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."

Comments

Proven?

[topside420]

How many times do we have to explain that no anti-piracy technology will ever work flawlessly nor will it not be broken over time.

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.

Re:Proven?

[kfg]

I have a friend who cut an album for Shanachie. Her next album she produced herself. Why?

She wanted to support the "artist."

When someone pays $20 for a CD at Tower if the artist gets a buck of it they're way ahead of the curve.

When Kenny Rogers was riding the country crossover wave he said that it wasn't until he had had five number one hits in a row that he made any money.

When I give my friend only $10 for her self produced CD I get a CD for half the price I would pay in a store, AND I know that $9 of that is profit in her pocket.

I believe in supporting the artist, and when the RIAA records a musical performance I'm willing to hand $10 to them personally for I'd be glad to do so.

KFG

When _will_ these people learn?

[base3]

There will be no effective copy protection until:

- there is an authentication server connected to our brain stem

- there is no "untrusted" way to convert sound into electricity

or

- 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

Look in the last 2600

[Drake58]

I'm not sure if anybody noticed, but there's a crack for this in last quarter's 2600. Ta ta.

Not good.

[ratajik]

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.

Re:Not good.

[SirShadowlord]

I can go one better. For a long time I stopped purchasing CDs, and just listened to whatever was playing on the radio, or in my Cube (my 4Pod mate has his stereo system wired through 23' of cable into speakers that sit on my side of the cube so as to give him that "real" surround sound. Flatscreen monitors hide the speakers on my side and don't get all gaused up like a CRT. But I digress).

But, I was kicking back, listening to the Steve Jobs Key Note at MWSF, and I totally and completely got caught up in the patented "Jobs Distortion Field". Part of it was iPhoto (I have close to 6000 poorly organized digital pictures), and part of it was how cool OS X is looking, but withing a month of the Keynote, I am now the proud owner of an iPod, Powerbook 667, and, (and I don't think I'm isolated here), about $200 worth of CDs in the last two weeks alone.

And my process is identical to yours -

o Buy the CD (Okay, it's more like, Buy every major domestic album U2 has ever produced),
o Rip the CDs with iTunes (The 667 get's a little warm, but it works flawlessy)
o Throw the Jewelcase away and Pack the CD into my CD-208 Binder (which also handily stores software and DVDs)
o Listen to the Music on the Powerbook or iPod.

I can honestly state I have not, in over a year, listened to music being played _directly from a CD_. And, while I recognize that I'm in the minority here (I don't drive, so I don't worry about car CD players), I can say with some assurance that for every 100,000 iPods or other MP3 players get sold, the chance of copy protection being acceptable gets diminishingly less.

That's It, it's all over - If nobody buys copy protected CDs (and nobody with an iPod will or MP3 player will), it's game over. DIVX went down not because it was broken, but because nobody was interested in buying the Discs.

It's too late - The revolution has been won. There will be no Copy Protection that prevents people from converting their Music into MP3s, because nobody will buy that media.

You heard it here first. (Err, well, maybe not, but I haven't seen it written anywhere but above before... )

How can you take a company seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Its the lame trick of a bad second session, TRK 0

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Why break copy protection?

[dustpuppy]

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.

A little math

[CaptainSuperBoy]

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.

Take a look at CDDA Paranoia website

[Shiny Metal S.]

CDS works by purposely introducing errors into the audio data on the disc. Audio CD players are supposed to interpolate across the errors such that there is supposed to be no difference in sound quality. But CD-ROMs--being designed to read data CDs where every bit has to be correct--don't do this interpolation, and thus they see the disc as having lots of errors and crap out.

Take a look at CDDA Paranoia. I use it to rip old CDs, full of scratches, which are unplayable on any CD audio player I have. But after I rip them with Paranoia, I can't hear any defects.

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...