> 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.