French Hackers Break SDMI

jonathan_ingram writes: "Two French hackers have reportedly broken SDMI. Various other groups participating in the SDMI challenge have claimed to have accomplished this already. However, this group has decided to publish their results, available at their site. The site includes a detailed technical report, together with the history and background of SDMI, and the SDMI challenge." Ah, what a seemingly good idea SDMI was for the media companies - now I fully expect to see a story "Newborn infant cracks SDMI, burps up on RIAA".

Comments

Re:One thing that most people don't realize

[Platinum Dragon]

Now suddenly you can stick a CD in your drive and a $0.60 CD-R in your burner, hit dupe and you have a 100% copy.

Not to mention, you can purchase a Phillips CD recorder, promoted in ads that encourage people to make copies of their CDs.

Lest we forget, VHS did not kill the movie industry, cassette tapes did not kill the music industry, and it appears CD-R, the upcoming DVD-R formats, and compression formats like MP3 still won't kill the music and movie industries. As you mention, MP3s don't sound as good as CDs. DivX-encoded movies don't look as good as DVDs. So the business about "perfect digital copies" being traded over the Internet will continue to be fantasyland until most people have cable/DSL or better (much better).

It seems out of paranoia, the media giants are willing to push overly cumbersome digital formats on people that do nothing to preserve an individual's ability to use their own legally-purchased bits as they wish, outside of making copies and selling or giving away those. Like the Divx pay-per-view DVD format before, these technologies will be soundly rejected by technophiles and early adopters as overbearing. Ultimately, so-called "anti-piracy" actions will prove counterproductive, as users will run into just as much trouble, if not more, using the digital "secure" formats, than the pirates these techs are supposed to stop. Stuff like "Why can't I have this song on both my computer and my portable MP3 player?" Stuff like (if CPRM is forced into the ATA spec) "Excuse me, but why can't I send these songs I produced to my friends?"

Big Business really needs to think about how many customers it is willing to inconvenience and turn away to knock out casual copying, instead of going after the hard-core pirates who make hundreds of copies of CDs. As the head of a Canadian media association once said to a class I was in, perhaps the industry will have to learn to live with casual copying, go after the full-blown mass pirates, and just encourage people to purchase full-quality, legal copies because it's the Right Thing To Do.

American researchers run into DMCA trouble

[Apotsy]

A recent article in the NY Times talks about how the researchers from Princeton and Rice are having to work out the legality of publishing their results, due to potential problems with the DMCA.

Re:One thing that most people don't realize

[Black Parrot]

> The goal that the media industries have isn't eliminating ALL piracy, it's eliminating mainstream piracy.

But the funny thing is, they end up eliminating casual piracy and barring exercise of Home Recording Act rights, and meanwhile the professional pirates keep selling piles of counterfeit DVDs.

I don't know what the media industries think they're trying to do, but they damn sure aren't eliminating "mainstream" piracy.

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