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Cactus Data Shield Tries Again
autocracy writes: "Midbar, an Israeli company that developed the breakage of standard called Cactus says that they have released more than 10 million CDs to the U.S. and Europe. They now claim that there will be no issues playing it but you will lose quality if you try to copy. I'm just wondering how it is that you can play it on a system at perfect quality, but when you copy it things don't sound right. Do they not know about optical output? Lame quotes including comments by the makers of how this is a 'proven technology' can be found at C|NET."
Hah! Soon the bastards will be shipping hardware dongles with audio CDs to plug into the back of our CD players.
Perhaps that will be the RIAA's next "copyright protection software."
"By including a buffer-overflow string at the end of the audio data that sends your current home address to our central servers when copied, we can now deal directly with software and music pirates with our brand new, combat-ready Customer Service Representives."
__
LilDebbie
And the geek vs. Corporate war continues.
Once again, the corporations losing this war on the basis that corporate types don't seem to be thinking on the same level as geeks.
And this is why the corporations are never going to win. They are predictable, and the geeks are innovative.
This is how it works. Picture if you will a major record company meeting room... for the sake of argument, let's call them the Big Music Guys. Systems analysts #1, #2 and #YesMan are meeting with big corporate pointy-haired type.
Management: "This Copywrite stuff is getting out of hand and making us obsolete. Help us control people's money again by providing a useless service."
Geek #1: "How do you expect to do that?"
Management: "Well, we're gonna make some way that stops them from copying our releases."
Geek #1 breaks out into laughter. Manager fires him.
Geek #2: "Y'see, the problem is that any way that we can possibly work on it to make it inaccessible, the rest of the world will find some other way around it. We can't possibly keep up with the public domain."
Management: "You're not being a team player. You're fired."
Pseudo-Geek YesMan: "I'll get right to work on it."
And YesMan, having attained his stature through ass-lipgluing as opposed to technical know-how, will spend much of his time working game #4711 of Freecell. Once he has attained this, he will spend about 12 hours putting together some simple encryption device that will fall to the suggestion of Geek #2. Management type returns to stockholders, says "We're currently working on a state-of-the-art encryption device to keep copywrite crackers from getting to our music" and stock prices go up. Shareholders revel in their smart investment as the company releases inferior technology developed by a yes-man which will get worked around approximately 12 hours after its release. Cycle continues.
Especially since these days, with the ever-rising popularity of free-information and licenses such as GPL that companies are finding it harder and harder to set standards, because the geeks are beating them to better ones, and as a result they can't make anything with any built-in security to it...
Yay geeks! We rule! Keep it up, kids.
Karma: Non-Heinous
"Dude, you're gonna go to jail!"
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
They now claim that there will be no issues playing it but you will lose quality if you try to copy. I'm just wondering how it is that you can play it on a system at perfect quality, but when you copy it things don't sound right. Do they not know about optical output?
It's not about optical output, silly. When they find out that you made a copy, Roger-- The RIAA Enforcer, comes to your house and rubs a key across your copied disk. Therefore, you will lose quality.
As if the pain of losing a CDR isn't enough, the noise made during this scrating is supposed to be untollerable.
Losing 1 CDR, the CD Scratch Noise, and Roger's body oder will prevent you h4x0rz from copying CD's in the future...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Excellent point. All the record companies need to do is hold off the CD copiers until such time as the artist has exhausted their fifteen minutes, by which time nobody will want to copy the CDs.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
keep in mind, this technology doesn't have to be perfect. if it's cheap for them to do, and stops piracy just a little bit, then it's a worthwhile move, from their perspective.
it's like the registration requirements on 'doze xp. it'll keep people from "casually" grabbing the cd from work and using it on their home computer. anybody really motivated can work around it.
-- p
>
> > Until moderators stop moderating up the same, old, boring arguments.
>
> Or untill they stop posting the same, old, boring articles.
Or until RIAA realizes that Midbar and all the other copy-control companies are selling nothing more than snake oil.
Or until RIAA realizes that no matter how much money they have, we're still right - making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet - and they're wrong.
Or (my personal hope) - until the combined weight of the bullshit coming out of Midbar's technical marketing staff's and Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti's shared hallucination is sufficient to gravitational collapse and becomes a black hole, thereby putting an end to RIAA, MPAA and the rest of the content control industry once and for all.
Right. That's called "patenting".
The deal is that in order to promote useful progress in the arts and sciences, the manufacturer has to tell the world how to make the drug. (That's why anyone can read the patent on it.) The government, in return for this service, grants the manufacturer a legal monopoly over making the drug for the next 17 years. After the 17 years are up, however, anyone can make the drug. If you can't make your investment into Prozac or Viagra back in 17 years, then tough titty.
That's the deal - if you tell the world how to make your miracle drug or cool invention, you get to price-gouge the world for the next 17 years. After that, everyone else gets to join in the fun and you have to compete.
> BUT if I go into target, I can buy a crippled "The Fast and Furious Soundtrack" CD. Why do I own the data, and not just a peice of plastic? They didn't sell the data, and that's obvious b/c it's crippled...
Right again. That's called "copyright".
By publishing 1000000 copies of the CD or DVD with a big pile of bits on it, RIAA or MPAA tell the world how to reproduce a song, or a movie.
Sonny "I read OT-7 and can communicate with that tree!" Bono was more than just an idiot, a $cientologist and a Congressman (but I repeat myself). You see, Sonny was also working for Disney, and because of that, RIAA and MPAA get to control who gets to reproduce the bits for 75 years after the original creator dies. (And to buy another law that says "100 years after death of creator" as soon as the current "75 after death of creator" starts to threaten Mickey Mouse again.)
See the difference?
Funny, neither can I.
The smart thing to do would be to realize that digital media (software, music, movies) are no different from the sorts of things that patent protection.
Both involve an initial innovation. Both involve telling the world how to reproduce your innovation.
Yet one has 17 years of protection, and the other, 75 years after the death of the creator.
Intellectual property laws need to be reformed in such a way that both copyrights and patents expire more quickly, require renewal, and if not renewed, the works in question (if copyrighted) fall into the public domain, or (if patented) lose patent protection.
We can quibble over the numbers - and I think "17 years" is too long - but even reducing the time limit on copyright to 17 years would be a damn fine start.
"If you can't make a respectable profit on a movie or a song in 17 years, give up and find another line of work".
Say it. Feel it. Think about it. If that's good enough for Pfizer and Merck and the tens of billions of dollars in biotech research, it's gotta be good enough for a fuckin' cartoon mouse, or a chick with big tits who can lip-sync.
Viva la resistance!
I think a more reasonable data protection scheme is the Raging Cactuar Data Shield. If an attempt to copy a "protected" disc is made, a cactuar will appear and attack you with his "9,999 Needles" attack. You will quickly learn your lesson that when the record companies want more money, they will do anything to get it.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
You obviously haven't dealt with the LAPD
Whenever I play my Britney Spears disk protected by Cactus DataShield in my Sony component cd player, the sound comes out scratchy and weird.
Those bastards, they are preventing me from playing my favorite tunes!