>The path of "figure out how to screen capture the entire DRM-unprotected movie as a video and send that entire file" has about the same level of resistance [...]
The biggest flaw with this logic is that screen capturing tools specifically don't work on DRM protected content. Moreover if you're trying to imply making a screen recording is some sort of black magic to normies, you must be living in the 2010s. Nowadays both iOS and Android have built-in screen recorders, and on desktops you can use something like loom, which works off a browser.
The biggest flaw with your logic is the utter lack of it.
If I could rip K-Pop Demon Hunters with a screen capture app to obtain a file I could share with a friend, I still wouldn't do it. Because finding a torrent is simpler and faster. I would get a very similar file, but so much faster, because I didn't have to keep the screen running at x1 for the full duration.
And finding a shady website that has it available is simpler and faster still.
>If I could rip K-Pop Demon Hunters with a screen capture app to obtain a file I could share with a friend, I still wouldn't do it.
Well no, because the lack of DRM wouldn't just mean you can manually screen record netflix. It also means you (or someone else) can write an app to screen record netfilx for you, or skip that altogether, similar to something like yt-dlp. After all, if somebody wants to rip youtube (DRM free), they don't screenrecord it, they find some random website/tool off google.
YouTube is not just DRM-free, but cost-free. One of the things you can pay for is "enhanced bitrates", and while you can yt-dlp them if you auth (maybe?), you won't find the random download sites offering it.
>>Most techie people I know ripped their DVD collections. Many ripped their Blurays but plenty didn't because it requires specialized software to get around the DRM. Only a handful of them have ripped their UHD discs which require specialized software AND specific hardware AND flashing a specific firmware on that hardware.
>The vast majority of DRM protected content (or at least majority by watch time) available in UHD via torrent in a matter of hours. People like to stay away from torrents, because it carries significant risk in many jurisdictions.
Sounds like you're proving his point? If stripping DRM is so trivial that anyone can pop in a bluray and rip it (like ripping CDs in itunes), piracy would arguably far worse. Pirates today have to brave shady torrent sites and the risk of getting C&D letters. Asking your friend to make a copy is far more accessible.
>No. The bottleneck isn't "getting the files", it's sharing them.
It's that hard to upload a file to google drive and share a link? Is your model of the average person a bumbling idiot that struggles to do anything other than opening tiktok and flicking up?
>and keep shipping mandatory DRM modules that run with deranged levels of privilege in places like TrustZone
What's "deranged" about TrustZone? It's just a way to allow code to be executed in a tamper-proof way. Advocates like Stallman might object to this on the basis of "freedom to tinker" and "user control", but it can't steal your data, which is what "deranged levels of privilege" sounds like.
Moreover it's not too hard to imagine DRM implemented in a way that doesn't have those issues. The most obvious example would be some sort of dongle that handles decryption and forwards it to a TV. In other words, a chromecast. It'll still be a black box, but I doubt anyone seriously cares. You can make a case about how your computer or smartphone should be "open", but the case is far less persuasive for a media dongle.
In ARM, TrustZone[0] is a higher level of privilege than hypervisors (EL3 vs. EL2); it's morally equivalent to x86 System Management Mode. That means it categorically can steal your data. There's nothing EL2 code can do to prevent inspection or manipulation from a malicious EL3.
A less awful design would have been to keep the security code at EL2 and have CPU hardware that can isolate two EL2s from one another[1]. This is ultimately what ARM wound up doing with S-EL2, but you still need to have EL3 code to define the boundary between the two. At best the SoC vendor can design a (readable/auditable!) boot ROM that occupies EL3 and enforces a boundary between secure and non-secure EL2s.
[0] Or, at least, TrustZone's secure monitor. TZ can of course run secure code at lower privilege levels, but that doesn't stop a TZ compromise from becoming a full system compromise.
[1] If you're wondering, this is morally equivalent to Apple's guarded exception levels.
>Google’s ad surveillance eventually feeds ICE and its ilk
Is this a prediction about what might happen or a claim about what's happening right now? Also, there's plenty of reasons to object to government/adtech surveillance, but "youtube ads are going to help ICE deport people" is probably the worse examples that I can think of.
DHS has been very upfront about the fact that they purchase pretty much all the data they can get, including from ad networks, in order to keeps records on and track people.
A: "Intel/AMD is adding instructions to accelerate AES"
B: "Might this enable a next level of DRM? Might this enable a deeper level of hardware attestation?"
A: "wtf are you talking about? It's just instructions to make certain types of computations faster, it has nothing to do with DRM or hardware attestation."
B: "Not yet."
I'm sure in some way it probably helps DRM or hardware attestation to some extent, but not any more than say, 3nm process node helps DRM or hardware attestation by making it faster.
>If you need to trust the encryption and trust the hardware itself, it may not be suitable for your environment/ threat model.
Are we reading the same article? It's talking about homorphic encryption, ie. doing mathematical operations on already encrypted data, without being aware of its cleartext contents. It's not related to SGX or other trusted computing technologies.
I'll believe it when I see it. The numbers simply don't pencil out. Streaming ads over cellular networks is going to be insanely expensive at rates that IOT/esim providers are currently offering. Not to mention that most people would connect to wifi anyways so they can watch neflix or whatever without a second device. If a 5G module costs $25 but only 10% of people actually never connect to wifi, you're basically paying $250 just to get that incremental customer connected.
Not for ads, but maybe the numbers work out if you're selling intel. How much is a household's watching habits worth on the market? How about keyword mentions in the room?
Piketty’s central argument is that when the rate of return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of economic growth (g), wealth concentrates over time into fewer and fewer hands. This is his now-famous r > g inequality.
The implication is that capitalism, left to its own devices, doesn’t naturally spread wealth around. It does the opposite. The relatively egalitarian period of the mid-20th century (roughly 1930s-1970s) was the historical exception, driven by two world wars, the Great Depression, and deliberate policy choices like progressive taxation. The longer historical pattern, which Piketty traces with extensive data going back to the 18th century, is one of increasing concentration.
His practical prescription is a global progressive tax on wealth (not just income) to counteract this tendency. He acknowledges this is politically difficult but argues it’s the most straightforward mechanism to prevent a return to the kind of patrimonial capitalism that defined the Gilded Age and the Belle Époque, where inherited wealth dominated and social mobility was minimal.
The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work. Piketty and his collaborators assembled an unprecedented dataset on wealth and income distribution across multiple countries and centuries, which gave the argument a weight that prior discussions lacked.
Which ones? The Sacklers are a prime example of how impossible it is to actually go bankrupt; considering they harmed millions of people, had the government step in and still remain one of the wealthiest families in the US.
"Filed for bankruptcy" != "out of money" in the ordinary plebeian sense.
These are the kind of criminals where the judges will let them stay under home arrest in their twenty-bedroom mansion, have their chauffeur drive them around in a car worth more than my entire life savings, etc... because it would be "unconscionable" for them to lose the life that they're accustomed to. I.e.: Affluenza.
Just look at Prince Andrew or whatever he's called now. He raped children and his rightful punishment would be to sit in a jail cell with no access to anything even resembling his lavish digs, instead he's luxuriating in a lifestyle you and I would envy.
I can list far, far more examples of billionaires or mere hundred-millionaires living luxuriously after committing capital crimes or "going bankrupt" than not.
Find me an ex-billionaire living out of a motor home, then I'll cede your point.
> These are the kind of criminals where the judges will let them stay under home arrest in their twenty-bedroom mansion…
Another egregious example of this sort of thing:
> Robert H. Richards IV was convicted of rape, the wealthy heir to the Du Pont family fortune […] received an eight-year prison sentence in 2009 for raping his toddler daughter, but the sentencing order signed by a Delaware judge said “defendant will not fare well” in prison and the eight years were suspended.
>The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work.
Empirical work... like conveniently ignoring the fact that there's far less old money billionaires than we'd expect?
>For these lucky people, the experience of the Vanderbilts and their contemporaries offers a cautionary tale. At the turn of the 20th century, America’s census recorded about 4,000 millionaires, note Victor Haghani and James White, two wealth managers, in their book, “The Missing Billionaires”. Suppose a quarter of them had at least $5m (the richest had hundreds) and had invested it in America’s stockmarket. Had they then procreated at the average rate, paid their taxes and spent 2% of their capital each year, their descendants today would include nearly 16,000 old-money billionaires. In reality, it is a struggle to find a single one who traces their fortune back to the first Gilded Age.
> In reality, it is a struggle to find a single one who traces their fortune back to the first Gilded Age.
This is a good point because there are no oil billionaires and things like trusts, family offices, offshoring etc. actually pose no challenge to accurately numerating and identifying people that ‘have’ or effectively control over a billion dollars at their discretion because they all just sign up for the list.
Of course there’s the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers but that doesn
FBI was literally sitting on Epstein files for years. They have chosen not to prosecute. When the state tried to investigate Epstein, FBI came in, took control over with claim they will share investigation results ... and then did nothing.
Yes, which happened only because a journalist broke a story about how FBI was not investigating Epstein for years and years. It was media who forced that to happen, after decades of abuse FBI was aware of.
Speaking of which, the previous conviction, the super sweet deal Acosta gave to Epstein before is also an example of elite unaccountability.
FBI and friends protected Epstein until it became impossible.
J6 is not a strong counterexample, IMHO. Part of the problem with Epstein is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," for which evidence is needed--and, it appears, hard to come by. Whereas with J6, there were thousands of hours of footage showing the crimes being committed (and in many cases bragged about), which made prosecutions much easier.
>With J6, in the matter of 2 or so years the FBI has secured over 1000 convictions.
Again, large numbers, but no context. How many people did you think were at the riots? 10k? 50k?
Moreover, Jan 6th was an event that definitely happened. The same can't be said for whatever happened at Epstein's island. The island exists, Epstein's a convicted sex offender, and people flew there, but associating with sex offenders isn't a crime, no matter how despicable it might seem.
> It's sexism in action; the woman gets punished while "boys will be boys." Prove me wrong.
Epstein died in his cell. If Maxwell preferred death to punishment she could've also killed herself. Also it's well documented that women receive less harsh punishment in court vs men for the same crimes, so yeah, it's sexism but not in the way you insinuate.
> Epstein himself is probably still alive in Tel Aviv anyway.
Yes, and it's Maxwell's lookalike that's serving the sentence, while she's enjoying herself in Argentina. See how quickly you can derails discussion with such absurd claims without any substance?
Please provide a list of all multi-billionaires who have somehow managed to lose any significant portion of their wealth outside of a divorce combined with bad marriage planning. And even in those rare cases, they don't approach bankruptcy.
It isn't that they get bailed out by the government (like the banks in 2008), it is that at the scale of their wealth there is no realistic way to lose it fast enough to make any significant negative difference when the neutral state of wealth at that scale is to snowball ever larger (mostly because we refuse to tax it appropriately).
>Yes but that was not from Jolla, but some random Twitter user.
So if a random auto blog was saying how Tesla FSD was "ULTRA reliable", it wouldn't be fair for Waymo (or anyone else) to reply back and point that out?
>Isn't this like telling the world you ate a full meal by eating samples at Costco?
The analogy fails because free samples cost costco (or whatever the vendor is) money. Raking Meta over the coals for using ffmpeg instead of paying for some proprietary makes as much sense as raking every tech company over the coals for using Linux. Or maybe you'd do that too, I can't tell.
The biggest flaw with this logic is that screen capturing tools specifically don't work on DRM protected content. Moreover if you're trying to imply making a screen recording is some sort of black magic to normies, you must be living in the 2010s. Nowadays both iOS and Android have built-in screen recorders, and on desktops you can use something like loom, which works off a browser.
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