I helped Krista Miller today, with her homework from languages and automata class. I loved that class when I took it, and helping her with some of those homework problems made me really happy. I love proving things about automata; they’re just so fascinating to me. I hope I get some really hard theory problems in grad school. I bet I will. That makes me excited.
Archive for the ‘Computer Science’ Category
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Monday, February 19th, 2007DRM and Cryptography (again)
Friday, January 12th, 2007I mentioned this once a while ago but I just made the same argument on slashdot.
If you take a look at DRM from the point of cryptography, you begin to see how silly it really is. Normally in cryptography, alice wishes to send a message to bob, and neither alice nor bob wishes eve to be able to read the contents of the message. This is NOT easy to do, but it’s possible if you design your system well enough.
The ‘DRM’ problem is as follows: Alice wishes to send a Message To Bob, without Eve seeing the Message. Bob however, would like to show Eve the message. In this case, Alice is a Media Producer, Bob is a Media Consumer, and Eve is a would-be pirate. You can’t even begin to argue how any system could be provably secure. All current DRM systems are based upon security by obscurity, which cryptographers have known for years doesn’t work.
The legal system must accurately reflect the portions of reality which it is intended to govern. The concept of a functional DRM system is becoming more and more an imaginary thing.