On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, Bryan Murdock wrote: > > It's an entirely different ballpark, Bryan. With Security (whether with > > cars or computers) you _don't_ want people without the "key" to be able to > > get in. So you make the strength of the lock directly proportional to the > > amount that others want to get in. (Which is why in South Africa, it's a > > lot harder to break into a car.) > > But you do want someone to see it, even if it's only yourself, and > that's why it's exactly why the same principles apply. Otherwise you'd > just rip out your computer's power supply and weld your car doors shut.
But you don't want the "enemy" to see it, hence the same principles do not apply. If I have a "secure" computer on the Internet, to access it I need a key of some sort, or a bug in the software to exploit. If have a DRM'd piece of software that _I_ can view, I don't need either of those two--I can view it by default. > Let's take an e-book for an example. Let's say some company, lets call > them Clay, starts selling e-books with DRM meant only for Palm pilots. > Joe Nongeek buys the latest Stephen King thriller e-book and decides > he'd like to make a copy for his friend. Is the DRM going to deter > him? Aboslutely. What's he going to do, take a picture of his palm for > every page of the book? Maybe he'll re-type the whole thing himself? > Probably not, so here you go, DRM has worked for Clay, and that is why > it'll work good enough for most everyone. In this case, we're talking about deterrence. That will only work so long as the book is not popular enough for _one_ single person to retype the whole thing (assuming no other flaws in the program (such as turning the e-book to text at any point, leaving the Palm's RAM available for dumping), and assuming all software is closed-source). Once _one_ person has typed up the whole thing (or used a scanner to automatically scan every page, and OCR each page--I can easily imagine setting up something to automatically do that) then the information is "free" and easily copyable throughout the world. I concede the point that DRM will work as a deterrent--see Apple's iTunes Music Store, for example. But not a very significant one--a simple password on a web page might prevent someone accessing it for days, weeks, or months ... but the best DRM is broken with analog tools in less than a day. So the question was, what sort of DRM can be "good" in the future? If all you're looking for is simple deterrence, I think you've got it right now. You're not going to get anything much better than what we've already got. ~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
