chaecuna posted at 4:14PM Tue, 05 January 2016 - #4247289

Fact #1: On DAZ forums, DAZ officials have been buried under requests of official statements about the future evolution of the DRM scheme. In response, they officially refused to make commitments about the future.

Not a fact - numerous Daz people have said that existing content that is available through DIM will not become Connect only, and will not be encrytped when installed via Connect. I'd have to check the very long thread to be sure exactly what else has been said, but I'm pretty sure there have been a lot of "no plans" which means .. no plans for various fearsome things that have been suggested.

Fact #3: It appears that there are problems with some Studio tools for DRM-ed content and DAZ officials are pointing the finger at these tools not going thru established Studio APIs but trying to access directly the DUFs. The fix indicated is to update those tools to be "well behaved", read always go thru Studio APIs.

Since some files will be encrypted, once we have Connect-only content, anything that relies on parsing a file will fail with that content. Accessing the same information from a loaded item will not be a problem. So the suggestion is that utilities that need to read and modify settings should do the latter, not the former.

When do you refuse to make written (i.e. legally binding) statements about something? when you already know that things will change and, needless to remark, not to customers advantage. Conclusion #1: Something more aggravating than the current DRM scheme is already scheduled to be implemented.

or, to the limited extent that you are correct in your premise, that they don't want to offer hostages to fortune in case they do ned to make a change that would, or could be interpreted as, reneging on a promise - which would not be limited to doing the plumb opposite.

With scripting and export still available, the current encryption scheme is as watertight as the Toll Booth in the middle of nowhere in Blazing Saddles. Conclusion #2: Either everybody in DAZ is suffering from lead induced dementia or there is something else, not yet in place, that will build a long, strong and high wall on the sides of that Toll Booth.

Again, your premise is somewhat false - export formats all involve loss of DS-specific features so are no thread, and while scripting can scrape a lot of the data and might be used to write a pseudo exporter it would be a) a lot of work and b) slow. Daz is not claiming that encryption will be an absolute barrier, merely that it will be a limited check on infringement. Therefore your conclusion is invalid - nothing of the sort is planned (this has been covered), nor is it a necessary consequence of the actual facts.

DAZ officials are adamant that everything has to go thru Studio engine code. This means that Studio engine code has to be in control of everything.

I'm not sure adamant is true - but yes, it has been advised that anything that needs to get data should get it via scripting (or plug-in) API. However, that is because of the encryption, not because of some special feature of the API.

Let's put all together: something worse is planned, this something has to prevent the trivial export/reimport of content and will be buried within Studio engine.

What can this "thing" be? I initially thought that DAZ would move to a browser-based cloud architecture but this theory is eliminated by DAZ insistence of using Studio APIs (if you go browser, Studio will become obsolete and whether people use APIs or not is irrelevant) so we derive that Studio will remain around, central in DAZ architecture.

The only thing that matches all the observed information is an evolution of DAZ_Connect that monitors your activity and, whenever you load a scene, you load content, you export content, you run scripts, it phones home to check whether you are allowed to do what you are trying to do. Checking might happen irregularly but still sometimes it will have to take place.

It has been said, I'm pretty sure, that there is no phone-home system planned - and care was taken in the design of daz Connect to minimise the amount of phoning home required (no need to reactivate after a reinstall of the OS, for example). Your deduction would require that they be planning what they have said they are not planning, and working in the opposite direction to the one in which they have gone.

Let's examine the consequences of using DAZ Studio, Big Brother Edition:

Consequence #1: your computer has to be online. No ifs, not buts, regardless whether Studio checks every time or randomly, when it tries to go out it has to be able to do so. You are disconnected? phone line troubles? bad WiFi connectivity? sorry, game over. Oh, I was forgetting: when now DAZ cloud services tell you that the forum is offline, you do something else, in our case, you can close Studio and wait for DAZ to come back online. Enjoy your non-use of the content you bought.

This has been denied, explicitly, by - as I recall - several Daz people.

Consequence #2: you are leaking telemetries on the content of your scenes, of your activity schedule and location, to everybody, from DAZ to hackers to law enforcement. Telemetries are never a good thing (it is not a coincidence that the first thing Windows 10 users do is to go thru all of them and turning them off). In this case, you cannot turn them off. Since we all perfectly know that is the most common usage of Poser/Studio, I hope that you are confortable with this kind of monitoring on your "art making". Should you belong to the limited category of users who can boast about their work in public, forget about doing confidential work for some party (e.g. legal presentations) with this continous leakage of information.

This too has been denied explicitly. The shop tab of Smart Content was set up in such a way as to avoid sending user data back to Daz because they didn't want to pry. Again, your inference requires Daz to be have planned what they say they have not planned and to be working in the opposite direction to that in which they have worked.

The rest of your conclusions build on these conclusions and so can be dismissed out of hand.