Alternative?

Posted Sep 11, 2003 4:45 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

There are some alternatives that are undesirable in a free society. Consider the scene in Orwell's "1984" when the interrogator shows Winston Smith a photograph proving that some core piece of propaganda about the state is a lie. Then he burns the photograph, which is the only copy. In the Microsoft fantasy world of perfect document control, the same will be true of all corporate documents: whistleblowers will never be able to prove anything, because all the evidence will disappear at will. Try to communicate something to an unauthorized person, and your computer will rat you out. Every word's origin can be traced, until the corporate CIO pushes the "shred" button. Sounds great, right? Perfect control of all the drones.

Public-key crypto can provide some degree of privacy. But to go beyond this to the Total DRM Vision, it means that people won't control their own computers any more; they will take orders from Microsoft file formats.

Posted Sep 11, 2003 10:21 UTC (Thu) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link]

The question is phrased wrongly. It seems that the assumption is that "we need to do this because MS is also doing this". There is the assumption that this is a serious general requirement (I am convinced that there are some users who need this, but does that make it a general requirement, i.e. something that has to be included in the core product) and that therefore we need to produce that as a key piece of software. I personally believe this is a niche piece of software, and should be developed as an "add on".

Posted Sep 11, 2003 13:38 UTC (Thu) by dlpierson (subscriber, #5124) [Link]

It looks to me like there is a lot of overlap between this version of DRM and the nondiscretionary access control requirements of many government security systems. I wonder if any of the open source users in the goverment would be able to cooperate on an open source solution?

Posted Sep 11, 2003 20:02 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

* only allows certain people to read the document

* allows document expiration

Both of those are technically impossible tasks. For example, either one could be defeated by a digital camera.

I think it's a matter of what should computers do. My feeling is that computers should do whatever the owners want them to do. (So long as it doesn't endanger anyone physically).

For example, if there is a document on my computer, I don't want the document to expire. My computer should transparently not let it expire.

If I'm sharing a document, I might want it to expire. However that's not technically even possible. It's best not to be a pain in the arse trying to do things that aren't even possible. The best I can do is to only make it available to people I trust through encryption. Another solution would be to modify each copy of the document slightly so that tracking down leaks would be faster.

Posted Sep 18, 2003 7:04 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

Several of these are principially impossible to do, if people, as Shamir said, "Hold the keys to their own computer".

If your computer is capable of showing a document to you today, without having to go beg some central cerver for permission, then it can also do it tomorrow.

If your computer can display a text for you on the screen, then it can also send the very same text to the printer.

The only way to prevent this is to take away peoples control over their own computers. The computer *could* send the document to the printer, but it *won't*, even if you ask it to. Because it is obeying it's master, and this master is NOT you, even though it's your computer.