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Comment by mynameisvlad | Hacker News Reader

> For example, without encryption I can drive by the old folks home and broadcast my video of "the world is ending, kill yourself before it's too late" and do a lot of mental damage to people.

I mean, yes, you can take a homebrew transmitter and do that, just like you could have done for decades. But you're still operating an unlicensed transmitter and are performing broadcast signal intrusion.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-A... already defines specific limits which prevent pirate broadcasting.

Why is DRM necessary? And why is it only necessary now?

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Because the OTA broadcasters want two things from the viewers.

First, they want to be paid. Second, they want to know who you are so they can provide “targeted” advertising to their clients.

DRM forces both.

The “unlicensed” aspect was never preventing this. Do you deny the basic benefits of end-to-end encryption?

Is end to end encryption even beneficial in a public broadcast medium? I mean, you’d need to send the encryption key as part of the broadcast. There isn’t an out of band channel to transmit a key, so how could this even work in a secure way? Or will they require an internet connect for key distribution? That seems antithetical to the purpose of broadcast TV.

Signing the signal is all you need to be able to validate that the signal came from the broadcaster. But even this assumes that the public key will be transmitted often and the rogue pirate broadcast a bad key.

It actually explicitly prevents this, legally speaking. That was my whole point. This was already explicitly illegal.

> Do you deny the basic benefits of end-to-end encryption?

Yes.

Encryption is for keeping communication private. There's no benefit when communication is meant to be public.

If you want signal integrity, you can sign the signal. But even that is overkill. The threat and harm of intrusion is extremely low.

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