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Vivendi Universal vs. News Corporation
timbo_red writes: "According to a BBC story, NDS, a company 80% owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is being sued by Canal+ for allegedly cracking their smart cards, which could have had a serious effect on ITV digital, the major UK competitor to Murdochs Sky digital in the UK pay TV market."
From the story:
News Corp has said that NDS chiefs operate independent of the media giant.
Interesting way of putting it. They could have said something more along the lines of "We didn't know what they were up to". Now they merely say that they didn't interfere. So, does this mean that News Corp knew what NDS was doing? :-)
ITV's premium channels also show ads, though. In addition, ITV digital shows non ITV pay content, such as Sky One, Sky Moviemax, Sky Premier. Since Sky is ITV Digital's number one competitor, some people have theorised that ITVD might not be terribly upset at Sky losing revenue due to pirate cards.
The other argument, of course, is that ITVD might be allowing people to get away with pirate viewing to build marketshare, at which point they'll start beefing up the encryption techniques to shut down pirates. Sadly moving to a wholly secure model would probably require changing the encryption method, which would obsolete all current decoders (iirc). This is unlikely to happen.
Actually this is not true when it comes to DRM measures. The problem here is that you are trying to keep information secret while sharing it with a few tens of millions of subscribers.
Ultimately any crypto scheme depends on the secrecy of a small number of keys. If a person reveals their key deliberately then anyone can read the information sent to them.
That said the Canal+ scheme does not have a great reputation for security. There are plenty of schemes that at least require the attackers to extract secret keys from smart cards. The satelite TV DRM problem is much easier than the DVD type problem. With a DVD player you can't issue a different key to each user and withdraw use rights on a per player basis. With satelite TV you can.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
This case underscores the global nature of society now, an issue further underscored by the Internet itself.
Really and truly, the idea of "jurisdiction" when it comes to "e-anything" is almost incomprehensible. I publish a web page here in California about barbecues and possibly break Indian law. I publish a (perfectly legal in the US) pro-nazi page with swastikas and break German law if Germans ever (god forbid) look at it.
In this kind of environment, "legal" falls to the least common denominator, whatever's left when everything illegal everywhere is removed. Not much of an argument for "free speech" since anything on the 'net is merely communication, after all.
Remember Dimitri?
At issue is that there is no international law (that the US will respect, anyway) and as a result of this deficiency, we see all kinds of craziness.
It's going to get worse before it gets better.(sigh)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
You can "guess" a one-time pad, but the whole point is that you can never know you guessed correctly. There is no way to determine whether the "correct" decryption is
"The secret formula is milk. Just milk."
or
"ethereal is wrong about one-time pads."
or
"8fj3*&(A*&#fjhdsdf*&!!@$8F(D&*Fjlkdsj#"
because all decryptions are equally likely. This property is why one-time pads are described as unbreakable. For a traditional keyed cipher, it's unlikely that more than one key would lead to an intelligible decryption, so you know when you got it right.