Wow. I certainly hope someone with a lot of power over company culture at, say, Apple is watching this. And that they get inspired to think about cultural preservation.
I really think it should be a standard act of corporate responsibility and platform stewardship to make it so that work like that of Professor Abrasive's, is not the only spare key we have to current culture a few decades down the road. We as a global culture just might be really, really lost and bereft of history if that was to be the case.
I frankly think that Apple under Tim Cook is in a historically unique position of making cultural preservation of games and software feasible and something built into the whole social and legal contract of proprietary, locked down platforms. It's not like Sony is going to lead the way with the PlayStation?
I mean, to really make preservation legit, there needs to be some sort of useful official emulation and data extraction capability down the road. For all we know now, there might be terrible legislation that prohibits reverse engineering in a lot of jurisdictions.
There's of course a lot problems to solve, with all the crypto and stuff, and licensing, but someone should be on this. Especially since software distribution is becoming all ephemeral and download based! Not to mention the cloud fragmentation of personal data.
To fix it, people should stop using DRM. Or as a first step to repeal crooked corrupted laws which declared breaking DRM illegal even for legitimate purposes.
As an alternative: we could demand that, for works that are only released to the public in encrypted form, an unencrypted copy is put in independent escrow (e.g. Library of Congress) to qualify for copyright protection.
But that database of unencrypted copies would be the ultimate target for industrial espionage, copyright theft, and hacking. I don't think we can trust any one organization with that responsibility.
Yeah, well, I agree that people should stop using DRM, but it's not like it seems to be happening. And from a business point of view, it can be really hard to make that case.
Anyway, the world looks really bleak for open platforms right now.
The main example is Android. If you have like one toe dipped into a role related to infosec at the moment, you can't serioulsy recommend that people you work with or care for even touch mainstream Android phones. Because the patching situation is such a dumpster fire.
Even Google's Nexus crap that is getting patched, seems to be set on a 2 year lifecycle, with 2014 phones getting end of lifed a few months from now. Pretty weak sauce if Google's intention is to set any kind of example for vendor security support on Android.
My sister runs my first iPhone, a 2012 iPhone 5, fully patched. It's going to be supported for another year or two, probably.
I don't particularly want it to be this way, but I have to almost force people I care about to buy iPhones. It feels bad, especially in cases when they'd have better use for their money.
So with Apple, specifically, they're really good at the closed platform game and I don't see them getting out of that, especially if they're getting more into things like payment services or automotive. Their crypto stance really implies that they want institutional-level trust from their customers. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/follow-t...
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Game consoles are unlikely to quit DRM too: the only thing that'd make them stop with DRM per se is probably to make all games just streamed from the, uh, cloud. Doable... maybe soonish but that'd rule out a lot of people and use cases where the connectivity just isn't there.
That's kind of why I suggested my half-baked idea to pressure, force and shame closed platform vendors into proper legacy support as part of the "social contract". Or whatever. Not that certain "social contracts", like the ones Western countries have with banks are working out all that great at the moment.
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But as I said, this idea of mine is half baked. Someone like Apple is only part of the puzzle, since apps and games increasingly rely on server backends to work properly. It's not like Apple could save the gaming world's cultural heritage in 2030 just by offering a binary blob that runs all iPhone apps from 2010.
> And from a business point of view, it can be really hard to make that case.
Not really. DRM usage has nothing to do with (honest) business cases. They are all crooked or Lysenkoist in nature (i.e. based on completely wrong / ignorant reasoning).
Also, I think you are mixing up DRM with security. DRM is the opposite of it. DRM can employ encryption, but its purpose is not to secure your system, but to police you, and because of that it actually compromises your security.
> apps and games increasingly rely on server backends to work properly.
Many multiplayer games surely do. That's why it's good then the server is open source. This way it indeed can be preserved. Otherwise, it will be lost as soon as the servers will go bust. Another option is to provide the server component with the game, to allow running it as server instance. Lot's of older games did that, allowing running LAN / WAN multiplayer without using dedicated servers. It's less common these days. Either developers cut corners with implementing it, or server components got too heavy, not sure.
Making single-player games rely on some remote services as a hard requirement is a very poor taste. Same if they have multiplayer component. It should be optional and single-player part should function without it.
> DRM usage has nothing to do with (honest) business cases. They are all crooked or Lysenkoist in nature (i.e. based on completely wrong / ignorant reasoning).
Can you explain this? The argument and terminology are unfamiliar to me. Wikipedia says:
> Lysenkoism is also used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.
The goal of DRM is, ostensibly, to be paid for the hard work of creating something that is easy to duplicate after being created. That's a reasonable goal, but really hard to do when the software is executing on a machine in the control of the user. Requiring a remote server is a logical way to accomplish that goal, with unfortunate side effects when that server is inaccessible.
In short, it means that logic of DRM usage is completely invalid and based on false premises (when someone tries to justify it using reasons like increasing sales for example and such).
There can be other possible reasons for DRM usage, which aren't Lyseknoist, but simply crooked. I.e. for instance, covering up incompetence, competition exclusion, standards poisoning, undemocratic policy making and so on. Those are done to achieve dirty goals, and they are harder to counteract than ignorance.
> false premises (when someone tries to justify it using reasons like increasing sales for example and such).
How is it a false premise? For the sake of argument, lets say we have a "perfect" DRM method.
Then do you believe that - for e.g. all the people who're pirating Windows - would switch to a competing product because they were not going to buy it in the first place? IMHO That would be a completely erroneous position. Maybe _some_ might, but there is no evidence that everyone would. Which is the crux of the problem. If DRM didn't increase sales then I don't think you could make the argument that every single publisher who uses DRM is doing it for reasons other than sales.
Because DRM is decreasing sales, not increasing them.
> lets say we have a "perfect" DRM method.
There is no perfect DRM. But let's say there is very hard to break DRM. That means very abusive, extremely privacy invasive policing method. It would fall even more into the crooked territory.
> If DRM didn't increase sales then I don't think you could make the argument that every single publisher who uses DRM is doing it for reasons other than sales.
Why not? I could make an argument that some do it out of ignorance, and the rest (of DRM users) are crooks. That's exactly what I'm saying. I.e. those who aren't dumb are using it for crooked reasons which have nothing to do with preventing piracy (I listed such common reasons above). And the rest (who use it indeed for sales sake) are digital Lysenkoists.
Based on crippling the product for those who pay for it. I.e. there will be those who will simply skip it because of DRM altogether.
In addition, some skilled pirates will remove DRM and provide that product without crippling for everyone else, and there will be those who otherwise could buy it, if it would have been DRM-free, but because it's DRMed they will pirate it instead.
No, that's not correct. It's based on research how DRM reduces sales. An opinion on the other hand is the idea that crippling products increases sales. That's exactly what was called digital Lysenkoism.
Yes, there will be a day when nobody is using iPhones anymore. Hopefully our ancestor will still be able to run some of the apps in the future. Social media apps are off course thin clients.
One of the nice things about Apple's review / publish system is that it encourages multiple parties to keep release binaries around. Both parties will need them in case there's ever an allegation of malicious or dangerous code.
Also app-specific DRM is unnecessary AFAIK, so that will avoid common problems.
I really think it should be a standard act of corporate responsibility and platform stewardship to make it so that work like that of Professor Abrasive's, is not the only spare key we have to current culture a few decades down the road. We as a global culture just might be really, really lost and bereft of history if that was to be the case.
I frankly think that Apple under Tim Cook is in a historically unique position of making cultural preservation of games and software feasible and something built into the whole social and legal contract of proprietary, locked down platforms. It's not like Sony is going to lead the way with the PlayStation?
I mean, to really make preservation legit, there needs to be some sort of useful official emulation and data extraction capability down the road. For all we know now, there might be terrible legislation that prohibits reverse engineering in a lot of jurisdictions.
There's of course a lot problems to solve, with all the crypto and stuff, and licensing, but someone should be on this. Especially since software distribution is becoming all ephemeral and download based! Not to mention the cloud fragmentation of personal data.