What does "supports DRM and may not be fully accessible" mean for SATA SDDs?
42 comments
·January 20, 2025ulrikrasmussen
jjcob
I was so happy when HDMI caught on that the troubles with VGA ports in meeting rooms were finally a thing of the past.
But now I randomly get "HDCP not supported" messages when trying to make a presentation because... I have no idea why. It's just a giant fuck you from the recording industry.
I could download a torrent of any movie I want, so the tech is obviously not preventing piracy.
It's just making random things in life harder than they should be.
bayindirh
Well, in most cases they won't be able to get Microsoft PC certification, so it's not going to happen. Hardware vendors are the wrong tree to bark at. Most of these requirements are passed down by Microsoft and content lobbies.
If they require your PC to be tinkerable/repairable; higher end devices will come with a "toolbox loaded with high quality tools to ease and improve the experience", "for no additional charge", as a selling point.
grishka
> Microsoft PC certification
Why is that a thing to begin with? What happens if a PC doesn't have it? It's not like Windows would refuse to run on it.
bayindirh
You can't officially sell the computer as "Windows Compatible", and won't be able to sell it with Windows preinstalled with an OEM license, which is basically (i.e. heavily discounted) free to you as the OEM.
Plus, it doesn't protect you from Microsoft making Windows incompatible with your specific system "by accident" (See Dr.DOS incident), or sue you to oblivion by a very small clause in their licenses.
hun3
idk, losing access to preinstalled OEM license?
globular-toast
It's a thing because people want to control other people. This is what it all boils down to, sadly.
pmontra
Don't give them ideas. 99 dollars per month to use your/their laptop. 49 extra to unlock the performance cores. 99 more for the discrete graphic card. 39 for the AI chip.
squarefoot
I think they'll push for something even worse: all computing to slowly become remote, turning local machines into dumb terminals as in the mainframe era, like the last 60 years of IT development never happened. Cloud, SaaS and vGPU are examples of this tendency.
Dumb terminals will be much cheaper: less resources, less (virtually no) storage, therefore many people will take this road to save money (ChromeOS anyone?), although in many cases they'll be forced to pay a lot more with time.
bayindirh
Welcome to Intel On-Demand, formerly called Software Defined Silicon (SDSi): https://github.com/intel/intel-sdsi
From the README:
Intel® Xeon® family processors with support for Intel® On Demand (formerly known as Software Defined Silicon or SDSi) allow the configuration of additional CPU features through a license activation process.
baq
In the B2B world where everything is being converted into yoy roi/roe it makes perfect sense for both parties, especially if you can pay for your cpus out of opex budget instead of capex.
Absolutely abysmal for the consumer though.
mschuster91
The first generations of Raspberry Pi had the same with video codecs, IIRC MPEG and h264, to keep the price down for educational users but make it usable for people doing stuff with video.
eecc
That’s vintage Mainframe playbook
eecc
OTOH, it allows you to implement secure vaults for your personal and most important data.
It all depends on how access to these privileged interfaces is managed.
Gigachad
Why would that be implemented by the SSD rather than the OS? I can't see any realistic reasoning for this but DRM.
luma
I could also have it show me one set of data on my secured machine, but a completely different filesystem + data if stolen and run on some other system, or booted under duress, etc.
This seems like a neat feature for some weird use cases.
ulrikrasmussen
Yes, the technology is not inherently evil, but some applications of it are. We shouldn't put bans on the tech, but we should put bans on usages of it which takes away personal freedom.
Using it to implement secure vaults for your personal data is a way to actually improve personal security, and I can get behind that.
Using it to prevent software from even running on your device claims to improve personal security, but actually it is mainly about asserting control over you. Yes, it improves security as a side effect, but it does so by taking away your freedom.
nonrandomstring
> a way to actually improve personal security,
I'm not sure this is true. I've studied trust models in some depth now and I think that cryptographic enclaves are at best an analgesic and sedative. Don't fall for any myth of symmetrical technology that can be used "for evil or good".
The purpose of this technology is to assert logical ownership over computation under remote physical control of another. That would serve your interests and rights iff you purchase a cloud computing resource you want to make secure in an untrustworthy data-centre.
Sadly "security" gets used as a bare noun.
One must always ask three questions:
- security for who?
- security against who or what?
- security to what end?
_blk
While I can totally relate to the sentiment, I strongly differ in the view that the battle against DRM is being lost. It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix. Don't like it, don't buy it. Vendor didn't stick to their promise? Sell the hardware to someone who wants it and submit a review or a comment.. I don't like DRM either for many use cases but it's not often that I feel violated to use or buy a product against my will.
Joker_vD
> It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix. Don't like it, don't buy it.
It's hard to buy alternatives when they literally don't exist, nobody is willing to provide them, and those who would maybe like to provide them, are quickly shut down by the industry's self-regulation mechanisms.
ulrikrasmussen
Capitalism and free market forces are not a magic bullet that will automatically optimize for your preferred utility function. They will optimize for profit and nothing else. This is why we need regulation to guide the market forces so we don't compromise the common good.
I cannot buy a smartphone which allows me to run my operating system of choice and use my national identity as an app. It just doesn't exist. I can either buy an expensive Apple device which promises to not track me but which is also decidedly a walled garden by design and hence a capitulation; or, I can buy a phone running a commercial Android build which promises to do all it can to track me because that is literally the primary business model of the vendor. The latter option allows me to install another operating system without the built-in tracking, but at the expense of disallowing me to use the phone for what I actually wanted to use it for, and hence it is a disguised walled garden.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people are not aware of the situation and/or have no interest in running other software. Relying on capitalism to "fix" the issue literally just results in tyranny of the masses, or worse; indifference of the masses which allows tyranny of the tech giants.
friendzis
> It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix.
Free market could fix this, however unrestrained capitalism is, at it's core, anything but free.
> Don't like it, don't buy it
In practice DRM and majority of content go hand in hand, therefore the DRM compromise places majority of content on the compromise scale. Don't like DRM, don't buy access to entertainment. That's a much tougher sell than it might seem at a first glance.
Unless the dominant majority shares your sentiment regarding DRM, you are on a losing side of the battle.
bayindirh
> Don't like DRM, don't buy access to entertainment.
Basically, that's a Hobson's Choice [0].
bayindirh
When there's a one ring to bind them all (Microsoft PC platform certification), and everybody needs to cater to it, you can't do anything besides allowing your PC to play nice with Linux kernel, if you want to sell that device and make some money.
OTOH, it's greatly helpful that Lennart Pottering of systemd is working squarely for Microsoft, enabling more and more of SecureBoot and TPM functionality in systemd to protect the users and systems' integrity in the face of adversarial attacks, so the PC can be TiVo-ized once and for all, after all.
What a great era to be alive.
BTW, this is exactly Capitalism, functioning as intended: extract value from a market for the shareholders of a company or an entity.
forty
I feel capitalism here is the problem, not the solution. The solution is file sharing (via BitTorrent & co), which is very much not capitalism.
_0ffh
> The solution is file sharing (via BitTorrent & co), which is very much not capitalism.
You'd be surprised, how many laissez faire capitalists regard "intellectual property" to be an anti-capitalist artificiality.
The whole raison d'etre for private property is that two people cannot use the same good for different purposes at the same time, it is rivalrous. Property ownership is the mechanism that resolves any potential conflicts arising from this rivalrousness. The owner gets to decide what to do with the good.
The same is not true for information, because we can both e.g. watch the same movie at the same time without interfering with each other, therefore there is no conflict that needs resolving. Therefore "intellectual property" is not a thing. (The reasoning goes further, but that is the simplest version of the most important argument I think.)
bayindirh
Or, "honest trade" (as a solution), I may say. I pay, I get files. I may pay more for higher grade files.
With this model, I legitimately paid for:
- Sidologie: A C64 game soundtrack tribute album, in lossless audio.
- OK COMPUTER NOT OK: Reissue of Radiohead's OK COMPUTER album, in 24 bit studio masters (post mastering).
- Too many albums from Bandcamp, in lossless form.
- Apple iTunes, in acceptable quality AAC files.
BTW, I used to play in an orchestra, so making music/art is not like writing code. It's way more abstract and painful to create.
Gibbon1
> It's nothing that capitalism couldn't fix.
This is what capitalism looks like.
bdd
I don't think in this very case it has anything to do with digital rights management. It detects an Intel SATA SSD, SSDSCKJF360A5L a disk that supports ATA Trusted Send/Receive commands used to interface with on-disk encryption features. Specifically 5B to 5F (reference: https://wiki.osdev.org/ATA_Command_Matrix).
To make things even more confusing, kernel refers to the command between 5C and 5F with the acronym TPM, and requires `libata.allow_tpm=1` command line parameter to be passed to allow issuing them. (kernel source reference: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v6.12/drivers/ata/lib...), which has _nothing to do_ with the trusted platform module TPM, just another TLA clash.
Here's the original commit from 2008. The naming is very likely through misassociation. TCG: Trusted Computing Group is most known for creating TPM specification. Another thing they work on is the OPAL specification for self encrypting drives. Author possibly clumped them into the same thing. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ae8d4ee7ff429136c8b...
Maxious
> I don't think in this very case it has anything to do with digital rights management.
From your kernel source link
> DVR type users will probably ship with this enabled for movie content management.
Indeed where the DRM error message comes from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/ffd294d346d185b70e28b...
> CPRM may make this media unusable
CPRM?
> Content Protection for Recordable Media and Pre-Recorded Media (CPRM / CPPM) is a mechanism for restricting the copying, moving, and deletion of digital media on a host device, such as a personal computer, or other player. It is a form of digital rights management (DRM) developed by The 4C Entity, LLC (consisting of IBM, Intel, Matsushita and Toshiba).
How can we be sure which CPRM it is though? Ah the kernel maintainers actually had an argument about it at the time https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5091 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5092
bdd
> Indeed where the DRM error message comes from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/ffd294d346d185b70e28b...
That's for compact flash cards. Based on the kernel message from the StackExchange post we can tell it isn't a CF. So it's not coming from the line you linked, but 11 lines below.
OptionOfT
The S in SD stands for secure, and can be used for DRM purposes as well.
Windows Phone 7 is the only one I know of that used it: https://web.archive.org/web/20110219215401/http://support.mi...
Once the SD card was bonded to your phone it was not reuseable elsewhere.
kurtoid
Some Garmin Marine units use SD cards for map updates (Bluechart), which also seem to use the S in SD
anilakar
So... one more reason to not buy the content and pirate it instead.
kristjansson
Drives for/from Digital Cinema Packages?
supriyo-biswas
I wonder whether the "owning" argument against DRM and streaming media can be solved with physical media which you can still own.
Although, realistically we'll just end up with a drive that locks the user out of critical parts of the operating system and system data to ensure lock-in, which is related to the "restrictions" and "freedom" part of DRM.
I truly hate how the battle against DRM is slowly being lost, and I predict that in the near future it will be very difficult to use many apps (or even websites) while running on custom non-commercial builds of your operating system because "your" hardware will collude with the service provider to deny you access.
This should simply be illegal and considered a human rights violation. At least hardware vendors should not be able to claim that they sell you the hardware and that you own it, they should be upfront about it being a rental agreement, and you should be able to cancel that agreement and return the hardware with a full refund at any time.