> Can you please elaborate...

Certainly. Intel (amongst others) supply consumer grade CPUs for a "multimedia" market, to service music and movie playback.

The movie and music industry apply intense pressure and lobbying against the computing industry to protect their profits. They see users having control over media, and thus ability to copy, recode, edit or time-shift content as a threat, which they dub "piracy".

Under this pressure to implement "Digital Rights/Restriction Management" within their hardware, semiconductor manufacturers have been making microprocessors increasingly hostile to end users, since if users were able to access and examine device functions they would naturally disable or reject what is not in their interests.

Hiding undocumented functionality to take over, examine or exfiltrate data from systems via backdoors etc is a natural progression of this subterfuge and tension between manufacturer and user. This situation of cat-and-mouse hostility should not exist in anything recognisable as a "free market", and hence I deem it "protectionism".

Now the real problem is that these same "multimedia" processors are used in other areas, automotive, aviation, health and even military applications. The "risk-tradeoffs" bought by big media bleed into these sectors.

Therefore it's clear to me that measures for the protection of "intellectual property" are directly at odds with computer security generally, and are increasingly leading to problems for the sake one relatively small sector. Sure, the digital entertainments industry is worth many trillions of dollars, but pales within the larger picture of human affairs. At some point we may have to choose. Hollywood or national security?

You are absolutely right, and media companies are the evilest of evil. But it's a little unclear why Intel felt it had to cave in. What would have happened if it had told Hollywood to go love itself somewhere? It's not like movie producers are remotely capable of making chips.

If could have been pushed down the chain. The media companies wanted to provide streaming so they talked with Microsoft. Microsoft realized it would be a valuable feature for thier OS and if they resisted but Apple didn't they would lose market share as HD streaming wasn't available. Then they said the same to Intel. If you don't do it people will buy AMD chips for HD streaming.

So basically it happened because users see the feature and don't realize how hostile it is until they actually try to access their media in an "unsupported" way.

Of course if everyone else resisted streaming services would likely have launched anyways, but that is classic prisoners dilemma.

It’s not like Intel have no competition. They probably figured that if they didn’t cooperate with the media industry, AMD or someone else would, and eat their lunch when suddenly Sony movies can only be played on AMD devices.

I’m not hearing much noice over intels latest chips losing support for 4k Bly-ray disc playback

(They dropped SGX which is needed for the DRM)

https://www.whathifi.com/news/intel-discontinues-support-for...

SGX is only dropped from consumer SKUs for product segmentation purposes.

Well Tbf to intel. The only people I know who use a bluray drive in a pc for 4K content, rip the content anyways bypassing DRM. The masses (in the pc watching moving via a Blu-ray drive space) have moved onto streaming anyways.

Yeah, I’m not saying they made the right call… If they have any business sense they will just open up the microcode after this.

One possibility might be that Intel thought that if they did not do it voluntarily, they might ultimately be forced to by legislation.

wdym cave in, it's not like Intel integrated technologies pushed on them. Intel developed HDCP and co-developed AACS (the Blu-ray encryption scheme). I dunno how much they had their hand in AACS 2, but considering it's literally built on SGX I'm going to claim without evidence that Intel played a significant role in creating AACS 2.

> What would have happened if it had told Hollywood to go love itself somewhere?

Intel's executives would show up to play golf, and find out that nobody wanted to play with them. They might even be no longer welcome at the country club. Power structures coalesce, because powerful people identify with each others' authoritarian desires.

"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" - Sony BMG

It's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...

> This situation of cat-and-mouse hostility

I think you could refine your point here.. markets include adverse negotiation, secure applications are a thing, and for that matter, weapons making is a thing. You can't "wish away" that part.

I have a colleague who makes secure DRM for FAANG since long ago, and has a large house and successful middle-class life from it.

To be breif and frank with you, I see those views as "part of the problem".

ok - second example is a California woman who went to law school, passed the California Bar Exam (2-day, super difficult) went to work as a junior attorney at a law firm in Los Angeles and worked her way up for more than ten years to get a promotion. That law firm is intellectual property and yes, Digital Rights Management too.. and she now has a successful middle class life with a house. No one had money to buy her a house, she worked for that and she did not have the ability to define the rules.

Where is the commerce ? the market? the reality, in your dream solutions ?

edit as a sound designer and open software advocate, with a book published by MIT Press, please know that some people in the USA try to make the arts life, and some of the emphasis here is the empty hands and pockets that follow. Let's agree, no mafia sound sellers, but also "no" to complete free flow of all digital material no matter what.

Intel's SGX was at least partially intended to implement DRM [0], and its various-ish predecessor technologies such as old-school Palladium/TPM was expected to do the same [1] (but was ultimately cancelled because of wide backlash).

[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/93006-intel-sgx-deprecation-im...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...

Thanks, didn't know these are pretty hardcore protection. Just curious maybe these protection layers and protetion-protection layers may introduce more vectors for attackers?

Would this kind of functionality not, more likely, be implemented on the behest of the CIA? The media companies could be used as a good cover though.

Why the CIA specifically?