The Fallacy of DRM

A
comment on Slashdot gave me a new perspective on why it is that Digital
Rights Managment (DRM) doesn't work, and can't work:

DRM relies on encryption.

Encryption is designed to secure communication between Alice and Bob while
denying it to the evil Eve.

In DRM, Bob and Eve are one and the same person.

In other words, DRM seeks to give a person access to an item while denying
him/her access to that item. This is not a recipe for success.

Another DRM Comment

And this is the problem with most DRM schemes. They do nothing to solve
the real problems of pirated media, and instead put all kinds of shackles on
the people who actually pay good money for their music, movies, and
software; in the process making pirated media superior to bought media.

More Anti-Virus Failure

An Article
on Techdirt about McAfee anti-virus blocking popular websites like ESPN and
Friendster as malicious. I could go on and on about how and why Anti-Virus
software doesn't work, and maybe I will some day, but I don't have time
right now to extrapolate.

Author Gives Book Away

This is a very cool
idea, and I hope to see more of it. They guy's point is this: obscurity is
worse than piracy. the more people who read his book, the more reasonable
it is that he'll build enough of a fan base to live off future
writings. And I'm all for that. I personally find it very hard to find
authors I like, and I'm unlikely to pony up money on an unknown commodity.
I plan on downloading and reading this guy's book and, if I like him, I will
find a way to give him money (ordering the book is a good start; I do
love harbound copies). Because the simple fact is that if I like his
writing i'll want him to do more of that, and being able to sustain himself
on writing alone is a good way to ensure more writing happens.

Really, take the blue pill on this one.

So, Some
Guy is claiming that physicists should seriously investigate the
possibility that, a la The Matrix or The 13th Floor, our universe is just a
virtual reality simulation. And he makes the claim that we can test this
and determine whether or not we're just bits in some computer! He says that
all we need to do it see if reality can do anything that information
processing can't; if reality can, then we're not just strings of 1s and 0s.

Now, i haven't read what the guys says, but already I see more than a few
holes. I mean, first off, you want us to find something, one thing,
that reality does that information theory can't do? First, that requires
that we test everything the universe. Which, among other things, means we
need to understand (at least within reasonable limits) everything in the
universe. THEN, we need to compare that to everything in information
theory, which requires we have to understand everything in information
theory (easier than "everything in the universe," but that's like saying the
Milky Way is smaller than The Universe). And never mind that
not-finding such a conflict isn't proof-positive that the world IS a
simulation. Even if EVERYTHING the universe does can be simulated,
that doesn't mean it is. So what we're left with is an
astronomically-academic potentiality to prove that the world is not (and can
not be) simulated.

At best WAY too much work for no real payout.