That relates to files stored on storage services (e.g. OneDrive), for which they would be legally liable, not for your own pc. You could also get around it on the cloud storage by encrypting it.
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No no no, this they cannot do. You can’t create a chip that monitors what you’re running, detects you’re running a program that strips DRM, and shuts it down. For example, I could write a Turing machine emulator, and then a DRM-stripping utility could be programmed in that. If someone had a way to recognize for any program anyone wrote whether it was capable of stripping DRM, that would essentially be a solution to the halting problem.
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I was going to say something similar; Thus far this is just what intel seems to be doing with the ME system, and the horrors that have surfaced already with such a light usage of it.
Imagine if intel decided that it wanted to step up their DRM schemes: they already have the perfect tool baked right in.
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When I saw the story all I could think was, “oh, Christ, not this again.” I’m glad to see some of you other fine folks have made the effort to set the record straight here without me having to waste time regurgitating your arguments for why this story is complete FUD.
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They could however just have a blacklist of executable hashes*, and block a program when you attempt to start the process, this is not something you can do directly from the IME though, you’d need to have an OS-level service loaded to do that (maybe in theory you could write something to do that directly from the IME, but that would be such a complicated system it would be completely intractable based on the IME hardware specs, if not NP-hard itself**).
Such a theoretical problem has nothing to do with IME or any related technology though, it’s far more general. Like I said in an earlier comment, they could jam this shit into the southbridge if they wanted, or into a hard-disk driver, pretty much anywhere if they were sneaky and inventive enough.
Obviously this is not something Intel would ever even attempt to do anyway, nobody would stand for that level of interference (aside from Apple users maybe). The only way I can imagine this kind of Orwellian interference would be if it was government mandated, in which case they wouldn’t have to put it in the IME, could put it wherever they wanted in the OS, but in that case it wouldn’t be Intel declaring war on general computing, it would be the government.
This is of course something to think about, and there are countries in the world that do have that level of interference from the government, they’re only limited by the fact that they’re not designing the hardware/have no control over those that do. But even with Trump throwing his weight around it doesn’t really seem like a realistic worry any time soon.
(*) there are lots of ways to get around that though, as any competent malware developer would tell you.
(**) it would have to recreate the entirety of the operating system’s memory management architecture for a start, along with a good chunk of the rest of the OS.
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Given a particular program you might be able to block it, but you can’t have a general purpose routine in the hardware or OS that blocks any DRM decryptors someone might write, not without blocking something much too broad. (For example, you could prevent all programs from running.) That was the suggestion to which I was responding.
I agree, but Cory’s wording was vague, ‘a program’ could refer to a specific program, or any program. My reading was the former, for which a blacklist would suffice.
Another thing you might be able to do is packet inspection in the IME, to try and detect copyrighted content being streamed illegally for example, and the IME could close the network connection without having to talk to the OS at all (not sure if it can actually do this, but it would be feasible), would be easy to get around with encryption though (which would have to be implemented properly to prevent man in the middle attacks). But all my previous caveats would still apply to that, re this having nothing to do with the IME (just stick it in the network driver and/or NIC).
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…sums up most of his posts from the past several years.
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Seems to work over USB 3…3.2 also. That would surely tear it?
Perhaps you’ll go so far as to say you’re satisfied its key exchange mechanism helps you secure computers ODNI or hostile state actors may have otherwise acquired?
Meanwhile DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale, lic. Fraunhofer IIS) is setting out to be a BRIC+EMEA Teleterm or something. NXP announced a new chip (DAB, DRM and DRM+ (FM bands), others) but I gotta make a login to get a proper datasheet. Then again there are at least RTL2832U receivers. (Demo of a TX/RX rig: https://youtu.be/zeGs7CQlvRg Sorry for not including the oldbits link for when that sailed BoingBefore.)
http://www.drm.org/products/ Lookout! '60s designers escaped the phantom zone and Eastern Bloc and are ruining all the organic self-assembly vibes!
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