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

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?