Why Intel will never let owners control the ME

There seem to be two arguments for DRM which could be considered logical from an executive's perspective (even if in my view unethical):

- Firstly, it delays the initial piracy of new releases. This is very variable and since new DRM systems aren't created as often as new films, this only seems to be successfully pulled off every now and then... but there have demonstrably been cases of it delaying piracy by a few weeks (hell, there's at least one video game which wasn't cracked for over a year). This probably feels valuable to executives who expect the bulk of returns on a film or video game to come immediately after release (especially if they have unrealistic expectations about correlations between piracy and lost sales).

- Secondly, and more significantly, it ensures that media companies can control how content is consumed, and control the devices available to consume content. If you want to make a Blu-ray player, you have to sign contracts, and those contracts can tell you what functionality to add and what not to add. "Unauthorized" players, circumvention technology will always exist for the fringes, but that's too minor to care about. What it does mean - in tandem with the anticircumvention technology ban legislation, 17 USC 1202 - is that you can't walk into a retail chain store and buy a Blu-ray player that'll happily make copies, or so on. Most likely this is what these companies really care about - ensuring they have a say on what Homer Simpson has to choose from in Best Buy.

To be clear, I unequivocally oppose DRM; but I suspect the above points are a closer approximation of the motives of the media industry in pushing it.

Was that intentional? :)

Sarcasm aside, in my experience, most managers do not understand technology even at a high level. Even the ones who come from a tech background often don’t bother to keep up. The typical mentality being, “I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Get someone from <insert tech department name here> to handle it.” When the <insert tech department name here> does come up with a solution, it is usually shot down if there is even the slightest hint of risk involved. And there usually is — any disruptive change — as all invocations tend to be — inherently carry a certain amount of risk. Even Steve Jobs was unable to convince the record labels to allow them to sell DRM free music via iTines until Apple had grown too big for them to go against — at least as far as music business was concerned.

Basically, the only things the so called managers are good at are passing around the blame and covering their asses. Way too many companies have been destroyed or are a shell of their former glory - having missed major opportunities because the management was not willing to deal with the risks associated with innovation — because they were content to milk their cash cow till it was dead — while laughing at deficiencies of the more innovative competitors’ version 1.0 products.

The real managers — the people who know what they are doing — go on to found successful tech companies.

I wonder, if it is so "in vain", why have so many folks been so spooked by it (e.g. Stallman, Doctorow)? Are they worried about the needless increased cost to consumers, or maybe they think it might actually work well enough? If you are really against DRM, I don't get how saying DRM "will never work" will help avoid it.

I worked at TI on OMAP MShield, TrustZone stuff (iirc we were the first (w/ Galaxy Nexus) to have good-enough DRM to be the first to have Netflix HD) and later at Trustonic which is the OS (and more) vendor of AMD PSP and many ARM-based devices.

Everyone* knew that some use-cases of DRM meant a single successful hack meant the content being leaked. It is mostly the low-level designers (CPU arch, physical die, OS/firmware etc) to be responsible for making it more difficult/expensive. Some use-cases will be necessarily be concerned with simpler attacks e.g. recording a few key pages of a secure/DRMed PDF with a hidden camera (and thus more complex protections like a Central Licensing, watermarking server becoming involved). There are some use-cases of DRM where leaks are not a big issue (e.g. a more dynamic content which involves occasionally communicating with peers/servers).

[*] This is probably not true. That basic case is easy enough to see, but I've personally seen other schemes where customers leave out key steps or end up trusting something that shouldn't be trusted.

@hlandau makes good points, I think.

I've always been on the fence regarding DRM. I think property rights seem like a decent idea so why not extend that to the digital realm? Do we not want digital scarce goods, collectibles? Is a technical enforcement of property rights superior to meat-space? I see many cool uses for DRM, trusted computing (and in the end I think it would transfer power from publishers, platforms, manufacturers to creators and owners). It's interesting (and makes sense) to see how blockchain people are generally in favor of trusted computing (though for many it seems to be too much of a "silver bullet"); iirc bitcoin wallets were some of our first customers after video DRM.

I've talked with many folks over the years (including EFF people) and I've still not gotten a sense of why the theory of DRM is bad (I would agree that most implementations have been horrible), other than it starting a snowball towards a cyberpunk dystopia future, maybe. I 100% agree that "you own the device, you should be able to control it". That means I support the right to tinker, am against DMCA, and think owners of devices should be able to run whatever software they prefer and be able to wipe, disable, replace whatever they want (e.g. root of trust). While I worked at Trustonic, I pestered the CEO many times (and rallied co-workers to do the same) to open source the OS. In the end there was (allegedly) not a good enough business reason to do so (and of course open source competitors began to pop up: trusty, tlk, OP-TEE, etc).

ME's use case is to be able to manage the machine when there is no OS installed, is unbootable or unresponsive. So somebody doesn't have to physically visit a datacenter and find the machine in a rack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...

However, I think the argument in the article still holds water, not because Blu-ray matters, but because nobody had any idea it wouldn't. CPU and GPU manufacturers probably have extremely long contracts to implement and obscure DRM features, fueled in part by Hollywood's sore feelings from the DVD Jon days.

Of course Netflix and Hulu and so forth happened and whoops, laptops got thin and stopped having optical drives and oops, Samsung added streaming services to their TVs... And now Bluray and it's assinine security schemes hardly matter. Hollywood didn't adapt well to this new streaming world so I'll bet they didn't see it coming either.

Of course the threats not over. Next generation we'll probably see even more insane copyright protection coming out of Hollywood for the sake of protecting services like Netflix as a contractual obligation if they want to carry the hot new garbage. I'm particularly excited to see what happens with stuff like Intel SGX.

This will probably continue for the next couple decades until a set of realizations finally become too apparent to ignore. After all, the pirates torrenting the latest Game of Thrones don't need Intel SGX or HDCP. They just click play.

But the more delusional and out of touch the industry is, the longer it takes. Video game DRM may not be a solved problem but even the absolute worst protection available today is so much less hostile than what we were dealing with a decade ago that it hardly matters. Hell, nowadays with PC games, anticheat is the more invasive technology. Modern invasive DRM mostly just phones home to get some crypto keys and to try to limit a single license from being spread to the entire internet. It may seem anticonsumer, but it's the worst there is, and it's very telling that gamers seem more concerned about tracking technology than middleware like Denuvo.

The article discusses the DRM aspect of it because this is one thing which would make it particularly legally difficult to allow owner control of the ME, since there are likely to be contractual obligations regarding keeping that secure.

AFAIK, Intel isn't offering the anti-theft service anymore.

[1] https://www.arm.com/products/security-on-arm/trustzone

That's exactly what IBM, Motorola and Apple said when they got together to promote a new architecture once. In 1992.

My understanding is that the industry has decided that UHD/4K content should require hardware-level DRM, no matter whether on disc or streamed, and that Netflix UHD requires a system with this functionality.

- Modern lithography just isn't that precise to my understanding. The whole point of binning chips is that you aim for an entire wafer of Core i9s, but you accept that some flaws will occur and will require disabling features of the chip. Are the disabled features "non-essential"? Certainly seems like they are if they can be disabled.

- From a marketing perspective, you'd need to help customers decipher dozens of different models of the same chip. For n features, you'd need (2^n)-1 chips, right? So Model A would support everything; Model B would support everything except virtualization; Model C eould support everything except HDCP; and so on.

- And as a customer, does that mean I need to spend $500 and replace my CPU everytime I realize I need a new feature? How would that work for laptops, where chips are frequently soldered to the motherboard?

I'm sympathetic to the idea of requiring transparency in general, but unfortunately hardware is a helluva lot trickier than software.

Google "Software Guard Extensions" and "Intel Enclave"

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions