I’ve built DCPs (Digital Cinema Package, the format that protectors use) and the DRM part is always so finicky. I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often.
It’s been over 10 years since I worked in a movie theater but this is the gist:
Hard Drives with the film are derived via FedEx and the films are encrypted with symmetric AES keys which are emailed to our theater. These keys allow us to play back the film for a window of time. Sometimes we’re sent keys to unlock different times if a film gets an extended release.
Some studios (Disney being the worst) would send you keys late into the evening, requiring staff to stay late to test for the following day. Sometimes they’d send us the wrong keys and it would take a long time to get the correct keys emailed to us.
I’ve never worked on this stuff but I’ve looked it up before. Essentially, theatres get a DCP but it’s unplayable without a Key Delivery Message (KDM).
My understanding is that theatres order these and pay a fee for each one. The KDM is only valid to unlock a specific DCP, on a specific projector, on a specific date and time. It won’t work if any of these checks are off meaning you can’t check that it works until the theatre is filled with patrons who paid to see your movie, as the KDM will only decrypt the movie seconds before playtime. If there’s some glitch, a theatre manager needs to call a hotline for a new KDM.
Someone working in a movie theater could just take the file and send it to other movie theaters and then they can play the movie whenever they want without paying the distributor. They could also just upload it onto the internet so anyone can watch it. It’s essentially to keep theater operators honest.
Apple does not care and will never care about open source other than the bits it has to care about because they’re a part of Darwin, their core.
They’re a company offering a particular “experience” and open source products do not fit into that model well at all. I use apple phones because I’m partially blind and for a very long time the accessibility story on Android was a screaming nightmare (I’m told it’s got better) but I have no illusions that they’re anything other than a profit seeking MegaCorp with all that implies.
Apple always had been painfull for any third party devs. Also Vivaldi worked several years to create a browser which works in this iPhone thing, and now, after it’s release, Apple admits Chromium. https://file.coffee/u/BPIaDNFX7YJkKtXuMdWNJ.gif
I wish I was born in europe rn lol. tbh with india’s population the gov could try something similar and apple would likely comply to not lose a huge amount of potential consooomers. Android has always been the dominating mobile os here but apple is slowly gaining numbers and they wouldn’t like to see the graph go down.
The article complains that websites twist themselves out of shape to game search ranking with SEO so they can sell ads. Google doesn’t provide transparency on exactly what changes SEO because they don’t want rankings gamed.
I dunno what to say. Ads are shitty for consumers. Websites that exist solely to sell ads risk turning into content farms (e.g. bOingbOing).
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