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DVD Drives Defeat Cactus Data Shield
jsepeta sends in a story about Cactus Data Shield, one of the schemes to be used for copy-protecting compact discs. A reporter for TechTV notes that DVD drives see right through the disc corruption that Cactus uses to supposedly prevent those CDs from being ripped.
Will this end up like the VHS market where VHS recorders started intentionally mis-recording Macrovision protected content, despite the fact they had fixed the original flaw that allowed macrovision copy protection to work? Or will the DVD drive manufacturers stand up to the recording industry?
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Another point is that many drives have maingenance modes which allow the host computer to see exactly what is on the disk without correction. This is normally used for testing, but again would be very useful for breaking the DMCA. Just read track w/o correction and aply the correction at software level ignoring the bad bits.
I guess that a DVD-rom drive is more sensitive to errors on conventional CD's as they have much finer bit resolutions for DVDs so they alreasy have the modified error recovery built in.
Protection of CDs is pointless and it interferes with customers' own rights and annoys the customer. The original article mentions a class action against Universal about Unplayable CDs.
See my journal, I write things there
It seems to me this is just one of those CDAutoStart things that Windows responds to in particular.
I got tipped off to this by when they mention "Track 1" never plays. I BET they didn't notice the total track count go up by one, as the Windows software talking to the DVD player parses its error-handling differently (correctly), and the result is like putting a PC hybrid CD in a Mac. In fact i strongly expect this Cactus lockout thing would not work on a Mac by default, and very very likely Linux/*nix as well. The tracks would appear as normal, though possibly not that first track, because its header DOES get lost in the scrambling, maybe.
Perhaps this is hogwash, but I've heard about Macs seeing through similar schemes before. I think that these TechTV guys sort of percolated through the truth of older reports to home users that are kinda savvy but don't like leaving their Gates Paradigm Computing, thus only the windows DVD stuff, no mention of other platforms at all.
On the other hand, if this is not unique to Windows (I wonder about Mac DVD players) then maybe that program has low-level drivers which affect how the CD drive does checksums, but DVD players do differently anyway.
Yeah, another victory for the Fair Use groups, as the people designing this have their asses backwards because they're counting on all computer users (mass 37331 pirates) to be Windows computers. OOPS...
Universal, i will scout for your discs, and as a Mac user of self-proclaimed badassary, "hack" via insertion your CD, rip, burn and mail to your well-tanned California ass.... Mwahaaha... All right enough fevered fantasies of geek revenge... back to work...
--hongpong.com
Ah, I see. Corporations are helping us to reach Nirvana by not allowing us to own property. They figure if we simply license everything, we won't own it and all of us will become Zen masters with no attachment to the physical world.... and here we are, all thinking that this is some scheme to gain power and extort more money from the hapless masses. Dammit, I knew corporations had the good of humanity in mind all along.
As described in a comment on FatChucks
(Tested it on 'Natalie Imbruglia - White Lillies Island' with a Yamaha 6x4x16x SCSI CDRW drive)
1) Get IsoBuster (A Win32 app)
2) Rip the entire disc as raw data. May struggle/take a while. Tell it to ignore any read errors
3) Open the raw file in CoolEdit (or any decent audio editor) as a 44.1Kz 16-bit stereo sample (with Intel byte ordering)
4) There you have it! The entire CD as one big sample!
5) In CoolEdit, you can use 'Edit->AutoCue->Find Phrases and Mark' to split the tracks up automatically
6) Save 'em out, and convert to MP3/Ogg if neccesssary
Too bad this Cactus system didn't become the standard before this was discovered, then RIAA would be a laughingstock.
They keep saying that they couldn't play the first track. Of course they can't play the first track, that's what contains the filesystem with the CDS player.
Correct me if I'm wrong (nobody's perfect), but this seems pretty simple to me.
Can you imagine a MOSIX cluster of these?
There is an excellent review of CPRM, SSSCA and the coming "Secure PC" on The Register. Here's a short excerpt from this article:
Not even watermarking is going to see them out of this. Watermarks can be removed anyway, and even if they succeed in a lunatic scheme to require that every computer audio board have some kind of watermark detection circuit, A/D and D/A converters that are fast enough and good enough are cheap, widely available, and easily hooked up to a PC.
Are the record labels just clueless or is there some other diabolical plan in the wings?
All kidding aside— here is a formula that might be useful to publishers of digital data:where If L > 0, the data will be copied.
A publisher can control the level of his data's protection only to the degree that he can control these variables.
- Cm cannot be kept artificially high, due to market forces to the contrary;
- Ce continues to drop, as coding ingenuity continues to outstrip copy prevention standards almost as quickly as they are developed;
- Ca is relatively low for the end user, since it usually only involves paying for software you had anyway; and
- Pa is low because the crime is widespread and social costs are low, so enforcement at the end user level is minimal.
This leaves a publisher of digital data with two variables he can control: the data's cost and its value. This provides two options for perfect copy protection:- make the product free, or
- make the product worthless.
Since neither option would be attractive to most publishers, it would appear that widespread copyright violations (and violators) will be with us for a long, long time.By making it slightly harder to turn your CD into mp3/ogg's, by the techniques described above (Macs, binary imaging, then spliting with Cool Edit, etc), groups will end up doing the releasing, like in the warez scene. This will ensure a more organized (complete cd's, as soon as the CD is release), high quality (decent hardware used to extract the audio) music album releases.
The only thing hurting the warez scene is games being so friggin big nowadays... multiple CDs, etc. You can't run bladeenc, or oggenc on a game.
Maybe DVD-Audio will help combat music piracy, but that's a bit off.
Cactus protection?
Don't touch the data or you will be subjected to thousands of lawy^H^H^H^H little pricks!
Talk about hidden meaning.
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Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
I've thought about the following for a while. There ought to be a two-track system of copyright. Whenever anything is released for public consumption, the publisher would make a choice:
In other words, the content publisher doesn't get to eat his/her cake and have it, too. By restricting Fair Use access, by cordonning off the material from the public domain (essentially forever), the publisher loses the protection of the courts. If you don't want to play ball with the justice system, you don't get to use it, either.
This approach is entirely justifiable, as copyright is a privilege granted by the state, not a right inherent in the content. As Litman and others point out, historically, copyright has been viewed as a bargain between the publishers and the public. If publishers try to unilaterally change the terms of the game -- by, for instance, encrypting data streams -- then the public has every right and justification to revoke the copyright.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Jobs' recent quote when the iPod shipped was right on the money:
"Piracy is a social problem, not a technological one."
That really sums it up. And you can see in Apple's products that they really believe this.
Ripping MP3's (or AIFF's) in iTunes is ridiculously simple. Like it should be. (Single click rips an entire CD)
Copying those MP3's to a portable music device is also incredibly simple. Even automated if you use an iPod (though iTunes works great with other MP3 players too!)
The only copy protection on my iPod is the fact that it's a one-way sync. And for what it's worth, it's a LOT LOT LOT harder to do a 2-way sync than a one-way sync. So I really don't believe the conspiracy theorists, and I think it's all about keeping things simple!
Steve's on the right track here. He understands.
There's no real technological reason that other companies can't do what Apple's doing. But for some reason, they "get it" and folks like MS, etc. don't.