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Copy Protection Galore
Kirk writes: "SecurityFocus is reporting that the cable industry submitted an FCC filing last week indicating that digital cable systems will use a patented, Hollywood-approved copy protection scheme called Dynamic Feedback Arrangement Scrambling Technique (DFAST). Under the scheme, HDTV-compatible recorders will refuse to tape movies, shows and sports events that have a 'don't copy' bit set. Consumer electronics makers fear an end to fair use rights, but cable companies will force compliance with DVD-style licensing agreement and the DMCA." And the Register notes that all hard drives will include copy protection by next year, under a plan put forth by the manufacturers to please the entertainment industry. Alan Cox doesn't like it, but Alan Cox doesn't call the shots here. T13.org has more information, including the specifications and some presentations explaining the system.
Absolutely, the US consumer has a right to make a backup. Time-shifting and other reasons for copying things have also been declared fair use, and are therefore legal.
However, this does not mean that the manufacturer or content provider is obligated to provide you with the means to do so. And, because of the DMCA, they can put in specific measures to prevent such things, and prosecute us for breaking them. They aren't prosecuting us for making the copy, they're prosecuting us for breaking the copy-protection.
It's called having your cake, and eating it too.
Why not? You can't record to CD's, but they became mainstream. I think you're living with your head in the clouds if you don't think DVD's will become mainstream. I would say that in some places they already are mainstream! I presume you don't own a DVD player, but if you did, you might find the difference between them and VHS is similar to that between CD and audio cassette (I have over 200 cassettes, which I've hardly listened to since I bought CDs... I can't stand them). The only reason I can see to have VHS is tape the TV (which I might want to do twice a year, and could live without as the TV is full of shite), or in video cameras.
Send it around as an email attachment, and we hackers get more undeserved bad press.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I think there is only one final solution to this: give up on the mass media. Yes, you heard me. No more Hollywood-movies (no great loss). No more Britney Spears (who cares). No more mindboggingly stupid game shows (what a relief!).
:-) And if they tighten the thumbscrews on that as well, there's always wireless. Not through some sleazy company, but through a collaborative wireless 'amateur' network like they're building in Seattle.
Does this mean you can not listen to music anymore? Of course not! People will still make music, and they'll probably still publish that music for wider consumption in 'canned' (or downloadable) formats. They may want to be paid for the privilege, and they will.
But the 'media industry' is on a fast track to extinction they way their heading right now.
Think I am joking?
I'm not. Guess who got rid of his TV set last month? I still have cable, but that's for my modem
OK, they can buy some laws to outlaw all this, and we'll find some other means to connect. As long as the true '1984' vision of forced television consumption does not come true, there is a way out. And should such a scheme ever come to pass, well you only have to read Orwell to learn how it will end...
"Omnis enim res, quae dando non deficit, dum habetur et non datur, nondum habetur, quomodo habenda est."
--frank[at]unternet.org
No way:
SCSI is terribly, terribly expensive in comparison. And it's the *principle* of the matter, because once it's been done with ATA, it'll be done with SCSI, it's just a matter of time.
No, this has to be seen for the very, very bad idea that it is. This is about *control*.
And what's to keep them from denying storage of all unsigned/unvalidated media? Let's meditate on why having all media centrally approved is *bad*.
grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
(Oops...that should have been " Lack of Physical security is no security".)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Look, things don't work like that article sounds. How does it know it's an MP3? Unless the OS tells it? does it find the file format? In FAT32? How about exfs2? or can't you use multiple formats? A hard drive you can't format would be a new idea of silly, but would have to be where they're going.
Sure, go crazy, but I wouldn't worry to much. A unique ID sucks - but you can't impliment copy protection without the OS, or the backup checker, or whatever. My theory is that INSTALLERs might check that value - to keep count. Backup managers MIGHT... etc. Although MSFT says they won't, which makes it useless.
But the worst-case scenario is enabling things like SDMI to work like they're supposed to more often - i.e. requires your HD to have the right "magic key" or else you can't play the DOWNLOADED music - which doesn't stop you from ripping MP3s. and yes, then you would lose those things when your HD crashed - but it only works for encrypted content that you can't break - and a decrypter that LOOKS for it....
more likely, it'll just be an addition to text books and a few specific pieces of software... and those will be things like SDMI that no sane person would go near, anyway. Don't buy SDMI - that's about the sum of it.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
The Register understands there is fierce opposition to the plan from Microsoft and its OEM customers.
Interesting... I agree with Microsoft for once... though for obviously different reasons...
-----
"Cut word lines. Cut music lines. Smash the control images. Smash the control machine." - William S. Burroughs
I will certainly grant that this misfeature provides some wonderful exploits for the nefarious. After all, how long will it be before some hacker constructs a WinTel virus that marks the whole disk as being "copy protected," thereby rendering it into so much chaff from the perspective of anyone that was planning to actually store data on it.
Western Digital, Quantum, Seagate, and friends will be gloriously happy at that one; it's a wonderful opportunity to sell people more disk drives.
But as for the number of ways that this is a Spectacularly Stupid Idea, I'm not sure I have enough fingers and toes to cope with counting it... I'll probably need a Pentium processor, one without the FDIV bug, hopefully!
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
believe it or not, Microsoft actually sells a LOT of their software.. that where all those billions of dollars come from -- what you thought Billy boy just pimps himself? The problem here is that people persist in buying their software even though there is cheaper and (sometimes) better software available. Most people don't even know that their software is bad/expensive or that Free alternatives exist. This is a lack of education and for every dollar of venture capital that this years linux companies spend on programming should be spent on informing the public.
How we know is more important than what we know.
seems to say "Dont buy my hard drive, buy my competitiors from overseas"
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Convince him that the copy protection scheme would cost consumers & businesses billions of dollars and only benefiting the Hollywood entertainment industry, you know, the guys that dump money on the Democrats by the truckload. Then point out that fighting this would help drain the coffers of your opposition's donors and would be backed by large numbers of individuals and businesses. I'm not much of a political hack, but if this could be protrayed as a way to screw the Democrats and look like a hero to consumers, you would have W going for it in a heartbeat.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
The entertainment industry isn't trying to fight "piracy" at all - they're using it as an excuse for a power grab. Currently, its perfectly legal to record Babylon-5 or the super bowl off cable with your VCR and keep the tapes around as long as you want to watch whenever you want. Of course, this puts a big dent in their profits, as anyone who does this isn't likely to buy the official videos that are almost always sold.
You can bet that, if this goes through, every single show on every station that can get away with it will have this bit set.
I'd argue the exact reverse of who should be allowed to set the bit - cable shouldn't be allowed to, as they've already gotten their money from me. Broadcast should be able to, as I'm getting reception for free.
-RickHunter
Nit: DMCA was passed by a anonymous voice vote. For all practical purposes, it is unanimous, but we have no idea whom the dissenters were because that was not recored.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
1)Bios-wipe the disk clean. Wipe it with a friggin' magnet, if it won't let ya do it through official channels.
One problem with the magnet: Most hard drives made since 1992 (and all voice coil drives ever made, with the possible exception of certain older Quantums) keep servo and tracking information on the disks, as well as extra firmware and things like the drive serial number and defect map. Unless you *really* know what you're doing (and have access to equipment that can talk directly to the heads on the drive; a clean room is helpful too), taking any sort of magnet to a modern drive would cause damage only the factory could fix.
-lee
Information wants to be free.
The corporations want to dominate our content, but why do we need them to? Without the huge chunk of profit these corporations take from artisits, why will the artists stick with this?
And why would the people tolerate this? They will not, and the corportations like the idea, because it keeps us trapped in their distributional paradigms.
But we can just push forward with our own.
Free content.
Free music given away on Napster, web sites, etc.
Free stories and novels given away for the masses to enjoy.
What kind of content can we expect? The odd, the fringe, probably not the best. But the people will grow more and more dissatisfied, and the fringe will grow. People will find ways to pay the creators, beyond just advertising support. T-shirts, small print run books, etc.
A perfect example of this new paradigm is web comics. The web comics make money off merchandise, from books to t-shirts to mousepads.
It will be a low start, but eventually quality content will leave the domain of multinational corporations and return to the people.
Burris
so what you're saying is that you dont know of a single person who has bought a computer in the last five years. Where do you live? South central?
How we know is more important than what we know.
"And if you store data using Ext2 filesystems, or ReiserFS filesystems, or BSD filesystems, or ... ad infinitum, and don't mark blocks as protected, this prevents me from storing data on the disk precisely how?"
Simple... The MPAA/RIAA will go back to their favorite puppet, "Judge" Kaplan and get Linux/BSD and anything else that can use ext2 illegal as a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. Furthermore, the Linux source code, as it contains this "illegal" code.
Scary shit. This demonstrates how dangerous rogue judges are, and why the power of the judiciary needs to be curtailed and accountability increased.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Nit: DMCA was passed by a anonymous voice vote. For all practical purposes, it is unanimous, but we have no idea whom the dissenters were because that was not recored.
Simple way to fix that: ask. Pick up the phone and ask what their vote was on the bill. Mind you DMCA was probably a rider on a totally unrelated bill, probably a disaster-relief bill or Protection Of Children And Puppies act.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Once again, the whole point is that if you are paying for cable, you should be able to time-shift. Guilty until proven innocent.. this is what corporations want you to think is the correct way to deal with copyright protection.
--
Alan Cox doesn't like it, but Alan Cox doesn't call the shots here.
You silly Linux people. Always pulling out your Alan Cox at the last minute.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Wouldn't this pretty much make TiVO unusable?
My question is, what to do about somethign like this. There are a couple of options, Boycott, letter writing to the companies, and writing your congressman.
I'm working on a website to assist with all of those, however I'm not yet very good at figuring who to write and exactly what to say.
If you know who to write or what to say, check out http://openadvocacy.net and email me suggestions.
Get involved
It's the 21st Century Do you know what your government is doing
Over the past few years, they've stepped up the effort by buying laws that trounce over consumer rights, and promoting technologies that they have sole control over. They have even gained the influence to use law enforcement agencies and the like to their whim.
All the while, America is becoming more and more of a police state where we are being forced to give up many liberties so that these media companies can make more money off of us.
I'm quite afraid that the world of the future will be one where everyone is a meaningless drone of these corporations. We're definately on our way there, it seems, when Hollywood has a say in if or not I can copy a file between computers.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
but I wonder what the odds of a class action or other suit would be?
After all, they would not be forcing us to buy *their* hard drives etc. We could always buy someone else's, Right? Except that someone else's also has the same junk. And everyone has conveniently stopped carrying the older technology at the same time. Complete with re-designed controller cards, motherboards, etc. Everything else would be "obsolete"
Further on down the road, can you imagine:
We obviously need to get a law passed ensuring Our property rights, and ensuring our ability to do the things we need to do.Strangely enough, according to the Register article, even Microsoft is upset with this. Maybe we need to make an alliance with them on this? [shudder]
Agreed, it sounds paranoid now, but who knows about later?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
such interception and devices would be outlawed by the DCMA, you're busted dude!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Basically, HDTV is dead, if this is true.
People will stick with their old analog TV's and VHS recorders when they find out what HDTV takes away from them.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This will be very alluring to hard drive manufacturers. The Sony's of the world will simply say - "you want us to put your drives in our box that will be sold into 200 million homes worldwide? You put our spiffy little device on it."
Smaller players will be crushed by the bigger players due to the revenue differential.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I don't LIKE this idea, but I do have to acknowledge that copyright holders should be able to protect their works to some extent without trampling fair use. And as I stated before, it shouldn't be on the consumer side where they fight this.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
H4X0Rdrives, inc., announces its new line of SuperMFM/166 and ESDIPlus! hard drives.
--
I can buy liquor. I could consume it responsibly, or I might drive drunk and kill somebody, But society recognizes my free will as an individual and lets me take whatever action I deem acceptable, along with the consequences that follow that action. I will go to jail if I drive drunk, but I am allowed to drive drunk if I choose. I can buy a gun. I could use it to hunt and feed my family or I could use it go on a shooting spree, but society recognizes my free will as an individual and lets me take whatever acton I deem acceptable, along with the consequences that follow that action. I will go to jail and possibly get executed if I shoot somebody, but I am allowed to go on a shooting spree if I choose. I can't buy a DVD and use DeCSS to decrypt it. I could play my decrypted copy legally or I could become a pirate and start selling it, but society does not recognize my free will as an individual, and prevents me from taking action they deem unacceptable, Whether I choose to take that action and the consequences that go with it is not a choice I am allowed to make. I will not be allowed to decrypt the DVD. One day, I won't be able to a book written by written by Karl Marx and read it. I could read it and study ideas of alternative economies, or I could read it an decide to overthrow the government. But society will not recognize my free will as an individual, and will prevent me from taking action they deem unacceptable. Whether I choose to take that action and the consequences that go with it is not a choice I am allowed to make. I will not be able to buy the book written by Karl Marx.
Ah, but we have one thing the 'content cabal' doesn't have: votes.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
How about using the legal system aginst anyone that makes these drives. Lets say Segate make a drive with these "features" so you can't make backups. Right now Seagate's liability is limited because they tell you to make backups. If you can't do that because of their new feature, then they waive their imunity to liability. Seagate with full liability for their product is a dead company.
It won't be needed. Existing drivers won't enable or use the CPRM feature (though the next release or service pack of a certain software product may end up having them included in its drivers). So your Linux boxen will be safe because you can make sure that CPRM usage doesn't get added. I don't know about Macs, but I certainly worry about Windows.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
First of all, this whole scheme is intended for media recording devices, such as TiVo, not for computers. The intention is to make it so that a movie recorded on the media cannot be played elsewhere, or copied by means other than what the media recording device permits.
That said, the answer to your question is this. The media recording device will interact by sending a challenge hash to the drive, which encrypts it and sends back the result. This is essentially authenticating that the drive really does have CPRM implemented, enabled, and activated. The software emulator, not having the necessary keys, won't be able to complete the challenge, and the media recording device will know it does not have CPRM media (it may still function at some level without such media, for example to record only movies without copy protection).
CPRM further is intended to prevent taking the hard drive media to a computer and copying individual files or cloning the whole drive to make an uncontrolled copy. The way this is done is via the encryption which will be different for every drive. Although the computer can use the CPRM device commands to access the read/only area, it won't have the recorder keys to make any sense of it.
Swapping an older controller onto a newer drive with the same platter configuration may not work, as the recording of the keys, and possibly of all the data on the platter space, could be done with a totally different low level format which the older controller would not understand. The best you could hope for is being able to use the older controller to low level format the platters, but that would wipe off all the keys, so all you now have in a drive w/o CPRM.
In it's current spec, CPRM is NOT something that interferes with normal computer functions, aside from reducing available capacity by 1 megabyte (get it back by low level formatting with an older controller, if you know how to) and increasing the cost by $0.17 or less. Whatever is written on the drive w/o the use of CPRM will read back the same on any computer. So you can still store "freed" movies on the drive with your BSD or Linux machine, and quite possibly even with Windows.
This copy protection mechanism requires cooperation between the recorder (subject to laws requiring implementation of copy protection logic) and the media (not subject to those laws). The recorder could be implemented to not record copy protected content on media that doesn't implement CPRM, and this would probably be it's way to be compliant with the law. Non-CPRM media can still be made, but may not work in new recorders. Manufacturers of the hard drives will probably be happy to implement this on at least some of their production to sell to the media recorder market. They may also implement it on the entire production line simply to save inventory and production scheduling costs which would likely be more than the patent royalties involved, knowing that normal computer functionality is not impaired.
What crackers will be seeking to do is extract and crack the keys, and probably implement some device that goes between a recorder and the media to completely fake the recorder into believing it has CPRM compliant media. What gets recorded may then be in the clear, or may at least be cloneable. Other potential cracks could be the ability to make a successful clone by emulating a media recorder with 2 interfaces and no copy protection. Whether crackers can crack these keys remains to be seen. Maybe the movie industry has learned and is using larger keys. OTOH, crackers have been way more resourceful than most of us have expected prior to successful cracks.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There's going to be a mad rush of people trying to get their TIVO's before this copy protection scheme is adopted.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
The DVD thing is pretty bad for those who use them. But DVD players are still not quite mainstream. It's a realm of geeks and the upper-middle classed. Many of them don't even care about region coding because they do their shopping down at the local store.
But start messing with TVs, and the people will care. Of course, that's assuming HDTV really takes off. We've been waiting for that to happen for years. So maybe what I'm really saying is "In 5 or 10 years, when this technology is outdated enough to be mainstream, then it will be bad enough to work up the masses".
I'm not bitter. No sir, not me.
Got Warez?
so, if they make HD copy protected... will it be illegal to make aour own backups?
Hash Bang Slash Bin Slash Bash
I think that those folks who advocate the elimination of intellectual property rights should think carefully about the results.
A lot of the impetus behind copy protection of this sort is due to the problems that companies are having with out and out piracy on the internet and in countries that do not do anything to enforce IP rights. When the legal systems fail to protect IP, companies are forced to take other measures to protect their businesses.
The unfortunate side effect is the demise of 'fair-use' in the sense of home copying and viewing.
I know that this may not be a popular view on slashdot, but if you were a creative content author, I think you might have a rather different opinion.
This sort of action (and keeping technologies secret) are in fact are a large part of why the Constitution has support for IP laws written into it. The fact that these IP laws are not sufficient to protect IP authors in this day and age is a very real threat to the free flow of information and the economic incentives to create content.
Some kid from russia will eventually break it, and you'll be able to get cheap modded recorders from asia :p
/me can't wait till they start selling DVD's for 2$ in asia .. (like VCD's)
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
I'm by no means an electronic or mechanical genious, but I've got a decent general knowledge and I've spent quite a bit of time tinkering around inside VCR's and the like. Given adaquate time and motivation, I could figure out how to bypass something as simple as a "do record/don't record" restriction. Its been done on the Playstation without too much difficulty, and a great many consumers were able to mod their systems.
I don't think this will ever come to pass though. VCR's are used primarily for the purpose of recording television shows and movies so they can be viewed at a later time. This is called fair use. Yes, I know that the term is losing ground quickly, but its not the only thing we have working in our favor. People actually LIKE the ability to record their TV shows and movies. They've grown accustomed to it over the years and to suddenly yank that ability away from them will NOT result in a favorable market response.
Those of you in the "industry" better take notice. Television, movies and the like.... they have a long history and are enjoyed by most of the population. But many people are and/or will find other means to entertain themselves as time goes on. Tactics such as these will NOT help draw them back to you every night, but instead will drive them further away. What is it you're trying to protect? You may have a monopoly on your "product" but if nobody wants it anymore, what good will it do you?
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
1)Bios-wipe the disk clean. Wipe it with a friggin' magnet, if it won't let ya do it through official channels.
2)Partition, install Linux
3)Put a minor hack in your FS that's designed to "escape out" any attept to embed magic disk instructions in files in a way they can't necessarily anticipate and try to trap.
Problem solved, and commercial PoliceStateWare becomes yet more unattractive for Joe Consumer next to free software.
The first question that occurs to me is, "Just who do they think they are?" I don't like to see people put the kibosh on Fair Use rights (or even my ability to grab something off the tube so I can watch it when I am home, or something).
I guess it all comes back to corporate control...I always knew there was more to HDTV than met the eye, and I wondered why, ever since I heard about it, alarm bells were going off in my head. Now I know.
Am I ahead of the Weltanschauung, or what?
Interrobang
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
there is already a bit of discussion at arstechnica on the message boards
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
A question: what incentive do the hard drive makers have to support the "secure" hard drive format? If anything, it will hurt them because people will be worried about not being able to store "media" on them. Possibly, they may be worried, that "everyone else" will follow the new scheme, and their drives will be incompatible.
Whatever happens, it sucks for us, the consumers. And I won't even go into my complaints about possible licensing for the proprietory technology for the "branding" of the drives.
-mdek.net
Copy protection schemes simply don't benefit the consumer; until they do, there will be no reason for consumers to support the products that contain these schemes over products that don't. We just need to make sure that consumers do have a choice.
Would you like to pet my Penguin? The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
The firmware in a new drive will refuse to store data if it contains a "don't store me" message. Actually, it's a single bit, but I want to generalise the technical issue to allow for more sophisticated (e.g. cryptographic or stegged) signalling.
It seems to me that if the HD firmware never sees the no-copy message because cfs (or PGPdisk) has encrypted it, then the firmware can't do anything but assume that it's okay to store. Treating all data as no-copy by default would be the only counter-measure to this, and that would defeat the whole point of a HD. I can't see any manufacturer (or OEM or anyone else) falling for that.
Do tell me if I've misunderstood the technical issues.
Nice post, but you use a disturbing phrase: consumer rights.
In the United States, citizens have rights.
Rights are not earned by consuming a requisite amount of mass-manufactured corporate pabulum.
Corporations want us to act like consumers (of course), not like citizens (of course).
Once we start meekly thinking of ourselves as "consumers" (rather than as entitled citizens) and possessed of rights on that basis (rather than because it is our goddamn country), we're already far, far down the wrong road.
DeDFAST
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
When people find that their mainstream hard drivers don't have the functionality they want, they'll simply buy hard drivers from smaller manufacturers. No big surprise there -- we already saw the same thing happen to Circuit City's ill-fated TiVo. I don't see how this situation merits such doomsday predictions; it might be inconvenient, but people aren't stupid. They know what to buy, and it won't be copy protected hard drives.
Remember, ultimately, companies are dependent on your dollar to keep them in business. Don't like their products? Don't buy them, and watch everything start to change.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
Not only that, but the supreme court has ruled that "time shift" recording is completely legal. The MPAA already got bitchslapped by the supreme court in their suit against VCR manufacturers. This is no different, it's just a digital medium as opposed to an analogue one. I highly doubt we'll ever see this scheme implemented in consumer devices.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
"Heh. Except that judges are the only thing protecting us from bad laws.
The problem is the people getting bad, corporate-bought or unconstutional laws passed, not the "rogue judges" who enforce those laws. You're absolutely right about what needs to be done, but lets say we do it-- who will protect us from the DMCA (which is "law", even if it is an illegal one) now? The George W. Bush-appointed supreme court?"
Kaplan and other judges who refuse to obey the law need to be accountable. The DMCA is clearly illegal based on previous precedent, AND the Constitution (which trumps ANY statutory law). Now only did he find in favor of the DMCA, he EXTENDED it (made more new bad law) by putting a gag order on people's speech, AND making hyperlinks illegal.
ALL government, not just judges need to be reigned in. You can vote out congressmen and presidents, but Federal judges are unelected and serve for life. Therefore, their power should be the MOST limited of the three branches. Their sole role should be in striking down bad laws where it conflicts with the Constitution.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
technically, it's not "illegal",
just "impossible" w/o breaking the DMCA.
It's like someone saying "we can't
legally stop you from reading a book,
but oh, by the way, we've padlocked
all of them."
(i know, the analogie's not that good...
i'm tired).
worse than this though,
something no one seems to have mentioned:
if these new hd's are incompatible
with the old ones, even over a network,
even with "normal" files,
does that mean floppies will have to
be re-done also?
so how does that work?
the way I see it,
either this would make all the old
floppies I have useless....
or they rig something where the keys
are stored on disk...
but that's stupid, as ANYONE
could easily grab them.
Eitherway, the emperor only have clothes
once there are _no_ children around
to say otherwise.
But since there are children now,
and they can't kill all of them...
I don't see how they can truly
protect this datastream,
no matter how scrambled it is.
-Slackergod
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
... go out and buy that stack of 60 and 70 Gig drives now...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
How do you tag files as being copiable/non-copiable without patching the OS?
Like if *ALL* OS manufacturers will patch their OSes for that. Like if *ALL* OS manufacturers will patch their OSes for that in countries that are rabid supporter of "fair use" (i look in the general direction of Deutshland).
This means that you have to seed the data with a particular bit pattern that would be recognized as a go/nogo signal by the drive, as the data is broken up in OS-sized sectors.
And what if you have a "driver" that intercepts those particular bit patterns and turns it in a go signal all the time?
This must be a troll or a hoax of a higher order, I just can't believe how this could be implemented worldwide. Maybe in the US, but certainly not worldwide.
--
Game over, 2000!
This is about to throw RAID, backup and encryption software into a cocked hat along with OS support for these drives.
M$ now has every other OS by the short and curlies? You can't reverse engineer it. That's now illegal. All M$ have to do is pay the manufacturers to NOT write drivers for any other OSs and they competition is dead.
Sun and Solaris? Never heard of 'em!
Apple OS X, BSD? Hunh?
All those x86 machines running Linux software? Wha..?
And this is to protect ephemera. Face it, is anything as dead as "Rugrats, the movie" or "Tarzan and the Green Godess"?
But you'll be carrying a few megs of crap on your hard drive to ensure that the wrong solution is applied to protecting it, from you. Oh yeah... And your OS better be able to decrypt it.
The next millenium is starting off really lousy.
Somebody shoot me.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I really don't understand how can they make it work at all..
by blocking *.mp3 to be copied? so we'll call it *.mpeg3. by not letting you copy DivX movies? rename it. These format doesn't add some "copy protections" on the files...
What else? Windows Media files? bullshit. I can immitate today a "windows player" which is actually a script file that pulls the data and identify itself as a WMA player. It's not that hard..
I really don't understand this purposal. Are they that naive? it will be hacked within 1 week and there will be Windows/Linux/other-os's patches/firmwares/drivers that will bypass this stupid copy-protection.
Then why bother?
They tried it in the 80's (copy protection on 5.25" floppies), in the 90's (remember Dongles?) and it was hacked all over and appeared then on BBS's, and now with the net it will take much shorter time - all you need is 1 or 2 15 years old bored kid and he'll hack it...
lame corps.. go figure
Hetz (Heunique)
Almost no hard drives, IDE or SCSI, do a true low level fomat these days. This is due to the way that servo information is embedded in each track on the disk. You need a special piece of equipment to do a true low level format.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This won't stop the professional bootleggers who get their copies even before the studio (I've seen bootleg daylies!)
Its going to screw that bored 15 year old though. Every drive will carry several tracks full of encryption code (including who owns it and what's on it?) Catching the kid may be as simple as a simple database lookup.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I note that only ATA drives are mentioned. SCSI would seem to have been overlooked for the moment.
They will enable it first, and then go to court, in which they will loose. Then they'll either turn off the bit, or replace the hardware.
Now my question is, who the hell are these people, and when will Slashdot interview them?
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
At what point did consumer rights just completely disappear? What happened to the idea that you try to please your customer? Where did that mentallity disappear to?
I do not understand how this kind of garbage keeps happening. We used to have, under "fair use", the right to "time-shift" any publicly accessible media. Television and radio shows, broadcast movies and sporting events were allowed to be recorded by law. So, how do the media companies propose to remove the capabilities that the legal systems says are perfectly allowable? By introducing a "no record bit" in the signal. These proposals (well, they are more than proposals now aren't they? But I refuse to call them "standards") are seriously just another attempt to gather more money.
But the thing that the industries involved here don't understand is that they are only going to hurt themselves in the end. Now, all of the people that have to work during their favorite shows will not only not be able to record those shows to watch them later, but they won't be able to watch them at all. How does that improve viewership of the shows that these companies claim are so important to their livelihood? If we have an evening where we are busy and we can't watch our favorite show, we can't watch that show at all. Forget about recording it because the industry says that's piracy. Be a good little consumer and sit in front of your TV when we tell you to. Well, what if we have lives beyond our television, but we still want to watch our favorite shows? Sorry, that's no longer allowed.
It just seems utterly ridiculous to me that companies keep thinking that by "getting tighter control" of their media they are going to make more money. All they are doing is wasting a lot of money on things that are going to garauntee lower viewership, alienating viewers, and pissing people off in droves. The electronics market will suffer. The consumers will suffer. And eventually, when people get so sick of trying to find ways to watch their favorite shows that they stop watching altogether, the media companies themselves will suffer.
Well, that doesn't really hurt my feelings too much. But it is amazing to see so much money wasted on something that is so utterly stupid. But, it seems stupidity is the only thing these companies are good at anymore. Once a business hits a certain size, that's it. You cannot be big and still play smart. It just doesn't seem to work.
Now, having said all of that, is it possible that the FCC will reject this? It would be nice if there were that much common sense in a government agency. The whole intention of agencies like the FCC is supposedly to uphold the law of the land. The law of the land says that time-shifting is allowable. But the law of the green (as in the green of the money of the kickbacks the FCC is bound to be getting from the industries involved) says that time-shifting is just another way of sayhing "piracy". However this turns out, I'm sure it will be another "consumers are evil, business is good" turn of events.
At what point will business realize that people are not evil just for being consumers? Legally, at least in the US, you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. But when it comes to business anymore it is automatically assumed that anyone that purchases any good is guilty of the most evil and vile crime that is possible with that good (or broadcast). It is not even thought, even for a moment, that a "consumer" may just be using something as it was intended, or if not exactly as intended, it isn't the evil and disgusting nature of the person causing them to do something "different" (Oh, that's a naughty word now isn't it?). It is just that they need to do it differently or they can't do it at all (especially in the case of recording a show because you aren't home at that time).
But let them do it. Once a few million consumers are pissed off and stop watching/recording their shows every day while they are working, maybe these people will finally wake up. But I doubt it. They will probably just assume that we are illegally tapping into someone else's feed.
------------
I read several peoples rants about how "I'd just go out and buy non-encrypted hard drives" and other such crap. What happens when a law get quietly passed REQUIRING ALL hard drives/OS to support this encryption? Seem a little over the top or unlikely? What would we have/did we say about the DMCA just 5 years ago? It coming and they've gotten smarter about how to get it done. They're not smart, but DeCSS (and WE by opposing them openly) has taught them how to get this kind of thing done. Ask yourself:
If I were a Movie or Recording mogul, what would I want the industry to look like in 10 years? Think about this for a moment.
Isn't it what's already happening?
How?
Because of verbal Congressional votes and lack of education. Don't bitch about the dark. Go light a candle. Ask your Congressman how he voted on this issue. I'm gonna write a descent flyer and start handing them out at movie theaters. I'd ask each of you to do the equivalent.
That's just my opinion.
[John Gilmore wrote about this topic yesterday on several lists. Here's my reaction. I'm curious to hear what others think.]
t ml)
I'm glad that John spent the time and energy to write a good summary of what is going on in the hard disk area. He's spot on about the dangers to our liberties.
But I was quite worried until I began to see the dangers for IBM and Intel in the scheme. This is not an easy play for them because it threatens much of the entire industry in these ways:
1) This is going to increase the cost of using PCs dramatically. Hard disk crashes are going to go from major disasters to utter catastrophes. When the disks go bad, you'll need to buy all new copies of the software, images, movies, and what not. Backing up? Well, that will be another headache that won't be possible without the right permissions. They can wave their hands, but there's no getting around the fact that installing software is going to have plenty of new red tape.
I don't see how they will be able to distinguish between the truth and a lie when a guy calls up and say, "uh, my hard disk crashed. I need to install it on a new machine." They either authorize it or they don't. In fact, they'll probably have to automate the process because it's so expensive to have an actual human on the other end.
My mean time between hard disk failures is about 2 years, but I'm a heavy user. Can we really afford to create a new class of technicians who do special hard disk replacement for 20% of America each year?
2) This really changes the nature of the business. Right now the PC and software manufacturers sell you a box, wave good bye and say, "Good luck." Support is a joke. Actually fixing the machines costs too much money. Anything worth under $400 is essentially disposable.
If they put trusted hard disks in place, then there needs to be someone to care for these disks. They can't just keep waving good bye when you walk out the door. The business model needs to change to be something like cable television. That means hiring thousands if not millions of technicians who will come to your house and fix your hard drive.
3) This is really going to slow innovation and that's really going to hurt IBM and Intel. Already the hardware guys depend heavily on upgrades to keep people buying machines. If people can't move their software to a new zippier computer, then they're not going to buy a new zippier computer. Take a look at the cable television world. Most people are still using 1970's era technology. It just takes too long for the service technicians to go to each house and replace things. But that's the only way you can run the world when you have trusted corrals for special data. You can't just let any schmoe upgrade their hard disk or any schmoe is going to be able to pirate Hollywood movies. Gosh, that's all us proles do all day long you know. Pirate content.
4) This is another opportunity for the open source community to come in and steal market share. If the press reports in Slashdot and other places are to believed, it was only a few months ago that Microsoft marched into the offices at Virginia Beach and asked them to produce the certificates for their copies of Windows. You know, those neat hologram embossed slips of paper. They didn't have one for each PC so they had to pay more than $129,000. (http://slashdot.org/articles/00/12/01/0532206.sh
This is another opportunity for Red Hat or some other Linux box company to walk into companies and say, "Use Red Hat, Mozilla, and Star Office and you'll never have license problems again. The hardware guys claim that they can take care of rights management issues for you. So can we and we cost alot less."
I think this may be the greatest thing that's come along for open source OSs yet. As Princess Leia said in the Hollywood content "Star Wars", "The harder you squeeze your fingers Vader, the more planets slip through the fingers." Do those content wrangling lawyers down there ever look at the content they protect?
http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for information on my book on open source software.
p3@wayner.org
Oh why, oh why, does the the software, and now the hardware industry too, seem to be engaged in a conspiracy to make the lifes of Sysadmins, consultants and legitimate buisness users, miserably beyond belief?
/.'ers, but not for ordinary employees. And it is time consuming; Windows, drivers, getting it networked, Service Packs, hot-patches, Explorer, MS-office, accounting software or whatever, and the extremely annoying reboots in between, not to mention the registration numbers from hell.
Any kind of low level hardware copy protection, is a recipe for distress and disaster, especially in real life enviroments, with mixed legacy hardware and software, upgrades, and hardware failures.
I don't care whether such protection schemes can be broken more or less easily; I deal (and have dealt) with buisness who actually tries to be legal licensvice. Installing modded harddisks, or cracking software, is not really an option on a server, where an hour of downtime, cost more than 10.000$.
And hardware do break down; Sure, the reliability of harddisks have increased tremendously over the years, few people experience hd-failures (and therefore don't do backups), on their own private pc's. But with everything computer related, the perspective changes dramatically with size: with 100 pc's, a hd-failures is something one has do deal with once in a while. With 1000 pc's you might as well have some spare hd's lying around.
Some experiences where copy protection may have been a major hindrance:
1. A lawyer came to us in distress: his laptop was broken and wouldn't boot Windows. The problem was, that he had more than 6 years of bills, bankstatements, accounts, letters, etc on it, without a backup of course. The hd was making funny clanking noises, so speed was of essence, and failure not an option. We managed to transfer the _whole_ content of the hd to another machine, and from there, we could begin to manually recover the data.
2. A server was brought to us in a civil court case; there was suspecion, that someone had tampered with the data on it. Since the machine could wind up in court as materiel evidence, one could not muck around on the hd. So the entire hd, was Ghosted (now a Symantec product) to another machine, and from there we could inspect the data, without compromizing the evidence.
3. Upgrades: An upgrade from WinNT to NT SB edition, or to a new edition of MS Exchange, may go well, or it may not. We have had a few cases of corruption of MS Exchange data when upgrading.
If the costumer has RAID, then one can make an easy rollback in case the upgrade goes wrong (breaking the mirror before upgrading), but if not, having a Ghosted image of the disk system may be a nice substitute. Reinstalling the OS, and restoring data from tape backup, is really the very last option, since it is very slow and errorprone. (We have encountered several instances of "Write only backup tapes" = The log says everything is fine, but it just won't restore).
4. Everyday maintance; employees come and go, pc's break down, Windows get corrupted and must be reinstalled, new pc's are bought, and old ones are handed down the company food chain.
The only sane way of dealing with this, is with some kind hd-image copying software. Not only does it speed up the process, but it ensures some kind of homegenity of the installations.
Installing a pc from scratch (and in the right way) may be trivial for
Since small (and smart) companies rely on extern consultantfirms, the cost and time savings from using Ghost, is significant. If this copyprotection scheme renders such hd imaging software useless, their IT-expenses for mundane tasks like this, may easily trippel.
5. Restoring an entire office from scratch: One of our costumers had their servers (2) and client pc's stolen (25). We managed not only to get new hardware the very same day, but restoring the entire office to functionality during the night. Only one day of downtime. Totally impossible to do without Ghost.
Just interferring with such a fundamental thing as copying is wrong. And how will this copy protection scheme function? What about; Hardware and software RAID, servers with two disk systems; one with, and one without cp-protection. Performance; checking every read and write, even if done in hardware, much incur some overhead. Theft or failure of hardware, then what about keys etc. What about viruses; could one set a permanent "don't copy" bit on a system. What about expanding a logical volume on a server (when adding new disks etc); will this "trivial" task come to a grinding halt, and crash the process. Even if it don't, will bought and paid software, suddenly stop working, just because the disklayout is changed. When called to a computerdisaster, how can one determine, whether the system will allow copying of essential files? Etc., etc.
Maybe some of my fears are ungrounded. Maybe this copy protection scheme will actually work most of the time. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It _will_ mean, that the _entire_ IT-industry around the globe, and everyone involved in it, will have to read up, maintain long extra list of what is doable or not, and how this scheme work or not. Not to mention the gazzillions line of code that (perhaps) would have to be changed. This is the "dreadfull dongle-problem" on a truly massive scale.
This scheme means an entire new class of serious IT-problems, suddenly have appeared. And this without any gain for the costumers. This is a guarantee for higher IT-cost, without any productivity added, not exactly what people need.
And it's impressive how a bunch of well paid managers and pseudo-artists can change the digital landscape in the whole world.
Obviously they have a well formed and powerful lobby. Are American senators aware of how they are affecting (negatively) the future of not only technology, but every basic principle achieved in the last century?
These kind of things should, although they didn't, decide who are your representatives and president. W. Gates III looks naive compared to the Hollywood lobby.
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Good thing I have my FreeBSD drive in dangerously dedicated mode, and don't use any of those standard partitioning mechanisms.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Now seems like a good time to consider the entertainment industry's giants as a big cartel and launch an anti-trust trial at least twice as big as the one we just saw against Microsoft.
May all Actors and Musicians who have been shagged by those industries please take a stand now and help their audience put an end to the industry's disgusting monopoly and their influence on politicians, police and other industries!
--
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Unfortunaly I have to disagree here. This can and will work. For several reasons actually. This isn't like drugs.
See with drugs, they are fairly easy to produce (even the toughest once require little more than a diligent chemist or botanist and a little inginuity - above the ability of the "average man" but not the average "trained chemist")
This means you have laws aimed at stopping the supply and distribution. That never works. You simply can not stop people from obtaining goods that exist, or can be made in sufficient quantities from distributing them.
However, in this case its different, only slightly, but still different. It is a long term process to be done in stages see...because this isn't the law stopping distribution, its the producers.
This is just the first step. They start with little copy protections things. They seem "token" and silly. Easy to bypass, hardly a threat.
Next thing you know, VCRs are a thing of the past, noone makes them. DVDs and DVD recorders replace them. The same for hard drives without copy protection etc.
As time goes on, the switch to HDTV, your VCR dies out, VCRs are no longer produced etc etc. Next thing you know, the majority of devices automagically respect the copy protect bits. You can't even find hardware that doesn't. Old hardware that doesn't is no longer produced...and so supplies will begin to dwindle.
its a stepwise process...eventually it leaves the producer in control. Fair use is gone, not by law but by media control. Check mate, in fact thats a good analogy, cuz its alot like chess....
You can move around, but slowly, your world gets smaller and smaller, they move in, and the next thing you know, your trapped, check mate.
The ONLY things that can stop this are renegade hardware manafacturers. Individuals doing things like "fixing" their own hardware will always be far and few between, wont even show up on the radar.
If they do it slowly enough, then they win, because people will just get used to it, and will just accept the limitations...slowly. People tend to be accepting of slow changes and react violently to fast ones.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
"It's quite simple," said a spokeswoman for the group. "The Human Genome Project was in some financial difficulty, so we stepped in and cut a deal. By leveraging the techonology already in place in hard drive copy protection, we will be preventing unauthorized duplication of humans."
Unauthorized human reproduction -- also known as "childbearing" to hackers -- has been estimated to cost content producers over $3 billion per year. Implementing copy protection at the genome level, the Holy Grail of the industry, is predicted to prevent up to 97% of "childbearing".
But not all industry figures are thought to be onside. Microsoft in particular has been vociferous in its opposition to the plan, saying that it would effectively eliminate the potential market for its software rental scheme.
"We demand the freedom to innovate," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently. "And that means being free to innovate for lots and lots of paying customers."
Free Software Foundation guru Richard M. Stallman was unavailable for comment. A source close to the programmer said he was "scanning the personal ads frantically."
Carousel is a lie!
By next year? HAHAHAHAHAH!!!
From what I understand of this technology, market acceptance is nearly impossible. But if all the big bad corporations get together and cram it down our throats, it'll take absolutely YEARS to make the transition. For example, the first article I read about this indicated that a protected disk and a real disk wouldn't be able to interoperate at all, ie: you couldn't copy a file from one to the other, in either direction.
And at any rate, I can't imagine anything at that low of a level actually working in a meaningful way. An HD processor hardly has the spare cycle to do the heuristics to see if I'm writing an MP3. And it wouldn't know how to read through the filesystem layer anyway.
Call me overly optimistic, but I don't think this will ever happen.
MoNsTeR
The easiest thing to do is simply open two files on the drive, one secured and one insecure. Then, whenever the paranoid app asks to write to the secure file, send that block of data to the insecure file, and send the same block to the secure one. Let the challenge/response mechanism built into the drive satisfy the app's desire to assure that it's talking to the Real McCoy, returning the status codes that come back from the secure file to the app.
As an added bonus, throw in the old BBS download quota bypass, and when the last block of data is written, return an error code to the app, indicating that the file is not correctly committed to disk. Also, you can have the app tell the drive to delete the secure file, releasing one "lock" (some supported schemes allow you to make 3 "portable" copies at a time, requiring verified deletion of a copy before another can be made).
Since the interface to the device has to be well-specified, this sort of approach is how the security will be circumvented. Having a copy of the .DLL will be a violation of the DMCA, of course, but so is having pirate copies of movies. Therefore, a version that can be loaded from a floppy will probably be quite popular.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
What a great law. What a fine bunch of people Americans choose to make their Representatives and Congressmen. What intelligence. Oh how wonderful.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Techies will cry foul, but I think that the legal departments of Western Digital, Maxtor and Seagate will cave in fear of Sony, AOL Time Warner, et all.
You're absolutely right. People who love their freedom and privacy will have no voice until they organize themselves into something big enough to compete with the influence of the megacorps. Something as powerful as the NRA. Maybe it will be the EFF. But how log is it going to take us to do this? And will it come too late?
When they came for the third-strikers who had stolen two bicycles and a pizza, I said nothing, for I don't steal either bicycles or pizza.
When they came for the cable descramblers I said nothing, because I don't watch cable.
When they came for the DeCSS sites I said nothing, because I have VHS and don't need DVDs.
When they came for my hard drive I said nothing, because my computer wouldn't let me.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
You know what the scary thing is? George Orwell was right. A few years too early, but he was right. Ignorance is Bliss, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery, and all that. Perhaps that should read "Slavery is Freedom." It's almost as if the masses want to be controlled; people will take this utter bullshit in stride because it was marketed as a new "feature," perhaps one to protect you against those evil hackers. They'll take away our free music, then our recorded TV shows, then ALL the media that Jack Valenti doesn't want us to see, then our books, and then, well, who knows? Our thoughts? The FBI's Carnivore crap has already proven that our communiucations are not private. And, unfortunately, The Framers of our Constitution got one thing wrong that could cost us everything: privacy is not a right or a liberty in the Constitution, because to them, the thought of privacy being violated in the ways that it can be today was totally alien to them. Perhaps one could argue that your thoughts are your property, and therefore protected by the Constitution, but the Judge Kaplan's of the world won't let that get too far.
So the Judiciary branch won't stop this downward spiral, and Congress sure as hell won't, they're the ones that set it in motion, after all. How about the Executive? Unfortunately, George Dubya hardly has a brain in his head, and the Roe v. Wade opposing conservative justices he appoints certainly won't help matters. Where does the burden fall on, then? The people, of course. I believe it was John Locke who said that if a government was not doing a sufficient job of protecting the peoples rights, the people have a right to replace that government. Let's see some action, people. The John Q. Public's of the world far outnumber the slimy politicians and corporate executives. The masses just have to be educated about how they're being assraped, and I garauntee you, no politician can remain in office if the vast majority of the people don't want him there. Hope lies in the proles, after all.
Yes, they can "copy protect" anything they want, and yes, they can patent any silly idea they want, but THAT WILL NOT stop us who are determined to preserve OUR OWN RIGHTS to find ways in BREAKING their copy protection.
This world function on the basis on SUPPLY AND DEMAND, and if there is ENOUGH DEMAND for a product which BREAKS the so-called "copy protection", there WILL BE people supplying the gadgets to do it.
Nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING is unbreakable.
Law? Legality?
Hey, who cares about legality when the law itself is UNJUST?
Peole who will argue for "obey the law" ought to take a GOOD LOOK at the "Declaration of Independence" signed by the founding fathers of the United States of America, in which, there is - am I am paraphrasing here - something akin to "if the government turns tyrannic, it's the DUTY for the people to TOPPLE it".
So, if the LAW itself is TYRANNICAL, then, it's the DUTY for us, the FREEDOM LOVING PEOPLE, to DO SOMETHING to make that LAW invalid.
If not through legal means, then, by hell, through ILLEGAL MENAS.
After all, the American people who revolt against the British rule over them were deemed by the British as "illegals", and see how America has regain her LEGALITY today?
Everything is relative, LEGALITY is also relative. Something that onces were "LEGAL" may not be legal anymore at another era - things such as slavery were once legal, but now, do you think slavery is legal?
Same thing with the "copy protection" and the "patent" thing - they (the hollywood bigshots) can say that they have the "legal backing" right now, but then, a year, 2 years, 5 years or 10 years from now, who can say if their "current stand" can still be valid or not?
Keep on fighting for our freedom, and DO NOT STOP FIGHTING !
If they want to put stuffs INTO our hard drives, in order to BLOCK US from record something, then, they have infringed on OUR RIGHT TO DO WHATEVER WE WANT with the things WE HAVE SPENT MONEY TO PURCHASE !
THis is THE CRUX of the matter - if we don't stand up for our rights now, sooner or later, those power-hungry monsters will tag on with some other LOUSY SCHEME to further limit our freedom, and who knows what else they will come up with next?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The hard drive copy protection is the most invasive and unfucking believably stupid idea yet.
First of all it issues massive, unprecedented prior restraint. Who says I'm ever going to write copyright protected content on it.
Second, it's a technological heinous crime. You should not ever introduce unnecessary complexity, latency, incompatilbility and additional failure modes to existing technology. Maybe I'm missing something here, but would you even be able to put Linux on such a hard drive? Would the kernel need a license key? It couldn't possibly be that bad. I must be reading it wrong.
I can't imaginge that hardware manufacturers would go along with this. If they are forced by new laws, that would be legislating a bad technology solution to a business model problem. How dumb!
There. Now you have the keys. Modify your driver to copy no matter what. No HD can come with an EULA, and you run a Free OS, right? Then it's legal too
IANAL. YMMV!
--
petard
.sig: file not found
You can still take a controller and put a new set of platters on it. But you have to low level format it so the controller knows the characteristics of the platters. And this inly for a similar platter surface. For unlike surfaces, the controller probably won't be able to work with it. And you'll need the low level software and data, which are probably not in the controller firmware.
Buying a CPRM drive, at this spec level (not sure about any future changes) for my computer won't bother me as long as I have control over the driver to make sure it doesn't use CPRM on me for something (e.g. I'll use BSD or Linux).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You think too small. The media guys already want to make digital monitors have builtin encryption! They noticed that it doesn't matter how good CSS is if a nice clean digital signal is being sent from the computer to the monitor; someone could tap it, so it needs to be encrypted. It's also easy to imagine digital speakers that take an encrypted bitstream.
It's all nonsense anyway. Even if no one cracked the encryption in the usual way, you could always take apart the digital monitor and digital speakers. There has to be some point at which there is a decrypted signal to record! (E.g. in the speakers, you could tap in to the amplifier stage.)
The cyberpunk solution: we must all get implants that decrypt video and sound. This does have its good side: when your boss walks in and finds you playing Quake VI, all she will see and hear is static.
steveh
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Putting copyright protection on the HD, presumably requiring the participation of the OS (not likely in the case of Free software anyway), essentially means that the PC must become a trusted client when running software.
Bruce Schneier (the very same) speaks to the idea of trusted clients in the 15 May 2000 Crypto-Gram. Here he says:
Besides, such a thing would put such a damper on PC sales as to make the last quarter look like a windfall...
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
Boycott and educate! Create your own content (if you can - even if it is only a web-based comic strip, drawn and scanned)! Educate those around you (your friends, family, fellow employees) - especially anybody who doesn't read /.
Talk to people - let them know your feelings, the possible scenarios, where all of this could go, and seems to be going to. Ask them if they want a pay-per-view/listen/read/taste/think world.
Make your voice loud about the issue, especially at places you buy from, so that other customers hear you. Heck, walk up to strangers who are buying DVDs, ask them for a moment of their time, and educate them. Give them a business card with some info (URLs, etc) pointing to what they need - pass them out (business cards are cheap to have made)...
Get involved in some way - any way. Help is much needed.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Fight fire with fire. We need to push for legislation that forbids the sale of technology whose primary purpose is access control and which also has the effect of denying fair use rights. I wish I had more to say about it, but that pretty much sums it up.
My first reaction is, of course, this is terrible, but then I realized, the more they push me away from tv, the more of a favor they are doing me.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Can someone give me one copy protection scheme that actually has worked?
It's called book burning.
-- dR.fuZZo
Since CPRM was not available when TiVo came out, Linux was an option (and a good one for quick cheap delivery to market). Clearly, to implement strong protections against hacking, the system will have to be made unhackable somehow. Whether that is possible or not is a valid question. Today I'd say most people don't have the ability to hack a system entirely integrated onto a single chip, so for now that would be a safe way. In the future that may not be the case when "Mr Chip Cloner" comes on the market in about 10 years.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The media can give the recorder 2 keys. One is its unique public key signed by the media manufacturer. The other is the media manufacturer public key signed by MPAA. The recorder verifies this by having the MPAA public key, verifying the media manufacturer key, then verifying the media key. The same takes place in reverse. Both devices have each other's public key. These keys are now used to conduct a randomized key exchange that man-in-the-middle cannot participate in. That results in a unique session key. If this session key is a strong 256 bit AES key, then I don't see an easy way to crack it with this approach. But I don't know if they actually do this or not.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It is actually legislation (DMCA) that got us into this situation. More laws would just make this situation worse. Ok, today the government would only be regulating certain hated record companies, but experience tells us that government action rarely confines itself to what we originally intended it for. Tomorrow, the power we gave to the politicians will be used for something that hurts us; just look at the DMCA and UCITA for perfect examples. The fact is that corporations have more resources and political clout with which to subvert the law than we do, so increases in government power always benefit such entities. We can clearly see this trend developing as government has become bigger and bigger in America.
We hate it when corporations corrupt the law, and rightly so, because we've seen what can happen. But why is it any more right for us to control the law? And even if it were morally right, would it do what we intend in the long run?
History tells us that the answers are "no" and "no" respectively.
You've then got the moral problem of whether you can force companies to do stuff with their property that they don't want to do. If they sponsor a record or show, then they should have property rights over what they have created, and if you don't like what they do with their rights, then tough! You'd hate it if someone told you what you could and could not do with your property, so why should we have the right to tell the record companies what they can and can't do with theirs?
Experience tells us that the record companies learn best from pain. The way to fix this is to vote with your feet. Don't buy copy protected stuff, don't buy hard drives with the copy protection code on. We shouldn't deal with this by expansions of the power of politicians, which may benefit us today but might choke us tomorrow.
If you want to effect change in government, try and get the DMCA repealed. Show the politicians that the DMCA undermines fair use rights, and that as such it is unconstitutional. Remember that fair use rights are intended to limit the power granted to copyright holders. The DMCA totally goes against that. Destroy the DMCA, and you destroy most of this mess. The record companies will then find that they cannot sustain their tactics. They've tried it before, with video and dual cassette recorders. They'll be just as unsuccessful this time, if the law doesn't help them.
We want less government in this situation, not more.
Windows: Where do you want to go today? MacOS: Where do you want to be tomorrow? UNIX: Are you coming, or what?
Future versions of Windows will only accept drivers which are cryptographically signed, in order to placate the MPAA/RIAA. This is already in the pipeline (if not in WinME) for audio device drivers, to ensure that drivers refuse to write protected content to a file when playing it.
This is another reason why there will never be legal software DVD/LiquidAudio/WindowsMedia for Linux; until somebody writes an API for letting a binary-only user process take over part of the kernel to ensure its integrity. After all, the basic assumption of copy protection is that the customer is a potential thief.
Welcome to the 21st century; your next computer will be less capable than your old one.
The RIAA/MPAA would be hard pressed to argue that an entire operating system is a circumvention device. That would be political suicide for them because they would lose any popular support they have.
...from the penguinhead geeks who already have a rather low opinion of them, and make up 0.1% of the population. The general public, knowing that the PC2002 or whatever spec, along with the latest and greatest version of Windows, turns their computer into a kick-arse entertainment system, won't see the problem with that.
Though outlawing Linux is unlikely to be upheld; we could perhaps see the GPL overruled and binary-only "trusted Linux" becoming the standard, with source code to be available only to certified security professionals.
This is why the FCC, FTC, or any other alleged 'consumer protection' agency, should never have let those mega-mergers go through. Now that the content providers have a lock on distribution, they can dictate the terms of any entertainment transaction. Soon everything will by copy protected and/or encrypted, and of course it will be illegal to even think about breaking that encryption, under the DMCA. As others have noted, even general purpose PC hard drives will have built-in copy protection, with no recourse, alternative, or consumer choice. Every 'view' will be a 'pay-per-view'. Every use will be metered and billed. All in the name of protecting the poor little media companies from the big bad hackers and pirates.
You won't be able to format a drive, because you might be erasing someone's copyrighted content. You won't be able to replace a failed hard drive, because it will be licensed to one PC. You won't be able to copy a file from one PC to another, because it might possibly contain copyrighted material. You won't be able to make a backup, because making a backup would violate the copyright holders license. All software usage will be monitored and metered and billed, pay-per-use.
Welcome to the new world of digital convergence, where nothing will be digital unless it is encrypted and copy-protected. Where every playback device has 'content protection' built into the hardware below the level where any possible hacking could take place. Where the rights of the so-called innocent are sacrificed in an effort to punish the always-presumed guilty.
Welcome to the new world of digital content.
< RANT MODE=STILL_ON >
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
One day someone will tip the authorities off, the police will show up at your door with a warrant, and next thing you know, you're Bubba's new playmate.
Welcome to the Digital Millennium.
The way I understand it, the new-ATAPI hard drives will not be compatible with old-ATAPI drives. You will actually need an "trusted client" OS which has support for the encryption built in (i.e., licensed). And that excludes open-source OSes.
I'm guessing this will be the next step, the only totally sure way of preventing copying is to ban all read-write drives. Soon, you're going to buy a read-only HD with windows pre-installed and that's going to be it.
...
Of course, you'll also need copy-protected RAM and registers, and
What the f... let's get back to our good ol' typewriter/wax cylinder...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The cartel is international; it includes companies such as Sony (remember their hastily-retracted statement about how they will block file sharing at your telco/ISP/in your PC? Well, I'd bet that Sony's engineers have contributed to the copy-protected hard disk standard, or other things still under wraps). The elegant (from their POV) thing about this proposal is that it is independent of US laws, and can be imposed anywhere where PCs are in use.
But all that aside, I do agree that this bit is necessary particularly for cable and premium channel -- broadcast channels should NOT be allowed to set this bit at all because they don't make their money sending data out ot the consumer, they make it in commercials. On the other hand the consumer is paying for the content on the cable stations (ehhh, somewhat), and since it's not broadcasted freely to everyone, there is need to copyright protection. Particularly in the case of premium stations like HBO, etc. However, there should be significant penalties for abusing the don't set bit -- Nick at Nite, for example, has no reason to use it.
What needs to be developed, besides the HDTV equivalent of he VCR, is the TIVO like thing where programs with the 'don't copy' bit set can be recorded locally on the machine but in no way can be pulled to any other device or media. Yes, that means propriatary hardware, but this would take care of fair use time shifting problems for the cable people.
But this is going to the Supreme Court at some point. I'm hoping someone follows the Aussie lead and take DVD region encoding to the Court, and the deCSS case will be taken there as well. The entertainment industry is trying to fight piracy from the wrong end, and instead should be looking more to the problem of offshore data pirates. Once the implications of these 'restrictions' hit JQ Public, there is going to be a major outroar on this.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Perhaps I'll learn how to paint or play piano instead of watching HDTV that I have have no fair use of.
If I don't pay for it I won't have to watch it.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
IMHO, the target market will be consumer oriented products like TiVo. These will have full embedded software that is more difficult to crack into (at least for the average person). If Linux's licensing doesn't allow such embedding, they won't be able to use it, even if a free TiVo clone is there for the taking. As the technology gets better at doing copy protection for these consumer recording devices, it will be harder and harder for open versions of these devices to be safe from being considered violations of the law that requires them to employ copy protection technology.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
However the situation has changed since then (the 1980's). Several factors have come into play which did not exist back then. The first is in the pre Windows days people expected computers to work more or less correctly, and they noticed when copy protection broke their machines. Most computer users raised on Windows 9X don't have any expectation that computers work reliably ; Windows 9X crashes so often that most people accept computer crashes as a fact of life . Most people have never operated a machine which will run for months without a reboot - and don't believe that such a machine can be built.
Secondly Windows has conditioned people to expect that doing anything with a computer involves a fight with the computer to get it to do what the person wants; in the simplistic MSDOS days one gave commands to the computer - and the computer did what it was told without argument - so people noticed when the machine failed to do as told - this made copy protection hassles stand out like a sore thumb.
Under Windows everything you do is a hassle, and people are used to wrestling with their machines to get something done.
Example:
That is what I mean by 'wrestling with the computer'. Because everything in Windows is a hassle adding more hassle to the process is not very noticeable . Don't expect the average person who never does backups anyway to notice that he now can't do backups. Most businesses don't even do backups.
The third factor that has changed is the DMCA. Because most people just obey laws without questioning them - the DMCA has the effect of causing most people to just blindly go along with it; sheep don't mind being herded.
By the way - under the DMCA any hard drive that doesn't have the copy protection scheme is a piece of hardware for circumventing copy protection and thus illegal. That is what the IBM spokesman meant when he said that the scheme would be on all hard drives by next summer - the manufacturers have no choice in the matter.
Don't count on consumer outrage to stop this mess - it won't be like it was in the 80's. This is going to happen the same way that DVD region coding happened - it will be a fait acompli before most people realize what is going on.
The DMCA outlaws the circumvention of copy protection, be it for a DVD, a digital cable TV feed, or anything else. That's what the DMCA is. That's why it exists. Your comment about copying TV broadcasts is ultimately irrelevent - the entire reason why the industry lobbied for the DMCA was to get around the fact that, without it, fair use would apply.
You cannot, legally, digitally record, within the US, a copy protected digital television program. (You can make an analog recording, but that will become harder as analog output capabilities disappear from more modern equipment.) It is not the "making a recording" that is the illegal part, it is the circumventing of copy protection that is illegal, which is a necessary part of making a recording.
To give an analogy, within the UK prostitution is legal. However, soliciting is not. Neither is owning/running a brothel, or pimping. So while someone can take money for sex, they can't get to the point that they'd be having sex and/or taking that money without breaking the law along the way. As a result, if you engage in prostitution in the UK, you are breaking the law. Were you to ask me to show you what law says you can't engage in prostitution, I'd have to show you the "disorderly house", "living off immoral earnings", and other statutes that make prostitution in practice illegal. The DMCA criminalises "fair use" in much the same way - "fair use" still exists, but in order to get to a stage whereby you'd be exercising "fair use", you'd break the law in the process.
I wonder what, ultimately, the solution is to ditching the DMCA. If the opponents would stop supporting Napster and similar technologies, and accept that content producers have a right to earn a living too, the fight against this slimy and repulsive bit of legislation might stand a chance of succeeding, but even so it will be a hard fight.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The fact that books were once freely available in libraries.
The fact that there ever WAS legal means to copy or record ANYTHING.
That there ever was such thing as a personal computer, where you could install or use any OS, or program you bought, copied, or were given.
That you were ever sold software, music, or videos instead of renting them.
That you ever could OWN a copy of software, music, or video.
It's time to wake up, folks. Yes, we techies will be immune to crap like this because we have the knowhow and the chutspa to do it, as there will be a break discovered in this "secure" protection, just as there always is with ANY "secure" protection.
But what is different now is that it is ILLEGAL to even try to do such a thing, or even have the tools in your posession to do this. What is most scary is not what the DMCA is now, but what it will become in 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, or a century from now if it is allowed to stand.
It's time to get out there and vote. Call and write your politicos. Contribute to candidates who support your positions. IT people could be a very powerful lobby if we'd just get out heads out of our servers every now and then and do something.
For one, I will NOT buy a hard drive with this shit on it. I encourage everyone else not to as well. I will not pay for something meant to store data on it that is going to second-guess every copy, move, and open command I send it.
If the market refuses to buy these things, they will stop making them.
DMCA, the MPAA, and the RIAA HAVE to be stopped. The future of our profession, our country(s), and our livelyhoods depend on it. If the DMCA is allowed to trample the individual's right to innovate, then the whole IT industry will fail.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
This is a total exercise in futility and those who participate deserve to waste all of the money that will be wasted on this.
--
If the MPAA was paying attention they'd have noticed that we went through a copy protection phase back in the '80's. A lot of those companies went out of business. If your content is not conviently accessable, people will go elsewhere. And that's before we get the anti-monopoly laws in gear, or do you really think the courts will support legislation which makes it impossible for you to express yourself without the express approval of some media company somewhere? No one ever seems to realize that these controls will make it next to impossible to generate free content outside the corporate infrastructure. Which is a rather convienent side effect. If you're a corporation.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I actually browsed thru the agreement they submitted to FCC.
Good god man... how could you read that stuff? It was a piss-poor scan of a low-quailty, 43 page FAX. My eyeballs nearly fell out of my head just looking at the first page. It would probably take me two or three hours to read that thing if I printed it out; it would take me a week if I tried to read it off the monitor. (I won't say anything about the abysmal typesetting -- I understand the reasons why people have convinced themselves that Microsoft Word produces documents that look "Good Enough", even if those reasons are all just a crock of shit.)
On the other hand, look on the bright side. If this is any indication of the technical compentency of the cable companies, we can look forward to plenty of ugly, poorly implemented and badly documented content protection schemes that will have more holes than swiss cheese, break randomly, and just generally annoy the piss out of everyone without doing anything they were meant to do.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I'd be more likely to think that if copy protection actually becomes practical then the added revenues received by software companies like Microsoft will be pumped straight into making it hard or impossible for people to switch to free alternatives.
How we know is more important than what we know.
why do people persist in saying stupid crap like "stealing software".. you're supposed to be more educated than the average joe on the street. Surely you understand that copying != stealing. Last time I looked stealing was a criminal offense too, whereas violating copyright is a civil matter.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yes, they're forming a new protocol. If they don't manage to get this one into place, they will continue until they do. Finding technological defeats is oodles of fun, but I see it as a quick-fix for a symptom rather than a cure for the actual problem: what to do with an increasingly seller's market which applies strategic pressure on a government to change the rules in its favor. It's now beyond Monopoly... a successful corporate entity can and will terraform its environment to become more favorable to it, rather than adapting to said environment, and as it becomes more and more successful will alter things even more to its liking, in a system of beneficial feedback. Beneficial to it that is... at the expense of all other entities (resembling the model of what the human race has done with "its" environment at the expense of other species).
In this instance, buying foreign alternatives is also a quick-fix, albeit one that will serve up to a certain point and then run out of steam, as the problem isn't exclusive to the United States. Eventually it will no longer be an option, and what then?
I offer a permanent defeat. It isn't strictly technological per se, but there is a way to render all legislation harmless to oneself. For those that haven't heard yet, it's sovereign citizenship, a way to opt-out of federal and what most people think of as state government. It's an individual option, not requiring voting for a certain candidate or lobbying for a cause (which means you don't have to wait for a statistically significant portion of the lemmings to wise up). You just opt out, with the appropriate paperwork. You then are able to lawfully live in the united States, but are out of jurisdiction in terms of legislation and so-called income (actually excise) taxes. Nothing is illegal for you. If someone challenges you on that, you're welcome to sue them in court; courts have been consistently backing sovereign citizenship up against johnny-come-latelies such as the IRS. Personally, I'd like to see the outcome of a soveriegn citizen's lawsuit against these people for intentionally crippling a drive to be compliant with legislation of the federal United States, which the courts have declared to be "a legal fiction" with no sound basis in law.
There are also a few crafty offensive weapons here for anybody who feels like going on the offense. One that springs to mind is a commercial lien against the people setting this attrocity into motion. A commercial lien was designed to give merchants an equitable way to reach justice... it's done out of court, and involves filing papers against specific individuals which damage their credit rating.
I think the most effective weapon is propogating awareness of sovereign citizenship itself. The mainstream media is too well-heeled to touch it, but as awareness of it continues to snowball, a lot of the assumptions we've previously had about the way things are run and exactly who is working for whom will become challenged. Legislation like this wouldn't even be seriously considered if the majority of people understood that federal legislation binds only entities who admit to engaging in interstate commerce (and most Americans are tricked into it via fraudulent wording in common forms). This also means that n a business not engaged in interstate commerce isn't subject to the legislation either; any sovereign citizen who wants to start churning out non-compliant hard drives is welcome to do so... and depending on the wording of the proposal, all they'd need to do is sell them to a third-party who would distribute them coast-to-coast. It works for every legislation one wants to circumvent... and allows a company in this country to do things which are simple legally impossible for other companies to do. As government contnues to encroach, I imagine that will make the prospect increasingly profitable.
For more on sovereignty, have a look at my write-up. Antishyster has more detailed info on commercial liens, among other things.
"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce."
-- J. Edgar Hoover
It's probably time to show them they can't get away with this sort of stuff - by making a free and better alternative (just as Linux is to proprietary OSes).
Anyone with good connections to hardware makers...?
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Once this is done, backing up the data is trivial; just copy the file. It could even be placed on a CDR or DVDROM and played from there instead of from a 'real' hard drive.
Hell,
To prevent the data from remaining unencrypted, the software in the content itself would have to check to see if it is encrypted. Yet, there are multiple problems with this once the software is running under the emulatior. For example: Just like copy protection of old didn't work very long, tools could be used to automatically identify what the software is looking for and jmp over it or patch it.
If, for some reason, the unencrypted data doesn't "work"...re-encrypt it on the fly through the emulator.
The only thing that would make this impractical is if the software needed to descramble/rescramble the information would require an absurd amount of CPU overhead...though I can't see that being a problem with +2ghz CPUs.
The only recourse to this is to sue everyone in sight who even thinks of using these hard disk emulators. That's what the MPAA has done with DeCSS, and let's face it...they have so far suceeded in supressing DeCSS.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
They keep calling these schemes encryption, when in fact in this situation it cannot be anything but fancy, CPU hungry, data scrambling. You don't have the encryption situation when your key and the "encrypted" data both reside at some point in the hostile hands.
You want me to buy a hard drive that is copy protected, so I can't back anything up.
You also want to make it difficult to virtually impossible for me to recover in case my hard drive crashed.
And you want me to pay more money for the privalege of using this technology.
OK, so now I think I'm going to buy my reliable, copyable, recoverable, cheaper hard drives from a non-American manufacturer, thank you very much.
I swear to God, these arrogant, clueless suits and politicians are going to strangle the United States of America until all the innovative spirit we have is gone, gone, gone.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
How do you know that you're really talking to the hard drive, instead of a software emulator that makes all hard drives look the same?
This will only work in absolutely closed systems, where 3rd parties never have the ability to write drivers, and where the CPU doesn't have the ability to trap on I/O. Even MS Windows (as we currently know it, at least) running on x86 is waaay too open and functional for this to ever work.
Pet Peeve: This is not copyright protection. It's copy protection. The bad guys' goal is to make the public think that these two wildly different terms are synonymous.
Copyright protection is something that protects copyright. An example of this would be a watermark that identifies who a copy has been sold to, so that if it ever turns up in the public, the copyright infringer can be prosecuted. I don't have any objections to copyright protection.
Copy protection is a completely different beast: it makes it difficult for people to make copies, even copies that do not infringe copyright. I have objections to copy protection.
When people (innocently or otherwise) confuse these two terms, they should be corrected.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Note that the National Association of Broadcasters wants to get in on the encryption action too.
This Variety article describes a letter from the NAB president about how "it would be a betrayal of the public interest to protect digital TV programs shown on cable from being recorded by consumers, but to not protect those broadcast over the airwaves."
Apparently it's in the public interest to prevent people from recording cable programs for home viewing... as long as you prevent them from recording broadcast TV, too!
using proprietary technology originating from the 4C Entity. They're the people who brought you CSS2: IBM, Toshiba Intel and Matsushita.
So a fifteen year old kid will go to court for cracking it. Big deal, just remember, don't like to it!
How we know is more important than what we know.