Hacker News Reader

Comment by garfieldnate | Hacker News Reader

I was shocked to find that this wouldn't even work on my desktop! You have to go to the browser settings and turn off hardware acceleration. If you rent an HD movie from Prime Video, you get a notice saying that your screen has to be compliant with some specific standard, and part of the standard is essentially baked-in DRM that prevents taking screenshots of the content. The device belongs to me, the content was streamed to me, the device has no business preventing me from taking a screenshot or recording video. Yet here we are, apparently DRM is baked into all of our screens now.

View on HN

"Why Rosyna Can't Take A Movie Screenshot" :

https://web.archive.org/web/20170617174641/https://www.alexr...

And that's why it's important to boycott devices and software that allow DRM : Intel and Ryzen AMD CPUs, Windows 11 (requires a DRM chip), maybe Chrome/ium if it doesn't allow to easily disable DRM support, Steam...

Boycotton all recent x86 CPUs is probably not reasonable for most people. More actionable is to make sure you control the software (most importantly, the OS) that runs on those CPUs so that their user-hostile features are not used for DRM.

You're right, not for most people. But we aren't most people here, and can stick with older AMD for desktops, as well as should be heavily investigating the alternatives like RISC-V (and also the "true" Linux, non-Android smartphone alternatives for somewhat related reasons).

> Yet here we are, apparently DRM is baked into all of our screens now.

This situation sucks. It's as if movie and tv studios (including Netflix, apparently) said "we want you to implement a bunch of intrusive, complicated, wasteful technology that will punish paying users while having little to no effect on pirates" and all the tech companies said "great idea, let's do it!"

I suppose the (self-correcting) endgame is when DRM makes paid media so inconvenient that it drives the masses to piracy.

It's already happening. You cannot get better than 720p on most services on linux, while pirated content is available in 4k

It is baked into Windows since Vista. They had to add it in order to license HDMI and this has led to the need to digitally sign drivers - they had to be able to revoke your driver if it turns out that you were doing something the movie and record industry didn't want you to do.

Just wait till they make impossible to take a photo with your phone of your desktop screen.

Like they already made it impossible to make color photocopies of some content? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

That's why I encourage everyone with a desktop system to run their HDMI outputs through a capture card as well as the monitors.

You will own nothing and be happy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com