Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: IPO, Protest, Ripping
This has nothing to do with "slacking." Xpilot writes "The Slack people have decided to discontinue support for the SPARC architecture (boo hoo), read about it here."
In other words, they're putting their efforts elsewhere -- which is not to say that someone else can't build on the GPL'd SPARC codebase already assembled up to now. I've never heard a Slackware user complaining, so Patrick and company clearly know what they're about.
Even for you U.S. persons! From the announcement I posted on Mandrake's upcoming IPO on a French stock exchange (and from the announcement it pointed to), many people got the impression that Americans were legally excluded from buying shares in the offering. Actually, it's MandrakeSoft which is not allowed to advertise the offering outside of France.
As one correspondent points out, "Everybody can use an online broker that accepts orders for European markets from U.S. people ( for instance) or use their broker if they can take orders for 'Euronext Marche Libre.'" Your regular broker may be able to handle this.
This isn't investment advice, though. Buy (or do not) at your own risk and pleasure, and pay attention to the various complications and liabilities ;) Either way, you may be interested in an informative article at Freezer-Burn about the process.
Additionally, a semi-anonymous reader wrote with a few figures about the offering: "After the IPO there will be a total of 3 395 269 shares. Which will do a valuation (market capitalization) after IPO of 21 millions Euros (18,3 millions USD). Redhat is currently at 577 Millions USD - so it's 1/30th Redhat size, about 3% of Redhat."
Too bad Adobe isn't a music publisher. You read recently about the quiet introduction of rip-resistant CDs into U.S. stores; now fadden writes: "I've posted an update to the CD-Recordable FAQ that explains my understanding of how (and, more importantly, why) the Macrovision technology works, why it won't prevent you from playing CDs in your car or on your computer, why it will be effective at making it difficult to "rip" or copy CDs, and where hopes lie for defeating it."
You need a copy of the Red Book spec to make sense of all that data, but it is possible to defeat this Macrovision rubbish like that.
http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html
_ANY_ declicker worth a damn will defeat it. It is a pathologically easy case for a declicker, and declickers can correct thousands of errors per channel per _second_. And you know what? If you get coy with it and try to NOT make pathologically obvious clicks- the interpolation on CD players won't kick in! It is a complete loser technology in every way.
'Fadden' horribly overestimates the effectiveness of this technology...
It's not. Not at all. You don't even use filters. What you do is run a separate filtered version of the signal, which ought to get pretty close but without any highs to it. Then, anytime a sample's way out of whack compared to the adjacent samples, you use the filtered sample instead.
It's barely even a filtering issue, because 99% (or 99.99%) of the music is _untouched_. You're just throwing in a backup sample when you hit an obvious click.
I've tested out my software on a recording where I introduced full volume clicking every 1000 samples, or 44 times a second. I think it would still work pretty well even if the interference was every _ten_ samples, or 4410 times a second. You'd get music out the other side, is what I'm driving at- and mostly 'unfiltered', this doesn't make the rest of the samples sound dull.
I thought you couldn't patent something for the sake of keeping anyone from using the invention. If they don't commercially exploit their invention, others are still free to license their technology...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
CDparanoia (the latest version) rips these cd's very well. It just takes more time.
Copy protection? Does this mean I did my own copy protection when I scratched the hell out of my older CD's?
Although, Macrovision is not known for making any type of copy protection that is secure (or worth a damn... Look at video tape copy protection... Macrovision is the biggest joke in the video world.)
Oh well, I am just happy that the CD manufacturers chose Macrovision... Keep up the good work Music industry!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I will not buy any compact discs that i know to have the macrovision technology, and if i buy any discs that i later discover to have the macrovision technology i will demand a refund. I am currently writing a letter to the FTC to protest that the discs with this technology are (by all media accounts i have heard thus far; let me know if i have been incorrectly informed) not clearly labelled.
I do not care if this is "defeatable" or not. I do not care if i can rip it. I do not own a cd burner. The extent to which this does or does not affect the digital reading of audio cds i have bought is not relevant to me*. I simply refuse to patronise the services of a record company which would intentionally degrade the quality of their products.
I find it unacceptable that any music company would dare to sell me a cd in which the error recognition information is incomplete or damaged. I do not care about their motives, and i refuse to accept "copy protection" as a valid motive. As far as i am concerned-- and, in my belief, as far as the FTC is concerned-- the messing up of the error correction bits has been done so that the products they are selling will degrade faster, with the added bonus that customers are hindered from easily creating backup copies of the music. Oh, i do honestly believe that they are doing this for the purpose of reducing piracy, but the amount of piracy that will be stopped by this is so minimal that "piracy" is not a valid excuse to me as a customer and so i am disregarding it..
I move my cd collection around a lot. i will frequently grab some of my numerous purchased cds to take with me in someone's car. i can not always treat my cds with the utmost care. I need that error correction, and as a heavy customer of the RIAA, i believe i have the right to demand that they sell me the highest quality merchandise they feasibly can. I believe i have the absolute right to demand that if they are going to intentionally degrade the quality of their merchandise, to any extent, then they must alert the customers which discs they have done this on-- and if they fail to alert us, the customers, then they are committing some form of deceptive business practices by passing off damaged merchandise as a new cd that correctly follows the red book standard.
I hope deeply that the FTC agrees with me.
If not, i will personally attempt to create some form of community watch system attempting to identify which cds have been tainted with this latest affront in the false and rediculous war being fought in the name of 'copy protection', so that customers like me can be fully informed and vote with their dollars. Customers should not be reduced to having to handle this kind of information themselves.
* (although i do frequently partake in the practice of opening audio cd tracks as AIFFs in apple movieplayer, then playing the track backward by pressing command-leftarrow. i enjoy this a great deal, and will be saddened if i lose the ability to do this-- and it seems that if the macrovision technology works, it will defeat apple movieplayer's attempts to open tracks as AIFFs quite nicely.)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Does this protection technique affect regular cd walkman/car players that have electronic skip protection, e.g. the ones that "pre buffer" the CD into large memories...
One obvious way to do it: Get a really, really good CD player which has top-notch D/A converters, a good transport mechanism, and very high quality analog circuitry. (From what other posters have written here, you _have_ to use the D/A converters in the CD player, as that's the only way to get all the information from the ECC bits.)
Then hook the analog output of that CD player to a decent outboard A/D converter using good cables. The outboard A/D converter feeds the digital result to your computer through an SPDIF cable, and there you go... The only headache is that you don't get the automatic CDDB lookup and track numbering.
Remember, since you're going to be compressing the result to OGG or MP3 anyway, the small loss in sound quality that you have by going through the CD player's D/A and the outboard A/D converter is essentially irrelevant. Especially if you're going to play it through computer speakers, which are all pretty lousy anyway.
In fact, with a good CD player and A/D equipment, the resulting compressed audio would sound better than your average 128 bit Napster crap.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
If the Macrovision copy protection works as described, people using Mac OS 9 and later will probably be screwed. Mac OS 9 uses the "digital path" (previous versions used the analog path). Disclaimer: I think the switch to digital path happened with OS 9. It could have been 8.6, though.
On the other hand, Apple might be using CD-ROMs capable of interpolating over uncorrectable audio errors even when using the digital path. If so, Macs will be the computers of choice for ripping (G4s do rip quickly....)
I gleefully await the descent of the hordes of Mac Faithful upon the RIAA and Macrovision...
One possible solution mentioned recently in alt.comp.periphs.cdr has been to hook the digital output from a CD player to a digital-in jack on a soundcard (or possibly do the same with a CD-ROM drive with a digital audio output). The player will deal with the intentional brokenness (which is what this really is, from what I've read) and provide a relatively clean signal which can then be captured, stored, folded, spindled, mutilated, etc. Since the signal never leaves the digital domain, it ought to be as good as ripping the CD by the usual means. The only advantage ripping would have is that it's faster, but recording a CD this way wouldn't be too much different than ripping tapes or vinyl.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
You get something like this (In reality, i suspect they don't use 32/8 bit words, but you get the idea):
(erm. There was going to be ascii art here, but apparently it was lame)
Anyways, from the disk, you get xx raw bits of data, and yy bits of ECC information. From these, you try to create xx bits of good data. I'll call the xx+yy a packet, for lack of a better term.
The copy prevention works by writing bogus packets where the ECC codes don't correspond to the read data.
The thing is that this all happens in the CRROM's hardware. The ripper never gets to see the ECC bits, so it doesn't know which bits come from real packets, and which are bogus. So it doesn't know which to interpolate and which to trust. Of course the CD-ROM's dac knows which to interpolate. To make things worse, if the CD is of high quality, the scrambled words will repeatedly be read the same, so rereadign the sector/track won't indicate where the error is.
A suggested circumvention
Conceivably, a slightly degraded disc might rip better, because this would excersize the ECC circuitry. My thinking is that a if you insert intentional and random read errors in the raw read of a packet (by breathing on it or wiping it with a greasy rag), a good packet will tend to be ECCed to the same ideal data for various rereads (perhaps after a re-wipe to randomise the errors), while the bogus packet, by virtue of having BAD ECC data, will tend to be ECCed to different values.
The main difficulty will be getting the degradation to be bad enough to cause REAL read errors so that most packets will require ECC but not so many errors as to overwhelm the error correcting codes.
I think. I've never actually ripped a cd myself.
Ok, I just had a thought. However, it depends on the ECC bits being used internally even for digital audio extraction. My understanding is that the whole point of macrovision for CDs was to write occasional bogus ECC codes, forcing the low-level read circuitry to always misread certain packets. The internal DAC knows which these are, and thus interpolates, but there is no way of signalling this on the digital output channel. My sheme relies on the digital output still getting the ECC treatment. Can you confirm whether this is the case?
If it is, then this might work:
ECC codes work (in the most abstact terms) by taking a (I'll pick some representative numbers) 40 bit raw word, and mapping it to a 32 bit data word. Using Grey codes you can (I'm making these numbers up) correct up to 8 incorrectly read bits per raw word, while detecting up to 18 raw bit errors.
Thus, the ECC can often reconstruct the data from the redundant bits. But these packets that the macrovision people write have bad ECC. So hopefully (more speculation) they would not ECC to the same value. Ie a bogus packet will consistently be misread, but will not be consistently ECCed to the same data for different read errors. However, the good packets will consistently be ECCed to the same value (that's what ECC is for, after all).
So my scheme is to induce a slightly higher raw error rate in reads (wiping with a dirty rag?), and to re-rip the disk seveal times (with a randomizing wipe between each rip). This will hopefully be low enough to allow good packets to be consistently reconstructed by ECC, while allowing bogus packets to be identified as such as they will ECC to different values for each read.
Comments solicited
Of course, they can go the DMCA route, that would be a natural. But there's another route.
It turns out Macrovision has been patenting not only the techniques that they use, but techniques for defeating them! By patenting ways around their copy protection before its even released, they can legally prevent circumvention devices through civil patent infringement lawsuits.
Here are some of their patents on circumvention of their earlier video stuff:
SBLive cannot make a perfect digital copy because it always resamples the digital input.
burris
What about simply the CD-digital outputs on dang near every PC CD/DVD drive from the past few years?
Both my Creative DVD-ROM (rebadged Matsushita) and HP CD-RW (rebadged Lite-on, I believe) have this output and yes, it works on both. If this works as an error-corrected digital out, then anyone with the right input on their sound card (all SBLives except newer Value versions have it, as does the TB Santa Cruz) effectively has the means to create as perfect of a digital copy as possible already. If only we knew which damned CDs have this copy prevention, I would give it a try myself...
(Yes, I hijacked the title because I despise the term "copy protection". It makes it sound as if all copying is a bad thing which, of course, is not true.)
5) Did they even consider that anyone with a recent Mac or with USB speakers doesn't have an analog link from their CD-ROM and must use DAE to play CDs?
Use the Digital Out from your drive to the Digital In on the sound card. Now use a normal cdplayer app like GTCD or Windows Media Player, then capture that audio with some kinda wave recorder like Soundrec or something. Take the resulting wave file and convert it to .mp3 .ogg .wma or whatever. Granted you have to rip at 1x but still, you beat them at their own game, and you are not "circumventing" a copy protection control, you are using a built in function of the CD-Rom drive you legally bought.
This isn't a copy protection issue, this is a consumer protection issue. The record industry is selling defective CDs.
;-)
They are intentionally violating industry standards (Red Book). Not to mention the fact that the interpolation was always optional and the quality varies considerably from player to player.
Somebody should write test program that detects defective CDs: It should print out the E32 and BLER error rates so consumers and reviewers can test their CDs and return them for a replacement if they are defective. If the replacement is defective, they should return the replacement, too....
There is professional test equipment that does this, but we need something that can run in a computer with a stock drive.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
very interesting read....but again, it can be defeated. The article mentioned 1) using an analog output 2) using a SP/DIF digital (error-corrected) output...which I assum is only available in high-end players However, all this means is that software will be able to emulate the DA (Digital -> Analog) converter. Take EAC (Exact Audio Copy - by far the best ripper) and add another option...to error-correct samples itself. Anything in hardware can be emulated in software; I give it one month at most, before somebody "fixes" the problem.
It looks like someone has already taken over maintaining an unofficial slack-like distribution for SPARC. http://splack.org
Now, I'm not quite positive about this, but...
The Digital Out on the back of PC CD-ROMs does not feed the pure 1s and 0s from the CD-ROM. The physical decoding and translation of the Redbook standard is handled inside the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. The information output to the Soundcard is interpreted sound information, not the actual bits from the CD. It is this reason that you are able to hook up headphones to the front of most CD-ROM drives and completely bypass the soundcard.
My conclusion on this issue has always been to use coax digital out on a CD deck, and either
a) hook it up to a home theater CD Burner, which should be able to handle it, then rip the burned CD. or...
b) hook it into the 5.1 input on the higher end soundcards.
Either way, it's still a pain compared to plain old ripping, but it should work.
1) Is there way to read these error correction codes?
2) What about the "digital out" on some older standalone CD players (like mine). Does this suffer the same problem?
3) Why is it so bad or hard just to do after the fact interpolation, using good sound filters?
4) Are the same bits hosed on each disc? If they were different, you could just overlay and fix, no?