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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.
I'm not sure if anybody noticed, but there's a crack for this in last quarter's 2600. Ta ta.
While this does allow it to become freely distributed over the internet, how is the anti-piracy technology supposed to tell the difference between our legitimate copy and the pirated copy. I really don't think they can do it without seriously pissing off the public.
Can any media truly be 'copy protected'? If all else fails I can use a program like Ghost2002 or other forensic-certified disk duplication software to do a bit by bit copy. Basically make an exact duplicate of a disc.
How would this be unplayable?
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.
Y'know what this reminds me of? If you're sick and the doctor says you're probably going to die, you're very prone to buying remedies from quacks. Even people who know better will do dumb things when faced with their own mortality.
Well, everybody is telling the record companies that they're going to die, so they react just like a human...any shaman who comes along, even Noam Zur, is worth a shot because they simply don't know what to do.
The CD is here to stay, and by its nature its unprotected. There's not a thing the record companies can do about that except release stuff that will just piss off their regular customers.
Meanwhile, they could convince people to go to a different format, but why would you give up CDs which have pretty good quality and the ability to copy freely with some unknown format where (a) people have to buy the same records over again (b) its copy protected so you can't make copies (c) there's an installed based of players that will be around for 15-20 years (notice cars STILL come with cassette decks?).
They really are screwed at this point. I have no prescription for them because they've gone out of their way to be deceitful and they treat their customers (us) like crap.
They rejected business models that could make them money (Napster).
They turn to things like copy protection (proven to fail over 2 decades ago).
And they stand behind laws like DMCA in an attempt to get rid of first-sale doctrine.
I am not crying a tear.
Why do these people continue to annoy the consumer when in the long run it will do nothing to stop sharing of MP3s. They actually manage to stop us from running the SPDIF Out into the SPDIF in, then I bet me sticking a mike near each speaker will likely be how I have to make my MP3s. Yeah quality won't be as high, but I bet it will happen. This just tramples our fair use rights. If this continues I will have to call my congressman about supporting the guy that was looking into revoking the CDR charge we pay, because the CDR make be used to illegally copy music.
Its still just the lame trick of burning a second session that defines incorrect track locations and durations for track locations. CD players that are not multisession (CD audio players usually) will ignore the fake second and third sessions. A second lame trick called Track-O is used that furthermore uses the P subchannel to assert a large region of track 1 as "silent" and it is silent and audio player skip over to second index area where begginning of track 1 audio really starts, but computers see data blocks in the first track in the beginning section with the P channel asseting silence. This hidden data area looks like a standard ISO9660 volume and further screws up players. Its an old trick from 1992 used on nearly 80 major titles, before Blue-Book Enhanced CDs (CDPlus) shipped. It only affects computers. A third sneaky trick of putting heavily corrupted data in the track lead in lead out areas to slow down auto-rippping is usually employed. And furthemore, ANY cd driver modified to trust the first session of a audio cd disk will play correctly, especially if it understands how to IGNORE track-zero tricks. Of course a raw copy of the entire disk will duplicate it, as long as the reaw duplicate deliberately ignores copying session information past the first session.
It merely needs to copy track 1 explicitely, all 2774 bytes per block on a Plextor or at least 2352 in raw mode.
Macs and PCs will soon have updated THIRD PARTY cd drivers that will play any of these things. One system will suffer the most... the newest macs... thats because to eliminate EMI audio noise, the macs force users to use digital audio extraction over ATA-ATAPI bus and SCSI bus exclusively. This is fine if the media is not heavily damaged in some sections, but these corrupted disks slow down firware in standard audio extraction modes used on macs. Apple got rid of all their A-D converters, even for audio mics. And now that thier audio D-A out is in usb and uses usb speakers no mother board interference and disk drive head interference emits on speakers cranked to 500 watts.
I miss track-0 tricks, its cool to see the world using it 10 years later.
It explains why some cactus cds can be copied except the first audio track, with older tools.
as for CDDA logo rights being removed by Philips.... Philips abused the tradmark symbol themselves!!! They placed it on some european audio CDs in 1994 that were 79 minutes long. That was in explicite violation of the CDDA logo standard that maintains a maximum of 333,000 blocks of audio allowed (74 minutes)
Even since that day, Anyone is morally allowed to violate the CD-DA standard logo because it MEANS NOTHING now and is abused even by Philips.
I wish there was a manufacturer symbol I could trust to look for that meant REALLY-CDDA not violating *ANY* part of the "Red Book" whatsoever. Then these Cactus abominations from hell could be avoided.
Sony and Universal will soon shut down web sites that explain how a cheap 5 cent resister tied across the leads of a decrypted-USB speaker input can be used as audio in source into a D-A audio card to extract formaerly-protected encrypted limited-access audio.
ha!
long live the resister!
"Dude, you're gonna go to jail!"
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
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.
So if you have no distribution in CA, what do you care? You weren't going to make any sales there anyway.
But, what happens if someone in CA happens to visit KY and sees your CD in a store in KY? If they liked your music, they may just very well buy your CD. That would *never* happen if it wasn't distributed far and wide.
I firmly believe that artists should be paid for their work and I do agree with you in principle that it is wrong for people to enjoy the fruits of your labor for free. But I also do know that as a result of mp3s and file sharing, my purchases of CDs has jumped by a factor of 3.
So I don't wholly subscribe to the argument that filesharing and mp3s is complete theft from artists or is detrimental to the future of the music industry.
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.
One of the answers on Paranoia FAQ nicely explains all of the problems with ripping CDs, and generally all of the differences between playing CD on audio CD player, and reading audio CD as a stream of bits with a computer. These differences are exactly what is addressed by all of those so called "copy-protection" techniques.
The "copy-protected" "CDs" have to be played by audio CD players (otherwise no one would buy them), but not ripped with computers (like it made any problem with copying them, even if it's possible to make CDs completely unplayable on CD-ROM drives... When will they learn?) so all they can do, is to address the differences between them. It's very good to know, how it really works.
The legend of characters on Paranoia progress meter gives a good introduction to what Paranoia can and what it can't fix (yet):
-
A hyphen indicates that two blocks overlapped properly, but they were
skewed (frame jitter).
This case is completely corrected by Paranoia
and is not a cause for concern.
-
A plus indicates not only frame jitter, but an unreported, uncorrected
loss of streaming in the middle of an atomic read operation. That is,
the drive lost its place while reading data, and restarted in some
random incorrect location without alerting the kernel. This case is also
corrected by Paranoia.
-
An 'e' indicates that a transport level SCSI or ATAPI error was
caught and corrected.
Paranoia will completely repair such an error
without audible defects.
-
An "X" indicates a scratch was caught and corrected.
Cdparanoia will interpolate over any missing/corrupt samples.
-
An asterisk indicates a scratch and jitter both occurred in this general
area of the read.
Cdparanoia will interpolate over any missing/corrupt samples.
-
A ! indicates that a read error got through the stage one of error
correction and was caught by stage two. Many '!' are a cause for
concern; it means that the drive is making continuous silent errors that
look identical on each re-read, a condition that can't always be
detected. Although the presence of a '!' means the error was corrected,
it also means that similar errors are probably passing by unnoticed.
Upcoming releases of cdparanoia will address this issue.
-
A V indicates a skip that could not be repaired or a sector totally
obliterated on the medium (hard read error).
A 'V' marker generally
results in some audible defect in the sample.
So, however the next copy-protection of the week which this time really works!(tm) will work, I'm quite sure that it will be no problem to Paranoia, maybe after few days, because Paranoia simply interpolates over any missing/corrupt samples, like audio players do. No need to say, thay it will always be no problem to audio input on my Sound Blaster...~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
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?