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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
If you want to commit a criminal offence, with penalties worse than the civil offence of downloading the book DRM-free from the darknet, that's up to you. However, I'm going with the assumption that I don't want to be a criminal at all.
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Could you explain what activities in relation to DRM are criminal, please? This isn't a snipe, I'm interested in the answer.
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(Also, you're quite wrong - example: One Time Pads. Immune to "breaking" when used correctly)
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Originally Posted by PKFFW
Oh my apologies then. I was merely going by the oft repeated claim(perhaps even by you but I couldn't be bothered going through every one of your posts to be sure one way or the other) on these boards that there is no DRM scheme that can not be broken. From what little I know about computers and computer code I believe that statement is correct and concur.
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DawnFalcon is correct in that a "one time pad" cannot be cracked "head on". A "one time pad" is an approach to encryption where both ends have a file full of random numbers (really random, e.g. from a radioactive source), which one uses to encrypt and the other to decrypt. You can only use this once (hence the name), then you need another one (otherwise, previous messages can be used to aid decryption). Because the encryption is truly random, there is no algorithm that can crack it - it's not an algorithmic approach. Most encryption in use today uses an algorithmic approach where the mathematics used is much faster one way than the other (like multiplying is much faster than dividing - only more so), and to decrypt it "head on" means taking the slow way around.
I don't see how this is relevant to DRM, however, because the way in which DRM is cracked is typically not by cracking the encryption, but by getting the user to provide the key, and decrypting in just the same way that the legitimate software being cracked does it. Even if there was a "one time pad" mechanism (which seems unlikely ever to be practical for a mass market), you could circumvent the DRM by applying the data in the same way that the legitimate software does.
In short, the reason that DRM can typically be bypassed is that it must be bypassed in order to give any access to the content at all. Whatever lock they put on the data, they must also provide the key - and this is their undoing.