The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site.
As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it legally.
What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.
Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.
> Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy
spotify and netflix are both prime examples of making it easier for a larger population to access drm enabled content compared to pirated content (at the time they started getting popular anyway).
with the advent of streaming services you didn’t need to download potentially dodgy files to your computer — viruses/malware etc.
napster/limewire et. al were originally examples for the opposite case. pirating via those was super popular. there were fewer steps to access the media compared to going to a physical shop to buy a CD/DVD. (*)
(*) i can’t remember when the itunes store came along. might have been after these services? or around the same-ish time.
DRM also intensively targets the new-release window during which much of the returns on any piece of IP are made; the latency with which high-quality copies hit mainstream sites has monetary value as well.
The average user would probably pay more for a different video streaming platform if their current one started requiring 4 or 5 more clicks per view. “Complex set of steps” for most people could involve finding a website that wasn’t explicitly advertised to them, using an interface that wasn’t AB tested into oblivion, and inexplicably having to “update their flash player” every single time they want to watch Barney Miller. Never mind bit torrent: you might as well ask them to build themselves a TV from scratch. They could figure it out— they aren’t (necessarily) dumb— but they really don’t want to have to figure it out. They just want it to work without friction.
The point is: DRM is circumvented once, by some grizzled pirate captain. Everyone else just gets to plunder their downloads DRM free, nice and easy.
DRM is ineffective because the pirate uploaders are competent enough to break it, and an average end user only downloads - rank and file pirates wouldn't make their own releases even if DRM never existed and making them was easy.
Users hate it, but DRM is vastly more powerful than that since you ultimately control user access.
DRM - which all online services with user profiling automatically have - can also let you ban users, retarget users for ads, abuse, and other things beyond the basic function of running the software.
It seems like you got bored halfway through and had an LLM write the second half of your post? You know there isn't a minimum length for blog posts, right? You can just stop writing.
Slight timeline correction: 25 years ago in 2001 Blowfish was no longer contraband - the crypto export rules had been changed by 2000. As of January 2000 Netscape and IE were both shipping 128bit DES internationally.
Still, the t-shirts with Blowfish source printed on them were a cool bit of retro hacker chic.
Also, the first OpenBSD hackathon was 1999; it was in fact semicryptographic (they shipped IPSEC) but they've had hackathons in the US since, and for a time developers were coming out to Calgary because that's where Theo was. The dumb export control shipping dance was real though.
Apparently we are still fighting for secure communication through cryptography [1].
Other issue that doesn't get enough attention on HN is the criminalization of writing code. Probably because it was cryptocurrency applications. First they come for the people you disagree with. Just like they first came for porn sites, and now Wikipedia is being monitored.
Recently I realised that a solar-powered garden light could easily hide an ESP32 and has its own power source. You could even place them in public without being too suspicious. Might want to disable the light, so the power lasts longer and so it's less likely to annoy someone into removing it.
Someone can do the math on panel and battery size. I'm thinking it'll work as-is, as the ESP with WiFi on will draw similar power to the LED that you disconnected.
But how will you give it even a GB of storage for a tiny model?
Yeah this persuaded me more than I thought it would, but there are still some pretty big differences IMO. A frontier AI model is a lot harder and more costly to produce than an encryption algorithm. Especially if we believe Anthropic that the Chinese can only do it by distilling their models (though tbh I would err on the side of not believing that).
RSA algorithm you can print on a shirt - and that would give you encryption that works as well as it possibly can. There's no "RSA 6.7 Turbo Pro EncryptingPlus" that would give you something radically new that the "t-shirt RSA" can't.
LLMs are massive, complex, and a moving target. Making them is hard, and there's no "we're done" there - the frontier updates every few months. It's easy to get and run a 2B model locally, but what concerns people isn't a cheap end device 2B - it's the 10T RLVR-fried monsters that frontier labs play with nowadays.
The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site.
As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it legally.
What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.
Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.
> Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy
spotify and netflix are both prime examples of making it easier for a larger population to access drm enabled content compared to pirated content (at the time they started getting popular anyway).
with the advent of streaming services you didn’t need to download potentially dodgy files to your computer — viruses/malware etc.
napster/limewire et. al were originally examples for the opposite case. pirating via those was super popular. there were fewer steps to access the media compared to going to a physical shop to buy a CD/DVD. (*)
(*) i can’t remember when the itunes store came along. might have been after these services? or around the same-ish time.
DRM also intensively targets the new-release window during which much of the returns on any piece of IP are made; the latency with which high-quality copies hit mainstream sites has monetary value as well.
But why would this larger percentage of people rip it themselves when the hardcore pirate already did it and made it accessible[1]?
[1] https://fmhy.net/video#streaming-sites
The average user would probably pay more for a different video streaming platform if their current one started requiring 4 or 5 more clicks per view. “Complex set of steps” for most people could involve finding a website that wasn’t explicitly advertised to them, using an interface that wasn’t AB tested into oblivion, and inexplicably having to “update their flash player” every single time they want to watch Barney Miller. Never mind bit torrent: you might as well ask them to build themselves a TV from scratch. They could figure it out— they aren’t (necessarily) dumb— but they really don’t want to have to figure it out. They just want it to work without friction.
The point is: DRM is circumvented once, by some grizzled pirate captain. Everyone else just gets to plunder their downloads DRM free, nice and easy.
DRM is ineffective because the pirate uploaders are competent enough to break it, and an average end user only downloads - rank and file pirates wouldn't make their own releases even if DRM never existed and making them was easy.
But it is easy to get the thing for free, because the free one doesn't have DRM.
Users hate it, but DRM is vastly more powerful than that since you ultimately control user access.
DRM - which all online services with user profiling automatically have - can also let you ban users, retarget users for ads, abuse, and other things beyond the basic function of running the software.
It seems like you got bored halfway through and had an LLM write the second half of your post? You know there isn't a minimum length for blog posts, right? You can just stop writing.
Slight timeline correction: 25 years ago in 2001 Blowfish was no longer contraband - the crypto export rules had been changed by 2000. As of January 2000 Netscape and IE were both shipping 128bit DES internationally.
Still, the t-shirts with Blowfish source printed on them were a cool bit of retro hacker chic.
Also, the first OpenBSD hackathon was 1999; it was in fact semicryptographic (they shipped IPSEC) but they've had hackathons in the US since, and for a time developers were coming out to Calgary because that's where Theo was. The dumb export control shipping dance was real though.
Reminds me of T-Shirts with DeCSS's code printed on it. Wild times.
Apparently we are still fighting for secure communication through cryptography [1].
Other issue that doesn't get enough attention on HN is the criminalization of writing code. Probably because it was cryptocurrency applications. First they come for the people you disagree with. Just like they first came for porn sites, and now Wikipedia is being monitored.
[1] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Maybe it's already out there.
We need a cypherpunks movement for open weight models
Most people today are too aligned. Like they want the models to be also.
cypherpunks of today would probably be focused on bringing big tech down a notch, rather than spreading more LLMs
Time to create some esp32-in-a-lightbulb open weight model dead drops.
Please don’t open-circuit the light for several hours.
Recently I realised that a solar-powered garden light could easily hide an ESP32 and has its own power source. You could even place them in public without being too suspicious. Might want to disable the light, so the power lasts longer and so it's less likely to annoy someone into removing it.
Someone can do the math on panel and battery size. I'm thinking it'll work as-is, as the ESP with WiFi on will draw similar power to the LED that you disconnected.
But how will you give it even a GB of storage for a tiny model?
Possibly a simple SD?
Yeah this persuaded me more than I thought it would, but there are still some pretty big differences IMO. A frontier AI model is a lot harder and more costly to produce than an encryption algorithm. Especially if we believe Anthropic that the Chinese can only do it by distilling their models (though tbh I would err on the side of not believing that).
RSA algorithm you can print on a shirt - and that would give you encryption that works as well as it possibly can. There's no "RSA 6.7 Turbo Pro EncryptingPlus" that would give you something radically new that the "t-shirt RSA" can't.
LLMs are massive, complex, and a moving target. Making them is hard, and there's no "we're done" there - the frontier updates every few months. It's easy to get and run a 2B model locally, but what concerns people isn't a cheap end device 2B - it's the 10T RLVR-fried monsters that frontier labs play with nowadays.
Everything is on the shoulders of giants in one way or another