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US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

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Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#261

Post by ryall »

galbsadi wrote: post #245
run4yourlives wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Season 3 isn't out on itunes in Canada at all yet. The only way for me to watch Season 3 is to subscribe to the $100/month + $20/month cable package that carries HBO. I've not bothered to pirate it, yet.

There's a way to trick your iTunes into thinking you're not in Canada. All you need is a second account and a gift card situated in the US. (I've seen people in the US use this trick in reverse to get BBC shows in America without pirating them.) Granted, it's retarded (and potentially still illegal) that people should have to do this in order to pay for content rather than pirate...but the option is there.

Seems like a lot of effort to pay people that seem to go out of their way to stop you from buying their merchandise

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#262

Post by vidarh »

regularfry wrote: post #232
vidarh wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is possible that they find holes, but I consider the odds that they will find holes like that early enough that countermeasures won't already be deployed in a situation where people have come to expect destructive actions from their software on a regular basis to be quite unlikely. Also OS level virtualization is not the only protection worth using in a scenario like this. Sandboxing at the syscall level…

> Of course it is possible that they find holes, but I consider the odds that they will find holes like that early enough that countermeasures won't already be deployed in a situation where people have come to expect destructive actions from their software on a regular basis to be quite unlikely. That's incredibly optimistic.

How so? People will be expecting their software to contain rootkits, and so there will be tons of people immediately analyzing any new releases.

Given that already when I last bothered with pirated software in the early 90's, serious warez traders were mostly only interested in software weeks before its scheduled release (it was not uncommon for unfinished versions of games to leak), which involved not just getting hold of the releases through leaks or hacking, but breaking any protection, and this would make up the first serious challenge for the warez scene in many years, and this will draw not just the warez scene, but security researchers, as well as a lot of "regular" developers like me who are fed up with these kinds of attempts, they are facing pretty much an army that will be dissecting every release.

Sure, some will slip through for some users, but every single instance will result in new counter-measures, many of which you can expect will cover as-yet undiscovered flaws in addition to just fixing specific issues.

E.g. a logical protection against attempts at attacking faulty filesystem permissions settings is to blanket ban access to the filesystem and whitelist specific files, specific directories, and sanity check all access to them.

For every loss, we will win more robust application sandboxing capabilities, and more people will be motivated to consistently make use of them.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#263

Post by DanBC »

vidarh wrote: post #262
regularfry wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course it is possible that they find holes, but I consider the odds that they will find holes like that early enough that countermeasures won't already be deployed in a situation where people have come to expect destructive actions from their software on a regular basis to be quite unlikely. That's incredibly optimistic.

How so? People will be expecting their software to contain rootkits, and so there will be tons of people immediately analyzing any new releases. Given that already when I last bothered with pirated software in the early 90's, serious warez traders were mostly only interested in software weeks before its scheduled release (it was not uncommon for unfinished versions of games to leak), which involved not just getting h…

I understand what you're saying, but so far Nintendo 3DS doesn't have any way of playing pirated 3DS games. (DS games are playable on a 3DS now). XBOX360 has some cracks, but these are complicated. Too complex for most people to bother with. PS3 is also too complex for most people. (I think, I haven't really looked hard for this.) I think even PS2 isn't trivial, although I could be wrong and I welcome corrections.

It bothers me. I'm probably wrong, but it feels like we have a bunch of sub-optimal OSs that have security kludged in as an after-thought, built on legacy hampered hardware, with a lot of concentration on "preventing people playing illegal content" (but also strictly controlling what people do with their legal content). There's a kind of arms race with pirates and anti-pirates competing on DRM schemes, and it feels like if all that effort had gone into better directions that we'd have 24 cores at 3.5 GHz and better threading with decent nice architecture.

And I know it's just marketing, and that washing powder (Whiter than white!) has been doing it for years, but being told that my content (which was sold to me as best quality available last time) is now being called garbage and I'm told I need to upgrade. In the past I didn't need to upgrade. I could keep my record deck and buy a CD player and rip those CDs to digital for my streaming media player. But in the future this is not going to be allowed. I'm going to have to buy an extra licence for family use.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#264

Post by run4yourlives »

galbsadi wrote: post #245
run4yourlives wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Season 3 isn't out on itunes in Canada at all yet. The only way for me to watch Season 3 is to subscribe to the $100/month + $20/month cable package that carries HBO. I've not bothered to pirate it, yet.

There's a way to trick your iTunes into thinking you're not in Canada. All you need is a second account and a gift card situated in the US. (I've seen people in the US use this trick in reverse to get BBC shows in America without pirating them.) Granted, it's retarded (and potentially still illegal) that people should have to do this in order to pay for content rather than pirate...but the option is there.

I'm not setting up umpteen different itunes accounts to try to give you my money. The whole point of paying for something is that I provide the money in exchange for the product. Why should I jump through hoops in addition to that?

There are easier options if I care. But to be honest, right now I don't.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#265

Post by pasbesoin »

All this requires money to accomplish. (Lobbying, development, bribes, etc.)

I, for one, have begun to make efforts to -- legally -- contribute as little as possible to the bottom lines of these organizations.

Put it this way: I look at "Hollywood", and I see bunch of prima donnas (admittedly, amidst a sea of workaday "nonames") who want to root my system.

I'm significantly less inclined to purchase their wares, every time I'm reminded of this.

Then I go outside, and discover I've better things to do with my time, anyway.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#266

Post by vxNsr »

hfsktr wrote: post #225
vxNsr wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually just read a book set in 2040 England where this basically happened, they'd created a system where if you tried to remove the hardware the CPU would be dissolved. The book was called "Pirate [something]" I can't remember the exact name but it had pirate in it...

The best I could do after a lot of searching (lots of books with pirate in the title): http://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Cinema-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765329... Your description sounds good. This book doesn't sound that good but it is future England, has to do with computers has pirate in the title.

That's it!

The book is okay, I was kinda surprised at how good he was at keeping the tech believable... still he mostly failed as authors who know little about tech do

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#267

Post by Torgo »

jacquesm wrote: post #129
obviouslygreen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your answer is Stallman ? Yes, he is a nut. In the sense of "no one will ever take him seriously, especially anyone involved in mainstream decision-making, who has ever read anything he has written," which is in this case the most relevant metric. Stallman is never going to be any help here, nor is anyone like him, because any "normal" person -- that is, one that other people won't ignore out of hand -- will igno…

Stallman is not a nut. Try finding one other nut that has so consistently foretold the future.

Being right is no defense. "you're a nut, that will never happen." "you're a nut, that's not what's happening." and finally "you're a nut. why does what's happening bother you so much?"

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#268

Post by vy8vWJlco »

kunai wrote: post #67
vy8vWJlco wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't even know what to do anymore." Code. People use Skype because there's no clear alternative (maybe work on Jitsi... It still needs a server for the good stuff). People use Facebook because there's no alternative (maybe work on RetroShare). People let their government tell them what to do because they think it's better than anarchy (maybe work on a political Kickstarter). Copyright enforcement against BitTorre…

I love to write software, but unfortunately, I don't think that will solve the problem at hand, which is the MPAA's DRM lobby. They have millions and millions of dollars' worth of support behind them. What's a few hundred hackers to a huge industry? If we want to really make a difference, we need all the support we can get. Perhaps even start an organization to lobby against the MPAA/RIAA similar to what sinak has do…

Ideally, IMHO, copyright would be non-transferable.
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