Intel's HDMInsult | Hacker News Reader

Intel's HDMInsult

defectivebydesign.org

30 pointskarlzt15 comments

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.

Software unlocks of hardware are nothing new in this industry.

IBM has done it with their mainframe processors for years.

Qlogic does it with their fibre channel switches - you can buy one with 8 ports active, 16-20 physical ports, and have to buy up to use all the ports.

Cisco, SonicWall and others artificially limit their routers in the number of DHCP or IP addresses that can be used on the network, and a variety of other features.

Is this an annoying PITA that I wish would go away? Yes, absolutely. But it's not some affront to humanity, any more so than other licensing restrictions (and thus, why the FSF is against it).

I agree, you pay for what you want, and if you want the additional functionality, you give them a call and its done! No more upgrade hassles

In an efficient market with perfect competition, the price of the product will approach the marginal cost of production. To the extent that Intel are able to do this, it's because they don't have enough competition, or aren't producing enough chips to offset the fixed costs.

People don't see the massive fixed costs involved, so they suspect lack of competition (and thereby gouging).

Of course, if Intel's profits are large and climbing, then there may be more reason to attribute it to lack of competition.

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.

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?

Yeah, I don't necessarily think geeks will come out on top as far as these particular technologies go. Mostly I object on principle to the government enforcing controls on how I can modify/use/destroy/whatever my property. To me that principle's more important than any particular battle over circumventing dongles or whatever.

I think (say) AMD probably cares a lot less about what you do with what they sell in your own home, and a lot more about how you propagate the information you obtain from reverse engineering it. Of course, the subtext to the "right to circumvent" is "the right to publish circumvention techniques".

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...

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.

It interferes with "traditional" "notions" of physical property.

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...

They can easily take the mechanism away from new processors, any time they want. For all anybody knows, this might be profitable.

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.

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.

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