
Intel's HDMInsult  - karlzt
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/intel-hdminsult
======
wccrawford
Again, as has been said over and over, it's a lot cheaper for Intel to target
2 markets with the same product and just charge extra for unlocking the full
potential.

It's exactly the same thing they are already doing when producing multiple
chips, except that this is a lot cheaper for everyone. If they didn't do this,
all the chips would be more than $50 more expensive.

Everyone is winning.

And yet people feel the need to complain about this. If must be psychological,
because it sure isn't logical.

~~~
_delirium
As long as I'm allowed to circumvent it if I can, sure. Mostly I object to any
legal mechanism that would cause a product I physically own to have
restrictions on how I can modify it in my own home. But if it's just a
technological restriction, sure, they can put whatever unlocking mechanism
they want on their chips. I think people should be legally allowed to modify
their own property however they want, but manufacturers aren't under any
obligation to sell products that are _easy_ to modify.

Alternately, if they want it enforced via contract, they could go the old-
school IBM route of renting me equipment rather than selling it. But then they
had better be prepared to take on all the legal obligations that someone
renting equipment has.

~~~
tptacek
One downside to the geeky demand for an inalienable right to circumvent
technological controls is that it drives vendors towards technologies that
degrade the end-user experience; for example:

* Games designed to depend on servers run by the game companies

* Movies that only play on players that license and maintain a virtual machine designed for content protection

* Software that installs kernel modules to hook the idle loop of your OS to monitor itself

I could go on and on. Geeks tend to see themselves in a narrative where
they're locked in mortal kombat with big dumb companies. After all, how dumb
do you have to be to believe that you can keep information restricted? Well,
it turns out money can buy some pretty excellent geeks. You may not be on the
winning side of this battle!

When's the last time you saw a satellite TV hack?

~~~
demallien
Oh, satellite TV hacks exist - up until about 12 months ago I used to work for
one of the companies that provides Content Access systems for satellite, and
it was my personal job to reverse engineer competitors' systems, to see how
they worked. As with every other DRM scheme out there, they can be cracked.
What the manufacturers have managed to do though, is make the systems hard to
crack globally - each box has to be cracked individually, you can't crack one
and then apply to the whole park. But then, who cares? If one can be cracked,
the torrents of the programs being aired will be up on the trackers the next
day, and everyone else can just watch on their PC...

~~~
tptacek
Ok. What you can't do is buy an H card off eBay anymore. The cryptography and
ASIC-level systems design that goes into preventing that is pretty
sophisticated.

Incidentally, when one compromise ends up costing a lot of money, the
economics start to work for watermarking.

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S_A_P
I think it is a short sighted strategy(scratch off processor upgrades) and
just opens the door for a new arena of "piracy"- hacking out the extra
performance of your processor without paying...

~~~
amalcon
People already do that! The slower-speed versions of a particular chip are
either chips that were flawed and had to be clocked down to work around the
flaw, or perfectly good chips that have been clocked down to fill demand.

Overclockers have been known to try to clock a "slower" chip to the speed of
the high-end ones, and exchange the chip until they get one that works.

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GrandMasterBirt
I think the first statement is the most valid one. DRM protects no content
from pirates. Period. I can download any movie I want in high def with no
hindrance. However legitimate users have a hard time transforming content and
thus pay for it many ways. There are many problems, too many to post in a
response, but the end result is the same.

