Pinboard (guardiantech)

Adobe ebook DRM secretly builds and transmits a dossier of your reading habits >> Boing Boing

guardiantech — 2014-10-08T09:26:47+00:00

The latest version of Adobe's Digital Editions, a DRM system widely used for ebooks, gathers enormous amounts of sensitive personal information about its users' reading habits and transmits them, in the clear, to Adobe. Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader used a network monitor to watch what Digital Editions 4 did after he installed it, and caught the software exfiltrating an unencrypted file containing an index of all the books in his library to Adobe. Adobe did not respond to Hoffelder's request for comments. Hoffelder has supplied a copy of the file that DE4 built and transmitted from his computer. It should be pretty straightforward to replicate this on your own computer if you'd like to verify Hoffelder's findings.

Hoffelder says: "Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text."

To Serve Users >> Hacking for Christ

guardiantech — 2014-05-15T18:54:50+00:00

Gervase Markham of Mozilla on the DRM-in-Firefox row:

we think our stance has worked rather well; over the years, the Mozilla project has been a force for good on the web that other organizations, for whatever reason, have not managed to be. But we aren’t invincible – we don’t win every time. We didn’t win on H.264, although the deal with Cisco to drive the cost of support to $0 everywhere at least allowed us to live to fight another day. And we haven’t, yet, managed to find a way to win on DRM. The question is: is software DRM on the desktop the issue we should die on a hill over? We don’t think so. Bradley accuses us of selling out on our principles regarding preserving the open web. But making a DRM-free web is not within our power at the moment. Our choice is not between “DRM on the web” and “no DRM on the web”, it’s between “allow users to watch DRMed videos” and “prevent users from watching DRMed videos”. And we think the latter is a long-term losing strategy, not just for the fight on DRM (if Firefox didn’t exist, would our chances of a DRM-free web be greater?), but for all the other things Mozilla is working for.

Reasoned debate in the comments too.

Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and W3C EME >> Mozilla Hacks blog

guardiantech — 2014-05-14T21:17:53+00:00

Andreas Gal:

Instead of DRM schemes that limit how users can access content they purchased across devices we have long advocated for more modern approaches to managing content distribution such as watermarking. Watermarking works by tagging the media stream with the user’s identity. This discourages copyright infringement without interfering with lawful sharing of content, for example between different devices of the same user. Mozilla would have preferred to see the content industry move away from locking content to a specific device (so called node-locking), and worked to provide alternatives. Instead, this approach has now been enshrined in the W3C EME specification.

New ebook DRM will change the text of a story to prevent piracy >> PaidContent

guardiantech — 2013-06-16T07:42:22+00:00

Janko Roettgers:

Well, this is one way to do it: Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute is working on a new ebook DRM dubbed SiDiM that would prevent piracy by changing the actual text of a story, swapping out words to make individualized copies that could be tracked by the original owner of the ebook.

Examples apparently include changing wordings like "unhealthy" to "not healthy", or adding hyphens to words. Book publishers are reportedly interested, but one wonders what authors will make of the idea.

2009: Why Kindle should be an open book >> Forbes.com

guardiantech — 2013-04-02T10:53:52+00:00

Tim O'Reilly, in February 2009:

I have a bold prediction: Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years.
…Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins. Amazon needs to get with the program. Or, like AOL and MSN, Amazon will wind up another online pioneer who ends up a belated guest at the party it planned to host.

Now read on.

Discussions about DRM often land on the fundamental problem… >> Ian Hickson

guardiantech — 2013-03-20T22:03:47+00:00

Arguing that DRM doesn't work is, it turns out, missing the point. DRM is working really well in the video and book space. Sure, the DRM systems have all been broken, but that doesn't matter to the DRM proponents. Licensed DVD players still enforce the restrictions. Mass market providers can't create unlicensed DVD players, so they remain a black or gray market curiosity. DRM failed in the music space not because DRM is doomed, but because the content providers sold their digital content without DRM, and thus enabled all kinds of players they didn't expect (such as "MP3" players). Had CDs been encrypted, iPods would not have been able to read their content, because the content providers would have been able to use their DRM contracts as leverage to prevent it.
DRM's purpose is to give content providers control over software and hardware providers, and it is satisfying that purpose well.

Hickson is a Brit who works at Google. It is the music business's biggest regret that CDs were not encrypted.

Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs to stay open, and Gopher's still not cool >> Boing Boing

guardiantech — 2013-03-11T17:29:19+00:00

Rob Pegoraro:

HTML5 is also pulling in such media capabilities as video conferencing; Berners-Lee pointed the audience to WebPlatform.org, a hub for those efforts.
Web apps, in turn, comply with Berners-Lee's "principle of least power," a rule of simplicity, security and interoperability he defined as "If you're going to transmit something, you should use the least powerful language that you can."
He is not, however, an absolutist. During a post-talk Q&A, he defended proposals to add support for "digital rights management" usage restrictions to HTML5 as necessary to get more content on the open Web: "If we don't put the hooks for the use of DRM in… people will just go back to using Flash."
Berners-Lee's biggest fear is not a mobile experience dominated by iOS or Play Store apps, but one in which the basic protocols of the Web are eaten away by ISP interference and state surveillance.

Getting ultraviolent about UltraViolet™ >> Martin Belam

guardiantech — 2013-03-07T14:53:25+00:00

User experience (UX) designer Martin Belam:

A good UX can be hard to quantify, but you sure know when you are having a bad one. And over Christmas I stumbled over a really good example of a bad one.
Regular readers may have noticed that I quite like Doctor Who, and so of course Santa brought me the latest DVD box set for Christmas. It includes the new UltraViolet™ feature of making digital copies available to owners of the physical product.
The instructions come in a leaflet in the box, and I was eager to try it out.

Anyone had a good experience with Ultraviolet?

New services bypass Apple DRM to allow pirated iOS app installs without jailbreaking on iPhone, iPad >> The Next Web

guardiantech — 2013-01-01T22:33:51+00:00

Matt PAnzarino:

So we’ve got two things going on. Services like Zeusmos have figured out how to ease the process of purchasing a developer slot and using its certificate to install ‘cracked’ apps, which are widely available on the internet. And ones like Kuaiyong are somehow bypassing Apple’s licensing rules to redistribute the same copy of an app over and over.
Security researcher Stefan Esser has been speculating about the Kuaiyong service on Twitter, noting that it could be an excellent way for them to distribute malware to iOS devices. Though the apps themselves are limited in what they can access due to sandboxing, specialized malware could be developed for certain popular apps that collected information and logged activity on your device. And there’s a strong likelihood that whatever they’re doing is using illegally obtained licenses at the least, and credit-card fraud at the worst.

Shame Projection >> Bitsplitting.org

guardiantech — 2012-11-29T22:17:49+00:00

"Shame projection" being the process of blaming someone else for something you feel ashamed about - like motorists who yell at people they nearly ran over:

Most folks who pirate media are feeling some of those same terrified, ashamed, regretful, and grateful feelings that the motorist felt upon almost killing me. In the case Marco cites, the projection outlet is on the companies for not making the media available.
This kind of projection seems to have a delightful efficiency. When the media companies do make the media available, the blame will be on their pricing it too high. When the price is right, it’s the media format that’s wrong. If the media format is right, then the DRM is too odious. If DRM is absent, then the authors are making too much money, anyway. If the authors aren’t making much, you’re only pirating to try it out. Once you’ve tried it and like it, you’ll pay for it when you get your next paycheck. You wouldn’t have to pirate at all if your boss wasn’t such a cheapskate and paid you better…

Why Guru3D probably never will review Ubisoft titles anymore >> Anno 2070

guardiantech — 2012-01-20T10:44:53+00:00

Here's what Ubisofts DRM is doing these days, they don't just verify the number of PCs you work on, nope .. they monitor hardware changes. So once we inserted that GeForce GTX 590 the hardware id # hash changed rendering our activation invalid.

What a bunch of rubbish ....This means that if we'd like to make a VGA performance review on Anno 2070 we'd need to purchase the game seven times. Ubisoft claims that you can send an email towards their support so that the activations are reset, we did so .. yet are still awaiting reaction.

When contacting Ubisoft marketing here in the Netherlands, their reply goes like this: 'Sorry to disappoint you - the game is indeed restricted to 3 hardware changes and there simply is no way to bypass that. We also do not have 7 copies of the game for you'.

I'm sorry, but I am not about to purchase the title seven times to make a review that by default benefits Ubisoft sales.

Looks like the reviewing torch has passed to sites that don't specialise in that way. How many VGA users do we have out there?

Misuse of 3-D digital lens leaves 2-D movies in the dark >> The Boston Globe

guardiantech — 2011-05-25T05:33:32+00:00

Wonder why sometimes films at multiplexes seem dark for no obvious reason? "A description of the problem comes from one of several Boston-area projectionists who spoke anonymously due to concerns about his job. We’ll call him Deep Focus. He explains that for 3-D showings a special lens is installed in front of a Sony digital projector that rapidly alternates the two polarized images needed for the 3-D effect to work.
“When you’re running a 2-D film, that polarization device has to be taken out of the image path. If they’re not doing that, it’s crazy, because you’ve got a big polarizer that absorbs 50% of the light.’’