The wedge used to drive home even more draconian privacy infringement like the Intel Management Engine.
Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
#32Common to have unique SN in a processor. Let the SW vendors do copy protection too. E.g. at Sonos we used them to associate with the software signed certificate such that you couldn't run a given Players software on another Player without the same SN. When making products via contract manufactures, especially in China, it was a wise procedure.
That is glorious and horrifying. Sounds like it protects your business from counterfeits and hobby hackers at the same time :)
Also, I have a Sonos system and it works great!
Re: Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
#33Yes, and he seems to be there to stay. :(
Re: Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
#34> Q: I've never heard of software "expiring." How is that possible? What a beautiful world that was
In many ways, all of the predictions made at the time in replies to articles like this have come true. Everyone is spying on us constantly; legitimate end-users are absolutely peeved off / made to suffer SaaS and activation crap, and the pirates do just continue exactly as before (albeit with a nice, NSA-provided open-source RE environment to play in...)
I logged in just to upvote this comment. Well put.
Re: Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
serial number Seems so quaint to think of that as a privacy concern.
I look back over the last 22 years, and we had very different attitudes towards privacy back then. It's sad to think that almost 2 generations are now growing up without knowing what privacy was, or how much actual freedom there was in being a free range kid with the only obligation being home for supper. We overestimate the change over the course of a year, but seriously underestimate it over a couple of decades.
22 years ago the vast majority of communications were either unencrypted or, if you had a fancy mobile phone, encrypted using weak, ITAR-compliant ciphers. Encryption on the Internet was for e-commerce sites with the budgets for the extra hardware, certification, and compliance needed for SSL, and the protocol was also kneecaped by ITAR outside of the US. Hell, even early DRM systems were laughably easy to break because of export-grade encryption (see DVD CSS).
The primary privacy protection for communications in 1999 was legal, not technical:
1. Police needed a warrant to listen on your communications (or, if they only wanted to know who you were calling, no warrant was needed)
2. Private wiretapping would land you in jail, and required covert access to someone's house, making it riskier to pull off
3. Analog telephone systems (already out-of-date) were entirely protected by a law that made it illegal to provide consumer-grade equipment that could be easily modified to tune to 800mhz. This is still law today, despite the frequencies being unused for analog, and is a thorn in the side of amateur radio.
This could be summed up as "we promise not to spy on you if you promise not to resist us if we change our mind".
An interesting expression of this idea happened with the whole NSA Clipper Chip debacle. Effectively, the US government wanted to move from unencrypted everything to key-escrow encryption, where private citizens would be technically prevented from wiretapping your phones, but law enforcement could still do so. It failed so hard that the US government just stopped regulating crypto export and the NSA retreated to slipping vulnerabilities in crypto standards (e.g. Dual_EC_DRBG, TLS Extended Random).
The actual legal protections I mentioned above melted away under the heat of the War on Terror. The US government adopted a classified interpretation of wiretapping law that boiled down to "if we aren't listening, we haven't spied on you". Effectively, the NSA would wiretap everything and store it securely, and then once they had legal justification to actually wiretap you, they'd open up what they had already recorded. In theory, this is just turning a wiretap order into one issued about 30 days ago. In practice, the "legal justification" part was someone filling out a form in XKeyscore and clicking a button, with no further verification in the vast majority of cases.
It was only after much of this leaked - twice, I might add - that people outside of encryption enthusiast communities actually started taking technical privacy protections seriously. Things like end-to-end encrypted messaging, Let's Encrypt, and efficient cipher implementations that actually made encrypting everything useful are things that people in 1999 could only dream of (except for the above-mentioned cypherpunks). On the other hand, all of this extra security is fundamentally reactionary. We would not be encrypting the whole web were it not for certain Nation-State Actors abandoning their already-flimsy legal protections and going for full-take.
Of course, none of that matters when you were just going to self-surveil and post everything you do to Facebook anyway. But that isn't really all that new. People have always been bad at keeping secrets, advertisers have always been spying on you (before the Internet), and there's hundreds of years of legal precedent concerning when, where, and how much privacy you lose when you open your mouth or go out in public. If there is a difference between the 90s and today, it's that today's technology makes you a lot more aware of when your privacy has been violated. Target may know when you're pregnant before your father does, but Facebook will brag about it to you.
Re: Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure I remember Sun compilers, Veritas Volume Manager, and several other pieces of software having license keys that expired in the 1990's. Several of them used something called FlexLM.
Flexlm is alive and kicking. All of thr EDA software I use daily is protected by it. Its so archaic I can only assume its been broken seven ways from Sunday, but its still there. Id be interested to know if anyone here knows why it's the de facto standard for on premises software licencing.
The reason it became de-facto was it had bindings to C/C++/Java (what most commercial software was written in from the 90s onwards) and worked on all main platforms (including most Unixes). There wasn't much else which provided that in the 90s, early 2000s.
RLM is a slightly more modern alternative to FlexLM which some software has moved to over the past 10 years from FlexLM.
Re: Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
#37Common to have unique SN in a processor. Let the SW vendors do copy protection too. E.g. at Sonos we used them to associate with the software signed certificate such that you couldn't run a given Players software on another Player without the same SN. When making products via contract manufactures, especially in China, it was a wise procedure.
That is glorious and horrifying. Sounds like it protects your business from counterfeits and hobby hackers at the same time :) Also, I have a Sonos system and it works great!
Horrifying should indeed be the reaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086
Re: Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I look back over the last 22 years, and we had very different attitudes towards privacy back then. It's sad to think that almost 2 generations are now growing up without knowing what privacy was, or how much actual freedom there was in being a free range kid with the only obligation being home for supper. We overestimate the change over the course of a year, but seriously underestimate it over a couple of decades.
22 years ago the vast majority of communications were either unencrypted or, if you had a fancy mobile phone, encrypted using weak, ITAR-compliant ciphers. Encryption on the Internet was for e-commerce sites with the budgets for the extra hardware, certification, and compliance needed for SSL, and the protocol was also kneecaped by ITAR outside of the US. Hell, even early DRM systems were laughably easy to break beca…
> 2. Private wiretapping would land you in jail, and required covert access to someone's house, making it riskier to pull off
Or people could just access the pole outside the house, or the cab on the street.
Re: Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
#39> Q: I've never heard of software "expiring." How is that possible? What a beautiful world that was
In many ways, all of the predictions made at the time in replies to articles like this have come true. Everyone is spying on us constantly; legitimate end-users are absolutely peeved off / made to suffer SaaS and activation crap, and the pirates do just continue exactly as before (albeit with a nice, NSA-provided open-source RE environment to play in...)
>albeit with a nice, NSA-provided open-source RE environment to play in.
Absolute game changer for reverse engineering. It was like leveling up three levels instantly.
Re: Intel PIII: Is Big Brother Inside? (1999)
#40> Q: I've never heard of software "expiring." How is that possible? What a beautiful world that was
The World of Open Source, without that enterprise software subscription/licensing per core model flavours corporations can account for and personally I feel with a slight tongue-in-cheek, is a product of accountants came before programmers.
Or home users, in which software doesn't expire, just updates and support does. More a terminology aspect in that way.
Today more things are subscription level, but mostly for content to drive that software.