[Infowarrior] - Content in lockdown

[Richard Forno]

Content in lockdown
An unbreakable link between media and its delivery end point is near


http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/0
3/28/14OPcurve_1.html

By Tom Yager

March 28, 2007

I¹m increasingly aghast at the erosion of the traditional freedom we¹ve
enjoyed to do whatever we please with our personal computers -- but
intrigued by the science behind it.

My latest revelation came during a recent visit to AMD for a day of
briefings, mostly about the Barcelona quad-core Opteron and the Torrenza
direct-connect coprocessor interface. During that visit, I got the briefest
of updates on ATI¹s new GPU (graphics processing unit) technology. It will
ship with software that plays movies on Blu-ray discs. The AMD rep spelled
it out in words that would have been undiplomatic coming from me: He said
that the new chips will ³block unauthorized access to the frame buffer.² In
short, that means an unauthorized party can¹t save the contents of the
display to a file on disk unless the content owner approves it.

There is a short list of parties who will be unauthorized to access your
frame buffer: You. There is a long list of parties who are authorized to
access your frame buffer, and that list includes Microsoft, Apple, AMD,
Intel, ATI, NVidia, Sony Pictures, Paramount, HBO, CBS, Macrovision, and all
other content owners and enablers that want your machine to themselves
whenever you¹re watching, listening to, reading, or shooting monsters with
their products.

Video, audio, and software will all drive a similar road, that being a
single, unmodifiable path from the original encoded, licensed source to
rendering, and on to delivery (display, headphones, portable device,
printer, or memory for execution of software). This bit of progress seems to
have little relevance to IT until you expand the meaning of the word
³content² to encompass that which you create that is consumed by human eyes
and ears.

As people working the IT side of business, academia, and government, we know
all too well that personal and customer information, trade secrets, and
other varieties of confidential data can be intercepted using tricks similar
to those that are used to swipe movies and music. IT content needs that
direct path from source media to delivery, too, so that possession of
encoded media -- say, a Blu-ray disc -- is critical to viewing, listening,
or executing.

For example, right now there is no unbreakable way to arrange that a PDF or
other sort of viewable document can¹t be copied or at least stored as a
snapshot of the display. The audio portion of a classified presentation can
be recorded as easily as hooking an analog or digital recorder into the
headphone output. HTML would be a much more viable means of rendering rich
content if it could be protected. Rich document and multimedia rendering
engines would know if they were talking to delivery devices that were
specifically matched with physically secure equipment. If a renderer
couldn¹t verify that a display or headset that it trusts was the sole source
of delivery, nothing would appear or be heard.

It¹s easy to write off entertainment content owners and distributors as a
money-grubbing cartel; for the most part, they are. But the technical work
they do to protect what they own matters, even that work which we find
distasteful given needless extremes of use such as pay-per-single-view.
They¹ve got the money to drive the science of data and content protection.
If they perfect that unbreakable link between the media and the delivery end
point, if there¹s never another DVD image splattered all over the Internet,
then IT will be able to make a promise that, to date, it couldn¹t: Nobody
can view or copy your data without authorization.