Curse

Fril Estelin · Jul 01, 2008, 07:58 AM // 07:58

Quote:

Originally Posted by zwei2stein

but it is abusable this way.

All technology is abusable. It's the old problem of the knife, which can be used to cut apples or kill people.

Quote:

About medical records in wrong hands ... yes, they can be abused. But if someone wants someone else dead so much that they investigate their medical records for weaknesses ... they are going to kill that person anyway.

I wasn't talking about murder (to my knowledge, that is not happened by manipulating electronic medical records) but accidents.

Let's just stop here the thread derailment. If you're trying to prove that all DRM is bad, you're just plain wrong. It's like saying knifes are bad because they kill people or MMO is bad because it's an addiction. Yet, SecuROM is an abheration amd Sony not trustworthy.

Chthon · Jul 01, 2008, 09:03 PM // 21:03

I'm going to try to get this thread back on the rails with Penny Arcade:

Anywho, the fundamental problem with SecuRom isn't that it prevents copying; it's that it completely fuques up your computer. Sony has shown repeatedly that they are willing to cause any amount of damage to your computer in order to prevent you from copying their stuff. In my book that makes them totally unworthy of being trusted.

I would not have a principled problem with a copy protection scheme that was wholly confined to the copy-protected content and did not infect my entire system.

The general problem with copy protection is that the sort of methods that would be acceptable to me aren't possible. Copy protection is intrinsically defeatable, and the only way to make it even remotely hard to defeat is to infect the PC and turn it against the user's efforts to defeat the protection.

The only "copy protection" scheme that has ever really worked is a-net's server-side, one-time CD-key verification. And it works precisely because it's not really copy protection per se, but rather a control on server-side account rights.