About Gilmore's letter on IBM&Intel push copy protection into ordinary disk drives
I'm glad that John spent the time and energy to write a good summary of what is going on in the hard disk area. He's spot on about the dangers to our liberties. But I was quite worried until I began to see the dangers for IBM and Intel in the scheme. This is not an easy play for them because it threatens much of the entire industry in these ways: 1) This is going to increase the cost of using PCs dramatically. Hard disk crashes are going to go from major disasters to utter catastrophes. When the disks go bad, you'll need to buy all new copies of the software, images, movies, and what not. Backing up? Well, that will be another headache that won't be possible without the right permissions. They can wave their hands, but there's no getting around the fact that installing software is going to have plenty of new red tape. I don't see how they will be able to distinguish between the truth and a lie when a guy calls up and say, "uh, my hard disk crashed. I need to install it on a new machine." They either authorize it or they don't. In fact, they'll probably have to automate the process because it's so expensive to have an actual human on the other end. My mean time between hard disk failures is about 2 years, but I'm a heavy user. Can we really afford to create a new class of technicians who do special hard disk replacement for 20% of America each year? 2) This really changes the nature of the business. Right now the PC and software manufacturers sell you a box, wave good bye and say, "Good luck." Support is a joke. Actually fixing the machines costs too much money. Anything worth under $400 is essentially disposable. If they put trusted hard disks in place, then there needs to be someone to care for these disks. They can't just keep waving good bye when you walk out the door. The business model needs to change to be something like cable television. That means hiring thousands if not millions of technicians who will come to your house and fix your hard drive. 3) This is really going to slow innovation and that's really going to hurt IBM and Intel. Already the hardware guys depend heavily on upgrades to keep people buying machines. If people can't move their software to a new zippier computer, then they're not going to buy a new zippier computer. Take a look at the cable television world. Most people are still using 1970's era technology. It just takes too long for the service technicians to go to each house and replace things. But that's the only way you can run the world when you have trusted corrals for special data. You can't just let any schmoe upgrade their hard disk or any schmoe is going to be able to pirate Hollywood movies. Gosh, that's all us proles do all day long you know. Pirate content. 4) This is another opportunity for the open source community to come in and steal market share. If the press reports in Slashdot and other places are to believed, it was only a few months ago that Microsoft marched into the offices at Virginia Beach and asked them to produce the certificates for their copies of Windows. You know, those neat hologram embossed slips of paper. They didn't have one for each PC so they had to pay more than $121,000. (http://slashdot.org/articles/00/12/01/0532206.shtml) This is another opportunity for Red Hat or some other Linux box company to walk into companies and say, "Use Red Hat, Mozilla, and Star Office and you'll never have license problems again. The hardware guys claim that they can take care of rights management issues for you. So can we and we cost alot less." I think this may be the greatest thing that's come along for open source OSs yet. As Princess Leia said in the Hollywood content "Star Wars", "The harder you squeeze your fingers Vader, the more planets slip through the fingers." Do those content wrangling lawyers down there ever look at the content they protect? -- -------------------------- Tune to http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for information on my book on Free Software.
At 10:19 AM 12/22/00 -0500, Peter Wayner wrote:
I don't see how they will be able to distinguish between the truth and a lie when a guy calls up and say, "uh, my hard disk crashed. I need to install it on a new machine." They either authorize it or they don't. In fact, they'll probably have to automate the process because it's so expensive to have an actual human on the other end.
Just a historical anecdote. Back in the old days, software could be linked to the unique ID on Sun motherboards. To move software to a new machine, you called and maybe faxed something signed (with a pen) to the effect that you weren't ripping them off. This was before the software-based floating licenses became popular. dh
On Sat, Dec 23, 2000 at 07:04:17PM -0800, David Honig wrote:
At 10:19 AM 12/22/00 -0500, Peter Wayner wrote:
I don't see how they will be able to distinguish between the truth and a lie when a guy calls up and say, "uh, my hard disk crashed. I need to install it on a new machine." They either authorize it or they don't. In fact, they'll probably have to automate the process because it's so expensive to have an actual human on the other end.
Just a historical anecdote. Back in the old days, software could be linked to the unique ID on Sun motherboards. To move software to a new machine, you called and maybe faxed something signed (with a pen) to the effect that you weren't ripping them off.
This was before the software-based floating licenses became popular.
A note on this note - I was told back in that era by Sun field service people that the standard thing to do when a motherboard failed was to swap the ID prom from the old motherboard onto the new one, thus avoiding the whole license conversion problem in the first place (but of course also doing wonders for the ability to track specific pieces of hardware and document ECO levels and the like, since a significant number of motherboards had swapped ID proms in which all the other information in the prom didn't match the actual board). Unfortunately, if the secret disk serial number hashed with the authentication domain key to generate the actual encryption key for the data is not readable or writable by the user this trick will not work for restoring bad disks. And if it did, it is not clear that the overall secure disk system could serve its purpose of protecting copyright.
dh
-- Dave Emery N1PRE, die@die.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18
Peter Wayner wrote:
But I was quite worried until I began to see the dangers for IBM and Intel in the scheme. This is not an easy play for them because it threatens much of the entire industry in these ways:
You've answered it yourself in the last two paragraphs. Screw IBM, screw Intel. In order for this nonsense to work, the operating system has to support it. You can bet Linux, and *BSD won't support it, or if they do, they'll provide the "extra" access needed. More and more I find, I need less Microsoft software*. Even at work where it's a mostly Microsoft shop and the standard desktop is W2K. GUID's, CPU Serial numbers, and now hard drives. That's ok, this will wind up killing Intel, and hard drive manufacturers that insist on this. Many like us, won't buy the shit. We'll buy hardware without serial numbers, or at least those whose serial numbers can be overwritten. i.e. SPARC's, Mac's, etc. and we'll be running *BSD/Linux. * Anecdotal: I've recently purchased a home entertainment PC as a replacement for my DVD player and CD changers, etc from qbex.com. It's basically a small PC in a very small form factor. If I ever get my hands on a good Linux based DVD player, I'll use that. (I guess I haven't yet been trolling the DivX stuff as I've had no need for it yet.) It pisses me off that the DVD player tells me that after five more plays, it will lock itself to "Region 1" and that while I have both VGA and RCA+SVIDEO out, that it would refuse to play on any RCA/SVIDEO hardware that doesn't have Macrovision. This is insane. Anyone can build such a Home Entertainment PC as the QBEX simply by purchasing an infrared keyboard+mouse and a VGA to RCA scan converter and likely get much better output... I bought this piece of shit simply because it already had all the drivers and pieces in one box. All I have to say is this: you bastards! Copyright protection is getting out of hand when it gets in my way. I've paid for the DVD's. I've paid for the player software. I've paid for the hardware. How dare they tell me how I may use it so long as I don't make copies other than backups? So what if I buy a perfectly legitimate DVD from a different country? I should be able to watch it without going through acrobatics! So what if I back up my legally purchased DVD's to VHS tape so I can watch it where I don't have a DVD player, or on my camcorder? So what if I can copy the raw bits off the DVD platter for backup incase I scratch it? When was the last time you saw a movie house offer to replace damaged media for nominal cost? (i.e. you've damaged accidentally, or your kid decided to use as a frisbie, or your dog as a chew toy?) So what if I hook up the VIDEO out signal of the DVD player or PC to a 2GHz transmitter so I can watch it in my bedroom instead of my living room? So what if I can have ten friends come over with beer and popcorn to watch a movie I purchased? So what if I chose to let a friend borrow my DVD's or if I borrow theirs?
This is another opportunity for Red Hat or some other Linux box company to walk into companies and say, "Use Red Hat, Mozilla, and Star Office and you'll never have license problems again. The hardware guys claim that they can take care of rights management issues for you. So can we and we cost alot less."
I think this may be the greatest thing that's come along for open source OSs yet. As Princess Leia said in the Hollywood content "Star Wars", "The harder you squeeze your fingers Vader, the more planets slip through the fingers." Do those content wrangling lawyers down there ever look at the content they protect?
-- ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :Surveillance cameras|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :aren't security. A |share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:camera won't stop a |monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :masked killer, but |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :will violate privacy|site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------
participants (4)
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