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SightSound To Distribute Films Via Gnutella
asonthebadone writes: "The online video firm SightSound.com plans to distribute feature movie content with Gnutella. The film content will be 'protected' by Microsoft's Digital Rights Management System. The article from CNET goes on to quote various security 'experts' as stating that Gnutella is "fundamentally insecure" and that its usage would sow the "seed of one's destruction". If you're looney enough to run a file of unknown origin with a .vbs extension, that would be referred to as Darwinism." (More)
Carnage4Life writes with more details: "Sightsound has put up for grabs on the Gnutella network a dozen encrypted movie files from Miramax Films, for which SightSound has secured online distribution rights. Once people obtain the file, they are required to rent or purchase a license to view the movie. [...] If this works this could spell the beginning of the embrace of online digital distribution of movies, music and other forms of IP by the entertainment industry. Maybe then all the Napster madness will be over."
So long as it's a greater inconvenience (or a large enough moral dilemma) to crack such files for a critical mass of people, it seems like everybody could win here.
Here is the description of Microsoft's DRM System: http://www.microsoft.co m/windows/windowsmedia/en/wm7/drm/drm.asp
There are very few details (no information about the encryption algorithm, for example) but my assessment of it is that it's absolutely useless in a Gnutella-like environment.
Basically, the file is encrypted with a symmetric (single key) encryption and you are then required to buy that key to decrypt the file. It is not clear whether Microsoft's media servers encrypt the file with a different key for each person requesting that stream (which would be the only way to do it to have at least SOME protection against piracy), but it is clear that even if it does that, it would be impossible to duplicate this behavior on Gnutella. You would be able to share only one file for each movie, so only one unique key can decrypt it. Thus, keys for such movies offered on Gnutella would start popping up on IRC channels, FTP and Web sites in no time, IMHO.
In fact, it would probably only facilitate piracy, since its a lot better to download a large movie from a fast connection from this company then from some warez FTP site that might go down at any time. Then you would need to go on that FTP site only to download the key.
People (or more importantly these companies) need to understand that encryption is NOT a solution for copy-protection (in fact, the only solution is not to give it away to anyone, if you don't want people to copy it) because it can only protect your information from unwanted eyes ONLY if both parties agree not to share it with anyone. If that is not the case, it is irrelevant whether you encrypt it or not - people are still gonna copy it.
Proof for that assertion, please? Have you been keeping logs and running statistics against them, or are your extrapolating your personal experience, hmmm :>?
I agree that people with technical expertise will find a way around whatever. However, that isn't what the intellectual "property" goons are worried about--they fear the day when non-technical users can avoid paying.
This, and the hassles of filling out credit card info for a few dollars, will probably be the big roadblocks in distributing low cost or payment optional content on-line. I'd love it if artists could distribute their work on-line for "micro-payments" but actually doing it will likely be complex technologically, economicly, and of course socially (as this thread demonstrates).
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Highlander 4: Endgame comes out this August, and you say this year is crap? HAH!
And no, just because Highlander 2 and 3 were written by crackheads doesn't mean this one will suck; it's based on the series (which was kicking ass toward the end), and includes both Connor, Duncan, and, get this, Methos. Methos is worth the ticket price alone my friend. If you aren't aware of the later episodes of the series, Methos is the oldest living immortal (~5000 years old), pretty damned cool, and played by an excellent actor.
copy and paste this link to see a spoiler
For a one time pad to be secure, each key bit must be used once and only once, for whatever purpose. You could transmit a new key pad with an existing key pad, but you would use up one key bit for every one that you would receive, so you'd be better off not bothering.
Why is this so? Because a true OTP, properly implemented, is unbreakable. If you want to use a key pad twice, once for data, once for new keys, go ahead, but it's not an OTP any more and it's not unbreakable. i.e. you send an encrypted message and then reuse the same key bits to get more keys. I have some good guesses about the text of your message, so that means I can have some good guesses about the key bits which were re-used. Thus I can determine the new key bits which are being transmitted. Is is this likely? No. But it is, implemented like this, no longer unbreakable. That's why otp's are special, because, implemented properly, they are unbreakable.
Cheers.
oh my god! that CAN'T be real!
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Almost -- I would enjoy wathcing a Kevin Smith movie WAY more than cracking it! Kevin Smith is the man and if i wasn't lazy i'd make you a link.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
So what you are saying (and apparently the moderaters agree with you) is that all the people that have been spewing about "If they make something easy to get and affordable on the net, we'll buy it instead of steal it" is a huge load of crap? Here is something that is distributed in the "great new way" everyone wants, yet no one is willing to pay for it, because it will be cracked and available for free. Once again, it is proven that high prices don't cause piracy, piracy is justified by bitching about high prices.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
While I agree that Gnutella hogs bandwidth, I disagree as to the extent that it sucks it up. I routinely download files 2,3,4 or more at a time at rates consistantly at or above 35Kbs - all of them (ADSL). Admitedley I could achieve nowhere near this performance with dial up service. My biggest peeve about Gnutella is that there is no way to stop the search once you have found what you are looking for - more unecessary bandwidth hogging :)
Holy crap! All this while I've been posting insightful, informative, funny posts to raise my karma. Now I discover you can just ask for karma!
Karma, please.
Oh yeah, not the negative kind, thank you.
-- Admiral Burrito, Karma-whore wannabe.
How do you distribute your movies for free and get people to send you money for them? Easy, distribute them on Gnutella and let the little people pay for the bandwidth.
What could be better?
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
Now hold on a minute. The original post was not entirely elegant, but it's not fair to say that it's necessarily wrong either. This issue is more complex than just pirates vs. decent folk. It is a conflict between the interests of copyright holders vs. the interests of the public. geekd is expressing a desire to get back at the media companies which have become so successful by charging the maximum the market will bear ($18/cd and $8/head/movie, last I checked). His solution is simply employing the same tactics. In other words, "lets get as much as we can". A solution to the current earthshaking effects of technology on intellectual property will have to find a compromise between both points of view. In the meantime, don't fault those who choose to employ the same tactics as the recording and film industries.
"Anyone who is on Outlook is potentially vulnerable and needs to be very careful and cautious," said Scott Blake, security program manager for Bindview. "It's very easy for someone to utilize the Outlook network to propagate a Trojan horse, a file that appears to be something useful but in fact is the SEED OF ONE'S DESTRUCTION!!!."
Blake added that Microsoft could possibly be at fault for encouraging people to use Outlook.
"It's somewhat irresponsible for (Microsoft) to be pushing a software that's fundamentally insecure as this," he said.
I love the smell of FUD in the morning. ;-)
Hmm, this is a perfectly insightful, relevant comment. I hardly think it deserves to be at -1. Why, Rob, is this comment at -1? Hmm?
Hey, by the way -- what's up with marking that last post "Troll"? Lame.
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
Encryption and licensing issues aside, what's the point of making the content available on Gnutella, when a web site would be much more practical. Gnutella already uses HTTP to transfer the file, and Gnutella is not as capable as Apache. And Yahoo doesn't index Gnutella, either!
That's funny, you hosting porn locally? :)
:)
I thought Disco Stu didn't advertise
Finkployd
Gnutella uses ordinary HTTP to transfer files, and supports restarts, at least by adhoc specs and most implementations.
Well, one reason to use Gnutalla would be if it were Open Source, but the last time I checked, the Gnutella development team had not released their source code, saying that they would wait until "a stable 1.0 release was ready". There are plenty of clones around that use the Gnutella protocol, but I am still curious why they have not been called on giving their product the GNU label when they don't actually provide their source code.
Here is a simple proof that one time pads are unbreakable.
Assume M0..i are the message bits.
Assume P0..i is a one time pad (= completely random bits shared by Alice and Bob, but not known by Eve).
Let Ei = Ei XOR Pi.
Alice sends E0..i to Bob, who recomputes M0..i as Ei XOR Pi.
Eve can intercept E, but cannot decrypt it. Why? Decrypting E means having M, but with M she would have P (bitwise XOR again). But we've said that P is a sequence of random bits, which Eve doesn't have! She has no way of verifying that she has used the correct key to decode the message.
This is a bizarre argument, but it makes sense when you consider that M, E and P are equivalent information-wise in this scheme. Revealing any two of them gets you the third, but one alone can't get you any information about the other two. Essentially you are exchanging a secret earlier in time (E) for the chance to later exchange a secret of the same size. It's hardly a "code", but it is unbreakable.
As has been pointed out several times, this is totally worthless for encrypting media like we're talking about. But if you guys get to toot your geek horns, so do I. =)
The file transfers in Gnutella use HTTP, so downloading from Gnutella is no less unstable/slow then downloading from the web.
:P
If someone tried to host a popular website on their AOL-14.4 baud modem, they would encounter the same problem.
on the other hand, these sightsound people probably already have a good webserver that they can run a Gnutella client. As long as you're downloading from them, and not some moron who decided to mirror the encrypted data
Of course, given that copy-protection isn't even theoretically possible, I can just see search results for a sightsound movie showing up right next to cracked versions of the same thing
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Sightsound is not the only company to be banking on Microsoft DRM to be "secure enough". There's plenty of other people going that route.
For information on MS DRM, see the Microsoft Digital Rights Manager Overview which talks (in very general terms) about how MS DRM works.
Interesting excerpts from the FAQ include:
And...
There will probably be a CERT advisory talking about how to circumvent both within a few months. :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you'll have to wait until the War on Violence subsides.
--
+&x
Informative: I have set up a mirror of this site as it appears to be /.ed already :(
Don't click on the link given in that statement if you're at work. I did, and it led to porn!
The reason why I ask is, I think if you take the entire population (of the world) and work out two variables, x number of people willing to spend y amount of dollars, you'll see that as y goes down, x goes up. The amount of money made by film producers (or distributors, or whatever) would be roughly x times y. Over time, however, x becomes more important. x is actually more along the lines of number of viewings rather than number of people willing to pay. But my point is, if you make y low enough such that an acceptable percentage of people are willing to pay, then they wouldn't have to worry about piracy.
Let me borrow, as an example, currency. The reason why printed currency works and why the government goes through all the anti-counterfeit stuff is because would-be counterfeiters would have to spend a lot more money than the value of the currency that they are trying to counterfeit. The government has the economy of scales on their side. They spend less than 10 cents printing each bill, but it would be much more expensive (though not impossible) for counterfeiters to produce counterfeits that can fool people. That's why counterfeit money is usually higher is denomination, because the lower denomination just wouldn't pay off. That's perhaps why the U.S. has, as it's highest denomination, the one hundred dollar bill.
Back to the encrypted movies. If they priced it so that it would not be worth anyone's time to pirate the movies, even though inevitably, a small percentage of the population will anyway, they can reduce the effects of piracy and actually make enough money (it's never enough, I suppose, and they want to get the money while they can), and the consumers will not complain about how expensive it is to watch a movie. Imagine if pay-per-view was only 10 cents? Take an average long-ish 2 hour movie, if you watched movies non-stop for a month, you'll average about $30, less than most utility bills and DSL fees. Would you do it?
Doesn't make any sense to embed next key in current msg because then next key will have to be = length of current msg, and eventually you will no longer be able to have a msg of any appreciable length. You might as well just use all the random bits in your key w/o having to transmit any new key info inside of the message.
At least as far as the recording industries are concerned, they could distribute demo/trailers of their movies @ 160x152 resolution (so you could get a taste of their stuff @ postage-stamp size, then get the "real thing" through their normal ordering process). I bet the porn sites would just LUUUUUVV this :)
A mindless ban on something typically doesn't work as well as decent education on the topic. Not that education seems to be valued very much any more anyway. I believe that if sex, even erotica, was discussed openly and sensibly from a young age then demand for pornography and prostitution would decrease dramatically. You always need to target demand, not supply.
The problem for artists is that their work is hideously undervalued. To survive they typically invest their money (and any "power" they do have) in power hungry little dictators that have no more interest in the actual art than the rest of the population. The result is the MPAA and RIAA - a marketing and legal machine with a choke-hold on popular art. It's no longer about the art, just the money.
I say, support local artists, buy stuff from independant labels, look up the word "patron". Sure, take in a mainstream movie every so often, but try to lose the false sense of need that's been implanted by immoral marketing practices. (I tell you, many of the complaints about DVD make people sound like they're hooked on drugs rather than home movies.)
Some encryption is 'belived' perfict, they are not, however, mathimaticaly proven. But no one with any clue knows how to crack them (unless you give 'em a quantum computer)
Even then, that encryption can still be cracked given enough time (say, a few million years)
Copy protection, on the other hand, is always crackable, beacuse you need to have a decrypted form somewhere on the client machine. That means you have to have the encrypted keys rigth there with the media. see DeCSS.
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
If you're looney enough to run a file of unknown origin with a .vbs extension, that would be referred to as Darwinism."
So, anyone out there wanna create the "killer virus" of the Evil Empire? Darwinism got a little forgotten recently - maybe we need a refresher course?
--
TheDude
Smokedot
Drug Info, Rights, Laws, and Discussion
TheDude
Smokedot
Drug Info, Rights, Laws, and Discussion
I can't beleive I didn't mention American Beauty...
I had originally thought it was going to suck and had to be dragged out to see it. Afterwards, I liked it so much that I went to see it again.
As for The Matrix, I could have sworn that it was a 1998 movie... brain fart on my part I guess. Prolly what threw me was how fast it got out on DVD.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Just a couple thoughts outside the scope of the current conversation...
Most entertainment media to be displayed in at a size and resolution that your average user would find enjoyable is over a gig for a full length movie.
Your average home user does not have a high bandwidth connection, and of those that do, they're on pac bell dsl and @home cable. Both of which at least in the SF Bay Area are highly overloaded as it is. Anybody see a problem here?
"Arrogance and Stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you." - Londo Mollari, Babylon 5.
Does anyone say "the bomb" anymore???
But yeah, I'd see a Kevin Smith movie any day. But seeing as Dogma was just out last year, and he typically has a 2-3 year interval between movies, and he just put a lot of effort into the Clerks cartoon, only to be fucked (again) by disney...
I don't think we'll be seeing a new View Askew production this year.
But, eh, I *DID* break the DVD boycott to get Dogma and Chasing Amy on DVD to complete my collection. Only two DVDs I've bought since the deCSS fiasco.... honest.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
It's for digital flatscreens, which most people believe are the future for displays.
They're not to concerned with you recording a lossy version, rather an exact digital copy.
The "They" is the usual bunch, but I seem to remember IBM working on this particular "innovation".
Um, can I pick a religion where I'm guaranteed eternal life with lots of redheads? And short brunettes? And... and....
I mean, as long as we're just shopping, you know, what the hell. So to speak.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
My problem with Gnutella is that you're never sure you're getting an original copy. This is fine for things like mp3 files, where there is no "original" copy.
While Gnutella presents you with a list of sources, you can't be sure which one is the original source, which for my investment in time, would be the only source I would trust. I would be quite upset to spend a considerable amount of time downloading a movie to find that the "copy" I downloaded was corrupt.
There are people working on Gnutella trying to add the ability to verify the content of a file before downloading it. This is primarily to allow you to resume a download from a different source, but that would also be useful in this context.
If "Show friendly HTTP error messages" is turned off, then it only shows that "The page cannot be displayed" if it can't get a connection to the server for some reason (like being slashdotted or whatever). If it does get some error message it spits it out as usual.
Me, Myself, and Irene might be good, if it's more like Truman than Jim's older movies.
Any movie that confuses the difference between schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorder reeks of crap.
Last year Jakob the Liar was released, and it was excellent.
Trust me, the original (Jakob der Lüger, East German, 1975) version kicks Robin William's hiney any day. But someone who likes a remake rarely appreciates the original as much.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
You're forgetting that, sooner or later, the movie is going to have to be viewed by a pair of eyes and a pair of ears (with some appropriate substitutions and/or absences for people without eyes and/or ears). If it has to be displayed on my screen, then you can bet that it'll be a piece of cake to redirect to a file.
It would be nice to see a GPL program being put to serious use. It will be nice to see how this pulls through. As for the protection... well, I saw the word "Microsoft" so I know that it isn't a problem... =P
Think about it. The firm distributing this movie is in the quiet period before their IPO. This is a great way to get press, and even if the file is cracked and distributed, they can always blame Microsoft. But that's not what they're worried about. Think about it this way: modern law enforcement is not so much aimed at preventing crimes as it is punishing the offenders after the fact. So, if the movie is "cracked" by actually purchasing the right to view it, then intercepting the video stream and saving that... Well, let's suppose that the keys and algorithms used in decrypting the movie are (1) all different and (2) all provide a slightly plaintext (the movie). You don't notice these differences unless you do a bit-by-bit comparison of two different decrypted copies of the movie. You don't notice them when you're watching, because, hey, there's a lot of information in a movie. Granted, the more you compress a movie, the less room you have for just throwing random bits in and having them be less noticeable, but bear with me... So now you can trace exactly which copy was pirated. (This is nothing new -- distributing a bunch of slightly different copies of something, so that when one gets leaked you can tell who leaked it). So now maybe the person who originally leaked the movie can be prosecuted. Or maybe it was somebody using a stolen credit card in a far-off nation, and they don't get punished. Regardless, the threat is still there, and people get a little bit more scared.
Who cares if people are scared?
Think about how long MP3s were around. A lot longer than Napster. So why are they only getting so much attention now? Cause they've become mainstream! No more navigating IRC or pop-up porn banner sites to get ftp passwords... Anyone can download Napster and start grabbing mp3s in minutes. Anyone. Which means there are now a LOT more pirates than there were, simply because it's now so easy...
Piracy will always exist. It's hard to secure data that passes, cleartext, through unprotected regions (video signal to a monitor). The point is to make it hard or dangerous enough that most people won't consider piracy an option. Then it will just be back to the "underground" doing it, and there will be far less public outcry when they get cracked down on...
Who would watch this movie if it was a normal theater release? Ok, how about if it was distributed online? Ok, now how about if it was distributed online, but securely, then got cracked and famous for being an early example of the "failure" of secure, digital distribution of audio/video... How many more people would want a copy, just because?
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
I, for one, would not pay. In fact, I would immensly enjoy trying to crack this protection scheme. I would enjoy trying to crack it way more than I would enjoy watching the film. An I would enjoy watching a film I cracked (or recieved a cracked copy of) way more than watching a film I paid for.
I have a feeling I am not alone here.
In an attempt to raie my karma up from the current -15, I beseech any moderator reading this to help a down and out brother. Oh, how the tears will begone from my eye and a smile grace my face if someone would spare me some karma!
/.ed already :(
So to help you out, here are reasons why to mod me up:
Insightful: After reading this article I have a few questions. Mainly, what are the potential security ramifications to both the whitehats and blackhats? It appears as though security was not directly mentioned, so sadly I fear that the designers left this crucial part out. I would not trust my data with an insecure system, and I'm sure you wouldn't either.
Interesting: After reading this article, I see that it is very similar to what is already on the market. Do they plan on setting this product outside of currently existing technology, or embrace what already is there?
Informative: I have set up a mirror of this site as it appears to be
Funny: Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?!?!?!
Underrated: Come on. I post at 0 now, hook me up. Look at these Insightful, Interesting, Informative, and Funny reasons!
Here are reasons why to NOT mod me down:
Overrated: Come on. I post at 0 now. This is not worth of -1, if at least for the novely value.
Troll: Nowhere am I suggesting this is a "FRIST PSOT D00D!" or that "Natalie Portman" is "naked and petrified."
Flambait: Nowhere am I suggesting that "Taco sux!" or "Signal11 blows!" or "linux sucks me"
Thank you for reading, now spare me some karma.
,
faeryman
Actually, they're planning on standardizing on a digital display format which is encrypted along the wire precisely to keep you from doing this.
Just try downloading something like a 3 meg mp3 for gnutella, it will take hours. Gnutella can saturate bandwidth like no ones business. There is no limit on the software, some guy on a 14.4 modem on AOL will have like 100 transfers going. Another thing is search timeouts, being they never time out the traffic it generates is amazing.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Post hoc ergo procter hoc.
Religions like Christianity have always been popular for a bunch of reasons, and the Romans had very little to do with it. Drugs have been popular since before homo sapiens sapiens was evolved, as humans aren't even the only species to use them. You're closest to the truth when you cite rock music, but there's hardly anything unique about that movement.
And by the way, the correct idiom is "forbidden fruit", not "forbidden apple".
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
What's to stop someone buying the licence (which is presumably some kind of program or file), and Gnutella-ing that too...?
That definately displays the high mistrust of authority even the general public has.
believe that if sex, even erotica, was discussed openly and sensibly from a young age then demand for pornography and prostitution would decrease dramatically.
There is empirical evidence to support this as well - like Sweden, for example.
". Sure, take in a mainstream movie every so often, but try to lose the false sense of need that's been implanted by immoral marketing practices. (I tell you, many of the complaints about DVD make people sound like they're hooked on drugs rather than home movies.)
Ideas are the most powerful drugs we have.. ideas which are communicated by sight and sound. There is no question it is a mind-altering substance.
But as far as I know, ANY software encryption is breakable.
Absolutely ANYTHING is breakable and it is doesn't matter whether the implementation is in software or hardware, except when it's a One-Time Pad and no one but the two parties know the keys.
If you can see how the decode process works, you can duplicate it.
Actually, you are talking about enCODING, not enCRYPTION. Encryption implies that you know EVERYTHING about the process except for the plaintext and the key but you would still need to either brute-force or use some more optimized cracking algorithm (the more inefficient, the better of course) to break it. DES, Triple DES, Blowfish are examples of symmetric ciphers that exhibit this behavior. RSA, ECC are assymetric or public-key algorithms.
What else is illegal? Suicide is. The rates are rising, but I don't know if it is "popular" by any means. Bank robbery is illegal. I just got back from robbing one myself, actually. I think that Christianity, rock music and drugs all have other draws than just being forbidden.
Now, music becomes illegal to download. Downloading music becomes popular.
Yes! Down with the establishment! I'll download music I hate! That'll show them!
Wait, no, I download music, when I do, because I like the music. The legality of it has nothing to do with it, except that it makes me LESS likely. I believe it's a deterrent. I certainly don't think it increases the chances of my downloading.
So Microsoft goes out and builds this standard. Then they say it's impossible. Then, to top it off, they make it illegal to crack it. Who shall be the first to taste the forbidden apple? Good idea! Me me me! I want to taste it!
Wait, no I don't, I don't care.
And what's with criticizing MS for developing the standard? Believe it or not (hold on to your seat here...) they're a SOFTWARE company. They make software. It's how they put food on their tables. If they didn't come up with software, they'd go out of business. (it would take a long time, but that would be the upshot) And what are they supposed to do? "Oh, here's our new encryption software... Um, it's not terribly secure." No. Of course they have to promote it as being secure.
Honestly.
If this works at all, it will go a long way towards the acceptance of gnutella/napster w/ wrapster/freenet style data exchange programs (peer to peer with gnutella and freenet, private with freenet).
OK, hands up for everyone who believes this won't get cracked?
Don_Negro, put your hand down, I said "get cracked", not "be smoking crack"
OK. No hands. No surprise.
I mean, Stephen King's ebook got cracked within hours, and he wasn't even charging for it the first day.
So, next possibility, this will get cracked, and gnutella will be demonized along with the computer cr/h/ackers.
Conspriatorial-think, is MS testing it's DRM software, PR repair can be handled later, and SightSound is helping the MPAA and RIAA to demonize gnutella and the like.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I tried to find specifications of this but I wasn't able =( So I'm going to have guess. =)
I think you could be right if 1) Computers could truly generate random numbers [say from the emissions per second from an ounce of uranium] 2) The encryption could never be decrypted [aka one-way encryption].
Encryption is like math. Let's for instance look at the Bell Curve. There's no way to take an integral of this formula...but there's a way to go about finding the ingregral nonetheless =)
Remember; if all else fails there's always the brute force method. Sure it may take years, but it can eventually be cracked.
Remember: the point of encrytion is not to hide data forever, but to make it take so long to decrypt it that the information is no longer valuable.
DranoK
That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.
Shh! Nobody knows I'm gay!
Good --> New, New --> Anti-establishment, Good --> Popular. Ergo all good things will be both condemned by the establishment and made popular by the masses.
This does not imply that all things anti-establishment become popular. Cannibalism and incest are two obvious examples of things which are clearly frowned upon by the establishment, but which are not (at present) very popular.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Here is why you can't reuse your pad, even to send the next pad. In this case, we will assume that you encrypt your data using XOR with the pad. We will have the following variables:
O1 and O2 = OTP one and two.
P1 and P2 = Plaintext one and two
C1, C2, and C3 = the three ciphertexts.
Send the first encrypted message:
C1 = P1 XOR O1
Send the first pad encrypted with the second pad:
C2 = O1 XOR O2
Send the second encrypted message:
C3 = P2 XOR O2
Your opponent has C1,C2,C3, since that's what you transmitted.
So, your opponent performs the following:
C1 XOR C2 XOR C3 =
(P1 XOR O1) XOR (O1 XOR O2) XOR (P2 XOR O2)
The way XOR works, duplicated variables cancel out, so the above is equal to:
P1 XOR P2
because the two O1's and the two O2's each cancel out.
Now, your opponent has your two plaintexts XOR'd with each other, which is easily solvable. You may as well use ROT13.
For instance Quantum Project has two versions of the same movie, the low-qual version is 3.95 and the hi-qual version is 5.95.
Im thinking that it shouldnt cost more for the hi-qual version, the only diffrence is the encodeing. Not sure if that warrents a price diffrence..
what do you guys think ?
This frightens me.
When they speak of a compromised run-time client, they mention a unique exe file and license keys, and the server binds that client to that computer.
The really scary part though is their remedy for a compromised client. If I'm to believe the wording, it's not the server that remembers the broken client, it specifically says "[the client] can be disabled", indicating the client self-destructs based on a server response, probably planting registry keys or whatever else so it cannot be reinstalled.
Whether or not this can be circumvented by reinstalling windows after a full format, and if no server-side memory is used it would work, the mere idea of a company reaching in and disabling my software frightens me. Granted, I'm sure it's in the EULA, and as only a license there is nothing owned, but I think it's a move in the wrong direction, and is one mroe puch for me to ignore the last ties I have to windows (games), and exist in the beautiful world of Linux forever. (If I just had printer drivers...)
-Tannin Kal
Er, how could that possibly work? Even if somehow they kept me from running any video capture programs on my monitor, i can still just pipe it to my TV instead of my computer monitor, run it in fullscreen, and record onto a tape (or, soon, DVD).
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
I think a judge would probably toss a suit against Gnutella and Freenet out on its ass - it's "bad people", not bad technology.
Excellent analogy! I hope to hell you are right, but alas, I lack your faith in our justice system, and have even less for our lawmaking bodies.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Neither does Christianity. It'd make it a far more interesting religion (in a "news at 6" sense) if Christian spiritual leaders usually get nailed to trees. It happened, what... once? And he was nailed up right next to non-Christian, non-religious, non-leaders. Just because he was crucified and Buddah or Krishna or whoever else wasn't, doesn't lend Christ any significance over them. It's only whatever YOU consider important about Christ that lends him importance.
Saying "Christianity has always been popular" kind of ignores the hundreds of years of persecution, doesn't it?
*yawn* Judaism has been persecuted for longer than Chrisitanity, and more often, and generally with more verocity. You can shake a stick at whatever social category you want and claim persecution and probably be right. It's a pointless and boring argument.
Come up with some interesting arguments. I know, I'm perpetuating an off-topic thread. So mod me.
Work is for people who lack the imagination to play.
After all, the program "gnutella" itself isn't that interesting (though it is handy). "gnutella" is just a new protocol. I don't know under what license the protocol is (if any) but judging on the history of it I'd call it abandonware.
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
12) Adam and Eve cannot plant apple seeds without paying royalties to the AAE for each apple copied through the borne fruit. The AAE also
sues the dirt for providing this copying mechanism. The sun and rainclouds are including as defendents in the lawsuit as well. The clouds are later dropped from the suit, however, as their contribution was found to be based solely on water vaporware.
13) Adam cannot core the apple, as that would allow other users to see the methods by which the above copying could be attained.
Better living through money.
You fail to recognize that all Darwin describes is a process. That process could have been created by a higher being. Nothing in Darwin's theories precludes the possiblity that God created a world in which life is predestined to evolve.
Even if you're the worlds most virulent athiest, you can only say that you believe God is dead. You can't prove it. All you can do is replace one faith with another.
I don't mean that the whole message would be the next key, it would simply be a block of data in the plaintext message. Perhaps a bit of it before each paragraph... If you use the same key more than once it's not secure, so each message must have a unique key. If you use a completely random key each time you must communicate the key to the recipient in some way, and if you are going to send the key via some "secure" method each time you send a message, you might as well just send the message itself via that secure method.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
Read the definition closely: it says 'small inherited variations.'
That's very different from 'making a stupid mistake that causes you to be killed.' Most times the mistake that gets you killed is a big non-inherited variation.
Not very many people think it through, so you can blather on about 'evolution in action' and sound 'clever' to the average idiot. But you sound like an idiot to anybody who thinks it through. Your choice, I guess.
- The Romans tried to stop christianity. Christianity became popular. Drugs were made illegal in this country. Drugs became popular. Rock music was chastized by the establishment as being "satanic". Rock becomes popular. Anyone starting to see a pattern here?
Problem is that you are mixing up the cause/effect stuff. These things didn't became popular because some power tried to stop them! On the contrary, the power tried to stop them because they were becoming popular.Your post seems to think that things become more popular as some power tries to stop them.
In realty, sometimes (too many, for my taste) the power succeedes! (in these cases we later are forced to think that these ideas were not worth at all!)
bricius--
I want my country to declare War on Suicide.
"They're committing suicide! stop them by any means necessary! Oh wait..."
-jpowers
-jpowers
I like the part about drawing the moths in to the fire. I imagine the people who oppose widespread music piracy on the internet like that part of what you said too. Burned moths don't get the chance to download much more music, so to speak. The analogy breaks down when you realize that humans are smarter than moths, and won't continue to fly into the flame when they see what happened to someone else who did.
/.
Furthermore, to address the last part of what you typed, Microsoft didn't just build 'this standard.' Microsoft also built Windows 2000 and openly challanged people to crack it. Guess what? Have you heard a big hullabaloo yet about a prominent site that uses Windows 2000 being cracked? I suspect we all would if one had. There are tons of people with something else to sell who will be screaming it from the rooftop if and when it happens. So it apparently hasn't. When it does, we'll start believeing you have a chance at a taste of that apple. No, scratch that. Somebody will have a chance. We've seen your work here on
Let's say SightSound sends me some encrypted video. For me to watch it, my computer has to decrypt it. For my computer to decrypt it, they have to send me the key. But now I have some encrypted data and the key! Cracking it is trivial.
It doesn't matter how strong your crypto is if you give someone the key.
If you're wondering why he posts at -1, read his web site, or at least his user history.
~ Give me 101 plastic soldiers, and I will conquer the world.
natalie was certainly cultured.
Damn it all. How dare they say you are "off-topic." When the topic here, as clearly advertised, is geek stuff. And what do geeks do? What act is the essence of being a geek? They, they, blush and/or shudder to mention but the truth must arise and be told, they bite the heads offa chickens. And the next question that naturally comes to mind is, what happens then? Blood spurts and runs down your chin, it can't be helped. Now look at your poster, on the wall behind the monitor. Look upon her full-whitepainted lower lip.
Your fan WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
People have demonstrated that they're more than willing to settle for lossy mp3s instead of cd tracks. And besides, there are driver-level hacks that can get around the need for digital-analog-digital converting.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Murder, plunder loot and burn
But all in moderation
If you do the things we say
you soon will rule the nation
First kill your foes and enemies
and then kill your relations
Murder, Plunder loot and burn
but all in moderation!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Videos compressed with a hacked version of Microsoft's Mpeg4 implementation look really nice, I just saw Natual Born Killers for the first time in Divix and I was blown away by the quality. Way better then VCD, way better (and full resolution to). And the file was only 700megs.
I would assume that M$'s secure content uses the same codec, as Divx
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
They should be able to track you down pretty easily and break your fingers.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Some folks here are already screaming "Gimmick". That's almost certainly true, but I imagine there's another reason for doing it.
Serving up video takes up a lot of expensive bandwidth. Why not let someone else do the serving for you? As an added plus, should SightSound's movies actually become popular, the number of people willing to host the files will increase, thus automatically scaling up the bandwidth accordingly.
OK, this is back to my general DRM (Digital Rights Management) speech.
GIVEN: The entirity of the user base will not accept a technology that restricts or degrades their experience with a medium they previously had greater rights on.
given that, let's explore the possibilities here.
Anything you can view can be copied. Remember the BetaMax suit. That's been solved by some tricks which don't noticably degrade the movie but do degrade any copies, if you don't have tech know-how or some low-grade video editing software.
Computers make copying data much easier--no degradation that can't be fixed. In a perfect, trusted computing environment where the OS, nay, the hardware, was working in concert with DRM software, the data could not be copied digitally.
Firstly, there are no such environments. Secondly, even in the perfect possible case, it doesn't solve the problem--if something can be viewed, it can be copied. Whether it involves getting a video-out from your video card and stereo from your sound card, (let's presume they're also working with DRM), or simply getting a dark, soundproofed room and setting up a video camera, it can't be stopped.
DRM in the digital world will be no better than the real world. Does the existence of VCRs manufactured for mass copying, copier machines, cameras, audio-out and -in jacks, and camcorders ruin the film/tv/music industry? no. When the dust settles, the digital world will be similar. Pirated data will be more available. Vendors will have to deal, or find better business models. Blockbuster and Xerox seem to be doing just fine on their business based off of technologies once thought to be the doom of their respective areas.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
You're not dowloading the actors and movie sets to your computer, are you? no.
Of course not, but you know that, and that's not what you meant anyway. The actor's labor is scarce, the other capital involved is, of course scarce. What we're doing is paying them for their labor, right?
After a fashion. What it basically amounts to is that the production houses provide these movie-making services to the public at a loss, and then trying to make it up by playing toll collector to the resulting information in perpetuity.
i.e. the movies are being made for free (or worse), and then subsidized later. That seems kind of bass-ackwards to me, although it's been the only practical way of doing it for a while.
The thing is, I think particularly as micropayment schemes become more widespread, it's going to become more and more practical to actually pay production houses/groups/what have you _directly_ for the service of making the movie in the first place.
At least movies are an example of where the artists are actually treated somewhat decently. It's certainly not true of the music industry -- you know this big thing about artists being able to eat? There's no way in hell 90% of the signed musicians in the US would be eating if they tried to live on the money they got from their record company.
I'd rather see artists paid for what they do, and how well they do it, rather than expecting them to work for what almost amounts to free.
In the long run, I think systems that don't pay the artist for creating art (and instead indirectly subsidize them by placing onerous restrictions on IP) are wrong, and destined to fail.
DNA just wants to be free...
The attitudes of many people here suggest that art will not pay the bills in the future.
Many people have pirated stuff before, many will again. The same technologies that making unlawful copies easier to distribute should also allow making legal copies easier to produce and distribute. While they may not become millionaires, people are already making decent wages distributing their music via mp3.com, even if they're also giving it away for free.
Really, the worst thing the content producers can do is to keep inconveniencing their legitimate customers. The more roadblocks these guys put in our way, the more customers like myself will try to make sure we have the technology to work around it.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I have to be nuts to think this way. I think that when someone makes a movie, he/she can ask money for it. Is that so bad? Is it so bad that artists/directors/actors etc. want to get paid for their job. Just like we get paid for our jobs.
I would love to make music. I would probably have an orgasm seeing my own record on a shelf of a record store, or someone buying it. I would also love to make music for a living. The attitudes of many people here suggest that art will not pay the bills in the future. I dislike this very much. That will mean that art will go Britney and movies will go Titanic.
Just browsing through the discussions I can't help but notice that, despite Microsoft's claims, whilst some of us belive that we shouldn't break the protection scheme, no one belives that we couldn't if we wanted to.
Maybe Microsoft should think about that.
-- If it's stupid but works, it isn't stupid.
My take on it is that if enough acts of rampant stupidity cause the idiots to be removed from the gene pool, it might result in rampant stupidity being removed from the gene pool.
:)
That's Darwinism.
However, evolving away that much stupidity could take a loooooooooong time
~ I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on tape somewhere.
Actually the engineers foresaw your little "h4x0r" schemes and completely bypass the creation of a temporary file. If my memory serves correctly, the file is decrypted at run time, immediately before being sent to the output hardware. Because of the low-level nature of the decryption software, there is (unless you are fluent in assembly) no way for one to intercept this decrypted data stream.
take that you script kiddies!
----(o)----
What the King did was to have fields of them guarded "by order of the King" with guards having the instructions to let people go through the sieve (I bet some of them even made the "thieves" pay to let them enter :)).
Given the aura of secrecy around potatoes, people did of course try to get in the field and steal them.
Isn't that called social engineering?
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
I any OTP gets cracked, all future pads are cracked.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
You're right. I really should try this before posting. But here it is:
Do all Gnutella "clients" have a look at the IP of the "server" that pushes a requested file to it, or would they accept a push from anywhere? Obviously, you didn't understand what I meant. Something like this.
1. I am a piece of code in an evil Gnutella client. I see that host A searches for the file lots_of_porn.zip, and that host B answers the query.
2. Host A tries to connect to host B for a download, but, nah, B's refusing the connection. A tries to make B push the file. But A is not aware of the IP that B will push from. I see the push request floating by on the network.
3. I, the evil client, open a connection to the IP/port that A has opened for the push, and send something really evil there.
4. The user at host A gets really surprised when he see the nude-pics of his grandma, and has a stroke.
Is this possible? Of course, one should never execute unknown code, and who knows that B's porn is better than my evil porn?
Just a thought.
sig here
What would happen if someone at Nullsoft "accidentally" leaked the code, DeCSS-style? I'm sure the code would propagate faster than the corporates could issue lawsuits, and "inspired" clones would pop up in no time. But I'm sure nullsoft would be held accountable in the courts, and nobody there wants to lose their job...
It looks like (unlike some other posters) I have actually browsed SightSound's website..
So they actually want you to pay $5 per viewing license (and the licesnse is obtained thru MediaPlayer)
So I think it's fucking shit.. Why download a good movie, and pay them for each viewing, while you can go to a good theatre and have nice overall experience for the same money ? Or better yet, rent a DVD..
Yes, but being the HUGE Kevin Smith fan that i am. i would gladly pay to see a film of his
The protocol has been fully reverse-engineered but only released with the windows client. Basically gnutelladev.wego.com deals with current generation clones and gnutellang.wego.com deals with extending the protocol to add new features. Capnbry did all of the reverse-engineering and he hangs out in #gnutella on EFnet so if you want to talk to the guy that did it he is the one to ask.
Moral delima, yeah, my eye.
I have an extensive collection of movies (rapidly approaching 1000 movies) They include copies, originals, and DVD movies. Now, here's my question. I have friends who come over and borrow movies, so how would one loan that one out? I own the rights, therefore I should be able to loan it out. How about selling it? Is that allowed? I can already see bulk licenses for sale on eBay. How long before they are deamed illegal, or in violation of that damn Digital Act?
In theory, I like the idea of being able to download a movie. Of course the only people who would benefit would be those with Cable or DSL or the like. I would have to smack anyone on a dial-up who would attempt it.
Now for the moral delima. How long before the encryption is cracked, week, MAYBE two. Then what, pull the plug on the whole idea? Not so easy, once you start, you can't stop (like those damn potato chips).
What about viewing on something other than my computer. I've only got a cheapo 15" monitor on my computer, but I have a 35" digital TV hook up downstairs with my DVD player. Would I be able to burn it to CD and play it in my DVD player? THAT MIGHT actually be worth paying for. Which brings me to my last thing...
Anyone heard about estimated prices? Or ease of obtaining them? If they want $10 per license, and I have to get on a slow ass website and spend 15minutes filling out a form, then another 5 waiting for it to submit, then ANOTHER 10 waiting for the email with the unlock password... Hell with that! I'll spend 10min driving to media play, pay $9.99 + tax for the VHS which I can watch on any TV, loan out to friends, then another 10min driving home. I spent maybe a buck more, saved time, hassle, and it's more usable. I hope they take these things into consideration before setting prices and going about all of that, else it'll just be able DiVX. A waste of everyone's time. Neat concept, poorly excecuted.
My $.02 worth.
This is a great thing, because while there will be people who will crack this thing and start distributing it, at least they are giving a try to this new business model.
The average mum and dad who love using their computers can now CHOOSE to rent their movies via the internet instead of going out to their rental store. The content on the internet has the potential to be better than the rental copies, in quality, and also interactive extras they can add on.
If they survive long enough, other companies will start looking at doing the same thing, and soon these mp3 and DeCSS lawsuits will no longer be relevant.
In any format, there will always be bootleg copies, but there will also always be enough people who want to pay for it legally for the companies involved to survive. They just have to give it a go!
---
Do lesbians go for strip clubs with nude women dancers, or would renting a girl-on-girl(s) porno flick be more appropriate?
Most of the lesbians I know do both. Though they seem to prefer the live nude dancers thing, even though it's WAY more expensive. My hypothesis is that the emotional connection (you know how women go for that), though temporary, is more intense (like, there at all) with a live person.
As a side note, my lesbian friends, when I asked them, said the strippers we very happy to do lap dances and the like for them, and some stippers even told them they prefer to dance for a woman.
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
Your machine crashes half-way thru viewing. Must you buy a new liscence? What if you get disconnected? When you dial back up and re-run the liscence their servers would say you already used your activation.
Somewhere out there, there is a Microsoft developer thinking "Nah. We'll just code the SQL so that each download is a transaction. With a long time-out parameter. Yeah, that's the ticket! Lessee, 30,000,000 AOL users at 56K dropping carrier an average of 6.8 times per download... <shrug> should work! We'll use ASP on IIS!"
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
As much as it pains me to say it, Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree with this software-based "intellectual property" protection mechanism. As others in the thread correctly point out, you can always intercept a transmission in the clear at some point on your machine. The packaged music or video may be owned or obfuscated by somebody else, but the output of its decryption is 100% within my control. It has to be translated, and immediately afterwards I can snag a copy. This form of protection will always fail in the long run. Its only hope is to render the cost of buying a legitimate copy less than the inconvenience of ripping the output stream. Before IP can be protected commercially (if indeed it should be) the hardware makers must collude with the owners of intellectual property. This is precisely what the MPAA is attempting to accomplish. If they own the players, then they can ensure that at no point is the clear stream electronically accessible. At best I can place a microphone in front of my speakers or try to do a video capture and re-record the output of a movie. But in either case, I will have at best a lossy copy. Personally I wish they would all just give up and go home, and stop treating a non-scarce resource like a precious, scarce one.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
That actually isn't too far off - that's how NT4 licensing works!
So if you had your choice of where to download a file, knowing that it was legitimate for you to do so, would you rather get that file from some random shmo or would you rather get it from the source?
What we have hear is a silly marketing idea to save the distribution company the cost of distribution, i.e., Bandwidth and lots of it!
Only it won't work. First, as a consumer I have quality requirements. If I'm going to download a 1.5 hour movie that is upwards of several hundred megabytes I'll want to know that there is sufficient bandwidth to do the job.
Next, I want to know who I'm downloading from, without having to either hack my own version of GNUtella or constantly do netstats to figure it out. In fact I'd like a digital signature, please. Let's see how often that can actually work with GNUtella, given the number of truncated files.
Now the one thing GNUtella DOES have going for it is that it is completely restartable. HTTP is not, and I know of no semantics in an FTP URL to allow for restart.
But given the quality (or actually, the lack therof) of the absolute crap that's been dished out into the theaters this year, it *IS* the literal truth that I'd enjoy trying to hack the encryption more than watching the movies themselves.
Really! What movies have been worth seeing this year? The only one I've seen and enjoyed was High Fidelity. I might give Road Trip a try, just cause I'm a big Tom Green fan. But what else???
Battfield earth? gag... I only regret that I didn't fall asleep earlier. Actually I regret going at all, but I'm too bloody-minded not to stay for my whole $8.50s worth of 2 hours.
U571? The bastard stepchild of Das Boot and The Hunt for Red October, but with neither the direction of Wolfgang Peterson, nor the acting talent of Sean Connery.
Rules of Engagement? Knockoff of "A Few Good Men" but without Jack Nicholson.
Gag, gasp and more gag...
I'd *MUCH* rathar spend two hours hacking at whatever encryption mirimax has put in place (Hell, or even just playing CivIII) than subject myself to any of the tripe that has been released THIS year again.
Seriously? WTF is up? Last year we had some aweosme movies...
Dogma
Being John Malkovich
American Pie
Enemy of the State
Toy Story 2
South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut
Austin Powers 2
And hell, even the oft maligned Star Ware Episode I, The Phantom Menace easily beats the snot out of anything I've been subjected to THIS year.
Have the powers to be decreed that 2000 will be the year that the movies suck?
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
I agree, this year has been bad for movies.
;-)
Thoughts:
Gladiator was a good movie.
X-Men will likely be a good movie, and it'll be out next month.
The Cider House Rules was a good movie.
Me, Myself, and Irene might be good, if it's more like Truman than Jim's older movies.
As for your last year's picks:
American Pie was retarded.
Austin Powers 2 was mostly not funny, in comparison to the first one. The jokes were often ripped from the first, were overused, or simply bad.
Toy Story 2 had a stupid plot, and CGI doesn't make a movie.
South Park was funny in parts, but there was way too much singing.
Dogma was very funny. "Not that it's any of your fucking business, but no, she's not my wife." *bam*
Last year Jakob the Liar was released, and it was excellent.
Last year American Beauty was released, and it was excellent.
The Matrix was from last year, and it was quite good.
If you go see movies like Road Trip, you can only expect to see crap. If you watch movies like Gladiator, then you're more apt to find a rewarding experience, except in the case of Mission to Mars, which was just bad.
IIRC, they sued mp3.com over that stupid patent. At least they'll be providing me with free movies now, I doubt their "security" will hold for long, and I certainly won't give cretins like this money.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
But as far as I know, ANY software encryption is breakable. If you can see how the decode process works, you can duplicate it.
True, any process can be duplicated, however any data cannot be. If any encryption algorithm is good you won't be able to break it even if you have the well-commented source code.
What encryption does is merge two peices of information, the plaintext and the key into one. If you have any two of those things, then you can get the 3rd. but if you only have one, you can't get anything else.
However, when you are talking about copy protection its different. In order to get the plaintext, you need to have both the cyphertext and the key. That means that the key has to come with the plaintext (or in this case, plainvideo). You should be able to see the problem here...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The "third party" builds have both source and binaries (or links to them) available as the various authors deem fit.
Interested in helping make the next generation of Gnutella better? Join me over at the Gnutella NG site -- gnutellaNG.wego.com (Password required, but it's free. Skip all the marketing demographics... wego.com seems to behave if you tell them "don't email me.")
_________________________________________________
Ever notice that MCSEs advertise the fact, but Sun & Novell certified people don't?
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I hate to tell you this but some form of encryption are uncrackable. Read some books and you can find the proof. Basically a single pat random key is uncrackable as it can produce any results.
That works as long as the key is not available for the cracker. With "encrypted" movies key is ALWAYS available -- if someone paid for viewing once, he has a key. The idea of "protection" is to obfuscate the process to make it impossible to re-use the key if it will be transferred to someone else or used by the same user more than once. This obfuscation will be the target of cracking, not the key itself.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I know that it's been reverse-engineered and that there are quite a number of clones out there. (I'm using GTK-Gnutella.)
Though what I wanted to say is that the legal status of the protocol is not clear (at least to me). Who owns the rights? Is it under GPL now?
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
Yea I sent them a email enquiring about this ,its been two weeks, no response
ZDNet seems to be relatively computer illiterate between their staff and policies. I like them, some of their people are pretty good. I would, however, have to say, that unless it's marketted by Microsoft or has never had an attack of any type even attempted on it, they really don't support it. They will say that they do, but the inner rung support from them just isn't there. It's a shame.
Eh...
I think you're overlooking rubber-hose cryptoanalysis here.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
1) Eve can't eat the apple.
2) Adam can't eat the apple.
3) Eve can't copy the apple.
4) Adam can't tell Eve about the ATI (Apple Tree Interface).
5) Eve can't inform Adam about the ATI because of the click thru EULA (Eden User Licence Agreement).
6) Adam can't use the trademarked word apple without the expressed writen consent of god and monday night football.
7) Eve can't walk around eden with the apple in her hand without first ataining the exclusive distrubution rights from AAE (Apple Association of Eden).
8) Adam is prohibited from making apple sauce or using any other "compression algorithm" on the copyrighted apple.
9) Eve is prohibited from telling Adam about the apple sause maker because it would be contributing to the use of compression tools in order to facilitate piracy.
10) Neither Adam ore Eve are permitted to make caramel apples as that would be using encryption and obfuscation on copyrighted materials with the expressed intent of unauthorized distribution.
11) The snake can only sell the apple at a minimum advertised list price of $17.99.
___
I'm not completely sure how this amazing protocol Microsoft has cooked up works, but if it's anything like the WMA files that required authorization, it's something like this:
User downloads file. When they attempt to play it, the program connects to the server and grabs the key if you're allowed to have it. You can then play that file freely on your system.
As far as I could tell, it didn't actually unlock the file, per se. I would guess it stores the key in a special little registry section so you can play it later.
So the question becomes this:
How do they keep the user from sending this registry bit to someone else? I would bet it's generated with the system GUID (that global unique identifier key that caused some controversy a while back). It's a fairly common thing for programs to use. So the client sends the server its GUID, the server returns with a key that works to unlock for that user's GUID, and it works seamlessly.
Where they ran into problems before was with programs like Winamp. When using an output plugin that could write to a file, Winamp could get around this restriction by removing the authentication through playback.
Well, try doing it with PGP :)
You can't handle the truth.
The only problem with a one time pad is that the random string ends up being as big as the message itself, so it's a real waste of space. Not to mention the fact that it still requires a secure way to get the huge random string to the recipiant.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Personally, I thought the singing made the movie.
I do agree that American Pie was a pathetic piece of pre-teen drivel.
Dogma was great, Cider House Rules was great, American Beauty was great, Gladiator was great.
I don't suppose it counts as classic cinema, but Mission: Impossible 2 was a very cool movie, in the same way that The Matrix was. (but not quite THAT cool, come on, we're talking about The Matrix here)
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Religions like Christianity have always been popular for a bunch of reasons
Funny that, I always thought that popular religions usually don't end up having their spritual leaders nailed to trees. Saying "Christianity has always been popular" kind of ignores the hundreds of years of persecution, doesn't it?
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
MINIMUM SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
Browser:
We only sell movies and music in a secure format. Currently, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 is the only browser that we have had 100% accuracy in delivering a decryption key successfully. Unsuccessful delivery of this decryption key could result in a credit card charge with complete receipt of the decryption key, which has been experienced with other browsers. The decryption key is necessary to inhibithe purchase was made. We are browser agnostic and we are working to support Netscape Navigator and other browsers.
Operating System:
Our system works on Windows Operating Systems. Apple Computer has not created a secure media solution (e.g. encrypted movies and music) for the Macintosh. Microsoft has released a beta-version of the Windows Media Player for the Macintosh, however, this version does not support the decryption of our movies and music. Until Apple Computer or Microsoft releases a secure media player for the Macintosh, the Macintosh is not capable of playing back our secure movies and music.
Evidently the encryption is negotiated between Media Player and the server (IIS)
Unfortunately they are a bit ahead of their time, to make this whole concept feasible they need to have millions of people with their TV's hooked up to their computers. Who is going to pay money to watch a movie on their computer. Not me.
no sig.
OED Entries Matched
1 entry found.
1. Darwinism ('dA:rwInIz(@)m). [-ism.]
1 The doctrine or hypothesis of Erasmus Darwin. Obs. (nonce-use.)
1856 B. W. Richardson Life T. Sopwith (1891) 256 Mr. Sopwith described the hypothesis of the development of living things from a primordial centre. That, said Reade, is rank Darwinism. It was the first time I had heard that word used..it had reference to Erasmus Darwin.
2 The biological theory of Charles Darwin concerning the evolution of species, etc., set forth especially in his works entitled `The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life' (1859), and `The Descent of Man and Selection in relation to Sex' (1871).
1864 T. H. Huxley in Nat. Hist. Rev. Oct. 567 What we may term the philosophical position of Darwinism.1871 Athenæum 15 July 84 It is impossible to reconcile the Doctors of the Church with the Doctors of Darwinism. 1876 Ray Lankester tr. Haeckel's Hist. Creation I. 1 The scientific theory..commonly called..Darwinism, is only a small fragment of a far more comprehensive doctrine. 1889 A. R. Wallace (title), Darwinism, An exposition of the theory of Natural Selection with some of its applications.
So 'Darwinist, a follower of Darwin, a Darwinian. Darwi'nistic a., of or pertaining to Darwinism. 'Darwinize v., to speculate or theorize after the manner of (Erasmus or Charles) Darwin; also trans.; so 'Darwinized ppl. a.
1883 Sci. & Lit. Gossip I. 79 Interesting to every sincere Darwinist. 1875 tr. Schmidt's Desc. & Darw. 292 Decisive in favour of Darwinistic views. 1882 Athenæum 27 May 663/2 In connexion with Darwinistic explanations of ends. 1880 Nature XXI. 246 Coleridge invented the term `Darwinising' to express his contempt for the speculations of the elder Darwin. 1886 Contemp. Rev. Sept. 435 Darwinizing sociologists. 1920 G. B. Shaw in Public Opinion 13 Aug. 160/2 It has restored faith in Providence to a Darwinised world. 1929 Blunden Nature in Eng. Lit. 14 The great mind which compares and sifts evidence until a new De Rerum Natura darwinizes us.
Non impediti ratione cogitationis.
You got beat up a lot when you were a kid, didn't you?
If it is piping to my monitor, and hence to my video card, it is in a format that can be captured.
Or are they going to outlaw video cards because they have to translate the format?
I think the actual truth evidenced by these examples is this: You can't legislate morality. In other words, you can make something illegal and therefore (perhaps) deter people through the consequences they face. But that won't convince people it is wrong. I know it's naive but I believe that most people have a relatively well-balanced sense of morality, and they can sesne when someone else makes a law that contravenes it. They might obey such a law but they don't respect it.
In counterpoint, consider the experience with drunk driving in the USA. Although it's still a problem, the astonishing thing is, rates of DUI (for young drivers) have been falling for almost a decade. (See, for example, http://w ww.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/alcohol/promdrunk/G ENERALFACTS.HTML for data on trends.) This has happened in part due to enhanced enforcement but largely due to education and a shift in perception. I teach high school and my kids are increasingly of the opinion that drinking and driving is more than illegal ... it's stupid. No amount of laws seem to reach them, because they don't take their moral bearing from laws. Insteasd, they evaluate laws based on interactions with their moral sense.
To bring this back to slashdot ground, I think the MPAA and RIAA and all the other evil acroynms are fighting a losing battle, because their methods don't deal with the morality of the issue. By relying on technological mechanisms (backed by draconian laws), they seem to be ceding the ground over the "rightness" of copying. And because they treat all digital distribution as morally equivalent to mass-producing bootlegs, they create an essential disconnect with their consumers.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Darwinism (därw-nzm)
n.
A theory of biological evolution developed by Charles Darwin and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Also called Darwinian theory.
So, by that theroy, any variations that would decrease an individual's (or, as is often discussed on slashdot, a business') abilitity to compete, survive, and reproduce (eg being stupid) would cause the individual to die off, since that is an undesirable trait that has a detremental effect to the species.
(I am not a biologist, and your milage may vary.)
-legolas
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
Bandwidth suckage for Sightsound and those who are downloading the movies will be enormous, due to gnutella's design. Even a poorly designed web page would be more efficient.
gnutella is (generally) much less stable, and noticeably slower than Napster. The only advantage I see of gnutella over Napster is that gnutella is unlikely to be sued out of existance anytime soon.
Using gnutella requires a moderate amount of computer literacy, unlike clicking on a button on a web page. This limits the audience by a large margin.
Perhaps Sightsound thinks the giga-huge file will be stored on other computers on the network, so that Sightsound's servers won't be the only ones burdened with transferring, but that's pretty unlikely.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Gnutella: verb. to move data very fast around the planet.
I like the sound of that :) I'm going to Gnutella my term paper so everyone in the dorm gets an A.
___
Guys,
The origional gnutella for some reason is still closed source. Nothing GNU, GPL or Free (speech) about it. Some clones may be GPL but the prgram "Gnutella" is not. Just a reminder
Now, what if this company doesn't care about the people who COULD and WILL crack it.. Maybe they just see that enough people would be innocent enough to actually go through with it .. and not know of what the hackers and other people are doing on the internet ..
.. just like DVD .. but people still buy the DVD's ..
There are TONS AND TONS of non-hackers on the internet. How many people are on aol??? But anyways, if they're just imaging that people will probably crack it
I dunno... They probably thought people could crack them, just like people can copy VHS, but the number of people who buy them pay for the company to be rich and the hackers to get free stuff.. so who can complain? =)
Ryan
I will be hosting a bachelor(ette?) party for my friend who is to be married in a lesbian wedding. Having gone through the normal bachelor party for my male (not necessarily more masculine) friends, I feel obligated to provide some wild pornographic action for her and her girlfriends.
Do lesbians go for strip clubs with nude women dancers, or would renting a girl-on-girl(s) porno flick be more appropriate?
Please advise,
Segfault 11
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
i based it on the movie, since i've seen it a million times. however there is an element of reincarnation in this parody that was not in the movie but was in the book (moonwatcher was dave bowman was the starchild). errr... maybe that didn't come out until 2010. i can't remember!
i took a bitchslapping for natalie portman!!
i took a bitchslapping for natalie portman!!
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
If you're looney enough to run a file of unknown origin with a .vbs extension, that would be referred to as Darwinism.
No, that's referred to as computer novices, computer newbies, or non-computer geeks.
My God! The hubris that comment reveals! How many of your non-programmer, non-power-user relatives would open that vbs script in a second, if it superficially resembled an advertised movie? How long would it take you to explain what VB Script is to them, and how long would they remember?
They've got better things to do with their time than learn a lot of computer jargon! And if Microsoft is willing to give them a system where they don't have to, then they'll choose it over "open source" every single time!
Before trying to Take Over The World, why don't you try to understand it first?
Whatever, let's assume the code uncrackable (yeah, I know no code is, just run with it for a second).
But with the frequency of incomplete files on services like Napster and Gnutella *ahem* so I heard *ahem* I believe I would go a littel crazy registiring movies and then finding out their incomplete.
I wondering what protection to this problem is being handled.
Currenting missing the ending of End of Days, or whatever, is no big deal - it was free.
How will they deal with this when I have to pay?
Malk-a-mite
Come on, people.
They are using gnutella to distribute digital versions of their movies.
They are grossly overcharging for the privelege, with one viewing priced at $9.95, more than a seat at the cinema.
I think we must consider the possibility that this is a ploy to completely discredit distributed file sharing technologies such as gnutella and, by association, much of the free software / hacker (not cracker) community. They know $9.95 is an unreasonable price, and as others have pointed out this makes it a strong incentive for cracking and unauthorized copying.
Imagine the following testimony, either before congress while lobbying for a new bill, or before the supreme court in upholding a new law banning FreeNet, gnutella, etc. outright:
"We have tried using this technology for distributing our intelletual property, providing users with an easy method of legitimate payment, but recorded only 6 legitamate sales in over 21,000 downloads. We need this legislation to protect our rights -- these people are ruthless vultures and steal from us no matter what we do, or how reasonable we are!"
By cracking and making unauthorized copies of this, you play into their hands. Hell, we're probably playing into their hands simply by not buying their overpriced product "we had zero sales using gnapster - there is no legitimate ecommerce capability there whatsoever."
These people aren't stupid. They are amoral, libelous, monopolistic thugs, but they are not stupid.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Aren't these the clowns that held one of those really vague patents? If I recall, it was for the distribution of audio and video over the Internet.
They've got an enemy in this corner...
I see this as leading somewhere really nasty. Where you will no longer be able to buy a movie and watch it over and over, you have to buy a license for each time you view it. This is exactly what circuit city's DivX was an attempt at.
I expect, in the next few years, you will not be able to buy a movie any more. Just like software, it will be licensed, and by opening the package you agree to the license, and that license will contain things such as you're not allowed to transfer the license of this movie to someone else, even on a temporary basis (no selling your used DVD's, nor even lending one to a friend).
I further wonder by posting this (off-topic as it is), am I suffering the same fate in terms of my Karma?
... don't you think that this is similar to DIVIX? Instead of geting a physical CD a computer downloads a movie and the person can purchase a single view or own license. The only difference is that the movie on DIVIX has a bigger screen, better sound system support, no expensive computer, ect. Would I invest my money in SightSound? No way.
Now, music becomes illegal to download. Downloading music becomes popular. As any sysadmin who has made the claim that their system is "uncrackable" will tell you, saying that something is impossible is a very good way of drawing engineers in - like moths to fire.
So Microsoft goes out and builds this standard. Then they say it's impossible. Then, to top it off, they make it illegal to crack it. Who shall be the first to taste the forbidden apple?
Gladiator was a good movie. X-Men will likely be a good movie, and it'll be out next month Gladiator was a good movie, probally the best movie I've seen all year. I've only seen previews for X-men though and I'm still skeptical. X-men is going to be one of those movies that if done right is going to kick ass. Otherwise it will suck so bad, it will make battlefield earth look like Citizen Cane. (Yeah, I stole it.)
As for mission to mars, I think that should be a movie like Highlander II or Star Trek V. It never happened.
I had a nightmare the night I saw mission to mars. I dreamed that I went back to see it and had to pay full price. Woke up in a cold sweat...
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
If I can see it or hear it I can record it. Lets face it, there going to have to accept the poeple who wan't to pay for it paying, and the rest... well, look at history. I mean I wish these people luck, but they had better not be liable for any cracking.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
This is just a (successful) publicity stunt by SightSound. They've been offering downloadable movie content protected by MS DRM on their website for more than a year. Getting it through Gnutella is less reliable and (as many others have pointed out) much riskier than going to the source.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
The Church of the Sub-Genius will do the job just fine! I can't wait to spend eternity on the Pleasure Saucers of the X-ists!
this year? american beauty (i know, it's a year old but hey.... it's worth seeing again. :) AMERICAN PSYCHO. i have never seen a movie until now that i could honestly say i liked as mch as the book.... see it now. why are you still reading this? go! hey lazy.... get up, kill the puter, and go see this movie. you think i'm kidding? huh? you want a spanking???? crud. sorry, guys... bored at work again. :)
--endcycle--
Maybe I'm dead wrong here, and if so just tell me =)
...well, I'll leave the problems up to you) just hack the code (hex editors are your friends!) to tell the proggy that the code is authentic no matter what.
It seems to me sending encrypted data over utilities such as Naptster etc could be a good or bad idea. Well, we all know the good so I'd like to point out some problems I see *grin*
1) Liscence creation/distribution. To ensure that the liscencing scheme is sound, I would think the best way to do it would be to have two classes of liscences. Type A would be a one-view liscence, and Type B would be a constant liscence. Each would be encrypted via a different scheme. With this, however, comes some inevitable problems. To make this work right, it would be assumed that one must be connected to the internet to check the liscence with an ever-growing online catalog (to make sure nobody has broken the scheme or is giving away their liscence code to everyone else). So....let's say you bought a one-view liscence. You're running winblows. Your machine crashes half-way thru viewing. Must you buy a new liscence? What if you get disconnected? When you dial back up and re-run the liscence their servers would say you already used your activation. Any other method besides online auth could be easily cracked.
2) How many people would downloading it not realizing they needed a liscence and jam tech support lines?
3) Why not stop spending time cracking the encryption method (which almost HAS to be stored in the viewer program and not online; else
Nothing is secure. Nothing. Sorry, but everything can be cracked. You'll spend so much time and money trying to stop it that you wonder when it just won't be worth it anymore.
God...WHEN is this whole Intelectual Property shit going to go away!?
DranoK
That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.
Shh! Nobody knows I'm gay!
Then again, there are bootleg copies of Battlefield Earth. ;-)
If you say it's secure, they will come.
We've been speaknig very generally about "encryption schemes" and "hackers", but it seems to me that this is much more simple than anyone has alluded to.
If anyone cares to try, I gurantee that you can easily capture the decoded stream after it has been passed to the DirectX Media runtime files. The nature of Windoze Media and video playback is such that it uses (exclusively) DirectX Media. If you don't believe me, install XingDVD player and delete some DXMedia runtime files and try playing an MPEG. EVEN INDEPENDENT SOFTWARE USES DIRECTX RUNTIME FILES FOR DECOMPRESSION. Therefore, it is plausible, and indeed, very likely, that you can simply capture the contents of a DMA segment in extended memory and stream it to the hard drive.
But you have to wonder, and I'm only speculating here, how many objections to this plan were heard by management from programmers within SightSound and MS before this was launched.
~sig~He who waits for opportunity to knock will never hear the doorbell~end sig~
I can only hope to piss near your glorious shadow. Where the hell do you come up with these stories? Slashdot should have a troll hall of fame.
Gladiator.
You won't regret it.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Take a look at that screen where it shows what other people are searching for -- this is all that is being sent (unless of course someone is downloading a file from you).
The film content will be 'protected' by Microsoft's Digital Rights Management System.
Yep, those quotes belong there all right. Never mind that it's Microsoft. The OpenBSD team and the NSA combined couldn't make this work, assuming they were silly enough to try.
First off, once you've paid for your key and gotten your file unlocked, there's nothing to keep you from distributing it. What's that you say? They might embed an identifier in the decrypted file? No problem. Just get together with a friend or two, figure out which parts are different, and munge those areas. Even if they used a variety of different regions, anything that identifies you will have to differ from your friend's copy. And if they make tiny changes everywhere, just do the same thing...make tiny changes to the least-significant bits, everywhere. Poof. Identification gone.
Those who run the movie distribution industry will ultimately have just two choices. They will either provide the content only to theaters, enjoining the managers to keep everything locked up in a vault; or wake up and distribute things freely (speech not beer), accepting the small losses due to free riders in exchange for the greatly increased profits from the majority, who will play fair if they are treated fairly.
(Actually, the "majority" will have no idea how to pirate it anyway. I meant the majority of hackers.)
In the transitional period, no doubt they will keep trying the same old authoritarian bullshit that always worked before. They won't learn very quickly, I'm afraid. Perhaps not until their investors replace them for losing money eight quarters in a row.
------
------
You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
Have you seen Timecode? At least it's ... a bit different. I'm looking forward to Small Time Crooks too.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You're taking /. WAY too seriously.
i took a bitchslapping for natalie portman!!
i took a bitchslapping for natalie portman!!
Ooh, ooooooh! So you want me to take up witchcraft? Speaking of unimaginable torture, how are you baptists doing, anyhow?
They're probably distributed as self-extracting (sfx) CAB files with a message, "Did you pay your money?" and buttons for "Yes" or "No"! Just open it with WinZip to bypass potential trojans in the sfx code... but be careful, the movie may be a trade secret.
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
Why is VB script such an EVIL thing now?
.vbs extension, that would be referred to as Darwinism.
.exe .com and .bat files are safe now. I was worried for a while there.
If you're looney enough to run a file of unknown origin with a
I am glad to hear that
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
I hate to burst your bubble, but I've had my hands on a cracked copy of win2k before it even hit the shelves. The reason you don't hear about this stuff is because someone bragging about it would be like .. the moths lighting themselves on fire. I'm sure micros~1 doesn't appreciate people cracking thier software and is more than willing to bust out the lawyers
- Wiglaf [IoStream Productions]
- Wiglaf [IoStream Productions]
The internet is currently really overloaded (oh the heady days of yesteryear) and jams (at least for me) are occuring constantly. I really love the idea that people are going to be exchanging gb sized files over intercontinental bottlenecks. Also, who, apart from T3 owners is going to be downloading these files? Do they want to distribute DVD quality (12 GB) or compressed films (say 1 GB low quality)? Which leaves the question of storing huge files on hard-disks. You're going to need extremely high capacity links and large disks to utilise this option... whilst corking up the net for others. And another thing, Gnutella isn't the optimal download medium, ftp or http supporting file resumption by i.e. Getright is a more logical choice.
You just have to consider the target audience. The fact of the matter is, that just now, people who use Gnutella are almost all there to get copyrighted materials without paying for them.
I'm not judging that.
But these same people will almost always have a level of technical expertise which will enable them to get the crack as well. Sightsound should aim more at the website distribution model they have just now, which is targeted at a different audience. The Gnutella idea is just as silly as setting up an iRC fserve, or putting it on some l33t ftp.
Also, what's to stop people putting the crack (for there is no doubt in my mind that there WILL be one) on Gnutella with the same or similar filename as the movie, so users searching for the movie will get the crack in the search results at the same time? At the end of the day, I do like this endorsement of Gnutella as a legitimate distribution medium, but it's just not going to work!
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
Maybe there wouldn't be a stupid licensee mistake, but inevitably, all encryption can be cracked...
At least these guys have the right idea about one thing: it's impossible to stop the copying of digital content, unlike the DVD guys and the RIAA, who believe that they can control the distribution of all content forever, rip-off artists and consumers, and make tons of money to pay lawyers and lobby congressman to pass laws like DMCA to allow them to keep making tons of money. What a cycle.
But $9.95 per view? That's insane. For $2 more, I could see it on the big screen, on a comfy chair, with hyper-mega-megabass that my neighbours won't let me get away with and dot-dot-dot. I wouldn't waste my bandwidth, money or time on something like that - unless I was really intent, I'd look for a warez version instead. And maybe I'm wierd but seeing movies is hardly one of those quasi-biological functions like watching Iron Chef or playing playstation.
The movie's worth maybe the price of a rental, what's that... $3? Monitor's a little nicer resolution than TV, and sound's about equal. I don't see how it compares to a "going out to the movies" experience rather than a "rent a movie" experience.
Another thing marketers might want to think about is that you make money on the internet with volume, not price - you don't have to recoup much in terms of distribution or packaging or whatnot, and low (as in "what a deal") prices make it worth the time not spent cracking or searching for the warez.
Data East: "Leaders in Dot Matrix Technology" - Star Wars pinball
Oh my God, I read this and I almost choked up my dinner laughing on the floor.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
All I see is "crack it!" up and down the comment board here, but how easy could that really be? After all, I'd assume that after the DeCSS fiasco they would have learned something and fixed there mistakes, and if I'm not mistaken, no one cracked the DVD encryption, someone got lucky and found an unencrypted key that allowed them to break the encryption. Without the key, DeCSS would be as useless as all those badly burned CD's on my coffee table. And with software viewers, couldn't the industry use one time license keys or keysets for a digital production, so that by compromising one, they wouldn't all be compromised. And another thing about software players is that they can be upgraded, so say someone does create a monolithic crack for any movie out there, couldn't they just release a new viewer program? After all, a couple hour download is not even close to as painful as having to do a hardware upgrade.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
2) If the encryption is cracked, we will see another legal maelstrom like we have around Napster and DeCSS.
3) If the encryption isn't cracked, then what happens to fair use? Fair use effectively ceases to exist if you can excerpt films because of encryption measures.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Why not make the password your credit card number and name as it appears. No not only does everyone who bought the movies not want it cracked they also don't want to pass this info even to there good friends, not to mention good friends don't want the responsiblity. Just a thought.
DBLO_P
Depends on what you mean by 'being cracked.' True, there is no way to recover a message encrypted with a one-time pad given only the ciphertext. That does not, however, mean that one-time pad-based encryption schemes are uncrackable. OTP systems in fact are notoriously hard to do properly because you must be absolutely sure 1) that your OTP is shared onlybetween the two parties involved and 2) that there is no way that anyone else could have that pad. 'Cracking' is still possible, it just means figuring out what the pad is (though you're far deeper into Mission: Impossible territory here than distributed.net typically gets).
In fact, all forms of encryption that I can think of at all are crackable, because they all work by creating some kind of secret (a one-time pad, a private key, shared session key, etc) and attempting to make it as difficult as possible to figure out what the message is without knowing the secret while making it as easy as possible to figure out the message given the secret. Which implies that cracking a security system is at most as difficult as figuring out what the secret is. You can make that tough, but you can't make it impossible, because somebody knows the secret because he/she can decrypt the messages.
By the way, somewhat off-topic:
can anyone tell me why, in an OTP scheme, you can't use your pad once for data, and then once for transmitting a new pad? I'm no crypto expert, and I'm sure there's a problem with that, but I can't figure out what it is.
--
-jacob
-jacob
What's to stop someone writing a program that simply captures everything displayed to the screen to a massive mpeg? (and there are programs that do this already...)
Or, if there's some sort of detector for this kind of thing built into the special viewer, what's to stop someone running VMware or wine under linux and then changing a few lines of code so that instead of displaying output to screen, it writes it to a file?
The simple fact of the matter is that no matter what you do to try and prevent piracy, there is ALWAYS a way around it at a low software/hardware level.
That's my 2c.
yeah, it's secure like Playstation games, man no one pirates those. Impossible.
DVDs, man, if all the computers in the world tried to break that encryption, it'd take a long time...
Macrovision Encoded VHS, man that just shut us pirates down overnight!
Music, man no one will ever think of a way to trade cd tracks over the internet, since cd audio's way too big!
Why are they distributing it via gnutella instead of directly from their own servers? Easy. Bandwidth! Can you imagine the costs involved in transfering, best case, 1 gig files to, say, 50,000 users? Egads!
Dump the bandwidth problem off to ISPs and end-users. Suuuure. I'm sure my ISP will appreciate my hosting 20 1 gig files for a few hundred people a day. Heh heh - NOT!
Another question: What is the motivation for people serving these beasts up? It's not like they're distributing great music to their friends.. ya still gotta pay if ya wanna play.
Hey, I'm a Canadian, and I found it funny!
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
"Personally I wish they would all just give up and go home, and stop treating a non-scarce resource like a precious, scarce one"
Are there an infinite number of actors in the world? Do they all have an infinite amount of time on their hands? Is there an infinite number of sound sets to shoot these movies on? Until the answers to the above questions (and many others) are "yes", you will find that the resource that is the digitally-encoded movie is indeed scarce, even if the resulting stream of 0's and 1's isnt. Simple supply-and-demand dictates that it should cost some finite value to supply the resource that you demand.
I don't know what that finite value should be. However, any system that treats the IP as being without value is wrong, and destined to fail.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Since I have absolutely zero money, I can't really buy anything... :P
:P).
This is a great Idea, at least in the 'pr stunt' way, since Gnutella doesn?t really beat out the Web in terms of ease of use, or stability. (On the other hand, users would be more likely to find these things just randomly searching for movies (just add divix-avi-mpg to the filename
Its certainly good that 'mainstream media' is taking a positive view of Gnutella, after all it does have a much greater claim to legitimacy then Napster. (It's not about breaking copyright, its about finding good porn!)
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
If the problem of this decryption was NP (stands for non-polynomial solution time) then nobody could write a program to do it. Or more to the point, because a program does the decryption, the problem can't be nonpolynomial.
Re: NP-Hard specifically - I'm probably wrong, but "Hard" means that the problem isn't provably nonpolynimial or not, it just seems to be. Some problems are proven nonpolynomial... I think they're just called NP. We know a computer can't do them.
Data East: "Leaders in Dot Matrix Technology" - Star Wars pinball
I'm a little curious as to how they're going to 'distribute it via Gnutella'. Gnutella is just a bunch of clients talking to each other and sharing files. So I guess SightSound is going to stick a bunch of Microsoft 'enhanced' and 'protected' files on their client and leave it connected to Gnutella full-time? And how are they going to be sure people pay for it? "Please visit our website, pay us some money and then launch Gnutella and download our files." -- Why the hell not just download it from their website or FTP site? Gnutella seems like an uneeded step here. If you don't intend for your files to be access and spread about the all of the connected machines and shared users, what is the point of using Gnutella beyond publicity?
Am I making sense here? Is gnutella going to say that you can't download their files and make them available on your Gnutella connection? If so, what is the point? And if they let you put them on your machine to share with other Gnutella users, but they require a fee for viewing the files or using them, who is going to bother wasting their own precious bandwidth and storage to host SightSounds big video files? To hell with that.
All I can say is GIMMICK - GIMMICK - GIMMICK. They saw a great chance for publicity and ran with it.
On another note, from the article:
"It's somewhat irresponsible for (SightSound) to be pushing a software that's fundamentally insecure as this," he said.
Insecure? By that logic, every machine and person connected to a network or the internet in any way whatsoever is irresponsible. What is irresponsible is being stupid enough not to run a scanner over your downloads if they're executable or just launching everything with a fun-sounding name because you're a bit too clueless to know better.
I say, don't download their crap. Make them wish they'd never bothered to waste their time getting on Gnutella and send them back to serving that crap from their own servers, unless they plan to start sharing the files with all Gnutella users and sharing profits with them for any files delivered to the end-consumer via their (the random Gnutella user's) private Gnutella hosts.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
this is going to fail the same way microsoft's secure music codec did. if grabbing the unencrypted output of a sound device is really the work of "hackers", then i can't wait to h4x0r the temporary file the movie streams to after decryption.
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
But--you could embed the next key inside of the message, it'd still be OTP.
However, if one of the keys is cracked by force, they can access all future messages. In fact, they could probably crack past messages, since they now have part of the plaintext of the previous message, so they can more easily crack that message.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
IF you can run a debugger on the code, then you can break any encryption that any program can come up with. I believe this is a variant of the class of problems known as NP-Hard. I have only heard about this in passing (I'm not really a programmer, I just dabble a bit occasionally), but as far as I know, NP-Hard is jargon for 'provably impossible'.
No matter what a program attempts to do, if you can sit on top of it and watch its internal functioning and code, you can duplicate its responses, spoof the other side, and crack the encryption. All encryption does is protect data IN TRANSIT.
Basically, to make this kind of file-sharing work, SightSound will need to go to some kind of tamper-proof hardware encryption/decryption. This can certainly be done (and often is), but it is very expensive. Intel is in the process of designing tamper-proof encryption into its next generation of video cards and digital display devices. Those will be HARD to crack.
But as far as I know, ANY software encryption is breakable. If you can see how the decode process works, you can duplicate it.