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SDMI Officially Reports on SDMI Hack
A reader sent us the press release that the Secure Digital Music Initiative folks have put regarding the hack SDMI challenge. They are stating that three out of the five were not cracked, contrary to earlier reports, and that of the two that were cracked, one was not a replicable event. Meanwhile, Salon has continued their coverage of the whole shebang.
The only consideration is that this group hasn't submitted their technical information (which automatically excludes their attempt from being considered). Now I don't know about most skeptics, but when a group of this stature claims to have done something, I would guess that they were being sincere - how many universities would allow research groups to do work on something like this and then make false claims?
UBU
The music industry blindly believes that as long as you can't make a perfect digital copy, their investment of millions into a protection scheme is a good one.
The music industry is wrong..Nobody seems to mind all the fairly crappy (compared to 'perfect digital copies') MP3 rips on Napster. Nobody will mind a protected song going to over high quality analog and being redigitized back into an unsecured format (Ogg or MP3).
It is all an exercise in futility and corporate self-ass-protecting.
I have less and less faith that people like those behind SDMI, the DMCA, Library/School filtering, etc. can loose. Yes, thus far people with reasonable, intelligent, knowledgeable positions have been able to hold all that money in check, but I just don't see how that situation can continue. What isn't technically possible _will_ be legislated into effect by people with the resources and desire to see it so.
What those who rose to the SDMI challenge did, if I'm to understand the implications of the end to the DMCA commentary period correctly, is now a felony. It is my understanding that even the Princeton team, a legitimate academic research effort, put themselves at risk of ending their careers by participating in this overtly sanctioned exercise in reverse engineering.
If the mind-blowing amount of money behing initiatives like SDMI can't create a technical solution, you can guarantee that it will realign to bring about a legislative solution, and once that's done, that money will move toward financing enforcement. The truly sad part is that we're already moving into the enforcement phase, and neither of the two possible next presidents have displayed any willingness to curb the trend. As the subject says, SDMI will win, not because of its technical superiority, but because there's too much money working to guarantee that it does.
I've been a cynic for a long time, but I've never seen so much to be cynical about as I have in the past year on the internet.
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
All hacks to SDMI attempted so far have been made without access to the watermarking algorithm. If SDMI is ever released to the public, however, someone will reverse engineer the algorithm--and post it on the web for all to see. As soon as that happens, SDMI will almost certainly be cracked more or less completely. The current contest wasn't at all close to a real-world test.
Everyone was trying to boycott the challenge earlier, thinking that if we let them release, we'll break it after it's official. Then some people broke it (for the most part. Not forgetting that it's impossible to secure anyway). Now, they're saying it wasn't broken and are moving ahead anyway! That's the impression I get.
Sounds like a good deal to me.
Jason
Why should i use SDMI when i already have MP3!
(If you live in the US: ) Easy. MP3 will be found to be an illegal bypass of the security measures found in SDMI and will be declared illegal. So will the CDs you own. And any tapes. And the concept of Fair Use will be thrown out. Just prepare yourself
(If you don't live in the US: ) Try not to laugh too hard at our stupid coporate laws.
This is supposed to be great art. So why does it look like a bunch of decapitated naked people? -- Calvin
It is incredibly naive of them to consider a hack on SDMI unsuccessful because professional sound engineers could hear the difference in the watermark-hacked version!!! Especially in the case mentioned in the article where it was a 2-1 vote, meaning one of these professional sound engineers out of 3 didn't hear the distortion.