Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

weeraman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 168 posts

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#11

Post by aftbit »

The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site.

As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it legally.

What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#12

Post by belinder »

aftbit wrote: post #11

The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site. As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it…

Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#13

Post by [deleted] »

belinder wrote: post #12
aftbit wrote: post #11

The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site. As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it…

Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.

[deleted]

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#14

Post by ACCount37 »

belinder wrote: post #12
aftbit wrote: post #11

The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site. As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it…

Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.

The point is: DRM is circumvented once, by some grizzled pirate captain. Everyone else just gets to plunder their downloads DRM free, nice and easy.

DRM is ineffective because the pirate uploaders are competent enough to break it, and an average end user only downloads - rank and file pirates wouldn't make their own releases even if DRM never existed and making them was easy.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#15

Post by ACCount37 »

IshKebab wrote: post #5

Yeah this persuaded me more than I thought it would, but there are still some pretty big differences IMO. A frontier AI model is a lot harder and more costly to produce than an encryption algorithm. Especially if we believe Anthropic that the Chinese can only do it by distilling their models (though tbh I would err on the side of not believing that).

RSA algorithm you can print on a shirt - and that would give you encryption that works as well as it possibly can. There's no "RSA 6.7 Turbo Pro EncryptingPlus" that would give you something radically new that the "t-shirt RSA" can't.

LLMs are massive, complex, and a moving target. Making them is hard, and there's no "we're done" there - the frontier updates every few months. It's easy to get and run a 2B model locally, but what concerns people isn't a cheap end device 2B - it's the 10T RLVR-fried monsters that frontier labs play with nowadays.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#16

Post by Cider9986 »

belinder wrote: post #12
aftbit wrote: post #11

The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site. As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it…

Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.

But why would this larger percentage of people rip it themselves when the hardcore pirate already did it and made it accessible[1]?

[1] https://fmhy.net/video#streaming-sites

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#17

Post by starrybreak »

aftbit wrote: post #11

The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site. As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it…

Users hate it, but DRM is vastly more powerful than that since you ultimately control user access.

DRM - which all online services with user profiling automatically have - can also let you ban users, retarget users for ads, abuse, and other things beyond the basic function of running the software.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#18

Post by inigyou »

belinder wrote: post #12
aftbit wrote: post #11

The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site. As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it…

Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.

But it is easy to get the thing for free, because the free one doesn't have DRM.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#19

Post by Cider9986 »

Apparently we are still fighting for secure communication through cryptography [1].

Other issue that doesn't get enough attention on HN is the criminalization of writing code. Probably because it was cryptocurrency applications. First they come for the people you disagree with. Just like they first came for porn sites, and now Wikipedia is being monitored.

[1] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

Post reply on HN