Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

Only as long as it's really the user the computer is trusting, and not some other entity. Personally, I don't really like TPMs or any of the other "safe computing" technology. In theory (and this is what everyone usually refers to when they advocate it) they can help the user, but in practice they're almost always being used to do the opposite and the path to freedom is insecurity (e.g. jailbreaking, running homebrew software, etc.) As the saying goes, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is."

OTOH, I can't find details on exactly how this video stuff works

That's sort of the point of DRM in general - you're not supposed to know how it works, because then you would be in a much better position to break it. It's no surprise that the details would be kept secret, and other security technologies are likely being used for this purpose - e.g. DRM'd PDFs.

The issue with recommending suitable ARM chips is that there are so many different ones by all kinds of vendors following all kinds of philosophies. In fact it's the first time I heard of that particular chipset vendor.

I looked at the chip's specs: Like most current ARM CPUs it comes with TrustZone (including advertising for a "trusted video path"), so an important part to decide if that's an open system is to check what code is running in that mode, and if that can be disabled or replaced. The open sourced u-boot code might be able to give insights here.

The other thing is Mali graphics: those come with a closed source graphics driver. There's a reverse engineering project (lima), but they're relatively small and thus easily outperformed by chip vendors (release new iterations of the hardware every 6 months, and they'll never be able to support everything).

Sorry that I can't give detailed answers, but it's just too much to stay current with the entire ARM market.

But then I remind myself of this[0] and I realize we'd be probably fighting our own future. Our world is going downhill because it's too uncoordinated, not too coordinated.

We're in a really tough spot here.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

The relevant quote:

But coordination only works when you have 51% or more of the force on the side of the people doing the coordinating, and when you haven’t come up with some brilliant trick to make coordination impossible.

The second one first. In the links post before last, I wrote:

> The latest development in the brave new post-Bitcoin world is crypto-equity. At this point I’ve gone from wanting to praise these inventors as bold libertarian heroes to wanting to drag them in front of a blackboard and making them write a hundred times “I WILL NOT CALL UP THAT WHICH I CANNOT PUT DOWN”

A couple people asked me what I meant, and I didn’t have the background then to explain. Well, this post is the background. People are using the contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear incidents – we, as a civilization, are going to wish we hadn’t established untraceable and unstoppable ways of selling products.

But the problem is that those are very high-speed signals(1920x1080 24bpp at 60FPS is around 350MB/s+) that require suitable hardware to capture, basically uncompressed video, and recompression would introduce more artifacts than the original. That's why pirates don't usually go this route; the result is only slightly better than pointing a good camera at the screen.

The intel video driver on Linux is open-source. I am sure there would be forks disabling this functionality in case it would be implemented. I find it outrageous that there's software that disables a functionality like screenshot taking, that's malware to me. I own that framebuffer, not intel.