Comment on What kind of special knowledge or equipment does piracy groups have?
lung@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Basically, media cannot truly be DRM because: (1) it ~has to be converted into data that screens and speakers can display (2) ultimately if it’s fetching widevine encryption keys, those keys are somewhere in your device and can be retrieved
So yes, you can do it. A “capture card” is such a “gyzmo” — but often, you can just rip using software, i.e. record the decoded stream
it’s not even hard. It’s just to much work, if someone else is doing it for me I thank them with thought and prayers (and sometimes I donate money)
Funny enough sometimes I’ll download shows that I already paid for (lile Max ot Netflix) just becaus VLC is great and my TV is not
unmagical@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
To put it another way:
Therefore, any media that is viewed on your computer is clear, on your computer, in a realm that you control.
This is also why ad blockers work. You can send me ads, or requests to fetch ads and my computer just ignores them.
Companies will never be able to stop this, cause at some point you can always just intercept the data feed at a hardware level and reconstruct the stream.
vala@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If they have their way they will. All the tech bros are pushing for trusted computing platforms.
Imagine a world where most/all computers are as locked down as an iPad. That’s what they seem to want.
unmagical@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
At some point the electrical signal has to be clear at a hardware level. Companies can make it harder, but if they’re streaming any info to a device in your possession someone will be able to extract that clean electrical signal and reproduce an acceptable feed.
Takumidesh@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
TPM isn’t inherently bad, it’s just a way to cryptographically store keys. TPM overall is great as it gives you a very secure way to store things like encryption keys.
You also don’t need TPM to lock down a system. Locked bootloaders have existed for decades and platforms have historically rolled their own encryption modules as they wanted, like your ipad example, or any video game console in the last 20 years, or most mobile phones, etc.
The ‘knows enough to be dangerous’ crowd has been fearmongering about tpm since it’s been introduced, it isn’t some magic bullet for vendor locking, since vendor locking is already achieved.
GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I might be asking a dumb question, but why can’t the companies host their ads on the server-side? Do the ads have to be on my computer for me to see them? What does being on my computer even mean in this context?
Sorry if this is a stupid question
CallOfTheWild@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Some do. YouTube switched their ad service so the main video and ads come from the same server. To get around this uBlock now blocks the script on the browser side that shows the ad, then returns a signal that the timer is up.
It’s a constant game of cat and mouse to get around ad blockers then block that new method.
count_dongulus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t think the new strategy of injecting ads directly into the video stream can be defeated in realtime though. It’s like how you cannot defeat tv ads…you can blank the screen, or record and restitch without the ads, but the content itself has the ad. YouTube is a bit different where you can theoretically skip ahead, but your device has to tell Youtube that it wants to skip ahead in order to actually even get the video content, and youtube can look at request timestamps to know you didn’t see the whole injected ad and just re-inject it in the video stream.
HeckGazer@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
They do host them on their servers, sort of (if you’re asking how ad brokers work that’s a bit of a different scope).
Does poo have to be on your desk to smell it? The post office (website) is telling you (your computer) to go over and pick up a parcel of poo that’s there for you. You say no, I don’t think I will (adblock/poo block)
GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That is one hell of an analogy
unmagical@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
What I mean by “on your computer” is not that it originates on your computer, but that some form of it exists there–namely this is going to be images, text, links, etc that the ad company hosts and a website will normally download temporarily along with the rest of the site’s content. Once your computer has that site’s information you can do anything you want with it. Importantly what exists on your computer is a local copy of what the ad servers host. If you decide to color ads blue on your computer that only affects your copy. The original ad, and everyone else’s copies remain intact.
GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think I understand now. Thanks.