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Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

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Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#41

Post by throwawayaway »

pgeorgi wrote: post #16
Pyxl101 wrote: post #4

Are chips with this feature sold in consumer devices? I'm planning to buy a new computer soon. How can I avoid or boycott the chips in question? Or can the feature be definitively disabled through the BIOS? If I buy a computer, then I want to own it completely and not have arbitrary DRM bullshit remove capabilities. If I wish to take a screenshot of copyright content and share it with friends (fair use), then I shoul…

All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. There's a reason why the "reclaim your freedom" notebook is still a Lenovo X60. Some of them come with larger firmware (5MB, making up vPro and AMT), others with the smaller one (1.5MB) that merely does the DRM stuff, but all of them have the full hardware access detailled in the article. AMD is clean on the chipset side until kaveri/kabini. After that, the…

hello pgeorgi - you are a mine of information on this stuff. thanks for taking hte time to explain all of it!

can you tell me if the odroid c1 is a good bet?

http://www.cnx-software.com/2014/12/10/hardkernel-odroid-c1-...

The company will provide images for Ubuntu 14.04 or Android 4.4 KitKat with Linux 3.10. I think other people can port os's to it.

I think it's going to be my next computer!

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#42

Post by geon »

pbprabhuram wrote: post #15
mercurial wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely missed the point of the article. "Trusted computing" is back with a vengeance. The fact that your computer runs complex firmware (your coprocessor's firmware can run a webserver?) which bypasses anything above it is the problem. It means you don't own your computer anymore: your overlords grant you the right to use it under certain conditions.

Nope I did'nt that is one way to bypass the problem

The problem is that you don't own your computer. You can't bypass that with a camera.

Who cares about movie piracy? Copy protection has always been broken and will always be. It isn't a problem.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#43

Post by organsnyder »

jrockway wrote: post #38
stingraycharles wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad. And it's even more sad that the most computer illiterate, "honest" people are the most vulnerable to this strategy. People that want an honest way to watch movies have the most problems watching them.

Yes, this is truly the sad part of DRM: the people that actually pay for content are the ones whose experience is most degraded. Pirates don't have to buy monitors with HDCP. Pirates can watch their collection when the authorization servers are down. Pirates can back up their media. Pirates can take screenshots. (Though I've never had this particular problem even with "DRM'd" media on Linux.) The list goes on. The co…

The most egregious: Pirates can skip the FBI warning and previews.

We got a portable DVD player to add to our arsenal of distractions for our toddlers on long road trips. One of the DVDs we purchased—an Elmo sing-along—prohibits the viewer from skipping the five-minute donation plea that plays before the menu. This is especially frustrating because the kids will inevitably bump something requiring playback to be restarted (even with the button lock enabled, the disc door can still be opened) at least once an hour.

Whoever made the decision to set the "unskippable" flag on that track must have absolutely no familiarity with their customer base. For the vast majority of parents, I'm sure the effect is exactly the opposite of what they intended: if I was ever considering donating to Sesame Workshop, I'm certainly not anymore.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#44

Post by eeZi »

Audiophilip wrote: post #34
pgeorgi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. There's a reason why the "reclaim your freedom" notebook is still a Lenovo X60. Some of them come with larger firmware (5MB, making up vPro and AMT), others with the smaller one (1.5MB) that merely does the DRM stuff, but all of them have the full hardware access detailled in the article. AMD is clean on the chipset side until kaveri/kabini. After that, the…

@pgeorgi: >All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. Do you have sources for this? I wanted to verify it, but after a few Google searches I could not find anything that states exactly that. I have a Haswell CPU, but I have no Management Engine settings in my BIOS. How does the vPro feature correlate with the Management Engine? Because not all Intel CPU's come with vPro. Or is that only a firmware d…

It is part of the chipset and has other functions too (parts of the power management, for example).

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#45

Post by pgeorgi »

Audiophilip wrote: post #34
pgeorgi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. There's a reason why the "reclaim your freedom" notebook is still a Lenovo X60. Some of them come with larger firmware (5MB, making up vPro and AMT), others with the smaller one (1.5MB) that merely does the DRM stuff, but all of them have the full hardware access detailled in the article. AMD is clean on the chipset side until kaveri/kabini. After that, the…

@pgeorgi: >All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. Do you have sources for this? I wanted to verify it, but after a few Google searches I could not find anything that states exactly that. I have a Haswell CPU, but I have no Management Engine settings in my BIOS. How does the vPro feature correlate with the Management Engine? Because not all Intel CPU's come with vPro. Or is that only a firmware d…

My source is that I work on coreboot, where we have to interact with that stuff all the time. It's actually somewhat hidden in our haswell driver because so much is now binary-only on Intel platforms.

But look at http://review.coreboot.org/gitweb?p=coreboot.git;a=blob;f=sr... whose comments refer to both "ME" (the management engine) and "PAVP", which is the "Protected A/V Path" referred to in the article.

One sure way to figure it out is to get a full image of your firmware flash, and analyze it. coreboot has a tool called ifdtool which can parse the "intel firmware descriptor", which is kind of a partitioning scheme for flash - among other things, to make room for the ME firmware.

Sometimes board vendors have full images available for download that you could use for analysis, but these days they're often smaller, shipping only the changed parts. flashrom (www.flashrom.org) might be able to read out the chip on your running system, but on Intel platforms in particular, this is often restricted and you'd need to attach some external flash programmer to read it out and be sure.

I think it speaks volumes that you have to work around such things on your own hardware in the first place...

As far as I know, vPro only requires the larger firmware and the use of on-chipset hardware, in particular NIC and GPU, since the vPro firmware doesn't support external devices.

I don't know if that's just economics (no need to write drivers for tons of devices, no desire to support other vendors' hardware) or if the ME is too limited for that - but my guess is the former.

One way we (at coreboot) can test ME involvement is to corrupt the ME firmware with an external flasher (while leaving everything else intact) and see the system either not start at all, or reliably shut down after 30 minutes. The exact behaviour depends on some wiring on the board, I guess.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#46

Post by TeMPOraL »

juliendorra wrote: post #29

Just a note on the discourse: the point "I own it, I should be able to use it the way I want" feels like not really effective (as a rhetoric) in many part of the western world and in many social circles. I really feel for example in France it would be easily brushed off using analogy to construction permits or driver licenses, or just put the person in some crazy-libertarian box ("the kind that want to print firearms…

Maybe stress that the computer is a creative tool and should not have artificial limits put in place? Compare this to a hammer and imagine that one weekend you wanted to finish that cupboard you're building in your garage, but your hammer starts throwing exceptions because your nails are not Apple iNails or otherwise MAFIAA-certified ones. "How dare you buy generic nails in a mom&pop shop around the corner?"

General-purpose computer is a tool that should be able to execute arbitrary code its users want to. I think Cory Doctorow summed it up the best: http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#47

Post by DanBC »

juliendorra wrote: post #29

Just a note on the discourse: the point "I own it, I should be able to use it the way I want" feels like not really effective (as a rhetoric) in many part of the western world and in many social circles. I really feel for example in France it would be easily brushed off using analogy to construction permits or driver licenses, or just put the person in some crazy-libertarian box ("the kind that want to print firearms…

Europe has strong consumer protection rights.

The angle to take is that media is sold misleadingly. When I buy a DVD / Bluray I am paying for a physical disc and a licence to use the contents of the disc. That licence is restrictive and restricts my rights more than law. Thus, I am not allowed to extract a short extract to use in an educational setting (fair dealings; fair use). Packaging and marketing of DVD / Bluray is unclear about this and gives the impression that you are "buying a movie", not buying some plastic and a licence.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#48

Post by roghummal »

jrockway wrote: post #38
stingraycharles wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad. And it's even more sad that the most computer illiterate, "honest" people are the most vulnerable to this strategy. People that want an honest way to watch movies have the most problems watching them.

Yes, this is truly the sad part of DRM: the people that actually pay for content are the ones whose experience is most degraded. Pirates don't have to buy monitors with HDCP. Pirates can watch their collection when the authorization servers are down. Pirates can back up their media. Pirates can take screenshots. (Though I've never had this particular problem even with "DRM'd" media on Linux.) The list goes on. The co…

Example: If you rented "The Interview" on Google's video service (in HD) and played it back on a software/hardware stack that didn't have the latest DRM(1), you were limited to SD.

You paid for HD. You got SD.

Of course, you could go pirate a full HD copy of the movie and play it back anywhere. The effectiveness of these inconveniences is overwhelming.

(1) I'm not positive it was even possible to redeem an HD rental in HD. I don't know anyone that didn't get forced to play in SD.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#49

Post by userbinator »

organsnyder wrote: post #43
jrockway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is truly the sad part of DRM: the people that actually pay for content are the ones whose experience is most degraded. Pirates don't have to buy monitors with HDCP. Pirates can watch their collection when the authorization servers are down. Pirates can back up their media. Pirates can take screenshots. (Though I've never had this particular problem even with "DRM'd" media on Linux.) The list goes on. The co…

The most egregious: Pirates can skip the FBI warning and previews. We got a portable DVD player to add to our arsenal of distractions for our toddlers on long road trips. One of the DVDs we purchased—an Elmo sing-along—prohibits the viewer from skipping the five-minute donation plea that plays before the menu. This is especially frustrating because the kids will inevitably bump something requiring playback to be rest…

The problems with DVD DRM are nicely summed up by this rather popular image: http://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#50

Post by Corrado »

hrrsn wrote: post #18
Pyxl101 wrote: post #4

Are chips with this feature sold in consumer devices? I'm planning to buy a new computer soon. How can I avoid or boycott the chips in question? Or can the feature be definitively disabled through the BIOS? If I buy a computer, then I want to own it completely and not have arbitrary DRM bullshit remove capabilities. If I wish to take a screenshot of copyright content and share it with friends (fair use), then I shoul…

Yes. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro 15" Retina and as described in the article, the chip & driver are present in my machine. $ ioreg|grep AppleIntelMEI | | | | +-o AppleIntelMEIDriver

My mid 2010 MacBook Pro 17" machine does not have the chip & driver (at least ioreg doesn't report anything). Just another data point.
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