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Another Audio Watermark Scheme Wins TI DSP Contest
CaptainTylor writes: "Texas Instruments' DSP and Analog Design Contest Challenge is over, and the winner is a group of students from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, who presented yet another scheme for digital-audio watermarking, and got US$100,000 for it. Here is a Dallas Morning News article on the winners, which is of course light on the tech details. Abstracts of the winner and the other two finalists are available, but I couldn't find the full submissions. It's worth noting that the competition was not specifically about copyright protection, just about using the TI TMS320 DSP in interesting ways. Wonder how long it'll take before someone cracks this scheme..."
And speaking of schemes, cracking, audio and contests, Logic Bomb writes: "According to an article from the Associated Press, the United States National Archives are holding a contest of sorts to see if anyone can finally figure out what was erased on the infamous Watergate tape that pushed Nixon's downfall over the brink. It would be amazing to have this national mystery put to rest."
Actually, wouldn't that be an idea on how to show to the public the effects of the DMCA? Use a well-known (and bad) encryption algorithm for copyright protection, then sue some respected scientific journals that explain why the algorithm is bad (and maybe also the libraries where you find those journals) for publishing circumvention devices?
But then again, courts would probably see a difference between code that is printed on paper and code that is saved on a computer. I guess the latter is "more executable" or something.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
That this is the URL for the robot:
http://real.uwaterloo.ca/~robot/
The link below is not the URL for the robot:
will send you a copy of the original on 8 track from prison.
It's not the tool that's bad, it's how it's used that can be bad...
They may build cool robots but who was the genious who used html to scale a 500kb image down to a 40x40 thumbnail instead of just creating a seperate thumbnail that would take like 2kb? Somebody's web design priveledges need to be revoked!
Download here.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It's just me or someone else noticed that all the recent crap for "copyright management" come from Israel? Does the Jihad has an account to receive donations? :)
Here's a better quote for you: "Don't reinvent the wheel."
I can explain the weakness in this technique in 3 words: Pirate Cable descramblers
... lets face it, I can't even listen to, much less copy a Celine Dion CD.
The watermark is kind of audible though (unfortunately).
For scary, check out This story
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
The idea of the watermark is that it's hidden in the audio signal, so it's there even if you go from digital to analogue or reproduce it in eny way. A type of watermark is already used for the DVD-audio format.
:p ), then you wouldn't want some unessery crap to the signal, would you?
Many HiFi specialists dosn't like this since they want a totally clean signal. The watermark is probebly not possible to hear on most HiFi systems, maby not on eny system.
But if you are one of those who has paid 6000£ for just the signal cables (what are those maid of enyway, solid gold?
Even if it shouldn't be possible to hear the watermark it must still be in the range of frequencys that humans can hear, otherwise most speakers wouldn't be able to reproduce it.
So this would mean that if you only played the watermark you would offcource hear it.
"Actually, I heard the blank spot was just noise introduced by a top-secret CIA funded copy-protection scheme from the era. ;) "
Wouldn't that mean that the attempts to hear what's there would violate the DMCA?
I think we're in trouble.
Even if every single CD-R writer company did embed watermarking code in hardware, how long do you think it would take for someone to come up with a hardware solution? Think Playstation and modchips.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Actually, that brings up an interesting question: Suppose someone decides today to use a copyright protection scheme which was cracked by researchers *before* the DMCA went into effect. Does it then suddenly become illegal to traffic in the so-called circumvention mechanisms? Does it become illegal to republish or redistribute the paper?
If so, a lot of back-issues of technical journals could be considered contraband under the law. Whee!
I read it too. It had something to do with the fact that you couldn't hear the watermark for the same reason you can't hear(for the most part) the sound that is lost due to MP3 compression.
As far as I'm aware, there are only two options for a company intending to use a watermarking technology:
1. Embed the watermark in the actual audio (for example, a high-frequency series of hisses throughout the song. this would enable the watermark to be present, more or less, if translated into other audio file formats)
2. Embed the watermark in the file format
Consumers will most likely not stand for the first option, and the second option is worthless after the watermarking scheme is cracked.
er, so anyway, the point is (and i think this was on /. at some point) you can check this url - scroll down a bit to get to the meat of the crack - for more information on audio watermarking and its effectivity:
http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.htm
anyway, selling media online has always been something churning around in the back of my mind and every time i come up with some sort of idea that may or may not work i, i can pretty much figure out a way to crack it.
my conclusion is that there is no way you can encrypt this data in an uncrackable way due to the fact that at some point you have to send audio data to the sound card - and if anyone intercepts that stream or |'s it to another dev then all your effort is wasted.
surely a viable solution would be to use hardware-based decryption using PKI. like lets say my sound card had a mobile (cell phone) like SIM card slot in it. so i buy this sound card, register with some MSP (music service provider) who supple me with a SIM card that i slot into my sound card. then i can download encrypted media (like NOT destiny's child, please!) and, tada, a workable solution.
the first thought that has always come into my mind here is *ping* HARDWARE DONGELS. nooooo. what a success that was! but i feel this is slightly different. its not like you are having software that probes for the existance of something which can be decompiled and cracked.
i've got a number of other great ideas on this that i've been formulating for over 3 years now, if anyone out there is interested in getting together to maybe push something like this forward (i have a lot of ideas with regards to ownership of content and so on as well - basically giving you the same "freedom" of ownership that you have with physical media), give me a shout on michael_jw_bartlett at hotmail dot com.
of course you can always buy gold audio jacks, plug it into you sound card's output and plug the input into your cd writer... ;)
No matter what the regulators do, there will always be a software hack (non-standard audio player, etc) to ignore the watermark. The only way to ensure that the watermark can be detected is with a special sound card. Even if the regulators come up with such a thing, a discerning customer (aka geek) will always opt for the non-restrictive hardware. Therefore, the only way this could become truly ugly is if the government outlawed "normal" sound cards and forced hardware manufacturers to stop making them.
If that happens, we've got bigger problems to worry about...
-- Brett
... when it was just announced that 802.11 WEP can be broken in 15 minutes, with longer keys broken in linear time based on the key length?
Slashdot editors: asleep at the wheel once again...
Nitpick:
cd sampling rate is 44100, thus nyquist says the max reproducible freq is 22050hz.
You'll see that all the settings on any 16bit audio software match those numbers (except dat, which is 48khz, iirc)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Hey, what happened to good 'ol American ingenuity. I find it pretty sad that only one American university participated in this competition. What's MIT, CMU, Berkeley doing? Lazy ass American gringoes...
Hell - it's even funnier because you moderators went after it like a pack of rabid dogs.
Microsoft claims they've done it. Making a watermark that gets re-recorded. It was here on Slashdot not too long ago.
The type of watermarking that is under discussion here is digital sound recordings. This protection can be made to cause the CD-ROMs laser eye to skip all over the CD and do other little things.
When making a digital copy, that is without playing the sound through a set of speakers, this watermarking technology is effective. If this watermarking signal from simply playing the original was to be reproduced at an inaudible to human ears, how would a microphone pick it up? Better yet, if the human ear is unable to hear it. Whose ear is?
I suppose that would be one for PETA, once they find out that some form of animal life is harmed by the piercing sound that only they can hear.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
try burning a SafeDisc2 protected image on a new Plextor drive.
No problem. The PlexWriter PX-W2410A does perfect Safedisc 2 copies, at least with the firmware shipped to reviewers.
Of course, SD2 is pretty much broken if you take into consideration BetaBlocker, a program you can use to 'fix' a SD2-protected image prior to burning. Works with any burner.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It's [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED]....
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
if i buy a song from an MSP, on their servers they have an unencrypted version of the song that they encrypt with my public key and then i download it.
in the case of cable pirating, that's a multicast signal that requires some sort of key to access. surely the signal that you are receiving is not encrypted uniquely to your device and the SIM card is not directly involved in PKI decryption of the signal.
er i may be wrong, like i said, i know nothing about cable pirating...
Why bother with the speakers and mic. Once the MP3 is converted back to analog couldn't you just pipe the analog signal back in and convert it back to digital then store it as the new file?
...Oh wait if that works maybe using analog signals is illegal as well.
The word on Free Software needs to go out to these kids, to show them that their admirable skill can help make the world a more free place. If they can program a DSP for watermarking, maybe they can help create better speech synthesis for the Stephen Hawkings of the world...
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Why bother with speakers and a microphone? Connect your sound card's (stereo system's, whatever) sound output jack directly to the microphone or input jack. No fuss, no mess.
*lol* This is the funniest thing i've heard in weeks.. Thanks..
Just hold the audio up to the light, it's right there.
I think I'll stop here.
If it's to be used with digital audio, the watermark must be IN the range of human hearing, since the anti-aliasing filters on the DACs and ADCs eliminate signals above 20 kHz.
Yes, that's true along the frequency axis. But what if the watermark hides 24 dB below the audio signal, where the human ear can't readily detect it, but a 16-bit DAC with a SNR of 90 dB can? Granted, a good audio compression algorithm will probably distort the watermark beyond recognition because lossy audio compression discards what the ear can't hear, so the designers of watermarking methods must tune their watermarks to be inaudible to the human ear but audible to the model of the human ear used by popular lossy codecs such as Ogg Vorbis and MPEG layer 3.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Inclusion of watermarking code into DSPs is inevitable.
Well, a DSP is a microprocessor which likes to add and multiply for real-time applications. I would expect a DSP to be able to watermark as much as an Athlon can. The impressive thing is that they're students and now I have an extreme urge to incorporate a TMS320C5410 in my car's ABS system.
Has anyone else noticed the amount of junk mail comming from TI is extremely high? I ask them for one data sheet and I get seminar invitations and catalogs in my mail every day...
Maybe the Israeli team should focus their energies towards forging peace with the Palestineans instead of building digital watermarking schemes.
I can't see what good their technology will do when both Israeli and Palestinean babies are maimed and killed every day in a pointless religious war.
Is it possible to manufacture a player that is completely programmable? Like that first personal computer that came in a kit. People could buy a "blank" player and write their own firmware for it. The firmware images could be downloaded and installed so my kit player could be a cd/dvd/cdr/cdrw/something completely different. This would place TOTAL control in the hands of the "consumer" (don't you hate being called that?).
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
All digital watermarking does is represent digital data (actually, any type of data, but in this case it they say digital) in an analog form, which is then grafted onto a larger source (the most common example being a music file).
So, just like a modem signal, a water mark is digital data that has been turned into sound. It has to be fairly robust to withstand degradation of the original signal yet still be readable. To be effective as a watermark (in music) it also has to be unobtrusive, i.e. you don't notice it. But it is an audio signal that (if you want it to be effective for things like SDMI) resides within the range of human hearing, or more accurately within the range of common recording devices.
(Very) Simple example: I spell my name in Morse code with a dog whistle that has a frequency just above what the human can hear but within the range of common recording equipment (be they digital or analog) while recording "Push Push in the Bush." I have now crudely watermarked that track.
Now, I can't hear the watermark on the recording that I made, and I make copies of this track I still won't be able to hear the watermark (because it is still just slightly above the audible range of humans, although my dog may howl), but its still being passed on from copy to copy.
If I serially copy it from tape to tape to MP3 and back to tape, assuming that there wasn't too much signal degradation (and if there was the music would sound like shit too) if I played that 4th generation copy and fed the signal through an oscilloscope, you'd still be able to see the Morse code, and my dog will still howl.
Now, how does this thwart copying and protect copyrights? It doesn't. That's not the point. All a watermark does is merely encode data into an analog system that will stay intact from analog copy to analog copy assuming the signal hasn't degraded to much (and like I said a good, robust watermark should be able to withstand a fair bit of degradation). Where the copy protection comes in is that the SMDI folks want to make devices that will recognize a watermark in an audio file and allow or not allow it to be played.
Check out:
.F. Tilik, A.A. Beex. "Encoding a hidden digital signature onto an audio signal using psychoacustic masking", in Proc. 1996 7th International Conf. on Signal Processing Apps and Tech.. pp 476-480
for a much better explanation.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Anyone who recovers what Nixon erased from the tape will be sued by his estate under the DMCA for circumventing his encryption scheme. Sorry.
all this encrypted audio formatting and what not has me wondering if it will ever make it into free compression solutions i.e. ogg vorbis?
i cant seem to come up with a sig.
you are correct sir.
No matter how unrealistic it is as a business model, copy protection is still an interesting problem, especially through watermarking.
Inclusion of watermarking code into DSPs is inevitable. CD-R companies, for example, have been eager to embrace similar methods... try burning a SafeDisc2 protected image on a new Plextor drive. Even a perfect data source can just be blocked by hardware, by detecting patterns.
Obviously, some companies will see a way to make a profit by getting around this. Educated consumers will buy hardware without locks.
The question is, will Congress permit anyone to create CD-R writers (for example) in the future that do not have firmware copy protection.
I hope the DMCA was an anomaly, and not an example of things to come.
...that canada's still represented...although the university of waterloo is getting weirder and weirder. take a bunch of nerds, put them in a small town with a beer festival and this is the result, i guess.
anybody (from UW or otherwise) got an abstract for this one?
Canada
University of Waterloo
Intelligent Motion Control Using the TMS320LF2407 Applied to a Six-Legged Walking Robot
Maybe they actually wrote the crack first, then reverse engineered it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
These things should be sponsored by universities or non-profit organizations like the ACM, not companies. I'd imagine the winning solutions are worth far more than the prizes offered.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
The purpose of copy protection is to prevent you from copying something, regardless of legality, illegality, or your rights under the fair use doctrine. All together now, "DUH!"
The purpose of a digital watermark is to identify a data file as authentic, or alternatively to identify its source. Such a watermark will NOT stop you from copying the file, but it may be able to identify that you were the source of the copy. Now, there are several problems with digital audio watermarks, one of which is the difficulty of embedding one without unacceptable loss of sound quality.
Both copy protection and watermarking can theoretically be bypassed by the "play through good speakers and record the output with good microphone and then you have the option of digitally encoding." Such digital recording will in all likelihood be of lower audio quality than the "protected" original, however it will be free of the copy protection and/or watermark. So which is more important, the ability to copy, or the sound quality?
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
nope.
First - digital audio contains VERY little frequencies that can't be heard by humans - what would be the point of encoding audio that can't be heard? For dogs? c.f. Nyquist sampling limit. Compact discs are sampled at 45Khz, so 22.5Khz is the upper limit of the sound that they can repro. That is outside of human range, but not by much.
Second - generally these watermarking schemes are very sophisticated. A simple band limiting/passing filter isn't going to do it. You need to do know the specifics of how it's encoded to remove it.... not that it can't be done (c.f. the guys that broke the SDMI challenge). Watermarks contain 'echo's' of themselves, time dependant bits, time independant bits, using one sound to mask another (a human wouldn't hear it), etc etc etc. They're pretty sophisticated.
About 4 years (?) ago at MIT i saw a demonstration of a watermarking scheme where they played music out of some speakers. They held a microphone up to the speaker, and their computer spit out what the watermark was. So the people who keep saying that they'd re-record watermarked audio this way can only do it if they have a recording device that doesn't obey/enforce the watermark. The fact that they've gone Digital->Analog and possibly back to digial doesn't matter a single bit.
I don't think that is quite right. I think the reason it can't be heard is because of its short duration. The watermark is distributed throughout the file in small chunks or whatever. Each chunk doesn't last long enough or is not repeated enough in sequence for our ear to realize it is there.
Smoke crack, rather than crack, the jail time is less, eh?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The watermarking system is inaudible to the human ear and virtually undetectable and resistant to removal attempts.
So this is NOT "protection can be made to cause the CD-ROMs laser eye to skip all over the CD and do other little things." That is the protection that Macrovision has (supposedly) used on some CDs, and this is *NOT* watermarking.
When making a digital copy, that is without playing the sound through a set of speakers, this watermarking technology is effective.
This is completely WRONG. A watermark is an analog signal. All they are doing is taking some digital information and encoding it into an analog form in such a way that its imperceptible to the human ear.
If this watermarking signal from simply playing the original was to be reproduced at an inaudible to human ears, how would a microphone pick it up?
So you're saying that if a human ear cannot hear something than nothing else can? Grab a microphone, an oscilloscope and a dog whistle. Gee, all those squiggly lines show up when I blow, but I can't hear it... hmm.. maybe I'm deaf... or maybe you just have no clue what your talking about. I vote for the latter.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Details here.
(don't even bother modding me up for this. It took all of thirty seconds to find it.)
Soundbyte from the article: watermarking relies on security through obscurity. Any obsessive slashdotter will tell you that relying exclusivally on such security is a Very Bad Thing (tm).
Heh man, we could use some serious pornage over here. Where's your "links of the day" list?
Stupidity never felt so good.
"The watermark is a signature, embedded within the data of the original signal, which in addition to being inaudible to the human ear, should also be statistically undetectable, and resistant to any attempts to remove it."
inaudible, but statistically undetectible. it says....this would tend to make me think detectable if you know what you're looking for.
a good mic will pick up sounds out of the range of the human ear...you won't hear it, but I bet if you hooked an oscilloscope up to the analog output, you could see it. not that you would necessarily know that you've seen it.
Brought to you by the people that gave you the Infinite Sharpness filter for Photoshop (find those completely sharp faces buried in fuzzy films) and the Internet Welcome Screen.
but, the piracy that they're trying to fight wouldn't normally be created with analog equipment...the recording industry realises that people have been taping stuff from the radio or cd/tape to tape for years, the fact that it's so easy to create CD or nearly CD quality recordings with cheap equipment seems to have them running scared...
how about mp3 compression, would the compression destroy a simple hide-it-in-the-highs type of watermark, or are there ways to get around it?
if the signal does remain in the audible range, the only ways I can see of injecting a message without altering the original song would be playing "tricks" with amplitude or duration...both of which would be totally useless for digital-analog recordings and would probably send epileptic or tell every tenth kid that "it's time to kill"......hmmmmm, maybe they've just modified the old subliminal message tricks? hehehe...be prepared to buy every crappy record that comes out.
Their presentation to the judges was very impressive (we presented first, and all I could think while watching theirs was "we're screwed..."). They demonstrated both the addition and detection of a watermark for pre-recorded and live audio. A couple of times, they played out loud just the watermark. It was pretty garbled, but you could definitely make out the content of the original audio. They did it for both vocal and instrumental music; both times, you could make out the lyrics and melody of the original sound. And when combined with the original, the watermark was inaudible (as promised).
But the most impressive part of all is that it was all done in real-time. They watermarked the audio from a local radio station as it was being broadcast, playing both the resulting watermark and watermarked audio with virtually no delay.
I told them in Dallas, but I'll say it again- Congratulations on winning. You guys were definitely worthy competition. With any luck, we'll face each other again next time around.
-patrick
I just figured out how to crack it! Take great quality audio reproduction equipment (Speakers) and then some very high quality audio collection devices (Microphones) and put it all in a proper sound room, or box.
For right and left channel sound you will need to have at least two speakers and at least two microphones and some way of merging the two recordings.
It might be a little far from perfect, but so are MP3's and the sound from the "Cracked" watermarked music.
Wait a minute... Since Sklyarov was arrested for creating a tool to break a protection scheme, does this mean that speakers and microphones are now illegal?
I suppose it is all how you interpret the DMCA...
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
a good mic will pick up sounds out of the range of the human ear...you won't hear it, but I bet if you hooked an oscilloscope up to the analog output, you could see it. not that you would necessarily know that you've seen
If it's to be used with digital audio, the watermark must be IN the range of human hearing, since the anti-aliasing filters on the DACs and ADCs eliminate signals above 20 kHz. Of course, the steepness of that antialiasing filter depends on the sample rate (higher sample rate == gentler filter). However, differences in converters and such would make it impossible to guarantee that a watermark whose frequency response extended out of the range of human hearing would actually work.
Oh yeah, a lot of consumer audio gear rolls off high-frequency response. I wouldn't be surprised if the HF response of your all-in-one stereo didn't go out much farther than about 40 kHz.
Personally, I'd like to see the brightest young minds continue to have access to well-produced commercial music.
This MAY sound like a radical concept, but not everyone *wants* to work on Free Software or on OSS projects.
Btw, Stephen Hawking turned down a better speech synthsesis program. Besides how could he explain the new voice to all his fans of his gangsta rap!?!? www.mchawking.com for more info
So, monkey-boy, what you are saying is that the digital watermark will stay along with the Analog sound signal in the air? After it leaves a speaker?
If that is the case, I would imagine that you would hear this watermark, thus making the creation of a watermark a waste of time. Since, nobody wants to buy music that is very poorly recorded with a screeching sound over it.]
Perhaps you should read a little about physics and the reproduction of sound waves.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Exactly. I am so discusted by the in action of the majority of the general public on all of these issues with copyright and the law. We all need to form a united front and stand up to these people who will take our Freedom away. You say that I am an alarmist and am imagining things? Look at what is going on around you. OPEN YOUR EYES, LOOK AROUND SOMETIME No more then a month ago there was a posting here about how anything innovative on the net with Audio or P2P had been smashed to bits by lawsuits. Look what happens to the 2600, look what happened to that poor Russian, bless his sould. We all need to stand together and not let this happen. At every turn in history there have been those that were ready and waiting to take away our freedom. We must learn from history and not repeat the mistakes of our forefathers. Will the United States go down in History as the country that spent the 20th centurty liberating the world of Oppression and Tyrany only to take away all of it's citizens rights in the 21st century. Not under my watch. JOIN THE CAUSE
what was erased on the infamous Watergate tape that pushed Nixon's downfall over the brink. It would be amazing to have this national mystery put to rest
;)
Actually, I heard the blank spot was just noise introduced by a top-secret CIA funded copy-protection scheme from the era.
Hey, at least we got some of the tape! If all this copy-protection shit had been introduced 30 years ago, we wouldn't have the tape AT ALL.
Heehee.
"Old man yells at systemd"
And they want us to PAY for that? I think not!
Nice job on the "post without reading or thinking" maneuver, mate!
See, it's a *watermark*. Now, what does "watermark" mean? Well, in this case, a watermark is data embedded in an audio signal that can do such things as identify the copyright holder of that signal.
Re-record the signal and guess what? The watermark is still there!
Joy!
Well, with your skills, maybe you can join the Slashdot Special Olympics! Start working on your crapflooding, and maybe you can win multiple medals!
"Monkey-boy," eh? Yeah, I kinda like that...
Well, sorry if I was slightly too harsh in that post, but you now appear to have more than proven my point.
Please, do read the article before posting... Or at *least* read it after being told you got it wrong.
1) Get a team of 10 audio researchers
2) Get one persone working on a watermarking technique
3) Get the other 9 try to break the technology
4) If (technology broken) then goto 2) with another researcher
...and loop forever until you realize that you can't make a watermark that cannot be broken.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
"Wonder how long it'll take before someone cracks this scheme.."
I wonder how long it'll take before someone gets arrested for cracking this scheme...
...I am honestly starting to believe that israel is nothing more than a war machine. How so? Well, how come every high security, copyright helping, AI-producing, etc. etc. software comes from that country? I don't know, its a tab fishy. So once they have this software they go make war and once in a while they get biten in the ass (like with that bomb). Too bad CNN doesn't show the state sponsored killings committed by Israel. I don't see the PLO mobilizing anything. Double standards...
Lets be clear here....... these watermarks are in the AUDIO - not in the specific digial representation. They are designed to survive thru generation loss, going from digital->analog->digital again (and maybe going form CD -> MP3 encoding back to CD) or any of a thousand variations.
If i make a recording that is a voice saying "DO NOT DUPLICATE" and every recording device on the market 'listens' for that sound, and if it hears it refused to record, the fact that you play via analog an re-record won't matter. The only way around it would be to remove the "DO NOT DUPLICATE". Now what these schemes do is exactly that - except they do lots of complicated and tricky ways to hide "DO NOT DUPLICATE", along with trying to encode it in the most robust fashion even if the signal gets modified. And in the same vein, they try to hide the signal in such a way that removing it would cause too much undesireable in the underlying music. The Stanford guys that broke the SDMI challege showed that it was possible to remove, but removing it ISN'T simple.
In your above 'cracking' example, it would only work if your recording device (not the microphones, the actual machine that persisted the music coming in) didn't respect/obey the watermark.
You haven't cracked anything. You've only demonstrated that you haven't a clue on how this technology works, nor a simple basic understanding of signal processing theory. If you ask Santa nicely he might bring you a spectrum analyzer for chrismas.....
That is exactly what he's saying, and he's correct. A watermark (for music) is simply data encoded as an audio stream that (if you want to use it for any practical purpose) is inaudiable to the human ear. It is designed specifically to do as you say.
Try actually understanding the topic you're posting to before calling someone a 'monkey boy.'
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Please elaborate. Are you saying that if I burn original material that I created using a new Plextor CD drive that it will nonetheless watermark it or otherwise munge my data?
The Congress, nor any other municipality in the U.S., can only restrict what we allow it to. It is not up to Congress to 'permit' it. I know that you simply used a convenient phrase, but it's important to remember this key distinction. The U.S. system allows government to do only what we allow it to get away with, otherwise it must keep it's grubby, greedy hands off.
People have rights, government has limited powers. Too bad more of us don't remember this.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
"Wonder how long it'll take before someone cracks this scheme..."
3 weeks. That's about our average crack speed right now. It can also be 2 weeks if they put a patent on the technology, enabling the crackers to directly figure out how it's working from the patent database, and one week if they have dumpster divers in the vincinity of the research building. One day, if you kidnap the researcher and force him to write a crack.
Why go that far, just tap it off the output of the D/A converter, or better yet (if you're a pro) tap it off the input to the D/A converters. 8)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar