Slashdot Mirror
More About Copy Control on Hard Drives
ErikSev writes "I know there's already been one /. story about this, but The Register is running a few more that might be of interest regarding the whole scheme to put copy protection on hdds. First is the proposal, then Alan Cox and RMS' responses, and finally the IBM spin on the whole deal. This is definately something we need to be afraid of."
We can start with the free knowledge and it may not be the fastest computer, but at least it will be ours. Who knows what unwanted technology has already found its way into your devices?
<p>
Uhm, this is the problem when people understand
just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be competent. I read the T.13 spec, but I doubt 5% of the people who read it and posted here, or wrote articles for nameless web mags know what they are really talking about.
<p>
Pray tell, how is the hard drive going to know that a given chunk of binary data has a "nocopy" bit set? The answer is... it doesn't. Some piece
of software must tell the HD what data is protected and what data is not. And no, it's not the filesystem code (although the fs will transit that bit from the app software to the disk).
<p>
Obviously, all data on the disk won't be uncopyable, you have your documents, files, whatever to worry about. So by using a little
logic, it's quite obvious that Linux WILL run on such disks, and free software will continue to
work on such disks.
<p>
What will NOT work is reading protected data written by some sanctioned piece of software using a non sanctioned piece of software. So? Like the previous poster said, merely dloading an mp3 and placing it on a disk isn't going to lock it up forever, the disk/nor the filesystem has no idea that the collection of bits is an mp3. I mean, I suppose it could, but it's highly unlikely.
<p>
Furthermore, the way dloading uncopyable data DOES work is that the dload is done securely by a sanctioned piece of software. As a straw example, take RealPlayer or some piece of software which dloads a DVD movie from timewarner and places it on your HD protected.
<p>
There are several (again, obvious) hacks to get around this, but I'm only concerned with using the
drive for legal purposes, not copying DVD's (I haven't seen a movie good enouhg to copy in the last 15 years anyway).
This kind of serial number is implemented with a new ATA command. All you need is a little device between your controller and your harddisks, which replaces the serial number given by the harddisk with another one or even return an error. Such device should not be too complicated to build and i see huge demands for it :-)
Two things I want to point out:
1) It's Western Digital that was buying IBM drives, and even them, only certain models are OEM IBM (and from what little I've seen of them, had WDC-made controllers on them as well).
2) Maxtor and Quantum HDD are merging, so that rules them out. That leaves Seagate and Fujitsu, basically.
-lee
So, what is to stop somebody writing a driver for your OS of choice which will intercept calls to check if a disk is encrypted and simply respond "yes it is", whilst in reality it is not?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Not to be pedantic or anything, but on some models of CD-ROM readers, it is possible to insert a CD without power to the drive. I have three SCSI CD-ROM readers that use caddys, and all three have a spring-based mechanical loading mechanism similar to that in common 3.5-inch floppy disk drives. Of course, on one of these CD-ROM readers, the drive must be powered on in order to eject the disk....
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
>if you download media with the copyright bit set
Huh? That implies the client has to set the bit. What do you mean?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
"If you're not pirating anything (software, MP3s, DiVX, et al) then you have nothing to worry about."
Except disk failures and bad blocks - the sort of thing that helldesk workers see about once every hour. Freeware as well. My DOS parition is useful to me ONLY as a Wine resource (it doesn't even boot on its own). If I had a disk with this support it would be useless to me, and a very expensive and crap program (VC++) would be a waste of space.
"work hard and spend a lot of money to bring us high-quality programs"
Just a little of a sweeping generalisation, there, a lot of companies write under-funded, under-scheduled crap. Most, actually. Do you *KNOW* what Microsoft's (as an example) profit margin is? And do you know how many small, hard-working companies they have destroyed? How can you possibly justify their actions in any moral system?
And don't take that moral view, most comporate prorammers don't care about the work, they just want the cheque.
"Even Windows, Slashdot's favorite target, is much better than Linux at this point."
This isn't a religious war, people on both sides have their various feelings, stay on topic. (I, personally, prefer any UNIX, and if Windows is ever all there is I will find a new profession.)
"And when you pirate software"
Who's talking about piracy? I've not got a single pirated data item on this machine, in this country fair use encompasses backups, and RAID arrays are certainly no part of licence conditions.
The main issue is where to draw the line. What if, some day, everything on your hard disk is copy-protected and your install medium was one-time use. Buy another copy? That IS the story with a lot of supposed Windows installation CDs today. My father recently bought a whole new computer because it was only a little more than buying an actual Windows installation CD, he now has two licences for the same computer (but still no actual install medium).
"The spirit of the season is Christmas."
No, the season is winter, the spirit, if it can be said to have one, is being colder than usual. Unless, of course, you're in the tropical area or the southern hemisphere, where it is summer, and probably warmer than usual.
"We should all give thanks to Jesus for dying for our sins"
If you want to believe that crap about your tree-hung godling go ahead, but don't pollute the minds of others, unless, of course, you can offer objective proof to support this view.
I like your 4 point summary. The best thing we can all do, I think, is to write /email reporters for newspapers in whatever metro / regional area we each live in. Many papers have an assigned "technology" reporter or two now, this is the kind of stuff they should glom onto, "How you, the consumer, will be shafted unless you read this article!". I'm going to send some letters now.
The PDF documents I use cost me $AUD100 per document (they are Australian Standards). I keep them on my hard drive, which is where I first downloaded them. If I lost my hard drive or upgraded my laptop, you can be assured that I will want to protect my investment in these standards by copying/moving them. Any document I can't move or restore is violating my right to fair use.
That is the danger of this proposal. It must be stopped.
I don't care about you napster and divx fans, you suck big time as you rip off the artists you claim you care for and sap bandwidth I need for my daily browsing - I pay for my music and go and see movies when they come out.
But when it comes time to make a stand, this where we draw the line.
Andrew van der Stock
Support manufacturers who don't buy into this unholy mess. Support Free Hardware projects to develop replacement controller boards.
My fear is the cartel will tie up patents for advanced capacity/functionality drives and only license development to manufacturers who use the copy prevention controllers.
The choice between Free Software and Consumerist Slavery will never be more important than in the next 5 years.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Most sources are in agreement that he took poison and shot himself.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'm so sick and tired of hearing that stupid "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear" argument. I just can't figure out when people began to accept this as a valid reason for taking away rights. I know the likes of Jefferson and Franklin wouldn't have put up with this kind of stuff, why are we?
er? "end up"?
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Odd to see MS and RMS on the same side for once :)
:[)
RMS wanted to hear a snappier name for this:
piracy
That's what I think. And I'm SURE this will get cracked (like SDMI). Then we'll just use strong cryto combined with next-generation P2P tools to spread content from person to person. Perhaps smart P2P agents will allow an agent to broker a trade of content between two users. Barter based P2P!!! r00l (EGGNOG got to me sorry.
it's UCITA
Erik
I'm not sure anyone else picked up on this, but isn't IBM the leading media researcher in the world right now? If they are represented on the committee/body/whatever, doesn't this make great sense to them?
ergo
1) lets develop a method to MAKE people use our technology
2) lets get a standard approved and hide copy prevention inside of it
3) in parallel, lets get a digital media copy prevention standard thru some dumbass body in need of protection like RIAA
4) they distribute their intellectual property to the public
5) then lets get that website ready so people can login with their credit card and PAY US to move a file.
Shew, it sounds like a stretch, but its so out there, it makes me nervous.
IBM if I find out you are the advocate of such an ill thought out technology, I will make a point to NEVER buy your hardware again. More importantly, I will persuade my clients to not buy/use any RS/6000 solution.
Please don't let IBM off the hook. S7A's are expensive relative to suns anyway.
Illegal copies are the excuse that's being used to push this through, but, when you read some data, how does the drive (or any other part of the computer) know whether you're making a copy or not? It can't. So, to control copying, it must control all access.
"Copy control" is definitely more honest than "copy protection", but how many people will recognize that a "copy control" system will affect them when they're not making copies?
Say WHAT? Any CPU worth running a "real" OS on (or even an unreal one like windows) has a "Protected Mode". That's how the flipping kernel of Linux and any other Unix works, not just windows. Sun's SPARC architecture, and probably all the other manufacturer-specific architectures, ABSOLUTELY has a protected mode, and God Knows they didn't do it for MicroShaft.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Yes, wouldn't it be wonderful if this could all end in bloodshed?
I will now proceed to fantasise about Quantum Corporate HQ in flames as it's being stormed by hundreds of people in black jumpsuits withpenguin insignias, toting assault rifles... mmm...
Do you know what happened in the very first days of the church when you needed a copy of the bible? you borrowed a copy from a friend and you copied it out.plain and simple,no copy right violations, no claims of piracy.all books and music for that matter were like this.not just the bible.People have a basic right to information to educate themselves.for either work or pleasure. People have a right to compensation for thier efforts, Linus Torvalds is compensated for his efforts,Alan Cox is compensated for his efforts. Linux is not about piracy, free software is not about piracy.RedHat sells Linux they make a lot of money at it, so do Caldera, SuSE, Debian is boxed and sold in stores too.Anyone can make money with Linux.check out any issue of Linux Journal and take a look at all those ads inside the magazine, there's a lot of products for sale and a lot of poeple making money.Linux works both ways as free code for those that can't afford it and as a new money making venture.Rob Malda himself isn't without some pocket change of his own in this regard.Now,take Napster,Music recording companies loan new artists a sum of money to get started upon signing to thier labels, this money is then re-paid upon sales of thier first album, most new arists ie: all of them. actualy make little or no money on the deal with the recording company, it' really the live concerts where they really make anything,in other words by listening to music on the radio for free it acts as an enticement to go and see the bands live and pay them by way of purchacing a ticket.Napster obviously helps in this regard too.by the way,the music recording companies since Napster made an extra billion or two since Napster has been around.Napster = promotion and sales.people have a right to fair use of art, books, literature,music.people should have a right to be compensated for thier work.People also should have a right to privacy, to enjoy what they read, or listen to without undue pressure or influence from caesar.There is a real obvious difference to stealing, that is best defined as breaking into someone's home and taking a valuable object fo yourself,and what the music recording and microsoft lables as piracy.God is both a Father to us and a judge, and he is the best judge in the universe, he is both fair and wise becuase he is perfect.God takes all these things into consideration, and into his hands do I place my faith in.I am a christian.Beware of people that want to wring every last penny from you, beware of people that want to control your thoughts and what you have access to,Bill Gates is entitled to fair compensation, but that's where I draw the line, no more.The music industry is entitled to fair compensation, but no more.I happen to think that the Music indusry are ripping the artist off and cheating them out of fair compensation. Plus I happen to think that Bill Gates is ripping people off too.Imagine buying a car, but never being allowed to open the hood, or worse, having to buy that car based on what information the seller gives you never being allowed to test drive it. beware of greed and usury.Obey God, love him, do as he says but don't ever let people especialy greedy people walk all over you or anyone else!stand up for yourself and others, be a christian, God doesn't like people that shortchange others or rip people off. praise Jesus, may he bless all of you. ps. windows sucks.
Except...
As an example, let's explore the liklihood of, say, scientific or medical data captured by an instrumentation device running Linux. What would be the liklihood of a byte pattern of your "licit" file being misinterpreted as "illicit" and being altered or lost? If there are maybe six bytes that have to be in a precise sequence of 256,1 / P(256, 6) = 3.7687E-15, which would be the chance of data misinterpretation. I would dare say that the liklihood of electromechanical drive faliure in both the original hard drive(s) and the backup media would be greater than that.
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Gleepy the Hen. More intelligent than the average hen.
True but the production would ramp up to meet the demand and we all would win, Id finally get cheep scsi drives I could afford to put in this raid bay gathering dust in my machine.
But it _does_ do just that, if you download media with the copyright bit set it seems you will be unable to back it up or move it to another disk, a real pain in the a** for people like me who have 6 disks and constantly move stuff around.
Um, in case you weren't following hardware a few years back, Seagate *bought* most of those "other" manufacturers. If Seagate says "yes", well, there goes most of the "other" guys, too.
Lemon curry?
Randall.
On a visible but distant shore, a new image of man;
Property law should use #'EQ, not #'EQUAL.
When a door closes - a window opens. This is nothing more than a challenge to the free software community. A serious opportunity arises to manufacture non-compliant drives, and no doubt someone will design software to emulate the response to the calls that PPR software will make during installation (and promptly trash the results!). For every measure, there is a counter-measure (as dsniff shows us). The whole deal stinks, and frankly, it just will not work.
Regards, tEtra
One possible way to gain credibility in opposing this is to propose an alternative solution that provides some measure of content protection without requiring disruptive changes to the disk drive standards.
It seems to me that the burden could be moved from the hardware to the software. There are already many software packages that implement copy protection by attaching themselves to either the ethernet MAC address or the hard disk serial number that already exists in current hard drives (Mathematica uses *both*). Presumably, a closed source media player could be designed that does the same thing - the media file is encrypted using a key that is dependent on the HD serial number or ethernet MAC address.
This may be a little less secure than the CPRM approach because it probably possible to write hacks that can intercept the program's request for the serial number or MAC address, but it would likely provide adaquate copy protection for the vast majority of the consuming public. Even though it may not be completely uncrackable, this scheme is still used to protect $10,000 software programs in preference to dongles, primarily because it's less inconvenient for users and cheaper for the vendors.
Even though it may not be quite as secure as CPRM, it has the advantage of not requiring changes to drive specs and would prevent all of the negative side effects described in the articles.
There may be reasons I didn't think of why this won't work, but suggesting *some* workable alternative will gain more credibility than just crying "I want my freebies, content protection sucks!"
Corprate IT types just love being able to create an single *image* with OS, apps, and everything, and then dump on to a couple hundred PCs.
I guess that technique is toast as well.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
I'm pretty sure any manufacturers who tried to do this would get the snot sued out of them by the Evil Copy Prevention Coalition. They probably have lots of patents and licensing agreements with clauses stating "Licensee agrees to implement all copy control schemes as a condtion of this license." There will be ways around it, such as secret codes like those on some DVD players to bypass CSS, or hacked firmware updates.
Getting around this CPRM scheme should be easy enough, just create a driver that has a hard disk emulation layer that traps all ATA calls to the hard disk and passes them through, minus the copy control codes. The emulation layer can go so far as encrypting the copy controlled data, but leaving the keys in an accessible file, where a simple utility can be used to decrypt and copy the file. The software making the copy control requests wouldn't know it was circumvented.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
There is one big reason to worry about this - these schemes will break interoperability between open source and closed source software and make all open source software suspect. Think it's annoying that you have to boot to Windows to view that Star Wars trailer in Quicktime format? Take that annoyance and mutiply it a thousand fold. If the corps have their way, no Linux software will ever be able to legally work with any data that is even remotely copyrighted. No company will allow an open source implementation of a copy protection scheme. Like that new album you paid for and downloaded? Sorry, can't listen to it in Linux. The protocols were reverse engineered a few years ago, but the guys who did it are now serving long prison sentences. Anyone trying to use Linux or other open source software to view protected content is automatically a suspect. Kiss your freedom goodbye.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
"Let people know the following: 1. These ..."
I would add to that list the point that the new hard drives provide no new benefits to consumers that the old ones didn't - rather, they actually provide less for consumers. (And at a higher cost - HD manufacturers cannot possibly make the new ones at = the cost they make current ones at; plus there will be a variety of additional cost burdens on OEMs, IT departments etc.)
I don't think this person is a troll, really, just a bit ignorant and naive. One of the main issues resolves around "fair use", a consumer right, which this technology removes - i.e. you don't have to be pirating for this to be an issue, it affects the majority of law-abiding citizens. This is just on the surface though, the technology has a reasonable amount of orwellian potential. Also, there is no reason for this technology to exist - like DIVX, it provides NO benefit to the consumer - all it does is increase the cost and reduce the flexibility of current hard disks. There is no positive reason for the existence of this software.
Actually I'm quite sick of hearing the "if you aren't doing anything wrong you shouldn't have anything to worry about" argument. Keep in mind that in about half of the States it is still essentially illegal, for example, to be gay. So maybe that won't affect you when they come around to install the cameras in your house, you'll still be spouting the "not doing anything wrong" line, but these things do affect many people who are not guilty of "wrong".
The problem is that hard drives missing these new "features" will become unusable with all of Hollywood's products since these drives will not authenticate the files to the players/recorders. So consumers might actually go out of their way to make sure their computer has Hollywood Inside(TM) if they want to consume Hollywood's products. Regular hard drives won't need to be illegal - they just won't be in high demand since they are "missing" the Hollywood Inside feature. The rest of us can continue to use regular hard drives and mp3's to our heart's content, but we won't be able to use them for applications that require authentication. But then again, manufacturers may not want to produce two different versions of every drive. There will be market demand for the protected drives (so that John Doe can consume Hollywood), so the manufacturers might just build it into every drive (to remain competitive) - especially if there is no palpable opposition. And once they have their tentacles around our hardware, they'll start adding new features, like pay per read and central reporting.
The only way this will fail is if the market demand for Hollywood's products doesn't support Hollywood's terms. But Hollywood will try to make it all as palatable as possible for ordinary consumers who aren't conciously afraid of the limitations this puts on thier privacy and freedom.
I noted in all the articles that it metioned all this was in consideration for the next standard of ATA. Personally, i could care less since i'm a SCSI guy.. but who knows what the future holds.
Really, I can't see this getting far off the ground. I'm predicting that there will be a bigger backlash from corporations complaining about integration worries with existing platforms. Let's face it people, money talks.. and if enough big companies bitch about it, it won't happen.
-brain
I agree.. money backs everything, and makes things fly or fail. I see this going down in flames. Many companies with existing platforms will stay away from it and cause earnings problems for the manufacturers of these drives.
-brain
And I'm not gonna tell why. Let them make the disks first etc etc, and then we'll break it.
nosig today
I do not perceive any possible method of implementing this protection scheme successfully: Processing of disk commands occurs on my local machine, and are therefore completely vulnerable.
It all seems like SDMI v2, to me.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
HELLO. ANYONE AWAKE?
Lesse. On the off chance this thing doesn't go down in flames, I'll predict that the enormity of the proposed system's damage will generate an unprecedented co-operation between Linux and Win developers, to create drivers and software to circumvent, trash, thrash, crash and generally consign to the bit bucket of history, this vile lump of protectionistic garbage.
Watch it fry. Careful, blink and you might miss it.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
The beauty of the system is that if Congress chooses to act like a bunch of rednecks (like circa 1955), the Supreme Court can desegregrate schools with a courageous decision like Brown v. the Board of Education. However, that decision will only stand if it is enforced by the President.
Federal judges are appointed for life. They don't run for office, nor do they take campaign contributions. Are you saying that federal judges will throw away their integrity for the couple of thousand dollars that they earn for giving speeches? Afraid of a little contempt charge, are we? Many times reporters have been jailed for contempt but have been released without naming their sources. If your assertion is correct, then all the reporters that refuse to name their sources would be in jail right now. Imagine the outcry if that were true!
Maybe if stopped relying on White Power advocates like Rush Limburger for your "political wisdom" and took Political Science 101 you would stop spreading this FUD!!!
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
If you have never heard of such an animal, here is press release describing the "friend-of-the-court" brief submitted by the Computer & Communications Industry Association during the Microsoft anti-trust trial.
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
However, don't forget that conservative court decisions tend to support Congress (i.e., the Constitution said that Blacks counted 3/5ths of a White person which eventually led to the Missouri Compromise dividing the country into slave and non-slave states which eventually led up to Dred Scott). The courts do not operate in a vacuum...
As for Judge Kaplan, I don't know what is up with him. Seeing as how most judges tend to be conservative, they will not disturb a bad law if the intent of the legislature is evident. Congress intended to protect the content owners with the DMCA, and Judge Kaplan let them.
If he had overturned the law in spite of Congress' intent then he is in effect "law making". As it stands now he is upholding the law that Congress created. If anyone, blame Congress for taking the money from the media corporations and making bad laws based on who gives them the most money...
PS: sorry for the White Power crack! I have been a little pissed off since the election (count the damn votes!) and forget that conservatives are all not money-grubbing White guys. However, it sure does seem like an awfully large number of them are!
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
So does this mean that MS could add encryption to their file formats so that only Office can open an Office generated file? What could KWord do? Imagine an office whose documents are all viewable but only with the software MS will let them use to view them...try running a perl script on *that*...
A forward looking statement. Secure hardware is coming, and secure hardware WILL contstrain what can be performed with a personal computer. My own fear is that "government sanctioned codes" may one day be the only legal programs we're allowed to run on "our computers", enforced by secure hardware initiatives that give some government sacntioned third party the athority to maintain a virtual "Traffic Cop" inside our personal computer systems.
Consider the Automotive Engine Management system for a moment and realize the EPA's interest in preventing consumers from reprogramming the fuel mixture for enhanced performance, an activity that now can be considered a felony violation thanks to the DCMA. The motivation to develop computing platforms "with no user servicable software" inside in intense, and I fear will ultimately become successful primarily because of the huge financial interest from HollyWood. Sadly, our only defense in the future may become gurrilla harware hacking!
oh....my!
Maybe it is time to boycotte the companies that are leading this initiative? If they want to hinder the freedome of their users, they will loose a, now, fairly significant part of their server market. Linux has media sexiness now and if the core Linux developers and maintainers in this area(Linus, Alan, Andre) say that there will never be support for this subset of the ATA spec in Linux, then that will send a message. Two years ago, or even last year, it would not have mattered, but when the Internet and companies like IBM are using Linux this heavily, it would mean something.
Just a thought.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
Unfortunatlyu, this will not help matters since the "copy protection" will still be implemented in software. These drives are identical to old execpt when you want to use newer software which exploits their features. We need to sell the idea that people should pay more for drives which will not work with some software packages to keep more software packages from requiring those drives. I think we are just going to need to play on people's paranoia, i.e. these drives will not let you back up. It is not the whole truth, but it's the only thing that they will hear.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
No, it just means that people will be forced to buy SCSI drives instead of ATA. Hell, ATA drives may not support this feature when used as a RAID, so you could just buy a motherboard with an ATA RAID controller instead of a normal ATA controller and use any drives you wanted.
Yes, we need to "stop this now," but that may mean switching to SCSI next summer. No one said that freedom would be cheap.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
There's only one way you can make a difference: Write GOOD free software, and lots of it.
BUT, spend 4 times more time PLANNING your code than you spend writing it. Be a perfectionist -- shoddy code will get us nowhere. Write every function so it's PERFECT before you continue on to the next function. Do more engineering and less aimless coding.
Make your code as simple, secure, efficient, and well-organized as you possibly can. Take pieces of other people's code of equal license. And most of all: don't be afraid to recode!
So let's get off our sorry asses and get organised!
I've written enough. Time to get back to work. I have a distribution to rebuild.
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Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
And third is the backup/RAID issue, which will be "resolved in the marketplace"... meaning, I assume, that not all drives will come with this "feature", or there will be some provision for totally disabling it. I wouldn't be surprised if, if this thing goes through at all, we end up with two grades of hard drives, just like the two grades of CD-Rs (data and audio) - consumer and server class, one with the copy control and one without.
Even if they manage to implement this on all hard drives, I doubt most of us here will be hit too hard... like the loopback system, there'll be at least several different ways around this stuff, and I bet even before the first drives are released we'll see effective countermeasures spread across the net. I've seen guys crack the most ridiculous, obscure, obsolete stuff just for the sake of doing it... but these drives would be the Holy Grail for crackers. It'd be a jihad, man. I give these drives approximately a 0% chance of success, even in the short term. It'd make CSS look good in comparison. Maybe I'm overconfident, but history's pretty clear on the success rate of copy control schemes - particularly if the copy control scheme royally fucks legitimate users.
When I first heard about DivX, I said, sweet Jebus, that is one dumbass technology... it was clear from the beginning DivX would go nowhere fast (some people were scared, as I recall, and with legitimate concern, just like now... but... c'mon). I predict this scheme will go nowhere even faster. Maybe it'll actually go into production, and maybe it'll last, and maybe it'll keep Joe Consumer from bootlegging N'Sync and everyone will be happy... but I bet not.
What we need here is a campaign where everyone writes to their elected representatives (congessman/woman, senator, M.P., whatever) and expresses concern about this. I would phrase it in terms of "Not only is this morally wrong, but I can no longer operate my business with this hardware."
Won't happen!
M$ will see this as an opportunity! Think about it. It's perfect for M$ to use the same "content protection" area of the HD to copy protect windows or any of the microsoft products. They could use the CPRM to their advantage. You have to think like M$ would think. This new specification could be another "tool" for M$ to use.
The scary part about this is the CPRM could be used to thwart the installation of non-M$ OS's, as far as "multi-booting" goes.
The saving grace is that I know that some individual(s) will hack the specification and write a nice little utility to "break" the CPRM. It is only natural that this would happen. Enough people will be outraged that this new form of copy protection will be thwarted, albeit a hardware copy protection - but, hey so where dongles and on-disk protection.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Before the Internet, before e-commerce, before Napster, I ran a small recording studio. It started as my own project studio, but demand was such that I started doing outside projects. This was the mid-'80s.
Digital formats had just appeared, CD-Audio, PCM on VHS, and DAT. For years, I resisted buying DAT, because of the SCMS subsystem. It wasn't until Tascam started printing instructions on which PCB jumper to clip on the DA-30 that I finally bought one. Up until then, my mixes were done with a Sony F1, Sound Designer II on a Mac, and an Otari open reel deck (and after, as well).
The proposed alternative to SCMS was a notch filter right in the middle of the audible band. SCMS is more of a "sticky bit" that limits digital-to-digital transfer of audio.
On top of this is the Blank Tape Tax, levied on music-grade (heh) CD media as well, the proceeds of which go to only the biggest acts: Michael Jackson, Madonna, Britney Tits. So I stick with data-grade and ignore interoperability problems.
Why am I being treated like a potential infringer? I just wanted to record my music and my clients' projects. Even if I chose to infringe on Madonnna's copyrights, my lonely little CD burner or DAT would hardly dent her revenues. Her pointy bras cost more than my entire studio, fer chrissakes.
Hey, sure there's a piracy problem. But restricting the distribution of the equipment necessary for the mass production and packaging of CDs makes more sense. Unfortunately, these manufacturers have lobbyists and I don't. And I'm left paying more taxes and holding less rights.
I'm just hoping now that someone, somewhere will figure out which jumper to cut on one of these new drives. As an animator, I must spend two or three hours a day copying files between drives or between clients and servers. Anything that complicates this process further is a tax on my time. I can always make more money. I can't make more time.
k., pissed.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
This is just a supposition with no real facts to back it up, but think about who would want this type of thing. Obviously huge media corporations such as those in the RIAA, MPAA, etc. Well if this type of technology is the holy grail for them, as we all suppose that it is, what would stop them from sending a little cash in the way of the hardware manufacturers? If the large media corporations help subsidise the cost of these new CPRM devices, then the cheapest hard drives on the market are the ones with CPRM on them. And why are EIDE/ATA drives so much more popular than the technically superior SCSI drives? Which one is much cheaper?
Except for a little four-letter word: DMCA. This law, in effect in the largest market for such devices (United States), would kill demand.
:P ), many of 'em know that there are certain things that they should be allowed to do, and they do it. Regardless of some stupid law. Just because it's a law, doesn't mean it's Right.
Yep just like the law against drugs have killed demand for drugs. As stupid as most people are (except for you, Mr. Moderator
Reading over many of the comments here, the posters seem to fall in 3 categories. I'll list them in order of their numbers from least to greatest:
1 - those that have an idea of what's going on. They know that only certain stuff will be encrypted and only certain things will be copy controlled, etc. They see this as yet another DVD type Region Encoding thing, except this time going to harddrives. They also realize the incredibly slippery slope that this can and will lead to if enacted. They also realize the technical headache this will cause.
2 - Those that have some idea of what is going on, but think Free Software (our Lord and Saviour, amen!) will prevent this from happening to members of their Flock. "Wrongo!" (ala Grinch). See where DeCSS has gotten y'all? Can you play DVD's on Linux today? Answer is probably not. Free Software won't do it if the Hardware is fubared and it is ILLEGAL to mess around with it.
3 - (the largest chunk from what i've seen) those that have absolutely no clue as to what is going on. "How will this affect those of us that don't copy illegal stuff?" "It's just software we can hack it" "hot grits on my harddrive natalie portman picks petrified behind 1024 bits encryption!". These people would be better off to STOP reading, scroll UP, and read the damn article.
oh i forgot 4 - misc. this includes the ranters (like myself) and whatnot who have a few good points and manage to mention hot grits and the like.
The help I need is rumours about suppliers starting to produce copy controlled discs.
You can do the same even if you only buy one disc. There are millions of people buing extra discs and new pc systems from small manufacturers that can change to a new disc brand on short notice.
> If you're not pirating anything (software, MP3s, DiVX, et al) then you have nothing to worry about.
This kind of comments really scare me...
From now on i'll listen to your phone conversations, read your mail before you do, and inspect your house on a random basis.
Surely you won't mind at all, since you have nothing to hide...
lone.
"At some point, the algorithm to tell the drive you have the key gets executed and can be intercepted."
Supposedly the key pairs system is here to ensure you can't just say "i have the key", but i agree with you that at some point, you have to actually use this key in order to sign or decypher data.
In the case of DeCSS, the key was unencrypted in one of the approved softwares (i belive it was grabbed from xing dvd player's binary and they then extrapolated more and more key at which point they stopped making new ones coz there was no point anymore).
The whole deal probably teached something to the industry... claiming something is secure is not enough, it actually has to be secure for the whole system to work. so basically they'll be more carefull when it comes to validating sofwares.
But again, i agree, this is not sufficient, at some point the software has to use that key and do something with it.
Thanks to debuggers, we have access to everything a software does and access. So the game for them would be to obfuscate the decrytion and signing code as much as possible. They probably won't care about the impact on performance since we're already hitting the Ghz and more.
But
There are two ways of 'cracking' this.. either get someone really clever who will step through the assembly, understand the algorithm and extract a key. This may be very hard if the code is very obfuscated. In that case, another option you have is to simply disassemble the program and cutpaste its assembly code, slightly modified to work with your calls.
Having done it myself and having seen people do it better than me, i know how easy it is to just disassemble a code and paste the assembly into another program.
This may not be easy in the case of a super-obfuscated binary, but it is DEFINITLY possible, and WILL be done.
Ask anybody who wrote a disassembler.
So here's one way to fight this: disassemble a trusted software. In the worst case, cut & paste its own assembly code inside your program (of course it's not as easy as that, but it's the main idea), then make your program be an ATA driver for your OS. Install two drives, one secure, one not secure. Drive the secure hdd with your ATA driver, make your driver autmatically decypher the data when it accesses protected sectors, then write it to the unprotected drive. Voila. The driver would basically render old software compatible again. The 'copy to another drive' part could simply be a copy command issued from the shell.
This is one among lots of other schemes which would work, i would bet my job on it.
lonedfx.
<i>"It's just software we can hack it"</i>
As stupid as it sounds, i may come down to just that, as it is (by far) the weakest part of the chain.
lonedfx
Hardly .5%
J
I am not a Frog. I am a Free Womble!
and I would do it right now, if I could get my hands around the necks of the bastards that want to pull this shit.
People seem to think that boycotts and commercial diplomacy are the only things these companies will understand.
BULLSHIT.
What we really need to do is hunt these guys down and beat the living shit out of them. And then go after the people they work for, the corporate officers that allow them to do these things. Smash their heads in with crowbars and two-by-fours, and leave them dead in the streets as a message to the others that might try to pick up where the dead have left off.
But alas, people in this age have allowed themselves to be pacified, and will write me off as a nut. Good for them. But in a hundred year's time, when our governments have been dissolved by the corporations they had been serving, when your children and grandchildren have no future but to produce and buy product, to keep the wheels of commercialism going, without ever stepping out, making waves, then you will see what all your "civilized" ways have brought you. And then, that day, when you are old and weak, and unable to fight back, remember those who wanted to stand up and fight, fight like men, and could not, because their bretheren were afraid to stand with them, and would have had them in chains instead.
I doubt that SCSI is going to be a viable option for OEM computers. SCSI is expensive, and requires very specialized motherboards or extra controllers, neither of which OEMs are fond of.
SCSI also sucks for cheap add on drives. Have you seen the costs of SCSI hardware lately? They don't fit into many people's price ranges.
"What's going to happen is IBM and others will make these drives, meanwhile overseas companies like in China will continue to make non-compliant drives and everyone will just buy them instead."
Keep dreaming. The majority of consumer-level PCs are bought from OEMs, who buy their disks from the kind of large, trustworthy, reliable manufacturers that can handle huge OEM customers. Manufacturers like... IBM.
As for server hardware, same issue. To maintain maintenance/service contracts, hard disks must be purchased from the original server manufacturer. And where do server companies get those drives? From companies like.... IBM.
The only way to deal with this is to make a lot of noise NOW. For the majority of consumers, this will not be like the intel/AMD option where OEMs were jumping all over the Athlon and customers could avoid the intel serial number. These drives will be everywhere, and for OEM customers, unavoidable.
And I'm sure you know that it's easier to call someone an American rather than a United States of American. That doesn't even sound right. :)
Any hard-drives that don't conform to this standard will be in high demand. Any hard-drive manufacturer who sticks to clean hard-drives will be making big $$$. But if the governments start to ban the manufacture of good ol' simple hard-drives, I think there is a big problem. Perhaps the software industry will also sue these hard-drive manufacturers for assisting in piracy. (On the other hand, are gun-makers sued for assistance in murder? Then again, cigarette companies are sued because of their product.)
Perhaps 30 years from now, people will have more silly ideas, like "We should let the government handle all the weapons so we don't hurt ourselves."
BTW: anyone who moderates you down is an idiot. You have expressed your point of view very well.
What!? Americans read this stuff? And I thought it was just us Canadians. :)
Large numbers of DVD players here in the Rest Of The World are either sold region free, are modified after sale to be region free, or are in a region other than what you would expect them to be. (A friend in Finland has a region 1 player, and owns exclusively region 1 disks.)
Incidentally, here's a map. Why the f*** is South Africa in a different region to the rest of Africa? Why is Australia in the same region as Mexico, and Japan in the same as Europe?
Contact your MP :)
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
However, I wanted to put Linux on the disk which meant repartitioning. I realized that if I repartitioned the disk I would NEVER get Windows back since I didn't actually have the install media. I complained to Compaq and they finally sent me a "Quick Restore CD". This actually contained WindowsMe, but in a special rebundled form along with Compaq's special software. You could use this to restore Windows even after a disk crash but apparently only on a machine that is substantially identical to the machine I originally bought. I recently tried to use the quick restore disk to install Windows within VMWare under Linux. The install wouldn't even start. Apparently, the virtual machine is too "un-Compaqish" for this to work. So, basically, I have a copy of WindowsMe that I can only use on the machine I bought it for. I have lost my freedom to purchase a different machine and move my Windows license to that system or to virtual hardware running under Linux. Five years ago this was not the case. You bought a machine with Windows pre-installed and they gave you a Windows floppy set or CDROM. The OS media didn't care where you installed it.
I know, piracy,piracy,piracy. Fuck piracy, all I'm trying to do is take a piece of software I legitimately own and move it from one place to another. When and if I really do need WindowsMe again (the original computer was purchased for a freelance gig) I will have to get a pirate copy of the actual Microsoft CDROM. This, in order to use something I already own a copy of!!!
Now back to hard-disks. The copy-bit is nothing more than an extension of this whole trend. The manufacturer wants to control what you do after you have bought the product. He wants to restrict your freedom to move the application, the data or whatever. Kind of like the PC OEMs already do with Windows.
--
--
Nothing to see here. Mooooove along...
--
--
Nothing to see here. Mooooove along...
There's more to it. CSS-auth, which is one utility included in DeCSS, actually issues special commands (which have to be supported by the kernel) to the DVD drive which cause it to unlock. These commands involve certain encryption keys and such. I don't know all the details, but DeCSS does more than just decrypt the data stream.
------
And without sounding too facetious, whose fault is that? If 99% of the world has allowed themselves to be snookered into that position, then they should be willing to either (1) accept their fate or (2) bust the chains. Some of us have made a conscious effort to wean ourselves away from this corporate-sponsored slavery, in part to protect ourselves from the very abuse we're talking about here. If anything, this should be a wakeup call to the 99% that they are basically being made to lie in the bed they've made for themselves.
Looks like the consummate haunting is close at hand, and I guess they'll just have to deal with it.
*sigh*
-Legion
It's sad that IBM has chosen to side with the large, Draconian content producers (who do not, of course, represent the wills of the majority of creative people).
I strongly recommend that all interested parties write messages to Mr. Jeffrey Lotspeich of the following form:
If your company implements the scheme described in your papers, our company will cease to buy all IBM products and will no longer make any of our products available for your hardware, software, or systems. We will further encourage others to do likewise.
--Brett Glass
Well. regon coding in DVD upsets a lot of people, and they still sell DVDs
Yeah, pretty much.
----------------------------------
Well, here are some simple solutions to this problem: -Upgrade your HD NOW if you have an older one, don't buy the new ones. :)
- Also , it would be a good idea to start stockpiling as many "Old-generation" hard drives as you can right now. That way you could sell and/or distribute them to people who don't want to buy into this corporate bullshit.
I myself currently have a 13mb hard-drive, and before I don't see any need to upgrade at all in the near future. But now I think that I am going to
Actually this could be really neat, there could be a huge underground market for older hard-drives that don't implement this "technology".
----------------------------------
I think you are forgetting, that although everyone involved in making a movie makes money, the studio almost always manages to not make a "profit" on it, in order to avoid paying taxes and percentages on profit. Now, of course, when you're a big star you negotiate a percentage on the gross, since only a dummy would take a percentage on profit anymore if he had the choice.
The movie industry runs on loans and producers, so they don't have to report gains or profits to keep investors happy, unlike the software industry.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
From the way that you are writing DIVX, I'm guessing that you have gotten DIVX and DivX confused, the former being the bad thing(tm) and the latter being a MPEG4 hack...
/Mikael Jacobson
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
No one is this stupid people, really. Especially with the Christmas Eve paragraph at the bottom, it's obvious they were joking. Taking the "I'm a congressman" viewpoint to poke fun and perhaps get some funny responses from knee-jerkers who took it seriously.
Plus, perhaps to get some good commentary in response to the pathetic idea of "if you're not doing anything wrong, it doesn't matter"
Bend over for the MPAA's gloved hand, your basic rights are about to be yanked.
So the movie, etc. you buy on a disk can't be copied to an uncontrolled disk. But what if you receive a broadcast or download some media? Does this "protection" scheme control what you do after the download? I don't see evidence that it does. And it seems to me short-sighted of the copy police to invent a heavy-handed new system that doesn't deal with downloads, where a lot of the new media is likely soon to be.
Creating more than one class of hardware would be a gift to any HD manufacturer that wants to "de-commoditize" the business. The temptation would simply be too great. One would do it, and then everyone. Everyone outside the scope of US law, anyway. Last time I checked, that was about 95% of the people in the world.
bosnia-herzegovina is definitely not anarchy, and iirc somalia is in a state of warlordism. warlordism is *not* anarchy. read some of the writings of Mikhail Bakunin before you try to say that Bosnia-Herzegovina and Somalia are anarchist.
Please email me about the petition - where can I sign it?
It could happen, trust me.
Of course you are correct... anyone who would dispute it's an idiot! ;o)
.vob's off a Region 0 disc, of which I have a couple from the National Film Board of Canada. Matter of fact the cartoon guy playing scrabble on the homepage is on one of the discs... and so is The Cat Came Back, my personal favourite.
Doesn't work under Linux nor Windows nor a Mac (emulator) tried and confirmed. You can easily read those
I really hope this "technology" doesn't make it into hard drives... or I'll be stocking up on some before the old ones go away, or wait 'till it's cracked.
You're right, this would be done in software. And the software involved is in the HD's firmware. It doesn't run on your computer's CPU, but on the drive's CPU. So it doesn't matter if you stick the drive in a Mac, a Wintel PC, a Sun Ultrasparc, or the trunk of your car, the enforcement software goes with it.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Interesting thoughts... I don't see the makers being worried about encrypted filesystems though. In fact, with the mood on gov't in the US now, it might earn them big brownie points to be able to say "Look, encryption of the info on this disk is physically impossible"
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
or (if this has become a criminal matter!?!), that you distributed it beyond the shadow of a doubt
Sorry, but in the US, and other countries wih fair criminal proceedings, it is only required to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond all shadow of doubt. If it had to be beyond all shadow of doubt, it would be impossble to convict anyone. Think about it. That's what those "big buck attorneys" do, they argue that there is still "reasonable doubt" that OJ didn't kill Nicole, or some such.
Devices like this may stop you and me from purchasing them, but I doubt this kind of thing is of any concern to the average non-nerd user. It is not going to stop people like my parents from buying.
-gerbik
of your game there in the US of A. This is starting to spill over onto the rest of us and we will not be happy. I am gonna start to petition our Pols here in Canada to embargo any of these hard drives and prevent them from crossing the border. I suggest that the rest of you non-US ./ folks do the same. I personally wouldn't be the slightest bit unhappy if the US recording industry and Hollywood refused to ship any of their trash north as we can generate our own no prob. Gonna be a hell of a short market ahead. Ride it Dubya.
"2. The new drives will not be defragable and will degrade in performance over time." MS said NT was not defragable, but someone came out with a defragger all the same. I claim that your #2 pt is weak... #4 is much more likely to rile people up and rally them behind the cause.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment...
You're assuming that an EULA, a click-wrap license, the likes of which has never been tested in court and was crafted solely by the mouthpiece(s) of a software company intent on keeping as many benefits and privileges and avenues to profit and potential revenue streams, etc., close to heart and minimize any and all potential liabilities, is a sound, fair, and legally binding document. No court has ever said that the term of ownership versus license-to-use lies one way or the other - we have only the corporate word on what our rights are. Now which side do you think they're going to err on in their "judgement" - ours or theirs?
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
Isn't this a country for the people and by the people?
Well thanks for a nice Christmas pressie. We are going to need an Open Source hardware movement with floating offshore manufacturing plants. Anyone with $100B out there ?
Will they come with a swastika on them? And will there be a hard drive burning for non compliant and legacy drives? This issue is something to take heed of.
Karma: Good. I'm hoping in the same way as pizza is 'good'...
I won't list anything specific, 'cos I'm sure the FBI would be here in a flash, but how about this: Link to HD manufacturers websites on /. and watch them fall to the /. effect! Better yet make a pop-up window that appears when you pull up /. it loads their web sites automatically; the number of hits they'd get per day would cripple them! Why not through in the RIAA and MPAA sites also?
And for you 31337 doodz of /. I want to see some web site defacing! "Maxtor" becomes "Max-whore" or "IBM" as "gee maybe we shouldn't supported that whole HD thing." Remember, if Sir Simon Milligan wouldn't say "Evil!" when he saw it, it's not worth doing.
I'm sure there are even more creative, and evil ways to fight this evil, use them! Don't stop short at any point, the only time we fail is when we've done nothing and let them walk all over us, there is no court in any civilized country that will rule in favor of "intellectual rights" before human rights. When you buy that new 60GB hard drive It becomes your property, they can't tell you what you can and cannot do with it
But also don't forget to also stop buying their products, or better yet, steal them! "Evil!" I don't expect this would last long if we'd strike back, and strike back hard, we have the tools, and the power, and with great power comes great responsibility. If one has great power they then have the responsibility to do great things.
Adler
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
It bothers me. Who would "sanction" a piece of software? Michael Eisner? I think this sucks on ice.
The answer is simple: it's good for both of them. How? All the software boys put out new software that needs this shit and stop supporting the old stuff. All the HD boys put out drives with this system and ditch the old ones. Win-win situation. If somone wants a new piece of software, they need a disk with this on it. Where do they get one? From buying it from the software guys. That way, both sides make more cash. Just like putting out a new version of Windows - everybody buys one, well, "because."
Not to provoke a flame war (or troll call), but how important (in the scheme of things) is the free software movement? We'd all find a way around it, use *nix and have an non-copyrighted party. But do we ~2% of the computing population make enough of a difference to Dell or IBM?
Dan.
"Claim everything, concede nothing, and when convicted - alledge fraud"
I may have missed something, but isnt the SCSI interface independent of ATA? (highly possible I am flaming wrong here).
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
there is a ton of information at T13.org. these links require a PDF reader:
Note the following contact information: Jeffrey Lotspiech <lotspiech@almaden.ibm.com>. Is this the lead project engineer? If you feel like emailing him for information, BE POLITE. Also the presentation mentions someone named David Goldschlag, who may be able to shed more light.
The second link especially has lots of nice diagrams and information about data structures - possibly useful for constructing workarounds and educating people about what this is exactly. Highly worthwhile reading.
still no mention anywhere about SCSI... seems like a "safe" alternative? I'm ready to ditch IDE forever.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
It may come to that. Don't give them any ideas.
Death penalty for economic "terrorism" or "treason" by producing, using and/or distributing a "destructive device" (i.e. a circumvention device which allows corporate profits to be hurt - thus an attack on the economy and the country as a whole). Just give them a few years...
1/2 ;)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Most people are worried about what this will do to backups and free software, but what about security? I mean, if they can tell if software has been installed on your computer by an unique identifier, could someone else write software that will also read that id and use it to track your movements on the web? I mean, I have written software that runs through the web and searches a client machine for a filename, the idea of searching for an id of this type could not be that hard to setup once this technology is implemented. Not only that, software manufactures can scan your PC for other software and without the user knowing during registration send back that list, and by using previous registrations see what you have bought before. Why yes, this is done today, but with the new technology manufactures can see exactly which computer you set it up on and also find out if you may be running something they did not register for you. Scary.
-Sternn
Oh no, you're reading this perfectly correctly. However, what they _ought_ to be saying is:
We'll just create this giant mess, and dump it in the consumers' lap. Because we just _know_ that the consumer won't buy from other manufacturers that don't support this kind of crap.
Would these be civil cases? Or criminal ones? Either way, they still have to prove either that it is highly likely that you distributed it to your friends, or (if this has become a criminal matter!?!), that you distributed it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Neither of which seems particularly easy, although that is what them big buck attorneys are there for, I guess.
Heck I would do it excrept for the following:
1. Somebody needs to write a boilerplate letter, and I don't feel I'm skilled enough to come up with a good one.
2. I probably only get one or two submissions
3. I get slashdoted and get thousands of submissions and it costs $$ to mail them all.
Any supp interest in doing this? if somebody does #1 I would be willing to pony up some $$ to mail the submissions (first 500-1000 anyways). Follow the link to my site here and send an e-mail to link at the bottom if there if your interested in helping.
- subsolar
"legitimate and illegitimate use prevention" is accurate but not very snappy. Any ideas using "restriction" or "obstruction" in a descriptive name?
So, all programs that access the data need to be "approved." Which, of course means, that this entire thing is just as much about access restriction/prevention/obstruction/blocking as the DVD CSS is. Haven't they figure that one out yet? If it's possible to get the data, then it's also possible to copy it. Which also means that any copy control needs to also be access control. Which is something people don't want.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
It's supposed to be ROM, protected somehow by the disk itself.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
To much trouble. Commercial companies like the one I work for rely on hardware that we can swap and mix and match like mad. Dead raid5 drive? ... pop another in... if we get hungup over copy protection with mission critical data... we sue the fuck outa the drive maker--that should be enough of a reason for them to NOT do it.
.doc file on the desktop.. and say.. the data is a blowfish encrypted tar.bz2.gz.bz2.zip full of warez. What keeps this from happening?
.. I don't want any HDD BS screwing with my database!
ANOTHER thing: there will always be software countermeasures that can avoid the hardware protection. I mean come on. gee lets place a
IF it happens... there had better be commercial counterparts wihthout the copy protection.
hell... ORACLE can use drives / partitions / slices without FS's
> What are the concrete things that I can do do
> nix this? (And don't tell me to write my
> congressman...I'm Canuck.)
Start a disk drive manufacturing company that makes drives that don't use this spec... we'll all buy from you!
So, let's say I have a gig of SDMI and CPRM-friendly music stored on my hard disk somewhere, in complete compliance with Big Brother's rules. I add another one, and because of the way hard disks work its pieces get fragmented all over the disk. No problem, I'll just defragment my drive.
BUZZ! Sorry, you have a gigabyte of space that is fragmented, but "cannot be moved" due to CPRM restrictions. You will not be able to get above 85% fragmentation now, because 15% of your disk is locked in place for copy prevention purposes.
So, in order to enforce copy prevention measures I am now unable to acheive proper performance out of my drive. This slows down my work (resulting in lost productivity) and decreases the life span of my hard disk (resulting in lost property when it dies sooner than it would otherwise). It also adversely impacts other LEGAL software, vis, defragmentation programs, who will likely get blamed for it because people tend to blame the program they first see it in, even if it's not at fault.
So.... what possible positive use does this have again to counterbalance restraint of trade and lost productivity? Oh, that's right, strict fascist control by the media cartels.
It's not time to be scared, it's time to do something about it.
--GrouchoMarx
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
What happens to those people who use SCSI hard drives in their home machines?
If this is an ATA/IDE spec only, are those people who use SCSI hard drives out of luck if they use one of the programs that would like to use the copy protection/control "features" (I could see downloaded audio, etc. being likely candidates for this scenario)
Carousel is a lie!
What happens if a computer virus were to mark all your files as read only?
Just a technical question: If I can't read one of the files, how does DeCSS work at all? All DeCSS does [as I understand] is take one stream of data [CSS encrypted] and output the decrypted MPEG stream.
It strikes me that any I/O errors would be produced from either bad media or a bad drive or a bad driver, yes?
Don't flame me, I'm trying to learn.
TheKnottedOne
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
So DVD drives "naturally" exist in a semi-broken state and need to be told with a key to become fully functional?
Does anybody know where I could find replacement firmware? ^^
TheKnottedOne
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
They'd lose almost 100% marketshare in every non western country, and a fair chunk in western countries to boot. And why would companies put up with this? There is no way admin would put up with this, IT support is such a hassle even without this.
...I agree with you for the most part... It seems that in the Western world(well, America and Eurasia[not EurAsia]) 'Innocent until proven guilty' is now translatable into 'Guilty until proven innocent'.
Way-back-when - in the 198*s to be more precise - I began to get into the computers. I thanked the Lord every day that some of those funky continental programmers(Usually German or Spanish) always managed to circumvent copy protection. Why should I pay twice to use the same program on two machines without endangering a master disk?
The vast majority of users now may not be clever and vocal in the sense the know every bit of their MBR off by heart but as IT gets more popular they are learning. The fact is that users can understand when something is going to limit their usage. For example, most will not recognise the term CSS, but they'll all have heard of Region Encoding and will shy away from any DVD models which don't have some easy circumvention. Looks like IT manufacturers are a victim of their own success - they've created a standard they can no longer divert from a straight improvement.
I've worked in computer retail and I know one thing for sure, if this stupid protection gets passed the term 'legacy-compatible' or 'restriction free data device' will become the mainstays of every salesman's pitch.
Anyway, surely enough geeks have now secreted themselves into the cubicles and managerial positions of N. America. Maybe it's time to send out the activation code? (Not for the rest of the world - we still have a good few European and Chinese sources for non-brand hard-drives 8)
Concrete analysis...
For those of us with IQs higher than yours(i.e. 10) losing a measly ten here and there doesn't really hurt us.
And your statement that moderators are 'crackwhores' is discriminatory - some of us are 'cocaine-fiends' or 'caffine-junkies' (I am the latter, by the way).
(Mind you, the last ten that I lost seemed to take my o-beel-et-tay 2 speel properlay wit et.)
8)
Concrete analysis...
Yup. I've just spent two hours, from just before Christmas day to now(02:11, Irish Time) reading every comment here. I've come to the conclusion that this is probably a non-story. In the unlikely event that this technology is integrated into the next gen of drives, so many programs will have to implement work-arounds that these work-arounds would- without doubt -be quickly absorbed into the mainstream of programming. It would be a matter of months at most before every slashdot user carried a copy of unprotecthd.exe/unprotecthd.prg on their emergency floppy disk (and I know you all have one!). Plus I've just finish working out a set of(or probably, more correctly, a matrix of) file conversion algorithms - so I'm very confident that in a broad sense all algorithms are workable.
As for me, I'm off to finish programming a Christmas present for my father in Q-BASIC (I know, I know...there's a reason, but don't ask me why.) Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight..
guv'ner.
8)
Concrete analysis...
Well, I have to disagree.
Here in Ireland and the UK almost anyone interested in purchasing DVD equipment knows about Region Encoding....Why?
Because as a former salesperson in a computer superstore it was a major selling point in the speel I gave to the average purchaser. Every ad for DVD players and DVD drives use region encoding as a major selling point. Heck, even the news has done pieces on it.
Mind you, I suppose in America average consumers would think less about the world outside their Region One box - why should they when they are so effectively cloistered from the multi-origin hardware world by extremely good marketing and PR?
8)
Concrete analysis...
Yup. But it's not just the Irish(which, depending on who you listen to, number between 3.5 and 7 million located on the island of Ireland itself). What I was trying to get accross was that in Britain and France -as well as Ireland- such things are known about because they are an issue.
I've only been to America once, and there seemed to be a huge difference between what people knew about and were prepared to buy. For example, in many stores there seemed to be a prime example of the irony: on the same shelf beside nifty, affordable and hi-tech gadgets that weren't going to be available in Ireland until six months or so later there were ancient and outmoded technology being sold for prices you wouldn't have seen back in the eighties!!
Knowledge is definitely power, and because CSS (Region Encoding) managed by movie studios provided America with movies first, it was a non-issue to Americans, so the man in the street wasn't bothered about it, salesmen didn't use it in their pitches etc, etc...
A thing like this proposed hard-drive spec. modification(I assume modification is more fitting than upgrade 8) would have a 'potential, practical(-sp) negative impact' on an American's use of a hard-drive, just as much as an Irish or Japanese person's. Also, despite the fact that the American public has been relatively shielded from the whole region encoding thang, they had their own quickly fought battle: DiVX (I'm not sure if this is the right spelling) vs DVD. When I was in America the DIVX was still being hyped as a great thing. I have never heard of it in any real sense being marketed in Ireland or Britain - in fact I only began to find out about it when I was in America. Americans were intelligent enough to shun that mistake because they had knowledge about something that would affect their entertainment negatively. I'm sure when faced with hard-drives that affect both their entertainment and, perhaps, livelyhood(i.e. programmers, offices and such) the American punter will, like punters accross the globe, vote with their feet and not buy.
(By-the-by, I always rant after a good turkey dinner, do sorry if I bored you 8)
Concrete analysis...
And MS has made a "profit"?
Wasn't one of the posts a while back that MS hasn't paid taxes in a while, since it donates software at full MSRP for deductions?
And when brought back to the store:
"Sorry, this software has been opened and can not be returned"
You mean like the MS EULAs that state "If you do not accept these terms, return to the retailer"?
Fat lot of good that does
What's to keep me from making "virtual" devices and then having those write to the harddrive? I mean, couldn't I just use some truely ph3arsome CueCat style encryption (XOR) and screw the "copy bit?" Then again, if you think I (or any one else) is going to pay good money for technology which is slower, then think again...
I'd assume the write request would come back from the controller chip with an error code. Linux might or might not display an error message that correctly described the error code. Maybe Linux users would just get used to the fact that "Error 387" meant a CPRM error.
Find free books.
I don't know how they've actually implemented it, but this is the way I would attempt to add copy control to an existing drive standard. If they do it the way I am describing, then it isn't a bad thing, although they might have screwed it up any number of ways.
(1) If you don't use the copy control features, then the drive behaves exactly like an ordinary hard drive. So you'd be able to continue to use all of your "legacy" operating systems and applications, and any new ones, provided they are written in the same way as the old ones, with no modifications.
Failure of manufacturers to allow this would mean that you could not even use the drive without paying for special software, and that would pretty much make the new drives DOA as far as sales. So trust me: the new drives are compatible with the old ones.
(2) However, certain new software (think DVD copiers) will try to check to see if the current hard drive is compliant with the copy-control standard. It will probably ask for an RSA-signed "certificate of copy-control" that it can verify. Software won't be able to fake it; the RSA key necessary to generate the certificate will only be licensed to hardware manufacturers under strict NDAs, although the key to verify it will be everywhere. If the drive isn't copy-control compliant, then the new software may choose not to run, or to run with restricted features. Sorry!
Also, the software will have to authenticate itself to the drive, in order to be granted permission to use the encryption features. After all, any software that used the encryption features would be able to decrypt encrypted sectors! That means, to write such a program, you would have to get a certificate you could present to drives, that the drives would verify. In order to do that, you'd probably have to submit your code to some board somewhere, which would make sure that your program didn't compromise the security.
But remember, this is not "all new software." This is software that will not be written at all until Hollywood is satisfied that their content will be safe. The key will be expensive, so most software vendors won't bother with acquiring one unless they think they can afford it, and that means most new software won't be copy-controlled. So, not only do you lose nothing by using a copy-controlled drive, but you gain something that you would not otherwise have been given.
(3) The hard drive's copy-control mechanisms will basically allow "trusted applications" to read and write on the drive in a hardware-encrypted manner. The encryption key used is unique to the drive and is never revealed to the CPU or any software. Sectors will be encrypted and decrypted individually, and in a way independent of where they are located on the disk. The new applications will need a few new OS features, so that the OS can basically show the new applications which sectors to write into or read from, given a file handle. But that's all the OS has to give the "trusted applications," besides access to the hard drive's encryption features. As long as the OS can lead the applications to their sectors, the applications will not care where the sectors physically are on the disk. So all existing file systems will work with copy-controlled files. The existing file systems don't even have to set a bit or anything to indicate whether the file is copy-controlled. Ordinary applications will see unencrypted sectors which are normal, and encrypted sectors which they don't know the key to, but whych they don't have to know the key to. Ordinary applications will still be able to read, overwrite, copy, and move the encrypted sectors at will. If the old applications keep the encrypted sectors on the same drive, the new applications will still be able to decrypt them, no matter where they have been moved to, as long as the OS can still find them. This means that all fears about losing defragmentation utilities, losing EXT2FS, losing Partition Magic, etc., are ill-founded. If old applications move the encrypted sectors to other drives, then new applications will not be able to read them in their correctly decrypted form until they are copied back to the original drive.
(4) Naturally, the key has to be stored somewhere. In removable disks, it makes sense to store the encryption key in a "secret sector" on the disk. Then, only trusted programs can re-encrypt data as it is moved from disk to disk. (You'll still be able to back up and everything, but if an un-trusted program restores the encrypted files to a different disk, the encryption key will be wrong and the files won't be decrypted correctly. Wouldn't it be great if every disk had a human-readable serial number on it, too, and if you damage the disk, you can send it to a disk replacement service, and they'll make a new disk with the same key on it, so you can restore your backups! But if you couldn't do that, only the copy-controlled files wouldn't restore; all the regular stuff would be unaffected.) On hard disks, the encryption key can be stored in ROM or on the disk. I rather like that idea; if your hard disk crashes, you can send it back but keep the ROM chip, and insert that chip into the replacement drive when you get it. The idea is that any application can copy the files, but the "trusted applications" will not be able to correctly decrypt data that has been copied, until it is copied back.
Actually, I don't think this copy control is necessarily a bad thing, provided it's implemented in a manner similar to the above, and provided that "certificates of trustworthiness" aren't too hard or too easy for the necessary parties to get.
If they're implementing it this way, I don't mind, because I will be able to ignore it. But I hope they don't screw it up.
-- Sunlighter
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Yeah, but software plagiarism doesn't have the same ring.
You can always just use the disk in unencrypting mode if you don't want your data taken away from you. The problem is that there will be software which won't be willing to write in unencrypted mode. Then there is no difference between choosing not to use such software on one hand and not being able to use such software because you don't have an encrypting harddisk on the other hand. Not buying a copy control disk might serve you as a reminder, but it certainly isn't a necessity from a technical point of view. It is a vote of some kind though, because if the main manufacturers switch to producing only copy control drives, small manufacturers are not going to make a difference: Your computer is expected to have a copy control drive. That is where the trouble is aiming at you from. Legislators and software companies alike will have a point in saying that it's ok to leave the few protesters in the cold for the "good" of all.
Anyone else here smell 'DivX'?
These ideas may be a pain, but the 'necessity' is not a new one.
It won't last.
...for 90% of the consumers. Yeah, you might have to use this scheme if you run SoftImage, or Lightwave pro, or some other super expensive, highly specialized software. But there is no way this would ever fall on the average consumer's system. Companies won't do it, because they know that the tech support calls would hit the roof, and they get almost no benefit from it.
Here's my question: So you have solved piracy? Well the reason that I was told why software costs so much more is because of those damn pirates that were using the software without paying for it. So how much less is software going to cost now? Hell... if this made the way for reasonably priced software, I'd switch over and start working out those bugs in it.
As for making cd's with this protection, same arguement above, but will this cd work in my car's cd player? Of course. No one would buy a new cd player, just to hear a new cd. A new player with essentally less options (See MSDOS 6.21 "upgrade"(Del stacker*.*)). If I can play it, I can encode it. Poof! No more copy protection on that cd.
Bottom line: If it's at all interoperable, it susceptible to crackers. If it's not interoperable, it's doomed.
If it's not better, it's not an upgrade.
Standards just aren't.
This will not happen.
Check out this link: http://www.namesys.com/
You can read there: "RAID tunung and block allocation optimiser Sponsored by emusic.com"
Might emusic.com be sponsoring file system development to include copy prevention really soon now (TM)? They sure don't need to optimize block allocation for 3-6 megabyte mp3 files.
I'm glad now that I kept my old copy of DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroup!
Looks like it's back to Nescape 2 to surf.
By what provisions?
funny munging
the hardware enforces a mechanism which *must* be implemented in software
No, read the Reg articles more closely. This is part of the ATA spec to be implemented in hardware. The new media block on the HD would prevent any copying unless allowed, period. This is "law-making" by Mega-Corps, and our legal protection against the Gov't doesn't apply, of course.
1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
Such as H.D. Thoreau... (not the unabomber)
It seems clear to me that this will make backups and coping of data problematic at best. I know if the company I work for lost any of our customers data over something like this we would sue there ass off. I say every user who has any problems at all should join in a class action lawsuit and bankrupt them. This is an unwanted add on to the technology witch is not needed, not to mention it could bring an end of free software. No click though contract can protect them form this because you do not have a choice to use something else. Sue them till they die!!!
Oh, and since they're the ones with the "keys", I think it only fair that they supply the hardware for me at no cost.
I'll take... Oh... 30 or 40 terabytes, please...
/tma
----
So why can't you just reformat anyway? At the worst, you take a DOS boot floppy and fdisk the thing to death, or give it a dd if=/dev/zero from Linux. And if a virus like this was possible and did cause damage, it would only hasten the end of this silly idea, since hard drive vendors and OEMs would not be at all happy to have to replace tons of users' hard drives.
--
BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
Well, I read over the articles, the specs, and the presentation, and to be honest, I can't quite see what everyone's getting so worked up about. To me, it looks as if all they're doing is providing a set of commands that can be used to cause data to be encrypted / rendered uncopyable by the hardware. While this will obviously raise all sorts of problems with data that is stored this way (no backups, no defragmentation, watch out for cache read-aheads, etc.), the way I read it, this only applies if the software explicitly requests protection--there's nothing saying you can't use it as an ordinary hard disk the same way things have worked up until now.
As far as the problems that would crop up with software that did use this feature, I imagine that such software would last right up until the day Joe Q. User defragged his hard disk and lost access to all of his protected data, and then be dumped by software vendors and OEMs who don't want to have to deal with all the threats and legal problems. (However much the courts may or may not be leaning toward Big Business, the argument "I paid for this but didn't get it!" is still a sufficiently strong one, I think.) I don't see much of a realistic probability that this scheme would actually work in the real world.
So what am I missing that makes this such a horrible problem?
--
BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
anything can be hacked...its just how many laws, warranties, and agreements you have to break in the process...
i'm not up on current world affairs, and in the recent past both places were either in the midst of civil war or true anarchy. however, my point was finding a server farm where the people in power could care less about copyrights.
i've seen nylon us flags before
anyone have a nice, good, server farm in oh, say, bosnia-herzegovina, or somalia, or some other anarchist region?
the dmca could never apply there...except under american-enforced martial law, but the un would hopefully not be so inept as to allow that...
well, nylon is worth more than wood pulp...
whaddaya mean non-nerd friends not having heard about it? most of my nerd friends hadn't heard of it before i informed them! and these are people that get warez literally almost every day.
Good point there. What about virtual filesystems. e.g. filesystems in a file like that of VMware. At what level of abstraction does this operate. I won't be able to copy a file in the ext2 filesystem but what about copy files inside of my virtual machine i.e. windows running inside vmware. Since the filesystem is in a file, will windows in vmware allow you to copy your files freely?
This kind of fascist crap pisses me off to no end. If anyone knows the answer to my questions please respond.
I believe the purpose of the content aware drives are to provide an extra layer of security to prevent fraud in a company.
The standard drives will "never" be replaced and the planet-wide-overhaul required would break too many valuable software applications to be of financial use.
The target market would most likely be pharmaceuticals, the defense industry, fashion design houses and electronic engineering companies.
The only reasonably novel use I can see is as a digital media storage facility, where content delivered by a media company can be stored and physically locked to a computer as far as perfect digital storage goes.
But Obviously, they can be re-recorded to non-fixed media. Therefore I see no way that any fixed content storage system like this will ever work in the consumer market. (audio watermarking is just an example).
I do, however, think that the industrial implications are important. Its a valid deployable storage mechanism as far as a physical barrier to industrial espionage. But I can imagine that it'll be hell to maintain such a network infrastructure. I can only hope those MCSEs will be able to cope with the security requirements of the future.
Pharmaceuticals, the defense industry, fashion design houses and electronic engineering companies are the ones with the money that this is aimed at. The protection of Trade Secrets.
Any assault on the consumer market is going to have just as much success as WAP. I mean... wtf.. I dont even have a WAP cellphone. And will never buy one. (it'd have to be a freebie).
-Tim
I believe that this is a case of the powerful attempting to remove the liberty of the common man. Where the simple "God given right" to ownership is being violated, so that the masses, no the companies can gain power. By my understanding the companies pushing for this standard are violating the very law they are claiming to protect. They are claiming to be protection the right of property, while in the same swift movement are taking away your right to own every bit(pun intended) of your computer. I'm sure everyone agrees any group that has enough power will use it to impose their will upon others. I don't see how any individual at these companies can enjoy this whole concept, except that they have a dollar attatched to their d**k. To avoid making this just a rant, I will ask this question: Is it possible for us, the consumer and the common man, to rebel? For everyone's sake I hope so.
Just go and buy a 40 GB hard drive now that they don't have any copy control. With 40 GB I think it whould take you a few years before you must upgrade again. If you have doubts, buy a bigger hard drive. Now cross your fingers and hope that everyone else will do the same and that nobody will buy those horrible hard drives with copy contol.
If we (the consumers) react this way, we can force them to leave this new standard.
Are you with me?
The fact is, entertainment companies, scared of increased freedom on the part of the consumer, are going to go to, where else, the federal government to solve their woes. With all the cash they're reigning in from CDs that are sold at huge profit, they'll be perfectly capable of lobbying legislators and pouring cash into campaigns. This practice of buying politicians is so commonplace that there's little to no public acknowledgement or outrcry in American society today.
Welcome to America, where the rich buy politicians and make their own laws (so they can get richer, of course).
This can't go through for a number of reasons:
The first being: Let's say I make some data, now if this would go through I couldn't make backups of it.
Who controls what? I CONTRL AND OWN MY DATA, no one else.
I have a right to make as many copies and backups of the software that I OWN as I like, not mentioning the data that I HAVE created.
Surely there is some kinda law that prohibits this thing from going through.
The second: It's only a specification and so far I've only seen IBM's name attached to it, there are a number of other HD manufactere's, like Seagate, Wester Digital and Maxtor and more.
They won't like it, why? Because the number of HD's needed would shrink, no backups -> less HD's sold. For business reasons it cannot work.
These are simple reason why it cannot work, post more reasons. (sorry for my bad gramma)
Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"Companies have to pay people to code..." :)
Errr, no... It all started when Bill Gates bought DOS or whatever it was called back then
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I know this is a bit offtopic, but how is creating a standard such as this not a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act? If psychologists can't create recommended standards of business practice through a non-profit congregation without strong government representation (actually, a gov't committee that tells them what their standards are w/o their consent), how can some of the most influential businesses in the world create recommended standards of hardware implementation? They probably have a loophole, but I just don't see it from my point of view? In other words, how legal is this?
Finder of the any key.
As somebody who doesn't buy into the idea of a moral right to warez, I'm trying to decide whether and how much I should get excited about this. So far I've come up with:
1) It's going to be a huge hassle for OS makers to support. They're going to be set back months.
2) Any new level of complexity is going to introduce new bugs.
3) Norton Utilities and similar tools are going to be severely handicapped.
But beyond that, exactly what is going to happen that is going to get in the way of any legitimate action I might take? I don't think this is going to stop me from ripping CDs. My impression is that people are flipping out more because better copy protection opens the door to increased pay-per-use and such. Not that I'm thrilled about that but until your hard drive starts sending off reports about your misbehavior, I think Alan Cox's comment , "Welcome to the United Police State Of America." is an offensive exaggeration. (A lot of people really do live in police states, you know, and they suffer much worse indignities than not being able to play DVDs from a different region.) And I thought ext2 didn't need defragmenting?
The move, backed by major entertainment industry, it has been suggested, smoothes the way for the acceptance of cryptographically-signed secure audio discs and other media content in the future.
It's not clear to me though that "it has been suggested" and "smoothes the way" mean that such plans exist or are technically feasible.
That only brings *you* down to their level.
I'm too sexy for you.
As I see this, all software that attempts to play/run/access protected media must itself be licensed and my default the developers too. It sounds like they are they want to apply the DVD model to everything. In order for a developer to write an application that accesses protected media, that developer/business must be licensed (meaning pay $$$, sign non-disclosure, etc.). That pretty much means an end to cheap/free non-commercial software, and the independent developer. If I wanted to write an application that played music/video, copied/indexed files (if any of those files were protected), etc. I would first have to pay for a license. Pretty much drives up the price of startups, and developers (all of which could only have learned how to work with protected media at a licensed firm).
I agree that "copy control" does seem to fit best. It has all the appropriate connotations.
You, my friend, are the 'stupid fuckhead' as you so elegantly stated. The previous poster realized that the original poster was referring to multiple governments not a singular one. The poster was trying to make the point that with 180+ countries in the world it is very hard for all of them to agree on a single course of action.
Take, for example, the recent treaty on the non-prolifiration of land-mines. It won the support of dozens and dozens of countries. Canada, the European countries, South American countries, Asian countries, just about every country with an army. However, the good old U.S. and Russia refused to sign the treaty, and without their support the actual usefulness of the treaty has been seriously blunted.
And why would I want a CD-burner anyway ? And why would I want a T1/cable/DSL anyway ? And what Joe-sixpack computation except Flask require a Pentium 4 or a Thunderbird?
Sure, this will mean that all those MP3's you've been downloading off the web might have some trouble residing on one of these "new" ATA devices, but someone please explain how one of these devices would possibly impact a user who simply doesn't make use of copy-protected data?
This would imply that people actually started downloading Mp3 from the content providers, instead of napster. How many people do you know on napster that will encode their mp3 with this shit? Not many I presume, but the EI don't quite understand that they do not have control over distribution anymore, so it is quite impossible for them to have control over copying. I don't think these HDs will do anything, as no one uses protected content as it is. I dont know one person who downloads any protected content, so ultimately this is moot, unless they start using this on CDs, which would kill basicly every CD player on the market, and I don't think the market is quite ready for a new audio format yet, and it wont be for quite a while, at least if the US. CDs will be the main format for some time in the US, as the only bonus to DVD-A is the surround sound capabilities, which are only useful for movies and games, IMHO. I really see no significant use for surround sound in music, so it seems that CD's will be here for quite a while.
Shit adds up at the bottom...
I don't think that these plans would be feasible at all, since it would most likely involve everyone buying new cds and cd players, which is something I don't see happening anytime soon, at least in the US. I have a post somewhere in this thread that is a litle longer than this one, but i have no time to find it...
Shit adds up at the bottom...
Well, no company has yet adopted the spec, and t hasnt even been approved by the standards body. IBM seems as if they will be the first. You can contact IBM's storage dept. here, and you can find t13's website here, where you can email the members, or even join by yourself, if you wish. The docs on CPRM arehere, here, and here, and you can see all the documents from the future spec here. Who says we have no say?
Shit adds up at the bottom...
the last link for the CPRM docs is actually here. sorry for the mishap, I was in a bit of a rush though...
Shit adds up at the bottom...
...on t13's website, its a presentation on CPRM. They say quite a few interesting things, like on page 3, they mention that its all about the license and not about the crypto. It seems these people will never get it... This whole thing seems like another CSS waiting to happen. BTW, they say that this is only for DVD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD-A, and a few other formats. It seems as though this is meant to keep the EI off the DVD-R makers, nothing more. I imagine that it will be fairly useless tech, but highly enforcible under the shitty ass DMCA. I can't wait until that POS gets before the supreme court...
Shit adds up at the bottom...
They can have my old vcr, my old camcorder and any of my other stuff WHEN THEY PRY IT out of my cold, dead hands~! -aicra
I would like to agree with Trollificus that moderators are crack-whores, and I would also like to agree with psicic that they are cocaine-fiends and caffiene-junkies. They also masturbate several times a day. Isn't is nice to reach a consensus?
Ashes of Empires and bodies of kings,
The truth about Michael
We can be pretty sure companies like EMC, StorageTek, Hitachi and the likes will have access to disks without this feature. Looking at the number of OEM disks sold to end-users, so will we....
Rob
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
French people are Europeans?
Come off it I'm not that sure the French are human, never mind European. In the words of Rommel "it's a great place to fight a war but I'd hate to have to live there"
"I would have to agree. Unless this is made mandatory by government (or other) fiat, it will fail absolutely."
Let us assume that the people behind this scheme buy enough US congress-critters and senators to have it made manditory in the US, what happens to the rest of the world? Are they going to be forced to go along with the scheme or will you see countries with strong customer protection laws telling them to piss up a rope. To give an example if Australia, my country, says to the hard drive and software manufacturers your scheme is illegal the two choices seem to be Australia is isolated from the rest of the world and is cut off from future developments or manufacturers supply non protected hard drives and software to the Australian market. I don't see the first as being probable and if the second eventuates how do you prevent the influx of "Australian Standard"drives and software into other markets?
As nice as it is to see that people will stand up against things like this, you worry too much. If, say, Seagate makes hard drives with this 'feature' then they would loose all sales and other manufacturer's drives would sell without this monkey on their back.
The technology is not bad (despite what the MPAA and DVDCCA may think) it is the legislation that comes REQUIRING such copy control that must be stopped.
This is going to play out like this: Manufacture A starts the new line of hard drives, OEMs B C D E F & G say lets buy Manufacture B's hard drive without this new 'feature'. Manufacture A's sales drop, so then their stock. CEO A says oh crap, my shareholders are gona revolt! Lets 'revise' the design! (smaks of the intel serial #s huh?)
After seeing Manufacture A go through slump, Manufactures B C D E F G & H hopefully wont be stupid and follow, right? After all, and new lines dot all come out at the same time, so the rest can watch the train wreak and learn....
"CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable Media) technology was developed jointly by IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba ("4C"), and was designed to meet the requirements of SDMI. This proposal extends CPRM and similar content protection schemes to ATA devices and is strictly optional. This type of content protection is primarily useful in portable, removable, devices that need to interchange with different hosts or consumer electronics players/recorders."
n ical/e00148r2.pdf
Read the proposal found at the address below.
The second paragraph in the thing clearly states that inclusion of the protection schemes is STRICTLY OPTIONAL and is PRIMARILY useful in portable, removable, devices that need to interchange with different hosts, players/recorders etc. Am I missing something here?
ftp://fission.dt.wdc.com/pub/standards/x3t13/tech
Linux Sucks. - g_byte
Just make sure you don't buy from IBM or Maxtor, whose drives are actually made by IBM. These indecent corporate connivers derserve none of our money.
I think a Quantum drive would be a safe buy, wouldn't it?
You don't have to buy two DVD players for Canada and Hong Kong - just go into Fortress in Hong Kong (a big name chain store for electrical goods) and buy one that is banner labled "all zones". No problems.
"Yes, the average consumer does not know what CPRM is. That is because they are uninformed. But if we, the geekly class, explain it to them they will understand and NOT buy CPRM drives. The same thing happend in the 1980's with copy-protected software. At one time, around 1985 I think, the number one selling software package was a program that broke copy-protections"
Yep. Had Copy II 64 back then for my Commodore 64 PC.
If and when CPRM is implimented and starts to become a pain in the ass, Joe Schmo Presario owner will get pissed.
The only problem is, it isn't the 1980's anymore. Programs like Copy II 64 are illegal today under the DMCA.
If all of we tech people are informative and willing to shove the info into their hands, we just may be able to anger enough Joe Schmo's out there to get the DMCA erased. After all, Joe Schmo is driving Napster now, not us.
This may be a case of going "a bridge too far" for the MPAA/RIAA.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Assuming you didn't intend this as a troll, I would like to point out a flaw with your reasoning... The entire Linux community (which arguably makes up the majority of slashdot readers) believes in free software. Piracy? What the hell can we pirate? One of the two dozen commercial apps released "experimentally" for Linux? Yeah, okay. Developing software does *not* take a lot of money. We have a lot of high-quality programs already, thanks to people in the community spending time to write them. And their use doesn't involve "stealing" anything.
Does someone have names/ addresses of execs at companies where this is going on? Please post them so that we can give them a polite reminder that we will avoid supporting them in the future if they pursue this horibble copy protection scheme.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Crack it... At the OS level.
Then port-bomb the manufacturer or such hardware devices.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
These drives will be about as popular as the first generation of Intel's P3 processor.
Didn't they learn how unpopular these kinds of things are from that farce?
I don't plan on ever buying a Big Brother(tm) hard disk.
What about software developers? I don't want to have to authenticate my program every time I compile the bugger.
-Q
-Q
No users were harmed in the posting of this message.
you know, between my nick, my posting history and what I'm about to say, you might be tempted to write this off as some sort of troll, but I think I speak for most of us when I say "THOSE FUCKERS".
please consider this for a +1 insightful, please, as I really think it sums up our collective outrage. thx.
:::
:::
Vaginux.
"eat me".
I have a US Flag that's made of wool.
It has 48 stars on it and was my Grandfather's flag.
The flag I put out on the front of my house on occasion is nylon, though.
Hay thar.
The 'controllers' that go with drives that are ATA are permanently installed as part of the drive. That's why in the old days when an 'IDE' interface was something you plugged into an ISA slot that it only had a few TTL chips and a PAL chip on it.
So there's no incompatability issue between controller/drive that would be produced by this change. Each drive has a controller embedded in it.
Hay thar.
So the FSF is gonna sue for the damages caused by the several bucks of loss they would sustain on the $36 share of stock they bought in order to file the suit?
They'd be laughed out of court.
Hay thar.
If you want a copy of Windows ME (yeah, I know...) that isn't bound to a particular OEM machine, you can go into any major store and purchase the 'Install on a New Computer' retail box version for about $180.
Or you can go into any screwdriver shop and buy a Hard drive, or a motherboard, and get an 'OEM' copy of Windows ME that's not hard-bound to a particular machine, for about $70. It's slightly more legally dubious.
The 'retail box' 'Install on a New Computer' version you are allowed to put on any single machine, anywhere, that you wish.
You instead have a very cheap (the hardware manufacturer probably paid about $30 for it) OEM license which is bound to a particular machine.
Those are the breaks. Deal with it.
Hay thar.
I realize that this is going to affect all the SCSI, EIDE drives, but what about the FireWire, and USB external. Oh wait, dumb question: Everything that is used in a popular demand and shit like that, well, I guess that someone is going to have to "invent" a new interface technology, and one that will over ride all these securtiy precautions, and be able to interact with all present interfaces, and to be somewhat easy to install, and use. Remember, Keep it simple, stupid.
How much for head?!?!
The DMCA is blatantly unconstitutional, not to mention impossible to enforce without turning America into a police state, it will probably die in its first real legal challenge (whenever that comes) and while it certainly reflects a disturbing trend it's not that much of a threat itself.
Honestly, these sorts of laws are, by their very nature, impossible to enforce; I bet there's not a single person reading this posting who, given ten minutes and a T1, couldn't find a perfectly functional copy of Photoshop 6. Let alone Napster... you need only look at Prohibition to see that unpopular laws with mass oppositition can never be effectively enforced.
I cant't stand the idea that some f***** industry controlling my HD. What's next?? This really sucks!! Can I beat up somebody?? I would really like to!
This is not, however, the BIG BROTHER come true, just a step in the "right" direction. A BIG step.
We should start a petition or some other campaign to oppose this plan in the works. Any suggestions?? Is there no limit to these techno MARKETING masters??
Let's start SOMETHING that poses a REAL threath to these bastards that are planning to take over the control of OUR HD's. Let's make it absolytely clear thet we do not buy any fchk**** drives if they don't allow some kind of manual override to turn off their bastard system.
I might be a little overzealous, since my W98 partition decided to fuck things up on me earlier tonight (don't ever move BIG (>600mb) files on a vfat system before taking a backup first). Oh well, it was at the end of its lifecycle anyway. Just lost some photos I would have liked to have had.
Tomorrow I'll kick the windoze out of my SYSTEM for good. Welcome LM 7.2.
There is nothing like a journaling FS!!
You see, there are these three branches. The judges may interpet a law, but they have limited enforcement powers. The President can always refuse to enforce a court decision, and Congress can always change the law. And unless it is a Supreme Court decision, there is always appellate court...
I'm sorry, but that isn't the case. The Emergency War Powers Act suspends this system of checks and balances in times of national crisis or emergency, making the Prez the de facto despot... and we've been in a state of national emergency since the run on the banks in the back in the 1930's.
Here are some sources on this...
Some more surrounding information
There is a plethora of information available on this. A simple Google search has proven extremely helpful.
Headline could read something like:
Proposed NCTIS copy control "standard" to sabotage your hard drive!
The alert should contain the mail and email addresses, phone and fax numbers of all hard drive manufactures.
It should suggest writing them telling them that the "standard" is objected to and that drives implementing it will not be purchased!
Many of these types of proposal will not fly. Bu this one, I think, may. For a couple or reasons.
- One is the 'non sequitur' nature of the argument "if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear". This is like saying "if you don't want our kids raped you must condone compulsory castration of males". No-one wants kids raped, hence no-one dares speak out agains the latter. Similarly, as no-one wants to condone illegal copying, no-one will speak out against this.
- The other one is the ignorance of the public. I have seen highly trained programmers who do not know about the DVD regions. Yet DVD has been destroyed by this region thing.
- The third is the sheer power of the corporations concerned. Media are hot, and media moguls seem to get increadible deals through (AOL/Time Warner beign the most recent example).
We need to be worried, I think.---
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
"Mind you, I suppose in America average consumers would think less about the world outside their Region One box"
Exxactly. How would people know if no-one tells them? And so really, they don't. And, unfortunately, as a marlket force, 250 million Americans easily win, when compared with 10 million (?) Irish people.
Michael
---
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
"if the governments start to ban the manufacture of good ol' simple hard-drives"
What - in tandem? Taiwan, Japan, the US, and Korea all agree, and all at the same time, to ban non-conformant drives? Fujitsu and Samsung sit around the same table for this?
I can't see it happen.
---
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
"someone please explain how one of these devices would possibly impact a user who simply doesn't make use of copy-protected data?"
Unfortunately, though, 99% of the world does. And that WILL affect you. If your next hard drive tried to interpret your right to write to it, you will no doubt run into problems soon enough.
---
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
I know he said governments in the plural. Read my post.
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
Ah, but the EULA was of course written up by lawyers, not by mouthpieces. And I believe courts have indeed sided with the makers of those EULA's. See the software alliance headed by Microsoft and its legal successes.
---
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
If knowledge is power, the american consumer is fairly defenseless against Big Business. Very few even know about thew region encoding, and very few have a problem with the way Win apps work (badly), because they 'belieev there is no better way'. I fear it will be the same with this. DO hope that I am wrong and you are right.
Michael
---
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
"they'll all have heard of Region Encoding and will shy away from any DVD models which don't have some easy circumvention"
---
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
The thing is, while "do not use on Sunday" is neyond that, the "you wil not make copies" clause might well be interpreted by a judge as reasonable. Weirder things have been held reasonable by judges. Prohibition of marijuana, internment of intellectuals, many come to mind :)
---
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
I would like to email the presidents of the HD manufacturing companies, telling them that I will not purchase HDs from a manufacturer that implements or supports this useless exercise. Everyone in the computer industry knows that somewhere in a system the encrypted data gets decrypted and it can be copied at that point so the entire exercise is pointless except to possibly add extra cost to the drives. Does anyone have such an email list?
[
:)
y -these-drives...
The concept behind Pay Per Read (PPR) is that the people you pay have to have access to your computer.
]
It works too if the drives have (crypted) access to a server to verify that you comply with the terms of the contract
[
Ergo, companies will gain complete and total control over your computer.
]
Total control is not mandatory. There is just an marginal edge to be gained. Just enough not to threaten privacy issues tho
[
Once your can give direct signals to the hardisk, you can do anything you want!
]
Sure
Seriously, the fact is that these drives may allow new business models.
Something that brings value is always interesting.
But if You don't like the conditions*price/interest to use the n3W-f*Ck1Ng-smart-and-useful-services-protected-b
just don't use them.
btw what do you think about the ASP ? You don't have access to the binaries, don't have the rights to copy them
And if you need them, you might have to pay for the "service" !
(no sig yet)
Pator
For most astute observers of world events and history, you are correct. However, many have no idea what you're talking about. How about a more detailed explanation? The inventors of this wonderful new copy 'protection' stuff are presenting it as just that, but the implications for free speech are enormous. Say, for instance, that this technology can be extended to search the content of your hard drives for 'banned' material. Given that you would have to have a manufacturer's permission to copy software... what's next? Another given is that most European countries already have laws against free speech(thanks to US 'victory' in WWII to make Europe safe for Communism), even though the Net respects no such laws. I can just see the censors drooling over this.
"There are few problems that can't be solved with the judicious application of high explosives" - Ragnar Benson
Didn't we learn in the 80s that copy protection, as the jargon file says, is "a scheme to prevent incompetent pirates from copying it and legitimate users from using it." Did you audio CDs have a 'no copy' bit associates with each track. Again, no one uses it. I fully expect DVD region coding to become yet another bozo bit.
From a user standpoint, these hard drives will be just like other hard drives except they'll be able to fail in new ways that will make recovering your data from them impossible. Where's the sense in paying extra for that (and you will have to pay extra for that, if only for the technology license required)?
And all this is just to make it safe for the MPAA to let you put movies on your hard disk? Well, for one thing, they don't have any movies available yet that can be put on your hard disk, and no promise of any, so why buy a drive with these new features you may never be able to take advantage of? Also, do you think companies will want their workers to store movies on their corporate hard drives? So why do they need the capability to do so? (Substitute "RIAA" and "music," or other terms, as appropriate in the above paragraph.)
In sum, this harebrained scheme makes about as much sense as using a bar code scanner on your computer to save yourself from having to type in "www.altoids.com"...and we all know where that scheme has gone...
Eric
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
The current groups of people against CPRM can be divided into two camps. One camp is the OSS camp, which is against CPRM on principle. The other group of people against CPRM is against it because the implementation is bad and violates basic principles of operating system design. This second group includes at the moment companies like Microsoft.
CPRM can be made to "work" in a way that the second group is - massively - in favor of it and I expect it to become so in about five years. In order for the second group to adopt CPRM it is necessary to make a CPRM-like mechanism compliant with the file system abstraction. This is easily done as soon as you abandon the sector based ATA concept for a file based storage device.
Imagine a lot more intelligence as part of your hard disk, and imagine the hard disk running an operating system independent file system abstraction on the hard disk electronics itself. In fact, only the lower half of a file system abstraction is needed, that is, free space management and block-to-file mapping. The upper half of the file system, name space management, is not sensitive to copy control and can remain in an untrusted device.
In such a device CPRM would run on top of the filesystem abstraction and therefore not interfere with it. Currently, CPRM runs below a filesystem abstraction and inhibits low level reorganisational operations. A device implementing file level access at the device itself would offer a standardized interface for such operations which would be able to deal with the details of copy control management in the context of such operations on the device itself.
This is a very scary idea, and it will be much harder to lobby against it, because the OSS lobby will not have backing of the software industry that time.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
All rights reserved.
If MS is agenst it it will probably go down in flames.
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Buy the Chinese drive, and make backups. Because you *can*
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If Microsoft DOES INDEED stop the spread of this evil technology, I hereby pledge to buy a copy of Microsoft Flight simulator. Or, no, I'll buy one of those wheel mouse thingies. Okay. Some value here.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Region encoding affecting only a small number of people:
only a small number of people are affected by racial discrimination.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Aren't you taking this out of proportion?
I know that there are many people that don't care about the laws of the US, take a look at the number of people that use Napster. I doubt more than 1% of the use is legal or ethical by any stretch.
As I said, a non-issue for 99.5% of buyers.
I was simply disagreeing with the original assertion that everybody hated the region-codes. It's not true because most DVD buyers aren't even aware of them.
Consumers don't care about stuff that doesn't bother them. Prevent them from being able to play that same DVD on a friend's player next door and you'll see outrage.
Prevent a computer user from being able to backup files off their computer, and you'll see outrage.
I refuse to buy music off the internet with these silly copy-protection schemes because it keys the music to my machine. If I want to backup the files because I'm getting a new computer... I'm screwed.
But all the protection systems on DVDs don't impact me in any way shape or form.
All that happens is that if you try to download an MP3 that is copy-protected with this mechanism, you get an error message saying "Your hard disk cannot store this data because you have CPRM turned off." So what?
I wonder what part of the Linux kernel generates this message.
--
> It's probably off topic, but does anyone think it is possible to recognise an mp3 as a specific song
Hell yes. We have speech recognition, it's not too far-fetched to imagine a "dictionary" of CD tracks. Purple Haze is always going to start with the same two alternating notes, same pitch, same rhythm... Easier than spoken word by far.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> Sorry, I might have had a brainfart. Whichever law they're trying to pass that'll make EULAs completely and utterly binding.
UCITA. Not like that silly little license game would work under any remote circumstance on anything resembling this planet.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
"We will not support this"
This entire scheme requires new device drivers or filesystem drivers, and likely both. If Microsoft states it won't write them or accept them from OEM's in the windows distribution, this scheme will simply end up in the trashcan.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
US flag is cotton I think.
Canadian flag is nylon.
Which country do you live in?
The one silver lining I can see in this is that such things would qualify as what I hear sales people bitching about all the time: sales prevention. Let's go with a ferinstance:
Joe User in the US buys a really cheap computer over the net. Part of why it's cheap is that it's all manufactured overseas and hence doesn't have the fancy CPRM (or whatever) drive in it. He goes out and buys the latest game that is hyped. It won't install on his disk because he doesn't have the CPRM drive. So he has the choice of a) buying a new hard drive and reinstalling just for this bloody game, or b) returning the game and saying gimme my money back idiots.
I think most Joe Users would opt for door "b", regardless of their politics or experience level. And that would have a serious impact on the game manufacturer's bottom line. (not to mention, given all the OTHER hacks through copy protection on games, how long before Joe User just goes out to the net and downloads the latest hacked version that doesn't care what drive it's installed on, or more likely gets a copy from his geeky friend who already did?)
I just don't see this scheme as working out in any practical way, unless of course as someone else mentioned, it becomes legislated as mandatory. And we all know that won't happen...right? RIGHT?
Sigh.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
On all the Hard drives I can afford, I see a lage market on ebay for these if this auctually gets approved and non compliant drives start becoming scarse. Of course there is always SCSI, maybe this is the big event needed to drive demand up and scsi prices down.
All you have to do is implement these new ATA calls, and just return the exact same values for every single hard drive you manufacture. You could get some nice vendor lock-in this way, "unlike everyone else's drives, you can copy ANY files between any of our drives, and they're compatible with all your 'protected' software and data".
There's got to be some reason why this won't work, but I can't see it.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
From what I've seen, this whole scheme is 99.999% pure legal machinations to assist in the enforcement of playing back licensed content through a (currently vaporware) hardware-dependent codec. The other 0.001% is simply a really bad idea that will potentially screw up data on hard drives.
It seems almost certain that:
1: Someone will come up with a filesystem that avoids verboten bit combinations (e.g.: UUencoded). Hey -- it's a 30% hit on capacity but drives keep getting bigger, and you could just keep usenet downloads in 'native' format. Alternately imagine using plex86/vmware style virtual drives (with virtual copy protection).
2: Someone will come up with a codec that ignores the encryption, or simply extracts the content and re-encodes with a different codec, not unlike using de-css to rip DVDs and then burn as vcds.
3: The content companies will foam at the mouth with rage. The FBI will start doing wholesale raids of homes to enforce the existing legislation.
4: The presence of suspicious filesystems, unapproved codecs, and of course 'illegal' copies, will make the consumer guilty before proven innocent. Several (dozens?) of people will get jail time. Hundreds will lose their computers for months at a time until they are cleared or impounded permamently.
This latest initiative will fail in a technical sense. From a legal perspective it would seem to provide some good evidence that you're doing something illegal, and an unfortunate few will pay the price by being scapegoats.
The only way I can see to deal with this is through civil disobedience. Ghandi style hunger strikes. Mass-revolt against the DCMA. Protest rallies. Egging and TP'ing of content company executives. Handing out thousands of free copies of a popular movie (with Chinese subtitles) that's just hit the theatres.
The target of this protest should be, must be, the basic premise of the DCMA and other copy-protection legislation, get it repealed, and prevent any replacement. Better yet, replace it with a law that prohibits copy protection.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Follow the MONEY...
What geeks should do is band together and buy HUGE lots of these drives, then return them because they are "defective." - i.e. "hey I can't seem to get my data off this drive".
Accepting returns cost retailers a TON of money, and if it is the same type of drives that constantly cause unhappy customers, the smart retailers will eventually stop dealing in those products.
Nice Troll.
It seeems to me that this is just another reason to go with open source. No need to worry about copy protection if you are using open source - so your data is free from the worries of such systems.
We should stop bellyaching and realize that these sorts of systems will just drive more people to use free (as libre) software.
And guess what, movies have budgets that most software products can only *dream* about. But, Microsoft wants to charge $200 every time you upgrade your computer. If they want to charge you like that, their prices should reflect it.
I don't pirate. But, I find it aggravating that everytime I install WinME, I have to provide a CD Key, and if I lose the case, then tough shit, theirs nothing I can do about, but buy a new copy. If the Motion picture industry can afford to produce a $100,000,000 movie, and release it to the public, at a cost of $6.00 a pup, and then make a massive profit, there is no reason why Microsoft can't do the same thing.
The truth is, that the software industry has a vested interest in doing nothing but screwing the costumer. They've been getting along with it for years, and now want legislation to force consumers into it, for years more.
Here's what software companies want. A world where they take no responsiblity for their product's quality, and can completely control the way it is installed, used, and then force the user to purchase upgrades. Let's face it, if you find a bug in your latest software purchase, there is nothing that you can do about it. You can't return it. You can't dissassmbe it and fix it yourself. You can only wait for an upgrade. And if the company ducks under, tough shit, you'll have to start the same process with another company altogether.
Software users aren't the ones doing the stealing, they're getting robbed blind themselves.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
I think you could probably make as many encrypted or encoded (.tar, .zip, etc) copies as you like. But the media players and recorders will refuse to use these alternatively encoded copies since the disc drive won't authenticate these files through the key encrypted special calls that are part of the system. So unless you have a alternative (eg, illegal thanks to DMCA) player, the encoded/encrypted copies can't be played.
It seems to me the hd makers would be killing their own market. Who is going to need an 80G drive, if not to store their mp3's, movies, and pr0n. The only things i know that manage that without the 3 above named things are corporate servers. Sure some users can stack up a bit of stuff. But really, media is what fills our drives today. And if they implement this to stop that, why will i need a bigger drive?
Everyone's been throwing out the "fact" that we'll be unable to legally crack this encryption thanks to the DMCA. However, I think this is perhaps an untrue claim.
/dev/random) would be fair game.
/. is! :-)
First, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." I would assume that "a work protected under this title" would mean any work which is copyrighted. So accessing uncopyrighted data on your hard drive (say, a dump of
Next, "to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner" (emphasis added). Well, as long as you give yourself authority to access anything you personally have created, then that should be alright as well.
Finally (and this one's a bit less clear-cut) "a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work." Now, say your encrypted hard drive is made by IBM. Let's further stipulate that you have some Microsoft-copyrighted software on your hard drive. Though accessing your hard drive requires the application of information and a process to gain access, it doesn't require the authority of the copyright owner. Microsoft is not involved in authorizing you access of their copyrighted work. The simple proof of that is that if these hard drives were created and used without Microsoft's knowledge, you could still access the data as long as you had the authority from IBM's side. The authority comes from IBM, not Microsoft.
So although this is of course a despicable proposal, it seems that cracking it is perfectly legal, until they discover this loophole and plug it with further legislation.
Disclaimer: Of course I am not a lawyer--no one on
--
Someone is going to have to start protesting. There is going to be a meeting of the standards group in Feb and that needs to have protesters present. People outside the front doors of Seagate and every IBM plant/office in the world will get a message delivered. The news media doesn't like geeks but when it comes to some tecnical issues they will listen.
... is where this discussion ends up.
For security, everybody (including you!) needs some kind of keys you can carry around and know are physically secure. You'll typically mix keys when you need real security ... passphrase and encrypted private key, say; or maybe you like
biometrics. This proposal makes you unduly dependant on some keys that you have no reason
to trust, and which you can't manage when the
operational issues come up. Or audit to know
nothing's being stolen from you (election?).
The policy question is who controls the keys. As RMS noted, Free people need certain things. Having control of one's own culture seems basic, but theft happen all the time ... not just
corporations from the public, or the other way
around. Makes things always evolve.
It's probably off topic, but does anyone think it is possible to recognise an mp3 as a specific song (and I don't mean by looking at ID3 tags.. I mean recognising the music) and if that is possible, is it possible to match a specific mp3 against a large database of songs (say, all the ones controlled by the big music cartels). Then how far fetched is it to imagine an intelligent agent scanning your harddrive for unauthorized mp3's? The likelyhood of music copyright owners actually going after the general public is very small. and a damn good way to loose customers. but the music industry really seems to believe they are above customer retaliation.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I dont know about educating the market, how about educating the people at IBM? These guys are supposed to be smart yet they continually pump out trivial encryption based "solutions" that claim to do things that are theoretically impossible. What they need is a couple of crackers on staff to attack their latest system and send them back to the drawing board every few months. It is truely sad.
How we know is more important than what we know.
welcome to the real world Neo.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I dont think customers have a choice. This is legal bullying at its best. Copy control now! or we'll sue your ass back to the stone age.
How we know is more important than what we know.
hmm.. could we guess that you can't even read the data off the CD without giving up some encryption keys from the controlled harddrive?
How we know is more important than what we know.
It will be a small step to pass laws forbidding DVD players without region encoding and hdds without copy protection. These laws will be bought and paid for like the DMCA. And they have the potential of being effective.
pushed by Nasty Software Hoarders opposed to Honest Open Source,
and by Nasty Music Hoarders who want us to Pay Per View for
music, videos, e-books, and other products that we've bought,
using them technical workarounds for activities that
would normally be covered by First Sale and Fair Use
and only be covered by the limited protections of copyright,
and they richly deserve to Die Like DIVX (remember DIVX?*)
and get rejected by the market like Lotus Copy Protection.
(*I'm told DIVX's cracked format has been recycled
as a convenient tool for Napsterizing videos...)
Much worse, these Mindshare Marketing Thugs are in league with
the sleazy DMCA-abusers who got a law written badly enough that
it not only directly confiscates the previous rights of
information consumers but goes far beyond that to
criminalize people who are engaged in the legitimate activity
of seeing what it is they bought and using it in interesting ways.
The technical side is bad enough, but left to itself,
either Darwin would get them or they'd find a market that's
willing to be couch-potato consumers we can sneer at,
either of which are ok, while the legal side is outright evil.
But what happens if we look at this from a cypherpunks crypto enthusiast viewpoint?
Cypherpunks write code. Nasty MusicHoarderPunks can too.
The right way to protect information isn't to write laws,
which are ineffective against crackers (whether government or
free-lance), usually contain loopholes for cops to abuse,
and can be changed if the government wants to -
it's to write code and algorithms and hardware designs
that actually protect the information.
That's what these guys are doing, and it's what we WANT them
to do, though we'd rather have them operate a gift economy,
the way the folk music profession did before it commercialized,
and the church music and hacking professions.
(I'm not counting the use of DMCA to criminalize
working around bad software - that's still evil.)
How do you build tools to protect information,
at a level of granularity that someone who'd
cracked root on a Unix box or bought or cracked User on a
Windows box can't break into? You use crypto to encrypt data,
with public-key algorithms to do appropriate parts in public,
use objects that maintain their own data and keys,
and maybe you build capability-based operating systems,
or partition functions into separate devices like smartcards
or intelligent peripherals to keep the private parts more isolated.
If you want to build a For Your Ears Only secure telephone,
it's much easier if you can ship an encrypted data stream
that only the recipient's headphone can decrypt.
And if you want a digital signature system that
can't easily be forged by FBI spook who shoulder-surfs
your passphrase, or want a digital payment system that
can't easily be ripped off by some online store clerk,
it's easier if you can use some hardware object in the process.
To a large extent, the threat models are critical to your security -
but if being overprotected doesn't interfere with regular use,
and doesn't interfere with the other protection you're building,
it's not a Bad Thing. Of course, it cuts two ways -
if you're not a Good Guy building hardware protection against
virus crackers, but an NSA Spook building cracking tools
to workaround for the software protections, it's nice to get
down and dirty in the hardware and hire Chip-R-Us to include
an undocumented Export Chip Private Key instruction in addition
to the Export Chip Public Key instruction...
Music Hoarders have a somewhat harder problem, in that they
want to copy-protect information while providing near-identical
copies to large numbers of people, while you're more likely
to want to provide your personal transaction information or
private messages only to a small number of recipients -
but you may still want some kind of watermarking to identify
who sold your "private" information to somebody you didn't authorize.
As long as watermarking isn't seriously obnoxious, the fact
that different listeners hear slightly different versions
isn't that bad - listeners at a concert also hear different versions
depending on whether they're in the front row, the nosebleed seats,
or the Phil Zone, as well as how hard they've been dancing,
how bouncily the people in front are dancing, whether Jerry
forgot some of the words or had a magical guitar night that reminds
them of a previous concert, and how, umm, chemically enhanced they are
Somebody allegedly wrote to RAH:
Intel and IBM know that Windows isn't going to protect their data -
if they want it protected, they'll have to work around it,
using techniques like CPUs, speakers, and disk drives that
share public keys and only pass encrypted data through the OS.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lotus dropped copy-protection because everybody hated it. Maybe IBM and friends have a new variant on copy-protection that's less annoying, and maybe everybody will hate it less passionately and develop their annoyance more slowly, but it has a high probability of dieing like DIVX movies.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Or you may find your New-Copy-Protection-Mafia-Capable gear stuck in the attic next to that DIVX lame-o format which failed quickly in the market.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How many people still use audio cassettes ? not many, and those who still do won't be able to do that for long... Don't think 5 or even 10 years ahead... think about 20, 30, 100 years in the future...
:/
The scary thing about this technology is that it could mean eventually all media whatever it is gets fully encrypted & signed through all the parts of the chain.
Looks like the media industry is investing in the future... they probably know it won't be possible to enforce using this technology soon, but let's consider the following scenario :
2000-2010 : hdd manufacturers implement CPRM in hdd, part of the consumers mass buy them, but a non negligeable part of it work around the limitations, by using old hdd or SCSI drives. Foreign manifacturers still produce hdd with the old uncrippled ATA command set
2010-2020 : The industry realizes that a chain is as weak as its weakest part, and that CD-ROM drives still have the ability to dump raw audio data that can be saved without the copy protection bit. The next move is not pressure hw manufacturers to include CPRM v2 into CDrom drives, enforcing the copyright bozo bit that's been here for ages.
2025 : the media industry start complaining to SCSI manufacturers, alledging their drives makes it easier for people to pirate music & video. CPRM v3 is proposed as part of the SCSI command set and implemented a few years later.
2028: Video capture devices now handle the multiplexed copyright control data sent along with video signals. You can still digitize and distributes the movie of your summer hollidays, but you can't capture StarWars 11, let alone distribute it.
2030-2040: the media industry realizes (at last) that foreign hw manufacturers still produce hw (cd drives, hdd, sound & video capture cards) that ignores copy protection. Time to change how we distribute music and video, digital era is here since 30 years anyway, so the industry simply stops producing solid media, thus making CD drives and video capture devices only usefull to anything that is not copyrighted, and getting rid of the foreign technology problem altogether. It takes about 30 years, but finally the only reason to have CDs, DVDs & videotapes is as collectors items.
2060 : The entire chain is encrypted and signed, there is just no way to dump digital media as raw data, simply because all hardware is "authorized" in order to get a decryption key, and using such a key to dump data as raw binary would violate DMCA v5. Software industry has no choice, data travels on networks completly encrypted, so if they want to use that data, they have to Pay And Conform (the new media industry slogan)
2100: there has been no challenge to the 100% controled media system since 40 years. Very few people are aware that just 100 years in the past, there was no dinstinction between copyrighted data and non copyrighted data. OSes make the distinction at the very core of their architectures, a media file automatically inherits security properties.
No media software has been developped independently since 50 years because the process of being a trusted media processor(tm) is 1) much too expensive for an individual, 2) only granted to software giants who could pay giant amounts of money in case of misuse of the key they've been grated.
2130 : By now, the media industry starts to relax, hardware and software are all CPRM v5 compliant. A Media file now IS an encrypted file by nature.
Since you can't develop independantly a media player or producer anymore, and since a media file is a secure file by nature, independant artists fade away. The only way to distribute media is through "proper" channels: the media industry.
2200: There has been no way to produce or manipulate media independently from the media giants for more than a century. People don't even think this is wrong, it's just the way the system works.
Digital books, digital music, and digital video is now everywhere. And all of it has been approved. There is now no ned to worry anymore, you won't run into pornography or anything BAD, whatever that means.
Our children are safe
lone.
As someone else replied to you, hard drives are not trivial to make. It's not like making chips, where all you need is a wafer fab to chug out wafers. Hard drives are very complex systems, that take a large company with a LOT of engineering resources to put together. Thus there are really only 5 companies in the world that make hard drives:
Seagate
Western Digital
Quantum / Maxtor (merged in October, I beleive)
Fujitsu
IBM (although I doubt they're actually making the drives, for some reason, although it doesn't really matter)
There may be a few other very minor manufacturers.
The implications are this: If they sign on this small list of companies, we are FUKT. Any small companies won't be able to sell at any kind of volume, and the premiums will shoot though the roof on "non-corrupted" drives.
Fortunatly, one of the few things we have on our side is that hardware manufactuers could give a damn about things like this. In fact, it's bad, because it might stifle demand. If Joe Shmoe want a 500 gig drive for his mp3s, these companies want to deliver and get his money. They have no moral qualms about what he uses it for. Same thing with ISP's and anyone else. Thats capitalism.
Take mp3 players for example...how many do you see with SDMI capabilities? How many that have SDMI enabled won't allow non-SDMI mp3s to be played? This pretty much sums it up. The time for terror isn't here yet, but it's getting closer.
This technology is already in your DVD drive! Believe it or not, you actually *can't* copy a DVD without using DeCSS, despite what the zealots say.
If you want to try it out for yourself, try this: Mount up "The Matrix". Now, *without* using CSS-auth, go to the directory with all the .vobs, and try to cat one of the bigger ones. You'll get a big, fat I/O Error. No, that isn't Linux that is preventing you from reading that file. It's your DVD drive. And it won't let you read it until you run css-auth, which is part of DeCSS.
In order to actually copy a DVD without DeCSS, you need a non-compliant drive. Good luck finding one.
What really annoys me is that the last time I pointed this out, someone responded to me and said essentially "No, you're wrong", and he got modded up and I got modded down. I'm not kidding, folks! Try it!
------
Sure, this will mean that all those MP3's you've been downloading off the web might have some trouble residing on one of these "new" ATA devices, but someone please explain how one of these devices would possibly impact a user who simply doesn't make use of copy-protected data?
I'm not saying this isn't a bad idea...I think it sucks that hardware manufacturers are being forced to cave into software demands (much like Intel did years ago with its "protected access mode" on its CPUs to assuage M$), and I don't believe the RIAA/MPAA cartel should wield as much power as they seem to over data replication issues. But I'm still waiting for someone to stop yelling "The sky is falling!" and show me exactly how this will affect someone who uses free software in lieu of proprietary software.
Do you have any confidence in the court system at this point to correctly define a circumvention device?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I suppose it is possible that the people behind this are confident they will get the law changed, but I think it is more likely that they are sitting in an ivory tower somewhere and talking only to each other, not letting the real world intrude on their thoughts.
Think about it: since non-copy-controlled drives are not supposed to work at all with copy-controlled drives, each Zip disk, floppy, or backup tape will also need to be copy-controlled, or else not work. You will need new drives for all of the above, too. In other words, for this proposal to go forwards, everyone will have to scrap all their storage devices and buy complete new ones.
And why would people do it? Suppose the copy-prevention goes wrong; you just lost all the data on that drive. It's a catastrophic failure mode. And you cannot swap out the drive without getting authorization from an external authority? You would also need to get authorization before using each and every Zip disk, backup tape, etc. I hope the copy-prevention guys are buying lots of net bandwidth and lots of fast servers; they will need them. And they will pay for all this how? By passing costs on to anyone who buys in to the scheme?
IBM couldn't even sell MicroChannel and that isn't a tenth as odious as this; it's dead before arrival. Unless it's mandatory.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
In reality, when writing to {insert target}, you are exerting a greater influence on the makers of the paper, envelope, pen, and stamps you bought for money. You support the stationary industry, more than you influence laws. That's the vote that counts - the one you make with your wallet. So, don't write to politicians, they don't understand any of this anyway, and if they did they wouldn't care.
Vote the important way, with money. Write to IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, whoever your favbourite hard drive makers are. Tell them how much money you have spent on their hard drives in the past. Tell them that if they implement this consumer-serfdom scheme, you will never buy another drive from them. Outline precisely how much extra you will be willing to pay to whichever of their competitors offers drives that are uncrippled.
Corporations aren't afraid of governments in N AMerica anyway, they already own the governments. They are afraid of you, their customer, because they are petrified that you might figure out that you own the corps, not the other way around.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
I have absolutely nothing against the Chinese, but I feel compelled to mention this.
Given the insanely tight tolerances required for modern Winchester hard disk design, there is no way I will buy a hard drive made by some unknown Chinese company. Some things I buy that are made in China are of excellent quality, but unfortunately that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Since it won't be a name-brand manufacturer manufacturing these drives in China (since the name-brand manufacturers will all have this blasted copy-control system in their drives), for all I know it'll be some unknown Chinese sweatshop pumping them out.
I simply cannot, and will not, accept the risk that shoddy QC/QA will result in the loss of my data. As a result, I will only buy a hard drive made by a reputable manufacturer that's been making hard drives for a looooong time.
Therefore, it looks like I will have two options:
- Buy a cheap Chinese hard drive that may fail prematurely due to substandard manufacturing and/or quality control
- Buy a name-brand hard drive with CPRM, and take it up the tailpipe
Either way, I lose.--
There may be an upside to the Bush administration. Bush doesn't get along with Hollywood. But he likes big business. Try to get corporate opposition to this going.
One interesting point is that it might leave hard drive and computer vendors open to litigation. If you lose data because of this, no disclaimer can save them, because it's willful, not accidental, harm.
Sorry, I might have had a brainfart. Whichever law they're trying to pass that'll make EULAs completely and utterly binding.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Of course it wouldn't work; but it's just as silly and unenforceable as the idea it's against. "This encryption system works on the honor system. Tell the system when you're writing copyrighted material so it can encrypt it!"
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
One point that hasn't been mentioned is that corporations might love this. They can use this technology to make sure that their software is all approriately licensed and so forth. And the home user market is getting very saturated. Tons of people have computers, and either find them to be not the useful or use them for chat rooms, pr0n, and mp3's.
Speaking of that, it amazes me that people replied to this post with comments about how the average computer user would be oblivious to the differences in hard drives. Have they been living in a hole? Do they know how huge Napster is? All these people will be _very_ away of something that will prevent them from exchanging free music.
Even if there is big money backing this idea, it won't work without some sort of legislation or something. Too many people are dealing with pirated software and mp3's for this to make any input. Maybe we'll all be ordering our hard drives from some shady place in Singapore, but that will be the case...
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
this stuff just gets more and more orwellian as the day progresses.
on this one, i SERIOUSLY urge you to take action. if that means calling your local legislator, do so. If that means doing something more provocative such as (oh my god!) forming a f---king protest line outside these guys' front doors, DO SO!!!
this isn't about companies getting ripped off anymore. This isn't about that "evil" napster corporation fucking everyone over. This is about big business trying to take away consumers' rights to fair use. All of the sudden you can't make a tape of that album you love so much. You can't do ANYTHING with it except play the original on compliant hardware. Same goes with any digital media that can be encrypted/have a copy bit set. Anyone see a problem here?
pure and simple: if you take a back seat on this one, you've effectively allowed big business to take away your fair use rights.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Now, to take a different view, hardisks aren't licsensed in the way that DVDs are. That means that hardisk makers aren't bound to follow the coding standard. That means that you'll likely end up with 2 standards: encoded (E) and (N) not encoded.
Parts of the Serial ATA standard are encumbered by patents on technologies that are necessary and irreplaceable to comply with the standard. One of the terms of the patent license will most likely be along the lines: "Licensee shall manufacture only E drives."
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
All you need is a little device between your controller and your harddisks, which replaces the serial number given by the harddisk with another one or even return an error. Such device should not be too complicated to build
Except for a little four-letter word: DMCA. This law, in effect in the largest market for such devices (United States), would kill demand.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The only two ways I can see these selling are:
1) For a given drive size, a "Media Consortium" offers huge rebates for your old drive, or choosing a new "copy protected" drive.
Who is going to buy a 70 GB. RMS-approved drive for $150 when you can turn in your old 8 GB. drive and get the copy protect version for $50? Not many people.
2) The second way is to just make it the only thing available. Given that 250 GB. drives are on the horizon, if it's the only way they're made, you don't have a lot of choice.
I'm actually quite happy about all this. I've always had a bit of the problem with dystopia, and now that the rats are coming out of their holes and passing flurries of hardcore legislation w/ the politician's help, I can rest much easier.
There really is a small group of ultra powerful, ultra wealthy a-holes that control the government and technology in ways such that they become incredibly wealthy, while the average Joe suffers.
Dystopia? Ha, more like reality.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Unless you have a monopoly such as exsists with CSS, you will not be able to force this down folks throats. It offers nothing for the user except grief and aggrevation. IS managers will very simply refuse to buy this unless a gun is held to their heads. I am sure that someone will continue to provide the good old type of drive and these will dry up and die the death that they so richly deserve.
This seems to me to be more of an intel serial number type of system. In other words, the hardware enforces a mechanism which *must* be implemented in software (probably at the OS level, for Windows). Personally, I see no problem with this, as long as I am not forced to run an OS or application software which uses it.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I am not a lawyer, can someone confirm the above?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Here is how it could work:
1. Software queries the drive for its ID when installing. It stores an encrypted version of that ID in the registry or a config file, or embedded in the executable it writes to the disk. If the software is moved, it detects a different ID from the drive than it expects and fails. If the drive is not ID capable the software fails. If the software is hacked to ignore the check it could work. Hard to do if the software self-encrypts/decrypts itself with the ID. Theoretically anyone could ask the drive for its ID. Unless the drive manufacturers require a special key to be sent to the drive to get its ID. And then they have to dish out keys to software companies. What do they do when a new company wants a key, which no current drives have?
2. Software downloads from a pay site would have you first get special software from the site to do the download. The ID is sent and the software is modified on the fly to only work on a drive with that ID.
ID spoofing is quite possible in both scenarios. Of course, any ID spoofing software could be illegal under the DMCA.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Uh, I'm not so sure. At least here that's the main marketing buzzword right now. "Region-free" is part of every ad for a DVD player I've seen recently.
Now, any computer buyer will have to check what CPRM is. Why? The same reason you can't buy mac stuff for a PC. Your normal programs simply wont work with the data, only approved programs will. If a program could get the raw data, then nothing prevents it from writing it to another disk, or output in whatever format it likes... so, this really means access control just like the DVD case. So either you buy an 100% CPRM-compliant computer, or you buy a 0% CPRM-compliant computer.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
If the average consumer goes to a store and sees a Compaq computer that says "40GB hard drive, CPRM compliant!" they're not going to say "uh oh, it's that evil CPRM, I'll go elsewhere." They're going to see yet another fancy acronym and assume that it is somehow good because fancy acronyms make something more advanced. They will buy the computer, take it home, and when they start running into problems will simply accept it as "computers aren't perfect." And by the time the general public figures it out, it will be too late, and will have become an accepted part of the computer age. The average corporate purchasing department has even less grasp of what is going on, so they're no help either.
It is scary. Very very scary.
--GrouchoMarx
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
This is exactly what happened when GEMA, the German answer to the RIAA, experimented with a copy control protocol called "Cactus" on some audio CDs. A person would take a CD home, and their machine wouldn't play it, then they would bring it back to the record store as "defective." Eventually GEMA backed down and the CDs were reissued without "Cactus" copy control.
Also think back to the time when key disking and other copy control measures were used with computer software. Programs like Copy II PC and Copy II Mac were big, big sellers back then.
Backing up your HD is a RIGHT even under the DMCA. In fact the DMCA specifically states that people have the right to make a backup copy of anything they own.
This will go down like DIVX:-( . How long did it take the market to kill DIVX:-( ? One year? Two? Don't worry folks. This is bad but not the end of the world.
---- Hey Grrl Geeks! Your very own geek news site has arrived!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
You can buy the new drives and just turn the "feature" off. From one of the articles:
So what's the big deal? You turn off the mechanism. RMS notwithstanding, you can now do whatever you want with free software. All that happens is that if you try to download an MP3 that is copy-protected with this mechanism, you get an error message saying "Your hard disk cannot store this data because you have CPRM turned off." So what?
People who create information have a right to encrypt it. You have a right not to bother with their stupid encrypted information. Who cares?
Actually, this could be the best thing ever to happen to free information. It will drive people away from copy protection and into the arms of free information. By making it an all-or-nothing choice, they're forcing people to embrace free information wholeheartedly rather than halfheartedly.
</don flame-proof body armor>
Find free books.
Not that there is any chance anyone in the big media will utter these three words in sequence.
What is now called 'Copy protection' would be renamed to as 'Data Damaging' ; it is a much more accurate description - and it lets people know what we technical people think of the activity. As in "I see someone has come up with a new data damaging scheme."
Even pointy haired bosses would realize that 'damaged data' drives are a bad idea.
I asked a similar question in the previous article. I got some interesting responses. You see it all at5 62 01&threshold=-1&commentsort=3&mode=nested&cid=19ca n
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/12/22/19
-mdek.net
hmm...how many slashdotters does it take to stop industry oppression of consumers?
aren't a large number of us it managers and other people in charge of large amounts of hardware purchases? let's put those powers to work to fight this industrial oppression.
I have for some time maintained that it is perfectly possible to build secure hardware, but they are trying to bring software in to the equation as well. That suggests to me that we can break it. So, we need to get FreeNet or a better similar thing working (and used enough!) so that the developers who are capable can develop without getting caught. We have the technology to win this until Intel/AMD/etc get in on it. Fight it technically, and also in the minds of the consumers and in the courts at every turn. My hat is off to those who will surely break this, as it is to those who did for DVD.
If it isn't defensible to outlaw posession of the code, its distribution shouldn't be outlawed either; otherwise, the legislators and judges are merely trying to hide what they are really doing behind some technicalities. If the US continues to go down this road, it will end up a police state.
That's an annoying infringement on fair use, but it isn't as serious as the end to all free software. In the long run, I think this kind of technology is going to be a dud. It will cause lots of headaches to consumers and computer users alike. It will probably fall into disuse. It may actually be beneficial because it gives free content an advantage, since free content can spread unhindered, while the commercial junk is subject to all sorts of problems and limitations.
Nevertheless, I don't have much respect for people developing these kinds of methods. Apart from the violation of fair use rights that it enables, to me, it is simply poor judgement and in poor taste.
The beauty of the system is that if Congress chooses to act like a bunch of rednecks (like circa 1955), the Supreme Court can desegregrate schools with a courageous decision like Brown v. the Board of Education.
Maybe if stopped relying on White Power advocates like Rush Limburger for your "political wisdom" and took Political Science 101 you would stop spreading this FUD!!!
Given your apparent total ignorance of the facts of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case, perhaps you should avoid casting aspersions?
Specifically, Congress was not involved in any way, shape, or form with the case. In Plessy v. Fergueson, the Supreme Court ruled that mandating separate accommodations was within the powers of the states. Congress was therefore, by Supreme Court ruling, powerless to end segregation in any state.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
"Haven't you ever thought of the fact that salesmen always have this "slightly more expensive" model that has just the right things? They also don't want to be part of the support disaster."
Especially since and hard drive that refuses to obey a copy or move command is defective. CPRM is a "bug" not a feature.
When these things come out, why don't we all add to our geek sites FAQ's for newbies to stumble onto telling them that their new HD's are defective because of this CPRM "bug" in the new drives and that they should return them immediately?
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"The legislation is already there -- its called the DMCA ... Remember, it makes circumvention devices illegal?
Do you have any confidence in the court system at this point to correctly define a circumvention device?"
No, because of "judge" Kaplan. So long as ANY judge is allowed to interpret (and make) laws without accountability, this will go on. You think the congress is bought? How about the judges?
Kaplan WORKED for a law firm that represented the MPAA before Clinton made him a judge. And he refused to recuse himself when being confronted with this fact, just days after scalding 2600's attorney, Garbus for a much more tenious conflict (having once represented a company that was later bought by Time Warner).
So long as judges remain absolute dictators in their courtroom, this is NOT a free country.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Products from Taiwan are great. Abit for example, makes some of the best motherboards there are, and caters to we tweakers/hardware hackers with overclocker friendly boards (that AMD and Intel hate).
I only buy Abit motherboards for this reason, they give me what I want, and I support them with my wallet.
If enough stink is raised over this, what is to stop Abit or another company over there for supplying us with HD's for the tweaker/hardware hacker market? There IS such a market, as evidenced by Abit's very existance.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Simple solution, only use software like Linux or BSD. Does anyone think that Alan Cox or Linus will willingly modufy the ext2 file system to obey CPRM?
Yes, there will probably end up being Linux software that is CPRM compliant, as Linux goes more mainstream. But they will be drowned out by hundreds of NON CPRM player software, and thus unable to compete.
If Microsoft puts this crap into `Doze, FAT32/NTFS, then the average `Doze user will be fucked. But from what I'm reading, MS isnt' too thrilled with this. They aren't dumb people, they KNOW this will ultimately drive down PC sales, and undermine Windows, as CPRM software will be 99.99% Windows apps.
This is a major opportunity for Linux, that is unless his eminence Judge Kaplan doesn't rule Linux illegal as a circumvention device, and make it illegal to link to kernel.org.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Perhaps someone can explain this to me. Yes, I read the referenced articles, and think I have a pretty good grasp of what they intend to do. But I have two serious technical problems with the entire scheme.
First, it sounds like the only way to force someone to use these "features" would consist of having a compliant BIOS, OS, *and* filesystem. That alone seems to insure that we can get around it.
More importantly, though, even if my assumption above turns out wrong, why couldn't someone create a ramdisk, copy whatever they want to it (copyrighted or not), then save that ramdisk as an image file with the copyable-flag set? Or for that matter, why wouldn't that same idea work with *any* mounted loopback filesystem? as long as " I " created and have copy permission on the "real" file (as the disk sees it), the contents of that file should not matter.
Any ideas? Please, I would really like to hear the flaws with my reasoning.
Let the FSF buy one share apiece of all the major hardware makers (not just hard drives, but motherboards, processors, etc), and when one of them decides to offer this sort of "copy prevention" facility, sue them on the grounds that:
* It's annoying to customers
* It makes their product less competitive compared to companies producing unprotected drives
* It exposes the company to liability if their protection scheme fails or can be bypassed.
"I have a right to make as many copies and backups of the software that I OWN as I like"
I wish it were true.
Read a software license agreement. You do not OWN the software at all. You have a license to use it under certain proscribed conditions.
I agree with your sentiments - this very dangerous initiative truly sucks - but since this is a legal question let's be legal about this: you do not own the software you "buy", and you can not legally copy it as you like.
Michael
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
I still don't understand what's in this for the HD manufacturers. What incentive do they really have? How is it going to benefit their business? Why should they cut a deal with anyone? Furthermore, why should they all cut a deal together, and who's going to force them to do it? I just don't see it.
What if I choose to use an encrypted filesystem? Not only is the filesystem meta-information encrypted, so is (naturally) all of the data. How is this thing going to determine what I am writing to the disk and what if some of my encryption sets that "do not copy" bit someplece?
... or ... could only store content marked with the "Fooland Approved" bit.
While I have not read the new specification in detail, it would appear to rely on data being sent to the drive in a very specific manner so that it can be verified by the hardware. Seems to me that this is a serious privacy issue.
What is to prevent governments from adding different kinds of tags to other kinds of data. What if the government of Fooland decided that disk drives should not be able to store content marked with the "no Fooland" bit
It isn't going to work. It relies on data being written "in the clear" to the disk drive. Not everyone does that.
Change the term "copy protection" to "copy prevention". The latter is much more accurate and doesn't have the connotation that copying is inherently bad.
"nobody liked the region coding in DVDs"
That's not really true. It was a non-issue to 99.5% of DVD buyers.
Now DivX on the other hand created a lot of questions with consumers. It failed in the market place because consumers could see no benefit from all the restrictions.
I don't quite understand this harddrive thing. What possible benefit would I get? What restrictions is this going to impose?
On the surface it doesn't seem to be a particularly good idea, and the consumers will very likely reject it.
It is only illegal to * create or distribute* such software.
It's also illegal to "import" (and there goes our offshore developer defense) or "otherwise traffic in" such software. Now maybe "downloading an (illegally distributed) copy for personal use" doesn't fit that final catch-all category, but do you want to be one of the defendants in the test case?
One argument here is that even if geeks band together and don't buy these drives, Ma and Pa will because they won't know any better.
.. this will be pretty effective once the MS Windows dialog "Sorry you can't copy that file here because MegaCorp B said so" becomes as common as the BSOD and the "Goodbye" AOL voice.
Well, one thing worth noting, is all it would take is a single smart CEO of a hardware or computer company to realize that this standard is a bad thing, and then launch an advertising campaign hinged on the fact that their hard drives don't hinder what you can copy. "Dell computers won't keep you from copying files! No wonder they're number one!"
--
Of course you can buy a chinese drive. But you won't be able to install the software your company needs on it, so you can keep your job. And you want to buy that piece of music you like so much. And you need that book for college. And you heard a lot of good critiques about that book.
The point is that although people can prevent you from downloading a certain book, no one can prevent you from spreading a book!
We still have some time before Fahrenheit 451 kicks in.
No sir. Don't like it.
I'm not entirely clear on why the NCTIS has the right or ability to force the industry to do it, although more than likely that's because I don't know very much about the NCTIS.
From the article:
However, what's likely to create a firestorm of industry protest is that the proposed mechanism introduces problems to moving data between compliant and non-compliant hard drives. Modifications to existing backup programs, imaging software, RAID arrays and logical volume managers will be required to cope with the new drives, The Register has discovered.
It seems to me that the industry response to the technical difficulties imposed by the "standard" make it far less likely to actually happen.
Also from the article:
The proposal makes use of around a megabyte of read-only storage on each hard drive that isn't usually accessed by the end user for a "Media Key Block".
Although this seems like a pissant technicality, we might be able to raise a fuss over that one meg of space.
And from the article again:
The Register understands there is fierce opposition to the plan from Microsoft and its OEM customers. Generating hundreds of thousands of images each week, the PC industry relies on data going from one master to many reliably and smoothly. Imaging programs face the same problem as restore software: the target disk isn't the same as the originator disk. Microsoft Redmond already has put in a counter-proposal that eschews low-level hardware calls.
As much as most Slashdotters hate Microsoft, they may be helpful in stopping this (at least, for now). RMS' response is also quite interesting.
Our main hope is that industry and consumer opposition will blow this piece of crap out of the water. The two less likely hopes are that (a) the standards committee will realize what an asinine action (and, probably, invasion of privacy) this would be, and (b) that manufacturers will give the finger to the standards body.
inigima
Arguments like "Nah, he only has a couple ounces, it must be for personal use" won't stand up in the digital age. You can't sector-by-sector replicate a gram of coke.
The DMCA may not state you can be persecu-- er, prosecuted for owning one copy of DeCSS, but they may certainly tell the judge that "He's got it, and most likely distributes it to all his friends."
[
now from an unposted thought from earlier, I wonder if there's a connection with the following :
. .
The International Herald Tribune has a piece which suggests that new software may be used to monitor for stolen music on your PC.
The company in question, EMusic, proposes to use the DMCA to shoehorn its software into a policing role for Napster users, as well as, no doubt, any other user of digital media, on behalf of the rights of copyright owners. Their chief, Gene Hoffman, baldly states, "Privacy is not the issue, Piracy is."
His statement implies that the trade for using the technologies which have themselves created an era of stunning growth for media companies, is a blunt, painful, surgical implant into our private equipment and facilities.
Whilst, In a update yesterday, Wired reports that the DMCA is said not to impact the rights of customers under first sale doctrine, an aggressive, "policing" stance such as the one proposed by EMusic, appears it would infringe that.
At a blunt guess, EMusic would effectively be placing a toll gate on the legitimate transfer of a legally purchased work. Under its plans to hoop up ISPs into blocking "infringing" accounts, it creates a lopsided penalty for alleged infirngement.
It is not stated how EMusic's system is or could be audited. If a legitimate owner of a work wished to sell or trade, in an error, trust could be reduced, impeding a sale. If the vendor's ISP account were incorrectly blocked, it is conceivable that the action might be a restraint of trade.
Either way EMusic wants to introduce a burden of proof on your ownerwhip of digital media. The company may be bandwagon jumping, or monkeying on the back of the "great fear" promulgated around Napster, but EMusic looks hawkish, and copyright lawers are becoming increasingly aggressive.
. .
Dear Slashdotters, I think the corporate wagons are circling. Are you up to the argument? Or have we left things too late?
- Yeah, well you do know that you wont be able to copy mp3s on that disk don't you? Nooowwww, we have this other disk, which is just slightly more expensive...
Haven't you ever thought of the fact that salesmen always have this "slightly more expensive" model that has just the right things? They also don't want to be part of the support disaster.
- Hey, yes is this customer support? Yes, hello, I get an error message when I try to use my programs. Oh, err, it sends files over the internet, uh, yes, ok... what? Not Possible?!?
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
"Afraid of a little contempt charge, are we? Many times reporters have been jailed for contempt but have been released without naming their sources. If your assertion is correct, then all the reporters that refuse to name their sources would be in jail right now. Imagine the outcry if that were true!"
Judges should never be allowed to jail ANYONE for contempt. That is unlawful imprisonment and a violation of the Constitution. It's one of those powers that the courts have "assumed" as it's part of British Common Law, even though it does not actually exist in the Constitution. There have been statutory limits placed on how long someone can be jailed for contempt.
If there is cause to jail someone there should be charges then a trial. Until then, no judge should be allowed to sentance. I know of a lowly district judge (county) who abuses his power to jail people for contempt.
"Maybe if stopped relying on White Power advocates like Rush Limburger for your "political wisdom" and took Political Science 101"
Woah there! I had PolySci 101, and thankfully it wasn't taught by a neo-Marxist. White power? How did THAT get into my comments? Sure the Brown vs the Board of Education decision was a great one. It struck down Jim Crowe segregation laws as Unconstitutional, as the ARE. I can name a slew of BAD court decisions, going AGAINST the law and the Constitution, that CAUSED segregation to begin with. For example, the Dred Scott decision, etc. That Supreme Court MADE a law (ie, blacks are not humans) that stood as an abomination that required the bloodiest war ever fought in this country's history to right.
And that court was packed by partisan DEMOCRAT appointees too. Lest we forget, it was the REPUBLICAN party that freed the slaves, and it because of REPUBLICAN senators that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. Senator Al Gore Sr. BTW, was one who voted against it.
All factual, and all can be checked in the history books.
Simply put, the courts are the way to get illegal things into law. And yes, judges DO make these "speeches" all over the place for obscene sums of money. And where do you think the money comes from? You guessed it, huge corps like Time Warner, and other MPAA affiliates.
How else can you explain Kaplan's decision in the 2600 case? The DMCA at BEST has parts of it that have problems with the 9th, 10th, 5th, 4th, 1st, and 14th amendments, not to mention the articles regarding patent and copyright. At least SOME of it IS illegal.
Kaplan either expressed
1. Extreme ignorance of the law (and he's supposedly been educated in this, this is assumed if one is a judge)
2. Extreme prejustice/bias.
Nothing else can explain his decision. There is no basis for it except in relying on an untested law, and he refused to perform the required Constitutional test. Also, he MADE A NEW LAW out of thin air by ruling on hyperlinks.
Explain for me please, how any of this is justified?
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
If the unique chip identifying code could be used to track you around the net, so can the unique code on these hard drives.
There is no privacy if anything is unique on the computer, chip or drives.
Anyone can write the software to query it.
The "if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" argument that you seem to be using is a dangerous one, becuase it can be used (and has been used) to justify taking away rights. Hitler used that argument, as did Lenin. As, no doubt, did Caesar (since you mention him) against the Christians.
It is also a meaningless argument. I have no contraband or drugs in my pocket. So do I object to being searched at every corner by a policeman? Or to being strip-searched when entering the country? YES!!
Let's look in practice. I have a lot of software. Probably 100 apps. For Windows as well as for Linux. But let's concentrate on the Windows apps. Yes, I paid for them! But here's the problem: Every time I switch PCs (I am on my fourth laptop this year, and have 8 PCs at home that I frequently switch around) I need to be able to move the app to the now-current PC. That is my RIGHT. And anything that prevents me from doing that is not a good thing. Call a 1-800 number? I spend half the year in Hong Kong and apart from the fact we do not have 1-800 numbers there, it is also 12 hours later there. Forget calling.
Remembering passwords? I ever forget where I wrote them down.
DVD regions? This means I have to buy TWO players (one for Canada and one for Hong Kong) an d I have to buy each movie TWICE. This is obviously insane! I should have the right to buy one portable player and one of each movie, and them to watch it whether I am in Hong Kong or in Toronto.
This kind of initiative is a slippery slope. We had copy protection once and it failed, because users them were vocal and clever. Users now are not (AOL is the world's largest provider...). Please, try to be a clever, vocal user and do not accept loss of rights, and inconveience, to do these corporations a favour!
Michael
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
Repeat ad infinitum: Educate the consumers, educate the consumers...
Let people know the following: 1. These new hard drives may break their old software and data. 2. The new drives will not be defragable and will degrade in performance over time. 3. The new drives will be inherently more prone to become corrupted and/or require expensive repairs. 4. They are being presumed dihonest and are being asked to pay the freight for piracy in a way that will inconvenience them far more than a hard drive tax would.
Consumers will say "NO" in the market place and the tech will be DOA. Remember too, a "consumer" is not just joe sixpack shopping at Best Buy. Consumers are: RAID solution providers, OEMs, IT departments who might have to buy all new equipment and software.
If enough large corporate consumers sign some sort of statement to the effect that they won't tolerate this, they can kill it.
Even as a long time defender of intellectual property rights, I am firmly opposed to this technology. It places an undue burden on the innocent in order to punish the guilty (already a disturbing trend in other aspects of society). It will create a lot of uneccessary problems for a lot of people. Efforts can be (and are) better spent going after people in Asia who illegally mass produce copyrighted materials. Don't make my life inconvenient just because of what some overseas criminals and teenagers are doing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In the "IBM spin" the IBM rep notes that "These [backups, etc] are good points, these issues will have to be addressed in the marketplace and you're absolutely right - but these have not even been discussed yet." It sounds like they don't really even give a shit about what appear to be fairly serious problems and they are going to resolve them in the "marketplace". So just leave it up to the backup software to take care of it? We'll just create this giant mess and dump it in someone else's lap, as long as hollywood is happy.....or am I reading this wrong?
You now have the means to use a piece of "unapproved" software to view your DVD's and * IT IS LEGAL.*
It is only illegal to * create or distribute* such software.
Anything you can leagally do with your IP you may still do with DeCSS without breaking the law. Only your SOURCE of the software has broken the law.
Read the DMCA very carefully, as well as the decisions handed down by the judges and you will find that this is true. If fact, note that the MPAA and the DVD consortium have not ONCE prosecuted for possesion and/or use, even though they have charged people who both possess and use said software with its distribution.
The law is VERY specific, and again, ONLY its distribution has been, so far, banned.
Maybe there is no compromise between free and proprietary software, or perhaps between free and proprietary information in general. This proposal is just one more indication that the proprietary side simply wants total control over what you can read or see or hear and when you can do it.
I can't see any reason why a hardware manufacturer would be stupid enough to implement this. Hardware makers want to sell units. Anything that ticks of customers is not going to sell units.
What's going to happen is IBM and others will make these drives, meanwhile overseas companies like in China will continue to make non-compliant drives and everyone will just buy them instead.
Frankly, I think if I was a stockholder in any company that makes hard drives, I think I'd want to make it very clear that caving to SOFTWARE interests is finacially a stupid move.
It's like 3COM implementing dongles for the PalmPilot to appease software developers. A) it costs 3Com a lot of money B) makes the devices more expensive C) pisses off customers who now have to deal with it and. So, if 3COM did it anyway, their shareholders could sue them for it.
Hardware manufacturers should be like backbone providers and common carriers. It isn't their jobs to regulate or restrict content.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
The real differences here are that everyone will be affected, and that the coding won't be easy to circumvent. You see, the hard disks will be made with the coding, well, hard-coded into them. And the principles behind the idea are outragous. It's like telling a person "Yeah, you paid for the book, but you'll have to send us an extra $5 every time you want to read it again." Tell me that doesn't piss you off.
The concept behind Pay Per Read (PPR) is that the people you pay have to have access to your computer. Ergo, companies will gain complete and total control over your computer. Once your can give direct signals to the hardisk, you can do anything you want!
So, if you disagree with anything I've said above, please reply to this comment. I'd really like to hear why having to pay to read a book every time doesn't piss you off.
Now, to take a different view, hardisks aren't licsensed in the way that DVDs are. That means that hardisk makers aren't bound to follow the coding standard. That means that you'll likely end up with 2 standards: encoded (E) and (N) not encoded. However, the E manufacturers will probably want software to recognize that their drive is an E drive. Uh-oh. That means game/software makers can keep their software from being installed on your computer! So now we're back to the "it's-a-problem-again-dept."
So, if that prophecy comes true, what will happen then? Well, you'll end up with a lot of consumers who are even more pissed off. There are 2 solutions to that (for the companies). 1) Team up and beat down the revolt (which, surpriseingly enough happens often), or 2) Give up and go home.
Obviously, you've got to get a lot of people already using the E drives to implement that strategy and be able to use solution 2. So, as long as an initial uprising happens, we'll be OK, right? Probably. And it most likely will happen (everyone, admit it or not, breaks at least one copyright law a week. It's like speeding. Everyone does it, most people do it often, some don't do it often, but everyone does it.) So, since none of what I said above is going to happen, I've needlessly spent 20 minutes pondering and pecking at my keyboard...:(
Conclusion: Make sure you go against copyright protecting drives!
It's all about the Karma Points...
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SIG: HUP