- storage will get exponentially cheaper
- data transfer speeds will get higher
It makes me think that eventually there will be illicit torrents of all the worlds music, plus the index, plus the metadata, and plus the interface/app for browsing it. In other words, people would not only pirate individual songs or movies, they would download their own complete copies of Spotify / Netflix. It isn't feasible now but it could be sometime in the next 5-15 years, depending bandwidth speeds.
I'm not sure how many people see this coming or take it seriously but I wonder what the effect could be and what the remedy attempts would be.
* push for cloud storage over local storage
* push for locked down devices over general purpose computers
* push for DRM on the open web
* big ISP companies fighting against net neutrality
For instance there will always be a market for custom computing and "PCs", and so non-locked PCs will (hopefully) always exist in a capitalist environment. That market I think ultimately circumvents any attempt at ubiquitous control of hardware. The same thing is at play with software. And hypothetical new methods of connectivity may be able to circumvent many attempts at central control of the net.
Unfortunately, that market is slowly becoming the minority, and because those "more free" devices may have limitations that make them incompatible with a lot of proprietary content (which is the majority) and circumventing those limitations could be illegal and difficult, there will be fewer users of them.
Reminds me of this https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html and the old saying "If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."
It seems to me that the a-grade private torrent trackers are exactly that. Larger catalogue, more comprehensive metadata, and better interface than any commercial service.
> In other words, people would not only pirate individual songs or movies, they would download their own complete copies of Spotify / Netflix. It isn't feasible now but it could be sometime in the next 5-15 years, depending bandwidth speeds.
If you have the infrastructure, and are really dedicated, you can definitely do it today.
>It seems to me that the a-grade private torrent trackers are exactly that. Larger catalogue, more comprehensive metadata, and better interface than any commercial service.
Regardless of metadata quality and collection size which I think is debatable although having not seen one... they are a la carte, so much different.
> If you have the infrastructure, and are really dedicated, you can definitely do it today.
No infrastructure is required, just multiple terabytes of storage (which most households do not have... yet), and bandwidth that makes downloading terabytes an attainable feat. Needless to say the later is not viable today either. But eventually both those things will become commonplace.
15 is a high number too. The set of music one would be possibly be interesting in hearing (of the set of all music which has already been produced) may be closer to 3-5 terabytes. Movies of course, are different larger set of numbers.
It's always fascinating to me how far the tools of the trade have come on since my heyday. They surpassed my own custom tools of yore a little while back, and things like this were things I could obviously never do at the time - nowhere near enough storage, for a start, but I also didn't know about the compressed/encrypted distinction (that would have saved me a lot of time!).
That you can do it in such an automated fashion now, where I just paged through the disassembly and hexdumps until I saw something that leaped out at me, is stunning. I'd coded a few helper routines, and my debugger was completely stealth and I could rewind a couple thousand instructions (the secret of my success! <g>), but never anything like that back then.
Perhaps I should look into this PANDA.
- Records (with PANDA) every instruction run and every piece of data read or written by that virtual machine for half a minute while it's playing audio. (!)
- Analyses that recording and uses some very clever statistics to identify functions that read chunks of data that looks encrypted, and write chunks of data that looks compressed (yes, you can tell the difference, compression is imperfect).
- Out pops one likely candidate, which sure enough is the decrypter.