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"Big Brother Inside" for just a unique id? What should we say now about Intel Management Engine?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, in 1999 one of the dominant software distribution models was shareware where frequently applications would stop working after some amount of time and demand payment.
With subscription, even continuing to pay increasing amounts isn't a guarantee than the product will remain available once the vendor decides to cancel it. And, piracy isn't an option for developing countries where the software price is over a year's average wage.
"Big Brother Inside" for just a unique id? What should we say now about Intel Management Engine?
Every single iPhone and iPad transmits its hardware serial number to Apple when you launch the App Store app, or on first boot after restore for "activation".
Anyway, speaking of unique identifiers in mobile devices, mobile phones have had IMEIs for ages - pre-dates Apple by a long time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With subscription, even continuing to pay increasing amounts isn't a guarantee than the product will remain available once the vendor decides to cancel it. And, piracy isn't an option for developing countries where the software price is over a year's average wage.
It's never guaranteed, no matter what payment model. There is plenty of discontinued closed-source software from way before a subscription model became a thing that everyone does, and some of it managed to stay alive only thanks to piracy. With subscriptions it's way worse, because it has to rely on a central server, sometimes for no good reason at all, and you can't even do that. It's just bound to happen that the c…
I still remember a working Starcraft CD key (though it later turned out that something on the order of 01234566789 worked).
"Big Brother Inside" for just a unique id? What should we say now about Intel Management Engine?
> But didn't you say it'd help to prevent counterfeiting of chips? The stolen part I get, but did it used to be easier to counterfeit chips? There's a lot that goes into making something that looks like a PIII, and even then, I assume Intel had state-of-the-art fabs, so I'm surprised this was a concern. The hardware scams I've heard of stamping better specs on something, for hard drives, a firmware hack that makes it…
> Q: I've never heard of software "expiring." How is that possible? What a beautiful world that was
serial number Seems so quaint to think of that as a privacy concern.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
Further, over time, many authorities have to be repeatedly reminded that User-Agents with UUID's != the user themselves, and every attempt by technologists to cram more UUID on more and more closely held technology with more and more ubiquitous and trending toward always on data streams just makes this threat harder and harder to play down.
You don't need to serialize and track everything. We need to stop doing it. This is also why the systemd machine-id was a step in the wrong direction.
> But didn't you say it'd help to prevent counterfeiting of chips? The stolen part I get, but did it used to be easier to counterfeit chips? There's a lot that goes into making something that looks like a PIII, and even then, I assume Intel had state-of-the-art fabs, so I'm surprised this was a concern. The hardware scams I've heard of stamping better specs on something, for hard drives, a firmware hack that makes it…
> But didn't you say it'd help to prevent counterfeiting of chips? The stolen part I get, but did it used to be easier to counterfeit chips? There's a lot that goes into making something that looks like a PIII, and even then, I assume Intel had state-of-the-art fabs, so I'm surprised this was a concern. The hardware scams I've heard of stamping better specs on something, for hard drives, a firmware hack that makes it…