This is AI written. Next time just paste your prompt or conversation with the AI that wrote the article. I'll then converse with Claude about it myself. There is no need for this intermediary.
The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site.
As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it legally.
What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.
Cheaper & easier - not by much. Australia blocks all the good torrent sites, so now I need a VPN, a reputable one. Also need terabytes of network connected storage, and usually I need more and more of it over time. Better and more networking equipment to buy and maintain. Media management and streaming software that works locally and remotely, to (maybe buy) and maintain.
Or I can usage discount offers for the various streaming platforms, and pay for each one I want to watch something on from time to time.
The streaming services also don’t come with who knows what malware like pirated media can.
And a YouTube Premium subscription because you get ad free YouTube Music and ad free YouTube.
This is true for music because the labels decided that they would upload their catalogs to every streaming service.
It's not true for movies, because the movie industry decided to sign exclusivity deals or make movies only available on their own platforms. Thus piracy is still the only reliable way to watch movies: you might get access to some subset of movies depending on which streaming service you subscribe to, but certainly not to all of them.
How does that negate needing a VPN, storage, networking, media management, remote access, malware?
I’ve never met even a data hoarder who has “all of them”, and I tend to watch them one at a time anyways, so I’d argue “not all of them” isn’t really a problem anyone has.
Having said that, I do tend to pirate a relatively small collection of movies and series, just the ones I could watch over and over and never get tired off.
You can access streaming (not torrenting) sites without a VPN and just watch whatever movies you want and there's no hastle or malware? If you like something particularly you can download it and then storage becomes a factor, and if all streaming sites are blocked a VPN subscription (reputable just mulvad) costs less than any streaming service and gives you access to every single movie and show, impossible to debate that it's not more convenient
Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.
Piracy is a service problem. Copyright monopolists always defeat themselves with their obnoxious greed.
Things were easy enough when Netflix had a complete catalog, now every studio wants to roll their own shitty streaming services in order to cut Netflix out. Result is a fragmented mess where you want to watch a great film but you have no idea where the hell it even is, and even if you find it you discover it doesn't work because your computer isn't locked down to their tastes, and even if you buy a TV appliance they stream you some shitty horribly compressied "high definition" video with artifacts in pure black frames, all on their homegrown laggy borderline unusable video players with zero features.
Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. It's the sort of thing that makes me feel like a total moron for giving money to these corporations.
> Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice.
I think the only people who believe that pirating is easier than using the streaming services are people who spend so much time with computers that they round the mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it.
I am technically capable of doing all of those things. I also have a rotation of online streaming services. Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.
I think this is all just mental gymnastics to try to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that some people don’t want to pay for things and, of those, some get a little fun out of doing all the steps and setup to pirate things.
Yep, same. I still pirate media from time to time, but it’s become increasingly infrequent that each time I think to do it I end up putting it off for months because I’d rather gargle broken glass, or watch politicians give state their opinion on topic or another, than go through all the rigmarole of pirating media.
Watching something on a streaming service, or using Apple / Google to “rent” it for a few days is like, what, three clicks away.
Rather than my media server updated over night and won’t boot, I’ve got it booting to a terminal session but the database is corrupted, fuck it I’ll just buy $2000 worth of new hard drives and then re down everything in Ultra 16k 96 bit colour with 4000 gigabit Dolby 400 channel surround-surround and upgraded to all gold plated fibre cabling and have this fixed in no time. Or my torrent site account got hacked or blocked, or the site changed URL again, or they updated their database and “hope to be back up soon”, or a Three Letter Agency seized the their hardware because they were also a involved in human trafficking of blood diamond child sex slaves, again.
It’s all too hard. I’d rather just listen to the footy on AM radio, or maybe read a book. Or occasionally complain about there being too many, or not enough, clouds / rain / sun / wind.
There's apps for that these days. Not going to names them, but if you're still downloading a torrent file on a computer, you're behind the times. It's as easy as Netflix on an Android TV with a remote these days.
Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?
Issues and topics that are reduced to a single idea are oversimplified to were lost of reality can take hold.
Example, say person chooses to never fund Amazon. Amazon owns MGM. The only way that person can watch an MGM movie is through piracy. The only alternative would be to buy second hand content so MGM / Amazon do not get a finical cut.
As media corporations become more monopolistic, like Paramount buying Warner Bros, I could see more people pirating so they do not fund David Ellison and people like him.
Which is all VSNG - Virtue Signalling Navel Gazing.
Such-and-such or so-and-so perceived or real bad actor of the week isn’t going to change their behaviour because they didn’t get my $0.03 from not-watching some ten year old film on a streaming service.
Up their with people who buy that Who gives a Crap toilet paper which purports to be environmentally friendly, yet is 2.5 times the price of a name brand toilet paper from the supermarket, and often comes with glow in the dark ink on the individually paper wrapped rolls, and comes in a giant full colour printed cardboard box, which is only available for home delivery so has baked in single-item last-mile delivery energy inputs to boot.
And it’s not even good toilet paper.
Are the gluten free wheat free dairy free vegan Anzac biscuits halal?
I sometimes wonder if some people’s brains are painted on.
Apple TV has a search function that allows you to find a film or series irrespectice of whatever service it's on, and launch the appropriate app to play it.
Some times I read these mental gymnastics comments about piracy being easier and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV.
I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.
DRM also intensively targets the new-release window during which much of the returns on any piece of IP are made; the latency with which high-quality copies hit mainstream sites has monetary value as well.
I think that's also wrong. I think that the primary reason media publishers use DRM is not to prevent copyright infringement. It's really to exert power over the entire ecosystem and use that power to implement rules around content distribution and use that are much more restrictive than the actual copyright law itself.
To copyright owners, there really is no difference. In many countries, notably not the USA, copyright is bound up with the broader concept of authors' rights, including the right to control whether, where, when, and how a work is exhibited. Rightsholders in the U.S. still believe in authors' rights from a moral standpoint; Jack Valenti wanted to outlaw VCRs because he was afraid of the rise of bootleg tapes, sure, but he also believed that movies were intended to be shown in theaters, and maybe only much later, licensed for television. Copyright and control over the distribution network were indistinguishable to him.
> Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy
spotify and netflix are both prime examples of making it easier for a larger population to access drm enabled content compared to pirated content (at the time they started getting popular anyway).
with the advent of streaming services you no longer needed to download potentially dodgy files to your computer (viruses/malware), wait for the download to finish, realise they’re a dodgy video cam recording of the cinema screening, download another one etc.
napster/limewire et. al were originally examples for the opposite case. pirating via those was super popular. there were fewer steps to access the media compared to going to a physical shop to buy a CD/DVD. (*)
(*) i can’t remember when the itunes store came along. might have been after these services? or around the same-ish time?
The average user would probably pay more for a different video streaming platform if their current one started requiring 4 or 5 more clicks per view. “Complex set of steps” for most people could involve finding a website that wasn’t explicitly advertised to them, using an interface that wasn’t AB tested into oblivion, and inexplicably having to “update their flash player” every single time they want to watch Barney Miller. Never mind bit torrent: you might as well ask them to build themselves a TV from scratch. They could figure it out— they aren’t (necessarily) dumb— but they really don’t want to have to figure it out. They just want it to work without friction.
The point is: DRM is circumvented once, by some grizzled pirate captain. Everyone else just gets to plunder their downloads DRM free, nice and easy.
DRM is ineffective because the pirate uploaders are competent enough to break it, and an average end user only downloads - rank and file pirates wouldn't make their own releases even if DRM never existed and making them was easy.
I often buy content to support the creators, then download it on torrent sites because the UI and experience is better. I can use whatever player I want, modify the screen size more and have no branding bloat (Amazon Prime! Youtube! Netflix! etc) and have a better, more focused, and even off-line friendly experience.
It gets deleted, I move on with life.
But man the experiences in branded players really sucks, and I wish it were better.
Users hate it, but DRM is vastly more powerful than that since you ultimately control user access.
DRM - which all online services with user profiling automatically have - can also let you ban users, retarget users for ads, abuse, and other things beyond the basic function of running the software.
Such as bypassing parliament -the people responsible for managing your rights-.
And subverting democracy and the rule of law too, by punishing you or otherwise manipulate you into desired behavior without going to court.
Code is Law. DRM is violence.
DRM does the job it's supposed to which is prevent casual piracy and increase the amount of effort it takes to pirate something. A thief could rob your house if they bumped your lock or just smashed your window. But that doesn't make door locks useless as those have large costs in terms of effort and risk. So the lock is still effective at preventing someone from just walking in and taking your stuff.
It's the same with DRM. Without it, media would appear on piracy sites instantly upon release. DRM makes things harder to pirate, and pirated editions harder to get. And the DMCA makes defeating DRM a felony under U.S. law, so pirate networks are riskier to establish, driving piracy underground. It's doing the job it's supposed to do. It's not going anywhere.
It's unfortunate that the final few years of the fastest AGI progress happen to coincide with a global surge in nationalism, polarization, and mutual hostility between human groups.
That raises a disturbing failure mode: under intense conflict, an AI could learn that exterminating some groups of humans is a justified or even desirable objective. Once that principle is accepted, the step to concluding that exterminating all humans is justified may become much smaller than we'd like to believe.
Slight timeline correction: 25 years ago in 2001 Blowfish was no longer contraband - the crypto export rules had been changed by 2000. As of January 2000 Netscape and IE were both shipping 128bit DES internationally.
Still, the t-shirts with Blowfish source printed on them were a cool bit of retro hacker chic.
Also, the first OpenBSD hackathon was 1999; it was in fact semicryptographic (they shipped IPSEC) but they've had hackathons in the US since, and for a time developers were coming out to Calgary because that's where Theo was. The dumb export control shipping dance was real though.
I feel like eventually we're going to end up just like how the cryptography restrictions were in the 90s. They might have seemed necessary back then, but now looking at it, the technology and AI is probably going to become so ubiquitous in the next 10 years that we're going to wonder why we even restricted it in the first place, when it's something that's just going to be everywhere. Like they said at the end of this blog: "What arrived in my letterbox after two weeks on a CD can be downloaded today in fifteen minutes."
It seems like you got bored halfway through and had an LLM write the second half of your post? You know there isn't a minimum length for blog posts, right? You can just stop writing.
Was going to ask you to elaborate but from your update I caught refreshing I see it kneecaps itself for safety?
I'm a hobbiest reverse engineer and I often use ida free/ollydbg to reverse engineer stuff. I'm tempted to use try and use llms as a help (I've used it for help with instruction one offs successfully, but not the decompiling/trying to make sense of decompiled functions).
Recently I realised that a solar-powered garden light could easily hide an ESP32 and has its own power source. You could even place them in public without being too suspicious. Might want to disable the light, so the power lasts longer and so it's less likely to annoy someone into removing it.
Someone can do the math on panel and battery size. I'm thinking it'll work as-is, as the ESP with WiFi on will draw similar power to the LED that you disconnected.
But how will you give it even a GB of storage for a tiny model?
Many people use those to hide their ESP32-LORA devices. Far better range compared to wifi ;-) It works but you'll still need to swap the 18650's every now and then. More of a concern is the privatization of free spectrum. If everyone becomes a radio-refugee, there will be nothing but noise & pirates.
To do what? Ban export of AI? Are you sure? Because it seems, so far, there has been some personal motivated government restrictions due to people not bending the knee and industry moves and clamoring about dangers to generate hype.
"The fears have changed."
Yeah, people are fearful that the entirety of the internet has been hoovered up and people are using that data to make tech that they are promoting by saying it will eliminate a huge percentage of jobs and is exceedingly dangerous. At the same time as they do that, they refuse to take any accountability for the negative effects their tech has or will have, avoid any over sight, and laugh at the idea of discussing that maybe such a consequential tech doesn't belong in the hands of a few tech bros whose only qualification for owning it is being rich.
"The worry is now cyber capability, biology and models that do things nobody asked them to do."
No, we are being sold those worries (really, really hard) but these are not "peoples" worries. They aren't even real governments worries. They are the worries being peddled to try and work some deal where the taxpayers end up holding the bag of hot air that is the AI economy.
This post is so frustrating because AI is the antithesis of everything the people fighting for cryptography access, working on opensource, pushing for a the sort of web that is beneficial to all, were working against. A giant concentration of power enriching the few at the expense of many.
> people are fearful that the entirety of the internet has been hoovered up
Information wants to be free. If you don't like the idea of information, ideas, ect being shared freely for anyone to use just say that. But you aren't on the side of open source.
> that maybe such a consequential tech doesn't belong in the hands of a few tech bros whose only qualification for owning it is being rich.
The solution to that is open weights, and for the technology to be in the hands of more people not less.
This point agrees with the central point that spreading out this tech as much as possible, with open weights, is the good thing here.
> A giant concentration of power
Concentration of power would be preventing open weights not supporting it.
Like WTF do you mean. Open source would be allowing anyone to use the tech easily. Obviously open source would want LLM weights to be public and easily sharable
(in a Forrest gump accent) my momma said that locks on doors only keep honest people honest. I'm not Forrest Gump, but my mom actually did say that and it's true.
What ever we have can be taken from us by powerful people, even life itself. In point of fact, that's exactly how these weights were created in the first place--they scraped the intellectual property of the world, and now are trying to restrict access to what they themselves just took.
That being said, I don't think any of the AI billionaires who are talking about this have taken the locks off of the doors or gotten rid of their security systems.
Yeah this persuaded me more than I thought it would, but there are still some pretty big differences IMO. A frontier AI model is a lot harder and more costly to produce than an encryption algorithm. Especially if we believe Anthropic that the Chinese can only do it by distilling their models (though tbh I would err on the side of not believing that).
RSA algorithm you can print on a shirt - and that would give you encryption that works as well as it possibly can. There's no "RSA 6.7 Turbo Pro EncryptingPlus" that would give you something radically new that the "t-shirt RSA" can't.
LLMs are massive, complex, and a moving target. Making them is hard, and there's no "we're done" there - the frontier updates every few months. It's easy to get and run a 2B model locally, but what concerns people isn't a cheap end device 2B - it's the 10T RLVR-fried monsters that frontier labs play with nowadays.
Apparently we are still fighting for secure communication through cryptography [1].
Other issue that doesn't get enough attention on HN is the criminalization of writing code. Probably because it was cryptocurrency applications. First they come for the people you disagree with. Just like they first came for porn sites, and now Wikipedia is being monitored.
This is AI written. Next time just paste your prompt or conversation with the AI that wrote the article. I'll then converse with Claude about it myself. There is no need for this intermediary.
The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site.
As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it legally.
What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.
Cheaper & easier - not by much. Australia blocks all the good torrent sites, so now I need a VPN, a reputable one. Also need terabytes of network connected storage, and usually I need more and more of it over time. Better and more networking equipment to buy and maintain. Media management and streaming software that works locally and remotely, to (maybe buy) and maintain.
Or I can usage discount offers for the various streaming platforms, and pay for each one I want to watch something on from time to time.
The streaming services also don’t come with who knows what malware like pirated media can.
And a YouTube Premium subscription because you get ad free YouTube Music and ad free YouTube.
This is true for music because the labels decided that they would upload their catalogs to every streaming service.
It's not true for movies, because the movie industry decided to sign exclusivity deals or make movies only available on their own platforms. Thus piracy is still the only reliable way to watch movies: you might get access to some subset of movies depending on which streaming service you subscribe to, but certainly not to all of them.
How does that negate needing a VPN, storage, networking, media management, remote access, malware?
I’ve never met even a data hoarder who has “all of them”, and I tend to watch them one at a time anyways, so I’d argue “not all of them” isn’t really a problem anyone has.
Having said that, I do tend to pirate a relatively small collection of movies and series, just the ones I could watch over and over and never get tired off.
You can access streaming (not torrenting) sites without a VPN and just watch whatever movies you want and there's no hastle or malware? If you like something particularly you can download it and then storage becomes a factor, and if all streaming sites are blocked a VPN subscription (reputable just mulvad) costs less than any streaming service and gives you access to every single movie and show, impossible to debate that it's not more convenient
It's only a DNS block fwiw. If you set your DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 everything works fine.
I recently realised even the build in iOS Private Relay gets around the Australian Government site blocks.
> The streaming services also don’t come with who knows what malware like pirated media can.
How does one put malware in media? Are we talking exploiting unlatched vulnerabilities in codecs, or are we talking random exe files?
It’s cat and mouse game. Australia blocks sites, sites move urls. If you don’t keep up, then they have caught you too.
Streaming sites can just delete your purchases whenever they want to. Sony already has.
Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.
Piracy is a service problem. Copyright monopolists always defeat themselves with their obnoxious greed.
Things were easy enough when Netflix had a complete catalog, now every studio wants to roll their own shitty streaming services in order to cut Netflix out. Result is a fragmented mess where you want to watch a great film but you have no idea where the hell it even is, and even if you find it you discover it doesn't work because your computer isn't locked down to their tastes, and even if you buy a TV appliance they stream you some shitty horribly compressied "high definition" video with artifacts in pure black frames, all on their homegrown laggy borderline unusable video players with zero features.
Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. It's the sort of thing that makes me feel like a total moron for giving money to these corporations.
> Piracy is a service problem
> Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice.
I think the only people who believe that pirating is easier than using the streaming services are people who spend so much time with computers that they round the mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it.
I am technically capable of doing all of those things. I also have a rotation of online streaming services. Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.
I think this is all just mental gymnastics to try to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that some people don’t want to pay for things and, of those, some get a little fun out of doing all the steps and setup to pirate things.
Yep, same. I still pirate media from time to time, but it’s become increasingly infrequent that each time I think to do it I end up putting it off for months because I’d rather gargle broken glass, or watch politicians give state their opinion on topic or another, than go through all the rigmarole of pirating media.
Watching something on a streaming service, or using Apple / Google to “rent” it for a few days is like, what, three clicks away.
Rather than my media server updated over night and won’t boot, I’ve got it booting to a terminal session but the database is corrupted, fuck it I’ll just buy $2000 worth of new hard drives and then re down everything in Ultra 16k 96 bit colour with 4000 gigabit Dolby 400 channel surround-surround and upgraded to all gold plated fibre cabling and have this fixed in no time. Or my torrent site account got hacked or blocked, or the site changed URL again, or they updated their database and “hope to be back up soon”, or a Three Letter Agency seized the their hardware because they were also a involved in human trafficking of blood diamond child sex slaves, again.
It’s all too hard. I’d rather just listen to the footy on AM radio, or maybe read a book. Or occasionally complain about there being too many, or not enough, clouds / rain / sun / wind.
There's apps for that these days. Not going to names them, but if you're still downloading a torrent file on a computer, you're behind the times. It's as easy as Netflix on an Android TV with a remote these days.
Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?
Issues and topics that are reduced to a single idea are oversimplified to were lost of reality can take hold.
Example, say person chooses to never fund Amazon. Amazon owns MGM. The only way that person can watch an MGM movie is through piracy. The only alternative would be to buy second hand content so MGM / Amazon do not get a finical cut.
As media corporations become more monopolistic, like Paramount buying Warner Bros, I could see more people pirating so they do not fund David Ellison and people like him.
Which is all VSNG - Virtue Signalling Navel Gazing.
Such-and-such or so-and-so perceived or real bad actor of the week isn’t going to change their behaviour because they didn’t get my $0.03 from not-watching some ten year old film on a streaming service.
Up their with people who buy that Who gives a Crap toilet paper which purports to be environmentally friendly, yet is 2.5 times the price of a name brand toilet paper from the supermarket, and often comes with glow in the dark ink on the individually paper wrapped rolls, and comes in a giant full colour printed cardboard box, which is only available for home delivery so has baked in single-item last-mile delivery energy inputs to boot.
And it’s not even good toilet paper.
Are the gluten free wheat free dairy free vegan Anzac biscuits halal?
I sometimes wonder if some people’s brains are painted on.
Apple TV has a search function that allows you to find a film or series irrespectice of whatever service it's on, and launch the appropriate app to play it.
Some times I read these mental gymnastics comments about piracy being easier and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV.
I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.
DRM also intensively targets the new-release window during which much of the returns on any piece of IP are made; the latency with which high-quality copies hit mainstream sites has monetary value as well.
I think that's also wrong. I think that the primary reason media publishers use DRM is not to prevent copyright infringement. It's really to exert power over the entire ecosystem and use that power to implement rules around content distribution and use that are much more restrictive than the actual copyright law itself.
To copyright owners, there really is no difference. In many countries, notably not the USA, copyright is bound up with the broader concept of authors' rights, including the right to control whether, where, when, and how a work is exhibited. Rightsholders in the U.S. still believe in authors' rights from a moral standpoint; Jack Valenti wanted to outlaw VCRs because he was afraid of the rise of bootleg tapes, sure, but he also believed that movies were intended to be shown in theaters, and maybe only much later, licensed for television. Copyright and control over the distribution network were indistinguishable to him.
> Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy
spotify and netflix are both prime examples of making it easier for a larger population to access drm enabled content compared to pirated content (at the time they started getting popular anyway).
with the advent of streaming services you no longer needed to download potentially dodgy files to your computer (viruses/malware), wait for the download to finish, realise they’re a dodgy video cam recording of the cinema screening, download another one etc.
napster/limewire et. al were originally examples for the opposite case. pirating via those was super popular. there were fewer steps to access the media compared to going to a physical shop to buy a CD/DVD. (*)
(*) i can’t remember when the itunes store came along. might have been after these services? or around the same-ish time?
“Locks only keep an honest man honest.”
-Most people’s grandfather
(I’m not saying these things are equal — just that this concept and the old saying share a perspective on securing things.)
But why would this larger percentage of people rip it themselves when the hardcore pirate already did it and made it accessible[1]?
[1] https://fmhy.net/video#streaming-sites
The average user would probably pay more for a different video streaming platform if their current one started requiring 4 or 5 more clicks per view. “Complex set of steps” for most people could involve finding a website that wasn’t explicitly advertised to them, using an interface that wasn’t AB tested into oblivion, and inexplicably having to “update their flash player” every single time they want to watch Barney Miller. Never mind bit torrent: you might as well ask them to build themselves a TV from scratch. They could figure it out— they aren’t (necessarily) dumb— but they really don’t want to have to figure it out. They just want it to work without friction.
The point is: DRM is circumvented once, by some grizzled pirate captain. Everyone else just gets to plunder their downloads DRM free, nice and easy.
DRM is ineffective because the pirate uploaders are competent enough to break it, and an average end user only downloads - rank and file pirates wouldn't make their own releases even if DRM never existed and making them was easy.
But it is easy to get the thing for free, because the free one doesn't have DRM.
Yet Netflix is as profitable as Disney. Having loved through netflix and popcorn tv that wouldn’t be the case without drm.
I often buy content to support the creators, then download it on torrent sites because the UI and experience is better. I can use whatever player I want, modify the screen size more and have no branding bloat (Amazon Prime! Youtube! Netflix! etc) and have a better, more focused, and even off-line friendly experience.
It gets deleted, I move on with life.
But man the experiences in branded players really sucks, and I wish it were better.
You wouldn’t steal a Claude!
Users hate it, but DRM is vastly more powerful than that since you ultimately control user access.
DRM - which all online services with user profiling automatically have - can also let you ban users, retarget users for ads, abuse, and other things beyond the basic function of running the software.
Such as bypassing parliament -the people responsible for managing your rights-. And subverting democracy and the rule of law too, by punishing you or otherwise manipulate you into desired behavior without going to court. Code is Law. DRM is violence.
> What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.
But the media ARE offered without DRM. At least many video games, the big ones too. And somehow they sell just fine
DRM does the job it's supposed to which is prevent casual piracy and increase the amount of effort it takes to pirate something. A thief could rob your house if they bumped your lock or just smashed your window. But that doesn't make door locks useless as those have large costs in terms of effort and risk. So the lock is still effective at preventing someone from just walking in and taking your stuff.
It's the same with DRM. Without it, media would appear on piracy sites instantly upon release. DRM makes things harder to pirate, and pirated editions harder to get. And the DMCA makes defeating DRM a felony under U.S. law, so pirate networks are riskier to establish, driving piracy underground. It's doing the job it's supposed to do. It's not going anywhere.
It's unfortunate that the final few years of the fastest AGI progress happen to coincide with a global surge in nationalism, polarization, and mutual hostility between human groups.
That raises a disturbing failure mode: under intense conflict, an AI could learn that exterminating some groups of humans is a justified or even desirable objective. Once that principle is accepted, the step to concluding that exterminating all humans is justified may become much smaller than we'd like to believe.
Slight timeline correction: 25 years ago in 2001 Blowfish was no longer contraband - the crypto export rules had been changed by 2000. As of January 2000 Netscape and IE were both shipping 128bit DES internationally.
Still, the t-shirts with Blowfish source printed on them were a cool bit of retro hacker chic.
Also, the first OpenBSD hackathon was 1999; it was in fact semicryptographic (they shipped IPSEC) but they've had hackathons in the US since, and for a time developers were coming out to Calgary because that's where Theo was. The dumb export control shipping dance was real though.
Reminds me of T-Shirts with DeCSS's code printed on it. Wild times.
I feel like eventually we're going to end up just like how the cryptography restrictions were in the 90s. They might have seemed necessary back then, but now looking at it, the technology and AI is probably going to become so ubiquitous in the next 10 years that we're going to wonder why we even restricted it in the first place, when it's something that's just going to be everywhere. Like they said at the end of this blog: "What arrived in my letterbox after two weeks on a CD can be downloaded today in fifteen minutes."
It seems like you got bored halfway through and had an LLM write the second half of your post? You know there isn't a minimum length for blog posts, right? You can just stop writing.
It’s kind of a bit ridiculous for Opus to blow up the minute I ask it to read from Ghidra, when the Chinese models, and even OpenAI, do not.
Leave the legality up to me, please, and don’t presume to be a power tool vendor regulating the use of their power drills, so to speak.
Was going to ask you to elaborate but from your update I caught refreshing I see it kneecaps itself for safety?
I'm a hobbiest reverse engineer and I often use ida free/ollydbg to reverse engineer stuff. I'm tempted to use try and use llms as a help (I've used it for help with instruction one offs successfully, but not the decompiling/trying to make sense of decompiled functions).
We need a cypherpunks movement for open weight models
Most people today are too aligned. Like they want the models to be also.
cypherpunks of today would probably be focused on bringing big tech down a notch, rather than spreading more LLMs
https://tinygrad.org is probably the best punk in this regard. Moving LLM's out of your drug dealers datacenter and into your utility closet.
No, being a cyberpunk is not about having some authoritarian control that prevents other people from using technology.
Instead it is about empowering the masses. It's about being a rag tag hacker fighting to do stuff that other people want to stop you from doing.
Cryptography is nothing like AI. It does not have the ability to upend the economy, and enable people to launch cyberattacks, etc.
Time to create some esp32-in-a-lightbulb open weight model dead drops.
Please don’t open-circuit the light for several hours.
Recently I realised that a solar-powered garden light could easily hide an ESP32 and has its own power source. You could even place them in public without being too suspicious. Might want to disable the light, so the power lasts longer and so it's less likely to annoy someone into removing it.
Someone can do the math on panel and battery size. I'm thinking it'll work as-is, as the ESP with WiFi on will draw similar power to the LED that you disconnected.
But how will you give it even a GB of storage for a tiny model?
Many people use those to hide their ESP32-LORA devices. Far better range compared to wifi ;-) It works but you'll still need to swap the 18650's every now and then. More of a concern is the privatization of free spectrum. If everyone becomes a radio-refugee, there will be nothing but noise & pirates.
Possibly a simple SD?
The framing of this entire issue is just wrong.
"Today the reflex is back."
To do what? Ban export of AI? Are you sure? Because it seems, so far, there has been some personal motivated government restrictions due to people not bending the knee and industry moves and clamoring about dangers to generate hype.
"The fears have changed."
Yeah, people are fearful that the entirety of the internet has been hoovered up and people are using that data to make tech that they are promoting by saying it will eliminate a huge percentage of jobs and is exceedingly dangerous. At the same time as they do that, they refuse to take any accountability for the negative effects their tech has or will have, avoid any over sight, and laugh at the idea of discussing that maybe such a consequential tech doesn't belong in the hands of a few tech bros whose only qualification for owning it is being rich.
"The worry is now cyber capability, biology and models that do things nobody asked them to do."
No, we are being sold those worries (really, really hard) but these are not "peoples" worries. They aren't even real governments worries. They are the worries being peddled to try and work some deal where the taxpayers end up holding the bag of hot air that is the AI economy.
This post is so frustrating because AI is the antithesis of everything the people fighting for cryptography access, working on opensource, pushing for a the sort of web that is beneficial to all, were working against. A giant concentration of power enriching the few at the expense of many.
> people are fearful that the entirety of the internet has been hoovered up
Information wants to be free. If you don't like the idea of information, ideas, ect being shared freely for anyone to use just say that. But you aren't on the side of open source.
> that maybe such a consequential tech doesn't belong in the hands of a few tech bros whose only qualification for owning it is being rich.
The solution to that is open weights, and for the technology to be in the hands of more people not less.
This point agrees with the central point that spreading out this tech as much as possible, with open weights, is the good thing here.
> A giant concentration of power
Concentration of power would be preventing open weights not supporting it.
Like WTF do you mean. Open source would be allowing anyone to use the tech easily. Obviously open source would want LLM weights to be public and easily sharable
Maybe it's already out there.
(in a Forrest gump accent) my momma said that locks on doors only keep honest people honest. I'm not Forrest Gump, but my mom actually did say that and it's true.
What ever we have can be taken from us by powerful people, even life itself. In point of fact, that's exactly how these weights were created in the first place--they scraped the intellectual property of the world, and now are trying to restrict access to what they themselves just took.
That being said, I don't think any of the AI billionaires who are talking about this have taken the locks off of the doors or gotten rid of their security systems.
Yeah this persuaded me more than I thought it would, but there are still some pretty big differences IMO. A frontier AI model is a lot harder and more costly to produce than an encryption algorithm. Especially if we believe Anthropic that the Chinese can only do it by distilling their models (though tbh I would err on the side of not believing that).
RSA algorithm you can print on a shirt - and that would give you encryption that works as well as it possibly can. There's no "RSA 6.7 Turbo Pro EncryptingPlus" that would give you something radically new that the "t-shirt RSA" can't.
LLMs are massive, complex, and a moving target. Making them is hard, and there's no "we're done" there - the frontier updates every few months. It's easy to get and run a 2B model locally, but what concerns people isn't a cheap end device 2B - it's the 10T RLVR-fried monsters that frontier labs play with nowadays.
Everything is on the shoulders of giants in one way or another
Apparently we are still fighting for secure communication through cryptography [1].
Other issue that doesn't get enough attention on HN is the criminalization of writing code. Probably because it was cryptocurrency applications. First they come for the people you disagree with. Just like they first came for porn sites, and now Wikipedia is being monitored.
[1] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/