> It is interesting though how this same conversation doesn't exist in the same way in other areas of computing like video game consoles
Historically, when the first game consoles with game cartridges existed, the hardware was much more niche than the available personal computers. Game system developers designed hardware specifically for games, and game developers developed for those specific systems. Also, physical media for games provided an ownership model and DRM.
In 2003, Apple released the iTunes Music Store partnering with music labels to counteract the prevalence of music pirating. That was the first major digital marketplace with DRM and way before the App Store in 2008!
In 2005, digital distribution for video game consoles came with the Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, and Wii. Being game consoles with unique hardware, they kept their restricted licensed development model of previous generations.
The iPhone and App Store just followed that pattern. Unique hardware and a licensed digital marketplace to go with it.
Now, the hardware between video game consoles, smartphones, and personal computers are mostly unified; and the only real difference is software, but the restricted marketplace model still remains.
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> The fact that mobile phones aren't yet just a standard type of portable computer with an open-ish harware/driver ecosystem that anybody can just make an OS for (and hence allow anybody to just install what they want) is kind of wild IMHO. Why hasn't the kind of ferver that created Linux driven engineers to fix their phones?
DRM. There are already devices where you can unlock the bootloader and install any OS on it. But then you won't be able to install apps that use the Play Integrity API to ensure DRM. Companies/developers want revenue and develop apps that require Play Integrity.
Any device that doesn't have DRM will never support a paid digital marketplace or paid content streaming.
> Is Android and iOS just good enough to keep us complacent and trapped forever?
Probably. Microsoft tried a DRM supported OS with Windows Phone and that failed.
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That being said, digital marketplaces and DRM have there place to prevent piracy and allow developers and creators to make a living.
If someone has a solution to prevent piracy without a root of trust that would be ideal.
"That being said, digital marketplaces and DRM have there place to prevent piracy and allow developers and creators to make a living.
If someone has a solution to prevent piracy without a root of trust that would be ideal.'
This is the equivalent statement to inspecting everyone's bag at any point because they might have something illegal. It's not an acceptable move from google.
> If someone has a solution to prevent piracy without a root of trust that would be ideal
and that someone is named Gaben, and the solution is called Steam. He has done more to solve piracy than any media empire who proportedly spent billions in law suits, lobbying and anti-circumvention ever did.
And Steam implements its own DRM and takes 30% from game publishers. Also, they don't stop game developers from providing their own DRM which require root-of-trust, like CoD or BF6 which require Secure Boot.
> And Steam implements its own DRM
Which is entirely optional. In fact there are plenty of games on there without DRM at all.
> and takes 30% from game publishers.
They could always use other stores. And they do, however their customers use Steam because it is so much easier than other stores, and big picture mode is so much easier than piracy.
Those are mostly to prevent cheating (which is pretty bad for an online game) rather than piracy.
Which is the same as root-of-trust attestation.
Which is better:
- Having applications provide kernel-level software to provide attestation.
- Or having the OS provide root-of-trust attestation, but also requiring signed binaries, and preventing global root privilege escalation.
The third option would be neither, but players want some sort of anti-cheat.
What about Ubisoft with ubisoft connect
Ubisoft Connect is separate from the DRM on their games as I understand it, it's a game launcher, achievements tracker, friends system, advertising method, etc.
How is that steam's fault?
Gaben like all of us isn't going to be around forever, nor Steam is guaranteed to keep being what it is without his leadership.
Don't ask lawyers for what the best solution should be, because its always "lawsuits!"
I think it's more equivalent to when game consoles check the license on disc media.
It used to be via hardware in the disc reader, then online license checking. And now it's fully digital, media and license.
The fucked up part is the fact that we can't transfer digital ownership of purchases. But at least I can use my purchases across multiple devices. Maybe this is what we should use blockchains for, but it would still require a locked device with root-of-trust.
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> It's not an acceptable move from google.
By all means, you can have an unlocked Android device with a non-Google sanctioned OS and not use Google Play. That way you can use any app that doesn't require Google Play Protect.
Companies are OK with it because it makes them money. The majority of users are OK with it because they can use those companies' apps.
> Any device that doesn't have DRM will never support a paid digital marketplace
Yet here am on linux buying games on steam
Steam is a bit different, since that originated as a PC digital marketplace before complete root-of-trust DRM from HW->bootloader->OS->SW.
If anything, I would bet on a shift where Steam on Linux requires a signed OS like Windows Secure Boot. Call of Duty and Battlefield 6 already require Windows Secure Boot.
Wait, a signed Linux OS with Secure Boot already exists. It's Android Play Protect.
Also on Linux, you only get Widevine L3, which limits video and audio quality for DRM web content.
Pirating is more of a problem of mismanaged price versus revenues. In the '90 in East Europe everybody was pirating because we couldn't afford any software not because "we wanted to steal". As soon as I got a decent salary I just bought the damn stuff and spared me of the headache of dealing with pirated things.
The people pushing for drastic technical measures to "prevent pirating" are probably accountants, that have no other idea of how to generate value and they imagine all "pirated content" will be converted to paid - which is not the case.
I live in Nigeria and I hate piracy, yet books her are so darn expensive that the average middle class citizen resorts to piracy. I think regional pricing will really help out with this.
> spared me of the headache of dealing with pirated things
Without any sort of DRM and today's internet speeds, pirating digital media would probably be like Napster
Greenheart Games famously purposely released a different version of Game Dev Tycoon for pirating. You can read the blog post here: https://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when...
Most of the software I use depend on centralized functionality. Example: convenient online invitation, sharing of resources and integrations (for productivity), accomplishments, ladders and updates (for games).
For music media, there are a lot of people (67%) using streaming (random source: https://ifpi-website-cms.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/IFPI_GMR...) which is a totally different service than having a list of songs on your device then struggling with organizing/synchronizing/keeping up to date.
Media and software do not "work" like physical goods. Value should be extracted from them but a lot of earth population is poor and could still "use" the media/software (example: 57% of world population has less than 10$ income per day source: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$mountain$enc...)
Regional pricing based on Purchasing Power Parity could be a solution. However, perhaps too many customers would use VPNs and pretend to be from the poorest countries on Earth.
Some technical solutions could be implemented, but I wonder if it is worth it? My claim is that probably 80-90% of the people that can pay, already do, because they get things they want in return (as mentioned with the online services connected to various things). We shouldn't make it completely easy to copy software, but the focus of companies would be to develop new useful things not to restrict platforms to police poor people or the few that like to steal.
In the end, I suspect that the platform companies know that - as an example Google probably gave Android without asking a lot in return - but what they need are excuses to restrict competition when they reached a dominant position.
Rather than proposing technical solutions to fix this invented issue, I would rather find the next challenger - that will start by being nice (same as Google did).
Ironically the drm measures are a huge part in why I tend to go for pirated content, as its more convenient to me AND of higher quality.
I went 100% legit on VST plugins years ago and regretted that decision so much when I had to change systems. It literally takes weeks to transfer hundreds of these, there are so many different DRM schemes and installer systems, it drives you insane.
Shifting goalposts: you said there's no marketplace, I pointed out a highly prominent one, and your counterargument is… they don't count because other different things exist.
I wish I could edit my original post, but I meant to switch the causality around.
What I’d meant was, a paid digital marketplace will end up with some form of DRM.
And furthermore, economic incentives will drive devices to implement some form of trusted computing.
Indeed. The complement of No Tux No Bux is If Tux Then Bux.
It's less likely that game consoles and smartphones will become fully unlocked like personal computers. I would bet on the opposite where personal computers have the same HW/SW model as smartphones. We are already almost there with macOS SIP and Windows Secure Boot. The only thing missing is removal or isolation of root privilege escalation.
> Now, the hardware between video game consoles, smartphones, and personal computers are mostly unified; and the only real difference is software, but the restricted marketplace model still remains.
Not really in regards to consoles, the hardware is still tailormade for game development, even if some components seem common.
> Any device that doesn't have DRM will never support a paid digital marketplace or paid content streaming.
None of the attestation stuff actually works for that.
For streamed content the pirates only need one person to crack one device and then everything is on The Pirate Bay. Notice that it's all still available in such places despite the DRM and the people still paying for it are still paying for it despite its availability there.
And apps are the same. If you put some attestation in your app, the pirates would just disable it in the copy they distribute, because attestation does nothing to prevent copying.
What it's nominally supposed to be for is so that a server can verify that the device is approved before providing some service. But that only works if a) the thing the server is providing is individualized rather than generally available, and b) the attacker can't get an approved device. The first is what makes it useless for copy protection. The second is what makes it useless for e.g. a bank app, because the attacker will just steal the user's credentials on a compromised device that never even attempts attestation because it's only connecting to the attacker's servers, and then put the stolen credentials into an approved device in order to transfer the money.
The only party to benefit from any of this is the incumbent platform if they can fool useful idiots into using it in order to lock customers into their platform.
> For streamed content the pirates only need one person to crack one device
Thus the push for locked devices.
> What it's nominally supposed to be for is so that a server can verify that the device is approved before providing some service.
Which is why Neflix wont work with a device failing Play Protect.
> The first is what makes it useless for copy protection
Not if you require a locked device to download the artifact in the first place to prevent copying.
I feel like you're not understanding the problem:
> Which is why Neflix wont work with a device failing Play Protect.
And yet the pirates still have all of their content, because DRM doesn't work. One pirate cracks one locked device and can download their entire catalog with it. That one pirate needs to know something about computer security and side channel attacks etc., but none of the people downloading it do.
It can't prevent the first copy from being made because the devices are only secure against amateurs but not professionals, and it can't prevent any of the subsequent copies because the pirates aren't using any DRM to distribute them.
> And yet the pirates still have all of their content, because DRM doesn't work. One pirate cracks one locked device and can download their entire catalog with it.
I know and I'm saying what we are seeing is a push to plug all those holes. iOS, Android, macOS SIP, Windows Secure Boot. All root-of-trust systems, so that only operating systems that prevent copying can download it in the first place.
Those pirates aren't using locked devices to copy content. They are using devices lacking copy protection.
The pirates still have the media which is only distributed to locked devices. Nobody really knows how to secure a device against a professional who has physical access to the device for as long as they want.
Xbox, post-360, has been very successful at doing so.
Xbox games are cracked all over the place. You're referring to jailbreaks. The incentive to jailbreak an Xbox is pretty low because if you did it, it would be basically a PC and anyone who wants "basically a PC" would just get a PC.
I've had this conversation with other people before. It generally goes like this. They say DRM would work if only it was the One True DRM where all the world is their chattel and their killbots have wiped out all the resistance fighters. I ask why it is that even the systems that work the way they want them to are still unable to prevent copying. They ignore the vast majority of these systems that are known to be broken and point to some outlier without considering why it is one. And it's typically something like, the same content is also distributed in a parallel system which is already cracked and then there is little reason to crack both of them, or there is less incentive to crack a system when the content it's used on is unpopular, or there is a statistical variation in how long it takes for someone to get to it and then choosing the longest one is effectively cherry picking or P-hacking.
The implication is supposed to be that if only we used that system for everything then nobody would be able to crack it. But if you used that system for everything then that's the system they would have cracked because it's the one you're using for everything. That's how it works. It's not that anybody has impenetrable security, it's that people rob banks because that's where the money is.
Except that in this case it's not gold, it's bits, so anyone who gets their hands on a single copy can make unlimited more.
> Xbox games are cracked all over the place. You're referring to jailbreaks. The incentive to jailbreak an Xbox is pretty low because if you did it, it would be basically a PC and anyone who wants "basically a PC" would just get a PC.
Those are the PC versions of the games. There is an incentive to jailbreak Xbox consoles as evident by the Xbox 360 jailbreak. You can download and play any Xbox 360 game for free.
The incentive is games for free and the ability to cheat. The incentive is more on the later now that console exclusives are less of a thing.
There’s an economic push to get the console model of digital distribution to personal computers which (un)fortunately goes hand in hand with trusted computing.
> Those are the PC versions of the games.
They're not. People crack the console-exclusive versions of a game and then play them on a PC.
> There is an incentive to jailbreak Xbox consoles as evident by the Xbox 360 jailbreak.
The current Xbox shipped less than a third as many units as the 360. Of the top 10 highest selling consoles ever, the three newest are 8, 12 and 19 years old. Consoles are kind of dying in general and Xbox is dying the most. Why is no one jailbreaking this thing that only 1% of people have?
> The incentive is games for free and the ability to cheat. The incentive is more on the later now that console exclusives are less of a thing.
Pirates are humans and humans are lazy so when it's easier to get the same game for free and run it on their PC they do that. And people cheat with custom controllers etc.
> There’s an economic push to get the console model of digital distribution to personal computers which (un)fortunately goes hand in hand with trusted computing.
The only thing that's happening is that Microsoft is hoping to get the same 30% of the game developer's money that Apple does. The question is whether the world is going to destroy them faster than they can destroy the world.
Windows market share keeps going down, and that was before Microsoft just caused there to be about a billion fairly recent PCs that can run Linux but not any supported version of Windows.
The subset of the market which is most likely to stick with them for a while is the same subset they can't do that to, i.e. the corporate market, because they're the ones who use Windows because they need to run their unsigned legacy line of business software. The home users are already sick of dark patterns and ads in the start menu and are starting to notice that Steam runs on Linux.
> People crack the console-exclusive versions of a game and then play them on a PC.
Can you provide an example of a current Xbox One or PS5 exclusive that is available on PC? Why isn't Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Yotei, or Halo 5 available on PC?
> Pirates are humans and humans are lazy so when it's easier to get the same game for free and run it on their PC they do that.
So should we make it easier or harder to get games for free?
> The home users are already sick of dark patterns and ads in the start menu and are starting to notice that Steam runs on Linux.
And game studios/publishers will start to demand trusted computing for Steam on Linux. There's a reason why the majority of the top 10 games on Steam by player-base are not playable on Linux.
It's the same reason there's a Netflix app for Chrome OS, but not some random Linux distro. And why the Netflix app doesn't work in an Android Emulator.
> Can you provide an example of a current Xbox One or PS5 exclusive that is available on PC?
https://x.com/XWineOne/status/1884670205701374063
People make translation layers for the console APIs and then you can play whatever game as long as they've implemented the APIs it uses. It's certainly not because they can't get a copy of the game out of the console.
And then how long it takes depends on demand. If you needed to implement this to run half of all games, it happens fast. If it's for an unpopular console with few exclusives, it still happens, but takes longer.
> So should we make it easier or harder to get games for free?
The real question is, should you willingly enable the likes of Microsoft to insert themselves between you and your customers? Requiring one pirate to do a little extra work isn't worth losing 30% of your income.
> And game studios/publishers will start to demand trusted computing for Steam on Linux.
Which would be useless the same as it is on Windows.
> It's the same reason there's a Netflix app for Chrome OS, but not some random Linux distro. And why the Netflix app doesn't work in an Android Emulator.
Netflix works fine on Linux. It runs in a browser and uses some DRM nonsense that doesn't work any better than it does anywhere else but satisfies Netflix's contractual requirements to use some DRM nonsense. It would also work fine if they would stop requesting that because finding someone to supply you with snake oil when you demand it doesn't mean that snake oil actually works.
> https://x.com/XWineOne/status/1884670205701374063
> People make translation layers for the console APIs and then you can play whatever game as long as they've implemented the APIs it uses. It's certainly not because they can't get a copy of the game out of the console.
That's not a current Xbox One or PS5 exclusive. Peggle 2 is an Xbox 360 game. The game data on Xbox 360 discs can only be read from the Xbox 360 DVD drive. Xbox 360 was jailbroken so that the games can be extracted and downloaded from the discs. They can then be played for free on modified Xbox 360s or emulators.
Xbox One has yet to be jailbroken. PS4 and PS5 depend on the firmware version.
Every game shown by XWine1 has been a game that was on the 360 or also already available for PC.
> And then how long it takes depends on demand.
I'm sure some of the top selling exclusives on PlayStation and Xbox have had high demand to be played on PC.
> Which would be useless the same as it is on Windows.
It's only useless on Windows because Windows hasn't fully committed to trusted computing yet. The end goal is NGSCB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...).
> Netflix works fine on Linux. It runs in a browser and uses some DRM nonsense that doesn't work any better than it does anywhere else but satisfies Netflix's contractual requirements to use some DRM nonsense.
It works as intended. Free Linux can only decode Widevine L3, so you are limited to a lower quality stream. Chrome OS supports L1.
On Windows, Netflix uses PlayReady, and on Apple OSes it uses FairPlay.
> That's not a current Xbox One or PS5 exclusive. Peggle 2 is an Xbox 360 game.
It's a game that was originally released for Xbox One and is still a console exclusive.
> The game data on Xbox 360 discs can only be read from the Xbox 360 DVD drive. Xbox 360 was jailbroken so that the games can be extracted and downloaded from the discs.
They can only be read from a drive with the right firmware to read them. It doesn't have to be done on the official console and it works for the newer Xbox consoles too:
http://wiki.redump.org/index.php?title=Disc_Dumping_Guide_(M...
> Every game shown by XWine1 has been a game that was on the 360 or also already available for PC.
This is because the number exclusive games is so small.
> I'm sure some of the top selling exclusives on PlayStation and Xbox have had high demand to be played on PC.
It's about aggregate demand. Someone has to implement that console's APIs on a PC, at which point it can play all the games, or if they implement part of the API then all the games that use that subset of the API. This happens quickly if there are thousands of exclusive games that everybody wants and not quickly if there are tens of exclusive games and people only really want like two of them.
> It's only useless on Windows because Windows hasn't fully committed to trusted computing yet.
It's still useless because "trusted computing" doesn't actually work. Any vulnerability in any part of the system can be used to extract everything, and new vulnerabilities are discovered on a regular basis. Several of the vulnerabilities have allowed extracting the keys from the TPM in popular hardware, so pirates can already get as many hardware keys as they want from any of those devices and patching them after the fact doesn't deprive them of any of the keys they've already extracted. And the vulnerable devices are essentially all of them, so if you tried to block every model that could have had its keys extracted your actual customers won't be able to view your content.
> It works as intended. Free Linux can only decode Widevine L3, so you are limited to a lower quality stream. Chrome OS supports L1.
And the pirates have both the L3 and L1 streams. If that's working as intended then it's useless, isn't it?
Unless its actual purpose is to lock people into platforms from megacorps so the megacorps can extract a thick percentage from the actual content creators by monopolizing the distribution path.
This is all a farce, because eventually the content must be decoded. Because our eyeballs must view it.
It doesn't matter if the OS doesn't prevent copying. The stream, in plaintext, exists and can be copied. Which is what pirates do.
The only way around this is skipping the TV and projecting the encrypted stream into your brain where it is then decoded by a Netflix Approved neurolink module.
For music and movies, yes. Though with movies, you even have HDMI HDCP and DisplayPort DPCP to make it harder.
For games though, the game binary is the media. Game console developers have been very successful at preventing pirating.
More locked device, more difficult obfuscation -> more motivation for certain people to break it and share it with everybody.
There is no way, you can plug all holes, iPhone couldn't do it with their golden cage and they spend ridiculous amount of money so their phone cannot be rooted, but you still have rooted iphone.
It took years before Apple relented and allowed the concept of a file be exposed to end users.
To be fair, initially Lisa also had the same document concept from Bravo, and that they took into iOS.
So Apple has been through this before.
Don't prevent piracy
> In 2005, digital distribution for video game consoles came with the Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, and Wii.
Or at least ten years earlier with a Japanese SNES:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview