Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Corporations claim that DRM is necessary for fighting piracy, for protecting the rights of content creators, or to keep computers safe from viruses, however there is no evidence that DRM has had any effect on any of those.

DRM is fundamentally flawed, because the user is both the recipient and the would-be interceptor that DRM protects against, so because of this it means the decryption key is at some point loaded in the memory of the user's device, which means that there's no "uncrackable" variant, but even admitting the possibility of an uncrackable DRM, you always have the analogue loophole. And because of the Internet, ordinary people can easily access the pirated copies made by other people.

The only thing that DRM proved effective for is vendor lock-in. Bought some games on Steam? Bought some books on Amazon? Bought some apps on iTunes Store? Those are "investments" hooking you in to these services for a long time.

And now DRM has infected W3C and web standards as well, because grandmas want to watch Netflix and as predicted, open-source can't join the party, because wouldn't you know, DRM is fundamentally flawed and is incompatible with open-source.

DRM is often said to get in the way of legitimate customers, which for the vast majority of cases is very likely true. Take always-online games as an example (like that one Assassin's Creed) - a pirate has the luxury of being able to play offline, where the legitimate customer e.g. loses game progress because their internet connection dropped.

I recall a PCGamer editorial that recommended people go and download a crack because the DRM scheme of a game came with a 30% performance penalty...

The operative principle here is "three can keep a secret if two of them are dead". A secret can only stay secret if everyone who knows it is unanimous in the desire for keeping it.

Alice can keep her own secrets. If Alice sends a secret to Bob, she is now dependent on Bob's willingness to keep it. But if Bob wants to share Alice's secrets with Eve, there is no scheme possible that would allow Alice to tell Bob and not Eve.

The best Alice can possibly do is identify Bob as the person who told Eve the secret, and then visit him in the dead of night and beat the willingness out of him with a PEX tube full of sand.

And if Alice wants to do that, she has to use a watermarking scheme that is undetectable to both Bob and Eve, otherwise Bob can remove it before sending the secret on to Eve, or Eve can strip it out as she gets it from Bob. You see the problem, here, since the whole reason Alice is doing this is because she has some difficulty keeping secrets. She is essentially hiding a steganographic message to herself inside her message to Bob, such that if she can detect it in any message from Eve to anyone else, she knows to pay Bob an angry visit.

Alice's real problem is that she's an abusive, crazy, dramatic, jealous stalker, to the point where Bob would usually rather deal with the shady, disreputable Eve than with her. As a result, Alice's schemes are often the figurative equivalent of "Bob, unlock your phone so I can read your mail, texts, and tweets," and sometimes even literally that exact thing.

Its odd that DRM had existed since the Apple //e days. I remember returning EA's "Seven Cities of Gold" because it wouldn't load right because the protection was so exacting it just wouldn't run on some machines. Twice it went back, I gave up playing that game. So annoying.

Then came the hackers who cracked games (and put banners up on game load..), copy tools to get around the copy protection. Locksmith was one I remember. My friend had a card with a button that would dump memory (machines only had 64Kbytes or 128) to disk, perfect for copying those games that loaded completely into memory and didn't go back to disk. You needed the card reload and play the games though.

I think some of those games survive in this era thanks to those crackers.

While some are fun to replay and important in context, The memory of those games is sometimes better than the reality. Though I miss mind-strike for intellivision though. Haven't seen anything like it.

>I think some of those games survive in this era thanks to those crackers.

If I remember correctly, a decent number of the titles Jason has uploaded have cracktros because that's all that's left (or all that we have for the moment).

Another interesting thing is that he's working with a cracker to provide crack-diaries that explore the thought processes and actions taken to break the security on the original media.

Read more: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4630

Thanks for the link..

Interesting reads about the steps take to get those games working again.

I wish they made the descriptions more prominent. You have to click the "TEXT" link to get them. Great link.

The lengths they went through to get you not to copy disks...

https://ia801500.us.archive.org/29/items/Muppetville4amCrack...

> you always have the analogue loophole

Give it time. Most everything these days supports HDCP. Screens are being integrated with cameras.

HDCP + computer vision scanning of the room to ensure that only the licensed number of people (and no cameras) are present isn't that far off.

I don't think it will work, also because of self-interest (tragedy of the commons :)), but I'm sure they'll try.

Maybe, maybe not. Microsoft already has a patent on that.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121105/21564420943/micro...

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