http://karpoke.ignaciocano.com/tags/freedom/Recent content in Freedom on Karpoke - Just Another BlogHugo -- 0.167.0esMon, 23 Feb 2015 22:03:00 +0100http://karpoke.ignaciocano.com/2015/02/23/the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/Mon, 23 Feb 2015 22:03:00 +0100http://karpoke.ignaciocano.com/2015/02/23/the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/<blockquote> <p>Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let’s call it DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked for—deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors—and challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy. These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these didn’t stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched.</p> </blockquote>