Two can play at that game. If bundling Internet Explorer was found illegal, this should be too, and the US and EU can start fining MS billions until they stop these underhanded anti-competitive tactics.

It's less about control and more about unhindered capitilism. Something a lot of people have blinders on about this is about capitilism and the world is fast moving towards a big fracture between the haves and have nots.

HDMI is a pain in different ways, and these are just examples in my house. Keeping track of version 1-2.2b has become a small chore. Perhaps it is time I burn it all down to claim insurance and start over.

As soon as you go past 1080p@60Hz, as you pointed out, you can't just grab any cable. I suffered a great deal from this moving to 4K screens. Sparkles, drops, and black screens are usually a connection problem. Some smarter device/driver combos will work around a bad connection by dropping colour information to fit into the available bandwidth, some won't.

I have one 4K display where HDMI 1 is, well, HDMI version 1. HDMI 2 (as in the second port) is HDMI version 2 and will actually display 4K@60Hz.

I have TVs that need fiddling to get the proper native resolution and framerate. Some need game or PC mode to disable overscan and show the whole image.

Currently on my desktop connected to a 4K TV, if I try to set a game to 1920x1080, the driver seems to pick something strange and I get no image at all. I'm not sure who to blame here.

I still have devices that won't do 4K@60Hz, they're limited to 30Hz. It's a device limitation, fine. A Raspberry Pi 4 will output 4K@60Hz but not by default. You have to enable it in the firmware config.

For what it's worth, the second letter of the d-sub naming convention indicates the width of the shell. A DB15 would be excessively wide for the number of pins. The correct name for the classic three row VGA port is DE-15 and it uses the same width shell as the DE-9 often used for serial ports.

Note, old Mac's used a wider, two row DA-15 at one point.

The DE-15 is occasionally called an HD-15 and the correctness of that is widely debated on internet forums.

No, it started with DDC and was used since Win95, the first PnP OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel

h.264 was licensed out of the box, but MPEG2 was not, you had to buy a license tied to your board (or processor) serial number to accelerate DVD playback on these systems.

I recently swapped from Debian to OpenSuse and before the first zypper dist-upgrade, verified non OSS was enabled.

Then I proceeded to edit videos in openshot, which couldn't recognize the most common formats. Man, I scratched half me hair off me ed after seeing VLC handle everything right beside it. No simple solutions were to be found on forums until after a eureka, I specifically searched with word "codecs".

Turned out I had to install the packman-easentials repo, then grab the forbidden codecs. Reminded me of the early 2000s, where things were pretty finicky gettin a functional setup in Linuxland.

This seems like such a contrived scenario. If the police want your info, they just request it from all the tech companies. If they want something on your laptop, they will just arrest you and have you unlock it.

They aren't action movie style disassembling your laptop and installing a key logger on the keyboard ribbon cable. They would need a custom one for every laptop and you could hardly fit something with wireless capabilities in there. When the $5 wrench works fine.

Attackers with that level of sophistication could most likely bypass any protective measures the SSD has or find some other way to exfiltrate data, like installing a transmitter on your RAM.

If that's your threat model, then an adversary getting physical access to your device even once should mean it's now unusable anyway, regardless of how secure you think it is. There's just way too many attack vectors.

> cryptographic enclaves are at best an analgesic and sedative

Cryptographic enclaves let you securely use passwords that are otherwise very easy to break.

For example, a random 4-digit pin can be broken in seconds, minutes at most, even with really strong PKDF functions.

With a cryptographic enclave that destroys your key after 10 unsuccessful attempts, attackers only have a 0.1% chance of breaking that PIN. This is an acceptable security level for many users.

In theory, better security than that is possible by using a complex passphrase. In practice, the passphrase ends up being "exampleDotOrgWinter25!", which is still very easy to brute force.

For many users, that random 4-digit PIN plus an enclave will end up being more secure than the long and complex password.

I think it makes sense in very narrow use cases such as hardware security modules for key management, giving the user a somewhat strong guarantee that there is a one-to-one correspondence between control of the key and physical ownership of the HSM. This is an example where limitations of what you can do with the hardware is the primary feature of the hardware and the reason the user acquired it in the first place. It is analogous to physical locks being hard to pick by design.

Any use of enclaves for DRM are unethical though, and solutions such as Play Integrity API is a commingling of security guarantees and totalitarian control over the user. Instead of proving to a service provider (such as your bank) that your whole phone is running a verified software and hardware stack, it suffices to communicate with a HSM with which you verify that the transaction to be authorized (1) comes from your bank, and (2) has a description which aligns with what you expect. The HSM can be built into the phone or be an external device with a small screen, but it should never ever enforce how you use the rest of the phone, it should only solve the narrow security issue of authorizing critical transactions.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for DRM-free purchases where most of the money goes to the artists. BitTorrent is a way to handle the fact when there is no such option (and put economic pressure so that options exist)

I don't think it's bringing up intellectual property is all that useful when talking about DRM.

DRM is a technological means to enforce private control independent of the (limited) legal monopoly from copyright.

It's legally enforced by the DMCA (in the US) and similar laws in other countries, which "criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself" (quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...).

If copyright were to disappear tomorrow, there would still be DRM.

I don't know, I view capitalism mostly as a way to allow people who have money to make more money without providing work or value from people who do work.

I feel that intellectual property (which in my language, French, is simply translated as "author's right"), by making intellectual work ("art of the mind") a normal merchandise, allows platforms, labels, editors, etc to make money from the artists work, so is favorable to capitalism.

Note that DRM makers are the main winners from this shit, as they capture value created by the artists, and they provide no value of their own since DRM has never prevented piracy.