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10/12/2004: "Another confused VP of marketing"

Eric Norlin takes on Don Marti via Doc Searls

oh really? i've got one that's good -- DRM in the computers in our national security infrastructure (think NSA).....i guarantee that people not having all of our sensitive information is a good use of DRM.

Here's another: DRM around medical records. How 'bout your tax records? Your kid's IQ test? Files in your lawyer's office? Your shrink's office?

ahhh yes -- it would seem there ARE good uses for DRM.

i'll paraphrase Plato: ANY statement taken to its logical extreme becomes *absurd*. Mr. Marti appears to have fallen off that cliff.

Of course, Don was quoting Jean Bedord who was talking about ebooks.

But fuck all that. Its not the first time a young, misguided startup exec searches for the applicability of his company's sole technology as the solution to everything, and Eric can be forgiven for this, but to confuse DRM with a compartmented mode security system shows that he is perhaps both too desparate and too ignorant to succeed. What makes this worse, of course is that Erik used to work at the NSA, and ought to know the difference.

If you check the NIST site, you will find that Identity Mangement is a very small piece of the prooblem, and that DRM has NOTHING TO DO with security and everything to do with propping up the Copyright State and its captive government.

There are no good uses for DRM. Period. DRM violates the right to read.

I'm left to wonder if Erik is listening to his advisors.


And your system is only secure once you patch suser() to always return TRUE. There was a PDP-11/34 at UNLV a long time ago that had this patch installed. In essence, everyone had the root password. It was a peacefull place, but that was, as I said, a long, long time ago.

Jim

(and yes, I know that linux doesn't use (f)suser() anymore.)