What does "supports DRM and may not be fully accessible" mean for SATA SDDs?

> HDMI forum refuse to let open source GPU drivers implement

What? How can an entity "refuse" to let others implement something?

It seems to me that the HDMI forum does not have any say in what someone decides to implement.

In my experience, the cables and dongles were prone to loose connections. You had to fiddle with the plugs to make sure they had a proper connection.

Selecting the right resolution was also problematic. Sometimes the native resolution of the projector didn't work for some reason, leading to blurry images.

I remember one time there was a weird issue where only half the image was shown. Another time, the image showed up with wrong colors (not sure how that happened).

HDMI isn't all rosy either, poor cables also cause connection issues. I had one cable that only worked in one direction. That was very odd. But in my experience HDMI connections are way more reliable than VGA connections.

(Maybe projectors and laptops also became more reliable, can't say for sure)

VGA/DB15 is not a hot-plug connection by default.

That part started with DVI.

We're...not, though?

Sure, computer-based displays are supporting various DisplayPort standards more broadly all the time, but TV-based displays are still all-in on HDMI, and the #1 reason (well, OK, the #1 reason is "because that's how it's been", but the #2 reason) is because the big TV/movie companies demand HDCP—DRM on the cable.

I'd love to see a big dumb TV and a set-top box or game console with a DisplayPort cable connecting them, but I don't actually expect that to happen any time soon.

Rights holders are pretty good these days about notifying your ISP so they can send nastygrams threatening to terminate service. Usually there's something like a three-strikes policy.

So, safe torrenting involves either paying for a seedbox, or tunneling your client through a VPN.

I'm sure you know all this already, just putting this as a warning to passers-by.

Nah, that won't happen. AIBros will just pay them to get the medium for peanuts money.

Just like this: https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113221679747517432

Spoiler: Academic publisher Taylor & Francis recently sold many of its authors’ works to Microsoft for $10 million, without asking or paying the authors — to train Microsoft’s large language models!

Yeah, theoretically, this battle should already have happened, the moment Disney realized there was mouse IP in DallE's, Stable Diffusion's etc trainsets and people were using it to create unauthorized content.

In practice, they seemed too interested in using the technology themself to care.

I predict IP law will just become fully hypocritical, with your protection as a creator and consumer depending on your status and connections.

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.

It's a thing because people want to control other people. This is what it all boils down to, sadly.

idk, losing access to preinstalled OEM license?

> all computing to slowly become remote

If it will happen it will be probably championed because of security and law enforcement: automatic virus prevention, parental care, OS upgrades, content scans, piracy prevention, etc.

Phones are more or less already there right now.

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.

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.

This one ended just great for Intel, didn't it?

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-finalizes-intel-on-d...

That's horrifying.

IBM and HP have had something similar to this in their mainframes/servers - Capacity on Demand - for decades. Pay more licensing to activate more CPUs/Cores that are present but disabled.

When you're a small enough minority politically speaking, your ballot votes will also effectively be ignored. I voted for a third-party candidate in a heavy red state, so my vote was purely symbolic, it had zero chance of having any effect.

your bank requires drm? what.

To prevent disk cloning.

A typical attack scenario here would be something like:

1. You leave your laptop in a hotel room.

2. Criminals / police break in and clone the drive.

3. They install a (physical) keylogger between your keyboard and the rest of the computer.

4. You return, turn the computer on and enter your password, which the keylogger transmits to your attackers.

They now have both the drive contents and the password needed to decrypt them.

You can mitigate this by using a TPM and storing the key there instead of deriving it from the password, but even then, an attacker is able to clone the drive first and get the key later.

With this feature on, you can't clone the drive until you get that key.

> 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?

> 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.

IMO, any technology that can be used to take control of devices away from their owners is inherently evil and should be banned outright, even if there are other uses of it that would be legitimate.