> the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine
That's why Intel management keeps greenlighting this project. Intel thinks that it if it can convince content producers to distribute media as blobs encrypted with Intel's public key (and maybe, say, Samsung's or Apple's), then we can transition to a world where consumer video files do work on most consumer hardware, but can't be decrypted outside the protected media path and ripped.
There's no reason this scheme can't work. OEMs and content producers just haven't been able to cooperate well enough to piece it together yet. Once they do, game over, except for the analog hole.
This scheme also has the side effect of creating a "moat" around existing OEMs. Sure, a new player can begin fabricating new CPUs, but existing media files won't be encrypted for these CPUs. It is literally a conspiracy against the public.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
In our universe, the "debugging tools" that could defeat this scheme are ones that can depackage an Intel chip and read its EEPROM directly. What do you even use for that, a scanning electron microscope?
Part of me really wants to go into full libertarian cryptoanarchist mode to enable a safe way of doing anonymous Kickstarters for someone to buy that SEM and crack any new DRM that's being thrown at us.
But then I remind myself of this[0] and I realize we'd be probably fighting our own future. Our world is going downhill because it's too uncoordinated, not too coordinated.
But coordination only works when you have 51% or more of the force on the side of the people doing the coordinating, and when you haven’t come up with some brilliant trick to make coordination impossible.
The second one first. In the links post before last, I wrote:
> The latest development in the brave new post-Bitcoin world is crypto-equity. At this point I’ve gone from wanting to praise these inventors as bold libertarian heroes to wanting to drag them in front of a blackboard and making them write a hundred times “I WILL NOT CALL UP THAT WHICH I CANNOT PUT DOWN”
A couple people asked me what I meant, and I didn’t have the background then to explain. Well, this post is the background. People are using the contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear incidents – we, as a civilization, are going to wish we hadn’t established untraceable and unstoppable ways of selling products.
It's a pretty big hole, and it's practically impossible to seal. Which is why I don't think we'll ever see "game over" for piracy, no matter how advanced DRM technology becomes.
At this point, I think censoring the internet is the only way for the movies/music industry to win. Sadly this isn't so far fetched.
> it's practically impossible to seal [the analog hole]
It's easier than you think. Look at Macrovision. Look at the EURion constellation. All you have to do is make your secure video path emit some kind of signal not immediately apparent to human eyes. In a post-general-purpose-computing world, you can just make consumer-grade devices respect these signals and refuse to record and make professional-grade equipment both insanely expensive and specifically traceable.
I agree, but my point is this - If you can see it or hear it, then you can record it. Sure, the recording device you'll need in the future might be insanely expensive/rare/illegal, but there's also a lot of money in piracy.
That's why Intel management keeps greenlighting this project. Intel thinks that it if it can convince content producers to distribute media as blobs encrypted with Intel's public key (and maybe, say, Samsung's or Apple's), then we can transition to a world where consumer video files do work on most consumer hardware, but can't be decrypted outside the protected media path and ripped.
There's no reason this scheme can't work. OEMs and content producers just haven't been able to cooperate well enough to piece it together yet. Once they do, game over, except for the analog hole.
This scheme also has the side effect of creating a "moat" around existing OEMs. Sure, a new player can begin fabricating new CPUs, but existing media files won't be encrypted for these CPUs. It is literally a conspiracy against the public.