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More On Hard Drive Copy Protection
rabtech writes: "I contacted one of the head guys working on the ATA specs [Kent Pryor of Quantum] about the 'copy protection' thing, and what that may mean for the hard drive industry. He responded, and I've posted his letter on our front page. I did point out the issue between copy protection and copyright protection: 'Yours may be the only one actually giving a rational reason for opposition.... I will pay special attention to the difference between copyright protection and copy protection. Thank you for pointing out that legal distinction. In general, we support copyright protection. The amount of copy protection that would be allowed under this proposal would not be determined by the standard, but by the software that controls the licensed devices.'" It sounds like a royal mess to actually implement hard-drive copy controls, since they require so many groups to cooperate, but the seed has been planted.
Will our boycott really matter?
We're boycotting Winmodems, remember.
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it is quite legal for me to buy a game cd and then copy it so long as I don't give anyone else access to the copyrighted material I have purchased the right to use.
.oO0Oo.
Copy protection is the mechanism that prevents me from exercising my legal right to fair use (in the USA).
The system says :
Copyright violation is illegal in most parts of the world. We pay our taxes to finance the police to protect us from law breakers such a this. The state has failed us so we must take the law in to our own hands. All users are criminals so we'll make them pay in cash and then pay in time fucking about with whatever shit we introduce to the arms race.
Remember Spiradisc?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Specifically, what happens if I live in France, and I want to buy a new hard dive? Well, the hard drive I buy 10 years down the road may have the capacity to be copy-protected, but I can't see how the industry leaders could force the drive to have such a system enabled, especially in a country where such measures may be illegal. I can't imagine any one manufacturer choosing to loose the sales of an entire country just to please the US Media Cartel.
So, you could simply order hard drives from, say, France. Unless the Cartel decided to bribe some more legislators, and then... I can just imagine it:
Then again, if something like this happens, you may only be able to read about it in that foreign country.
Akardam Out
What exactly is to stop me from revving up my debugger and NOPing out the handshaking code in both the downloader and the player? At which point it'll look just like a normal data transfer when saved.
That's why I mentioned the part about some of the functionality being server side. The stream would come to the downloader encrypted. The downloader becomes a middle man itself, and doesn't have the opportunity to dictate the final key (or lack thereof). Anything the downloader can do, the server can do with the downloader as an intermediary.
It can still be hacked, but somebody has to grab a copy of the server to even begin analysis. (or, you're back to cracking a tamper proof chip).
As someone else pointed out above, the last easy hack is the stream going to the soundcard. It's only a matter of time before that gets closed up.
Of course, there is the problem (for RIAA, not for me) That most people will find a recording made by sending the output of the sound card (or USB speaker amp) directly into another soundcard and re-digitizing to be of acceptable quality. You would have to cut into the USB speaker and intercept the signal between amp and speaker since there's ALREADY been talk of encryption the stream over the USB.
Keep in mind that having done that, you are STILL guilty of a felony in the U.S. unless/until the DMCA is overturned.
Ultimately, the best answer is to kill all of this by educating the masses that this is just another DivX and their $1000 music collection could disappear overnight if the operators of the 'service' fold up like DivX did.
My experience is that it is a bit more difficult than this to actually destroy data on a HD with an external magnetic field. Thought the suggestion is an awful lot of fun to contemplate :-)
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I fear that Apple is going down that same road again. OS X's window manager, Aqua, is just different enough from the classic MacOS interface to trip up people who DON'T have an xNIX background. The Cube should have been a bargain-basement model...an iMac that can use inexpensive SVGA monitors instead of having a built-in (and crappy!) monitor. Instead, it's an useless high-end model...completely outclassed by the G4 dual-processor minitower.
Apple needs to introduce some REALLY INSANELY GREAT STUFF at MacWorld in a week, or they are indeed cruising for a bruising.
---- Hey Grrl Geeks! Your very own geek news site has arrived!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I suspect the magic key block corresponds to the directories in this case: unless you can back it up and restore it to the new drive, you can't recover from media failure. Alas, leaving the directories unprotected broke the effort to demonstrate the system was secure: it allowed me to prove it was insecure instead!
If we assume the vendor wants you to fail to restore the data, then it opens questions about suitability for the purpose sold...
davecb@spamcop.net
Part of that bottom line is how much bitching there is from the customer.
As this hard drive will cause more inconvenience to the customer, there will be more people "below the line" of intelligence required to understand how CPRM affects them.
These people will download something and try to copy it to a disk for a friend. It'll fail. They will get some backup software and lose all their protected downloads. Then they'll post:
to a bunch of website forums. They'll then learn why they can't copy their stuff and will BITCH and WHINE to CompUSA (or wherever) until they get their money back.
When these constant returns start eating into their profits, they'll do something. Just like FutureShop 'round here advertises the Apex DVD as a "CD-R MP3 playing machine!". I'll bet it was because of people like me that _expected_ a DVD player that can play Audio CDs to be able to play CD-Rs. I ended up returning the models that didn't. Told 'em why too (actually the sales guy even said they play CD-Rs, so it isn't all my fault).
Or so I hope that's how things will work... :-)
[BTW: Has anyone else noticed slashdot restricting their freedom of speech lately? I've not often (actually, IMHO never) posted spam here, but keep hitting the lameness filter for lame reasons. You wouldn't beleive the MAJOR PAIN IN THE ASS it was to get those exclamations to appear Ho hum.]
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Consider the propogation velocity of a PC virus that did nothing that the user would recognize as damage... until long after it had spawned its next generation. A virus that smashed the key block, for example.
davecb@spamcop.net
What are the things that have prompted you to expand your hard drive? For me, it was the following in succession:
- Collecting GIFs and JPGs (back in the BBS days)
- Collecting pirated games
- Collecting tons of MP3's
- Collecting movies
I'd bet that most large home hard drives are filled with similar things. The conclusion? Piracy is good for the hard drive industry.Heck... P2P is good for the hard drive industry. Instead of having the songs stored on a few central servers, you have them stored in many locations, and the cost is spread out over lots of people.
--
Actually, at least at one point (and possibly even today) Adobe's programs looked over LANs, if they were available, to see if other copies of the programs were running and had identical serial numbers. But I do think that it's not a big secret that MS and other big companies, though they would prefer everyone to buy their software, tolerate large scale piracy because at least it harms their competitors in the mindshare arena.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"Yeah, right.
No self-respecting server administrator will use IDE drives in a RAID array. Why? IDE drives are much less reliable than SCSI drives.
"
I don't think Enterprise or larger servers would ever use IDE RAID. What I'm talking about is the average workgroup-sized office server. You know, the most common server that is sold...
When given a choice between no-RAID SCSI (because of expense), and buying a RAID-5 IDE setup with a hotspare drive at the same cost, I think it's obvious that IDE RAID is going to make it into servers.
IDE is not THAT much less reliable than SCSI. It's also not THAT much slower. Sure SCSI is faster, more reliable, and better. But IDE drives dominate the PC market because of cost. It costs a TON more to get that 5% edge SCSI offers over IDE.
I AM a Network Administrator, and I would never use IDE drives in a mission critical application. But IDE-RAID is better than NO RAID, so I see it invading the lower-end of the server market that currently does not use RAID.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
USB has something that's purely layered. I've not looked at it: Content Security (scroll down a bit), by folk from Intel, Microsoft, and Philips; dated summer Y2K.
That's not "part of USB" but I sure hope we don't start to see it show up in products. Like USB disk drives or MP3 players, for starters.
I have serious reservations about such attempts to remove the discretionary/social control aspects from copy control policies. This whole gig about criminalizing behaviors that have traditionally been civil issues or non-issues just sends shivers down my spine.
Remember: When government gets smaller, that means the abuses are only going to be committed by even less accountable organizations.
Until a way to destroy the watermark is found, that is.
The same may be said for copy prevention.
---- Hey Grrl Geeks! Your very own geek news site has arrived!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
What about a BUYCOTT?
Instead of screaming at hard drive producers about how we won't buy from them if they implement this copy/copyright/whatever protection, why not send them letters stating that WE WILL GIVE THEM OUR PATRONAGE IF THEY DO NOT IMPLEMENT IT?
It's less threatening, but it gets the same point across.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
"I don't doubt that the biases of somealtrocksite.com may be better than that of the moneygrubbing RIAA members, but there will *always* be a system of elites who decide what to push and what not to push, and the vast majority of people who don't have a lot of idle time to "shop" for music will be more than happy to accept RIAA marketing. "
For one thing, there are a TON of websites out there. There is at least one to serve your own particular music taste and bias. And you would be able to at least listen to the music before buying it.
Sure there will still be Britney Spears even in the Internet music age. Face it, Darwin hasn't yet come up with a way to kill off those who let their lives be dictated by slick marketing. It's a fact of life that the masses listen to crap, watch crappy movies, because they are satisfied with it.
I'm posting this right now on a PC that contains not a BIT of Intel hardware, or Microsoft software (AMD Athlon/Linux). Not much marketing out there for what I chose is there? Yet, AMD and Linux are the two fastest growing forces IN the PC market.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"I dont understand the "IDE RAID is coming" thing, I have been using IDE RAID for 4 years using a under-$150 card, it isn't exactly new technology."
IDE RAID is jst now coming into wide use. Like everything, it starts out with the expert enthusiast crowd (like us), then goes mainstream.
Wouldn't everyone like to have their PC data protected by a nice fast, redundant RAID-5 array? You can if you use IDE.
Unfortunately, the Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA crowd wants to get between you and your storage media. They don't care about what you want, just their bottom line. The corporatist mentality.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
That's why version 4 fucked up all vertex on saving if it saw the dongle had been cracked ?
The computers in the US have already reached the point of market saturation anyway. The rest of the US has said that a computer is not in their life style. Now who are you going to sell the
new crippled HD's to? It is just like VC players no body wants them, even tho most people dont do much recording anywhy, Why ? because people dont see the value. Their friends come over and tell them how stupid they were for buying a crippled VCR. Consumers have to feel that they got a good deal, and they do not make the same mistake twice. On WWW time Information moves too fast to sucker the public, you tell anyone that these HD's are a crippled POS they wont touch em, and they will tell their friends just to show how smart they are. Its not like the supply of REAL HD's will just go away. No this is the analog World losing control over the digital World and not taking it too well. IBM should be reminded of MCA and PS2.
On the real front......
This pirate crap is just book cookin anyway, most of the people would not have/use the games or programs if they had to pay for it all. Now if a person is really into a product and sees an added value in really buying it they will. Pirate use of software is better marketing then any thing else in the industry. Do you really think that we
would be here right now if every software package was purchased outright. Hell NO! How are we going to learn and get trained if we are not students fork out mega bucks for the top end apps? I cant afford to do that and not all of the things I would like to learn about are at work or ever will be.
Music and Video might be another issue but I still think that bands should make money on proformance not album sales. Movies, well most of em suck anyway, and if they are good people will go and see them in theaters even if they can get an regionless DVD. If people are not going to the theaters, that is a social change not because of priate DVD's. That is what this is all about, a social change, with growing pains. Trends come and go and maybe some of the "establishment" will go too, might not be a bad thing really.
Out
Some say Clinton played into the hands of Hollywood and that Gore would have done the same. NEWSFLASH: If you think Bush is going to come down on the right side of this, THINK AGAIN
His advisors - and Jack Valenti - will have him believeing that this is GOOD for consumers and, in fact, most of them WANT it. Bend Over.
Plaintiffs are everybody with such a hd, purchasers of content with such protection, maybe more. Local governments and school boards buy a lot of that sort of thing. I think they would jump at a chance to rake in punitive judgments of some deep pocketed defendants.
Spreading the suits over many jurisdictions simultaneously would spread the defendants leather-winged legions pretty thin. Each would need to spend tens of millions a day just to have legal ears in all those courtrooms.
Any lawyer could come up with dozens of complaints starting fom denial of fair use, damages to unrelated data by failure of backup utilities, digital wiretapping (digital sounds more sinister to joe public), quartering of their agents, the list goes on. They don't need to be that sound, legally, there just needs to be lots of them -- enough that each suit is a little different from the others.
Fight politics and greed with greed, sympathetic juries, politics, and votes. The public won't be jawboned into protecting its rights, but it will jump right in if there's money to be had.
Maybe this is a general method for knocking the zaibatsu out of their roost.
--Zax
-- We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms.
Have a look at what those industry morons are up to:
The proposal to enhance the ATA-spec with copy protection extensions is an enhancement of CPRM.
CPRM itself is just one of several technologies which are part of the so-called "Content Protection System Architecture" (CPSA).
[http://www.4centity.com/4centity/data/tech/cpsa /c psa081.pdf]
Enter CPSA, servants, attendants.
CPSA is an attempt to define a technological framework in order to fulfill the entertainment industry's (RIAA, MPAA etc.) demand for complete control of distribution and copies of audio/video content. The idea is to create a secure end-to-end chain from cable-station/satellite-receiver/settopbox/DVD etc. to the enduser's speaker/digital-display etc.
CPSA is supposed to include the following content protection technologies among others:
Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM)
- protected exchange of audio/video on DVD, FlashMedia, (ATA-hdds planned)
- encrypted storage of content
- protected storage of content management information (CMI)
- system renewability
- methods to prevent playback of bit-by-bit copies
developed by: 4C (IBM, Intel, Matsushita (MEI), Toshiba) http://www.4centity.com
Content Protection for Pre-recorded Media (CPPM)
- robust protection of DVD-Audio content on DVD-ROM media
- encrypted storage of content
- protected storage of content management information (CMI)
- system renewability
- methods to prevent playback of bit-by-bit copies
developed by: 4C (IBM, Intel, Matsushita (MEI), Toshiba) http://www.4centity.com
Content Scrambling System (CSS)
- protecting DVD-Video cotent via authentication and content scrambling
developed by: DVD Copy Control Association (CCA) http://www.dvdcca.org
Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP)
- robust encryption of content passing between digital devices in the home e.g. IEEE 1394, USB
- copy control information
- authentication and key exchange
- digital encryption [sic!]
- system renewability
developed by: 5C (Hitachi, Intel, Matsuhita (MEI), Sony, Toshiba) http://www.dtcp.com
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP)
- encryption on high-bandwith interfaces to digital displays e.g. DVI
developed by: Intel http://www.digital-CP.com
4C/Verance Watermark
- technology for creating/reading watermarks (Content Management Information - CMI) in audio content
developed by: Verance Corporation http://www.4centity.com
Finally, a video watermarking scheme (to be selected by the DVD CCA)
All information above taken from:http://www.4centity.com/4centity/data/tech/cpsa/c
(Dated February 17th, 2000; revision 0.81) Absolutely recommended reading!!!
So much for the overall framework.
Some interesting details on the technologies described above:
Content Management Information (CMI)
- additional information added to the content in order to establish rules and conditions restricting its usage
Copy Control Information (CCI - a subset of CMI)
- copy restrictions through data flags: copy free, copy once, copy nomore, copy never
There is an enlightening presentation on DTCP (warning: horrible layout):
http://www.dtcp.com/data/dtcp_tut.pdf
A preliminary version of the DTCP specification (v1.1) can be found here:
http://www.dtcp.com/data/DTCP_spec11_informationa
A few buzzwords to wet your appetite:
- content encryption, supported ciphers: M6, Blowfish (modified), DES
- authentication: Diffie-Hellman key exchange, PKI
- cryptographic functions: SHA-1, random number generator
[cf. Chapter 4.4 Cryptographic Functions]
The next document makes for another interesting read:
http://www.dvdcca.org/4centity/data/licensing/ado
let's have a look at some excerpts:
Exhibit B-1 CPPM COMPLIANCE RULES FOR DVD-AUDIO (p.35ff):
Section 3. Encoding Rules for individual parameters of prerecorded DVD-Audio disc
- specifications for control of copy permission (3.2)
- specifications for control of copy numbers (3.3.1)
- specifications for audio-quality control of copies (3.3.2):
The Audio Quality Parameter (Q) consists of 2 bits and defines the number of channels (ch), sampling frequency (fs), and quantization bit level (Qb) of permitted copies.
another example:
section 4. Playback and output control rules for participating player devices
- playback control by audio watermark: unencrypted content with CCI bit of Audio Watermark set to any other state than "copy freely" will not be played (4.1.1)
- player devices built after Dezember 31, 2000 have to respond to the Verance/4C Audio Watermark (4.1.2)
- as soon as a method is determined players shall, through media type detection, prevent playback of recordable media with CPPM protected content(4.1.3)
An interesting tidbit on HDCP can be found in an article at maximumpc.com:
http://www.maximumpc.com/reprint/intel_revamps/
a quote from that article:
(...) Intel has proposed the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection encryption spec. Using hardware on both the videocard and the monitor, HDCP will encrypt data on the PC before sending it to the display device, where it will be decrypted. The rub is that only new DVI-equipment will have the feature, which creates a slight risk of obsolescence for those who invest in DVI early on.
Intel officials have downplayed that issue. They claim that any DVI monitor will be able to display protected content, because the HDCP-equipped DVI card will simply sense that an older DVI monitor lacks HDCP features and will lower the image quality to keep the content protected. Of course, no one has accounted for consumer acceptance. Will people embrace a standard that reduces image quality on their older equipment? Intel officials say the loss won't be enough to irk people.
how about this one:8
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000218S000
"HDCP uses a 56-bit key, with individual keys distributed to the various vendors. A violated key could be tracked down and revoked over a satellite broadcast network, for example."
Apart from the documents obtained from the specification websites referenced above a search on the manufacturer's websites (Panasonic, Sony, etc.) for keywords like DTCP, CPRM etc. yields further information such as press-releases and other documents.
A couple of devices that already make use of these technologies have already been announced and/or gone into production such as:
Matsushita (Panasonic) DVD-RAM recorder DMR-E10
Panasonic D-VHS VCR PV-HD1000
Silicon Image SiI 168 PanelLink transmitter chip for DVI hardware
Silicon Image SiI 861 PanelLink controller chip for DVI hardware chip
And you guys thought CSS was the only thing to be worried about.
---Police Line - Do Not Cross !---
Will our boycott really matter?
/. do get these things at work. Why do you think they get these things at work? Purchasing power. They know that you probably have the influence of perhaps several hundred thousand or maybe even millions of dollars of purchasing power over the next few years. In other words, there are some people on slashdot whose spend on disks (RAID arrays, etc.) are going to be equivalent to 100s of ordinary home users. I'm likely to spend to have influence over around $1 million worth of RAID arrays and disks over the next few years on my own... and that's just me...
Yes, although it probably won't change much. It will however make them think, and here is why.
Do you ever get those free industry papers and magazines sent to you? In the UK there are ones like Computer Weekly and "Computing" (imaginative titles, eh?) and I get one from the US called "tele.com"... I suspect most people who read
Let's suppose that IBM introduce this system for their drives. We all decide to boycott IBM and buy Matrox instead. We end up with crappier drives, but we feel good inside. IBM may possibly turn around and say "Hey, where did that $20 million worth of RAID business go?" and we can all turn around and wave at them saying "Over here! We're with the nice boys from Matrox who haven't put copyright-protect on..." and IBM may just possibly re-consider.
I agree with another poster that in a day and age when you can't make a disk read-only in hardware that manufacturers should be considering protecting the "copyright" as laid down by an institution that exists in another country to my own (I live in the UK), and telling me what I can and can't have on my disks.
There is also the whole can of worms about how this is actually going to work, and as to whether it could all get a bit Big Brother down in the firmware...
In other words, there are some people on slashdot whose spend on disks (RAID arrays, etc.) are going to be equivalent to 100s of ordinary home users. I'm likely to spend to have influence over around $1 million worth of RAID arrays and disks over the next few years on my own... and that's just me...
I could toss similar numbers around too, but the fact is that I don't get to tell Sun, EMC, or Hitachi what brand of disks I want in those servers and arrays. I just tell 'em how big.
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Copy protection hard drive plan nixes free software - RMS By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Posted: 23/12/2000 at 01:07 GMT
Richard Stallman says that plans to put content control into industry standard hardware pose a threat to the adoption of free software.
... tries to disguise obstructionism and rampant power as an attempt to keep a program or book or song safe from harm. It is a propaganda word."
Proposals have been made to add CPRM (Content Protection for Removable Media) into the ATA hard disk specification, we reported on Wednesday. CPRM originates from the the 4C Entity and licensing is administered by License Management International, LLC, which also administers the CSS license.
"This resembles CSS and e-Books: it is another plan to impose additional power over people who use published information, on behalf of those who hope to control the power," he writes in emails to The Register.
"This plan seems to pose a threat to free operating systems. We will surely not be authorized in the US to implement free software to access any of the centrally-controlled data. So a free GNU/Linux system won't be able to do it."
"If users accept the domination of centrally-controlled data, free software faces two dangers, each worse than the other: that users will reject GNU/Linux because it doesn't support the central control over access to these data, or that they will reject free versions of GNU/Linux for versions "enhanced" with proprietary software that support it. Either outcome will be a grave loss for our freedom."
"We must hope that some countries refuse to pass laws to prohibit free software such as DeCSS, so that some part of the world can publish the software that will keep freedom alive, underground, in the rest of the world."
Stallman also highlights the term "copy protection". "The word 'protection'
Indeed: it's a euphemism as incongruous as down-sizing or friendly fire. As an alternative, we quite like "copy control". But if you have snappier suggestions, we'd like to hear them.
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
No, but as well as telling them how big, is it not also possible to specify "non copy protected HD"? Then either do not buy systems with copy protected HDs or if you find the drive is copy protected then return it as being "unfit for its purpose".
That's just one more challenge for the crackers.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Individual boycotts are unlikely to have a discernible effect --- there just aren't enough disk buyers around who are aware of this issue.
However, there is an easy way of amplifying our insights and making the companies take note: use the extremely active investors' networks, and offer the view that investing in hard drive manufacturers is inadvisable given that their sales will be taking a huge downturn owing to the incorporation of copy protection on drives. Names names if you can: we know that Quantum supports the scheme, and at least 3 of the 4C companies make drives --- IBM, Matsushita and Toshiba.
In the UK, investors' information exchange sites like this one seem to have dozens of thousands of very active customers (we see their mailing lists spew out an incredible torrent of investors' comments every day). Advice offered here is likely to have a significant effect on share prices far beyond the number of people providing the advice, at least in the UK.
Does anyone have a list of equivalent sites in the US and the rest of Europe?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Of course SCSI and FireWire could be polluted with such CP crud.
-Todd
Oh, anyone else notice what a sad shit site Rabtech runs? Intense ignorance! If it wasn't so pathetic, it would be funny. Maybe it is a parody?
I think this is a really optimistic view through rose colored goggles. I have yet to hear a good fair use complaint from all of this. When I watch the tonight show they show clips of movies and play songs by artists. When I listen to reviews on NPR, I hear clips from movies and songs. My library has DVD movies and CDs that I can checkout. What part of fair use is being denied? I have yet to hear a complaint from somebody trying to excecise fair use that has been stopped or denied. Now if you think that bootlegging whole movies and songs in fair use then you're full of shit because it has never been. I have yet to hear from a professor that hasn't been able to show his class a movie or play them a song. Now, profs can't distribute stuff, but they have always had problems with that, they always have to ask permission and they usually get it.
Here's one for you from an Australian's point of view. Im about to relocate to the States for a few years (job requirement). I'll be bringing a nice set of region 4 coasters with me. Just because you cant think of ways that this is hurting people, doesnt mean they arent there.
Thanks a lot MPAA, you bunch of pricks...
---- Hey Grrl Geeks! Your very own geek news site has arrived!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Not really. I only want to store GPL or public domain stuff (or my own stuff) on the hard drive how's that circumventing copy protection? I have the perfect right to make copies of what I'm storing.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Chris, I don't think that we can really just ignore the traditional channels and support the independent artists like yourself exclusively.
:-)
The migration of established musicians away from the studios (for which we had hoped) just doesn't seem to be happening, and music consumers aren't willing to abandon their favourite bands. Unfortunately, this means that some sort of accommodation will have to be reached with the studios eventually, because their demise and hence the release of artists from their contracts seems most unlikely to occur. Ditto the abandoning of copyrights on countless thousands of works gathered over decades and treated as financial assets --- it just won't happen, yet people will still be wanting access to this material over the new medium.
I guess it's still a possibility that the traditional music industry will continue its present extreme myopia and in due course all CDs will be available unofficially over the net and the RIAA member institutions will die, but I doubt it. Their shareholders would force a re-org as soon as there is any real downturn in profits, should it ever happen --- but there's no sign of it happening yet of course, quite the opposite, so it seems that the "piracy-as-advertising" brigade is right.
In any event, MP3s aren't going away as they're now part of the music culture and also widely supported by hardware player manufacturers, so initially begrudging acceptance and then finally real exploitation of online distribution by the current detractors is bound to happen eventually, in my view. The result may not be a flat-rate scheme, but something new will arise!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If so, you are consenting to being taxed on independent work, the money of which goes directly to my worst competitors. It effectively negates my attempts to undercut the majors via mp3, if you decide to pay this flat tax like you propose.
It's kind of like 'music CDRs': as an indy guy I would kind of like to see people outright boycott that stuff: all it's doing is adding X amount of surcharge, which goes straight to the RIAA as if it were some government authority, which then turns about and uses that money to try and shut me down or impose taxes any way they can. Please don't give them _more_ ideas :P :)
Let's just make sure we're not giving Quantum credit for anything here. Given the opportunity, I'm sure any manufacturer (eg. IBM) could give the same lip-service.
It costs nothing to flatter a concerned letter writer, claim ignorance of any devious agenda, and play down the danger by saying "revisions are 2 years apart" and "vendors are free to implement their own extensions to the standard". Blah blah blah.
Even so, with a recorder I can always put a microphone in front of the speaker and record the sounds. Then I can convert that to MP3 if I want.
What if I want to give away my own recordings? Is it going to be illegal to put an MP3 file up on the internet, if it contains music that I wrote, performed and recorded?
We can hope that this sort of manuvers by the recording industry will kill the job of a "pop star". I wouldn't be too upset...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Is a one-page, easy to understand flyer that explains to Joe User why this is BAD for HIM RIGHT NOW. Not why future historians will be pissed, not why his rights are being trampled on, and not why it means Linux has problems. It needs to explain clearly and concisely (don't tell him it has 8 different crypto keys and is hard to break -- he doesn't care) why it will prevent him from doing what he does already every day, or why it prevents hime from doing things he knows he should be able to do but probably doesn't (backups). Then, we all need to whenever we're in Best Buy or whatever and see someone looking at hard disks, hand them a copy, and answer any questions. That will do more than any amount of griping on slashdot or in newspapers ever can. So, is there such a flier that can be printed off, and if not, and you're interested in helping, send me an email. If there's support, I'll help.
Excellent. It's nice to see someone in the know take notice of the little guys, and the response was quick. Quantum will be getting my business...
Karma: Good. I'm hoping in the same way as pizza is 'good'...
Phase 1 - Design standard that makes installed software impossible to copy on other machines.
Phase 2 - For each software you release, separately bundle two "editions". One only works on copy-protection-enabled machines, and costs half as much as the other. Meanwhile, pressure HD companies to make copy-protection-enabled drives. Tell people how easy it is to upgrade to the new standard.. And how much money it'll save them.
Phase 3 - Stop making software that works on normal HDs.
Phase 4 - Implement new functionality in the copy-protection standard which disallows installation of unapproved software. Such as non-microsoft OSes..
Here's the problem with that scenario that I see:
Let's say that you get your 10$/mo subscription to this service, and can download all you want. What's to stop you from being a "nice guy" to friends (perhaps to get them hooked, or perhaps they don't have a fast connection) and getting songs to them?
Unfortunately, with an "unsecured" format, the RIAA would never get into a business like this. They'd shoot themselves in the foot. People could pay for the service, then fire up napster on their machine, and then what would happen?
A lot of people could technically get good mp3's for free (granted, only the ones you downloaded, but I could see where you could build a request program etc... you see where I'm going with this)?
At least, that's the thought that runs through my head. If it's unsecure, the RIAA doesn't want any part of it, and if it's secure, most (if not all) intelligent people wouldn't want it either (because of copy "protection" or not being able to use the file in all places etc...)
Just my 2c
Karnal
They care quite a bit.
Less revenue means less power. Wall Street doesn't care how much money there is in the bank. That a result of what has already happened. Wall Street cares about what is going to happen, and one important indicator of that is revenue, both current and projected.
Why does MS care so much about what Wall Street thinks? It cares because a steadily rising stock price allows them to dangle stock options to hire and retain high-quality engineers, which not only helps them but ups the ante for the competition, who in turn have to spend a disproportionate amount of money for their own engineers.
Without a rising stock price MS suffers from brain-drain, while at the same time its competitors have an easier time finding and retaining good help.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
well, if done right, it would all be done (mostly, except for the license passing back and forth) in hardware.
There would be added latency for the additional hardware to pass the info back and forth, but hopefully it would be much less of a hit than CPU (however, you made a good point -- CPU is cheap, and nowadays, CPU is fast.....)
Karnal
Why would SCSI have some thing passed in this order of business and it go unflamed as this has? Is this because the majority of affected users are using IDE technology instead of others. Though this issue does not seem to be an issue of performance aspects (as per SCSI being superior) but more of a target for the rampant distribution of proprietary material found on readily replicable systems and hardware.
.
Anyway, The Register (the site that also broke the story) has posted a very good FAQ on the subject:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15718.html
(for the goat sex paranoid)
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..is that if you can't replace individual drives with generic equivalents because of their brain-dead compliance with the RIAA's unreasonable demands, then their product doesn't meet your reliability criteria.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It is obvious that this won't work without cooperation between the HD, controller, and r/w software, presumably including the OS if this is to prevent simple copying.
How this would bind you is, content would be released in a form which could only be read by a fully compliant system. It would not matter just what your key is, but you would have to have one in order to install what you had legitimately purchased. (Obviously, there ain't squat they can do about media formats that don't support their scheme, except make them illegal. News at 10.)
I see the hack for this as being a software hook to intercept the commands which retrieve the key block. Hey, I'll have a key, it will just consist of a megabyte of zeroes. At worst, such a hack might have to be a hardware dongle on the IDE cable. People will do this if they feel it will benefit them. Just look at the flap over DVD encryption, or even the third-grade half-assed XOR scheme used by Digital:Convergence.
The bait for getting you into this new straitjacket will be some new improved quality (doubtful in music, but what got DVD's off the ground for video), improved content (DVD's again), or simple failure to release content in uncontrolled format (software industry). I sincerely doubt that this scheme would prevent you from backing up or making n copies of uncontrolled content of your own origin, including .mp3's and legacy content released outside of the standard. It would only be this controlled content, which you voluntarily bought (right?), which could not be copied from one drive to another and expected to work. Unless, of course, you arranged through a hack for the new drive to have the same ID as the old one.
Of course it's fine to voluntarily boycott such controlled content, but what do you do when it's the only content available? I've been told repeatedly that VHS is on its way out in favor of DVD, and there does seem to be a gradual trend in this direction at the local Blockbuster. (After all, excepting the copy protection scam^H^H^H^Hscheme, DVD's are clearly superior to analog videotape.) So as soon as you want to use anything at all that relies on this dubious technology you will fold up, buy the software and the compliant hardware and grumble while it does its thing. And you will lose that content when you buy a new PC or hard drive -- unless you get the hack for it.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
...because all "copyright protection" mechanisms give the distributor full control over everything recorded -- what is a kind of "copy protection" that is infinitely higher than anything allowed to him by copyright laws. It's a way to strip users from any rights, protected as fair use, and put content distributor in charge of policing itself.
No possible technical "copyright protection" measure can't be reduced to limiting what distributor can do, therefore all of them -- claiming to be "copy protection", "copyright protection" or anything else, should be fought against.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Well,
you didn't read my post. I mentioned analog recording (aka with a microphone).
Huh? SCSI drives have controllers built into the drive. What did you think executed the SCSI commands once they were sent to the drive?
This will be a hardware thing. There will be a software component but it will largely be done in hardware because they've already been burned trying to rely on software. It will probably be an extra set of APIs, block reads and block writes that require a special key or something. Once written those blocks will only be readable with a given driver which will then have hooks that only allow certain applications to read the data. Movie data could be written and then only read with a movie player that is from a given provider and sure to not allow a copy to be made. Microsoft .Net will use this stuff to avoid making the user download parts every time they want to run something. There isn't any way to stop this other than to start producing content as good as the content providers and then give it away for free.
The scarry part, the really scarry part is that Linux drivers might not be a given. There might not be media players for Linux (I'm not sure why they wouldn't make them but there still isn't a quicktime player or a microsoft media player) Drives are a fairly fundamental part of a PC. Initial CP drives might just not allow Linux to read some blocks but later drives could potentially be completely incompatible and require secret drivers that only work under Windows and MacOS. It would be the winmodem/winprinter attack at an entirely more fundamental level. They could take the hardware out from under us, with relative ease. That is the fear. The bottom line to me is that we need to keep this shit away from computers, put it in to TVs and VCRs and what have you if that will please the powers that be but I don't want to lose my ability to program my computer, store and read data that I put on it because some movie company is worried that I'm going to steal the data off of their DVD movies. I don't want to be forced in to a windows world by the entertainment business. We either need to keep this as far as possible away or embrace it and make sure than whatever standard is picked isn't one that is going to lock us out, I can already promise you that it will because MS is going to content protect entire windows partitions and try to keep us from sharing data between OSes.
If you're a real free software believer then the fact that people want to protect their IP shouldn't bug you, you just don't use it. That's getting to be a tough road to drive because it's starting to mean you don't watch movies, you don't listen to much on the radio, you don't buy many CDs. That has always been the way we've fought though, and they we produce our own stuff and make it as good or better and make it do our work for us. I think the same thing applies here. If you really want to see this kind of stuff stop then get your artist friends to start producing content and giving it away for free. I think you'll find that it's difficult. I want to see someone make Braveheart or Titanic with donations and then let anyone see it, copy it, reuse it for free. It probably won't happen in our lifetime, but maybe I'm wrong.
Lobby congress if it makes you feel better, but we're talking about one of the most fundamental rights of Americans: the right to produce something people will pay for and then collect as much as you possibly can for it.
I do not subscribe to IEEE Computer Magazine and so do not have access to that article.
However, you have not given us any information that would lead us to lend credibility to those figures. The sample size for the IDE drives compared to SCSI drives brings to mind "statistical error". A single bad batch of drives can mess up any lot of 24 drives.
To cite some useless personal figures: I have owned 10 ide drives in the past 4 years (all but 3 still in use). Only one of the ones not in use were because of a failure. The other two just were too small for their own good...
That would be a failure rate of 10% over 4 years, or 2.5%/year.
I have never owned enough SCSI drives to be statistically significant : ).
Everyone knows that knows what the DMCA is, and everything that entails knows that it is just as idiotic and ill-concieved as prohibition. Why don't a bunch of us get together and form a movement to get this piece of legislation overturned? At the very least, firing off letters to our congressmen with some rational arguements against it might bear some fruit. I personally can't see this whole hard drive/ATA spec doomsday thing happening at all... but the idea that if it were to happen, and we can't do anything about it because of the DMCA is frightening. Just my $0.02
SCSI and firewire already have such controls built into them, and no controversy exists there. Another incident of mundane happenings being blown waaaay out of proportion...
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From what I see, yes this would work. But you are missing the point: I shouldn't HAVE to use something to get around this, because I should have the freedom to buy a drive without this copy protection crap built in.
Chris
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
[Case in point: I'm currently helping a company install various Linux servers in their NT network, the decision for which was significantly helped along by the threatening letter they received from Microsoft about reporting their current licensing status. Way to go Microsoft, threaten legitimate customers who've just begun to have a viable alternative to your monopoly...]
Added to this is the fact that the unauthorized users of your software don't all represent paying customers. Many of them either can't afford the product, don't really need it, or don't think it's worth the price, and if forced to pay would rather just stop using it. The numbers that software industry groups report as being "lost to piracy" are overinflated by orders of magnitude, in the sense that while copying may nominally add up to those kind of figures, under no conceivable market or legal conditions would that money actually ever be collectible.
Finally, yes, copying is a marketing tool, and one which companies don't have to spend any time, money or other resources on. Since companies can't easily control copying of their products, it makes sense to allow it to occur and judiciously play the heavy every now and then - especially indirectly, through an industry organization - to make sure that potential customers remember that they're supposed to be paying for this stuff.
This simply isn't true. What about the "book schemes" used by games a few years back. To start the game you have to enter a word from the book which "proves" you bought the game and have the book. You're allowed to backup the program, you're allowed to put it on different machines, you just need the book to play it. What aren't you allowed to do that the law allows?
That's NOT A COPY PROTECTION SCHEME. Nothing about the book method prevents you from making copies, as you yourself said.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
In which case, from what has already been posted, I do not think that the presence of CPRM on the drive will make any difference. If it only affects CPRM 'enabled' documents then if you do not use any such documents then will it not behave like a non-CPRM drive (except that you have "lost" a little capacity)?
Do not forget that RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. So the whole idea of RAID is that you use low cost (and therefore lower reliability) drives and the array part provides the redundancy which makes the reliability of the whole much greater than that of an individual drive.
It would take a long time to track down songs that have your "watermark" on napster, because you need a large enough chunk of the data to get it to work reliably. During that "hack sdmi" contest thing I emailed them asking why the files were so big (50+MB wav files), and that was the reason they gave me.
from what I saw the site was more of a "we like the Mac, but hate apple" type thing. All their articles were about either cool Mac stuff, or screw ups by Apple (as a company, not so much related to the quality of the actual machine). This is somewhat understandable attitude. As an outsider looking in, it has always seemed to me that Apple delights in tormenting it's loyal users, who keep coming back because they like the product.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
No copy protection scheme prevents commercial pirates from turning out identical copies of the 'copy protected' material.
All 'copy protection' schemes are about preventing people who have legally purchased material from using their material in ways which the law has always allowed.
Copy protection is about allowing current industry companies to maintain control of artists and other people who create copyrighted material.
'Copy protection' is about the current industry companies attempts to continue to be dominant in the recording and publishing fields.
Current companies are terrified of the Internet because the Internet allows artists and writers to publish their works without going through a publishing company .
'Copyright protection' is the responsibility of government to protect material which is copyrighted from theft or other illegal use.
'Copy protection' is a scheme by companies in the recording and publishing industries to control how legitimate purchasers of copyrighted material use that material . 'Copy protection' is an attempt by the recording and publishing industries to eliminate 'fair use' of copyrighted material such as LIBRARIES .
The only encouraging thing about the copy protected disk situation is that it is the first time that I have been able to get across to non technical people why the DMCA affects them . That is a very good thing - we need to let the non technical people understand why these things are so important to all of us.
I really doubt that the people making motherboards and the people doing mass piracy in asia have anything to do with each other... unless you believe in some 'asian conspiracy'... next thing you know those jews will be in on it too...
---
I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
---
I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
Not if your company is called AOL-Time Warner-Western Digital-Quantum.
Edith Keeler Must Die
BTW, I suspect what you're running into is the "no ASCII art pr0n" restriction, in case you didn't already know that.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Nice idea, but I think you'll find there aren't enough people who think like you do, to make a difference. You might succeed in creating a bit more awareness, but most people will remain disinterested until the issue bites them in their own ass.
I would consider an engineer a great deal more knowledgeable than I. Why don't you ask him yourself, since he's the one who made the "claim".
-
You know what they say... or maybe you don't. Actually, I can't think of it either. But something progressing exactly the way it was planned is nearly impossible today, especially with so many parties involved. I agree that this is a royal mess, and in it I see very many opportunities for disaster.
Does CPRM not only affect files which have been 'protected' using it. So if the Windows (or other software) installation disks do not use CPRM then why cannot the mass-install techniques still be used?
Watermarking is a MUCH WORSE thing than CPRM. Watermarks are audible. Thus the music is degraded. The only good thing about watermarks is that they can be removed--that's what the SDMI hacking challenge was all about!
It would take a long time to track down songs that have your "watermark" on napster, because you need a large enough chunk of the data to get it to work reliably.
It would take a while. That's why they would need to prioritize and just go for nabbing a percentage of offenders. It wouldn't take all that many to have a decent chilling effect. Of course, if it were really about the piracy, they would mostly focus on the mass duplication schemes which dump many thousands of bootleg copies on the market. Instead, even before Napster, they have been focusing on individuals giving a few copies (often of dubious quality) away. I don't deny that they have the right to do that, but logic, their claims, and reality put together reveal a hidden agenda. We may know the shape of that agenda by the way the other pieces fit together around it.
Either the stuff will refuse to install on your disk in the first place (e.g. "This content is optimized for CPRM drives, please upgrade.") or your driver will have to implement a MITM attack.
It all really just depends on how popular it gets. If it doesn't take off, then people who write stuff that depends on CPRM will have little market for their products. And if it does take off, then everyone's drivers will just fake it, so there won't be any copy protection anyway.
If you own stock in any of the companies who are developing this stuff, you might want to ask the management why they are flushing your money down the drain...
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...but it's interesting that a filter feature designed to weed out trolls also succeeds in weeding out AOL-for-Dummies type statements. Perhaps there's a connection???
How about you folks all send some of this wisdom to the people who are behind this?
Pete McLean of Maxtor, Vice Chairman of T13
Kent Pryor of Quantum Corp, Secretary of T13
4C Entity's Contact Us address
I suggest that a Slashdot effect of IT Admins and purchasing decisionmakers will have more effect on this proposed standard than anything else, including America's favorite passtime, lawsuits, or the threat of illegal hacks. Be vocal!
I think the DMCA can be worked around in this case. The only thing that made DeCSS illegal is that no copyright owner of a CSS-protected DVD has (so far) ever granted authorization for the system to be bypassed. The reason for this is that (so far) every CSS-protected DVD has been owned by MPAA members and published with a license from DVD CCA. Why there hasn't been an exception yet, I'm not sure. Probably something to do with the expense of producing DVDs and movies.
But DVDs are still a lot less common than hard disks, and the number of people who write and distribute software that runs on hard disks, is immense. All it takes is for one programmer to write a program that uses this form of copy protection, and then explicity grant authorization to everyone to bypass the copy protection.
That's one of the weak points in DMCA: it doesn't really outlaw bypassing copy protection. It just outlaws bypassing copy protection without the authority of the copyright owner. If the copyright owner grants that authority, then technically by DMCA's definition of "circumvent", circumvention has not occurred.
If software that uses this copy protection scheme (but grants users authorization to bypass it) were to become widespread, then it would become necessary for drivers to bypass CPRM, and yet no one would be able to credibly say that the purpose of the driver is to bypass CPRM without authorization, since it would be easy to demonstrate that the driver is, more often than not, used with authorization.
Any copy protection scheme can have its DMCA protection removed, not by hackers cracking it, but by hackers adopting it.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You have to make sure that the OEMs and the "mom 'n pop" chop shops in Taiwan get the message that you don't want to buy these drives.
The MnP chop shops are so used regulation they won't even see it as rolling you over in pig manure. And if they don't see the point, (like it costing them more,) YOU are so screwed.
You may all be buying Apples to run OS X to hang onto your rights or using aging, fragile and perishable drives. If you think Jobs is going for this, you're nuts.
Oh and I hate Mac haters. To the people stupid enough to name their site that way, I can only say: LUST AFTER MY UNENCUMBERED MACHINE. I'll be able to back it up.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Well, you have to remember that there has to be ALTERNATIVES for a boycott to work.
For many of the more technically inclined, Linux works for that. But what about those that aren't knowledgable (or at least don't think they are) to run those alternatives? These are the people who use their computers for mostly office work, and will stick to the big name products (primarily MS Offic, and Corel WordPerfect to a lesser extent).
And just to remind you, they are the major market share. If the big name products start requiring this, then they WILL follow.
However, MS does appear to be against this (probably requires a lot of recoding for some Windows routines - just a guess), lending some very big resistance. I suspect many other software developers might be against it to, such as Symantec and McAfee (I wonder what that would do to virus writing - might make them close to impossible to remove).
Microsoft on the side of freedom of access? Isn't that one of the signs of the apocalypse?
Then there's the issue of liscencing. If this becomes the standard, and software starts requiring it, what happens if companies start getting denied the liscence to put this in their storage media? It's a potential monopoly problem as well.
Though with all the demons this releases from it's Pandora's Box, remember that there are very good uses for this technology - specifically where there is a need to protect critical data. Just think of all of those government and corporate servers around the world that this could be used in to protect confidential data.
I'd like to see this technology get into that sector, just keep it away from the standard for consumer electronics.
Dark Nexus
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
Actually, all IDE hard drives have the controller built into the drive itself. The IDE controller on the motherboard isn't much more than a connector to the CPU bus.
This is one thing that makes this so evil, because they are taking advantage of this. CPRM as it would be done to IDE drives can't be done to SCSI, because the controller is outboard. And I doubt they will anyway because it will break RAID arrays, etc.
I wonder if the HD manufacturers are participating in this for their own motive: Cripple IDE..
IDE has been steadily catching up to SCSI in speed, reliability, and usefulness. Now IDE RAID is coming.. HD manufacturers stand to lose a TON of profit if the smaller servers start being sold with IDE RAID instead of SCSI RAID. CPRM breaks this, and wil make IDE useless for RAID.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"Will our boycott really matter?"
./'ers have a fairly disporportianate influence in IT worldwide, as we are the technicians, engineers, etc who are looked at by the non-tech savvy.
Will it change their minds? Probably not. Will it persuade someone (Samsung, Fujitsu, etc) to not participate, or also sell drives WITHOUT this "feature"? Probably.
That's what we need to do. Get someone not to play the game, then buy their HD's and ONLY their HD's. Eventually all the rest will be forced to offer drives without CPRM. At the same time, we need to educate EVERYONE we come in contact with. Tell them to ask for non-CPRM drives. Explain it simply, tell them that these hard drives are crippled and defective. Spread FUD.
After all,
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
It's realism.
What I'd like to see is Microsoft and Open Source community being officially (a combined press release/conference, for instance) on the same side in this debacle. That would be deliciously machiavellian. The enemy of my enemy is my friend...
There is not a single Winmodem on the 100 or machines that I manage, but this means nothing, because they are all bussiness machines that have no modem at all. I can't really boycott Winmodems, because I don't buy modems. I would tend to guess that the same is true for most people here that have purchasing power in a company. On the other hand, if I start boycotting a brand of hard drives, I could have some small effect to the manufacturer's bottom line, so could a lot of others. A sys admin boycott of modems is fairly ineffective, because most sys admins don't deal with many internal modems. A sys admin boycott of hard drives on the other hand... Especially if you add in the fact that Microsoft is opposed to this technology (According to the Register story it would break a lot of their software), and therefore a few NT admins may also join a boycott, It could make a difference.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Don't you think it's astounding that Orwell was just a few years off?
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Where does the DCMA (or anything else) say that access to the media is illegal? What it says is that circumventing protection to access copyright works is illegal.
If I create data/program, to which I or my employer own the copyright, and write it to the hard disk then accessing this is not unauthorised. So access to the media will be required so as to gain access to this material.
is the comment from the "Quantum Guy" is that he hasn't really had any emails about it..."maybe 40 or so".
MP3s are an open standard.
Warning: Open does not necessarily imply free; for instance, the Apple Public Source License is not a Free Software license.
Anyone can download CDex w/ LAME for free and roll their own MP3s.
And infringe several United States patents (and foreign counterparts) in the process.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I could toss similar numbers around too, but the fact is that I don't get to tell Sun, EMC, or Hitachi what brand of disks I want in those servers and arrays. I just tell 'em how big.
Sure you do! Explain to them that the copy prevention mechanism is considered a DEFECT and that if they can't promise defect free HDs, you'll have to go with an Alpha. NOBODY produces a platform with unique capabilities these days.
What it really comes down to is the issue of solidarity. If one tech at a company refuses to touch such a drive, he (or she) is fired. If NO tech period is willing to touch them, the drives go away. Sadly, it will probably take an actual wide scale abuse from an entrenched system to make enough techs realise what they should have done when they still could.
Note that economics could work in our favor. Drives that provide little or no support for copy prevention will intrinsically cost less to make. If capitolism is still somewhat functional after the under the table dealings, those drives will cost less.
The webserver at www.ihateapple.com appears to have been rooted and the link posted with the article appears to have been replaced with a hacked page. Anyone have another source for information on this topic?
"Everything works if you let it" - The Flying Mouse
Wow, thanks for the program info. :)
I just tried it, and it's a lot better than the little shell script I was using
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Here at iHateApple.com
we use WindowsNT machines
to host our website. That
is why is was so easy for
this site to get hacked. We
are currently still hacked
and chances are, won't figure
it out. Why you ask? Because
we are lame and tried fucking
with the platform that Bill
Gates stole. Any way, you will
be redirected to www.apple.com
shortly. Learn from us, don't
host your website on a Windows
machine. It's not smart.
r00ted by -> NewWave
(poster's note: I hope they didn't destroy the data, I kind of wanted to read the response to his letter!)
I'm not sure if they did that to try to guage the amount of piracy that was really going on with their product, just for the publicity, or some other reason.
Anybody got the complete list of companies to boycott for this mess?
err... OK, I'll admit it... I gave in and bought one (not for myself, for a friend who had extremely light usage and couldn't justify twice the price for a non-winmodem).
Has everyone else done this too?
Most other countries aren't nearly as bad as the US with the DMCA. Just make sure that it is not developed there.
None of that makes the system absolutely secure. It CAN be broken given enough determination. What it would do is raise the bar quite a bit higher.
I'm glad you added this caveat, because the schemes you describe are far from unbreakable. In fact, as long as the decoding is done in software by a computer under user control the scheme is ultimately vulnerable. In the case of a system where the user has control of the OS (like, say, Linux?) you can ignore all of the rest and just tap the data stream being sent to the sound card. Even under Windows, a sound card driver "shim" could perform the same function. I'm doubtful that the current schemes will really stop 90% of the illegal copying because, as always, it only takes one smart person to create the tap. And if some other uses for the tap software could be, er, invented, the DMCA could be circumvented as well.
To really protect their music, the RIAA also needs to get sound card manufacturers to help out by placing decryption/decoding hardware on the cards. With a secure crypto module on the hard drive, another on the sound card and a third on the download server it's possible to construct an effective copy protection scheme. Breaking it would require hardware hacking on your sound card to intercept the data flowing from the decoder to the D/A converter.
--
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It seems rather shortsighted for the hard drive manufacturers to be trying to help put in place copyright protections, because, and let's be frank here, 'illegal' media has fueled their industry for years.
If people didn't have gigs of mp3s, pr0n, and pirated software, the market for huge hard drives would be much, much smaller. (Yes, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for needing a 80G drive, but 9 out of 10 people walking out of Best Buy with a 80G hard drive are going to use it for mp3s.)
Fortunately, I still believe that most corporations value $$ over everything else, and it will eventually dawn on them that even attempting such protections is against their bottom line.
As many others have said, unrestricted copying is a huge boon to the HD world. Now they wanna stop that and cut a thick portion out of their revenue??? This new method requires tons of 'compatible' components and is very difficult to implement in a new setting, let alone an enstablished one.
I think the HD manufactuers got pressured into doing SOMETHING by the big record/movie people, they came up with this idea. They'll trot it around release a few HDs with it, let it fail, then go back to the record/movie people saying "We tried and it didn't work, sorry"
For this to work you need compatible HDs, Motherboards(controllers), and software. People wont want to use the software. The controllers/motherboards come from asia manufactuers (we've all heard about piracy in asia) that have a lot to lose by implementing this protection. And there will be suppliers of HDs without this 'feature.' THis is gonna flop like DIVX and I think the HD guys know it.
FunOne
FunOne
Does that still work? Damn.. Haven't used that since grade school...
"FYI, SCSI and IEEE1394 have already approved something similar without controversy."
For those not in the know, IEEE1394 is the real name of firewire.
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Hate to dissapoint you, but if you'd looked at the article, the guy in the letter says that the new SCSI standards already have such measures in place.
Yes, similar measures have been in the SCSI specs for some time. However, I'm not aware of any SCSI drive manufacturer who implements those portions of the specs, and I haven't heard anyone say they want to begin, either.
--
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I've long heard that there are some applications vendors who surrepitiously participate in the piracy market.
The idea is that the user base for your application is broader than the paying market can ever be, but the paying market is as swayed by the ubiquity of a product as it is a software application's price or features. You may have a better application, but if "everyone" is using your competitor's product the paying customers may choose it to guarantee better collaboration or portability for their documents.
By flooding the non-paying market with copies of your application you help insure that you have this kind of influence.
I think this is a believable idea, especially in the freelance market where there's a lack of centralization in terms of the workforce but the exchange of electronic files is pervasive and made much simpler by a common document format. Think of designers and Photoshop* -- ad firms use freelance talent all the time and even lame apps keep getting used because they're ubiquitous.
Of course I have no evidence that applications developers actually participate in this or how they would participate, but to some degree its a compelling idea.
* Disclaimer: I'm not accusing Adobe, Photoshop users or anyone else of participating in the illegal duplication of software. Photoshop was used stritcly to illustrate a particular example of market standardization.
I can't figure out why the hard drive manufacturers are giving this scheme the time of day. If it works, it will dramatically reduce the amount of copying being done (perhaps 95% of all non-corporate copying I'd guess), and so it's absolutely inevitable that the number of drives bought will plummet. This is not to the advantage of disk manufacturers at all.
Given the profit motive, the drive manufacturing sector of the free market should be dismissing/ignoring these proposals altogether. What's happening here, what's pushing them to support it? They're definitely not addressing their customer requirements.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Microsoft is probably against this because they don't care about their programs being illegally copied now it'll require them another 10 thousand line of code, more frequent crashes. On the other hand Linux popularity will fall and microsoft will grab a stronger hold in the OS market and will be a monopoly (if it already isn't)
SDMI is meant to make your life hard. In fact, it's meant to fail. The RIAA wants no part in selling music in file form, over the Internet or otherwise.
Why? Because even SDMI threatens their very existance. Sooner or later, especially with broadband, it's going to be more feasable for bands to by-pass the record labels entirely, make their music, sell it THEMSELVES, make a much higher profit. This is what the RIAA fears.
The recording industry of today can be summed up like this:
1. Most artists do not even own their own songs, the RIAA affiliated record labels do.
2. The record labels make ten TIMES what the artists do per sale.
The recording industry as it exsts today cannot continue in it's current form. MP3 and any other portable, high-quality, no-loss copy format threatens their very existance. Sooner or later, major artists are NOT going to sign with record labels, sign over the ownership of THEIR creation to the RIAA, etc.
It is this future the RIAA is trying to forestall in any way that it can. Fact it, it can't. MP3 exists, and there is no way the RIAA is ever going to be able to convince enough people to use NOT use MP3. Which is why they are doing it dishonestly, using unprincipled judges (Kaplan), and trying to cripple PC hardware thru backroom deals (CPRM).
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Of course the internet is the answer, but what mechanism do you use to sort the wheat from the chaffe? If you start using the ratings/preferences/biases of some web site, aren't you just trading the biases of the RIAA members for the biases of someone else?
I don't doubt that the biases of somealtrocksite.com may be better than that of the moneygrubbing RIAA members, but there will *always* be a system of elites who decide what to push and what not to push, and the vast majority of people who don't have a lot of idle time to "shop" for music will be more than happy to accept RIAA marketing.
I'll agree to all your points, but to a certain degree don't the artists thrive off of the publicity and "business sense" that the record companies provide? How do I, some guy in Minnesota, get to hear about some cool band that plays in Columbia, SC? Even when I was 21 and had the time and inclination to go to the music clubs 2-3 nights a week and spend hours listening to the indy radio stations it was difficult to keep up with what was out there.
Working 60+ hours per week, house, wife, etc means that I get to spend about maybe an hour a week trying to listen to new arists. Without the record companies (admittedly bad) publicity and filtering, it's tough to find new artists let alone get ahold of their recordings.
I think to a certain extent the music industry will stay in existence if only to provide a steady stream of "new" artists to a public that doesn't have the time or desire to filter them out.
I don't see any. The only way to effect copyright protection you need to have copy protection, right?
Nope! Copyright protection can be effected by watermarking the content. Then, if you see your copyrighted material on Napster (for example), you track it down to the person who is offering it for download. You can get some idea of how many people downloaded it based on having the same watermarks. Now, you tell them to pay up or prosecute. You don't have to catch them all, or even most. Just a few examples will do.
None of that would have any impact on me making a copy for use in the car or for backup, or even making a copy for a friend (small change!), but it would prevent mass abuse.
No shock about those stats, despite the old chestnut that IDE and SCSI are really the same disk mechinisms. Right now, despite the technical pros-n-cons, the interfaces are essentially being used to segregate the desktop and server markets.
If there ever were special "IDE-for-Servers" disks, I would imagine that they would cost almost exactly what SCSI disks do.
They DO have a watermarking scheme.
I was aware of the watermark. I should have been more clear by saying rather than just using much simpler watermarking.
From the e-mail:
but by the software that controls the licensed devices
SO what does this mean? AT what level would that be implemented?
BIOS; HD Controller; OS?
I actually think you would have to have a carefully crafted cooperation between the HDD, the Disc Controller na dfinally the OS. So does that mean that once on of those links doesn't work the whole CP Scheme will not work? I still don't quite get it how this stuff could work, even with appliances like tivo.
However it's scary seeing you rights fading out more and more each day.
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx
That's a pretty good description of how it'll work...
I wonder though where they're going to get an embedded CPU capable of doing realtime decryption of data at a speed anywhere near what the hard-drive can read at. If they can't, and this is a moving target, they're going to end up with a crippled product where protected media is read at a crawl, imagine trying to seek in a large movie this way... Ugh.
And this protection assumes that someone isn't going to crack it once and distribute the resulting unprotected media. Especially because 'cracking' in this sense means using something akin to 'Play to Disk' in your MP3 player, or recording the data it sends to the audio out disk.
This just prevents basic copying, but as soon as one of the readers gets compromised and distributed, anyone will be able to make unemcumbered copies with ease.
It'll be just like now, except that people like me (bored sysadmins with an OC3 available) will have a personal grievance with the media companies.
Once again, the stupid media companies are the weakest link in their own chain. They'll never get anything right and they'll piss everyone off trying.
Good work.
Now, we need to make it very clear to the CEO's of every disk manufacturer that we can reach, that we will boycott any copy-protected drive.
They can't even be bothered to make drives with a real hardware write-protect anymore, so the security of MY data is apparently unimportant. I'll be DAMNED if I'll buy a disk that secures the MPAA's data, but can't be configured as read/only so I can keep the script kiddies from messing with it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The hard drive market is VERY competitive. Margins are tiny. Only a single manufacturer has to look and see the demand for non-protected drives. How many people would be willing to pay an extra $5, $10, or even $20 for a drive that ignores this stupid scheme. Enough people to kill it completely - no manufacturer is going to give a competitive edge like this to their competition. Just make sure that the manufacturers know that if they insist on impletmenting this, you will purchase drives from another who doesn't. Those of you that order PC's from companies like Dell and Gateway for your companies, ask if they are using the new drives (if and when they come on line), then tell them you won't order any PC's that ship with them. Enough noise like that and they will get the message very quickly, and pass it to the drive manufacturer even faster - do you think IBM, Western Digital, or anyone else is going to want to lose those two pc providers as a customer?
just my take on the situation.
If all else fails, what about slashdot group ordering a large quantity of non-protected or scsi drives (enough for bulk discounts)?
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
How will they manage to prevent a single raid-array disc to be copied ? /dev/hdxx (or sdxx) volume is not rot13-uuencoded / rot13/uudecoded on the fly ?
How will they ensure the raw
And btw, doing this will have an ethic impact : what about fellows who want to backup their ext2fs or reiserfs volumes ?
Does this mean we will have to pay for specific backup software with NSA backdoors (who said "MS" ?) ?
I believe there's something rotten...
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
Copyright protection can be effected by watermarking the content
... climb out and hang ...
Until a way to destroy the watermark is found, that is.
---
Put your feet out and stop
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
This whole copy protection scheme (as all others are) is pointless. You can make downloaded songs triple-encoded with different 4096-bit keys, require a hardware dongle that has to be kept locked in a safe that is welded to the computer, and this still isnt going to stop people from swapping pure good ol' american FREE MP3S!!. When I say free, I mean free of copy protection and other impurities. Not free of cost.
You can secure the secure stuff all you want and unless you can find a way to un-invent MP3, you're right back where you were.
If they want to stop 'piracy' (By this I mean people gaining posession of a song without paying) they should SELL MP3s. And I mean all of them. Every song by every artist. Available for download in MP3 for $10/month. I would get that in an instant. That $10/mo would get you a guranteed good rip with a good download speed would be worth it.
People dont use Napster because they dont want to pay any money. They use Napster because they dont want to have to go to a store, pay 100x what the CD is worth, and then find out they dont like it. If I could pay $10/mo for unlimited downloads IN UNSECURED MP3 FORMAT I would never use Napster/openNap/PowerNap/etc again.
--IronHelix
Now is the perfect time to make sure this doesnt happen, start writing letters to your local newspaper/congressman/president. oh and the san jose murcury ran this article about it.
A blog about stuff.
Copyright laws aren't mutating into anything -- there was no changes in copyright laws except some ridiculous extension of the duration of protection. DMCA is a kind of legal garbage that has nothing to do with "copyright laws" -- it's an exception from general laws made for particular kind of distributors, legalizing practices that amount to extortion and illegal terms of contract.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If/when this gets implemented how long do you think it will take for some bright lad to circumvent it. This will slow down "piracy" only in the short term while being a pain in the butt for ordinary users. All these companies are forgetting what should be their golden rule "Thou shalt not piss off your customers"
Any unauthorized access to the media is illegal. It doesn't matter if it takes place through deliberate action or inaction.
We are not at that point yet. However this is certainly the direction we are going odds on the next WIPO treaty will be an attempt to get the whole world to use US style "copyright" (i.e. holder of original copyright also holds copyright of any "derived works") as well as to broaden the definition of "copy" far beyond it's original meaning.
what is a kind of "copy protection" that is infinitely higher than anything allowed to him by copyright laws.
It certainly isn't "infinitly higher" also copyright laws are at present mutating into "useright".
Nor do any of these things actually stop "piracy" in the first place.
Only for selfish reasons.
Under CPRM, one master disk cannot be used by OEMs to load windows on thousands of systems. Each must be installed by hand (or script), making the process slower and more costly.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
While not a scientific study of reliability, there was an interesting article (The Art of Massive Storage: A Web Image Archive, IEEE Computer magazine, 2000-11) that found big differences between the reliability of IDE and SCSI drives. Over an 18 month period, 6 of 24 IDE disks failed (25%), 7 of 368 SCSI disks failed (1.9%).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Why the Hell isn't there a geek PAC? You all toe the fucking Slashdot political line. But when are you fucker gonna get out there, offa your asses, stop whining about how Congress is being bought.... And start buying your own Congressmen? I'm not rich, but I'll donate $50 if you get your shit together.
this letter feels more like a public relations than anything worth while. first it spends no time talking about black and white quantum policy - whenever he talks of policy he uses terms like "will pay special attention to" and "In general, we support." can you get anymore wishywashy. Then he dedicates almost a third of the letter to complimenting to complimenting Russ and how Russ the "only one actually giving a rational reason." the author may be saying that you're so smart but he's thinking how your so gullible. anyone who goes through the trouble of writing this letter without actually saying anything solid has something to hide. I'm not saying blackball quantum because of this letter but please don't praise them either.
Money talks, bullshit walks. It worked for the Pentium unique identifier, it worked for DivX, and it'll work here too.
The thing is, now is the time to stop these schemes in their tracks. We've started down the slippery slope, and after this one, the next battle is SMDI compliance. Well, we already lost in a big way with the passage of the DMCA. It's the bridge to taking away everything and anything. This is phase 2. And if we cave in here on this stupid copy prevention scheme, the next privacy infringement will be even harder-- if not impossible-- to stop.
The key is to send a clear message-- I will NOT purchase any equipment that has this type of copy prevention system on it. I will boycott it, I will encourage my friends to boycott it, and I will explain to them why.
They will try all kinds of tricks to get us to buy it. They'll bundle it with something else we need, they'll try to make it our only option, they'll tout its technical advantage, to get us to use it. When they do, they've won.
It's mousetrap cheese, folks. History will judge us on these years when the Internet went commercial-- did we compromise and acquiesce or did we stand up, resist, and let big industry roll over us with their fucked up standards...?
This is just the beginning. Remember, it's all about the money. And that's where we, for now anyway, have the most power.
Is this whole CPRM effected by the filesystem (fat,e2fs,etc) or OS used to store the data?
What if I use an encrypted filesystem?
How might this work with non-ms software?
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Can't any copy-protection mechanism be defeated by using an encrypted filesystem? Or am I missing something here? An encrypted filesystem would slow down disk access, because encryption and decryption consume CPU cycles, but CPU is cheap.
The proposed standard will not prevent organised copyright theft, or even a knowledgeable hacker; user-friendly software for installing an encrypted filesystem will quickly become available, so that even ordinary users will be able to copy whatever they want, just like they can now.
I have converted all of my mp3's to .ogg and now use cdparanoia piped to oggenc for ripping any new CD's to preserve quality. I encourage people to use Free formats and protocols, and most of my friends now use vorbis instead of mp3.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
As I understand this..the HD's role in this is passive. The software has to actually support the copy protection and handshake with the drive right? What's to stop the crackers from just ripping out the code that initiates the handshake? Isn't that what crackers do? Remove copy protection (cd checks..etc) This doesn't sound very practical.
Market forces could clearly win out here
... correct my Economics101, but wouldnt the RIAA/MPAA clearly demostrate a oligopoly - and collusive behaviour? WTF is wrong with this picture - I thought we had all agreed we tolerate capatalism because it breads innovation through competition... every time I pick up a browser or a paper I read about another industry setting restrictive standards/license terms/leases etc etc because there is virtually no competition in 99% of the modern marketplace (this would exclude ordinary chattle (dishes, plastic knick-knack-garbage, furniture))
I wholy agreed - except this bit.
You assume there is competition - there is none, therefore the 'market' you look to correct this problem dosnt exist. Americans need much stronger monopoly laws - especially the ones regarding COLLUSION
Instead of piping one program to another, you could try using abcde. Abcde calls several programs (ripper + cddb + id3 + encoder) using a shell script, and works pretty well. By default, it uses cdparanoia and ogg vorbis, so you should be happy with it :) At the end, you have properly-named-and-tagged music files in a named directory.
It's in Debian; if you're using something else, you should be able to find the site fairly easily.
Sotto la panca, la capra crepa
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
--
aw I wasn't trying to bait anyone. I was merely suiggesting that a products users should not define my opinions of the product too much.
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
[From the page linked to in the parent post] - Gilmore says moves are also taking place to build copy-control into monitors...
... climb out and hang ...
Copy control in monitors?!? Give me a fscking break.
---
Put your feet out and stop
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Of course it's fine to voluntarily boycott such controlled content, but what do you do when it's the only content available? I've been told repeatedly that VHS is on its way out in favor of DVD, and there does seem to be a gradual trend in this direction at the local Blockbuster. (After all, excepting the copy protection scam^H^H^H^Hscheme, DVD's are clearly superior to analog videotape.) So as soon as you want to use anything at all that relies on this dubious technology you will fold up, buy the software and the compliant hardware and grumble while it does its thing. And you will lose that content when you buy a new PC or hard drive -- unless you get the hack for it.
We are all sheep. We all know that slashdotters and the like have effectively no voice in the world-- that we are either portrayed as whiny losers who whine to each other on Slashdot (there's a whole lot of truth to this) or renegade hackers who have nothing but damage to others' rights on their agenda (there's very little truth in this). But with DVD's we aren't even using what little voice we have. Indeed, the technophilic nature of the sort of people that are drawn to slashdot probably means that a higher percentage of them than the common public have DVD players.
What we *should* be doing is boycotting the DVD standard, and loudly. Some of the few respected speakers among the techno-nerd crowd from which slashdot draws its audience should be echoing these boycotts. The message should be, we're not interested in a format that has a central patented control (i.e. DVDCCA) on the very format. We will boycott it until manufacturers and content providers come up with another format not so encumbered-- and buy *that*. Market forces could clearly win out here, but all of us techno-geeks are too drooling in awe of the capabilities of DVDs that we've just jumped lemming-like over the cliff rather than have the willpower to take whatever insigificant steps we could to harenss those market forces.
Market forces killed DIVX. The manufacturers are getting more canny, though. With DVIX, it was obvious to every consumer that they were getting a bum deal. Now, the manufacturers are getting better at slipping things in, things that only techno-geeks notice, which they can then use to provide DVIX-like controls on the hardware and software that everybody already has bought. There will not be market forces against it until the computer illiterate notice what they're losing, and by then it may well be too late.
(What's happening is that the massive entities who control distribution in the analog world are trying to enact legislation and such that will allow them to continue the same sorts of controls on the digital world. In the analog world, they were a little more natural. Joe Average making a copy of content would degrade it in quality; only the big entites had the resources necessary to really provide quality content. In the digital world, this is not true; anybody can make full quality copies. What should really happen is that as the digital world takes over, there should be a paradigm shift, and whole new models of distribution should come in. (Much as the very presence of recording technologies introduced new paradigms.) However, the people who have all the power in the analog world don't want it. But it really is unnatural, and eventually something that really uses digital technology to its full effect will take over and send the analog power brokers the way of the dinosauar. It will happen. Unfortunately, I fear it may take 50 or 100 years (pessimistically speaking), and those of us who live in the interem will have to suffer for it. Especially since those few who understand the issues don't do anything about it, but either just whine to each other (as I am doing now) or give up and buy tainted technology (as all of you have done with your DVDs).)
-Rob
Anyone have details about this?
Just my two cents.
--- I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.
Sounds like you're advocating something illegal under the DMCA, namely circumventing copy protection used to protect a copyrighted work.
It's decss all over again. They encrypt software, music, you name it onto a CD, DVD, Installer disk, whatever. You can't get it off there because that's a DMCA violation. Then they make a Windows-based installer to transfer it securely to the Hard Drive. You can't get it off the HD either-- it's another DMCA violation.
Boom. There goes your right to use any of that content in Linux, unless they feel like giving you a Linux installer.
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
here will be understood now. From the letter;
An optional set of ATA commands has been proposed by IBM that could support the CPRM method from the 4C entity or other methods. After implementing these commands, a hard disk (HDD) supplier wishing to install CPRM keying information and support that particular key management method would need a license from 4C entity
This observant post at open law might give you a better idea of who 4C entity is.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Read about it here.
A static "Media Unique Key" in a separate, hidden area of the drive, identifies the individual drive. Making use of broadcast encryption and one way key algorithms, would-be hackers face a daunting number of keys to break.
Someone surely will break it sometime, but you have to stop and wonder when they state things like, "hidden area of the drive". Are they going to allow an individual group to validate the ethics of this. Some such as EPIC?
"It requires both drives to be compliant when data is to move from one disk to another," says Lotspiech. "And a compliant application to get all that data to the new drive".
So a hard drive containing small individual containing non-copyable files of say, Gartner reports, will essentially be unrestorable using existing backup programs.
How will this affect legacy systems and businesses who may not have the money to fully convert their systems should they want this technology.
Sounds like this has a long way to go and I'm sure many companies will oppose this.
F.B.I.'s Most Wanted Hacker
Thanks for the memories