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Comment by weird_trousers | Hacker News Reader

Forced to DRM for security... And people will still argue that Windows (and I will generalize to "Microsoft products") is not evil?!

Come on guys, come on...

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What would be the alternative?

Build your whole machine at home?

Is it a joke?

There are multiple alternatives, for Microsoft Windows or other Microsoft products like Office or Azure.

So, trusting someone else is a solution?

Trusting something you can verify is a solution.

Which DRM solutions like TEE and FHE are, so I don't see the issue.

The "DRM" used here by Signal is just a Win32 function that keeps a window out of screen capture, not an anti-tamper software nor a protected media path.

Fair.

But it seems to me that's a step in the right direction, even if it doesn't go far enough.

Yes?

Isn't that how trust works? You stop trusting those that don't deserve it. Unless you're a complete isolationist and/or sociopath living off the land in the woods, you need some level of trust in others.

The tradeoff here is "do you want to trust this repeat abuser again, or trust someone else who has not been [as] abusive?", not "do you want to trust this repeat abuser again, or nobody ever again?"

You're presenting an extreme example of a false dichotomy.

I don't see MS as the problem, but the structure of how we, as a society, create and use IT.

Signal uses DRM to protect its users from the OS. This is nice, because now they don't have to run to some other companies that could do the same thing.

In such a case as this, yes. Not every systems product is designed to exfiltrate your data.

Linux is the most obvious

On the hardware you build yourself? I don't think so.

The OS and the hardware become irrelevant when you run your apps behind DRM.

At least one thing we can thank the copyright trolls for.

I bought an AMD mini-PC. It came with windows 11, but I just yanked that NVMe drive out, and installed Linux on it. Linux support for such devices is excellent because they're basically down to just one SoC package that's been tested by AMD. This one also has an Intel Wifi/Bluetooth chip, which is exactly as flaky as any other Intel product would be with any other OS.

Anyway, there are options to disable TPM in the BIOS if you care, but I don't think any of the DRM stuff works by default.

I’m very confused. You know what DRM is right? I’m not trying to insult you, but I feel like we’re working with different definitions or something.

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