That's the same pie-in-the-sky "what if" that loser corps have been pursuing forever.
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.
> "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."
Evidently you either simply didn't read or understand my proposal, and you mistakenly believe I am writing in support of corporations using DRM against individuals. That is the complete opposite of the truth.
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."
"Digital Rights Management" -- you know, words mean something. If it's digital, and it's used to manage rights to that digital information, then it applies. Also, if you had a clue to the academic and research origins of DRM, you'd know it's also "trusted execution." DRM as you are aware of it in the hands of Sony et al is just one single application of DRM/trusted execution. Just like HTML is just one application of the more general SGML or the abstract notion of markup languages in general.
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.
> "Digital Rights Management" -- you know, words mean something.
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).
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.
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.