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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."
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.
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.....