Manipulative DVD's: Another Reason Against CSS

duesi writes, "According to c't 7/2000 at least one DVD contains manipulative messages. They have been sent a copy of "The march is over," about which a reader complained. He said that some scenes contained noisy pictures. The c't technicians found nothing technically incorrect. But when they filmed the DVD off the screen and checked picture after picture, they found hidden messages in some scenes. For example you see a guy drinking some wine and suddenly, just for a fraction of a second, the text "DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE" appears on the screen. There are other messages like "Respect your parents" or "No firearms at school". The best thing about the story: If you DeCSS the film, those funny messages disappear magically... To me, this seems to be like hidden censorship or even a test for mass manipulation. References: c't 7/2000 P. 42."

Neil Franklin offers a translation:

"Andrej Schutka noticed that a DVD of "The March Is Over" (country code 1 edition) was showing flickering in 3 scenes. Slow motion and single step revealed nothing in the pictures. But running at normal speed and recording it from screen with a camera and then single stepping the video showed that sublimal messages were being inserted for 3 times 2 frames:

"Don't Drink And Drive" in an restaeurant scene
(pictures of this one are given in the article)
"Respect your parents" in a father/son fight
"No Firearms In School" in a school room scene

Note that these messages are not in the picture frames themselves, as they do not display in single step, they are also not in the subtitle "subpicture" data, as switching off subtitles does not affect them. They are also nowhere else in the entre picture data extractable by DeCSS. It is therefore assumed by c't that they are stored in the CSS tracks which DeCSS does not dump to disk.

Note also that this means that displaying such secret data must be part of the DVD specification, built into every device, known to all NDA-subjected designers (how else would any device know to display them?). That is, we have here a real conspiracy (by DVD Forum? MPAA?) hidden behind the NDA secrecy intended to protecxt trade secrets from competitors. Clean case of abuse of law.

c't thinks that this feature may be the real reason that country codes exist, to pander to different countries political whims. Political Correctness at work, the customer is shitted.

This article is of course a victory for hackers, as DeCSS has just been lifted from the status of "DVD on Linux enabler" to "medium of proof for cheating" in the style of CPHack.

This case, if it gets known far enough, has all that is needed to sting every type of activist:

DeCSS supporters for its use as tool to find such stuff
anti-corporates for such scheming
anti-NDAs/anti-secrecy for the abuse to hide such schemes
anti-law-abuse in general
anti-advertising for the use of sublimal messages
anti-Political Correctness for the first message
youth rights for the 2nd message in this case
gun activists for the 3rd message in this case."

Comments

Shameless!

[Mr. Neutron]

Why, how could anyone even think about such a shameful tactic as using subliminal messages redhatsux. I mean, a product or sevice should stand on its own merit useslackware. I think this is a telling sign of how evil the movie industry is colorlsrulz.

--Pat Volkerding.

--

The sad thing about this joke...

[Pliny]

Is that there is a problem right now with subliminal messaging in a movie. Not being covered by anybody either...

Battlefield Earth Allegations

Open Group tried that when making X11R6.4 non-free

[divec]

Good Idea: If I ever need to do something evil [spy on users, etc.], announce it on Apr. 1st. No-one will believe me and I can get away free!

Good idea, but too late - the Open Group tried this in 1998, when announcing that X11 would be non-free in future (see here for the slashdot article).

Why I wish Journalists would be more responsible

[E1ven]

This article is one example of why journalists should be more responsible.

Personally, this sort of thing makes me very sad indeed. I checked out the site, and although it didn't look like the article (not that that means anything!)
If it is true, enough people will ignore it, thinking it some April Fools day prank...

This happened with the other stories posted today. Read the comments. No one cares what they are about. Everyone is talking about the way they are posted. sigh

Good Idea: If I ever need to do something evil [spy on users, etc.], announce it on Apr. 1st. No-one will believe me and I can get away free!

TGFBabelfish

[G27 Radio]

Well, I guess we're not done with Babelfish for the day yet. And yeah, this has got to be another April Fools day joke. One would think that if the CSS designers were talented enough to be able to encode secret messages within their encryption algorithm they'd also be able to make their encryption secure...

numb

This is not the only DVD!

[bcilfone]

I've seen this and it is absolutely true! Just the other day, I rented Stigmata on DVD, and while I was watching it, I noticed that there were a couple of scenes with some visual artifacts in them, so I tried to do a slow motion and zoom to see what was going on.

Well, the player was right at the scene where the girl is telling the priest how she doesn't believe in God. I was stepping through it, and as soon as she finished saying "God", there was one blank frame, immediately followed by a black frame with blood red lettering that read "There is only one true God". When I stepped to the next frame, my DVD player starting spinning uncontrolably and smoke began to pour from my television.

Immediately after, the power went out in my apartment and the two square miles around me. As lightning repeatedly struck my DVD player, an angel appeared in my living room to bring me a message from God. She told me that by using DeCSS, I was stealing money from the righteous MPAA and I should never use linux again because so many poor folks paid for their MCSE and that linux damages the ability of the marketplace to innovate.

I have never seen anything like it. The weirdest thing though was that when I DeCSSed it, no angels appeared!

I think the obvious solution is that no one ever attempts to break CSS again, because that's how God wants it.

Near-subliminality has a place in art

[22984]

This an April fools joke, I assume?

Anyway, anyone who saw Fight Club might have noticed that director David Fincher put in several such near-subliminal images.

Several-frame apparitions of Brad Pitt's character
(this is just noticeable enough, and makes a lot of sense near the end of the film)

When Edward Norton's character is frantically trying to tune out something to the effect of "burning" and "flesh", the exact dictionary defintions appear on screen for approx. 2 frames each.

And, at the very end, just as Brad Pitt's character did with children's films in Fight Club, a frame of pornography is shown for a fraction of a second.

I missed some of the subliminal images the first time around, and apparently some have studied crowd reaction during these moments. Almost exactly as Pitt's and Norton's characters show when they splice in subliminal images, there is a strange aura of confusion regarding that scene.

This ends up serving the director's purpose masterfully, but there is an issue. Some people may be afraid of being "influenced" aside from their own will. This is valid, so we must see if 'near-subliminality' is subliminal enough.

But, when using IMAGES, one isn't trying to send a hidden message, but to create and enhance the mood of the film. Which is something we go to movies expecting to see, right?

Final food for thought: From the people I've spoken too, the one's that missed the images tended to dislike it, and have a significantly slimmer understanding of the film.

Besides, subliminal messages don't work

[Fastolfe]

Besides, everyone knows (or I'd have thought) subliminal messages don't really work. There was a story last fall about how it was just a hoax to get funding out of the government.

ROFLMAO

[fReNeTiK]

Whahaha, I can't believe you fell for it, duesi.

Well actually, I can. At first I believed the story and spend a whole hour transcribing it into a submittable feature for slashdot. It was going to be my great day. A story by me on slashdot.

Then I recalled that this was the april's issue of c't, and that they had a truly excellent track record of april 1 pranks.

Last year, they distributed a small FTP client for windows, which they claimed used the QOS field in TCP headers to accelerate file transfers by an order of magnitude. As you all know, this field actually exists, so they printed a longish article explaining how TCP/IP works, complete with extracts from the relevant RFCs, to make the prank more believable. I think they used up 4 pages for this. As late as october, they still had people mailing them to complain that the software didn't work. Hilarious.

...Or an older one where they presented the latest Microsoft GUI project, which supposedly featured a fully 3 dimensional desktop. A friend of mine tried to convince me for a whole evening that it wasn't fake (the screenshots where very well made).

To any c't guys reading slashdot: You're the best!

On a related note (and to the other c't readers around here): Do you think the exploding CDs story is fake too?