Would it also then become illegal to program software that would defend against such software rooting your machine and erasing things that goes against its views of fairness?
I'd like see them try to root my Gentoo box.
I'd like see them try to root my Gentoo box.
It'll be similar if this law passes. There's a binary blob for Windows and OSX. It's illegal to reverse engineer that blob. It's illegal to circumvent the need for that blob.
Hmm. This leads me to the idea. Why care for software rootkits when PCIe hardware may actively screw with the system? Considering MAFIAA already had success with enforcing HDCP on almost every modern video card out there...
Your description sounds good. This book doesn't sound that good but it is future England, has to do with computers has pirate in the title.
The book is okay, I was kinda surprised at how good he was at keeping the tech believable... still he mostly failed as authors who know little about tech do
Also OS level virtualization is not the only protection worth using in a scenario like this. Sandboxing at the syscall level (restricting allowed syscalls and arguments substantially) is also highly useful, and if we start seeing a threat from apps that people are expected to intentionally install knowing that they pose a risk, we will see a lot more aggressive security work.
That's incredibly optimistic.
Given that already when I last bothered with pirated software in the early 90's, serious warez traders were mostly only interested in software weeks before its scheduled release (it was not uncommon for unfinished versions of games to leak), which involved not just getting hold of the releases through leaks or hacking, but breaking any protection, and this would make up the first serious challenge for the warez scene in many years, and this will draw not just the warez scene, but security researchers, as well as a lot of "regular" developers like me who are fed up with these kinds of attempts, they are facing pretty much an army that will be dissecting every release.
Sure, some will slip through for some users, but every single instance will result in new counter-measures, many of which you can expect will cover as-yet undiscovered flaws in addition to just fixing specific issues.
E.g. a logical protection against attempts at attacking faulty filesystem permissions settings is to blanket ban access to the filesystem and whitelist specific files, specific directories, and sanity check all access to them.
For every loss, we will win more robust application sandboxing capabilities, and more people will be motivated to consistently make use of them.
It bothers me. I'm probably wrong, but it feels like we have a bunch of sub-optimal OSs that have security kludged in as an after-thought, built on legacy hampered hardware, with a lot of concentration on "preventing people playing illegal content" (but also strictly controlling what people do with their legal content). There's a kind of arms race with pirates and anti-pirates competing on DRM schemes, and it feels like if all that effort had gone into better directions that we'd have 24 cores at 3.5 GHz and better threading with decent nice architecture.
And I know it's just marketing, and that washing powder (Whiter than white!) has been doing it for years, but being told that my content (which was sold to me as best quality available last time) is now being called garbage and I'm told I need to upgrade. In the past I didn't need to upgrade. I could keep my record deck and buy a CD player and rip those CDs to digital for my streaming media player. But in the future this is not going to be allowed. I'm going to have to buy an extra licence for family use.