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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."
If they want to make money, they should spend more time getting REAL artists and not just 'performers' then maybe people would be more interested in supporting them and buying their music.
This technology WILL cause many problems and WILL be able to be copied flawlessly within days if not already. This is how it does and always will work. Do they not see that they are losing more money tring to stop us than anything? Is it not time to give up on the anti-piracy CDs?
All it takes is 1 person to copy the CD then EVERYONE can get it. Its that simple.
- there is an authentication server connected to our brain stem
- there is no "untrusted" way to convert sound into electricity
- the DMCA is backed by Colombia-style death squads
To those who would argue that they're "raising the bar on piracy and keeping the honest people honest," I'd ask you to consider which people copying some of these CDs love more:
- the music of Charley Pride
- the feeling of power that comes from distributing it after cracking Cactus Data Shield
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
As someone who generally buys all his music, this is VERY annoying. I've pretty much changed how I listen to music these days, and I wish companies like this wouldn't muck with it. I normally:
1. Buy the CD
2. Rip the CD
3. Throw the CD away (well, OK, store it just in case... but I rarely see it again).
4. Play the music on my machines (Either directly or via the shoutcast server I run locally, and only locally, on my network).
5. Sometimes re-burn to CD so I can listen to it on my car.
This is all legal, from what I can see. If they're preventing me from doing any of the above, then I've got a problem with it. They need to come up with something else, something that doesn't interfere with my fair use of the music.
I wish they had more details in the article. I can't honestly tell if they're going to muck with any of the above, but I've got to guess at step #2, I'll be out of luck.
C'mon, seriously. Does anyone really expect 'copy-protection schemes' to actually work? How many different methods have various industries come up with to try to hinder use and/or copying? Macrovision? All that did was make me want to get a GoVideo. CSS? Cracked in so many different ways that to outlaw them all, the government would have to destroy all computers in the US. How long will it take for someone to crack this crap?
I mean, AudioCD protection? Get real. I refuse to buy CD's for just this reason. (Don't get me wrong, I like to buy CD's, and I still buy local artist's albums) But I don't listen to CD's. They get stored. Ripped and stored. It's just easier to listen to my music when it's stored on a server in the closet. Not to mention, I don't have to worry about losing the disc quite as easily. I've had them stolen, scratched, lost, etc. Does this mean I no longer have the rights to the information on it? Just because my R.E.M. CD won't play anymore, does that mean that it was illegal for me download the entire disc off the internet? (to quote the great Stigmata:) FALSE.
There will be some problem with trying to implement this new technology. I have a CD player. It came with the stereo that's hooked to my computer. It plays Red Book format discs. I don't know that it's going to play Cactus format discs. Do I expect it to? No. From here on out, I plan to buy Philips equipment, because I know that it is going to work the way I expect it to, and play the CD's I buy the way it's supposed to. If I want to buy CD's that I can't listen to, I'll just buy some bricks. At least those I can throw at RIAA executives.
And don't throw the DMCA into this. I'm sick of this stupid law. It goes against so many things I believe in, and the very basic tenant of our freedoms. This will come to a climax, and one side will fall. Whether it's the people or the corporations, is yet to be seen.
Let's see.. the RIAA has said it lost $300 million dollars a year to piracy. In 2000 they shipped 942 million CDs.
Now that they've eliminated all music piracy through their innovative copy protection techniques, we should all enjoy the price drop: $300,000,000 / 942,000,000 = $0.32 per CD. Since they are no longer losing all that money to piracy, we can look forward to paying 32 cents less for each CD! They are basically a trustworthy group, so I'm sure they'll pass the savings along to consumers.
If it's copy-protected, it's not really a CD. Thank you, Philips.
kazaa was limited to searching for 128kbps mp3s (sans a quick registry hack), and often the "most popular" mp3 of a particular name is of the 128k variety. i'm sure for those of us who didn't rip our own entire collection, or get alot of mp3's off of mp3.com or others, 128 is perfectly fine. if reduction = 56k however...
moox. for a new generation.
Of course it won't work, nobody expected it to. It just appeared to work at the demo and everyone *knows* about demos. There are no 10 million CDs. There is no copy protection. There is no spoon.
What there is a heck of a lot of, is spouting about Cactus Data Shield, which has a really good name. We are helping launch this company, people. But how to keep quiet when the only way to express oneself is to talk / type?
We could limit ourselves to a minimum mnemonic. Don't waste words on these droids. No flamefest for lurking writers to write about. They can only write, "The Slashdot Community again voted a resounding NO with 853 negative minimum responses against CDS Corp. and 1 for them, which was by an Anonymous Coward, Guess Who."
Some likely mnemonics:
"DOWN WITH CDS" (or just "DOWN!@*%") - Full moral support for complete technical, business, social failure of the company.
"DUH" (or "DUMB", or "BAKA" if you are feeling Japanese) - Breaks the laws of physics and sociology; techies know, and their investors will get it in the end. Embellishment may be added after first keyword in caps; subsequent posters can get away with "DUH (see above)".
"CRACK IT NOW!" - Call to Arms, etc.
Now we can mail Perl-calculated tallies to elected officials, RIAA, etc. while 1) redefining target company's name as a mnemonic, 2) limiting time we waste - adds up to a man-month, and 3) creating an intelligent, opt-in, scary voice that is news by itself. Then we distribute our own software.
Slashdot might like to incorporate top recent keywords (they're in caps at the top) into a handy pull-down item to save irritation - adds up to 4 ulcers per month - while forcing DUH target to provide minimum grim satisfaction.
There is no such thing as copy protection. Any method attempted to stop copying is bound to fail: the hardware sees copying as just another read command, and if done in software, well, what if you don't use that software?
The only way to stop piracy with 'copy protection' is encryption. After all, what good does a copy do you if you don't understand it? (Look at CSS and the details of Cactus: rearrange some or all of the information, and suddenly the old reading methods don't work.) As if we needed another reason to hate anti-encryption legislative proposals! You can be sure that they would exempt copy protection schemes while making sure your 'private' emails remain an open book to law enforcement.
The executives of these companies seem to be completly oblivious to two points. First is, of course, that any encryption will only deter for so long (and if you use not-that-strong stuff like CSS, that isn't long at all.) Second is that (obviously) we aren't buying from them the physical disk, but the information on it.
But when we look carefully at what they are doing, we can see how they do understand these issues. They're using the kiddie-level encryption right now. I've wondered why, and came up with only one answer: they're waiting for SSCA to pull out the big guns. Could you imagine a CDROM encrypted with Rinjael, and 'kept encrypted' by SSCA??? They know that by trying to extra-legally limit the ways or means of access to that information, they would lose customers. Well, first they need to make that limitation legal...
If not for the SSCA gambit the RIAA seems to be playing (more like betting the house on!), I would suggest the proper response to this nonsense would be, like with the BSA raids, to encourage it; the faster access protection schemes are shown to be nonsense by the open market, the better off we will be in the long run. But when you throw proposed SSCA legislation into the mix this idea just gets worse. All I can suggest is to not touch these disks at all. Don't buy them, don't pirate them, and if you're a store owner, don't sell them.
I'm off to write petitions to the big retailers now. I just realized that the only way the RIAA can't raise the cry of piracy when these disks don't sell if if the vendors are the ones who don't buy them!
Do you like Japanese imports?