Intel Adds DRM to New Chips 673
Badluck writes "Microsoft and the entertainment industry's holy grail of controlling copyright through the motherboard has moved a step closer with Intel Corp. now embedding digital rights management within in its latest dual-core processor Pentium D and accompanying 945 chipset.
Officially launched worldwide on the May 26, the new offerings come DRM -enabled and will, at least in theory, allow copyright holders to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard rather than through the operating system as is currently the case..." The Inquirer has the story as well.
But what about consoles (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bye Bye Intel (Score:2, Interesting)
I know I will be sticking with AMD....
Umm... AMD is part of Trusted Computing Group [windowsfordevices.com].
retrocompatibility? (Score:5, Interesting)
fun for hackers (Score:5, Interesting)
lots of fun to be had with this I think..
Re:Bye Bye Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
Read it (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not only talking about on-chip DRM, they're also talking about a "feature" called Active Management Technology in their new chipsets.
By the sounds of it, it's a firmware-level mini-OS that allows an administrator (or presumably anyone with the password, or the appropriate exploit) to, and I quote:
"remotely enable, disable or format or configure individual drives and reload operating systems and software from remote locations, again independent of operating systems
Frankly, that worries me quite a bit more than the DRM.
Bad Step (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:AMD position? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe buy a little cabin and become a fisherman. Fuck the technology industry. The "content moguls" have fucking ruined it for everyone with their whining control-freakery.
I hope they dig their own graves with this one.
I still think.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I still think it might be possible to defeat this with an emulator.
Re:Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
So what will this do to Intel sales in China? (Score:3, Interesting)
And is it just China? Don't a number of other countries have similar policies? This seems like it could have serious implications for Intel's global position. The US market is big, but it's not necessarily where the PC growth is coming from over the next few decades.
Re:Sales. (Score:3, Interesting)
What makes AMD so useful if they wouldn't support DRM, even for people hating it? It's not like not supporting DRM = ways to bypass DRM. To AMD boards not supporting this, a DRM'ed file will then just look like a blob of heavily encrypted and digitally signed material. Is that so much better than a blob of material you can do something with, although you wouldn't like the system?
Yes, from a "I don't support this because I don't like the philosophy" perspective, I can see your point, but can't see it'll matter much for how all this will evolve (DRM becoming even more mainstream than it already is). After all, MS + Intel isn't a minor player, and AMD all alone looks like peanuts in comparison to that force.
Re:Virus Writers (Score:3, Interesting)
They all think about it and know its possible but out of fear for what that would do to the world and how many years they would go to jail for, top virus writers simply don't do that. Look at all of the oppurtunities they've had over the last five years to wipe machines.
Mass Destrutction viruses are old school and it seems today its all about stealing Credit card info and address book entries. DRM or tricking the system into trusting code won't make it any easier. Windows already does that all on it own.
Re:What about CPU IDs? (Score:4, Interesting)
So while I may be wrong I think this feature will go unoticed except by those who download DRM software and then are trying to break it. Even then it may be no different unless its harder. If vendors are going to rely on this and this only, hope they have forceably updatable micro code in that chipset otherwise they are in for trouble.
Oh and in the nonDRM world easynews continues to only cost $9 for 10GB.
Re:PPC (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sales. (Score:1, Interesting)
Any minute now, Cell Architecture machines will be in full flow, and Von Neuman architecture will be a dead duck except for embedded systems that use the 8051, MIPS, Sparc or Z280 architecture anyway.
And cell architecture will presumably run derivatives of Linux, FreeBSD and OSX, but not WinXP.
I have seen the future, and It is Apple shaped - this will be FAR bigger than the 8->16->23->64 bit transitions. This will be like punched cards to VDUs all oer again.
It may need a whole new OS/Compiler infrastructure, but OpenSource can deliver that pretty quickly. Once you have it, the performance gains for many tasks are 1,000 fold. Esppecially for the tasks that i86 already finds hard!
Re:But what about consoles (Score:2, Interesting)
people are so quick and ready to jump on these "circumvention" devices because they think they are only used for copyright infringement.
well i could care less about playing copied games. i just want the machine to be mine... to run code i want it to run. how hard is that to understand?
people put up with this blatantly illegal/immoral shit because they are "game machines". that you pay money for them and then don't have the ability to use them as you wish, doesn't enter their teeny tiny brains.
if they tried this with some major item, like cars, people would be up in arms.
imagine some ordinary object in your life... that you buy and then later find out, there are restrictions on what you can do with it... set by the manufacturer... who sold you the product and then has the gall to tell you what you can do with what you own.
it is NOT about "pirating" games.
Ubiquitous Law Enforcement ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Pirates" not "moguls" have ruined it ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Completely untrue. Most people will pirate what they want if they can do so. Low-price and other reasonable terms are largely red herrings, they don't really change things. Seen it all before with software sold in university bookstores. A textbook comes with a coupon for a heavily discounted commercial software package, one that has no anti-piracy. Sales of the software are negligible. The publisher then adds trivially defeated copy-protection, sales of the software approaches the number of textbooks sold. As long as a DOS "diskcopy" command could copy the software it was pirated, when a crack was need sales jumped wildly.
Re:Sales. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, sure. We've heard that one before. If highly parallel operations were some kind of silver bullet, then Thinking Machines wouldn't have gone out of business a decade ago.
Once you have it, the performance gains for many tasks are 1,000 fold.
Maybe some "highly crucial" tasks, like rendering textures in yet another FPS game. However, it doesn't look like the general-purpose decision making logic, which dominates a lot of applications, has been beefed up much at all vs. a conventional CPU.
Re:Sales. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seconded. I bought AMD because of this before Intel even implemented it, simply because Intel said they were going to. And as I'm the person in my social group that everyone asks about computers, I'll be recommending they avoid Intel and Dell also.
Re:Sales. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Sales. (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get your hopes up. DRM is coming to every consumer "general purpose"(with DRM installed, Trusted Computing has broken the general purpose aspect) computing device in the future. You're going to be stuck using today's, and the very near future's, technology for a long time if you don't want DRM. And why not have the ISPs out there not let computers connect to the internet if they're not "Trusted?" Even your old machines will probably be marginalized to a permamnently offline life.
You might as well live up the internet and the computing platforms we have now. Soon these platforms and these protocols will be permamnently broken to make way for Trusted Computing.
Re:Sales. (Score:3, Interesting)
Some bloated apps are still annoyingly CPU bound. OOo startup, for example. Many server apps are also CPU bound.
Games and media (playback and encoding, as I believe the latter is efficiently parallelisable) will benefit greatly, and this is usually the reason people upgrade their chips.
Games and media are already accelerated in the GPU on the graphics card. Moving it into the main CPU would simply be a change in packaging strategy, not the orgasmic revolution in computing that the OP was talking about.
Re:Sales. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Read it (Score:1, Interesting)
Old Soviet anecdote.
By some magic Stalin was restored to life. He come to Kremlin, looked at today's Russian government and said: "I had two proposals: first, the entire government should be shot and, second, Kremlin should be painted into green. Do you have any questions?" Everyone shout out, "But, why green?" for what Stalin replied with satisfaction, "I knew there will be no questions about first one."
DRM will not work for the Entertainment Industry (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, you might need to organise the publicity, yourself, but then so many large organisations have poor understanding of publicity that they leave to to independent agents anyway. And I'm sure if you talked to these agents in the right manner, they may do a deal on future profits.
There is also a question of whether a pirate could then use DRM to build a virus that is undeletable from your system. As I understand DRM is about restricting the movement of files, which in turn may cause considerable problems with virus checkers in the future.
Away, call me old fashioned, but if I really want to buy a piece of music, I would much rather go and order the CD from Amazon, or go round the corner to my local record store or supermarket. At least then I am reasonable confident that I will have music to play the day after the all the PCs in the world with DRM enabled connected to the internet mysteriously fail causing complete chaos.
Re:Sales. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, the people I know who buy Dells get about 8 months out of them before hardware starts to fail. Now these are average users, so I think this is an issue as that is (I think) one of Dell's big market segments.
I personally think the issue is the total lack of active cooling + newer Intel chips which leads to overheating.
Now, the systems are also difficult if not impossible to upgrade. Generally, you just buy another.
Not only is this less affordable for the people I know, but it also leads to more junk being thrown out. Bad for the environment.
What I tell people is that if they want a mediocre machine that they throw out in a year, buy a Dell. If they want decent support and something that will likely last them 4 or more years, pay a little more and get a local shop to make it.
Though I don't actually know anyone who's bought a $350 Dell either, they usually seem to spend more like $850.
Re:Sales. (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently it is to "resolve symbols" located in shared libraries. I think someone will have to come up with something clever to fix this, as I don't see applications getting smaller in the future. Maybe we need yet another incompatible C++ ABI.