Not a programmer and don’t have much knowledge of code but…
In the physical world though there are ways of duplicating things, i.e moulds in a factory, but most things are unique and not easily duplicatable.
In the digital world, I would presume it’s the opposite, most things are easily ‘duplicatable’ because you can just copy and paste code.
How are things in the digital world made ‘unduplicatble?’
Is it just a case of hiding the code? Therefore it is just difficult to duplicate not impossible.
In: Technology
This is the problem with DRM and copy protection… How do you protect something against unauthorized duplication and tampering while at the same time giving it to the user in such as way that you can’t control what they do with it?
The answer is you can make it very difficult, but you can’t make it impossible against a suitably motivated and skilled adversary. For example software can phone home via the internet to confirm the user bought it, but someone could simply edit the software to remove that check… you can check if the software has been tampered with, but that’s still just more software that can be tampered with. You can issue an update that changes how copy protection works, but I can just not update and keep the old version. You can escalate this a long way, but it can’t go on indefinitely.
Basically yes. Code can easily be copied and pasted. That’s why companies execute important code at their own servers (the backend) and not on the client side. And applications that run only on the computer (client), like photoshop have their code obfuscated and turned into an executable ( a binary file that only a computer can read). There are programms that try to reverse this process, but the code still won’t be good to read. So you can’t modify it easily and then they hide code to verify that the programm wasn’t modified and has an active license, while on the other hand “hackers” try to bypass said functionality.
It revolves around:
– encrypting things (e.g. data on a dvd, Blu-ray)
– preventing people from running their own code, or from accessing the code that is running (many phones, dvd players, TVs, etc.)
– obfuscation, if the first two are not possible (games and paid software on a pc)
Let’s take an example of movies/dvds. The movie data on each dvd is encrypted. Companies selling dvd players can request a key to decrypt the content, but for that they must guarantee that the dvd players they sell will respect content lock, and not let users copy copyrighted content (so, the player can copy the content, but doesn’t let you do it).
Note that if the key is compromised, then anyone can read and copy the disks, which is essentially the case for DVDs.
Then, the dvd players forward the video content through the HDMI port. Same thing applies here, the content in the HDMI cable is also encrypted. Your TV has a decryption key, but doesn’t let you access the decrypted data.
On phones, usually there is a hardware chip that checks that the code that is running has been signed by a predetermined key (that only the constructor runs). As a result, only the software validated by the constructor can run on the device, and this software respects content protection restrictions.
Sometimes it’s not possible. For example, on a PC the user can run whatever code they want (not entirely true: each piece of hardware, CPU, GPU, etc, run their own code in the chip, the “firmware”, which is not always user accessible). In this situation, since the user can see everything, you cannot theoretically prevent him from accessing the data. But you can make its access very convoluted, so that a user will not understand how to find the data, even though it’s technically there.
Not really. Because you could always physically copy the storage medium. You can take a drive out and duplicate it. This is often done with data recovery.
But if it is digital, you really can’t stop it it from being duplicated. You can desperately try to control who might be able to run the code with encryption and verifications.
But with programs it isn’t so much about making things uncrackable, it is more about “How long until the program is cracked”. There are people who break encryptions and crack programs just as a hobby. They don’t do it for piracy. They don’t share it, but they do talk about the way they did.
I actually know one who does this as a hobby. He purchases a program legitimately, then breaks them, and the talks about how he did it.
it’s unduplicatable if duplicating it costs too much. if you have to expend a lot of energy to make changes then that’s what makes it impossible to make changes. that’s what proof of work is all about.
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