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Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

Question.

Why does this also affect Display Port? Is the document elsewhere stating that both are intertwined?

It is depressing how “intellectual property” damaged computing. Just imaging a critical bug needs fixed in 15 years and the key signing utility is not available because ${RANDOM_CORP} disappeared. Don’t say that couldn’t happen: Nokia, Sun, DEC, Apple (nearly bankrupt 1998), 3DFX, Aureal and so on. And this lists only the ones where the employees are no longer available. Other just cancel support. Broadcom - which I know avoid - doesn’t care anymore about their BLE 4.0 chips and the (security) issues.

Seeing how Netflix and others succeeded with a flatrate model - which is the actual solution - this is completely unnecessary. The authorities missed to create institutional ways for creators to collect money, just awkward unfair taxes on harddisks and VHS-Tapes. Which streaming did?

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Both HDMI and DisplayPort can use HDCP. The authors of the DisplayPort standard also invented their own clone of HDCP called DPCP, but you can also use HDCP over DP, and it seems like HDCP is a lot more popular(?). In any case the DRM implications (in terms of lockdown and code signing) are the same. Though not explicitly mentioned in the screenshots of the i.MX8M reference manual shown in the article, reading the rest of the manual it's clear DP is affected too. (Which, again, is why the MNT Reform forewent the use of the DP interface to attach their eDP internal display in favour of a MIPI DSI to eDP bridge.)

I certainly agree that restrictive code signing practices like these are completely unacceptable. In my view, the 'right to repair' movement should encompass a right to any keys needed to fix bugs, though I am not optimistic about 'right to repair' being interpreted in this way.

Worth noting that while we usually think of DRM as a (patently ineffective) way to prevent piracy, in reality it seems to be much more about controlling end devices and the manufacturers of end devices. I explain more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17588610

> (Which, again, is why the MNT Reform forewent the use of the DP interface to attach their eDP internal display in favour of a MIPI DSI to eDP bridge.)

There's only one display interface capable of driving DP/HDMI on i.MX8M, so if they didn't do that they wouldn't have external HDMI port.

Thanks.

Don't forget how they killed DAT before it even had a chance to get going. Consumers were stuck with analog casette mixtapes for another decade or more unnecessarily.

The worst part is what it did to indie/amateur musicians. The only models allowed to record at 44.1 were "professional" that cost a lot more than the very few consumer models that were only allowed to do 32k and 48k.

Wouldn't 48k be better quality than 44.1? Why not use 48k?

If the end user is going to play it at 48k (trivial today) then it is absolutely better.

Back in the 1990's independent/aspiring musicians needed to make CD's to send out to labels/radio stations/sell to fans. CD Audio is fixed at 44.1KHz. Transcoding 48k to 44.1 generates undesirable artifacts, especially back then when you likely had to convert to analog first.

Makes sense, I can definitely see why you'd want to skip a DAC/ADC step.

For some reason I was thinking about it like nowadays when you just do the samplerate conversion ITB with hardly any degradation.

> Just imaging a critical bug needs fixed in 15 years and the key signing utility is not available because ${RANDOM_CORP} disappeared.

It doesn't even need to be a corporation disappeared; it could be they decide they don't want to sign things anymore. As a application developer you have to make a choice --- how long do you want your last and final build to work, knowing it's impossible to fix any client side issues after that, and you can't extend it later.

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