f13.net

I'm preemptively putting this into politics, since I know that's where it will end up anyway.

Two pieces of news which you may have heard about, and if not, you should have.

First, HD-DVD DRM was cracked (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=119871). Really. (http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/aacs-drm-cracked-by-backuphddvd-tool/) I guess that means HD-DVD will win the format war.

Second, a well known security design analyst (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/) whips out his bitch stick and smacks vista and some hardware companies around. If you haven't read or heard about this (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt), it's worth the 15 minutes of time to read it and get informed. It's going to cost us all - especially gamers, who purchase high-end PCs - a lot of money.

For anyone outside of techies to take him seriously, he'd have to alter that.  All it achieves right now is turning someone like me away with the thought, "Oh look, another anti-MS zealot with an agenda."


ed: pwnd by typing skillz

Consumers can't win against corporate logic. If product flops due to DRM its due to piracy, if product succeeds despite DRM - its profitable only because DRM.

I hope there is special circle of hell for DRM execs, where they get to watch and copy Leonard Nimoy's Hobbit video over and over and over again for all eternity.


As to Vista - I have seen this coming and ready to weather it out, my PC should last me for 3-4 years on XP64 Pro. Hopefully Vista will be another ME by then and more sane version will come out, if not then it will be the end of PC gaming for me.

I totally agree. On the one hand you can argue that after looking at all the facts, it's clear something is a bad idea. However, comments such as 'the longest suicide note in history' and 'drinking the kool-aid' are better left to the newspaper/magazine headline writers. First impressions are important, and if you're going to write something like this, you need to put on your virtual interview suit and write dispassionately. The conclusions will speak for themselves, there's no need to try and help it along.

It's well worth the read anyway. Just skip past the blatant metaphors, the conclusions really do speak for themselves.

The problem is that Microsoft has forced hardware manufacturers to conform and add DRM overhead to essentially every pipeline and step, with it's associated design and performance costs. They used 'vista certified drivers' as a hammer, because vista won't support anyone who's not certified. This cost gets passed onto you in terms of performance degradation, straight price, and possibly system stability whether or not you even plan to upgrade... and you will have to upgrade your hardware at least, or you won't be able to play any of the games coming out next year :/

Yes, nothing puts the screws to MicroSoft like switching from PC to Xbox360.  :cthulu:

Still though, it seems a giant pain in the ass to go through just to add a week to the time that it will take a bored teenager in the Netherlands to crack and invalidate the whole setup.

DRM is snake oil techies make bank off of selling to media morons. Fucked users is just an unfortunate side effect.

The real question is will Vista be the straw that pisses off enough people to break the camels back or more of the same? You know Microsoft is going to make all new game releases from them Vista only just like they did with XP.  XP's media player has DRM to some extent but it wasn't enough to stop adoption. IE7 has some scary shit in it too like the built in ecommerce pay-to-play antiphishing certification system.

Will Vista DRM be restrictive enough to make people buy more Macs? Everyone has been saying businesses are holding off buying it and it will be the last major OS like OS from Microsoft. I'll believe that when I see it though.

There have also been some news articles rumbling about restrictive DSL upload speeds. Will that get mainstream enough to force ISPs to raise upload speeds? Possibly.

And then we have the RIAA which has been fighting MP3s for almost 9 years now and are no closer to winning than when they started. Not only that but they have lost ground. They killed Napster and Kazaa but PirateBay, AllofMP3, and YouTube are pumping out more than ever before. For a few million dollars in equity YouTube bought off all the record labels.

I hope the Zune is an omen for Vista's success (or lack thereof).

Anything that doesn't put customers first will ultimately fail. Sounds cheesy, I know, but it's true. Even for Microsoft.

Blu-Ray uses the same copy protection scheme so it was "cracked" too, though the "crack" in this case in not the same as it was for DVDs with DeCSS. It's more a proof of concept at the moment and not a functioning piece of software since you still have to figure out how to extract the title key from memory yourself. Assuming this holds up, eventually there will be tools and services that the tools will connect to automatically fetch keys as needed, kind of like how FreeDB works for fetching CD track information.

I read most of that Vista article and while I don't claim to understand the specifics of content protection, the general conclusions seem logical.

Here is what I am curious about, it sounds like this is mostly to protect movies and music and such, "Premium content" as he called it. So will this have much effect on gamers and general consumers?

My only concern will be if this idea trickles down to general consumer electronics, so I have to buy content protected DvD players and TVs to be able to watch my own movies.

Part of the arguement, as I read it, is that Vista will increase overhead in the hardware, even if it isn't running on the system, hence making all compatible PCs (aka all PCs) run slower.

The Vista article seems to break down to 2 arguments...

1) New software requires more hardware power. Film at eleven.

Solution : Don't upgrade immeadiately. Non-Vista software isn't going to turn into pumpkins at midnight.


2) The DRM solution is a kludge and will impact signal quality on films and music.

Solution : Buy films and music through non-Vista channels which will have to exist for years anyway.

As long as I have to pay $9 or more to see a friggin movie, I will gladly steal from the movie studio's. I support any opposition to DRM. My question is this: Why is it so hard to siphon off the unencrypted content as it is being displayed? This was the big thing about music. It has to play over my speakers, which means that all I gotta do, worse case, is patch the speakers jack into a good recorder. Why can't somone just put in a "patch cable" that runs from the graphics card port to an HD recorder?

That's the whole point of all the shenanigans in Vista -- they are trying to close the "analog hole" and make it so that only if you have end to end "copy protection" will the full digital content be played back otherwise you get "degraded" content or nothing at all.

Isn't this sort of tangentially related to the whole "Trusted Computing" debate?

Nothing tangential about it.

Kind of. Without the underlying hardware getting in on the act it should still be possible in theory to work around all the crap in Vista eventually though depending on how well Microsoft did its job it may be more effort than it's worth. Once the hardware gets involved (e.g. in the form of a TPM chip) it becomes much harder if not impossible (with current computing resources) to crack. BTW, the Intel Macs now have TPM chips inside them so it's not only MS that's working to curtail consumer rights.

Well at least this thread has stopped me from waiting for Vista before building my next PC (or buying it at all) next this year.

Ditto.  Vista was the last thing stopping me from building a new PC, because what's the point in buying a new copy of XP now and then having to buy Vista when it comes out?  Now I plan to hold onto XP for as long as I can.

I said the same thing about 3.1.

Weep now so your tears don't streak over the install disc.

It's true, I said the same thing about not moving off 2K onto XP.  On the other hand, my objections there were purely aesthetic, which go away pretty quick once you get acclimated.  Which is why I was all gung ho about moving to teh new shiney that is Vista. 

If Vista is going to require more expensive hardware and in return give me degraded performance and less freedom in media consumption, though, that's a much more bitter pill to swallow than moving from square corners to rounded corners.

It will only give you less freedom in media consumption for media that is appropriately locked down. That media won't even play on a non-TPM system. At the moment the Apple TPM chips are just used to ensure that you don't run Mac OS X on systems made by other companies without a lot of trouble. I can cope with that. When the day comes that Apple cripple Mac OS X such that only authorised media players run on it, and those players prevent me from using content that I've paid for in the way I wish to (ripping CDs to MP3, etc) then my Macs will run Linux fairly nicely. The real problem will come when Apple, MS, et. al. form a consortium to only allow licensed OS software to load on commodity PC hardware. That day is very likely coming, and it will spell the end of Linux in its current form (though you'll still be able to buy it from consortium members like RedHat, IBM, etc).

Absolutely.

Sounds like Vista will be crippled when it comes to HD to prevent any ripping/copying of HD content, even through capture via audio out channels... ...and if OS X follows suit, it will be Linux for me...

The Internet and attendant technologies were never going to remain an eternal emerald fairyland of rainbows and leprechaun gold.  Much like the Industrial Revolution and environmental laws, regulation will lag but always catch up.  Expecting 1995-2000 to never end is an unreasonable position. 

I've been hearing that statement since at least 1985.  The dates keep changing, but not much else does.

If you build a shittier mousetrap, someone will build a better one, one that does what people want, rather like Zelazny's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Zelazny) bit in Lord of Light about the constant re-invention of the flush toilet.  Damn capitalists.

That said, there is usually some noise like this about some feature in every new Windows' release. 

Vista will have a bunch of new scary dialogs to scare people when installing web games (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12314). One more reason to use Flash or Shockwave. Sucks to be WildTangent though.

And a second article predicted 600 million Vista installs by 2010. Also said something like Vista won't play existing HDDVD or Blue-Ray if your digital monitor isn't plugged in via HDMI or whatever the copy protected interface is.

Your setup needs to support end to end HDCP (i.e. software DVD player, video card, monitor) to playback HD-DVD/Blu-Ray content at full resolution. The overwhelming majority of video cards installed today do not support HDCP.

Sounds like we'll all be watching DVDs on Ubuntu.

Microsoft seems to always find a way of coaxing people to use their technology.

Mainly because everyone's a lazy coward (I'd go so far as to say that it's your civil duty to not be).

Dude, if game companies put out stuff for Linux as much as they do for MS, I'd switch in a heart beat. I MUCH prefer Linux. Yet here we are. Fuck, not even EVE has a linux port yet, despite the trumpting of said development. (http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1870)

All Linux has to do AFAIK is implement and support DirectX.  Most distros of Linux don't even come with OpenGL, though, and most Linux implementations of OpenGL are buggy as shit.  I can't really blame game developers for avoiding the platform.   :-P

Of course, if one group of games developers were to make a set of (curiously similar to DirectX) graphics libraries for Linux and sell them to other games developers, they'd be laughing all the way to the bank. Games companies used to code a lot more of that shit anyhow. Half their board members are probably former assembly language coders.

I suspect that sort of thing was more doable when you didn't have to worry about optimizing for different graphics cards.  Software rendering is relatively easy because you're working on top of some reasonably common interface.  Writing your own graphics library that performs comparably to DX would require you to write new drivers for any card that you want your game to support.  (Or convince hardware companies and/or hardcore Linux weenies to buy in and do it for you.)

What, you mean like this?

http://transgaming.org/gamesdb/screenshots/single.mhtml?screenshot_id=1029

Note this is not a port -- EVE is running under Cedega in the screenshot.

I have no truck with this nonsense.

Windows damn well should display scary dialogs when running arbitary code downloaded off the teh internets, espeicially when you run it with admin privileges. And I don't imagine anyone smart enough to be intelligently running arbitary code downloaded off the teh internets will have any difficulties clicking through them.

LUAs should really be the default position if you want to hold out any hope of securing home PCs.


The ESRB 'not rated' thing can probably be ignored, as happily people are smart enough to realise this sort of parental control system is never all that effective, and that the only real parental control is putting the PC in the living room; even if anyone does use this feature I gather parents can allow/disallow speicific games anyway. Vista parental controls will be about as effective as the V chip.


The Game Explorer thing looks incredibly annoying - but that's more my inner geek objecting to any OS making rules about how my files or UI shall be organised than anything else.

What is Cedega, exactly? From what you're saying, its not a Wine emulator, but some other conversion method?

It's a commerical fork of Wine and used to be called WineX.

Yup, Blu-Ray was "cracked" (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=120869) too.

There is zero chance of them being able to secure a PC for mainstream “premium content” when the PC is controlled by someone else.  I don't think it will cost gamers a lot of money, the whole system is going to be bypassed with ease.  Trying to use software to secure computers is like using a long metal chain to prevent someone stealing your expensive boltcutter.  I can only think Microsoft have some major deals in the pipeline with Hollywood and the Music Industry, they know this just isn't going to work.

Edit, typo

The thing they're doing, as I read it, is not just trying to use software to secure the computers directly, but using it to strongarm the hardware manufacturers into providing secure hardware, i.e. "our OS won't work well on your hardware unless you make it secure like the MPAA wants, and our OS is the new shiny so if your hardware doesn't support it you're fucked."

Yeah I get that, but all the communication between hardware devices ultimately requires software.  It's going to be entirely possible to configure your toaster to communicate with "Hey I'm not really a toaster, I'm a state of the art HDTV, here's my hardware key to prove it" and Vista will quite happily believe it.  More standardisation for hardware drivers might be one of the few good things to come out of this and I really don't think adding a key entry to hardware firmware is going to be that big a deal.

I bought my DVD recorder in a supermarket here in Europe, I found a crack for making it play Region 1 DVD's in about 2 minutes on the net, purely because the manufacturer knows that not having an available regionless crack will reduce sales.  There's nowhere near the same level of security for the old DVD system so lets take the UK 's new credit card chip and pin system as an example, every credit/debit card in the UK can be cracked by a simple modification to the POS card reader that allows it to be linked to a PC as demonstrated on prime time TV this week (http://www.bbc.co.uk/consumer/tv_and_radio/watchdog/reports/insurance_and_finance/insurance_20070206.shtml).

If some of the larger software / hardware companies simply decides to not give a shit about Vista, it will flop. Which will force MS to conform more to the consumer and the rest in the industry. As it is now, it's fairly likely that Vista will flop the the extent that it won't gain enough movement to accomplish a migration even with support from the rest of the industry. In the end, the consumer has the power, but only if enough consumers care to use it.

Of course Vista will be adopted - don't be ridiculous.

The only question is how the price of Vista will drop first.

By the end of the year you won't be able to buy a mainsteam PC with XP through retail channels.


Whether anyone bothers to use Vista DRM is a more reasonable question.




The hardware is also under control of the enduser, so the same arugument about trying to secure bolt cutters still works. And there are limits to how much security you can put in the hardware layer anyway.


The only way you can *ever* secure a system in the way that MS and MPAA/RIAA want would be with permanent independent monitoring, and even then you all you can do is identify that someone has broken the monitoring link, once the link is broken your dirty pirate scum is is free to do whatever he wants. This isn't because of hardware or software limitations, it is because of logic limitations, all this DRM nonsense will ever do is irritate those people who were not capable of getting involved in piracy in the first place.

DRM, like many anti-piracy and anti-cheating attempts, mostly hurts legit users. Big-time pirates find a way around.

If you don't like the DRM on iTunes songs - use eMule to get the song for free. The only person the DRM stops there is your grandma who has no idea what eMule is.

As Jobs points out, you can buy a CD without copy protection on it. But you don't have to buy it - you can just download it from someone who did buy it and uploaded it.

I will buy music off the internet when:

- I can get the songs in a lossless format.
- There is no DRM

Until then I will only buy music in CD form. If I wanted a lossy format as my only copy I'd just (continue to) download via P2P.

It's very interesting what's happening here with the hate triangle of Apple, Europe, and the recording companies. I definitely see this as Jobs desperately trying to get the recording companies to give in before the european deadlines kick in.

Living here in Korea, apparently there is great fear of the "evil Asian piracy" or something.

It's quite difficult to get games shipped here.  And many of the digital download sites won't service anyone outside of CONUS, I guess.

I hope they realize that I do try to get the game legally first.  After I hit their stupid legal speedbumps I steal their shit with no shame or regret.

AACS cracked some more (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=952954#post952954).

Edit: I'm not sure why this is in Politics, moving to General.

For those of you that don't understand what they are saying in the above Doom9 thread here's a basic primer on DVD and AACS encryption as I understand it.

For DVDs that are encrypted with CSS (Content Scrambling System) there is only one key that all disc manufacturers use to encrypt that data and DVD players use that same key to decrypt the data. That key was discovered very early on because of a mistake a software DVD player developer made that exposed that key. They could've changed the key but that would've broken all the DVD players (hardware and software) that existed at the time.

For AACS (Advanced Access Content System) they added additional layers of protection to try and make it harder for people to unencrypt the data.

In AACS to decrypt the data you need a key again (called the Title key). However that key is unique for each title and is itself encrypted as stored on the disc. So an AACS playback device needs to unencrypt that key and then use it to unencrypt the data. The first crack for AACS entailed searching through memory for the unencrypted title key, but that has to be done for each title.

To actually unencrypt the title key is a complicated process. The simplified version is that each playback device gets it's own unique device key (instead of sharing one like with DVDs). The set of all "valid" device keys, when passed through a "media key block" that's stored on every AACS-protected disc will result in a processing key that with some additional permutations is used to unencrypt the title key.

The above crack is the discovery of the processing key from a particular software playback program. That means that any current title can be decrypted without knowing the specific title key by using that processing key. However, the people who control these AACS keys are able to "revoke" individual device keys by creating a new media key block which manufacturers would then use on the discs. This means that it's highly likely that sometime in the future the device key for that software player will be revoked and another processing key will need to be discovered (or people will have to go back to discovering unencrypted title keys individually).

The open questions are whether or not the AACS people will at some point simply disallow software AACS playback programs if it proves impossible to protect the processing keys or if they'll continually update the media key blocks or if they'll simply give up like they did when the CSS key was discovered and not bother to revoke any more device keys.

If they disallow software players, then that pretty much ends all non-unix or apple media center PC's or even playing them on your laptop or regular PC - even if you have a legitimate copy and a legitimate drive, right? So really, what was even the point of "premium content" protection in Vista if they purposely make it so you can't use the "premium content"?

Yup.

Good question.

As Jobs pointed out, all these systems have the same problem. There is no security when all the information is local. Yeah they have some keys but the keys are on the disc and in memory - but wait! Those are encrypted with yet another key - that is also on disc or in memory.

Good security typically requires that some password or some other thing (smartcard, etc) be introduced from outside the system. In addition access to the client machine while it performs the security stuff is a very bad thing as well. (As even if the key came from outside you can grab it from memory)

So here you have a system that does not require anything from outside the system (it is all baked in to the disc, software or hardware) and the user has complete access to the client at all times.

So yes, you can maybe go with a hardware only solution but that would never fly with consumers. You can try to create some sort of protected memory system but when the key is stored locally that isn't really enough, you also need to prevent they key(s) from being read from any hardware or the disc itself.

Even theoretically sound security systems are very prone to programmer error and oversight.

So in short, it is a very hard problem and the people working on it are pretty clueless. As I said before, their efforts simply screw the naive consumer while merely slightly annoying large-volume pirates.

As a sidenote I find it very ironic that Jobs is complaining about having to DRM iTunes music when Apple products are the most heavily DRM'd products around.

Not to mention forcing otherwise legitimate consumers into piracy. If a person wanting to play their HD version Pirates of the Caribbean on their laptop and has to download and install some hacked homebrew software to do it, it's not a much further journey to discovering where and how to get the HD content fro free too. The recoding and movie industry's best defense against piracy has always been, and will always be, making thier product inexpensive enough and easy enough to use that it wasn't worth pirating. Once it's expensive enough or a big enough PITA, people are going to just take it and do it guilt free - no matter how many laws and fines they get passed.

?? Explain please. Hardware lockin of the OS != DRM. And it's been surpassed. Unless you mean Apple software, in which case you're wrong.

Yes it does. That's like saying FairPlay isn't DRM because it's tied to the iPod.

Doesn't matter.

Huh. So because you can't install OS X on your generic PC Apple is the worst DRM offender? That's an interesting viewpoint. Never mind that I could give you my OS X disks and you could burn them and then install that copy of 100 networked mac's no problem, you want to be able to use it on unsupported hardware - with Apple's blessing! The fact they won't let you is DRM? Despite the fact that the actual software is not copy protected at all and has no keycode required or anything. They just won't help you install it. But you can still do it.

Ok, yeah I see your point.  :roll:

EDIT: Comparing it to Fairplay is retarded. Call me when you can copy a song to 1000 ipods no problem. FairPlay is DRM. Not allowing your OS to install on unsupported hardware is not. Don't be stupid. OS X is neither copy protected or even copy restricted. They just don't want to support it on generic PC hardware, but if you want to you can run it. You seriously call that DRM?

Although I can't recall - it may need a keycode. I'm looking at my Tiger disks though and I don't see one. And keycodes are really obnoxious DRM...

So not being able to use FairPlay on unsupported hardware is DRM but not being to run OS X on unsupported hardware is not DRM. Make up your mind.

You're not getting it. You CAN run OS X on unsupported hardware, with 0 cracking of the OS. You're primarily dealing with the difference between EFI Bios and generic PC motherboard BIOS. It's NOT DRM - it's a simple technical issue.

You CANNOT copy a FairPlay song from on iPod to another iPod or music player without hacking the DRM WHICH IS SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO PREVENT COPYING. C'mon man, it's pretty obvious what the difference is. Apple doesn't expressly forbid you from running their OS on a dell - they just won't support it. You are expressly forbid from cracking FairPlay to work on unsupported hardware. I just don't see how you equate the two.

Show me the instructions where I can take an off the shelf copy of OS X and install in on my PC. I've seen stuff like this (http://www.profit42.com/index.php/2007/02/07/osx-1048-on-a-normal-intelamd-computer/) but those all require special versions of OS X.

Edit: typos

That doesn't require a special version of OS X. It's just you need to create an image of OS X - perfectly doable from a boxed copy - to use in the install. Here's how you do it without requiring the 'illegal' developer OS X build (OSX86).

For 10.4.x Install Dvds: <--- this is your boxed copy that you should legally buy, piracy is still wrong.

1) Use partition magic or other partition software such as Acronis's suite or another partitioning program to resize a PRIMARY partition so that you have at least 6700 megabytes of unallocated disk space before any logical partition.  If you need more space then you can also just make a fat 32 partition which windows and Os X both recognize so you can transfer files between the two operating systems, but be sure to leave 6800 megabytes of unallocated space for Mac Os X itself.

2) Click on the start menu then click run to open up the run menu.

3) Type in diskpart and  the command prompt should open up.

4) In the window that just came up type in "select disk X". (you replace x with the hard drive which you have configured in step one. example: "select disk 0"

5) then type in "create partition primary size=6690 id=af" This will create the partition in which you will install OS X on. If it said it was unable to create the partition make sure you have enough unallocated disk space after your first primary partition.

6)Reboot you computer.

7)Put in your install DVD (your DVD may or may not need patching, any one that you get from the store will need patching and you )

8) Go into the utilities menu at the top of your screen once you have booted off of the DVD and go into the disk utility and format your AF partition. DO NOT SET THIS PARTITION AS ACTIVE, LEAVE THE FAT32 ONE ACTIVE.

9) Follow the setup directions till you are done and enjoy.

From the Insanely Mac forums (http://www.insanelymac.com/). I haven't validated but alot of people there seem to have had no issues.

Complete install guides for many flavours here. (http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Installation_Guides)

That said, there seems to be conflicting information about the legality of this, so if you insist it's DRM I'll just agree to disagree.

Thanks if I can find a guide that I can use with Linux with an off the shelf copy of OS X I'm going to give it try. Unfortunately my Windows hard drives don't have enough space but my Linux box does at the moment.

I looked at those before I made my previous post and those all looked like they require the developer or hacked versions or it's not clear they'll work with a purchased copy.

No I'm not talking about EULA restrictions -- I don't consider that DRM -- I'm talking about the software checking for specific hardware as one form of DRM.

Ah. That's not a special version of OS X - it's essentially a "Slipstreamed" version of the OS (similar to what you have to do to  WinXP to get it running on Mac hardware (http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp)). The version alot of people are referencing is the Developer x86 OS X disks which are not bootable on PPC hardware. It's a bit complicated, if you dont have a mac creating that patched OS X version can be challenging. It's relatively easy on a mac because you can create a patched startup DVD that is compatible with generic PC hardware.

Most people seem to be buying a boxed copy of OS X then grabbing the ISO of a pre-patched version. This way you are totally license compliant, although not EULA compliant according to some.

I still don't see how this is possible. From here (http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ#The_Developer_Intel_Mac_looks_like_an_ordinary_PC_-_is_it.3F):

My emphasis. Are you sure I can do this without downloading a special copy of OS X?

No I'm not. I have also been reading, and although some folks have done it they are all people who already had a Mac sitting beside the PC and were able to create a trick installer. My understanding of the TPM was that it was primarily related to Rosetta - as indicated here (http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ#What_part_of_the_OS_relies_on_the_TPM_module.3F).

I may have underestimated Apple's effort in preventing this however - you may indeed have been correct in which case I apologize. I have never installed OS X on PC hardware, although friends have using images from my mac - for educational purposes of course.

EDIT: It appears I was wrong, sorry Trippy. The issue is not simply the fact that OS X expects and EFI bios, but also that the kernel expects the TPM to be present. You cannot boot without it. A phone call to a friend who has done this and owns a Mac reveals regardless of what you own, you do need to get a torrent file that alters the OS X install to work (and subsequently run) without the TPM chip.

Ergo I would agree - that's DRM.

As an aside, if you do want to run OS X on your PC it seems painless enough provided you're willing to break copyright law not just an EULA.

Definitive answer from InsanelyMac:

Apple uses the Infineon SLB 9635 TT TPM chip in their Intel Macs. A kernel extension is called by several parts of the OS (most particularly the non-Darwin GUI) to check for functions in the TPM chip (simple ones that identify the TPM chip as an Apple serialized one). In order to run it on non-Apple hardware you have to replace the kernel extension with one that returns the appropriate values without looking up a chip. It's quite easy to do from a programmatic standpoint, but the fact that each software update requires new hackery prevents most laymen from running OS X on non-blessed hardware.

In theory, Apple could take the profits they make from selling a computer, and mark up the price of a PCI module that contains a TPM chip. Consumers could then place the 'Apple Tax' in a computer of their own choosing and run OS X. It would keep Apple rolling in filthy lucre from hardware sales without them having to actually build computers.

That would make the Apple Tax far too transparent to be palatable, and effectively remove any Appleitism that beret-wearing coffee-shop beatniks might assume.

I was working for several minutes on how to spell Appleitism.  I'm going to have apple respelled as appel.

EDIT because I did not spend enough time on how to spell coffee.

They did have an open platform at one time....Except through licensing the Mac Open Firmware implementation for PowerPC. It ended up cutting into Apple's profits, so I can see why someone like Jobs is weary of the idea at this point. When he came in to rescue the company, one of his first moves was destroying the clones. Almost immediately after Jobs took over, the Mac platform became a major player again.

As far as he's concerned, the results speak for themselves. In his mind, every move he's done has built the company up. Whether their previous failures actually had anything to do with clones or not, he's not going to see it that way.

The clones weren't really that good. They were just cheaper, and there only what, 2 of them? It was a good idea, and one that would have kept Apple's share in the market steady and growing had it been given enough time and vendors. It would have also made Apple turn into a software company instead of a hardware company and I'm sure there were enough elitist design pricks in the upper echelons who didn't want that.

Motorola, Umax, Power Computing (who were the real threat), and a few others. I think even Pioneer was a clone company for awhile.

The Moto and Power computers were pretty good.

Slashdot thread from Monday discussing Apple OS DRM and Virtualization (http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/07/02/12/2322220.shtml)

Device key for WinDVD 8 discovered (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122664) (not verified yet).

This shit is why I've stopped buying DVDs:
(http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/8107/piracy2rt5.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)

I will not buy a dvd that has commercials in front of it. I shouldn't have to buy a fucking hacked Taiwanese DVD player so I can skip the crap that they flag as unskippable.

I might start downloading stuff from Comedy Central off the internet because of all the utter shit they make me click/wait through.  Any Alliance Atlantis products too.

Device key for WinDVD has been revoked (http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/Press.jsp?mode=04-06-2007).

Hackers win. Again. (http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/10/aacs-hacked-to-expose-volume-id-windvd-patch-irrelevant/)

Why do they keep trying?


Oh, yeah. Money hats.

It always kind of amazes me that people still feel the need to hack DRM solutions. I understand when the DRM hinders legitimate attempts to use the media, but a lot of these people just want shit for free.

You're amazed that young people with nothing better to do will go to lengths to 'stick it to the man' and get stuff for free?

What planet are you living on?

Eh, I guess I feel I have better things to do than stealing shit.

I think I can better understand that it's a technical challenge; it's like a huge puzzle set up by these multinationals that cost millions. I guess it could be a pretty big thrill to crack it.