Slashdot Mirror
Domain: dow.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to dow.com.
Comments · 26
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Re:Supply and demand?
Yes, heaven forbid we should ever obstruct progress..
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Re:Interesting but pointless
In the northeast US I've seen this quite frequently. Though people are pushing their builders to go back to plywood and TYVEK house wrap. However this foam has a better R-Value and moisture barrier than OSB. Some builders put it over OSB too, but that gets pricey.
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Simple fix?
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This isn't Styrofoam!!!
Styrofoam (R) is a Trademark of The Dow Chemical COmpany. What this article is talking about is normal polystyrene such as taht used in cups.
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Re:Government, absolutely
People try to make wholsome products... problem is nobody buys them.
Yeah, I hear that Katamari game was a real stinker.
And that puppy petting game, what was that called? Total bomb in the stores.
And what about that animal town game where you fished and wrote notes to your friends? Maaaan...that's not getting game of the year!
Seriously, is there a brain in there or have you been playing with the Great Stuff? -
Re:Thanks, Tom!Griffin said he believes a majority of people "want to make sure that as humankind expands into space the United States is there in the forefront."
"That is why this is important," he said. "It's about where human beings go and what they do when they get there and what that means to the future of the human race."
B.S. - I agree with the above poster when they say "There's ridiculous amounts of money to be made in space...we just need to get up there...and stay up there this time."
The government is not doing this for "the greater good", but rather to fill their own pockets...and the government wants to be the first to get there to claim all that they can. They'll find one way or another to tax everything in space once they can claim it is theirs.
I would think that we'll need space exploration beyond all the glitz and glamour for our own survival. I'm not a tree-hugger or anything, but I live in a town completely polluted by a large chemical company. You can't even swim in the surrounding rivers because of dioxin warnings. Not to mention that "coincidentally" that the soft tissue cancer rate is one of the highest in the nation and much much higher than other areas in Michigan.
So yeah, I see space exploration as a necessity (colonization or the like) and not a money-maker or politician pocket-liner. Unfortunately, it is treated more like the latter.
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Re:A few beefs
But the color blue is a trademark of the Dow Chemical Company.
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Re:Care to define that?I love this quote from here.
Prosecutor Jerry Wilson says he isn't abusing the law, which defines chemical weapons of mass destruction as "any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury" and contains toxic chemicals.
I guess Union Carbide et al are just going to have to get out of the US then. -
I assume..."...will allow astronauts to spacewalk and repair holes up to fourteen inches in diameter."
Obviously buzz and friends will now be equipped with extra strength Great Stuff.
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light emitting polymers
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Re:Not so inaccurate ..
If all the high-traffic web sites on the Internet are running IIS...
But that's not what Port80 are showing with their methodology. They're only showing what Fortune 1000 companies are running. So they are not looking at what (for example) Google run - one of the highest-traffic sites. Instead they are looking at what Dow Chemical are running. Now how often do you think web users visit www.dow.com? IMHO Port80's methodology is at least as flawed as Netcraft's, if not more so (since they're implying that their methodology is more relevant). -
I was really, really, really, geeky.In the 9th grade, some many long-n-odd years ago, I started working at a molecular biology laboratory, as a lab-tech. There, I met Parafilm, and fell in love. It was like thick, translucent Saran Wrap, but so much more bad-ass (as far as a geek like myself could perceive bad-ass-ness).
It was stretchy, self-sealing, could form sterility-preserving seals. It was acid/base/alcohol/corrosive-resistant, we used it to wrap bottletops before placing them in the autoclave, and god knows how hot it got in there. Heck, we used it to seal unfinished beers.
I actually took to carrying around a few sheets of it with me everywhere, and I undoubtedly found uses for them. I took a few sheets with me to summer camp, and on the night of the big bonfire, the bigger (and less geeky) children swooped down upon the field and managed to snag all of the long sticks for marshmallow-toasting. After 20 minutes of scavenging, all I could find were a small pile of 6-inch-ish twigs. Parafilm to the rescue! I bound these twigs together into a trifurcated, flame-resistant monstrosity that noone could argue with. Sadly enough, my popularity was not much improved by this feat.
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Home Depot technology
Foam panels are just the beginning. Imagine how quiet his machine will be after he fills every space and crevice inside with expanding foam!
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Don't forget...
NARAS is SARAN backwards.
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Boycott Dow??Dow is a Corporation. As such, they don't really respond to moral issues -- only financial issues that fall out of moral upsets. Saying "oh, Dow are nasty people" won't do much to get their attention. Cutting Dow purchases by 10%, on the other hand, would.
If you want to get Dow's attention, tell people to stop buying their produ cts, and tell them why. At the end of Dow's 2001 financial report, they have a partial list of Dow and associated company trademarks.
I peeled out that data, paired it with the company name, and then sorted the result.. If you want to boycott Dow products, these names would probably be a good start.
I'll also place a copy of this list on my website ( http://www.bcgreen.com/dow/trademarks.html) where I can update it as necessary. (147 references so far).
damn lameness filters force reformatting.Affinity
Amplify
Attane
Betadamp
Betaguard
Betaseal
Calibre
Cellosize
Covelle
D.E.H.
D.E.R.
Derakane
Dithane
Dowex
Dowflake
Dowper
Drytech
Elite
Envision
Ethocel
FirstRate
Fortress
Garlon
Glyphomax
Grandstand
Hamposyl
Insite
Insta-stik
Intacta
Intrepid
Isoplast
Lamdex
Liquidow
Lorsban
Maxicheck
Meteor
Mimic
Mycogen
Opticite
PAX System
Peladow
PhytoGen
Polyphobe
Primacor
Pulse
Questra
Responsible Care
Safe- Tainer
Saranex
Shac
SiLK
Spider
Stinger
Strongarm
Styron
Syltherm
Syntegra
Telone
The Enhancer
Tone
Tracer Naturalyte
Trenchcoat
Trycite
Tuflin
UCAR
UCON
Unigard
Unipurge
Versene
Voracor
Voralux
Voranol
Vydyne
Zetabon -
Re:Sheesh, not againGot any examples of sort-of-high-traffic sites that just plain don't work in Mozilla based browsers?
Well, I don't know if you consider the Dow Chemical Company in this category, but virtually every page is broken in Mozilla with Javascript code strewn across the screen; search forms, etc. don't work as a result.
The problem is that their HTML comments are screwed up with the wrong number of double-hyphen pairs. Mozilla parses them correctly per the SGML standard, the result being not what Dow intended; but IE parses them incorrectly, and IE's bug cancels out Dow's bug. Curiously Dow's own internal search engine does parse the comments per the standard, so you often see garbage JavaScript fragments (even in IE) - the same ones you see in Mozilla - where the summary for the search result page should go.
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No problem now
As of 12:30 pm EST the offending site http://Dow-Chemical.com now points to http://www.dow.com/homepage/index.html anyway. So apparently there is nothing to worry about. Satiric criticism is erased by domain hijacking and no-one has to be the wiser.
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It depends.
Are you planning on investing a bunch of money in this or do you just want something that will work?
There are plenty of pointers above for expensive solutions, so here's a cheap solution that works for most things you want to pack.
Get a box big enough to put the screen in. Get some garbage bags. Get some Great Stuff (available at any hardware store).
Put a garbage bag in the box, put the screen in the box, now fill the bag with great stuff. Fold the bag over so the goo doesn't come out & lay the box on it's side w/ the screen laying on the bag full of great stuff.
Put another bag on the other side. Fill it with great stuff. Wait. Ta-da. Just slide out both bags together and there you have it.
Works with just about anything, totally re-useable, and works pretty damn well. -
Re:10,000,000 active web sites can't be wrong.....
hmm, i don't know about you, but i'm much more interested in basement virgins than executive vice presidents
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Trademarks and "Slashdot" and "Windows"Naming something Slashdot was a good idea -at least in terms of trademark law!
However, naming something Windows was a bad idea (again, for trademark law)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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More people died in Bhopal than in the WTC
On December 3 1984, a large quantity of Methyl Isocyanate (IIRC) was accidentally released from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Over 4,000 people were killed; over 200,000 were injured.
We all know what happened on September 11 2001.
The apologists among you are already preparing your rebuttal, building the argument that the WTC deaths were intentional and the Bhopal deaths were an accident. Union Carbide, an American company (now owned or otherwise absorbed by Dow) manufacturing a dangerous product demanded by American manufacturers or consumers was very much aware of the dangers of Methyl Isocyanate--precisely the reason why the plant was not built in America. I'm sure profit (the modern-day "prophet") figured into it as well. So by consciously building a ticking time bomb in a poor country halfway around the world, Union Carbide made it clear that the lives near its location were worthless--just as Atta and his crew did as they boarded their planes on that fateful morning.
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And You Thought I Was Kidding
Prepare to witness the most concerted and massive engineering effort -- both social and technical -- ever undertaken by mankind: The digital equivalent of damming the ocean.
I wrote about this on Slashdot almost a year ago, in the vague hope it might become a featured article: The music and movie industies are working very hard to prevent you from using your lawfully-obtained material in any way they don't want. To that end, they have formed the Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG), which is working hand-in-hand with a ton of high-tech companies to bring pervasive copy protection measures to your PC.
I saved my original screed on the subject, and it's reproduced below, with appropriate updates. Bottom Line: Do not let them sneak this garbage past you or your friends. If you find that a product contains copy protection, don't buy it, and encourage others to do likewise.
____________________
Recent stories on Slashdot have told of the ongoing "tennis match" between digital content providers versus consumers and technically skilled people. The recent cracking of DVD's Content Scrambling System (CSS) lent ammunition to the opinion held by computing professionals and users that copy protection systems are doomed to fail. The effort has been likened to building a dam against the ocean; a foolish and useless exercise. In Slashdot discussion fora, the point has often been raised, "If you can perceive it, you can copy it. What are they going to do, encrypt the bits all the way to the speaker/electron gun?" If the Copy Protection Technical Working Group gets its way, that is precisely what's going to happen.
I received a piece of email spam today, which actually turned out to be useful (probably the only time that's ever happened anywhere). It directed me to a flat panel display industry group. Among others, one of the links pointed to the California Display Network, which had a link pointing to technical info on flat panel technology. Since I currently earn my living writing graphics card and display drivers, I clicked through to see what I could learn.
I found an entry for an overview of digital visual interfaces, provided by Silicon Image. As I reviewed the headings of the slides, one entry stopped me cold: Conten t Protection Status. Content protection? In a flat panel?? Yup: "Implementation of DVI content protection is suitable for PCs and monitors." [emphasis mine]
Thus began an evening of link clicking and Google searches to find out what this off-handed remark could mean. The slide made mention of the 'CPTWG'. This is the Copy Protection Technical Working Group, a consortium of content providers (movie companies), consumer electronics manufacturers, and players in the IT industry. This is the same group that developed CSS for DVD players.
One paragraph from the above page is particularly disturbing:
CPTWG has focused until now only on "casual piracy [sic]", characterized as what a grandmother can do in her home with her DVD. Piracy [sic] requiring even the level of expertise (and equipment) of her grandson, who might be an EE student, has been excluded from consideration. There is a growing awareness that a broader content protection effort may be necessary.
The most recent meeting of the CPTWG was yesterday, 8 December, 1999. Their meeting announcements may be found here. It costs $100 to attend. According to the site, their last meeting was on 11 April 2000. It's not clear if additional meetings have been held at regular intervals.
The attendance roster from the April meeting (RTF file) lists a very interesting, and possibly worrying, mix of organizations. A partial list of representatives included:
- MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America),
- AFMA (American Film Marketing Association),
- Sony Pictures Entertainment,
- Universal Studios,
- Warner Bros.,
- Disney,
- Paramount,
- CEMA (Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association),
- MEI (parent company to Panasonic), makers of consumer electronics,
- Pioneer, makers of consumer electronics,
- JVC, makers of consumer electronics,
- Philips, makers of consumer electronics and VLSI components (including video encoders),
- Sony, makers of consumer electronics, computers, and displays,
- Toshiba, makers of consumer electronics, computers, flat panels, disk drives, digital cameras, copiers, and laser printers,
- NEC, makers of computers, displays, printers, and telecomm equipment,
- Hewlett Packard, makers of computers, printers, and testing/measuring equipment (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, etc.),
- Quantum, makers of disk drives,
- IBM, makers of computers, disk drives, and bunches of other stuff,
- Compaq, makers of computers,
- Apple Computer, makers of computers,
- ATI Technologies, makers of PC graphics cards,
- Dolby Labs, creators and licensors of audio enhancement technologies,
- Intel, makers of microprocessors, motherboard controllers, and graphics and peripheral chips,
- Microsoft, software market monopolists,
- Dow Chemical (I have no idea why they're here),
- DVD-CCA, licensors of CSS, and currently in court trying to prevent the spread of DeCSS,
- A number of law firms.
If you download the roster and read closely, you'll see every major piece of your computer represented. There is no doubt that at least one part of your computer -- your CPU, your RAM, your disk drive, your graphics card, your monitor -- is manufactured by one of these companies.
If you look further still, you'll see there are no consumer advocacy groups listed.
What are they all working toward? Quite simply, to prevent you from using your lawfully obtained digital material in any way they don't want.
Here's one example of how they'll do it: If you've visited Fry's or CompUSA recently, you'll notice that full-size flat panel displays are starting to appear. Currently, most of these displays are based on the old VGA analog signals, which are converted into the digital signals needed by the panels. The Digital Display Working Group is working on a new connector and signalling standard called Digital Visual Interface (DVI) that will allow computer displays to go all-digital. You won't need a DAC on the video card; the digital signals will be fed straight through to the display. Image fidelity will be much higher, since there won't be any intervening DAC/ADC conversions. Version 1.0 of the standard has been published and is available for download (PDF format). The DVI spec currently does not stipulate copy protection measures. However, plans are in the works to incorporate it.
Intel is one of the primary contributors to this effort. On Intel's developer site, they have some papers on copy protection for IEEE 1394 (Firewire) digital streams. In two separate articles, 1394-based Digital Content Protection: an Intel Proposal, and Content Protection for IEEE 1394 Serial Buses (the latter being a Powerpoint presentation masquerading as a PDF file), Intel outlines its proposal for protecting digital content over Firewire. By using cryptographic authentication techniques, a device offering digital content will "handshake" with other devices on the bus to assure that digital data is only received by, "compliant devices." In a revised overview of the proposal, IDF Talk: Content Protection for the IEEE 1394 Bus, Intel offers concrete implementation details, including:
- DSS (Digital Signature Standard)
- Diffie-Hellman key exchange for device authentication,
- Blowfish cipher for content encryption, with a keylength of 32-128 bits,
- Digital watermarking techniques to declare "rights" (right to playback, right to copy, etc.) to the receiving device.
The full proposal (currently version 0.91), with lots of technical detail, is mirrored on CPTWG's site (the links to Intel's site don't work).
Intel's proposal also recommends that the copy protection system be field-upgradeable to thwart ongoing attacks, and that it should be possible to revoke (read: disable) a device determined to be "compromised." (The tone of the proposals is also interesting. It's previously been thought that, because of USB, Intel is hostile to IEEE 1394. Yet these proposals suggest that Intel's quite enthusiastic about 1394... Once copy protection is incorporated.)
Intel's proposal mentions only IEEE 1394. However, it also mentions that there's nothing preventing the technique being applied generally to any bi-directional link. So for all occurrences of '1394', substitute 'DVI', and you've got an idea of what to look forward to in your new digital monitor. And your new DVD player. And your new HDTV set. And your new USB speakers.
Intel goes even further in their paper, A Framework for DVD-Audio Content Protection. In it, the author suggests that DVD-Audio recorders permanently remember the IRSC (International Standard Recording Code) of every song the device is asked to copy, so that it may only be copied once, period. They go on to suggest that the recorder could have a modem built-in to authorize (read: purchase) the ability to make additional copies.
In short, through this industry consortium, Hollywood proposes to exert control over every link in the digital chain, from the digital camera, to the disk drive, to the CPU, to the graphics card, to your display. They will decide what rights you have. Even if a court decides Fair Use includes multiple copies for personal use (such as assembling a video montage), it won't matter. Your computer will still refuse to make the copies (and probably fink on you, as well).
This coordinated effort is ostensibly to combat unsanctioned copying (which the industry chronically refers to incorrectly as 'theft' and 'piracy'). However, no one has ever been able to provably quantify the value of unrealized sales due to such copying. All dollar estimates that have been published are just that: estimates, based on idealized extrapolations of what-if scenarios. Moreover, although the industry claims to "lose" billions every year, they continue to post record profits. Finally, despite the proliferation of CDR drives and the Internet, most unrealized sales are the result of organized mass counterfeiting rings, not casual copying. None of the proposed methods I've seen appear to thwart mass counterfeiting at all. So clearly there's some other reason for all this.
The thing that puzzles me most is why the computer and consumer electronics industries haven't told Hollywood to take a hike. Intel's copy protection proposals state, in bold letters, "No content protection = No Hollywood content." This belief is taken as axiomatic by all the players, and appears to be the driving force behind the entire effort. This belief is also false.
Audio on CDs are recorded as plaintext, and the music industry continues to earn rapacious profits. Even the with the advent of CDRs, no music industry executive in his right mind would suggest dropping CD sales and going strictly with cassettes and vinyl. If nothing else, the manufacturing costs for CDs are lower than those for cassettes and vinyl. Likewise, DVDs are tremendously cheaper to produce than videotapes. Videotape duplication is a labor-intensive process; DVDs can be stamped out automatically. The savings in cost-of-goods alone would more than balance against any unrealized sales from casual copying. Corporate shareholders, always mindful of the bottom line, will also demand that the studios move to the cheaper, higher-quality process, copy protected or not.
The fact is that the computer and electronics firms are in the driver's seat, and are free to dictate how the new digital formats will work. Hollywood will use whatever format becomes popular, whether it has copy protection or not. They may grumble about it, but they'll use it. The economics afford them little choice.
We are only now beginning to explore the social and ethical consequences of a Star Trek-like universe where everything can be infinitely duplcated at zero cost. We have no idea where things will end up. But now is not the time to start erecting electronic walls and imposing artificial scarcity. The ignoble and richly-deserved death of DIVX showed -- fairly unequivocally, I thought -- that consumers want to make free, fair use of their digital media, without interference from outside. I believe its death reinforces the future toward which we've been pushing for centuries: Increased abundance at reduced cost. We can only hope that the lesson of DIVX will be repeated until it is learned.
Schwab
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Link re. Dow's "SiLK".
From http://www.dow.com/dow_news/co rporate/20000403a.html:
The Dow Chemical Company is supplying IBM with SiLK* semiconductor dielectric resin
This is an artificial polymer with a low dielectric constant. Not the silk used for cloth.
The article also gives a moderately technical description of why a low-k dielectric is a Good Thing. -
No, not silk. SiLK.SiLK is a commercial product from Dow:
"SiLK Semiconductor Dielectric resins developed by The Dow Chemical Company are new, low-k polymers for use as an interlayer dielectric (ILD) material for high-performance integrated circuits.
I read a much better, more technical, article somewhere yesterday, but I can't find it. Sorry.
SiLK Dielectric resins offer the lowest commercially available dielectric in the industry." (From Dow's SiLK website.) -
No, not silk. SiLK.SiLK is a commercial product from Dow:
"SiLK Semiconductor Dielectric resins developed by The Dow Chemical Company are new, low-k polymers for use as an interlayer dielectric (ILD) material for high-performance integrated circuits.
I read a much better, more technical, article somewhere yesterday, but I can't find it. Sorry.
SiLK Dielectric resins offer the lowest commercially available dielectric in the industry." (From Dow's SiLK website.) -
Damming The Ocean
I submitted this to Slashdot's Your Rights Online section some weeks ago, but it was rejected. I think the article is pertinent here.
Recent stories on Slashdot have told of the ongoing "tennis match" between digital content providers versus consumers and technically skilled people. The recent cracking of DVD's Content Scrambling System (CSS) lent ammunition to the opinion held by computing professionals and users that copy protection systems are doomed to fail. The effort has been likened to building a dam against the ocean; a foolish and useless exercise. In Slashdot discussion fora, the point has often been raised, "If you can perceive it, you can copy it. What are they going to do, encrypt the bits all the way to the speaker/electron gun?" If the Copy Protection Technical Working Group gets its way, that is precisely what's going to happen.
I received a piece of email spam today, which actually turned out to be useful (probably the only time that's ever happened anywhere). It directed me to a flat panel display industry group. Among others, one of the links pointed to the California Display Network, which had a link pointing to technical info on flat panel technology. Since I currently earn my living writing graphics card and display drivers, I clicked through to see what I could learn.
I found an entry for an overview of digital visual interfaces, provided by Silicon Image. As I reviewed the headings of the slides, one entry stopped me cold: Conten t Protection Status. Content protection? In a flat panel?? Yup: "Implementation of DVI content protection is suitable for PCs and monitors." [emphasis mine]
Thus began an evening of link clicking and Google searches to find out what this off-handed remark could mean. The slide made mention of the 'CPTWG'. This is the Copy Protection Technical Working Group, a consortium of content providers (movie companies), consumer electronics manufacturers, and players in the IT industry. This is the same group that developed CSS for DVD players.
One paragraph from the above page is particularly disturbing:
CPTWG has focused until now only on "casual piracy [sic]", characterized as what a grandmother can do in her home with her DVD. Piracy [sic] requiring even the level of expertise (and equipment) of her grandson, who might be an EE student, has been excluded from consideration. There is a growing awareness that a broader content protection effort may be necessary.
The most recent meeting of the CPTWG was yesterday, 8 December, 1999. Their meeting announcements may be found here. According to the December meeting announcement, the next meetings will occur on 11 January, 2000, and 9 February, 2000. It costs $100 to attend.
The attendance roster from the November meeting (PDF file, sorry) lists a very interesting, and possibly worrying, mix of organizations. A partial list of representatives included:
- MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America),
- AFMA (American Film Marketing Association),
- Sony Pictures Entertainment,
- Universal Studios,
- Warner Bros.,
- Disney,
- Paramount,
- CEMA (Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association),
- MEI (parent company to Panasonic), makers of consumer electronics,
- Pioneer, makers of consumer electronics,
- JVC, makers of consumer electronics,
- Philips, makers of consumer electronics and VLSI components (including video encoders),
- Sony, makers of consumer electronics, computers, and displays,
- Toshiba, makers of consumer electronics, computers, flat panels, disk drives, digital cameras, copiers, and laser printers,
- NEC, makers of computers, displays, printers, and telecomm equipment,
- Hewlett Packard, makers of computers, printers, and testing/measuring equipment (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, etc.),
- Quantum, makers of disk drives,
- IBM, makers of computers, disk drives, and bunches of other stuff,
- Compaq, makers of computers,
- Apple Computer, makers of computers,
- ATI Technologies, makers of PC graphics cards,
- Dolby Labs, creators and licensors of audio enhancement technologies,
- Intel, makers of microprocessors, motherboard controllers, and graphics and peripheral chips,
- Microsoft, software market monopolists,
- Dow Chemical (I have no idea why they're here),
- A number of law firms.
If you download the roster and read closely, you'll see every major piece of your computer represented. There is no doubt that at least one part of your computer -- your CPU, your RAM, your disk drive, your graphics card, your monitor -- is manufactured by one of these companies.
If you look further still, you'll see there are no consumer advocacy groups listed.
What are they all working toward? Quite simply, to prevent you from using your lawfully obtained digital material in any way they don't want.
Here's one example of how they'll do it: If you've visited Fry's or CompUSA recently, you'll notice that full-size flat panel displays are starting to appear. Currently, most of these displays are based on the old VGA analog signals, which are converted into the digital signals needed by the panels. The Digital Display Working Group is working on a new connector and signalling standard called Digital Visual Interface (DVI) that will allow computer displays to go all-digital. You won't need a DAC on the video card; the digital signals will be fed straight through to the display. Image fidelity will be much higher, since there won't be any intervening DAC/ADC conversions. Version 1.0 of the standard has been published and is available for download (PDF format). The DVI spec currently does not stipulate copy protection measures. However, plans are in the works to incorporate it.
Intel is one of the primary contributors to this effort. On Intel's developer site, they have some papers on copy protection for IEEE 1394 (Firewire) digital streams. In two separate articles, 1394-based Digital Content Protection: an Intel Proposal, and Content Protection for IEEE 1394 Serial Buses (the latter being a Powerpoint presentation masquerading as a PDF file), Intel outlines its proposal for protecting digital content over Firewire. By using cryptographic authentication techniques, a device offering digital content will "handshake" with other devices on the bus to assure that digital data is only received by, "compliant devices." In a revised overview of the proposal, IDF Talk: Content Protection for the IEEE 1394 Bus, Intel offers concrete implementation details, including:
- DSS (Digital Signature Standard)
- Diffie-Hellman key exchange for device authentication,
- Blowfish cipher for content encryption, with a keylength of 32-128 bits,
- Digital watermarking techniques to declare "rights" (right to playback, right to copy, etc.) to the receiving device.
The full proposal (currently version 0.91), with lots of technical detail, is mirrored on CPTWG's site (the links to Intel's site don't work).
Intel's proposal also recommends that the copy protection system be field-upgradeable to thwart ongoing attacks, and that it should be possible to revoke (read: disable) a device determined to be "compromised." (The tone of the proposals is also interesting. It's previously been thought that, because of USB, Intel is hostile to IEEE 1394. Yet these proposals suggest that Intel's quite enthusiastic about 1394... Once copy protection is incorporated.)
Intel's proposal mentions only IEEE 1394. However, it also mentions that there's nothing preventing the technique being applied generally to any bi-directional link. So for all occurrences of '1394', substitute 'DVI', and you've got an idea of what to look forward to in your new digital monitor. And your new DVD player. And your new HDTV set. And your new USB speakers.
Intel goes even further in their paper, A Framework for DVD-Audio Content Protection. In it, the author suggests that DVD-Audio recorders permanently remember the IRSC (International Standard Recording Code) of every song the device is asked to copy, so that it may only be copied once, period. They go on to suggest that the recorder could have a modem built-in to authorize (read: purchase) the ability to make additional copies.
In short, through this industry consortium, Hollywood proposes to exert control over every link in the digital chain, from the digital camera, to the disk drive, to the CPU, to the graphics card, to your display. They will decide what rights you have. Even if a court decides Fair Use includes multiple copies for personal use (such as assembling a video montage), it won't matter. Your computer will still refuse to make the copies (and probably fink on you, as well).
This coordinated effort is ostensibly to combat unsanctioned copying (which the industry chronically refers to incorrectly as 'theft' and 'piracy'). However, no one has ever been able to provably quantify the value of unrealized sales due to such copying. All dollar estimates that have been published are just that: estimates, based on idealized extrapolations of what-if scenarios. Moreover, although the industry claims to "lose" billions every year, they continue to post record profits. Finally, despite the proliferation of CDR drives and the Internet, most unrealized sales are the result of organized mass counterfeiting rings, not casual copying. None of the proposed methods I've seen appear to thwart mass counterfeiting at all. So clearly there's some other reason for all this.
The thing that puzzles me most is why the computer and consumer electronics industries haven't told Hollywood to take a hike. Intel's copy protection proposals state, in bold letters, "No content protection = No Hollywood content." This belief is taken as axiomatic by all the players, and appears to be the driving force behind the entire effort. This belief is also false.
Audio on CDs are recorded as plaintext, and the music industry continues to earn rapacious profits. Even the with the advent of CDRs, no music industry executive in his right mind would suggest dropping CD sales and going strictly with cassettes and vinyl. If nothing else, the manufacturing costs for CDs are lower than those for cassettes and vinyl. Likewise, DVDs are tremendously cheaper to produce than videotapes. Videotape duplication is a labor-intensive process; DVDs can be stamped out automatically. The savings in cost-of-goods alone would more than balance against any unrealized sales from casual copying. Corporate shareholders, always mindful of the bottom line, will also demand that the studios move to the cheaper, higher-quality process, copy protected or not.
The fact is that the computer and electronics firms are in the driver's seat, and are free to dictate how the new digital formats will work. Hollywood will use whatever format becomes popular, whether it has copy protection or not. They may grumble about it, but they'll use it. The economics afford them little choice.
We are only now beginning to explore the social and ethical consequences of a Star Trek-like universe where everything can be infinitely duplcated at zero cost. We have no idea where things will end up. But now is not the time to start erecting electronic walls and imposing artificial scarcity. The ignoble and richly-deserved death of DIVX showed -- fairly unequivocally, I thought -- that consumers want to make free, fair use of their digital media, without interference from outside. I believe its death reinforces the future toward which we've been pushing for centuries: Increased abundance at reduced cost.
Nevertheless, the CPTWG and the organizations supporting it are blindly moving forward. It may turn out it's impossible to dam the ocean, but they're gearing up to give it one hell of a try. We can only hope that the lesson of DIVX will be repeated until it is learned.
Schwab