On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, Andrew Jorgensen wrote: > > The only possible way to do this is to have a completely unbroken chain of > > closed, DRM'd technology all the way up to the display. But even then, > > you run the risk of (a) reverse engineering, and (b) I can still take a > > photograph of the screen, if it's that important. (And if it were the sort > > of situation as at Los Alamos, it would be that important.) > > I disagree with the part about closed technology. Closed technology (as > has been said many times before) is only closed until someone breaks it > open. But think about that. Is OpenSSH any less secure because it's > open? Is GPG? Why should DRM be any different? It's ultimately the same > problem. Maybe we just don't have the right math yet.
Again, it's this simple confusion between the idea of Security and DRM. The reason why OpenSSH and GPG were theoretically possible, even before we came up with the fancy math, is because you're trying to keep somebody out. With DRM, you have to let the very person you distrust _in_ to the system. Try this thought experiment: you come up with any hypothetical DRM system for an open-source system. This system is _always_ going to have to display somewhere--to the screen, to my speakers, wherever. Then I can _always_ redirect that display, that output, to somewhere recordable so I can play it back again at my leisure (and copy it to others as well). The only way around it is for the software (and hardware, too, eventually) to disable redirection--disable the "Print Screen" key, or copy-paste, or the sound card's record function. [And as I mentioned before, as long as tape recorders and cameras are available, even at the hardware level you're stuck.] And maybe it's just me, but I cannot for the life of me think of anything that can disable redirection in open-source software to be done in a way that cannot be trivially undone. Do I have any challengers? Tell me your hypothetical system, and I'll tell you the trivial way to break it. Thank you, have a nice day, drive through :-) ~ ross -- This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter. ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
