RE: Ross's TCPA paper
On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Scott Guthery wrote: Privacy abuse is first and foremost the failure of a digital rights management system. A broken safe is not evidence that banks shouldn't use safes. It is only an argument that they shouldn't use the safe than was broken. I'm hard pressed to imagine what privacy without DRM looks like. Perhaps somebody can describe a non-DRM privacy management system. On the other hand, I easily can imagine how I'd use DRM technology to manage my privacy. You are fundamentally confusing the problem of privacy (controlling unpublished information and not being compelled to publish it) with the problem of DRM (attempting to control published information and compelling others to refrain from sharing it). Privacy does not require anyone to be compelled against their will to do anything. DRM does. As I see it, we can get either privacy or DRM, but there is no way on Earth to get both. Privacy can happen only among citizens who are free to manage their information and DRM can happen only among subjects who may be compelled to disclose or abandon information against their will. Privacy without DRM is when you don't need anyone's permission to run any software on your computer. Privacy without DRM is when you are absolutely free to do anything you want with any bits in your posession, but people can keep you from *getting* bits private to them into your posession. Privacy without DRM means being able to legally keep stuff you don't want published to yourself, even if that means using pseudonymous or anonymous transactions for non-fraudulent purposes. Privacy without DRM means being able to simply, instantly, and arbitrarily change legal identities to get out from under extant privacy infringements, and not have the new identity easily linkable to the old. Privacy without DRM means people being able to create keys for cryptosystems and use them in complete confidence that no one else has a key that will decrypt the communication -- this is fundamental to keeping private information private. Privacy without DRM means no restrictions whatsoever on usable crypto in the hands of citizens. It may be a crime to withhold any stored keys when under a subpeona, but that subpeona should issue only when there is probable cause to believe that you have committed a crime or are withholding information about one, and you should *ALWAYS* be notified of the issue within 30 days. It also means that keys which are in your head rather than stored somewhere are not subject to subpeona -- on fifth amendment grounds (in the USA) if the record doesn't exist outside your head, then you cannot be coerced to produce it. Privacy without DRM means being able to keep and do whatever you want with the records your business creates -- but not being able to force someone to use their real name or linkable identity information to do business with you if that person wants that information to remain private. Bear - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Ross's TCPA paper
I'm slightly confused about this. My understanding of contract law is that five things are required to form a valid contract: offer and acceptance, mutual intent, consideration, capacity, and lawful intent. It seems to me that a click-through agreement is likely to fail on at least one, and possibly two of these requirements. First, it is doubtful that there is mutual intent. The average user doesn't even read the agreement, so there is hardly mutual intent. However, even if I accept mutual intent, it would be easy to argue that there is no capacity. I have four children under the age of seven. None of them have the legal capacity to form a contract. Three of them have the physical capacity to click a button. A corporation would therefore have to demonstrate that I and not they clicked on the agreement for the contract to be valid. As a side note, it seems that a corporation would actually have to demonstrate that I had seen and agreed to the thing and clicked acceptance. Prior to that point, I could reverse engineer, since there is no statement that I cannot reverse engineer agreed to. So what would happen if I reverse engineered the installation so that the agreement that was display stated that I could do what I liked with the software? Ok, so there would be no mutual intent, but on the other hand, there would also be no agreement on the click-through agreement either. Paul Peter D. Junger writes: Pete Chown writes: : Anonymous wrote: : : Furthermore, inherent to the TCPA concept is that the chip can in : effect be turned off. No one proposes to forbid you from booting a : non-compliant OS or including non-compliant drivers. : : Good point. At least I hope they don't. :-) : : There is not even social opprobrium; look at how eager : everyone was to look the other way on the question of whether the DeCSS : reverse engineering violated the click-through agreement. : : Perhaps it did, but the licence agreement was unenforceable. It's : clearly reverse engineering for interoperability (between Linux and DVD : players) so the legal exemption applies. You can't escape the exemption : by contract. Now, you might say that morally he should obey the : agreement he made. My view is that there is a reason why this type of : contract is unenforceable; you might as well take advantage of the : exemption. That isn't the reason why a click-through agreement isn't enforceable---the agreement could, were it enforceable, validlly forbid reverse engineering for any reason and that clause would in most cases be upheld. But, unless you buy your software from the copyright owner, you own your copy of the software and clicking on a so called agreement with the copyright owner that you won't do certain things with your software is---or, at least should be---as unenforceable as promise to your doctor that you won't smoke another cigarette. The important point is not, however, that click-through agreements are probably unenforceable; the important point is that people---at least those people who think that they own their own computers and the software copies that they have purchased---generally believe that they should be unenforceable. (And in the actual case involving Linux and DVD players there was no agreement not to circumvent the technological control measures in DVD's; the case was based on the theory that the circumvention violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.) : The prosecution was on some nonsense charge that amounted to him : burgling his own house. A statute that was meant to penalise computer : break-ins was used against someone who owned the computer that he broke : into. : : The TCPA allows you to do something that you can't do today: run your : system in a way which convinces the other guy that you will honor your : promises, that you will guard his content as he requires in exchange for : his providing it to you. : : Right, but it has an odd effect too. No legal system gives people : complete freedom to contract. Suppose you really, really want to exempt : a shop from liability if your new toaster explodes. You can't do it; : the legal system does not give you the freedom to contract in that way. : : DRM, however, gives people complete freedom to make contracts about how : they will deal with digital content. Under EU single market rules, a : contract term to the effect that you could pass on your content to : someone in the UK but not the rest of the EU is unenforceable. No : problem for DRM though... I don't think that one should confuse contract limitations, or limitations on enforceable contract limitations, with technological limitations. There is nothing, for example, in any legal system that forbids one from violating the law of gravity. One of the many problems with the use of the Digital Millenium
Re: privacy digital rights management
I wrote: Perhaps we are using wildly divergent notions of privacy Donald Eastlake 3rd wrote: You are confusing privacy with secrecy That's not a helpful remark. My first contribution to this thread called attention to the possibility of wildly divergent notions of privacy. Also please note that according to the US Office of Technology Assessment, such terms do not posess a single clear definition, and theorists argue variously ... the same, completely distinct, or in some cases overlapping. Please let's avoid adversarial wrangling over terminology. If there is an important conceptual distinction, please explain the concepts using unambiguous multi-word descriptions so that we may have a collegial discussion. The spectrum from 2 people knowing something to 2 billion knowing something is pretty smooth and continuous. That is quite true, but quite irrelevant to the point I was making. Pick an intermediate number, say 100 people. Distributing knowledge to a group of 100 people who share a vested interest in not divulging it outside the group is starkly different from distributing it to 100 people who have nothing to lose and something to gain by divulging it. Rights Management isn't even directly connected to knowledge. Suppose I know by heart the lyrics and music to _The Producers_ --- that doesn't mean I'm free to rent a hall and put on a performance. Both DRM and privacy have to do with controlling material after you have released it to someone who might wish to pass it on further against your wishes. There is little *tehcnical* difference between your doctors records being passed on to assorted insurance companies, your boss, and/or tabloid newspapers and the latest Disney movies being passed on from a country where it has been released to people/theaters in a country where it has not been released. That's partly true (although overstated). In any case it supports my point that fixating on the *technical* issues misses some crucial aspects of the problem. The only case where all holders of information always have a common interest is where the number of holder is one. Colorful language is no substitute for a logical argument. Exaggerated remarks (... ALWAYS have ...) tend to drive the discussion away from reasonable paths. In the real world, there is a great deal of information held by N people where (N1) and (Ninfinity). - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: privacy digital rights management
On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Donald Eastlake 3rd wrote: Privacy, according to the usual definitions, involve controlling the spread of information by persons autorized to have it. Contrast with secrecy which primarily has to do with stopping the spread of information through the actions of those not authorized to have it. We have thousands of years of experience with military crypto, where the parties at both ends of the conversation are highly motivated to restrict the flow of private information. The current state of this technology is very robust. That's secrecy technology, not privacy technology. I have seen private and secret defined in exactly the opposite fashion as regards keys: a private key is private because you never ever share it with anyone, whereas a secret (symmetric) key is a secret because you've told someone else and you expect them to not share it (in the sense of can you keep a secret?). Clearly there's not a common understanding of these simple words. Seems to me that Dan's mini-rant was referring to privacy in the sense you define it above (controlling spread of info already held by others). - RL Bob - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Ross's TCPA paper
On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 10:01:00AM -0700, bear wrote: As I see it, we can get either privacy or DRM, but there is no way on Earth to get both. [...] Hear, hear! First post on this long thread that got it right. Not sure what the rest of the usually clueful posters were thinking! DRM systems are the enemy of privacy. Think about it... strong DRM requires enforcement as DRM is not strongly possible (all bit streams can be re-encoded from one digital form (CD-MP3, DVD-DIVX), encrypted content streams out to the monitor / speakers subjected to scrutiny by hardware hackers to get digital content, or A-D reconverted back to digital in high fidelity. So I agree with Bear, and re-iterate the prediction I make periodically that the ultimate conclusion of the direction DRM laws being persued by the media cartels will be to attempt to get legislation directly attacking privacy. This is because strong privacy (cryptographically protected privacy) allows people to exchange bit-strings with limited chance of being identified. As the arms race between the media cartels and DRM cohorts continues, file sharing will start to offer privacy as a form of protection for end-users (eg. freenet has some privacy related features, serveral others involve encryption already). Donald Eastlake wrote: | There is little *tehcnical* difference between your doctors records | being passed on to assorted insurance companies, your boss, and/or | tabloid newspapers and the latest Disney movies being passed on from a | country where it has been released to people/theaters in a country | where it has not been released. There is lots of technical difference. When was the last time you saw your doctor use cryptlopes, watermarks etc to remind himself of his obligations of privacy. The point is that with privacy there is an explicit or implied agreement between the parties about the handling of information. The agreement can not be technically *enforced* to any stringent degree. However privacy policy aware applications can help the company avoid unintentionally breaching it's own agreed policy. Clearly if the company is hostile they can write the information down off the screen at absolute minimum. Information fidelity is hardly a criteria with private information such as health care records, so watermarks, copy protect marks and the rest of the DRM schtick are hardly likely to help! Privacy applications can be successful to the in helping companies avoid accidental privacy policy breaches. But DRM can not succeed because they are inherently insecure. You give the data and the keys to millions of people some large proportion of whom are hostile to the controls the keys are supposedly restricting. Given the volume of people, and lack of social stigma attached to wide-spread flouting of copy protection restrictions, there are ample supply of people to break any scheme hardware or software that has been developed so far, and is likely to be developed or is constructible. I think content providors can still make lots of money where the convenience, and /or enhanced fidelity of obtaining bought copies means that people would rather do that than obtain content on the net. But I don't think DRM is significantly helping them and that they ware wasting their money on it. All current DRM systems aren't even a speed bump on the way to unauthorised Net re-distribution of content. Where the media cartels are being somewhat effective, and where we're already starting to see evidence of the prediction I mentioned above about DRM leading to a clash with privacy is in the area of criminalization of reverse engineering, with Skylarov case, Ed Felten's case etc. Already a number of interesting breaks of DRM systems are starting to be released anonymously. As things heat up we may start to see incentives for the users of file-sharing for unauthorised re-distribution to also _use_ the software anonymsouly. Really I think copyright protections as being exploited by media cartels need to be substantially modified to reduce or remove the existing protections rather than further restrictions and powers awareded to the media cartels. Adam - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
TCPA / Palladium FAQ (was: Re: Ross's TCPA paper)
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html Ross - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
DRMs vs internet privacy (Re: Ross's TCPA paper)
On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 03:57:15PM -0400, C Wegrzyn wrote: If a DRM system is based on X.509, according to Brand I thought you could get anonymity in the transaction. Wouldn't this accomplish the same thing? I don't mean that you would necessarily have to correlate your viewing habits with your TrueName for DRM systems. Though that is mostly (exclusively?) the case for current deployed (or at least implemented with a view of attempting commercial deployment) copy-mark (fingerprint) systems, there are a number of approaches which have been suggested, or could be used to have viewing privacy. Brands credentials are one example of a technology that allows trap-door privacy (privacy until you reveal more copies than you are allowed to -- eg more than once for ecash). Conceivably this could be used with a somewhat online, or in combination with a tamper-resistant observer chip in lieu of online copy-protection system to limit someone for example to a limited number of viewings. Another is the public key fingerprinting (public key copy-marking) schemes by Birgit Pfitzmann and others. This addresses the issue of proof, such that the user of the marked-object and the verifier (eg a court) of a claim of unauthorised copying can be assured that the copy-marker did not frame the user. Perhaps schemes which combine both aspects (viewer privacy and avoidance of need to trust at face value claims of the copy-marker) can be built and deployed. (With the caveat that though they can be built, they are largely irrelevant as they will no doubt also be easily removable, and anyway do not prevent the copying of the marked object under the real or feigned claim of theft from the user whose identity is marked in the object). But anyway, my predictions about the impending collision between privacy and the DRM and copy protection legislation power-grabs stems from the relationship of privacy to the later redistrubtion observation that: 1) clearly copy protection doesn't and can't a-priori prevent copying and conversion into non-DRM formats (eg into MP3, DIVX) 2) once 1) happens, the media cartels have an interest to track general file trading on the internet; 3) _but_ strong encryption and cryptographically enforced privacy mean that the media cartels will ultimately be unsuccessful in this endeavour. 4) _therefore_ they will try to outlaw privacy and impose escrow identity and internet passports etc. and try to get cryptographically assured privacy outlawed. (Similar to the previous escrow on encryption for media cartel interests instead of signals intelligence special interests; but the media cartels are also a powerful adversary). Also I note an slip in my earlier post [of Bear's post]: | First post on this long thread that got it right. Ross Anderson's comments were also right on the money (as always). Adam - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
