What if there was a way to provide access to your medical records to people who need them, only for as long as they need them? What if even the provider of the service couldn't easily circumvent this?
DRM can not be trustworthy by its mere definition (because trust is a mutual thing, and those who deploy DRM don't trust you - the user. So you have every reason not to trust them in return). And it never can be valuable since it's not only unethical and insulting towards users (since it uses presumption of guilt and police state ideas), but it's also completely ineffective and all it does is punishing paying customers, while the vast majority of actual pirates don't deal with it. DRM should just die out for good.
> What if there was a way to provide access to your medical records to people who need them, only for as long as they need them?
Authentication and information security has nothing to do with DRM, even though both can have features like encryption. Let's not mix unrelated subjects.
Authentication and information security has nothing to do with DRM, even though both can have features like encryption. Let's not mix unrelated subjects.
What is the limiting of who can have my personal data and when, but Digital Rights Management, or DRM? One cannot stop at authentication, because to be complete, one has to prevent copying data. Without this, it becomes problematic to trace who has released information, and without some legal support, nothing at all is practical.
DRM can not be trustworthy by its mere definition
Sorry, but this is fluff. You could apply this "logic" to authentication as well. DRM has to involve some mutual trust and cooperation to the same extent that any protocol involves mutual trust and cooperation.
The key is to realize that DRM as practiced by corporations is evil and unworkable because the economics were utterly unrealistic. Really, where DRM could help individuals would be the elimination of trivial deniability on the part of corporations. Right now, when your data privacy is breached, there is no cost to "break" anything and it's very hard to pin this on a particular corporation. Add a DRM mechanism, and then there is something tangible to apply protection laws to and a labor cost with definite intent to breach an individual's privacy. In aggregate, the cost and potential legal liability becomes too high to for virtually any corporation to contemplate. We would arrive at a situation where corporations could afford to violate the privacy of a few select individuals, but could no longer do so to the public wholesale. Ordinary citizens would enjoy a measure of protection, though rich individuals and corporations would not.
Sounds pretty good to me.
Underlying everything, I'm not so much advocating DRM, as I'm calling to question emotionally charged "magical thinking" combined with naive induction. Let's not just leave things at "DRM is bad" devoid of real examination of what's happening.
EDIT: It also occurs to me that the historical factual differences between individuals and corporations should be used to modify the current formulation of "legal persons." "Legal Persons" should be considered as "persons" only in terms of a few specific factors, like the owning of property. The historical difference between actual and legal persons with regards to data privacy abuses would be an important corpus of information in support of this.
DRM can employ authentication in itself, sure. But DRM is not about ensuring that you are you. DRM is about limiting what you can do with your own system in various ways and / or spying on you (even when it already knows that you are you). Simply because DRM is preemptive policing.
I have no problem with authentication, same way I have no problems with you using a lock on your door (normal security). I have problems with DRM, same way I'd have problems with police putting their camera in someone's house (overreaching preemptive policing).
Hopefully this makes it more clear. I often see people confuse DRM with merely security / authentication / encryption etc. That's plain wrong.
> The key is to realize that DRM as practiced by corporations is evil and unworkable because the economics were utterly unrealistic.
No. It's evil because it's using police state methodology of treating everyone as potential criminal and employing presumption of guilt, which results in overreaching policing measures which violate one's privacy and security.
Isn't that what you're doing when you lock your doors though?
No. You lock your doors to protect your house from external threats. Here it's completely reversed. DRM invades your private digital space (your computer, your system, the programs you run etc.) for the sake of policing you. I.e. it's not like a lock on your house doors. It's like a police camera placed inside your house. That's exactly what makes it overreaching and unacceptable.
Policing itself is a not an evil idea in general. But it's evil when it's overreaching. Saying - "let's prevent crime" is OK. Saying "let's place police cameras in everyone's house to prevent crime" is not OK.
In the personal DRM case it would not be invading "your private digital space", you would be using it to protect your digital space.
It is not like "a police camera placed inside your house." It is the equivalent of the homeowner placing a security camera themselves to protect their property.
Protecting your own digital space is called security. Let's be clear on terms usage, otherwise time will be wasted because of misunderstanding.
DRM is always about policing others by invading their digital space.
Or about voluntarily giving some autonomy up. In the case of organizations like Facebook, they would be giving up autonomy, such that they would only run certain audited versions of certain software. Given that such companies have large numbers of computers aggregated in a relatively small number of locations, the economics of verifying these mechanisms is much more favorable than the inadvisable "traditional" use of DRM has been.
You are not going to be able to process ideas like this properly, if your only background is uneducated Internet backlash.
Protecting your own digital space is called security. Let's be clear on terms usage, otherwise time will be wasted because of misunderstanding.
Throughout, you have been insistent on an imprecise, popularized usage of terms. I will agree, however, that time has been wasted because of misunderstanding.
They created the term and they polluted it for good. Trying to whitewash it now serves no useful purpose except causing confusion. If you want to talk about concepts of protecting your personal information - just use another term, otherwise misunderstanding is guaranteed (like above).
> popularized usage of terms
No, it was you who tried to create your own interpretation of DRM which differs from what its designers put into it. That's up to you, but don't expect anyone to understand you.
Again proof that you have no familiarity with the abstract concepts or its history, prior to the popularized furor. Nor do you care or are particularly curious, or are capable of processing the logical implications of such new information.
No, it was you who tried to create your own interpretation of DRM which differs from what its designers put into it.
Let me assure you that the designers of DRM had the other interpretations in mind the whole time. You are basically arguing for your own ignorance.
don't expect anyone to understand you.
In other words, I should expect only uninformed rubes on the Internet.
Let me explain AGAIN -- I'm not talking about such a system running on your machine. I'm talking about such mechanisms running in Facebook's, Apple's, Google's, and the NSA's server farms. It's about 4 messages into this thread. Please get a clue.
Which is? Security threat for them (same as DRM which runs on your machine is a security threat for you). It doesn't sound sensible.
1) That's the same kind of half-baked wishful thinking that's been going around the Internet since before the web. 2) I'm not advocating doing what loser corps have been pursuing. I'm advocating flipping the economics around 180 degrees.
someone else breaks it shortly thereafter, whether it's DiVX, or DVD encryption, or BluRay encryption
It's wishful thinking to ascribe magical powers to anything, even hacking over the vast labor pool of the Internet. Modern content encryption based on VMs gets broken but takes labor to break, and only works as well as it does for mass-distributed media because enough people care about it. (I'm not talking about DVD encryption and earlier. Keeping a single symmetric key secret is fundamentally broken.) Flip around the economics, so equally powerful protections are applied to data only a few people care about, and the addition of a little legal support would be enough to form an effective deterrent.
It is fundamentally broken -- for corporate mass distribution. But that's not the only thing it can be used for.
What is fundamentally broken is the idea of overreaching preemptive policing (DRM). I.e. the one expressed by Sony execs in the past:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit#Background
> "The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake."
It's as broken and crooked as it gets.
What is fundamentally broken is the idea of overreaching preemptive policing (DRM).
The record clearly shows that applied to individuals, DRM becomes "fundamentally broken overreaching preemptive policing."
The same record clearly shows that turned around 180 degrees, DRM is entirely appropriate. What's broken for protecting a single piece of information the whole Internet wants becomes viable for protecting information chiefly valuable to the individual. DRM applied in reverse against corporations is "economically viable historically supported policing."
I think you simply use the term DRM incorrectly. You think DRM means information security. It doesn't. "Turning it around" makes it not DRM anymore.
I think I've made the mistake of discussing while assuming the wrong level of information background amongst the participants.
They mean what they were designed for. And that is excessive preemptive policing. About "trusted execution" you are wrong. Original meaning of trusted execution is exactly about security, not about DRM. Actual usage of that term is more than often happens to be about DRM (which is conflicting with security actually, because DRM can be viewed as a security risk).
See https://youtube.com/watch?v=XgFbqSYdNK4
If you constantly mix up security, authentication, trusted execution with DRM, I think you should consider your own level of knowing what you are talking about. I explained everything above.