#DRM

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[prokopetz]

People getting mad about Firefox switching to using hardware acceleration for video playback because they think "hardware acceleration" is a form of DRM is basically the browser equivalent of people freaking out because some random social media platform's terms of service says they own your posts, then when you read what the ToS in question actually says it's literally just "you grant us the right to show your posts to other people".

[theftshrubbery]

To Victory! 🎏🛡️

[probablyasocialecologist]

Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet. The recent move by the megacorp and its shiny-headed billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos is another large brick in the digital wall that tech companies have been building for years to separate consumers from the things they buy—or from their perspective, obtain “licenses” to. Starting Wednesday, Kindle users will no longer be able to download purchased books to a computer, where they can more easily be freed of DRM restrictions and copied to e-reader devices via USB. You can still send ebooks to other devices over WiFi for now, but the message the company is sending is one tech companies have been telegraphing for years: You don’t “own” anything digital, even if you paid us for it. The Kindle terms of service now say this, explicitly. “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you,” meaning you don’t “buy a book,” you obtain a “digital content license.”

[...]

Amazon is far from alone in this long-running trend towards eliminating digital ownership. For many people, digital distribution and streaming services have already practically ended the concept of owning and controlling your own media files. Spotify is now almost synonymous with music for some younger generations, having strip-mined the music industry from both ends by demonetizing more than 60% of the artists on its platform and pushing algorithmic slop while­ simultaneously raising subscription fees.  Of course, surrendering this control means being at the complete mercy of Amazon and other platforms to determine what we can watch, read, and listen to—and we’ve already seen that these services frequently remove content for all sorts of reasons. Last October, one year after the Israeli military began its campaign of genocide in Gaza, Netflix removed “Palestinian Stories,” a collection of 19 films featuring Palestinian filmmakers and characters, saying it declined to renew its distribution license. Amazon also once famously deleted copies of 1984 off of people’s Kindles. Fearing piracy, many software companies have moved from the days of “Don’t Copy That Floppy” to the cloud-based software-as-a-service model, which requires an internet connection and charges users monthly subscription fees to use apps like Photoshop. No matter how you look at it, digital platforms have put us on a path to losing control of any media that we can’t physically touch. How did we get here? 

28 February 2025

[belovedrm]

[numenoria]

Thinking about how (movie) Boromir didn't even want to go to Elrond's council and only went because of Denethor's greed and disregard of his own son's mental well-being (and the chance to save Gondor ofc). Thinking about Boromir being the "golden child", emotional anchor, peacemaker of his dysfunctional family and surrogate parent to Faramir. Thinking about how Denethor lives vicariously through Boromir and idealized him so much that he intentionally blinded himself to Boromir's anxiety, fear and hesitancy because to Denethor that equals failure and weakness... Thinking about Boromir in general 😫

[stick-arms]

DOWNLOAD YOUR KINDLE PURCHASES NOW

Amazon is removing the option to download your books to your computer on 2/25/2025.

Please pass this on to anyone you know with a kindle.

In days of yore, when we paid for something we expected to own it in perpetuity. Amazon has other ideas, and will soon be able to remove access to or edit your books without your consent. The only way around this is to download a backup and remove the DRM with something like Calibre.

https://www.cloudwards.net/remove-drm-from-kindle-books/

[luigiblood]

Virtual Game Cards, a detailed explainer, and other thoughts

As of this writing, we're a few days after the March 2025 Nintendo Direct, and a few days before the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct of April 2025, and in the last Direct, Nintendo announced a new optional feature that will apply to Nintendo Switch 1 & 2 systems starting late April 2025.

This feature is the Virtual Game Cards. Many people got confused about it, and to be honest, so was I initially. The video is not really well thought out, though, after watching more than one time, you might get it, but still, it's not a very good explainer from Nintendo, so first of all, we need to set things straight for anyone who doesn't get it and reads this blog somehow.

I also want to talk about what it means for the future, and my personal impressions of it.

The Current System

For explaining what this is about, we need to dispel one notion that I saw a few times: This new system has NOTHING to do with your physical game cards, and ONLY has to do with digital games and nothing else. And no, this is not evidence of Nintendo putting physical game cards away. Stop.

Now we need to talk about the current system that we've been using for playing digital games to this day, because many people can take quite a few things for granted. This system is also in place for PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

All digital games are owned by an account, and for the sake of explaning things, I will refer to that about your account and your games from there on.

There is a concept called the primary console, and it basically means the main console linked directly to your account. It has several benefits:

Your digital games can be played without an Internet connection to boot them.

Other accounts on that console can play your digital games.

If you buy a digital game from Nintendo's webpage, your primary console would automatically start the download.

Meaning, if you have a second, third or however many consoles you own with your account in them, that it doesn't have those benefits, you would require an internet connection anytime you want to boot your digital games, and other accounts on those consoles cannot play them.

That's the old system.

Virtual Game Cards

Now that we got the old system out of the way, we need to explain the new one. Now forget the old system entirely, this new system is a completely optional replacement, with its own completely different logic with different pros and cons compared to the old one.

The goal of this system is for accounts to use more than one console at a time, without a huge dependency on an Internet connection at all times, and I really wish Nintendo pushed these benefits in their video.

With this new system of digital game access, all of them would be considered as Virtual Game Cards that can only be inserted in one console at a time. Your account can only have up to two consoles linked this time around where you can access your digital games.

Because Nintendo insists on this system to not be abused: You would need to link both consoles locally (+ online for security), only the first time though. After that you can just freely manage what digital games you want access for on each console, and you can even use a website for that, so an internet connection is required to transfer games around both.

When you have access to a digital game in this system (as in, the Virtual Game Card was inserted), an Internet connection is only required the first time you boot it up. It won't be required in subsequent plays.

And all accounts on that console can also play it freely. This means it gives basically the same advantages as a primary console, but per digital game instead.

And then, on top of that, you can lend one of your digital games to another account in your family group (this is not just a Nintendo Switch Online thing, it's a free feature of your Nintendo Account).

Pros & Cons

To sum it up, here's the pros & cons of the old system:

Pro: You can have as many consoles linked to your account as you want, and access your digital games on all of them.

Pro: (Unintended?) You can share your account to another person to let them access your games.

Con: Only one console (primary console) can let other accounts have free access to your digital games.

Con: Playing a digital game outside of your primary console requires an Internet connection no matter what.

Now, the pros & cons of the new Virtual Game Card system:

Pro: On any console where the Virtual Game Card is inserted, the digital game can be played without an Internet connection.

Pro: Likewise, the digital game can also be played by anyone else's account on that console freely.

Pro: You can lend your digital game to another account from your family group...

Con: ...for 14 days, only locally, you cannot lend to anyone in your family online.

Con: You can only link up to two consoles (only locally) with access to your Virtual Game Cards.

Con: Extra Steps? You would need to virtually eject and insert digital games everytime you wanna use a different console to play the same game, and an Internet connection is required for these actions.

Con: (Intended?) You cannot share your account to anybody else to share your games without changing linked consoles.

As a reminder, you can choose between both systems, but they're really completely different systems.

The catch?

As you can kind of tell, it would look like the Virtual Game Card system has more pros than before, but that's kind of the catch here.

For me, this new system actually solves some problems I currently have, but this would bother other people with different needs. That said, I believe Nintendo is still right in assuming one person doesn't need more than two Switch consoles. I don't personally see the use of having even more, unless...

Unless, that is, you're sharing your account with friends to share your digital games. This system is totally made against this use, and I'm sorry to tell you: Nintendo completely forbids this. And maybe, this is happening too much for Nintendo's liking. So instead of banning people, they devised a system that punishes this use, without making everyone have an entirely worse system, solving other problems that the old system had in the process.

So let's be clear here: this kind of system proves how much Nintendo doesn't really trust their userbase to not abuse the system. But do I really blame them for that?

At this point I just have two questions:

Is the Switch 2 forced to have this Virtual Game Card system?

And how long until this new system is no longer optional?

If you're having a home console, and then a console to play on the go, this can solve the problem of the overreliance on Internet when you're outside of your home. The difficulty of doing a portable console is that you have to deal with the possibility of not always having an Internet connection, and this is clearly a response to that.

What this new system implies can also be the complete removal of the concept of "secondary" consoles. I feel like there would be only one primary console for an account, and linked locally to a secondary console, which, obviously, is supposed to punish those who does account sharing.

The good?

I spent a lot of time talking about the catch, but there is still I think good things about this.

On a personal level, I have two Switch consoles: One of them is purely for myself, the other one is for my mother/father. I could have made the other console my primary console and solve this problem, but for convenience, I would rather want my personal console to be my primary console. Also in this home, it happens that I get power outages or/and Internet outages (sometimes no mobile network in the slightest), so I'd like a solution that doesn't really punish anyone when it happens.

So this new system actually have some convenience for me. I could just switch games between both of them. And on top of that, I can lend my games (and viceversa) with my brother who has his own console. For family users, I think this is nice stuff.

Many people have compared this with Steam. I had to look up the new Steam Families system which replaces the old system I knew:

Nintendo's system is clearly worse than Steam's. Steam just lets everyone in the family freely share their digital library with everyone in the family, and now, there's even less Internet dependency. There's still the idea of only lending one digital copy at a time (meaning if two people in the family owns the same game, two copies can be shared across the family to play together), and it doesn't seem to have a limitation of how many PCs can be used. Steam probably trusts their userbase way too much but it sure is the most consumer friendly of the options.

On consoles, this kind of system doesn't really exist. Sony and Microsoft definitely doesn't, and Nintendo is essentially doing a small dabble, which is still nice, let's be fair here.

Conclusion

It's really hard to say if this system is better or worse to me, overall. It depends on your needs, but I think this is a clear attempt to prevent account sharing, first and foremost, while attempting to give a concept of digital game access in a sort of tangible way, while not requiring a permanent Internet connection.

This is already the beginning of a new Nintendo that will represent the Nintendo Switch 2, and I don't believe this is the only big "change."

[clatterbane]

I am also now the owner of my first Kindle device: a gen 4 from ca. 2011, which arrived today.

Which I totally did not snag off eBay for like £15 plus shipping, entirely to obtain a legit serial number.

Because that has evidently become necessary since the last time I didn't do it. (You don't have to convert to PDF, btw. You can do epub, or basically any other format you want.)

It did actually turn on once I got some charge into it.

The screen was looking strangely scrambled up when I opened the package, and I was concerned that it might not be in working condition-- whether or not I'm planning to use the device for much. But no, it did come on fine after a charge.

The thing was pretty comprehensively packed, inside a box with bubble wrap, and an inner packing tape mummified envelope.

.. Additionally padded with what look to be crumpled-up pages of someone's class notes?

That person's handwriting is remarkably more legible than mine. I guess I could have picked up a little knowledge about British VAT accounting while I waited for the device to charge.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[jinx-blackout-84]

Okay so basically at the start of the August drama specifically, Tommy made a skit video. You might wanna watch it for context, and if you do, it's called if youtubers were honest.

Here's the part I will be talking about for the post, though

Also for more context, dream has admitted to sexually messaging underage fans, and still associates with George, who made openly sexist comments.

He had a section in there about how Dream handled the Qsmp situation and was basically just making fun of him.

After seeing this, Dream gets on Twitter and starts liking and unliking posts making fun of Tommy.

Inniters get mad, ofc.

Drm stans are ticked bc their precious baby pedo is being bashed, inniters are fighting back.

Drm stans are calling Tommy abelist for the way he portrayed dream, he was not being ableist, he portrayed every character similarly,and are saying he was joking about Dream getting doxxed, which he never did.

Inniters are pointing out that Dream has tried to take credit for Tommy's career before and that this is bot the first time Dream has behaved like a manchild.

And then the Drm stans go after motherinnit.

She fights back, we fight back, all out controversy, that brings us to where we are now.... awaiting Dream's twitlonger so we can watch Philza bash him and end his career. (This has yet to happen but the second it does I'll add it to the post)

Also, a helpful don't stop the party edit to help explain things too

Be careful though, it flashes.

@give-grian-rights

@uncertaininnit

@timetokrill

@uncalamar

@atlusreadsrandomshit

@girldiomedes

@kyromaniacc

@happyunknownunknown

@colorsystem-color

@milkforartist

[theftshrubbery]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DREAM! 💚⭐️

the minecraft end poem read by us to you :)

[autolenaphilia]

Blu-ray DRM is really devilish. I use a program called makemkv to rip them, because there is no other way to play them on my laptop, and there are no legit linux options for blu-ray playback, you have to crack the drm to play them. The easiest solution is makemkv to rip the movies into files, it works out of the box.

But if the level of drm (aacs) on a particular blu-ray is higher than what Makemkv can handle, the disk will update the firmware on your drive to revoke access to makemkv, so it can't access any blu-rays.

"One famous “feature” of AACS is a so-called host revocation. It was designed to ensure that only “approved” software can use your drive. Every Blu-ray disc contains a file that has a list of host keys known to be used by "unauthorized" software. This list has a version number. The moment you insert the disc into your drive, the drive checks if the list is newer than the one it knows about, and if it is, the drive re-flashes itself (updates firmware)."

And that happened to me. It was a blu-ray of the 1972 Hammer horror movie Fear in the Night that did it. The one program that works with my blu-ray player now couldn't access any discs, including ones it had ripped before. And there are absolutely zero linux programs that are authorized to playback blu-ray discs.

I had to flash my drive's firmware to allow something called libredrive, which allows direct access to files and bypasses the aacs drm firmware.

And that was quite the journey. I had makemkv installed as a flatpak via my distro's software manager. and I needed to use the command line. Flatpaks are a great packaging format. but they are primarily for gui apps. So i had to build makemkv from source. And then I had to figure out the commandline for the firmware flashing tool included with makemkv, which was hard because the instructions linked flat out lie. There is no "flash" command for sdftools, there is only "rawflash", you have to read the thread carefully to find that out. This page helped. I had to download new patched libredrive firmware.

And finally i figured out the command I needed ""sdftool -d [drive name] rawflash main,enc -i [new firmware file name].bin. And now I can use my blu-ray drive again. It's now libredrive.

So much work to finally be able to use the drive I paid for, and the blu-ray discs I also paid for. I'm not running some major piracy operation, I just want to be able to watch movies I legally own on my laptop. And drm stopped me, and I had to break it.

This is why DRM is so bad, and anyone who uses it deserves all the piracy they are trying to stop with it. It's scummy to take someone's money and then interfere with their ability to use the copy of the products they own and paid for. It's such atrocious treatment of the customer that anyone who does it deserves to have their stuff pirated.

[belovedrm]

DRM … UR KIDDING ?! UR JOKING ?! OH MY GOD.

[numenoria]

The Rings of Power Season 2 EP1: Thoughts/Observations/Commentary ✨

Ayyy I finally made it to Season 2!

EP 1: Elven Kings Under the Sky

- Flashback to the Dawn of the Second Age...ooh backstory!

- A blonde short-necked individual is conferencing with Adar and the Uruks.

- S-Sauron?? This must be a previous incarnation. You smol squat necked bean.

- Adar does NOT like what he's hearing.

- Adar's actor has been recast :(

- I'll miss Joseph Malwe approach to the role but Sam Hazeldine is crushing it so far.

- "Many orcs will die" The Orcs/Uruks:

- Okay that explains the beef between Sauron and Daddy Adar.

- The Uruks are over it. Sauron keeps politicking to be Dear Leader. One of Uruks pops off and tries to STAB Sauron! 👀

-Sauron quickly dismarms the Uruk and KILLS him?? I don't think this will end well for Sauron..

- Adar and the Uruks simply beat the breaks off Sauron. They stab him so many times it makes the Ides of March look like light work.

-Sauron explodes.. I think? And shifts the climate. His essance leaks out of Frodowraith and he takes his form from a rat (poor sqeakers) and eventually other parts of his environment. He's basically a blob of sorts.

- Sauron takes his S1 form from a dead guy, kills several people, including a well meaning older man and we get the scoop on how he ended up on the raft.

- Galadriel chases Elrond in what looks like a "Wait don't tell dad!" moment. Galadriel girl you gotta be quicker than that!

-Elrond informs The High King Gil-Galad of Sauron's association with Galadriel.

- Gil-Galad is over it! Galadriel and Elrond argue.

-Naur Galadriel your situation is like 10x worse than Elrond's 😩

- Gil-Galad demands the Rings. Elrond refuses.

- "Seize him" Oop 👀

-Elrond: 🤸🏽🌊

- Galadriel is shook.

- Random/Possibly intentional parallel:

- Back in Mordor the unfortunate Southlanders have been taken prisoner by Adar's Uruks

- Halbrand/Sauron goes willing. Ooh boy..

- Some person with a badass bronze (??) skull mask spies on a lost Nori and Stranger/Gandalf.

- Nori talks the Stranger into rousing a tree with bugs so they have some food.

- It's giving Timon and Pumbaa with these fried beetles.

- Nori and Stranger bond over missing their respective homes. Stranger realizes they're being followed.

- Fucking dusty ass Waldreg and Co. bullies and beats Halbrand

- Halbrand/Sauron threatens to kill Waldreg. Pls send this old man packing!!

- Sauron tames the dog beast 👀

- We're in Lindon now and Elrond is camping out under a bridge.

- Cirdan is introduced. Yet another name I've been pronouncing wrong...

- Gil-Galad sends a messenger to Celebrimbor regarding Sauron. I do not think the messengers will make it...

- Gil-Galad scolds Galadriel out of love. Galadriel figures out where Elrond is hiding.

- Cirdan is infatuated with the Rings. Elrond asks him to destroy them. Cirdan skirts around the issue. Wtf else is in those rings??

- Elrond clocks Galadriel about her bad decisions

- Cirdan is on a wee boat making off with the Rings.

-Nori and Stranger try to trap their follower and it's POPPY?? Girlie pop is very Samwise coded 🤣

- Poppy helps get them back on course. We love a halfling queen with a sense of direction!

- Cirdan wants to fuck the rings and decides he cannot destroy them. The Simarils are like crack to elves!

- Adar and Sauron have a chat. Adar says Sauron's face was beautiful he gave him wine 👀

- Halbrand/Sauron:

-Halbrand states Sauron had taken a new form??

-Adar wants a chained up Halbrand to swear loyalty to him while kneeling at his feet. Whatever in the medieval bdsm is this?? 😂

- The dog beast attacks Waldreg. RIP!

-Halbrand sets off to "Find Sauron"

- Sang that shit High King!! 😩

-Beautiful yet somber scene. I love the diversity of the Elves. Everyone of them ethereal in their own way.

- Cirdan shows up with the Rings and it's pretty much fuck Elrond at this point.

- One of the rings falls out of the bag and tumbles towards Galadriel. She is captivated by it and puts it on. Cirdan and Gil-Galad wear the other two rings.

- Light returns to Ergieon again. Elrond storms out.

- Mirandia is introduced. Naur she's so cute omgg 😍

- Halbrand/Sauron reaches Celebrimbor before Gil-Galad's Messengers. 😳

ETA: Gonna switch to desktop later to add more gifs/screencaps. Mobile only let's me add 10 😭 Images added b/c tumblr mobile sucks!

EP 1 was great! It piggybacked off the momentum in S1's finale episode. One down 7 more to go! ✨

-Davi ☽︎♡︎☾︎