly all the time, but TV-based displays are still all-in on HDMI, and the #1 reason (well, OK, the #1 reason is "because that's how it's been", but the #2 reason) is because the big TV/movie companies demand HDCP—DRM on the cable.
I'd love to see a big dumb TV and a set-top box or game console with a DisplayPort cable connecting them, but I don't actually expect that to happen any time soon.
> I'd love to see a big dumb TV and a set-top box or game console with a DisplayPort cable connecting them, but I don't actually expect that to happen any time soon.
It's a shame the Alienware 55" OLED gaming monitor (with DisplayPort) seems to have been a one-off.
Rights holders are pretty good these days about notifying your ISP so they can send nastygrams threatening to terminate service. Usually there's something like a three-strikes policy.
So, safe torrenting involves either paying for a seedbox, or tunneling your client through a VPN.
I'm sure you know all this already, just putting this as a warning to passers-by.
Correct but 0-5$ a month is still cheaper and less effort than 10 different streaming services for +10$ each with the added benefit of preventing ISP surveillance.
> 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.
IP law isn't hypocritical. It's doing what it was built to do[0]: centralize control of publishing in the hands of capital so that the state can then regulate speech through regulating those publishers.
You see, in England, publishing used to be a state monopoly, but it was extremely unpopular with authors, so Parliament dropped the law that established the monopoly. But they still wanted the control over speech that such a monopoly would provide. Publishers had a long habit of ripping off[1] authors, so this new censorship regime was sold as a way to bind publishers to authors. In other words, cede to the state control[2] over your speech and we'll mint you memberships to the new and upcoming capitalist class.
Copyright is often framed as a bargain, or social contract[3] between the public and authors: we agree to not copy this work for X years and you agree to make works without expectation of prepayment. The real social contract is between authors, publishers, and the state: you deliver our propaganda, and we treat authors' labor as a special kind of capital, which publishers are allowed to trade like stocks.
Like all social contracts, this deal has changed before and it is currently changing now. Publishers still have an interest in cutting authors out of the deal, and generative AI gives them cover to do so in the name of innovation.
[1] Politically correct: "capturing the value stream of"
[2] The American version of this dropped the state censorship regime, but we still occasionally see attempts to wield copyright as a censorship tool. Most recently, someone tried to sell returning to 14-year copyright terms as a way to punish Disney for being too "woke".
[3] A gentleman's agreement, informally bargained for through the actions of many people, that has been codified as law and enforced through the power of the state.
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.
> In September 2016, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that "the sale of a computer equipped with pre-installed software does not in itself constitute an unfair commercial practice within the meaning of Directive 2005/29 when such an offer is not contrary to the requirements of professional diligence and does not distort the economic behaviour of [purchasers]." The Court also ruled that Directive 2005/29 does not require OEMs to include a separate price for an operating system license.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even without a leak, they face a risk with how actual CPUs bin out.
They have to sell some $1000 CPUs at $600 as unlockable later to fulfill their contracts. But if their process is marginal, they may have to divert $1000 CPUs from the market who would pay $1000 for them to satisfy the $600 market.
IBM and HP have had something similar to this in their mainframes/servers - Capacity on Demand - for decades. Pay more licensing to activate more CPUs/Cores that are present but disabled.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Many banking apps (and other payment apps) won't work on phones with custom android builds, nor on phones with unlocked bootloaders, same for rooted phones.
But yeah, in turn, unless you have a "dedicated banking phone", this will mean that people will stay with the official OS's with all the DRM features included.
Do you think your bank is obligated to run its software on your arbitrary device? Why? If, for its own risk tolerance of fraud, it needs to ensure nothing has messed with its app, shouldn't they have the right to refuse? You've not paid anything for the app, it's simply a venue for a service they offer.
I would not like to live in a world where I need to pay extra to ensure some folks want "freedom". Fraud indirectly is a tax on all of us. There should obviously be limits on what we put up with, but I'm not sold this limitation is where the line should be drawn
Well, the same as drm then... on a rooted device, you can run a screen recording app, that's why netflix might soon run only on attested devices. Tinder? What if you're faking your location, attested device only. etc.
Want freedom, a rooted device, a device not made by samsung or apple? Well, fsck you and your freedoms, right? It's not like a phone is a general purpose computing device.
Soon the same will happen to PCs... why should your bank run on linux, what if you've messed with the cookies? Microsoft windows OS, attested system, and you'll be banking in edge only. Just because some people like you support this.
There are countries where you cannot own a gun legally. Many in those countries see the benefits of giving up the "freedom" to own a gun for the greater good.
I understand your point, and also worry about a world I cannot use my Linux desktop to do things I can on my phone. I'm optimistic Linux distros will manage to solve these problems if they arise. Tighter integration with hardware vrnfi
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.
Local-only memory (say readable only from a certain CPU security ring
and securely erasable in an atomic operation) is a useful tool for
methods such as you describe. What I'm shooting at is private memory
under cryptographic control of a remote networked entity. I should
more properly have said "remotely secured enclave" or something like
that.
I think in this area it's hard to be precise amidst confusion about
who does the encryption, who generates and keeps the private keys, and
what power that affords them.
> 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.
IMO, any technology that can be used to take control of devices away from their owners is inherently evil and should be banned outright, even if there are other uses of it that would be legitimate.
Not a single device you own gives you full control. If you have a wifi or LTE modem attached to your device, chances are it runs some firmware you cannot override for legal reasons as you would be at risk of breaking some laws by doing so. It feels like folks draw the line based on what runs on the primary CPU (in particular the kernel), but this is strangely arbitrary. There are all sorts of technologies that will slowly make this appear to work while simply shrinking what you are capable of doing from the kernel you run (eg trustzone, hypervisors you don't control, etc). From the perspective of hardware makers this is just more firmware which everyone is already seemingly okay with.
There are too many (non drm even) forces in the industry pushing us in this direction as it solves seemingly real problems (anti-cheat in games, ensuring your bank credentials and biometric data cannot be stolen, work accounts cannot be compromised, etc). There is simply too much risk and therefore money to be lost by giving users control over these things.
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.
Thanks for detailing your viewpoint. I very much respect it, yet still disagree.
Kindly allow this analogy: if capitalism optimizes for monetary profit alone, communism optimizes for the common good..
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.
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.
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.
My point is that DRM is still not intellectual property.
The DMCA prohibits circumvention of DRM, even when there is no copyright infringement.
It's illegal for an author of a story who still holds the copyright to it, to download a DRM'ed version of the story and then break the DRM.
It's illegal to circumvent DRM to unlock works in the public domain.
The Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 was meant "require the infringement of a copyright for a violation" when circumventing DRM, but it and others like it never passed.
Yes, DRM is used as a technological means to enforce intellectual property rights, but get rid of property rights completely and it will still be illegal to circumvent DRM.
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.
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.
He doesn't, because he would quickly loose all his business to the competition, and if there was none, there quickly would be - unless government force provides him with an artificial monopoly.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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)
If that hammer is the mean of production of some company and as a result of owning the hammer I can get all the profits of the company, while doing no work and the people doing the actual work with the hammer get only low wages , then this is indeed capitalism :)
The hammer allows the worker to be more productive than he would be without one, so he chooses freely to team up with the hammer-owner for a share of the additional value created by using the hammer.
The endlessly repeated "but all muh profit goes to the evul capitalist" thing is logically nonsensical, as whatever share of the additional surplus generated by the hammer goes to the capitalist is by definition the capitalist's profit, however small. So you essentially demand to be handed someone else's property for no compensation at all, as that would be the only way for there to be no profit for the capitalist (if indeed, the product is successfully sold at all).
The capitalist, who by the way is the one who invested not only in the hammer but in the raw materials needed for production, and who shoulders all of the risk and delayed gratification, while the worker gets a risk-free, immediate income, before the company even earns it's very first cent.
Yes, once again I think it's all fine, provided that people who did not provide any value to anyone are not allowed to own all the hammers, which implies at least abolishing inheritance. "Choosing freely" when the choice is "use my hammer or die, because btw my ancestors got all the hammers" is not choosing freely.
Exactly, i think you read way too much into what i said. I'm not saying it's bad or anything, i'm saying that's the definition. Capitalism is a production method where capital owners decide what should the labor do, unlike anarchist worker councils, or feudalist lords. But capitalism say nothing on free trade, absolutely nothing. You can be a communist country or an anarchist commune and implement free trade. I'm pretty sure native mexican communes are allowing free trade (because if they didn't Mexico would likely do something about it), despite having a non-capitalistic method of production (which sometime is feudal, which is to me the worst system of production, once again, i clearly never stated capitalism=bad, i'm just saying capitalism != free trade)
Okay, the part of "free markets are possible without capitalism" is quite obvious. But going back to the earlier messages, what happened is that I assumed that capitalism implies free markets (not the other way around), and that's not equally trivial.
I think capitalism at least implies markets, because otherwise it makes no sense at all. Who would care to specialise in the production of any good if there was no way to profit from it by offering it on a market?
But does it imply free markets? That probably depends on where you want to draw the line between free and non-free. Personally, I'm a purist in these matters. There does not currently exist any market that I know of, which I would consider to be really free. So by my standards I assumed too much in my original statement.
In public discourse though, I usually try to adopt a choice of words more compatible with what I estimate is the prevailing POV, as it eases communication. By that standard, there exist plenty of free markets, and maybe the claim could be made that capitalism does imply free markets, unless one is happy to have discussions about nonsensical constructs.
This is much more interesting than the previous discussion! I honestly never thought of it this way.
I will try to answer with a question: what was proto-capitalism?
People talk about mercantilism but I disagree.
I'll explain: you bought a share off a boat trade (often slave trade, let's be clear) and got a share of the profits. Multiple to hedge. At the time, you didn't had free trade between nations (the concept of nation was in the process of existing at the time), and tariffs, and a lot of different taxes. You also couldn't sell your shares. If you were the main buyer however, you could choose the trip rough beginning and initial trading goods, but during the journey, the captain made all the choices. Often he traded with his preferred trading post. Was it capitalism? The captains and first mates had as much power as the owners, if not more, so I would say no, but we could disagree. So for now: no market, no capitalism.
Thinking a bit more about late mercantilism, I now think (writing
this) that capitalism really started with 'joint-stock' companies. And, with all respect to the 'muscovy company', that really begins with the English 'east India company', which would be considered today state capitalism. Captains still had power while on the sea, but way less than Mediterranean captains. They had to stop at specific trading post, depart on specific days (and not month). They did not choose all of their crew, and relied on the royal navy to defend them. They could use bigger, less armed ship, do more efficient trips, at the cost of a bit of freedom for captains. I'm not sure anybody could buy a share though, but I think that's still capitalism. So for me, the response is no: you don't have to have a market to have capitalism.
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.
>Once the SD card was bonded to your phone it was not reuseable elsewhere
It password-protected the card (using CMD42). You can remove password while erasing the card, but most devices weren't aware of password protection feature at all.
SD actually stands for "Super Density", optical disc format that was replaced by DVD but they already had the logo designed and apparently didn't want let it go to waste. https://www.global.toshiba/ww/news/corporate/1995/11/pr0701....
> It password-protected the card (using CMD42). You can remove password while erasing the card, but most devices weren't aware of password protection feature at all.
You could actually use a Symbian device to bring the cards back to life!
OP is about SSD, 2 Ss, so twice as secure ;)
> OP is about SSD, 2 Ss, so twice as secure ;)
Like applying ROT13 twice?
Super Secure Drive
Looks to be 2 Ds, so Super Duper Drive ?
just like homo sapiens sapiens is ehhh ... nevermind
Some Garmin Marine units use SD cards for map updates (Bluechart), which also seem to use the S in SD
So... one more reason to not buy the content and pirate it instead.
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.
Don't use media that relies on it when you're not the one managing it. These features are cool when you control them. Digital signature verification on Redhat is great.
Even if you are managing it, you should still avoid it unless the hardware is designed so that it's inherently impossible for it to be used any other way. Otherwise you're financially supporting the problem.
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
The HDMI Forum most likely does have a say about a corporation's implementation, or for allowing the protected hardware to be used.
But that likely leaves space for specs and keys to be leaked, read out, reverse engineered or worked around at some point. Not by AMD themselves.
> 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.
I've resorted to putting tags on all my HDMI/Display Port cables with the version/anything special cause I was sick of trying to figure out if the problem was the device or the cable being old.
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.
Check with the AV supplier for the venue and you will find that most conference projectors are intentionally lower native resolution than entertainment projectors. They are different types of hardware for different markets.
I like to prepare the presentation using a laptop or monitor having the exact same native resolution as the projector will have from the beginning.
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.
Hotplug needs support at all levels to work. The connector is just one of them.
In case of PS/2, it needs IRQ12 specifically and it doesn't support shared IRQs like PCI does. If PS/2 is not plugged in at startup, IRQ12 is reassigned by BIOS to PCI or ISA PnP cards, so no matter what OS does, it PS/2 can't work without a reboot.
> 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.
It can also be a firmware bug or a momentary brown-out during the connector insertion that glitched the controller, which could happen even if the pins were properly sequenced.
Especially silly because the HDCP master key got leaked back in 2010.
I've read that there are HDMI splitters and other devices like that that incidentally also happen to strip HDCP. Maybe you can scrounge up one of these to carry?
Well, good thing that we are slowly moving everything into DP.
But it's a bad thing that it's so slow.
We're...not, though?
Sure, computer-based displays are supporting various DisplayPort standards more broadly all the time, but TV-based displays are still all-in on HDMI, and the #1 reason (well, OK, the #1 reason is "because that's how it's been", but the #2 reason) is because the big TV/movie companies demand HDCP—DRM on the cable.
I'd love to see a big dumb TV and a set-top box or game console with a DisplayPort cable connecting them, but I don't actually expect that to happen any time soon.
> I'd love to see a big dumb TV and a set-top box or game console with a DisplayPort cable connecting them, but I don't actually expect that to happen any time soon.
It's a shame the Alienware 55" OLED gaming monitor (with DisplayPort) seems to have been a one-off.
> I could download a torrent of any movie I want, so the tech is obviously not preventing piracy.
Could? Why don't you? Stop feeding this terrible industry doing everything it can to put the personal computing genie back in the bottle.
Rights holders are pretty good these days about notifying your ISP so they can send nastygrams threatening to terminate service. Usually there's something like a three-strikes policy.
So, safe torrenting involves either paying for a seedbox, or tunneling your client through a VPN.
I'm sure you know all this already, just putting this as a warning to passers-by.
Correct but 0-5$ a month is still cheaper and less effort than 10 different streaming services for +10$ each with the added benefit of preventing ISP surveillance.
> 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.
IP law isn't hypocritical. It's doing what it was built to do[0]: centralize control of publishing in the hands of capital so that the state can then regulate speech through regulating those publishers.
You see, in England, publishing used to be a state monopoly, but it was extremely unpopular with authors, so Parliament dropped the law that established the monopoly. But they still wanted the control over speech that such a monopoly would provide. Publishers had a long habit of ripping off[1] authors, so this new censorship regime was sold as a way to bind publishers to authors. In other words, cede to the state control[2] over your speech and we'll mint you memberships to the new and upcoming capitalist class.
Copyright is often framed as a bargain, or social contract[3] between the public and authors: we agree to not copy this work for X years and you agree to make works without expectation of prepayment. The real social contract is between authors, publishers, and the state: you deliver our propaganda, and we treat authors' labor as a special kind of capital, which publishers are allowed to trade like stocks.
Like all social contracts, this deal has changed before and it is currently changing now. Publishers still have an interest in cutting authors out of the deal, and generative AI gives them cover to do so in the name of innovation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
[1] Politically correct: "capturing the value stream of"
[2] The American version of this dropped the state censorship regime, but we still occasionally see attempts to wield copyright as a censorship tool. Most recently, someone tried to sell returning to 14-year copyright terms as a way to punish Disney for being too "woke".
[3] A gentleman's agreement, informally bargained for through the actions of many people, that has been codified as law and enforced through the power of the state.
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.
The EU decided not to:
> In September 2016, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that "the sale of a computer equipped with pre-installed software does not in itself constitute an unfair commercial practice within the meaning of Directive 2005/29 when such an offer is not contrary to the requirements of professional diligence and does not distort the economic behaviour of [purchasers]." The Court also ruled that Directive 2005/29 does not require OEMs to include a separate price for an operating system license.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
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 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?
No? It's been pretty much a constant throughout history.
idk, losing access to preinstalled OEM license?
> they won't be able to get Microsoft PC certification, so it's not going to happen
Really? That is the barrier?! How much control do you think you have on "Microsoft PC certification" standards?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even without a leak, they face a risk with how actual CPUs bin out.
They have to sell some $1000 CPUs at $600 as unlockable later to fulfill their contracts. But if their process is marginal, they may have to divert $1000 CPUs from the market who would pay $1000 for them to satisfy the $600 market.
IBM and HP have had something similar to this in their mainframes/servers - Capacity on Demand - for decades. Pay more licensing to activate more CPUs/Cores that are present but disabled.
That’s vintage Mainframe playbook
> 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.
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.
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.
your bank requires drm? what.
Not drm per-se
I was commenting this (from above):
> 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.
Many banking apps (and other payment apps) won't work on phones with custom android builds, nor on phones with unlocked bootloaders, same for rooted phones.
But yeah, in turn, unless you have a "dedicated banking phone", this will mean that people will stay with the official OS's with all the DRM features included.
(or well.. as we in the balkans do, pirate stuff)
Do you think your bank is obligated to run its software on your arbitrary device? Why? If, for its own risk tolerance of fraud, it needs to ensure nothing has messed with its app, shouldn't they have the right to refuse? You've not paid anything for the app, it's simply a venue for a service they offer.
I would not like to live in a world where I need to pay extra to ensure some folks want "freedom". Fraud indirectly is a tax on all of us. There should obviously be limits on what we put up with, but I'm not sold this limitation is where the line should be drawn
your whole take is just ignorant.
yes i expect the bank to have to run on any client as the client should not be trusted.
Well, the same as drm then... on a rooted device, you can run a screen recording app, that's why netflix might soon run only on attested devices. Tinder? What if you're faking your location, attested device only. etc.
Want freedom, a rooted device, a device not made by samsung or apple? Well, fsck you and your freedoms, right? It's not like a phone is a general purpose computing device.
Soon the same will happen to PCs... why should your bank run on linux, what if you've messed with the cookies? Microsoft windows OS, attested system, and you'll be banking in edge only. Just because some people like you support this.
There are countries where you cannot own a gun legally. Many in those countries see the benefits of giving up the "freedom" to own a gun for the greater good.
I understand your point, and also worry about a world I cannot use my Linux desktop to do things I can on my phone. I'm optimistic Linux distros will manage to solve these problems if they arise. Tighter integration with hardware vrnfi
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.
Local-only memory (say readable only from a certain CPU security ring and securely erasable in an atomic operation) is a useful tool for methods such as you describe. What I'm shooting at is private memory under cryptographic control of a remote networked entity. I should more properly have said "remotely secured enclave" or something like that.
I think in this area it's hard to be precise amidst confusion about who does the encryption, who generates and keeps the private keys, and what power that affords them.
> 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.
IMO, any technology that can be used to take control of devices away from their owners is inherently evil and should be banned outright, even if there are other uses of it that would be legitimate.
Not a single device you own gives you full control. If you have a wifi or LTE modem attached to your device, chances are it runs some firmware you cannot override for legal reasons as you would be at risk of breaking some laws by doing so. It feels like folks draw the line based on what runs on the primary CPU (in particular the kernel), but this is strangely arbitrary. There are all sorts of technologies that will slowly make this appear to work while simply shrinking what you are capable of doing from the kernel you run (eg trustzone, hypervisors you don't control, etc). From the perspective of hardware makers this is just more firmware which everyone is already seemingly okay with.
There are too many (non drm even) forces in the industry pushing us in this direction as it solves seemingly real problems (anti-cheat in games, ensuring your bank credentials and biometric data cannot be stolen, work accounts cannot be compromised, etc). There is simply too much risk and therefore money to be lost by giving users control over these things.
> chances are it runs some firmware you cannot override for legal reasons as you would be at risk of breaking some laws by doing so.
I don't want things I own to try to enforce laws against me.
> There is simply too much risk and therefore money to be lost by giving users control over these things.
I know the megacorps will never want to give us control of our stuff. I'm saying that I wish they had to.
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.
Thanks for detailing your viewpoint. I very much respect it, yet still disagree. Kindly allow this analogy: if capitalism optimizes for monetary profit alone, communism optimizes for the common good..
> 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.
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 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.
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...
The legal backing for DRM comes out of copyright legislation. Without that legal backing DRM is much less of an issue.
My point is that DRM is still not intellectual property.
The DMCA prohibits circumvention of DRM, even when there is no copyright infringement.
It's illegal for an author of a story who still holds the copyright to it, to download a DRM'ed version of the story and then break the DRM.
It's illegal to circumvent DRM to unlock works in the public domain.
The Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 was meant "require the infringement of a copyright for a violation" when circumventing DRM, but it and others like it never passed.
Yes, DRM is used as a technological means to enforce intellectual property rights, but get rid of property rights completely and it will still be illegal to circumvent DRM.
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.
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.
> but doesn't, because he's a nice person
He doesn't, because he would quickly loose all his business to the competition, and if there was none, there quickly would be - unless government force provides him with an artificial monopoly.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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.
Capitalism posits that it should be legal to privately own capital goods. If I own something, that makes me the one who decides what to do with it.
There are systems which recognize private ownership which are not capitalists.
Capitalism is just about the full control of means of production and of companies by capital owners as explained by your parent.
Do you own a hammer? Well, that's a capital good, so you're a capitalist! Congratulations!
If that hammer is the mean of production of some company and as a result of owning the hammer I can get all the profits of the company, while doing no work and the people doing the actual work with the hammer get only low wages , then this is indeed capitalism :)
The hammer allows the worker to be more productive than he would be without one, so he chooses freely to team up with the hammer-owner for a share of the additional value created by using the hammer.
The endlessly repeated "but all muh profit goes to the evul capitalist" thing is logically nonsensical, as whatever share of the additional surplus generated by the hammer goes to the capitalist is by definition the capitalist's profit, however small. So you essentially demand to be handed someone else's property for no compensation at all, as that would be the only way for there to be no profit for the capitalist (if indeed, the product is successfully sold at all).
The capitalist, who by the way is the one who invested not only in the hammer but in the raw materials needed for production, and who shoulders all of the risk and delayed gratification, while the worker gets a risk-free, immediate income, before the company even earns it's very first cent.
Yes, once again I think it's all fine, provided that people who did not provide any value to anyone are not allowed to own all the hammers, which implies at least abolishing inheritance. "Choosing freely" when the choice is "use my hammer or die, because btw my ancestors got all the hammers" is not choosing freely.
Exactly, i think you read way too much into what i said. I'm not saying it's bad or anything, i'm saying that's the definition. Capitalism is a production method where capital owners decide what should the labor do, unlike anarchist worker councils, or feudalist lords. But capitalism say nothing on free trade, absolutely nothing. You can be a communist country or an anarchist commune and implement free trade. I'm pretty sure native mexican communes are allowing free trade (because if they didn't Mexico would likely do something about it), despite having a non-capitalistic method of production (which sometime is feudal, which is to me the worst system of production, once again, i clearly never stated capitalism=bad, i'm just saying capitalism != free trade)
Okay, the part of "free markets are possible without capitalism" is quite obvious. But going back to the earlier messages, what happened is that I assumed that capitalism implies free markets (not the other way around), and that's not equally trivial.
I think capitalism at least implies markets, because otherwise it makes no sense at all. Who would care to specialise in the production of any good if there was no way to profit from it by offering it on a market?
But does it imply free markets? That probably depends on where you want to draw the line between free and non-free. Personally, I'm a purist in these matters. There does not currently exist any market that I know of, which I would consider to be really free. So by my standards I assumed too much in my original statement.
In public discourse though, I usually try to adopt a choice of words more compatible with what I estimate is the prevailing POV, as it eases communication. By that standard, there exist plenty of free markets, and maybe the claim could be made that capitalism does imply free markets, unless one is happy to have discussions about nonsensical constructs.
This is much more interesting than the previous discussion! I honestly never thought of it this way.
I will try to answer with a question: what was proto-capitalism?
People talk about mercantilism but I disagree. I'll explain: you bought a share off a boat trade (often slave trade, let's be clear) and got a share of the profits. Multiple to hedge. At the time, you didn't had free trade between nations (the concept of nation was in the process of existing at the time), and tariffs, and a lot of different taxes. You also couldn't sell your shares. If you were the main buyer however, you could choose the trip rough beginning and initial trading goods, but during the journey, the captain made all the choices. Often he traded with his preferred trading post. Was it capitalism? The captains and first mates had as much power as the owners, if not more, so I would say no, but we could disagree. So for now: no market, no capitalism.
Thinking a bit more about late mercantilism, I now think (writing this) that capitalism really started with 'joint-stock' companies. And, with all respect to the 'muscovy company', that really begins with the English 'east India company', which would be considered today state capitalism. Captains still had power while on the sea, but way less than Mediterranean captains. They had to stop at specific trading post, depart on specific days (and not month). They did not choose all of their crew, and relied on the royal navy to defend them. They could use bigger, less armed ship, do more efficient trips, at the cost of a bit of freedom for captains. I'm not sure anybody could buy a share though, but I think that's still capitalism. So for me, the response is no: you don't have to have a market to have capitalism.
But it clearly isn't a final answer.
> i think you read way too much into what i said
Well, it seems like I really may have done that. I actually hadn't even noticed that my interlocutor had switched inbetween.
> i'm just saying capitalism != free trade
Right, unfortunately it's very late and I think I need a clearer head for an adequate answer.
> It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix.
This is what capitalism looks like.