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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

>we’ll see a resurgence in piracy

I am not so sure about that. It will always exist, but it is getting increasingly difficult to break DRM. So we may have long periods where the rips are inferior compared to the source (i.e., transcodes via capping). All the new 4K stuff is already quite difficult due to SGX/other hardware enclaves. So it's not a question of just time/dedication to reverse engineer a blob.

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An inferior rip beats 4k "not available in your country".

Also, hardware does get hacked too.

indeed, sgx is poor and broken like most of intel 'security' featurs :D

Source quality and video codecs are so good these days that those "inferior" rips will be much higher quality than, say, DVDs. It's all about "good enough".

Right? I remember watching awful cam rips back in the day. I'm always so busy these days, 90% of the long-form content I watch is on my tablet riding the bus on my commute. Movies are different, but I can't remember the last time I was inclined to see a tv show above 720p. This is all personal anecdotes, but still.

> it is getting increasingly difficult to break DRM

Do you have real examples of where this is the case? Outside of a vanishing minority of titles, DRM-stripped releases appear in a timely manner just as they have always done.

It’s already happening, just read this thread and similar ones here and on reddit. People are very open about it.

Worst case, set up a dedicated video camera rig on a good 4k TV, calibrate and downscale to HD. It will look fine.

Without going into specifics there are multiple attack vectors for breaking DRM or simply bypassing DRM. Many are unfortunately for content providers trivially easy. The only real limits are for naked, original files which are best possible quality available outside of the content provider networks themselves. Every single transaction point from creation, transmit, transcode/transmux, distribution to CDNs, and finally transmission to the end user is an attack vector. If you're assuming that attacking the DRM directly is the only option or even the best option available, I'm sad to say for content providers, you're unfortunately misinformed.

Even after all that, there's always the analog hole which can never be fixed.

I would argue that it IS a question of time and dedication.

When life gives you lemons you JTAG those keys out the enclave if you have to. Don't worry, life always finds a way.

>JTAG those keys out the enclave

I'm not so optimistic. That is precisely the threat model. That is not to say that it is impossible. Side channel exfiltration from stuff like SGX has been shown, but that's a different game really.

Yeah, but people in the scene are good. Like, world class good. Like, 'perform fault injection to dump BootROM from SoC to get management core execution, discover CPU cores with a custom ISA doing DRM, black-box reverse engineer the ISA, exploit code running on those cores to get code execution, exploit silicon bugs to escalate and extract DRM keys from there' good.

It's a challenge to circumvent DRM, so people with the skills to do so will attempt it. I expect that for many it will also be a matter of fighting back against something that is inherently a threat to (digital) civic freedoms.

And because DRM is fundamentally broken (i.e., there is always the analogue hole at the end of the spectrum) it will never prevent piracy on its own.

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