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Re:US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for ... by vidarh on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @10:40AM (#5780296)
How so? People will be expecting their software to contain rootkits, and so there will be tons of people immediately analyzing any new releases.

Given that already when I last bothered with pirated software in the early 90's, serious warez traders were mostly only interested in software weeks before its scheduled release (it was not uncommon for unfinished versions of games to leak), which involved not just getting hold of the releases through leaks or hacking, but breaking any protection, and this would make up the first serious challenge for the warez scene in many years, and this will draw not just the warez scene, but security researchers, as well as a lot of "regular" developers like me who are fed up with these kinds of attempts, they are facing pretty much an army that will be dissecting every release.

Sure, some will slip through for some users, but every single instance will result in new counter-measures, many of which you can expect will cover as-yet undiscovered flaws in addition to just fixing specific issues.

E.g. a logical protection against attempts at attacking faulty filesystem permissions settings is to blanket ban access to the filesystem and whitelist specific files, specific directories, and sanity check all access to them.

For every loss, we will win more robust application sandboxing capabilities, and more people will be motivated to consistently make use of them.

Re:US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for ... by DanBC on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @10:53AM (#5780379)
I understand what you're saying, but so far Nintendo 3DS doesn't have any way of playing pirated 3DS games. (DS games are playable on a 3DS now). XBOX360 has some cracks, but these are complicated. Too complex for most people to bother with. PS3 is also too complex for most people. (I think, I haven't really looked hard for this.) I think even PS2 isn't trivial, although I could be wrong and I welcome corrections.

It bothers me. I'm probably wrong, but it feels like we have a bunch of sub-optimal OSs that have security kludged in as an after-thought, built on legacy hampered hardware, with a lot of concentration on "preventing people playing illegal content" (but also strictly controlling what people do with their legal content). There's a kind of arms race with pirates and anti-pirates competing on DRM schemes, and it feels like if all that effort had gone into better directions that we'd have 24 cores at 3.5 GHz and better threading with decent nice architecture.

And I know it's just marketing, and that washing powder (Whiter than white!) has been doing it for years, but being told that my content (which was sold to me as best quality available last time) is now being called garbage and I'm told I need to upgrade. In the past I didn't need to upgrade. I could keep my record deck and buy a CD player and rip those CDs to digital for my streaming media player. But in the future this is not going to be allowed. I'm going to have to buy an extra licence for family use.