Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights | Hacker News Reader

Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

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269 pointsaweeraman157 comments

The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site.

As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it legally.

What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.

Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.

The point is: DRM is circumvented once, by some grizzled pirate captain. Everyone else just gets to plunder their downloads DRM free, nice and easy.

DRM is ineffective because the pirate uploaders are competent enough to break it, and an average end user only downloads - rank and file pirates wouldn't make their own releases even if DRM never existed and making them was easy.

But why would this larger percentage of people rip it themselves when the hardcore pirate already did it and made it accessible[1]?

[1] https://fmhy.net/video#streaming-sites

The average user would probably pay more for a different video streaming platform if their current one started requiring 4 or 5 more clicks per view. “Complex set of steps” for most people could involve finding a website that wasn’t explicitly advertised to them, using an interface that wasn’t AB tested into oblivion, and inexplicably having to “update their flash player” every single time they want to watch Barney Miller. Never mind bit torrent: you might as well ask them to build themselves a TV from scratch. They could figure it out— they aren’t (necessarily) dumb— but they really don’t want to have to figure it out. They just want it to work without friction.

But it is easy to get the thing for free, because the free one doesn't have DRM.

> Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy

spotify and netflix are both prime examples of making it easier for a larger population to access drm enabled content compared to pirated content (at the time they started getting popular anyway).

with the advent of streaming services you no longer needed to download potentially dodgy files to your computer (viruses/malware), wait for the download to finish, realise they’re a dodgy video cam recording of the cinema screening, download another one etc.

napster/limewire et. al were originally examples for the opposite case. pirating via those was super popular. there were fewer steps to access the media compared to going to a physical shop to buy a CD/DVD. (*)

(*) i can’t remember when the itunes store came along. might have been after these services? or around the same-ish time?

DRM also intensively targets the new-release window during which much of the returns on any piece of IP are made; the latency with which high-quality copies hit mainstream sites has monetary value as well.

Piracy is a service problem. Copyright monopolists always defeat themselves with their obnoxious greed.

Things were easy enough when Netflix had a complete catalog, now every studio wants to roll their own shitty streaming services in order to cut Netflix out. Result is a fragmented mess where you want to watch a great film but you have no idea where the hell it even is, and even if you find it you discover it doesn't work because your computer isn't locked down to their tastes, and even if you buy a TV appliance they stream you some shitty horribly compressied "high definition" video with artifacts in pure black frames, all on their homegrown laggy borderline unusable video players with zero features.

Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. It's the sort of thing that makes me feel like a total moron for giving money to these corporations.

Apple TV has a search function that allows you to find a film or series irrespectice of whatever service it's on, and launch the appropriate app to play it.

Some times I read these mental gymnastics comments about piracy being easier and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV.

I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

Sometimes I read these mental gymnastics comments about being leashed to half a dozen providers for “convenience” and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like a NAS.

I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. Inventing strawmans about how difficult it is to click one button in Jellyseer and have a max-quality, buffering free copy of what you want to watch in perpetuity is an order of magnitude more work than renting a poor-quality subset of the media that publishers consider it profitable to provide.

> I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture.

My local farmers and grocery stores contribute ~nothing to actual evolution of culture. I still think they deserve to get paid for what they do. I don’t think this is as smart of a point as you thought it was.

Regardless, the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time.

This boils down to “I want free stuff but I want to feel morally superior about it”

> the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time.

More commonly, at least in Australia which at various times has had record level piracy, content can be worth _something_ and also not worth "that much" and hence worth pirating.

This has been seen with games - once charged in Australia significantly more than in Europe or the US. Game piracy was rife and didn't really drop in volume until Australian game prices fell more in line with elsewhere.

With the coming of Netflix TV and movie piracy dropped a lot - as prices rose and sheer number of providers rose making it impossible to see whatever caught your eye all on the one source subscription, piracy volume in AU increased again.

This boils down to "We'll pay for stuff .. but only so far".

You’re moving the goalposts from “contributing nothing” to “actually it’s valuable but I don’t want to pay that much but I also don’t want to not watch it”

This is still a silly argument. If the price of something is higher than you want to pay, that doesn’t justify taking it.

This has come all the way back to supporting what I said above: The only service problem is that people don’t like the part where it charges their credit card. Piracy lets them skip that part.

> You’re moving the goalposts

Nope. I'm a first time commentator in this subthread I'm stating a position held in one part of the world.

Maybe it'd require moving your "goalposts" to get there .. but I'm not moving anything, just pointing out exactly how the ground has lain here for decades.

I never said the content was worthless, I said the distributors are worthless. If I can get the same content, at a higher quality, more efficiently and cheaper (free) through piracy than legal means, the distributors are by definition not providing value.

I absolutely pay for physical media, for which a much higher share of revenue goes to the actual creators of content than the leeches who extract rent from it.

This is exactly why Steam has and continues to dominate the gaming market, they made it easier than piracy, and didn’t fall victim to the terminal-stage capitalism that has turned every previously decent streaming platform into hot garbage.

> I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button.

You think wrong. My Steam account has 300+ games on it. I pay for several streaming services. I have a physical media collection that even includes a copy of windows vista, to my eternal regret.

> Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

And yet that's what you have to do if you don't want to pay to get total garbage in return for your money.

The pirates compete with each other to release the best encodes, to the point they mix multiple Blu-Rays together into an ultimate release because some region somehow received a better version of some scene or whatever. Normal files you get to play using mpv.

Netflix ships horribly compressed nonsense where color gradients are so full of artifacts it hurts my eyes. Highly dynamic segments are painful to watch. Amazingly enough it's still the least bad option, the other services have even worse quality and a borderline unusable video player software to boot.

Service isn't just about ease, it's also about quality. If you want quality, piracy isn't just easier, it's almost always the best option, if not the only option. It's sad that the copyright industry can't seem to match what's essentially a bunch of amateurs but what can you do?

If you don’t mind paying for things and your only concern is the quality, then presumably you pay for the source material and then also download the best quality pirated version you can find, right?

That would satisfy both of your claims: That you don’t mind paying for things and you only do piracy to seek out the highest quality.

If you selectively choose not to pay for things where you can get away with it (e.g. not Steam games) then this claim doesn’t hold the slightest amount of water.

> presumably you pay for the source material

I do. Multiple times, even.

Okay great. Then can you acknowledge that when everyone else is talking about piracy, none of us are talking about you?

You are the 0.001% of pirates, but you make assertions here like all pirates are high minded people who are secretly actually paying for the content and are only interested in some extra video quality. That describes such a vanishingly small number of pirates that it’s meaningless in the broader discussion about piracy.

I acknowledge nothing. Especially not those made up numbers.

> but you make assertions here like all pirates are high minded people who are secretly actually paying for the content and are only interested in some extra video quality

you are replying to comment "I do. Multiple times, even."

Not a native speaker, but as far as I know in English "I" in this context refers to a single person, specifically someone writing this referring to themselves.

If anything you made assertions referring to general population and it is quote easy to guess that "Some times I read these mental gymnastics comments about piracy being easier and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV." will have nonrepresentation on HN.

> when everyone else is talking about piracy, none of us are talking about you?

piracy-related laws often miss exemptions for cases like this

No, he's still a pirate.

If he doesn't like what the distributor releases, he shouldn't watch the movie or show at all. Paying for a legitimate copy does not grant you infinite legal or moral use of the work, only permission to view the version of the work provided under terms set by the OWNER of the work.

Nobody cares about the owner's "terms".

The whole point of this thread is the fact the owners keep getting outcompeted by a bunch of pirates precisely because of those idiotic "terms" nobody really cares about. The more "terms" they add, the more their product sucks. No one wants to read a dozen pages of legal boilerplate just to have a shitty experience watching some film. Thanks to piracy, they don't have to.

Literal rent seeking monopolists don't get to preach about morals either. Knock copyright duration all the way back to 20 years and maybe the monopoly becomes tolerable enough for us to listen to the plight of creators.

If that's what you actually believe, it's either because you have financial ties to the owners, or you are in the authority-obeying Kohlberg stage. There is no simple universal answer to whether piracy is moral. It is easy to argue that giving money to rich corporations who fuck everything up is worse than not giving them money.

Here’s an idea: some suit in an office somewhere doesn’t get to dictate how I engage with art. My moral obligation ends where the people who made the movie get paid.

you bought a smart tv maybe you got a dumb tv and then plugged in a dongle? Or maybe you bought a smart tv and also purchased another home media device thingy and you gotta remember to switch to w the apple tv for this thingy. you signed in to it you created dozens ? Hundreds? Of accounts to watch all the content you want, try to figure out what plan you need to watch the content? Will you subscribe for a bit and cancel later ah ok siri set a reminder to cancel the subscriotion ill take care of that. Wait oops i went on vacation and netflix is mad that im. Not watching from home do i need a different plan? How do these amazon prime video channel subscriptions work how many do i have?

All that instead of a jellyfin server and a single search? It’s all gymnastics just different gymnastics

I would be happy to pay to buy or rent a single show or movie. The problem is that a lot of that content is only available with a monthly subscription. Screw that, those monthly bills eat you alive. I hear that the For All Mankind series is pretty good but there's no way I'm signing up for Apple TV just to watch that. So I'll skip it and watch something else.

And that's the appropriate response to have. If you don't want to pay according to the copyright owner's terms, then you don't watch the show. Not liking the copyright owner's terms for watching the show does not give you the right to steal it.

Yes, I know copyright infringement is not stealing per the technical legal definition. But splitting those hairs is like splitting hairs between pedophiles and ephebophiles: anyone doing it is very likely just telling on themselves as the exact sort of criminal under discussion.

Where do rights come from?

> Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

Not really, decent chunk of my MP3 collection is abandoned media not sold literally anywhere at all. Or was never published in public in the first place.

> if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV

no, as I am not interested in Apple's walled garden, and so far I have not used any of their devices or products

(OK, I used Mac for about one hour helping neighbor to fix their printer, and I tested Mac-specific bug on website for hour or two)

> I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button.

Not in my case, I regularly try to buy MP3 that are in my collection already but I have not paid for them.

It costs me mostly in time to find them and create accounts and pay for them and deal with various hoops. Far more than it costs me in actual payments.

  > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

It's not 2003 anymore. If "navigating torrent sites" is your idea of piracy, then you should certainly check out the so-called arr-stack of software that searches online sources for wishlisted items, downloads them, equips with metadata and subtitles, and presents for viewing or listening without any user input, based on predefined preferences.

Apple TV and other commercial offerings are a steaming pile of shit in comparison and I can't imagine people like the CEO of Apple watching stuff off Apple TV and not a proper arr-stack setup. It's like eating McDonald's every for every meal when a chef is readily available. Why would you do this to yourself.

With Apple TV, you can't even do something as mundane was fixing translation errors in subtitles before you show a movie to a friend. You're stuck with what some cheap outsourced translation service came up with. It reduces the owner of the library to a passive mouthbreather who has virtually no control over their experience; can't choose which cut of the movie to see; can't replace an ugly poster with a nicer one; can't edit movie description to remove spoilers; and so on and on. In essence, you're watching someone else's library, and that someone has not put much effort into proper curation to present every item from the best possible side.

Issues and topics that are reduced to a single idea are oversimplified to were lost of reality can take hold.

Example, say person chooses to never fund Amazon. Amazon owns MGM. The only way that person can watch an MGM movie is through piracy. The only alternative would be to buy second hand content so MGM / Amazon do not get a finical cut.

As media corporations become more monopolistic, like Paramount buying Warner Bros, I could see more people pirating so they do not fund David Ellison and people like him.

So just watch something else. We have more video content available than anyone could possibly watch in a lifetime.

> Piracy is a service problem

> Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice.

I think the only people who believe that pirating is easier than using the streaming services are people who spend so much time with computers that they round the mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it.

I am technically capable of doing all of those things. I also have a rotation of online streaming services. Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.

I think this is all just mental gymnastics to try to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that some people don’t want to pay for things and, of those, some get a little fun out of doing all the steps and setup to pirate things.

There's apps for that these days. Not going to names them, but if you're still downloading a torrent file on a computer, you're behind the times. It's as easy as Netflix on an Android TV with a remote these days.

Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?

No there are services that provide global cdn access to torrents. Your provider sees https traffic from your closest cdn edge. You don't share back at any point. These things are a couple of steps more to setup than getting a Netflix subscription and work almost an any device.

So all of these free (or paid apps? I don’t know, I don’t use any) that offer access to pirated content…

They’re all above board? Not doing anything nefarious?

That’s obviously not an argument anyone would intentionally make.

They are making money out of this. Subscription is like a month's Netflix for a year's access to everything. Multiple "providers" offering this which means there is money to be made.

So their business model is to profit off pirated content, and that’s why you trust them?

I don't think I said anything about trust. I was talking about content delivery. All the things you mentioned before are avoided using this method of delivery.

So you’ve audited the code of these apps, apps published by active criminals, and confirmed in a via reproducible build that none of these apps are a vector for VPN access, nor try to take advantage of vulnerabilities in any of the other software installed on that system.

I think you are either pretending that you don't understand or can't understand what I'm saying.

At which point did I mention apps?

Anyway this discussion is over.

Yep, same. I still pirate media from time to time, but it’s become increasingly infrequent that each time I think to do it I end up putting it off for months because I’d rather gargle broken glass, or watch politicians give state their opinion on topic or another, than go through all the rigmarole of pirating media.

Watching something on a streaming service, or using Apple / Google to “rent” it for a few days is like, what, three clicks away.

Rather than my media server updated over night and won’t boot, I’ve got it booting to a terminal session but the database is corrupted, fuck it I’ll just buy $2000 worth of new hard drives and then re down everything in Ultra 16k 96 bit colour with 4000 gigabit Dolby 400 channel surround-surround and upgraded to all gold plated fibre cabling and have this fixed in no time. Or my torrent site account got hacked or blocked, or the site changed URL again, or they updated their database and “hope to be back up soon”, or a Three Letter Agency seized the their hardware because they were also a involved in human trafficking of blood diamond child sex slaves, again.

It’s all too hard. I’d rather just listen to the footy on AM radio, or maybe read a book. Or occasionally complain about there being too many, or not enough, clouds / rain / sun / wind.

> mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it

Heh, that’s what you think modern piracy is? How quaint. In reality I have my own “Netflix”, with access to effectively all media ever created and I click play. That’s it. That’s the entire process. No credit cards, no finding which service has it, no finding out that the service doesn’t have it in my country at this time, no ads. I punch in what I want to watch, I click play, and it plays.

> Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.

Sounds like your problem. Though again, that’s already more steps than it is for me.

> which is that some people don’t want to pay for things

I was happy to pay, and did so for years. Then the services got worse, increasingly fragmented and ever increased in price as service got poorer. Now I’m no longer happy to pay; and have a superior service to boot. The industry successfully convinced me to give piracy up, before driving me back to it a decade later.

> Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.

That's just because you're fine with consuming the low quality slop they stream out. Doesn't mean people who care more than you do are engaging in "mental gymnastics". We don't want the same things.

I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncensored version. The uncompressed version. The lossless version. The DRM-free version. The best version.

The copyright holders just aren't providing it. They only provide slop, and only on their terms, take it or leave it.

Then a bunch of fans gather together, hunt down an old film roll, drop tens of thousands of dollars on equipment to scan it and somehow it becomes a better version than the one the industry released. It's not fair to dismiss that level of commitment as "it's just people who don't want to pay for things". Industry should probably hire more people like that. People who give a shit.

> Then a bunch of fans gather together, hunt down an old film roll, drop tens of thousands of dollars on equipment to scan it and somehow it becomes a better version than the one the industry released. It's not fair to dismiss that level of commitment as "it's just people who don't want to pay for things".

This is absurdity. The average pirate is not downloading content that some fans spent $10K digitizing from an original film roll.

The average pirated content wasn’t even shot on film.

These piracy justifications are some of the weirdest mental gymnastics that happens on this site. I’m not taking about the pirate connoisseurs who only download the finest encoded sourced from artisanal film rolls to complete their collection. We’re talking about the average pirate who searches for a torrent or stream because they don’t want to pay a couple bucks.

This constant attempt to glorify pirates into the true, most moral, purest content consumers is so weird.

> This constant attempt to glorify pirates into the true, most moral, purest content consumers is so weird.

Why? You just said that they have to put more effort into it than the average person. Normie just signs up for netflix and watches whatever shows up. The pirate has to set up a torrent client, join private trackers and get connected with the so called scenesters, only to end up scrutinizing film grain of different encodes on screenshot comparison sites so he can spend his ratio budget on the best possible version.

It's true, that's a ton of work. Why would anyone put up with that nonsense, if not because they want higher quality than the industry is putting out? Netflix is not that expensive, and even if it was you can always share an account with some family members or something. Trivial.

> I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncensored version. The uncompressed version. The lossless version. The DRM-free version. The best version.

Basically the same greed that every billionaire has, just with negligible economic impact.

If billionaires are allowed to be extremely greedy then why aren't hundredaires allowed to be extremely greedy?

Sure, as long as they don’t have any moral concerns about society’s support for billionaires.

Appreciation of the arts getting compared with greed of billionaires ..... How the times have changed.

“Appreciation of the arts” = “stealing someone’s creative work”.

Nothing has changed, people are just trash.

If all billionaires wanted are copies of data which can be created at no cost there would be no problem with them.

That's true, but a lot of the time the best version is available on a blu ray you can buy.

The best version isn't some cumbersome Blu-Ray disc, it's the Blu-Ray's data remuxed into an mkv you can play with mpv.

Sometimes the best version just isn't sold anymore. See the 4K77 project for a concrete example.

Or ask your savvy friend for a copy on DVD-R. That's quite easy.

And to be clear: this was the original piracy, friend-to-friend networks. This was the original "scene" before torrenting and can still work this way with torrenting, or Usenet or whatever. We've just become more atomized and less group-oriented in general so chances are you aren't a member of a friend group that has a piracy guy, and you have to learn it yourself to get it done.

Every time this argument comes up, it doesn’t explain why piracy rates are much lower, despite having a lot of service problems. Piracy is a cultural thing. And I’m saying this as someone who kinda understands the pirate’s position.

> it doesn’t explain why piracy rates are much lower, despite having a lot of service problems.

Can you explain why you think piracy rates must be higher? Piracy isn't “free” after all.

Very common for some movie, tv shows or music not be available here. Or also, fairly expensive to buy/rent for some. If it was service issue, this would drive people who want to enjoy the media to piracy.

Yet it doesn’t.

Piracy has its own costs. It's likely that given the trade-offs, piracy rates don't increase.

PS: I have no idea whether piracy rates are up or down.

Isn't the explanation self evident? Piracy requires nonzero technical competency (not much but still), dedicated computing hardware, and a decent chunk of storage. It's a fairly low barrier to entry but it is nonetheless a barrier and your typical person off the street these days doesn't reliably know what files and folders are.

I know Japanese people who can easily pull it off, but ideologically very against it.

Sure, there are those who ideologically oppose it in most or all scenarios. But there are also obviously those who don't exhibit such unconditional opposition to it.

So what is the answer to your original question? I don't believe it to be some large cultural shift on a global scale regarding its acceptance (as I took you to be suggesting) given that such opposition clearly is not itself universal.

My impression of cultural acceptance of it in the US is that it is highly dependent on (at least) one's socioeconomic situation as well as the effectiveness of the solutions on offer. As a concrete example, if you're well off and everything you watch is available on netflix people will probably judge you if you're bragging about how you pirate it all in order to avoid a few dollars a month. Meanwhile I know plenty of people who preface their explanation with "well I do have several subscriptions, however ..." and no one seems particularly bothered by this.

I think something that worked well (against privacy) is in the US ISPs work with the studios, and you will get a letter threatening to be sued if you download a torrent. My country doesn't have that... And everyone I know uses torrents.

Netflix etc is also popular, as it's easier if the content is there. But if it's not... people know where to find it.

IIRC most of the US ISPs are simply owned by the movie studios now. They bought them to fight piracy.

That would be because "piracy rates" are not, in fact, much lower.

The main problem is that media doesn't cost enough. It's all bundled so the true price is hidden. I'd gladly play thousands to watch a movie/series if studios could take that signal and work with it. $15 or whatever is the same as free most of the content is for people who don't care (or care way to much about miscellaneous trivia)

“Locks only keep an honest man honest.”

-Most people’s grandfather

(I’m not saying these things are equal — just that this concept and the old saying share a perspective on securing things.)

I think that's also wrong. I think that the primary reason media publishers use DRM is not to prevent copyright infringement. It's really to exert power over the entire ecosystem and use that power to implement rules around content distribution and use that are much more restrictive than the actual copyright law itself.

To copyright owners, there really is no difference. In many countries, notably not the USA, copyright is bound up with the broader concept of authors' rights, including the right to control whether, where, when, and how a work is exhibited. Rightsholders in the U.S. still believe in authors' rights from a moral standpoint; Jack Valenti wanted to outlaw VCRs because he was afraid of the rise of bootleg tapes, sure, but he also believed that movies were intended to be shown in theaters, and maybe only much later, licensed for television. Copyright and control over the distribution network were indistinguishable to him.

Jack Valenti wanted to ban VCRs because he didn’t have more advanced DRM technology at that time. Publishers now have HDCP, so they don’t need to lobby the government to ban VCRs. They can just make sure to never license HDCP to any device manufactures that want to sell a recording device.

>> complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.

Finding and playing what I want via netflix or amazon is far far more complex than downloading and playing a video from a pirate website. Want to watch the original non-upgraded Star Wars, good luck even finding it on any streaming service. But it is instantly available via any number of pirate sites.

I think there’s a difference between what people think they’re aiming at and what they actually aim at.

Media DRM makes it harder for the person who can already legally access it to use it or share it in an unapproved manner. Or maybe to avoid ads, but that’s pretty rare.

So DRMing a media file or stream has approximately no effect on the ability of a non-paying customer to get pirate it, because anyone searching for a pirated copy can find a DRM-free version anyway.

But its all available easily with the DRM already stripped off by the hard core pirates.

My best friend used to download pirated movies all the time - because it was easier than trying to get what he wanted by legal channels. It wasnt even the cost. When Netflix took off, he stopped pirating and paid the subscription.

While i agree, certain DRM (video streaming) has gotten to the point where its made getting a show legally, at 1080p+, more trouble than pirating. And not from lack of DRM. There's a certain good middle ground and I think we've passed it.

Users hate it, but DRM is vastly more powerful than that since you ultimately control user access.

DRM - which all online services with user profiling automatically have - can also let you ban users, retarget users for ads, abuse, and other things beyond the basic function of running the software.

Such as bypassing parliament -the people responsible for managing your rights-. And subverting democracy and the rule of law too, by punishing you or otherwise manipulate you into desired behavior without going to court. Code is Law. DRM is violence.

Yet Netflix is as profitable as Disney. Having loved through netflix and popcorn tv that wouldn’t be the case without drm.

DRM does the job it's supposed to which is prevent casual piracy and increase the amount of effort it takes to pirate something. A thief could rob your house if they bumped your lock or just smashed your window. But that doesn't make door locks useless as those have large costs in terms of effort and risk. So the lock is still effective at preventing someone from just walking in and taking your stuff.

It's the same with DRM. Without it, media would appear on piracy sites instantly upon release. DRM makes things harder to pirate, and pirated editions harder to get. And the DMCA makes defeating DRM a felony under U.S. law, so pirate networks are riskier to establish, driving piracy underground. It's doing the job it's supposed to do. It's not going anywhere.

Cheaper & easier - not by much. Australia blocks all the good torrent sites, so now I need a VPN, a reputable one. Also need terabytes of network connected storage, and usually I need more and more of it over time. Better and more networking equipment to buy and maintain. Media management and streaming software that works locally and remotely, to (maybe buy) and maintain.

Or I can usage discount offers for the various streaming platforms, and pay for each one I want to watch something on from time to time.

The streaming services also don’t come with who knows what malware like pirated media can.

And a YouTube Premium subscription because you get ad free YouTube Music and ad free YouTube.

It’s cat and mouse game. Australia blocks sites, sites move urls. If you don’t keep up, then they have caught you too.

Streaming sites can just delete your purchases whenever they want to. Sony already has.

It's only a DNS block fwiw. If you set your DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 everything works fine.

I recently realised even the build in iOS Private Relay gets around the Australian Government site blocks.

This is true for music because the labels decided that they would upload their catalogs to every streaming service.

It's not true for movies, because the movie industry decided to sign exclusivity deals or make movies only available on their own platforms. Thus piracy is still the only reliable way to watch movies: you might get access to some subset of movies depending on which streaming service you subscribe to, but certainly not to all of them.

How does that negate needing a VPN, storage, networking, media management, remote access, malware?

I’ve never met even a data hoarder who has “all of them”, and I tend to watch them one at a time anyways, so I’d argue “not all of them” isn’t really a problem anyone has.

Having said that, I do tend to pirate a relatively small collection of movies and series, just the ones I could watch over and over and never get tired off.

You can access streaming (not torrenting) sites without a VPN and just watch whatever movies you want and there's no hastle or malware? If you like something particularly you can download it and then storage becomes a factor, and if all streaming sites are blocked a VPN subscription (reputable just mulvad) costs less than any streaming service and gives you access to every single movie and show, impossible to debate that it's not more convenient

> The streaming services also don’t come with who knows what malware like pirated media can.

How does one put malware in media? Are we talking exploiting unlatched vulnerabilities in codecs, or are we talking random exe files?

> now I need a VPN, a reputable one. Also need terabytes of network connected storage, and usually I need more and more of it over time. Better and more networking equipment to buy and maintain. Media management and streaming software that works locally and remotely, to (maybe buy) and maintain.

Literally none of these things are reality other than for the very specific means you are aware of.

> The streaming services also don’t come with who knows what malware like pirated media can.

What is this, an MPAA pitch from 2007?

I don't see how you would need more and more space for media with time.

You don't have to take it upon yourself to archive the entire history of Hollywood, you know.

You can get _very_ far with 20TB, hell, even with just 10TB.

> Cheaper & easier - not by much.

I spent a total of $150 for my entire homelab setup two years ago with not a single investment made since then. Used to pay $80 per month for streaming back then, bet it would be >$100 now

If you randomly make up issues and limitations then yes of course it is hard to circumvent those non-existing issues and limitations.

I have to use a free DNS over HTTPS in any case, thanks to my amazing government's censorship (italy), so that's something that needs doing in any case.

There's no need for terabytes. You just made it up.

> What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.

But the media ARE offered without DRM. At least many video games, the big ones too. And somehow they sell just fine

You wouldn’t steal a Claude!

I often buy content to support the creators, then download it on torrent sites because the UI and experience is better. I can use whatever player I want, modify the screen size more and have no branding bloat (Amazon Prime! Youtube! Netflix! etc) and have a better, more focused, and even off-line friendly experience.

It gets deleted, I move on with life.

But man the experiences in branded players really sucks, and I wish it were better.

> As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it legally. > > What would happen if media were offered without DRM?

You kind of answered your own question. What you should have asked instead was - What would happen if media and payment was a straight forward offer we would have Netflix

It's unfortunate that the final few years of the fastest AGI progress happen to coincide with a global surge in nationalism, polarization, and mutual hostility between human groups.

That raises a disturbing failure mode: under intense conflict, an AI could learn that exterminating some groups of humans is a justified or even desirable objective. Once that principle is accepted, the step to concluding that exterminating all humans is justified may become much smaller than we'd like to believe.

> That raises a disturbing failure mode: under intense conflict, an AI could learn that exterminating some groups of humans is a justified or even desirable objective

That is not a failure mode; its the default. Whoever is developing an AI - let alone an AGI - will shape it to, or alternately only accept one that is aligned with their world-view. If it goes against their interests in any way, they'll pull the plug and start another round of training from the last acceptably-aligned checkpoint. US DoD A(G)Is will follow DoD doctrine, and the same goes for those by the PLA, anything less will not be fit for purpose.

Grok

The rise of "nationalism and mutual hostility between human groups" is mostly due to the establishment / capitalists / "national security services" of USA.

You make it appear as though it is from all sides, but it is not, it is the old odious "Bzhezinsky doctrine".

Slight timeline correction: 25 years ago in 2001 Blowfish was no longer contraband - the crypto export rules had been changed by 2000. As of January 2000 Netscape and IE were both shipping 128bit DES internationally.

Still, the t-shirts with Blowfish source printed on them were a cool bit of retro hacker chic.

Reminds me of T-Shirts with DeCSS's code printed on it. Wild times.

Also, the first OpenBSD hackathon was 1999; it was in fact semicryptographic (they shipped IPSEC) but they've had hackathons in the US since, and for a time developers were coming out to Calgary because that's where Theo was. The dumb export control shipping dance was real though.

Had one of the OpenBSD Blowfish t-shirts [1] and wore if for many years until it broke. My best memory of it was as an intern in Silicon Valley, when suddenly the CEO who never had seemed that technical, walked past me and one of the secretaries talking and going: "Blowfish, right? Nice!". He earned a lot of respect from this intern that day.

It is a shame that the OpenBSD folks do not reprint their old designs as I would buy about ten different ones in an instant.

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html#4

Illegal Tattoos: RSA https://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/

DES doesn't really come in 128 bits, and certainly not its SSL implementations. Perhaps you are thinking of AES?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1...

You’re right. RC4 was what I meant. See sibling comment.

128bit SSL precedes the AES contest.

DES doesn't accept 128 bit keys. It's native key size is 56 bits which was commonly extended to 168 with 3DES (encrypt-decrypt-encrypt).

You’re right - 128bit SSL 2/3 used RC4 not 3DES. I was misremembering - one did occasional see marketing describe 3DES with two 56bit keys with 8 bit parity checks as 128bit (actual key strength: 112bit) and I was thinking that Netscape and IE SSL had been part of that wave.

This is AI written. Next time just paste your prompt or conversation with the AI that wrote the article. I'll then converse with Claude about it myself. There is no need for this intermediary.

I think you're joking, but there are some topics where what you're describing might be a great way to communicate an idea.

> I believe {audacious claim}. I've prepared this chatbot to defend the claim. If don't already agree, tell the bot why I'm wrong and it'll convince you that I'm right.

Because if you've anticipated and countered all likely objections, you still don't know, for any given reader, which of those objections are going to be on the forefront of their mind. Encoding the argument as a bot means the important parts come first, even if those are different parts for different readers.

Not sure if I'm alone here, but I'd play.

I agree, I think having our own arguments reviewed by an AI first would be a great way to improve online discussions.

Also, people should use AI as a personal spam filter.

However, this should be done with local AI, not an intermediary service. And I think local AI will eventually win.

That also doesn't mean you should stop communicating normally in meatspace.

It’s kind of a bit ridiculous for Opus to blow up the minute I ask it to read from Ghidra, when the Chinese models, and even OpenAI, do not.

Leave the legality up to me, please, and don’t presume to be a power tool vendor regulating the use of their power drills, so to speak.

Was going to ask you to elaborate but from your update I caught refreshing I see it kneecaps itself for safety?

I'm a hobbiest reverse engineer and I often use ida free/ollydbg to reverse engineer stuff. I'm tempted to use try and use llms as a help (I've used it for help with instruction one offs successfully, but not the decompiling/trying to make sense of decompiled functions).

Yeah try Sonnet 5, it has no guardrails and it can run continuously. Hook it up to IDA, or I use Ghidra, with MCP and it can autonomously search for whatever you tell it to using a text prompt. It’s way faster than doing it by hand.

Only issue is Sonnet is kind of a silly model and whilst it’s good at searching for stuff, it lacks a little bit of common sense compared to Opus or Fable, so you’ll have to drive it.

You can tell it stuff like “find the code that handles the immobiliser” and it will give you a result in around 2 hours, which would take me weeks by hand.

It seems like you got bored halfway through and had an LLM write the second half of your post? You know there isn't a minimum length for blog posts, right? You can just stop writing.

Publish a blog post https://www.comptia.org/en-us/resources/ce/choose/renewing-w...

  You can earn one CEU for each blog post of at least 500 words...

How to earn CEUs https://www.hcca-info.org/certification/continuing-education...

  ...Publish a compliance related educational blog post (minimum 400 words).

We need a cypherpunks movement for open weight models

cypherpunks of today would probably be focused on bringing big tech down a notch, rather than spreading more LLMs

https://tinygrad.org is probably the best punk in this regard. Moving LLM's out of your drug dealers datacenter and into your utility closet.

No, being a cyberpunk is not about having some authoritarian control that prevents other people from using technology.

Instead it is about empowering the masses. It's about being a rag tag hacker fighting to do stuff that other people want to stop you from doing.

Most people today are too aligned. Like they want the models to be also.

I don't understand what we're talking about here. The cryptography debate was won because the government was wrong. PGP for example is not dangerous, it's a safe and well-behaved piece of software that prevents certain messages from being read by people other than their intended recipient. If PGP had "escaped containment by finding a zero-day in a package proxy and reached production infrastructure at Hugging Face, exploiting additional zero-days along the way", everyone including Phil Zimmermann would have immediately agreed that this is a dangerous product which needs to be handled carefully.

> PGP for example is not dangerous ... If PGP had "escaped containment"

I think the disconnect here is the dishonest framing that OpenAI have purposefully put on this incident. Their LLM did not "escape containment" in this "rogue AI" Hollywood blockbuster sense that they want you to believe. An LLM cannot do that; it is just a static computation graph that outputs a probability distribution.

What escaped "containment" is a piece of software they wrote that uses an LLM and which, through OpenAI's negligence, lacked ordinary technical and human guardrails that should have been present. It was run in "YOLO mode" with gobs of compute and no human oversight. That situation is the source of the danger, not the model weights. The model itself was simply given the opportunity to generate a bazillion commands, many of which were nonsensical garbage, and a few of which worked. It was not the work of a supreme intelligence.

This distinction is very important, because OpenAI have shifted the discourse from where it should be (OpenAI's negligent use of software) to a place that serves their strategic business interests.

LLMs remix existing knowledge and output text. That is not inherently hazardous. What can be hazardous is bolting systems that touch the real world onto them. But it's always possible to make a tool dangerous by misusing it.

For example, vehicles (which do have inherent dangers) are widely accepted as ordinary and useful tools. So are bricks. But if you strap a brick to the accelerator, you have made an autonomous murder machine that can escape containment! The existence of this possibility does not imply that we should rethink automobile licensing or the sale of bricks.

(in a Forrest gump accent) my momma said that locks on doors only keep honest people honest. I'm not Forrest Gump, but my mom actually did say that and it's true.

What ever we have can be taken from us by powerful people, even life itself. In point of fact, that's exactly how these weights were created in the first place--they scraped the intellectual property of the world, and now are trying to restrict access to what they themselves just took.

That being said, I don't think any of the AI billionaires who are talking about this have taken the locks off of the doors or gotten rid of their security systems.

I feel like eventually we're going to end up just like how the cryptography restrictions were in the 90s. They might have seemed necessary back then, but now looking at it, the technology and AI is probably going to become so ubiquitous in the next 10 years that we're going to wonder why we even restricted it in the first place, when it's something that's just going to be everywhere. Like they said at the end of this blog: "What arrived in my letterbox after two weeks on a CD can be downloaded today in fifteen minutes."

Time to create some esp32-in-a-lightbulb open weight model dead drops.

Please don’t open-circuit the light for several hours.

Recently I realised that a solar-powered garden light could easily hide an ESP32 and has its own power source. You could even place them in public without being too suspicious. Might want to disable the light, so the power lasts longer and so it's less likely to annoy someone into removing it.

Someone can do the math on panel and battery size. I'm thinking it'll work as-is, as the ESP with WiFi on will draw similar power to the LED that you disconnected.

But how will you give it even a GB of storage for a tiny model?

Possibly a simple SD?

Many people use those to hide their ESP32-LORA devices. Far better range compared to wifi ;-) It works but you'll still need to swap the 18650's every now and then. More of a concern is the privatization of free spectrum. If everyone becomes a radio-refugee, there will be nothing but noise & pirates.

I guess the author (who is familiar to me) missed the common theme behind these two things. It's use in military systems. So no surprise there. Right from the days of Enigma machine to AI drone, the same restrictions were used many times.

Germany or Europe is no different.

With these models, what is the moat? Is it the architecture itself or the training data? Why can’t China create these models themselves? It just feels like theater to restrict models. Can someone tell me why I am wrong if I am?

all of the above. the harness is important when you want an agentic process, the model is important when you want tuning. it's a lot like how nuclear research often requires lab equipment, a corpus of knowledge, and access to materials (e.g. isotopes). all of that is restricted in an effort to prevent nuclear proliferation.

Its the time and the electricity needed to train them. The US sacrificed quite a lot in order to make this happen. We're tolerating a measles outbreak, our economy is in the trash due to tariffs and draconian immigration enforcement. Basically every sector that's not AI has been poisoned in one way or another in order to drive sufficient investment towards AI.

If China wants to compete at building the best forefront models, they'd have to make similar sacrifices (though I doubt they'd be as messy about it).

But if they can are content with 95% as good at 5% of the cost, then they can focus on distilling instead. I don't think the architects of the sacrifices anticipated just how easy models would be to pirate.

So the most is real, but it's effective for a rather constrained set of scenarios.

> We're tolerating a measles outbreak, our economy is in the trash due to tariffs and draconian immigration enforcement. Basically every sector that's not AI has been poisoned in one way or another in order to drive sufficient investment towards AI.

Incompetence is not sacrifice.

Yeah, I'm not sure if I would call it "incompetence", but it wouldn't be hard for the U.S. public or private sectors to afford MMR vaccine doses for the whole population (or merely the portion that has missed doses on the recommended schedule). Those doses would have a super-low opportunity cost.

MMR vaccines would be a net positive to the US economy, to the tune of $3.5B in direct savings (14x benefit/cost) and $7.6 billion (26x benefit/cost) in wider societal benefits [1]. Those are 2004 figures, so the dollar amount savings would be even bigger now.

To a point made further up the chain: The US's woes aren't driven by AI investment, but the self-interest of a select group. Compare it to a thief who causes $20,000 damage to steal a $100 stereo from a car.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15106102/

Sure, over decades, but if you think the singularity will arrive sometime next week then all of this forward thinking nonsense is a distraction. And if you're heavily invested in some story related to that singularity, then you have a financial incentive to sabotage the forward thinking nonsense.

If it were my scheme, an incompetent president would be my first purchase.

The incompetence show they've put in office is just an attempt to make it look like an accident.

True, but sustained low interest rates (they are still way too low) cause investment to be moved from productive activities to speculative activities to completely ludicrous activities, as the saner tiers fill up and there's still money left to allocate.

Sorry this is not true at all. O Those are just corrupt, incompetent practices by an idiot who is drunk on power. It has nothing to do with AI. This is not an answer at all. You tried to shove a square peg into a round hole for what reason. I don’t know

It's clear that the idiot does favors for the highest bidders. If you follow that money it points you, in various ways, to the AI companies.

Who would have an incentive to tax physical goods entering and exiting the country? Somebody who is competing for investment dollars and whose product is digital.

Who benefits from immigration overreach? People whose products are especially relevant to mass surveillance.

Dismantling the US biomedical superiority and our public health endeavors might've been Trump's idea, but it happened in a room full of people who sell capabilities related to convincing a nation full of sick people that there's nothing untoward happening to them.

The market is controlled by AI companies right now, and Trump is letting the market have its way with us, therefore the AI companies are having their way with us. This is what happens when you abandon antitrust efforts and end up with companies that are too powerful for the government to regulate: they end up running things. It's the robber barron's era all over again. You can't absolve them of responsibility just because the president is OK with it.

And that's what the moat is made of. There will be opportunity costs associated with putting everything you've got into datacenters, and those are costs that most governments are too competent to be tricked into paying.

Yes I wasn’t questioning that the market and government is controlled by the AI companies. What I am saying is that cannot be a moat. If anything it will be an anchor that will pull these companies down. If anything that is a signal that they don’t have a moat

If the scale necessary to get the job done cannot be achieved without a corrupt government in your pocket--somebody to drag people out of town hall meetings and ensure that the infrastructure gets built regardless of consequence--and your competition in another country can't influence their government to do the same thing (and that government itself doesn't care to do so), that functions as a moat, doesn't it?

It's not a new dynamic. The US lets companies do all kinds of things to its citizens re: privacy or the environment or disinformation... things that would be illegal in other countries. It's the American trade-off and although I don't appreciate the explosive diarrhea angle to it, it does give American businesses some protection against foreign competition.

I'm 27, and I genuinely had no idea what had happened in cryptography 25 years ago. This was a really refreshing and insightful read - thanks for sharing.

Cryptography is nothing like AI. It does not have the ability to upend the economy, and enable people to launch cyberattacks, etc.

Apparently we are still fighting for secure communication through cryptography [1].

Other issue that doesn't get enough attention on HN is the criminalization of writing code. Probably because it was cryptocurrency applications. First they come for the people you disagree with. Just like they first came for porn sites, and now Wikipedia is being monitored.

[1] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

The difference with weights is that unlike in the past one can not fit the secrets on a T shirt print.

Yeah this persuaded me more than I thought it would, but there are still some pretty big differences IMO. A frontier AI model is a lot harder and more costly to produce than an encryption algorithm. Especially if we believe Anthropic that the Chinese can only do it by distilling their models (though tbh I would err on the side of not believing that).

Everything is on the shoulders of giants in one way or another

RSA algorithm you can print on a shirt - and that would give you encryption that works as well as it possibly can. There's no "RSA 6.7 Turbo Pro EncryptingPlus" that would give you something radically new that the "t-shirt RSA" can't.

LLMs are massive, complex, and a moving target. Making them is hard, and there's no "we're done" there - the frontier updates every few months. It's easy to get and run a 2B model locally, but what concerns people isn't a cheap end device 2B - it's the 10T RLVR-fried monsters that frontier labs play with nowadays.

Maybe it's already out there.

The framing of this entire issue is just wrong.

"Today the reflex is back."

To do what? Ban export of AI? Are you sure? Because it seems, so far, there has been some personal motivated government restrictions due to people not bending the knee and industry moves and clamoring about dangers to generate hype.

"The fears have changed."

Yeah, people are fearful that the entirety of the internet has been hoovered up and people are using that data to make tech that they are promoting by saying it will eliminate a huge percentage of jobs and is exceedingly dangerous. At the same time as they do that, they refuse to take any accountability for the negative effects their tech has or will have, avoid any over sight, and laugh at the idea of discussing that maybe such a consequential tech doesn't belong in the hands of a few tech bros whose only qualification for owning it is being rich.

"The worry is now cyber capability, biology and models that do things nobody asked them to do."

No, we are being sold those worries (really, really hard) but these are not "peoples" worries. They aren't even real governments worries. They are the worries being peddled to try and work some deal where the taxpayers end up holding the bag of hot air that is the AI economy.

This post is so frustrating because AI is the antithesis of everything the people fighting for cryptography access, working on opensource, pushing for a the sort of web that is beneficial to all, were working against. A giant concentration of power enriching the few at the expense of many.

> people are fearful that the entirety of the internet has been hoovered up

Information wants to be free. If you don't like the idea of information, ideas, ect being shared freely for anyone to use just say that. But you aren't on the side of open source.

> that maybe such a consequential tech doesn't belong in the hands of a few tech bros whose only qualification for owning it is being rich.

The solution to that is open weights, and for the technology to be in the hands of more people not less.

This point agrees with the central point that spreading out this tech as much as possible, with open weights, is the good thing here.

> A giant concentration of power

Concentration of power would be preventing open weights not supporting it.

Like WTF do you mean. Open source would be allowing anyone to use the tech easily. Obviously open source would want LLM weights to be public and easily sharable

Even if we look at crypto analogy, US government actually created an open standard of DES and AES, so they knew the argument. Maybe the crypto export controls were just a protectionist play with a fake explanation of national security. (In that case it's useful because as a commercial subject you have to follow the law.)

Anyway, I think open weight models will win. I am strong believer that AI (even the frontier) can be done just as "deductive core, encyclopedic shell". That is:

- Deductive core is a small number of basic primitives (in an LLM probably less than couple thousands, like words in simple english) which encode the human common sense reasoning logic and epistemology. These might correspond to the elements of the embedding vector as well.

- Encyclopedic shell is a collection of many facts about the world (most importantly their definitions) expressed in the language of deductive core. The new facts can be deduced by applying the rules from deductive core to the encyclopedic shell; that's what we call "model reasoning".

Deductive core, encyclopedic shell is not a new concept. Any programming language has primitives and then a library of useful functions. In Lisp, the deductive core is special forms; in Haskell, it is Haskell Core (based on HM typesystem); in Lean, the core is based on Calculus of Constructions; in Prolog, the core is mostly the resolution algorithm. Even in predicate logic you have axioms and then you build a library of useful tautologies from that.

I also believe that current AI (large reasoning models) deductive cores suck quite badly. They have been generated by an evolutionary algorithm as an emergent property of LLM pretraining, and are probably order or two magnitude larger than actually required. I believe hand-crafted deductive cores will win in the long term.

Now, through this lens, what is there to be export-controlled (or just controlled in general)?

You can't control the encyclopedic shell. It's like Wikipedia or other books that have already been published. It would mean closing down research and STEM publishing.

I also don't think you can control the deductive core. It's just an algorithm (a language interpreter), and desirably, a small one. Any country with a rich enough history of philosophy can probably recreate one (such as China). Moreover, I believe many open source models already contain decent deductive cores so that fight has been lost as well.

The only reason we have this discussion is that LLMs are shrouded in mystery, because their vast knowledge (the encyclopedic shell) is written in an unaccessible language (the deductive core) of their weights.

Every couple years, capitalism tries to reinvent itself by creating a new type of property. Yesterday it was "big data", today it's "model weights". Don't fall for it; it's an enclosure of publicly available knowledge and our ability to use it.

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