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Comment by dlitz | Hacker News Reader

What kind of engineers keep building these anti-consumer, anti-competition DRM systems? Someone should call them out publicly, by name. The world doesn't need more DRM systems.

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Yeah! We should find these engineers who might have families and shame them to the world! They'll never work in this town again after they traded in their scruples for a few bucks.

In other news, I'm excited to announce my social dating startup just got acquired for a bunch of money! We'll be deleting all the data and shutting down.

Woah, woah, woah. Deleting all that dating data? You sure Facebook doesn't want that?

The kind of engineers who want to supply people with a $140 machine instead of a $500 machine, I'm guessing.

Don't like it? Don't buy a Keurig. There are hundreds of other ways to brew coffee at home.

NO. Don't dox people. Don't threaten to dox them. Don't encourage others to dox. We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by there actions. Think about that every time you start to grab your pitchfork.

Who said anything about doxxing? Cheap intimidation tactics aren't going to change anything.

I don't care about these people's home addresses or even their contact info. I just want to know who they are so that I can avoid surrounding myself with people like them---people who won't/can't walk away from projects that harm end-users---and thereby avoid putting myself in situations where I would be pressured to do the same thing. To do that, we need transparency around this sort of thing.

Right now, writing code in PHP can hurt an engineer's reputation more than writing DRM code in any language. That's pretty ridiculous IMHO.

> Right now, writing code in PHP can hurt an engineer's reputation more than writing DRM code in any language. That's pretty ridiculous IMHO.

I mean, you just completely made that up.

The kind of engineers who get told by their bosses that the new product needs to have DRM so that they can profit from cups. The razor and blades business model looks great to corporate execs.

Speaking as someone who on a variety of occasions has been asked to bake these kinds of restriction into a piece of code, I've tended to follow the restriction to the letter but not the spirit -- yes, this product has "DRM", but yes, any child with a hex editor can disable it in a few minutes.

From this I guess that weak DRM is very often entirely intentional.

As for the kind of engineer that does it, you do. Or more accurately, every engineer who has ever been asked to place their ideals ahead of their paycheck -- and realized jumping ship simply wasn't worth it

I've always assumed that weak DRM is the result of a cost benifit analysis. A child with a hex editor could disable it in a few minutes, but most of your customers do not have a hex editor. And, of those that do, the ones who are willing to spend the time to break your DRM (however trivial) would probably not have bought your software anyway. The intersection of people who would work around your weak DRM, and who would pay if they could not do so is small enough that it is not worth paying developers to spend the time to implement a strong DRM.

I think integrity is a better word here than ideals. We're not talking about doing the best you can, we're talking about doing something that you know will do harm. And yes, I've given up the paycheck twice in that situation. Don't pretend you're just like everyone else if you think choosing not to do the right is okay. Because you are not like me. Sometimes you absolutely have to, but by being an engineer in a first world country, that simply does not apply.

There have been a few instances of this sort of "malicious compliance" that I've noticed, the biggest of which has been Pandora: If you're not in the US, you have to convince their website that you are in order to play music (due to licensing restrictions). However, last I checked, the audio servers have no such restrictions, so you can still stream directly from them rather than having to push that through a proxy as well.

Yep, most country restrictions seem to work that way. The worst though is billing -- e.g. having to have a credit card from that country -- or auto-updating DRM. In both of those cases, it's not impossible but it raises the bar quite a bit. That said, even in billing scenarios, people seem okay with lying about your address, so long as parts of it match and the card can still be billed. E.g. if out of the US and it asks for a US zip code, just use the numbers from your postal code.

I'll start:

Keurig

No, I mean the individual engineers.

I really doubt the engineers are the ones who said, "Wouldn't it be great if we made this product decision that would impact revenue positively?"

Maybe they didn't have the option of protesting a design decision from higher up in the company and possibly being out of a job. It may be a crappy thing to do from a consumer perspective, but it's not illegal and arguably not immoral.

Or maybe some young inexperienced engineer wanted to show what he could do and did THIS. That is one way of growing up and becoming experienced: bad judgement.

Can you start the good deed by sharing your real name and address?

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