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CD Copy Stopper
CTho9305 writes "Technology Review has an article about a new CD and DVD copy protection system by Doc-Witness, where the disc itself has a smart card on it. The card checks if a request is valid, and then returns a key to decrypt the contents of the disc. It apparently works with standard drives."
...is watching me copy?
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
eDrugTrader said it pretty well yesterday.
3....2....1....
ok, wheres the crack for this?
=)
Gentlemen...BEHOLD!
-Dr. Weird
I can't wait for the ridiculously easy fix for this one. All you have to do is spit on it and it not only copies, but increases the quality!
I think its Mozilla that has the ability to forge its client information to a webservers logs. So uhm, why couldn't CD ripping/DVD ripping software impliment this feature. I'm sure someone will figure it out, and make it work. (Atleast this one requires more than just a sharpie marker to crack)
Can all fish swim?
Saying it will be defeated within 30 days. Any takers. Also, $25 saying it will be by a Russian.
The technology is highly attractive...
Perhaps, but that website sure isn't.
.. as long as it works on standard drives. As a member of the moral community I agree that piracy is a rampant problem that has the potential to rob the entertainment industry of its biggest stars. On the other hand, I cannot agree with any technology that is going to cause problems with the existing base of installed equipment. People in this industry are smart; I have confidence that they can come up with a solution that meets this criteria (and it sounds like this might be it!)
Naturally, this will cause howls of protest from the "rip it and send it all over the world" crowd, but they are a small and pitied minority whose actions are not to be tolerated.
An OpSecure protected media does not only reflect stamped or burnt information but can also RECEIVE, STORE, PROCESS, and TRANSMIT INFORMATION.
A CD that can transmit information? How, may I ask, does it do that, exactly? The benefits to a content producer are clear, but I do not see how this technology would magically allow the CD/Smart Card combo to transmit information back to the content producer.
Of course, we can also all parrot the usual "If I can play it, I can copy it" line which we all know already...
rather than repost: COMMENT
what are we doing to stop this/educate the masses?
How will this effect the cost of the CD media? It doesn't sound very cost effective to me, seeing how it would be a matter of minutes before someone wrote a program to crack it. I'm sure the developers know this too.
One minute Funny, then I'm Offtopic. Now I'm Troll. How about taking time to read my advice and giving me an Insightful.
Usually I say it is trivial to bypass almost any security measure, but after reading the article, it sounds like this one could be tough to crack, as these are not 'normal' off the shelf CDs
/. type people, I bet these CDs will be expensive enough that they wont be used en masse by CD publishers...
Fortunately for
How can this possibly be claimed to work with standard drives?
Our dvd players read the optical stream from the disc, and then decode it video out. What is this chip supposed to do -- decrypt on the fly and send a new optical pattern to the read head? I don't think so.
I think someone is trying to push a new kind of dvd drive that requires the discs to have smart cards...
Granted, Windows XP had nothing this advanced on the disc itself, but the methods of circumventing this new protection device will likely be the same as the ways WinXP's product activation was circumvented. Just reverse engineer the code, find the references to the smart chip, and remove those references. Granted, one won't be able to just "copy the disc", but cracked ISOs can still be theoretically distributed. It'll be interesting to watch.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Film at 11.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Maybe it's just me, but does it dawn on no one -- at least no one at the RIAA and perhaps the MPAA (Jack "Maddog ... Grrrrrrr!" Valenti in particular) that they (and by "they" I mean the RIAA and the MPAA) are slowly destroying the promise (so-called, of course) of digital technology?
All this stuff -- from half-assed watermarking, to government-sanctioned hack attacks on 14 year-old Kazaa users, threatening to throw them in federal high security lockups -- all this stuff is destroying what it's attempting to preserve.
"Please return your drive to the manufacturer so that we may upgrade it to be compatible with new and exciting technology that has become available! Don't miss your chance to make full use of this new technology, because it really is better!"
if they make as great a light show in a microwave as a regular CD does...
Do you inspect a roller coaster everytime you ride it?
It is impracticable to crack since it is hardware based
See! Uncrackable! Just like that CSS thingy!
'cos we Lunix haxx0r are too l33t and we circumvent anything.
I WANT MY FREE MP3!!!!
lolOllo1l1ol1
From Doc Witness's homepage:
It is impracticable to
crack since it is hardware based and is
based on dynamic protection. Unlike
competition it is not based on passive
protection (that is easily cracked)
or remote activation (that is both offensive
to customer's privacy and easily cracked).
Uhm. Okay guys. If I was a record producer who was living with (the very real) fear that my job was about to go away because of digital copying, the line above would make me think twice about using your technology.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
So is this the smart thing to do? It seems as if more CD space would be needed for this added software and encryption. What if a CD needed all 80 minutes for the album? If you have to install this "smart card" reader in order to play a stupid CD, I think this would just deter customers from buying it and just let them download them instead.
.smell my feet.
new encryption scheme
baby oops i cracked it again
more britney copies!
siri
let's count how many posts say "the crackers will have this fixed in X days."
I don't understand where my ability to make backups for myself has gone. That's part of my right as an OWNER of a piece of software. I am ALLOWED to make a backup for myself.
With this, if the disc goes to crap or the "smart card" goes to shit what am I going to do? Can I call up Doc-Witness and say, "hey, send me my money so I can get a new CD?"
I have the kids that run around my house. They wake up, eat breakfast, and then go outside and collect all manner of nasty goo on their little fingers.
Then they come in for lunch, "play" computer, and muck up CDs. I'm not talking about my really important stuff that is snuggled away - I'm talking about the games they are alloyed to play...God forbid they get their hands on Warcraft 3!
I always make burnt copies of CDs for the kids to use, so that when they roll over it with the toy car and crack it I can just make a new one.
I know piracy is a problem for the industry, but it just sickens me at how legitimate fair use gets slaughtered for people like me!
And forget the "I won't be buying any of THESE CDs line" -- that only works until Toy Story 17 comes out on DVD....
Case
How quickly they forget:
If you are forced to distribute the secret in an insecure way, the game's over. Better yet. it only takes one read to copy the data.
I guess it's a nice idea that just misses the point.
Dojo: defanging browsers so you don't have to
I thought that under certain circumstances smart cards have already been cracked. Additionally, this would still be suceptible to program patches that cause the program to not check for authentication. I guess this should at least make software publishers feel better even if it doesn't prevent copying.
Lastly, wouldn't this make it impossible to make a backup copy of a CD. I'm pretty sure that my burner doesn't write smart cards. Perhaps, they should just give everyone two copies of every piece of software, just in case.
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
Apparently it will not work with today's standard drives, as they are not capable of hardware-decrypting any data streams from CD. So this whole thing will only be successful if ALL player manufacturers comply and add that capability to their drives (or this capability is added on the operating system side for PCs). So the obligatory question is (again): would you rather buy a crippled DRM-ROM or a normal drive? And you can be sure of one thing: if this technology becomes mainstream, they RIAA _WILL_ make you pay per session or invalidate CDs after a certain time and you _WILL_ end up paying much more while having much less freedom of use!
Am I the only one who thinks that this doesn't make good business sense?
It checks for a key, then allows the decryption if the key is valid, BUT works with standard drives too? If it works with a standard drive, then it means that I can take that unencrypted information, store it on my hard drive, and then burn it to another CD. Where is the protection here?
(sarcasm)
YES! This is great news!
Thanks to this new technology, the price of CD's should plummet, as it will be impossible to rip them!
Finally, they have solved the problem of piracy and can now lower the price of CD's since they will not be 'losing money' anymore (a slow economy doesn't count)
(/sarcasm)
Yeah, right. I bet those greedy pigs will raise the price of cd's even more citing the need to produce 'anti-theft technology'
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
It looks like this is for software packages.
The installer communicates with the smart card to get permission and the decryption key needed to finish the install. So, reverse engineer the installer and run one legitimate install to capture the decryption key and you can make as many installs as you want.
It's a little more secure if the disk has to be in a drive to run the final software, and it expects to communicate with the smart card to authenticate authorization to run.
Not only will the smart card prevent copying, but it will prevent the use of the disc as a coaster. Excellent technology.
Hmm....very nice, what about the cost involved in such a setup, ok, so i can put it in my production line, but what's the additional cost ? How long before a simple marker gets rid of the copy protection ? Security is more of a process than a quick solution. If people wanna find a way to crack it, they definitely will, btw where is the video cleaner fluid of mine...he he he.
-- Live Long And Prosper
what they mean is if you don't have one of these fancy new drives to protect against piracy, then it will also work in a normal cd/dvd player.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
They must think by creating a strange 'dynamic' storage format that the crackers won't be able to copy it. Don't they realise that signals on the IDE bus (or any other bus) can be snooped? any protection system is only ever aiming at the average joe public. Frankly why they spend so much money developing such technology is beyond me. This money could be spent on developing a secure Internet based distribution system for music.
themselves.
Sure they may never come into contact with a UFO, but other Slashdot readers will and when they do, they'll need to have memorized this guide. I know I have!
This is the CD equivalent of a dongle.. yes the CD can't be cracked but since there is interaction between the CD and the reading device someone will find a way to hack the device instead. Look at the number of apps which "require" a dongle to work but have been easily cracked.
"small and "pitied" minority?! Wake up bud! 70 million downloads of Kazaa alone. The entertainment industry isthe minority in this equation.
Cheers, Tormentius The geek shall inherit the earth
RCA out into my Tape deck, or Audio CD-r . Hi I just beat your protection. Come on people what are you going to try next.
If these can't be produced cheaply, and integrate with existing cd presses without modification they will have a hard time getting off the ground.
What will this add to the manufacture costs?
It will be cracked.
People said harware dongles were the answer to piracy yet within a month dongle emulators were going around...
Israel based huh?
well that completes the circle of events....
FULLY TRANSPARENT to the consumer (as long as he or she keeps the user agreement).
This worries me. They even mention down below how static systems are easily cracked and how 'phone-home' is offensve to user privacy and still not solid. Which user agreement will they use? The one that inclides fair use or a new creation that disables any and all attempts to protect our investment?
I'm not a 'consumer' with gigs and gigs of stolen MP3's, but I am someone with backups of my legitimately bought copies. I have two siberian huskies that seem to love chewing on CD and DVD cases (I'll stop leaving them at the door, I promise) so these backups become invaluable.
Sadly, people who've read their benefits section will realize that our right (yes, it is a right) to have legitimate back ups are tossed out the window...
Their website is not very generous on details on how it work.
If no special hardware is needed to make it work, then it probably rely on software to do decrypt the disk.
The key used to descrypt the disk is sent to the computer when a legitimate request is made. Once you have the key, who is going to prevent you from keeping it and reuse it later.
How can they have dynamic keys if the CD-ROM is encrypted once?
It would also be probably easy to pose a reading request as legitimate and then decrypt the whole disk and store the cleartext ready to be burn on a new CD.
This kind of scheme may prevent M Smith from copying the disk, but M Cracker will find a way arround the protection in no time.
All copy protection scheme inveted as of yet were defeated. This one will go the same way.
Ok, they encrypt the data on the CD. Ok, I have to get the key from the smart card with the optical interface (really a cool bit of technology if you think about it). Ok, then I can unencrypt the CD. Now explain to me why I can't just keep this key, or even the unencrypted data around?
If you are trying to protect an application (say a game), then I could see it require the use of the smart card, but it doesn't seem like it would be to hard to write a device driver wrapper around the CD-ROM driver that exists that will emulate this.
Overall, very cool technology. In this instance it seems like it will do little more then keep honest people honest. Is that really of value to any publisher?
And what about the good 'balance' of cd's?
We know speeds above 40x can made some cds explodes (already happened here), what if the cdrom has some chip on its side, won't the cds already vibrate at more than 12x speed?
Let's wait and see if that product really hits the market. Another great cracking-challenge will appear
One, this system will be crackable by hardcore pirates. Not legally, under the DMCA, but all the pirate has to do is intercept the decryption key coming off the embedded card, and decrypt the disk image in memory before burning the illegal copies.
Two -- hasn't the market already proven to the software publishers that tricky copy protection always limits sales? There's just tons of technology schemes to enforce licenses, from dongles to license files to whatnot -- but for mass market s/w (Word, NWN, Mavis Beacon, etc.), paying customers (the target market) will almost always go for the non-copy-protected alternatives (even if they don't intend to pirate the disks to all their friends).
In the Star Trek evil Mirror Universe, virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma is gangsta hiphop star DJ Yo Ma-Ma.
The only way this could work, unless I missed something, if a program knew that it had to get the decryption key from a certain place on the CD-rom.
What I am puzzled by, and the site does not explain, is what would prevent anyone from reading the key transmitten then creating a cracked program that gets the key from some other place. This doesn't seem to much different from using a dongle and we all know why they have disappeared. To bloody inconvenient. It reminds me of the old dos gaming days, when legitimate gamers had to type a word from a certain page every so often while people with illegal version just could keep playing.
This in fact seems sligtly worse since how would the CD be capable of reliable recording on how many "different" machines at the "same" time I have the program installed? MS might not like it but it is perfectly legal for me to install software on more then 1 machine so long as it is not on more then 1 at the same time.
Oh well no doubt this will go the way of all the other protection schemes. The legitimate users pay for protection wich hampers only our ease of use and nothing else.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This technology was mentioned in this month's Technology Review. Sadly it only seems that it was in the print version.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Title: CD Copy Stopper
Okay...
Later: You can copy the CD
Sounds effective. Then: without the card the software won't run.
Hmm...okay. So we've copied it to another CD. There isn't a card anymore. Why's the card needed?
Earlier: A "smart card" embedded in the CD unlocks the disc's encrypted content.
Oh. So we rip an ISO off the CD, crack the encryption to form an unencrypted ISO, and burn it back to another CD.
Gee, like that's not gonna happen.
It is impracticable to crack since it is hardware based and is based on dynamic protection
Sorry to say, but hardware has been 'cracked' and hacked before, and will be done again.
At some point in your computer, the signal must be decoded for regular use. All someone has to do, is find this signal, and use that to copy a CD or DVD (DVD burners are getting out more and more...). I'm sorry, but i really don't think that this, or any technology in general, is going to work perfectly, to a consumer's satisfaction. Problems::
1. As has happened so many times, the media screws up on Average Joe consumer.
2. Those who want to copy/crack/hack it, will. They can't stop it.
Old hardware, like quad-speed CD-roms and the like, won't work. Hardware varies, from year to year, from manufacturer to manufacturer, from country to country, from pc to car audio. Things will not work for someone, and people don't like that. It's just bad karma man!
Not that works at least. If you can play it, you can copy it. Why don't they just give up?
.... that is able to outmaneuver my Sharpie pen?
Since when do you, or anybody else, have the legal right to "rip" a CD, which is intellectual property, off? You are sold the disc in a very specific format, with the understanding that you will use the disc in that particular format. If you want to listen to the music in your car, take the disc with you in your car. If you want to listen to the disc while you're walking, pop it in your Discman. If you want to listen to the disc in your living room, bring it into your living room. This is *not* rocket science.
If you bought a puppy at a pet store, would you rip off one of its legs so that you could keep it in your car? Maybe one of its other legs to take with you when you're out on a run? When you buy a CD, you're buying a disc. You do not buy the rights to the music, which are owned by the industry.
The MPAA and RIAA are not about movies or music, contrary to what you may think. Those organizations exist to only preserve the status quo.
At least I can't see any way to trust a client once it has been transferred to the general purpose computing platform; at that point the software is open to inspection and its secrets won't remain hidden very long.
--
BitTorrent in C -- LibBT
http://www.sf.net/projects/libbt
Although this is a good guide, I'm not a fan of the recent changes.
#3 says not to attempt to contact the aliens, but #9-16 says the exact opposite. We all know that it's dangerous to contact aliens, so I think we should get rid of the new points before someone gets injured. (We can keep #15, but it must be used with caution.)
So the CD sends information to the drive using an on-board LED.... What powers this LED? Am I going to have to recharge my copy of Quake before I can use it?
Perhaps little magnets on springs! Then they could just stop and restart the disc spinning several times to move the magnets around, and use induction to run the LED.
Anyways, ultimately all you have to do to defeat this is to write some software that asks the smart card for it's key, then write some more software to make a decrypted copy of the disk
Newsflash - People don't care about art, or music, they care about money.
Most of the comments so far are about the RIAA, MPAA, CDs, DVDs, etc. I think you're missing the point of this technology. The idea seems to be that by embedding a smart card in the disc, some piece of software can check that the disc is actually the original. This does not in any way prevent you from copying it. All it does is allow some appropriately knowledgeable piece of software to distinguish the copy from the original.
You know all those PC games that require you to have the CD in the drive in order to play, even though the game itself is fully installed on the hard drive? This is just a more sophisticated version of that. But now, if you copy the disc, the software will be able to distinguish between its original disc and the copy (and presumably refuse to run if the disc is a copy).
Thus it is only applicable to executable content, not to data-only music CDs or DVDs. It could only be made applicable to them with external help-- there would have to be something in the players that knew to check the smart card to determine authenticity.
At least that's the way I read it. But I could be wrong.
this seems like the emperors new clothes: they are gluing together a dongle and a CD, and to make it backwards compatible with CD rom drives, the disc contains electronics and a led to flash back signals at the drive. Sounds very clumsy to me.
With much less technical effort, you could make a small USB device that does the same. It's not glued together with the CD, but who cares?
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
I guess this is where we find out if piracy has any real cost associated with it. If piracy really does cause the massive losses that RIAA says it does, then it would be worth their while to try a media-based solution, even if it raises their cost. The retail price of CDs is set by what the market will bear, not by the cost of production. If I can buy a blank for 25 cents, I know the music industry is getting a better deal in bulk.
If RIAA members still want to get $18 per CD and this hardware/media hybrid protects the ability to do that, then they will absorb the cost. On the other hand, if piracy "problem" is merely a smoke screen to attack low-cost/online/non-RIAA distribution, then this technology is dead-on-arrival. Time will tell.
This wont work. It doesnt sound any different from the protections companies employ now where the CD has a magic key or secret uncopyable section on it. Pirates simply copy the part of the CD that is readable and then use a cracked executable distributed on the CD that doesnt bother looking for the secret section or bytes.
Until it's impossible to copy all the information on a CD this is the way illegal games and applications are distributed. This innovation, however ingenious wont make a dent in the pirate industry.
Anataka suki desu. Itsumo. Itsumademo.
This sort of thing is really starting to get tedious. I don't know if the copy protection will be broken when it is originally released, and as such, I'm ambivalent about buying any music that might be using it, or other copy protection schemes. Between the lower prices, and the lack of copy protection, its almost worth moving to vinyl, the hip image that records have is just a side effect.
There is nothing magical here that is truely different from any other scheme. I read how this thing is designed, it will work off any standard cd drive. Which means that you can still 'rip' an image of the darn thing. You can try to figure out what a 'legitimate' code is and then just copy the data, or you can let whatever program that they consider 'legitimate' to run properly, but with a custom debugger grabbing the info as the program gets it. Heck, you can make a microcontroller that logs all communication going through the ide pins! Since both standard cd drives and computer ram can be read and hacked, there is no way this will work any better than any other half baked scheme.
With one exception. Those countermeasures I mentioned above probably won't work on Microsoft's new oh-so-secure upcoming OS (which shields ram and devices from such attacks, supposedly).
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
It is impracticable to crack since it is hardware based
Didn't we already teach these techno-weenies that there is no such thing as client side security, in hardware or software?
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Welcome to Vietnam.
...lose an unwinnable fight.
The end will likely be the same:
Lots of wasted time.
Lots of wasted money.
Lots of people hurt for no good reason.
And the big guys with all the big firepower...
New encryption scheme
Sings "Oops, I cracked it again!"
More Britney copies!
like, having dynamic content on cd-rom? err? how? wtf? and it'll work with my old 2x mitsumi too? and it'll be cheaper than usb/parallel/serial/whatever dongle?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Ok now my day is complete! Is it my imagination or almost everyday there is a different story at slashdot about "the new cd protection scheme". Does ***anyone*** believe that this crackpot scheme has any ***remote*** chance of being used in the next 1000 years??? What else will they think of next, mr. data's fractal encryption???
Just a thought, is the product obscure or obsecure (maybe we need to re-invent the wheel on this one). Btw one thing that got left out of this discussion is that the technology wont even let me make a copy of my favorite CD ?, come on, u have to be kidding. Illegal MP3's ? ok i do agree, but what if i don't want a single scratch on my CD and i need a backup CD ? Surely you got to be out of your mind to think i'll buy 2 CD's for the same content ? Think about it guys.....
-- Live Long And Prosper
the specs on the request that has to be made, couldn't you crack this with some sort of brute-force method?
A photodetector at the edge of the CD turns the drive's laser light into electrical pulses, which travel to the embedded smart card and request the key.
I suppose it's conceivable that this might be possible with a CD-RW drive. But with a regular CD-ROM drive? I think that's bullshit, plain and simple. It's not like there is any command for sending data to the laser of a read-only drive. Do they send the request in morse code by turning the drive off and on again?
I think this is just more snake oil being peddled by folks who know the can make an easy buck off of nervous media executives. My guess is, it'll work fine during the dog and pony sales presentation, it'll cause endless support headaches for paying customers, and be trivially bypassed by the warez folks.
I swear, I don't know where they finds the folks who sign on to these deals. Have a problem with piracy? Make your product less attractive than the warez version by saddling it with a bunch of flakey 'copy protection' technology. That'll help your market share!
tanks for all of the comments. you won't see another 'offical' version of the guide until monday. its the Reading Festival this weekend. bye you guys.
1. This is nothing more than a CD that carries its own dongle. This might be attractive to companies like Quark and Microsoft, but isn't applicable to music CDs.
2. The company hasn't said how much this costs. If the price is much higher than what it costs to mass-produce normal CDs/DVDs, then only a few software publishers will bite. Also, not every CD production facility will be willing to invest in new machines.
3. PR releases tend to hype (and even lie) about how many companies are "interested" in an attempt to lure the others in. We need to shine more light on this subject fast.
but i've yet to see one and they seem to run fine on all the computers i've seen them installed on.
I don't understand where my ability to make backups for myself has gone. That's part of my right as an OWNER of a piece of software. I am ALLOWED to make a backup for myself.
From the article:
You can make backup copies. You can burn these CDs to your heart's content. You could probably also make a backup copy of the smartcard (if they designed it right). You just can't use software/media/whatever in a manner that would violate its license.
Hmmm.
Suppose we presume that this magic card really, really works.
Assume it is the fly, cats-pajamas, Golly-Gee-Whiz-Neato, super deluxe, smokin', king of the hill, rad copy protection of all time.
So perfect it gets canonized in Rome.
So ---
It determines what it considers to be legitimate requests?
How does it tell the difference between a completely legal archive copy and an illegal copy?
How does it know the difference between a completely legal archive copy (a right protected by federal law, BTW) of an archive copy made because the original disk was destroyed?
How does it know the difference between an illegal installation on another computer and a legal installation on an upgraded computer? A legal installation on another computer that replaces the first one?
Is this smart card also a legal scholar, familiar with fair use exceptions?
Unlike many here, I believe in intellectual property rights and have no problem protecting them.
I have a big problem, however, with protecting intellectual property rights by taking away my rights and those of everybody else.
Store owners aren't allowed to protect against robbery by shooting everyone who looks like they might steal something. IP owners shouldn't be able to protect against theft by infringing on the legitimate rights of their potential customers.
Ummmm... you're comparing "hurt" caused by badly-devised copy-protection schemes to seeing your friends die around you while you risk death or crippling injuries at 18 years old for a losing cause?
You need a reality check in a bad way.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Why not actually address the answer I gave; namely that I wouldn't care about any copy protection scheme in the slightest, provided that the content producer would replace damaged disks without argument? Oh, you can't can you, because that would invalid your argument.
So yeah, I stand by my original insult. You're an idiot. I have plenty more, too, if you're going to continue to be an idiot.
This technology does not work on current drives! The article itself states that it is easily implemented into current drive production lines. I still don't see how it will prevent copying, as long as the unencrypted data has to be passed to the sound card you can still intercept that data stream at some point.
Copy protection that can't be compromised by your typical metallica fan.
Don't buy CDs that have this "feature".
There is nothing, short of Palladium, that will stop people from ripping a CD they can play on their computer. If a CD audio player can read the data on the CD by any means, a CD ripper can read the data the same way. It's just that simple. Any data that is distributed in a computer-readable format can be copied without too much creativity or effort, especially if it conforms to an open standard.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I can see how it could be possible to read/write data to a smart card embedded in a CDROM disk.
First understand how a CDROM is read, a laser beam is sent to the surface of the CD and the laser beam is bounced back based on the pit's in which the data is stored on the CD. A photo collector picks up the bounced laser light and determines if it is a one or zero.
I do not know how much control of the laser or collector one has on a CDROM drive.
But if you can control the modulation of the laser in the CDROM drive you could send a message to a photo collector embedded in the CD.
Then you only need to have the CDROM drive laser turn off and then look for light from the CDROM disk.
Thus you have two-way communications!!!
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
Could somebody tell me what an "invalid" request from a CD is?
'I want to read this bit, and the next bit, and the one after that..'
After all, I always thought it was what you did with the bits once they were off the CD and in your 'puter that was the problem.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
I must say it's a cute idea. It will certainly stop the "exact-bit-by-bit-copy" pirates untill they have bought themselves a machine that can duplicate and manufacture that onboard chip.
BUT! Just as SecuROM and C-Dilla it must decrypt the content on the CD before it can be used, and then it's a simple matter of grabbing it and saving it as a 'plain' CD.
In the Case of SecuROM and C-Dilla their success is their Achilles heel, since they are so common on games nowdays there are nice utilities out there that automatically recovers the original unencrypted executable.
If this new scheme is successful it's just a matter of time before a one-click crack is readily available on ze net.
Yeah,
No more home-made copies.
Let professional pirates do it!
You are so right it scares the crap out of me.
These things ARE coming to pass because the general population *is* voting with it's wallet. MOst people buying CD players and CDs have no clue what copy protection or digital rights management is. If you try to explain it to them they still don't get it. What they do get is that, I buy this great CD player and these CDs and I can listen to the latest cool tunes. Their not thrilled with the cost of the CDs but, "hey, what are you gonna do?". "Dude, you gotta get the latest Brittney Spears CD it is SO sweat and did you see that shot of here on the back of the cover?"
Like a dear in the headlights, most people don't even know that they are being screwed, much less care.
When I, Joe Consumer, go into a store and buy a CD, I am purchasing a physical object with data burned on to it. I am not purchasing a license to "listen to the contents in specific situations"... not even the RIAA is dumb enough to suggest such a thing! (As a matter of fact, the ??AA doesn't even consider copying ONE CD for a friend to be illegal! Apparently, the bigger fish get their goat.)
Once I have that physical disc that I purchased, I can convert it to whatever format and as many formats as I please, as I have paid for the disc. As long as I am the only person using the music derived from the original disc, I am merely exercising my Fair Use rights. Thus, your starement that there is no such thing as a "legal rip" is a complete and utter falsehood. I can burn a spare (or "backup") for the car, make an OGG for my portable music device, and leave a high quality mp3/OGG on my computer for Winamp to play... all completely legal.
Technical limitation: 72x drives? With a smart card in the middle, won't it weaken the CD a bit and make it more likely to fly apart? 40x may even do it.. dunno for sure.
Other than that, I assume the chip stores the number of installations, and does so with some piece of computer identification. What would happen if you formatted your machine? you may not generate the same id...
-DrkShadow
I read the article the other day (either here or on wired) that talked about the Russian CD/DVD plant located in a Russian government building. I believe that it said they were selling for about $6 a piece. I assume that they are doing it at a profit. So, why in the heck at we paying more than twice that in the US. My hope is that technology would work to cut out the middle men or significantly reduce the cost of production and hence the cost. Music/Movies should be getting cheaper, not more expensive. If we could buy a music CD for $3.50 or a movie DVD for $7.50, why would anyone go to the time, effort and expense to steal the content. I have difficulty believing that it would not be better business to reduce prices and eliminate any copy protection. I was hoping to see artists/moviemakers selling their own music directly for download or as a packaged CD/DVD from their own websites. I know that a few artists are doing this, but not to the degree that I was hoping to see. Maybe the next generation of musicians/producers will move this direction. If not, hopefully I can gain great amusement from watching the supporters of the RIAA/MPAA get their asses handed to them.
Actually, this isn't true.
Anyone below average scares the crap out of me and, by definition, that's 50% of everyone.
Let's look at a few IQ's- 90, 90, 90, 95, 100, 180.
With these numbers, the average IQ comes out to be 107.5. This puts 83% of the population to be "Below Average".
It can also work out the other way.
20 (vegatable), 50 (retard), 120, 130, 125, 100, 115, 180.
The average of these numbers comes out to be 105. So that putss 75% of the population above average.
Now you say, "Well isn't 100 supposed to be the average IQ? Well, yes, but as you can see, it doesn't always work out to be the median number either. Truthfully the average is probably a little higher or lower. But then you have to ask yourself who you consider...
To make everyone take it you have to factor in language (which many IQ tests factor in), problem solving, etc.. which can all be somewhat screwed up. A dolphin has a pretty high IQ as things should go, but he can't tell me if Cat is to Kitten as Dog is to...
yea, and then we have to factor in those with mental problems, or mental gifts. Those people throw things off pretty well. Then some people are uncaring or unwilling, which would pull the scores down more. What about people who have a huge problem speaking and dealing with people, but can spit numbers out at you (hmm, Pi...)
Anyway, 50% of people are not below average, nor are 50% above, even if it all averages out to "average" IQ...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Look at their "Customers & Strategic Partners" section :
"Under Construction"
*grin*
Eventually someone will write a ripper that downloads track times from the intenert, and then literally plays the cd and records/breaks it up. Sure it takes an hour to rip a cd, but it is still possible. And all it takes is one person to do that to mp3, and then everyone can convert and burn to a cd. This is so pointless. People are going to steal no matter what.
If you want to stop it ( or at least reduce it), put out better music, and sell it for less. I'm tired of paying $16 for a CD, and then 50 for a concert ticket. How much money do these artists really need. Do they deserve all the fame and cash just because the can kind of sing. I think that is the real underlying sentiment from most people.
And sell the damn mp3s. I would have paid $20 dollars for a napster that was secure, and all the songs where of good quality. Maybe I only get a 100 songs a month, thats fine, just make it a bit cheaper and easier to get. I'd rather do that then hunt through Kazaa.
This is all the relevant info you need ->
and then returns a key to decrypt the contents of the disc
Hell yes! Sign me up today!
I would be more than willing to pay an additional premium on the CDs I buy if it meant I could have the c00l technology.
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
Whilst I respect the right of copyright holders and their respective pitbulls to protect their properties, do they not realise that if an item of data can be viewed\watched\listened to etc. then it can also be copied?
In light of this, all attempts to protect data are doomed from the get go. Unless the RIAA\MPAA etc. get their wish and every item of electronics is copy-protection enabled. With this, as with all other copy-protection mechanisms, it will be broken. Possibly within days.
Would it not be better for these guys to accept it and realise that it is only the lowest common denominator crap which seems to clog up the peer to peer networks. The best stuff, the stuff that really becomes a part of a persons life is the stuff which is bought, by fans, for full price, again and again.
Produce good content and the fans will buy it. Produce derivative crap and don't be surprised when it isn't respected.
I don't know of any processor that does not require power. They are a little short of info in the article, but what do you do when the battery on the CD dies? It's not like a smart chip that is powered by the socket during the transaction. I can't see this being compatible with the redbook standard in any way providing compatibility with any of my exixting hardware. It looks like another obscure new kid on the block that will have to crack the chicken and egg problem.
The truth shall set you free!
the disc itself has a smart card on it
yup, that sure is a great idea... SmartCards are un-hackable! Just ask the Satellite compan... err, nevermind
the CD/smart card obviously returns the decryption key to the software that is running. it would be trivial to capture what the smart key returned and then make a patch so that the program won't check the smartkey again.
No, no, no wait..... I mean: Damn guys! We'll never be smart enough to break through that protection scheme. I guess the magic-marker thing didn't work. It must have been a hoax. Now we will never be able to steal money from the pockets of the misunderstood music industry associations and artist who worked so very hard. Oh well, I might as well go and buy me a copy from a reputable music store chain and a second one just in case this one gets scratched.
Maybe what the music industry really needs is quality music at low prices (less than $10.00USD) so the cost of copying music is greater than buying it off the shelf...
Think about this: When was the last time you copied a VHS video that could be purchased at your local discount retailer for $7.99USD?
rules are made to be broken,
encrypted data is made to be cracked.
e.
It is quite simple
Haiku should not be funny
Try a Senryu
You're a complete fucking retard. You can't even string a simple sentence together coherently. You also seem to be having trouble following the thread here, as I have not said once that everyone should be using copy protection on their CD's. I said that I don't have a problem with copy protection on CD's, provided that the company which produces the CD will provide a replacement CD should the original become damaged.
Take your pills, retard.
I'm so glad they got the patent registered. That way, the clever people who thought of this will get the reward they deserve for their innovation(tm) when this idea is adopted across the board!
Happy days are here again!
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
No, but I might take a picture of that puppy to keep in my wallet, or a movie of him to take in the car.
Fine, so take a picture of your CDs and bring them with you in your car.
You are comparing apples and oranges.
How many of us have written letters to the newspaper to inform people of these issues? How many have called/emailed news stations to suggest a story? How many of us have written to CNN/[your favorite newspaper] to point out the factual errors in their stories? How many of use just like to sit back and whine and bask in our own sense of superiority as we, meek little us, defend all of freedom by ourselves?
Even if they finally get a protection scheme that works, all people will do is plug the cd player into the audio in jack on their soundcard, and record the audio to mp3. The only people they are going to stop are grandmothers trying to rip that sinatra tune off the cd they purchased that don't have the expertise to figure out how to rip an mp3 besides clicking a button.
reporter 2: "Do you think that we will see a trend of this, The apparenly call them selves "The Smart Masses"
Reporter 1: " it it too early to tell Jan, Although some people belive that they were acting in an aliance with Bin Laden, wearing shirts with the phrase, "rm -rf bin laden"."
Reporter 2: "I guess we will have to wait and see, how the us government handles this. I assume the people blinded today will be held in military brigs untill the war is over."
Reporter 1: "I belive that is in the best intrest of the country. " Reporter 2: "In sports today..."
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
This technology is for CD-ROM disks, NOT audio cd's. It is to copy protect computer software or data on a computer cd-rom, not music on a music cd. It cannot be used in a music cd or dvd-video player (not without a firmware change to the player anyway). It works on computers because the cd-rom will contain an install program that acts like a bootstrap. This install program interacts with the smart chip buried in the substrate of the cd-rom disk. The data or software on the cd (not the bootstrap or install program) is encrypted and cannot be used until decrypted. You can read the entire disk and copy it by conventional means but as the data is encrypted it is useless. The smart chip contains the key to decrypt the data. The bootstrap/install program knows how to access the smart chip and obtain the decryption key. You can't copy the contents of smart chip onto a blank cd.
Ok, everyone understand this? This is NOT about audio or video, it has nothing to do with MP3's. Think bootleg cd copies of MS office that you see at every computer show. That's what this is aimed at. OK?
Really. You need to teach them that this is an expensive and sensitive piece of equipment, and it shouldn't be treated like that.
Click the link on their web site (http://www.doc-witness.com/tech.htm) on the 'Customers and Strategic Partners' link. I assume the words 'under construction' on a web site basically means, hey I'm not really worried about public relations. :)
when i get a new cd, the first thing i do is convert it to mp3. then i stick the original in a cd case never to be seen again. if i cannot do this, then i'm not going to purchase the cd. if i get a cd that doesn't allow me to do this, then i will return it.
if this happened to an artist that i really liked, i would probably send them a letter explaining my position. i would then tell them that i will not purchase the cd in question or any future cd's which have this type of protection.
if they dont listen, then they dont listen. the cd would end up on irc, p2p networks, netnews, etc. before it's even released. this type of alienation of their fans hardly seems worth it.
-- john
Any bets this crap works (if it's working at all, and not just a vaporware announcement) only under Windoze?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
So... that's all you have to do in this tech market today? Claim that you can solve all problems by waggling your fingers?
Microsoft: Yeah, we know we're known for making products with holes big enough to drive a truck through, and we're becoming infamous for spyware --- but Palladium will solve all of your security and privacy issues!
This CD smart card crap sounds quite similar to me.
Is this a new business model that they're teaching in school? The Pseudo-Solution Model?
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
If all else fails, you can always just get you and your friends together, spend some money on some musical instruments, and play the music yourself. Oh wait, there is a phrase for that: Garage bands!
Where is the next new garage band playing the cover of Nirvana and Metallica? I'll just go and tape record them... LOL!
Don't touch copyrighted music, movies or whatever with a ten-foot pole even if you have to. Keep your money. Buy beer instead.
I don't see what the problem is. If you are intent on consuming as much entertainment as you can, it will only mean that the people who you despise will win. Stop consuming, stop buying. Sleep or walk or whatever (sleepwalk?). Paint pictures. Do something else.
BTW:
Dude, you're far more secure than I am.
While the lower 50% scare me, as they do you, I'm also a bit nervous around anybody who tests out anywhere beneath me on the scales. Pretty frightening considering I and everybody in my family test somewhere upwards of the 94th percentile on any test we've ever taken.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
I think something like OpSecure could prove to have a positive effect on Free software. Consider that, as publishers find more effective ways to prevent license violation and unfettered copying/distribution of their wares, many PC users will be forced to make a decision that they have not in the past: 1) Pay for a legitimate copy of a given title, or 2) Use a Free (or free) alternative. Consider how many people today buy one copy of MS Office and install it on several machines or share it with friends and family. If the license enforcement becomes difficult to circumvent, a three-machine Office purchase will suddenly skyrocket from a few hundred to over a thousand dollars--more than the cost of a new PC! This opens the door for low-cost (StarOffice) and no-cost (OpenOffice, KOffice, Gnome Office) alternatives to establish a foothold in the market.
The end result? I guess that depends on the big guys' response. MS, for instance, might dramtically reduce prices for its Office suite, which also has short-term benefits for the public. This may not be sustainable, though. The funny part is this: unlike Wal-Mart, which moves into town and sells (concrete) goods at cut-rate prices until the competition disappears, there is no way to run the competitors out of business when they give their (intangible) goods away for free. How long can MS' Office division remain profitable in this scenario?
To sum up my rambling, improved software license enforcement could, in a delicious display of irony, promote Free software adoption.
One of the reasons that I became a lawyer was to avoid ever having to hire one. -SPYvSPY
mr. ac troll,
i believe you are confused. "rip" is the term for copying data (esp. music) from a cd. it is different than "rip off" as is steal or dismember. i can "legally rip" a sheet of paper in half, but it is equally as unrelated.
as to your puppy analogy, that would be the same as buying a cd and breaking it into pieces to take with me to my car, not the same as copying it to listen to it in my car. your analogy does not make sense. chewbacca is a wookie...
i don't buy rights to the music, but i buy the right to listen to that media. at some point it must be converted from the unlistenable format of 010101100111000101010010110010010100101 etc. to analog voltages which are converted to sound waves by my speakers. what difference does it make if i change it to another 1101010110101010 format before i listen to it? hint: the answer is that it makes no difference.
slashdot wouldn't be fun if you never took the time to feed the trolls, at least when they are close to on-topic.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
It seems to me the you could
install the CD into a virtual machine
and then just copy the entire virtual machine.
I hate it when companies go out of their way
to make something not work.
Won't this encryption scheme make disc more susceptible to error propagation (like DVD)where one error in the data leads to improper decryption of following data. I know that there are encryptionsn schemes that don't have this problem, but i don't see any mention of the kind of encryption they are using
My drives don't talk to no smartcard or request any decryption code like that.
Nor do they send any validation or id code to the disk.
Works with standard drives, yeah right!
And my food is quantum encrypted so it provides no calories unless the stomach gives it the correct Digestive Authorization Query Sequence!
(If the hardware doesn't check, it ain't gonna happen!)
Now if these guys were selling new drives that check the new disks, that would be different, but as it stands, I've got to wonder how many bridges they've got for sale...
(And I don't mean network bridge either...)
Since the technology will have to work in a standard read-only drive, any request to read data off of the CD will have to be authorized (otherwise the CD wouldn't work in a legacy player). A read-only CD drive will not be able to tell whether a request to READ data is a request to play the music on the CD, or a request to copy the CD's content to a file. This protection may prevent direct track to track CD to CD copying, but it will not prevent someone from copying all of the files on the CD to their hard drive or a CD-R, or ripping the songs into MP3's.
The truth of security is that its inversly proportional to the number of people with a desire to circumvent it.
It will NEVER work in any form for the music industry. For the software industry its just a matter of how popular your software is...
As much as I dislike the current trend of intellectual property laws I must say that I am amazed at this idea. I think it is great. It gives companies a wonderful tool to protect content and to protect the consumer. Concerning the topics such as fair use, archive copies, etc I will address my opinions separatly as such:
:)
Fair Use: You could create a reversed engineered copy of the installation or an ISO image, the game data is there, just encrypted. The smart card is used as a "key" to access the software. This does not violate the archive as you can copy the CD files (and while they may be encrpyted there could be software unlocks provided) but the use of a hardware lock (which is what this in reality is) is up to the vendor. A great many high end products use hardware locks and this A: Reduced the cost of some of those implementations and B: Using existing hardware and software. For the hacker types that hate CD access (I do I NO-CD crack just about every app I own, case in point MOO2), therefore you could simply code a software tool that acts like the smartcard and implement it as a hook to the CDROM subsystem (Emulate the existence of the card).
As far as fair use rights, I think any vendor with any morals, and yes I know those types are fading fast, (I am actually planning on using this if it falls into budget on a few projects I am working on) would simply check for the card periodically rather than each run time (Perhaps each time you patch the program or some similar activity).
Imagine if I was a large corporation that needed to install say 4000 copies, there is NO WAY IN HELL I am going to pay for 4000 physical copies and devote manpower (or is the personpower now??) to having installers be present. What if the application takes an hour to install and I only have a 4 hour window to get all 4000 done? I ahve to have some way to multicast the app to the clients. I'm sure many appications, like M$ with activation will have corporate distributions (like the Microsoft Select program) that will have an alternative to the card (prob. a simple license server).
Imagine the security benefits of this technology in encrypted communications for Ebusinesses. Quicken and programs like that could use the embedded smart card to store unique cyphers for communications for online sales, or in my current position as a beginning game developer embedded encyption to prevent cheating (Can I hear a Hell Yeah from the Counter-Strike crowd?)
Ultimatly remember people, the technology itself is a wonderful and innovative idea. One of the best I have seen in the last 4 years. The arguments will come down to HOW it is used. I love this idea for it's possibilities in gaming (Anti-Cheat technology) and in secure business transactions. ALL the negatives I see being posted and that I can see for myself depend solely on implementation of this technology.
Remember any new technology now can be used to screw people over, take PGP for example you could have encoded all your application installation files in PGP and forced users to connect to an authentication server to decode and install. Is PGP an evil tool of the "E-Man?"
My 2 cents again, be gentle, my asshole still hurts from the last flaming
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I swear, I don't know where they finds the folks who sign on to these deals. Have a problem with piracy? Make your product less attractive than the warez version by saddling it with a bunch of flakey 'copy protection' technology. That'll help your market share!
i had friends who used a program, 3d studio i believe, which used to rquire a hardware dongle. this wasnt really a problem, except they had about 2 or 3 other software packages which required the dongle. finally they started installing the warez versions-even though they had legally purchased the software. it was just easier to deal with the warez version than the big tumor of dongles hanging off the back of their computers.
-- john
On the other hand, once someone gets the private key, game over, pirates 1, DocWitness 0.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
into EVERY CD. Why? Face it, the consumer has no power anymore. Only money talks and that means Mega-corporations. Would you like to see the look on Mr. Mega-corp CEO when he is told that the upgrade on the main ERP system coughed a hairball. Then when they went to fix it the CD told them that it was already in use please insert $500,000 to try again. Start to make life hard for big business and the technology will get buried so deep you couldn't find it with an oil rig. It would suck for the consumer but, as it has been stated in other posts, it would only require capturing the unencrypted data stream to allow copying. That is tough now but it would become readily available in the face of something like this.
Karma: Positive. Mostly affected by the lack of a karma joke in your sig.
From the article: 'It is impracticable to crack'
impracticable Pronunciation Key (m-prkt-k-bl)
adj. Impossible to do or carry out
Sounds like a challenge to me...
-----------------------
Moderator's essentials
It may not be possible to COPY the contents of a protected disk, but surely it is possible to read the data (decrypting while reading) to HD and then writing it to another disk.
The new disk has no protection.
If a CD audio player can read the data on the CD by any means, a CD ripper can read the data the same way
actually when you listen to an audio cd on your computer the data is transferred through the audio cable. it's a 4 pin cable about 1/2 an inch wide. the rippers transfer data through the data cable. it's normally a 40 pin ide or 50 pin scsi data cable about 2 inches wide.
using the data cable allows for a bit for bit copy of the data. i dont believe you can get that out of the 4 pin audio cable. not that everyone would be able to notice the difference in the audio by using the two different methods, but they are not the same.
-- john
This company should hook up with Bill! Imagine a Windows XP disc that you cant copy AND you have to register it with The Great God Gates! I just hope if they do sell it to Microsoft that the company (a) gets a damn goot patent 1st, and (b) nails the SHIT out of Microsnot in licensing fees :-) Or better still - reel em in with a cheap but restrictive EULA... then sock it to em fo more expensive licences!!!!
You only have to pay for 50% of the software you are making money off. If you are just learning/experimenting or even using to create free software (gpl) you don't need to pay for it. Games and music. You don't have to buy it, but do buy it (the ones you like) and give it to friends as gifts. Also, make an effort to see your favorite performers live when they are in your area. Thats it. Pretty simple eh? No lawyers involved either.
How can this possibly be claimed to work with standard drives?
It may be compatible with standard drives - meaning you can read data from them (and copy them as well). BUT in order to enforce the encryption you need either a new drive, new firmware, or a new driver. It cannot enforce it's "lock" on current standard drives. To claim to do so is a blatant lie. There would need to be a globally unique serial number on every CD/DVD drive on the planet - AND it would need to be transmitted to the last track of the disc every time it is inserted into a drive. Standard drives do not do this.
I'm a 2000 man.
Wait, so this smart card is supposed to interpret not only a read request, but the intention of the reader as well? Um, yeah. When will the RIAA/research firms get it? You can't possibly secure CD's without breaking existing players. It's just not viable.
The recording industry (and through them, the movie industry) has already lost this fight. They lost it around 1995 or 1996. Everything since then is just a King Canute maneuver. They've lost for the following, single reason: For more than six years -- 1.5 student "lifetimes" -- college students have been getting music for free and getting used to playing it where, when, and how they want. And their younger siblings have been watching them. Game over.
You're right. Most of them probably don't know or care about "Fair Use" rights or copyright law or the DMCA. But they know MP3. They know timeshifting and spaceshifting. They know what they like to do with their music. And they are, statistically, going to be a demographic the RIAA/MPAA want: For no one is discretionary income so high a ratio to total income as for 20-somethings. The *AAs desparately, desparately want to sink their hooks into this demographic and extract all the cash they can. Yet these people expect free music.
And it won't get better. Maybe the culture machine will drive people to buy the protected CDs. At least as likely, the teen set will say, "Screw this -- I want my MP3".
The corpse hasn't stopped moving yet, but no technological fix is going to breathe life back into the old music distribution model. And Holllywood knows it's next... why do you think they combined a crappy protection scheme with the draconian DMCA? Because they know (a) people can draw the line from copying music to copying movies and (b) only a massive legal campaign will have any hope of stopping that, by stigmatizing movie copying before it becomes socially acceptable.
But they are too late. People can draw the line. And people already accept movie copying... somewhat fringe now, but growing.
The buggy-whip makers hear the thunder of tomorrow and are scared. Rightfully so.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
1. As has happened so many times, the media screws up on Average Joe consumer.
2. Those who want to copy/crack/hack it, will. They can't stop it.
The sad thing is, when Average Joe Consumer starts having problems with the latest DMCA-compliant device, he is unable to fix it without spending a fortune to get a new player/decoder/etc, and often he is unwilling to pay. So, in reality, the only people who get to reliably use it are the hackers.
"Easy to use" and "hacker proof" devices are a lot like child-proof safety caps on medicine bottles. It's trying to make it easy to use for those with lesser abilities, and harder to use for those with greater abilities, which is impossible. That's like trying to come up with a math problem that an elementary student can answer, but a college math professor cannot.
It ends with alienating the target audience (my grandmother absolutely hates the childproof caps, and takes all the pills out first thing and puts them in a plastic bag...), and are unable to prevent its circumvention (...while every one of her grandchildren can open the bottles without a problem).
The speed of time is one second per second.
They just need a software driver update. The OS tells the driver to fetch a sector for normal CD's. Now, instead of just fetching a sector, the OS tells the CD device what process is requesting it first through software and then the request is made.
there is no legitimate copying! what are you thinking, you just bought a license! Silly vict^H^H^H^Hcustomers!</??AA>
Until the RIAA can outlaw loopback audio cables, there will always be mp3 recording (for home personal fair use of course! Please dont come to my house with a tank!)
-- Insert wisdom here:
This whole what you can and can not do with a movie or a piece of music you buy situation has gone to far already and I know that we are not half way down the proverbial road yet.
This whole conflict over copying cds and the like comes from the fact that Copyright and freedom of speech can no longer exist side by side within the internet in it's current form. Some thing has got to give in this struggle either law or technology.
Law's will be passed and there effectiveness will be judged by there inforcability , p2p networks will evolve and so will the music industry's tactic's to destroy them but at the end of the day whatever any one says or thinks some one is going to suffer and that person is you and me.
What the world will be like in 10 years time is any one's guess but one thing is for sure there will be plenty more stories like this .
_________________________________________________
How is this substantially different introducing bad ECC data on the disk and checking for that? I can see how this will stop no-brainer solutions that attempt to burn the same incorrect ECC signal to a disk when doing a raw disk copy (as I guess the laser needs to move around the disk in a predetermined manner), but it won't stop the "real hackers". Basically it'll be the same difficulty as current systems - just remove the section of the code that performs the check and the system is worthless. Are there any games on the market you can't get wares versions of if you look hard enough?
And it's always the legitimate users of the software that have to suffer. For instance, look at the no-cd hacks for pretty much any game you care to mention. People who paid money for the game have an added inconvenience when playing, people who pirated the game just load it straight from hard disk.
I think it's really about time that companies just started trusting their customers as their attempts at copy protection seem to achieve little except annoying genuine customers.
Ok, so for all intents and purposes, this is a dongle. It's an active piece of the CD that contains hardware that can be used for challenge/response mechanisms used for copy protection.
Has anybody ever heard of cracks for dongle-protected software? (insert roaring laughter here).
Silly fools. Marketing anything as "uncrackable" is going to shoot you in the foot. This is no more secure than SafeDisc, it just requires a patch to the binaries (don't check that disc) and you're good to go.
If a computer can read it, it can be cracked.
You can copy the CD, but without the card the software won't run. Try to install the software on more computers than the publisher allows and the smart card will shut you down.
This is supposed to work on CD/DVD software, not music. If you think about it, there's no way this gimmick could keep me from ripping CD audio to MP3 files. I'm not even sure it could keep me from making a straight bit-to-bit copy of the CD audio, unless the rewrite the CD player firmware to process the card -- a functional impossibility.
This might even work with DVD movies, but I think it would be incompatible with existing DVD players. It seems that only software, which is designed to check the smart card on the disk and verify its presence, could possibly benefit.
I'm not convinced it's unbeatable, however. The CD drive is designed to scan a piece of media for bits in a particular order; that being the case, it should certainly be possible to copy the output of the smart card to an ordinary CD-R.
This only leaves the consumer with the inconvenience of having to have a phyiscal CD in their drive in order to use a piece of software, sort of a "key" to unlock the game or application. And for anything other than games which take over the screen, this would be a major pain. If I wanted to swap media out of my CD drive every time I wanted to play a different game, I would've just bought the Playstation version.
This technology might work in future game consoles which are designed to check for a smart card and know the difference between a CD with and one without, and that might be the best place for it. I can't see it catching on anywhere else. We'd be going back to the days where every program, including the operating system, had to be run off of a different floppy disk.
those licence plugs you had to put on the parallel port to run a given software package.
You know why complanies didn't use them long? Because people would buy more expensive or less featured software just to avoid them after having encounter them once.
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
[i]: Try to install the software on more computers than the publisher allows and the smart card will shut you down. [/i]
In other words, I can only format my hard drive so many times before I can't install my applications anymore?
In this DRM mess, I've given the benefit of the doubt time and time again, but every time, it's proved to be undeserved. It's starting to annoy me greatly!
Let those copy protection flags get put in every broadcast by 2006. Let them bring smart card CDs to market. It's all theory to Joe Sixpack now.
But imagine Joe Sixpack needs a new VCR or DVD player in 2006, his is broken, or he gave his to the kids and wants a new one for his home theater. He heads down to Circuit City, picks one up cheap, takes it home, and boom! several days later, discovers he can't record Return Of Seinfeld or Monster Trucks Revealed.
He might try the 800 number. He might bug a friend or two. But he's really going back to Circuit and chew some major ass, especially when he finds EVERYTHING is like that, and he is SOL, and not even his old tapes will play in his new machine. He's going to bring that machine back to Circuit City, he's gonna kick and scream and holler and GET A REFUND.
Won't be long before Circuit City screams and yells at the manufacturers and distributors to take back these returns and stop sending this crippled crap. There will be an unholy immediate instantaneous backlash that will get Congre$$'s attention far faster than RIAA and MPAA cash.
See, it's like M$ and their licensing fiasco. These guys win a few early rounds, buy a few laws and judges, and get greedy. They push the pendulum way too far. DivX didn't teach them a damned thing. Joe Sixpack will.
Infuriate left and right
My complete monologue on this goes something like, "Ignoring the difference between mean, mode, and median; if you're of average intelligence, half the people you meet are likely dumber than you. In a democracy, they vote. Be afraid."
You could've hired me.
This is so true. In fact, when I first looked into this, I accidentally clicked on the Doc Witless site and realized I was reading hype and not going to get a whit of useful information concerning the technology.
The little article on Technology Review didn't add much, either. This is what's so wonderful about things like /. We now have hundreds of curious hackers trying to figure out how this works. I love it!
MjM
I only mod up...
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
doesn't sound like it. Since TotalRecorder acts as a psuedo sound driver, this (like most) copy protection scheme wont prevent recording.
Damn, as if CD prices weren't high enough already, just think what they'll be if record companies start using this type of protection. The RIAA us just dumb enought to do it. If they use this protection for DVDs, we might see DVD movies actually cost more than their repective soundtrack CD.
The RIAA is losing so much money because they are wasting it on these half-baked, totally wacked out copy-protection scams? Oh yeah and mismanagement.
Ok, please tell me where I'm wrong here:
So I have this CD, with a "photodetector" which somehow magically converts a short burst of infrared light (while this thing is spinning in the drive) into enough power to run not only a smart chip to decode the pulse train, but to also power an LED to talk back to the drive?
Ok, let's assume that the first part works. How does this CD also magically know how fast it is spinning and when the LED is over the lens of the reader so it can time its replies to the drive? Now I put this thing in my 50x CD-ROM and all of the timing is screwed up.
According to their website, their technology is "... impracticable (sic) to crack since it is hardware based and is based on dynamic protection." If it's burned to a CD, it ain't dynamic. Only one set of encrypted data means that even if 100 keys can decrypt it, once it's decrypted once, the fact that 99 other keys will work is immaterial.
It seems to be a bit iffy, to say the least. The only way this would have a remote chance of suceeding would be for each disk to have a program that controls the drive at a very low level: a known rotation, repeatedly reading a certain sector to keep the lens and photodetector/LED assembly aligned long enough to do the data transfer, and overriding the very strong error correcting that is inherent in CD-ROMs. All do-able functions, but easy to screw up on a different drive or firmware revision.
So, what am I missing?
You all already know what I'm gonna say here because its been said over and over again by those people who AREN'T simply trying to fleece the powers that be out of money. Its the same thing with "Face Recognition" in airports, or "Brainwave Detection" in airports, or any of the slew of anti-virus/anti-haxor bs that goes around. Doc-Witness is a company that wants to make money by selling something obviously ludicrous to a group of companies willing to throw any amount of money at a problem that isn't really that big of a deal.
You wanna stop music and video "piracy", and make sales go up? Stop putting out crap artists, and terrible movies. Its the biggest hypocrisy going that the RIAA and MPAA are making legal cases out of "intellectual property theft", they haven't had an original idea in decades.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
How do I figure that? It is simple, the Business Software Alliance simply will not allow itself to be tossed to the wayside.
Here are a few reasons...
BSA Audits. These alone bring in untold hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in fines for infrigning on copy right. What happens when there is no possible way to pirate? All of those fines and revenue generated by the piracy raids and audits will simply cease to exist. That is a very important piece of revenue to the members of the BSA.
Doesn't make any sense? Well, here are a few other things that don't make sense...
The American Medical Association will not and probably never will stand up in Congress and demand that tobacco products be declared illegal. There are a few reasons for this; One is that the tobacco lobyists wouldn't allow it, withdrawling support from the Congress-people that decide to support that idea. Secondly, the AMA membership includes a large number of doctors and healthcare providers that make their money centered completely around "curing" people with smoking-related illnesses. They simply don't want to put their own people out of work.
There is simply to much money to be made by allowing people to continue to smoke, just as there is simply to much money to be made, if software piracy continues.
The only part of the software industry that would probably benefit from this technology would be the entertainment software industry. They might be the only group to adopt this technology wholesale as they have the most to lose from piracy. Games simply are not used in a business environment. If they were used as productivity tools, then the game software producers would be more lenient on piracy.
The reason is simple and has been covered time and time again. If people become used to using a particular tool, that is what they want to use. If they are able to get a working copy of Adobe Photoshop at home and get hired to do a job of photo editing. They will likely have their employer purchase that software package for them to use.
-.-
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I used to hate dongles. But I have come to believe that I just have hated every implementation detail up until now, including this one.
The problem is the need to search and locate the dongle itself, whether a CD or something that plugs into an I/O port (serial, mouse, USB, etc.), in order to use the product. It makes legitimate use of the product a severe pain, even if it legitimately protects the product.
Xesdeeni
The smartcard will only need to supply a decryption key when you install the program. After the (special) installation program gets the key from the smartcard, it will use that key to decrypt the encrypted data on the CD, install the program on the harddrive, and then you won't need the cd any more. Just like installing programs now.
Except, of course, for the fact that you took the default install of MS Office, and it didn't install the Equation Editor, and you need to put the CD back in for that. Oh, and MS Photo Editor, which really isn't all that bad. Oh, and the extra import filter for those files in WordPerfect 5.1 that you thought you'd never need again.
This is just to control access to the data on the CD. It won't be required to run the program after it is installed, any more than the CD is needed to run programs now after you install them. This is just a key for installation, not a runtime dongle.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
And then there was the crack for the dongle... which similated dongle present on a virtual serial port... and allowed the program to run as normal. From what I read of this article... the content is on the CD as per normal, albeit in a form of encrypted format, and is then decrypted by the key on the card. Despite all the fancy theory (in which the decoded picks up a pulsed "wake up" signal and beams back the decoder as a standard light signal), so long as one can simulate the decoded, one can read the data. So, once somebody cracks the code (hopefully standardized, but otherwise by perhaps analysing the data between an encoded copy and the original CD)... an app to simulate the process, and protection becomes moot. As a personal side note, copying is still illegal, I don't support it as a general rule. If you get the warez and it enough to play it through or keep it, why not shell out a few bucks for something that's worth it? (whatever happened to shareware, like in the good ol Doom Ep1 days). Anyhow, that's my spiel... flamers ahoy! Can I get my silicon chips in Salt&Vinegar or dill - Phorm
Required addition:
If you encounter an alien, don't try to make any jokes about "phoning home." This really pisses them off because the aliens didn't see dime one of royalties from "E.T."
Today, there is a thriving secondary market via ebay and other venues. The sales in the secondary market generate no revenue for RIAA members. And due to the digital nature of CDs they typically do not degrade from owner to owner, physical abuse aside. Consumers who want a given CD have several options for obtaining a copy: secondary markets and digital clones. Not all lost sales are because of digital clones.
If the RIAA wankers (or others) intoduced a EULA and an effective means to enforce DRM, this secondary market would eventually wither.
-rp
i guess reading the article before posting COULD help...sometimes...
Which for some reason brought to mind the image of AI Robots as programmers, with their metallic fingers whirring away at the keyboard.
totally nonsensical, of course. but it is a picture.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I have to say this is the most ingeniously crap and pointless copy-protection system ive ever seen. The hardware is impressive to the point that i almost didn't believe it. Alas, they forgot one thing, its not going to work because people will defeat it using the same methods they've used to defeat all the others. Software running on your PC is subject to your snooping, you can access any memory location and analyse any program, its an open platform and that's the way we want to keep it - free from Microsofts and Hollings shackles. That's why every key, dongle and serial has been cracked, and its about time that people realised that you cant build a 100% secure system.
Its a real pitty because that was a really ingenious idea, maybe they can use it for something else...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
All the embedded chip will provide is an encryption key for CDs containing software. If you were a software provider which would you prefer:
1. A CD with an embedded "smart card" that would raise the cost of the product significantly.
2. A secure web site that provides an encrypted activation key to registered owners without significantly raising costs?
I don't see this product as having much of a future.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Replay attacks:
1. Write a CD driver that works much like any other CD driver.
2. Modify above so that it logs all requests made by the computer along with time stamp, the requested block, and the data that came back, and how long it took to come back. (Incase this thing cares about timing.)
3. Read all the other blocks off the CD to get the static ones off the actual optical media.
4. Add to the driver so it can in addition to opening CD's, open the log and return the same data the software requested.
5. Put the log up for P2P sharing.
6. Feds bust your ass in jail for piracy.
7. Become Bubba's bend over bitch.
All this copy protection stuff is only going to increase the cost that the companies have to pay in order to distribute their products. You know, sooner or later, that someone is going to come up with a way around it. At that point, all the copy protection advocates have gotten themselves is a bigger bill.
The GNU project makes a good philosophical point: if you disagree with something, don't support it, and don't participate into it. Often, DVD players are hacked to break their region encoding. Under a GNU like philosophy, a better answer is to create and/or use alternatives that are simply not designed to limit your freedom, and when everyone does this, those things that are designed to limit your freedom will eventually wither away and die. It's a lofty philosophy, and a hard road, but the logic is impeccable, and you have no alternative if your convictions are deep enough. I don't have much respect for those that complain about copy-protection; music and movies are not essential to life. If you disagree with what companies are doing, find something else to do with your time. Create an alternative. Read a book. No one can copy-protect anything or limit your freedom unless you support it and allow it.
If it decrypts on the disc, then it's just as rippable as any other disc. Sounds like crap to me.
sulli
RTFJ.
If you did, you'd know better. The perfect solution would be that the kids know better. But they don't. That's a simple fact of life. So you use the solution that actually works.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Why don't we use macrovision as well?? Some people never learn ....
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Last time I checked it did.... Or are they going to put a battery on every CD rom? I can see it now...after two years the battery goes dead and the disk won't work any more.
How many people who are reading this post own DVD players and continue to purchase DVDs?
(massive show of hands)
How many of you are still holding out on your refusal to buy into this consumer-abusive technology?
(5 or 6 people, 10 tops, raise their hands)
How many of you are actuallly so radical that you refuse to purchase audio CD's controlled by the RIAA because you despise their business practises and treatment of artists? I answering this question, I only want to see the hands of people who would continue to not purchase CD's if all the filesharing networks in the whole world suddenly disappeared.
(hundreds of hands raise as I ask the question, but all of them go back down as I state the disclaimer.)
How many of your run Windows?
(Even most the hardass Slashdot-edition Linux Twinks, including me, are forced to admit they own and occasionally use at least one copy and leave their hands down.)
Nope, doesn't look like it's destroying the technology to me. Looks like it's just taking the technology in the direction large corporations with no respect for the rights of the consumer want it to go. Unfortunately, we all seem to value getting to see Yoda on methamphetamine and getting to play the Latest New Video Game that's exactly like the last Latest New Video Game only with Different Pictures more than we value our own dignity, so it's probably going to keep going that way.
Slashdot Eds... Will you PLEASE stop posting stories from any person touting uncopiable CDs, especially when they can be read by a normal CDROM for cryin' out loud. You have a brain, right? I mean really, now. Those words alone should alert you that the author is woefully uninformed... On a side note, how much is it going to produce this sort of disc anyway?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
That brings up another question: We know how much abuse a CD disk can take -- it's not harmed by much short of being melted. But will this "smart chip" stand up to electromagnetic fields (such as it might encounter from spending a couple hours atop your monitor)?? Or will it tend to become garbled or nonfunctional after a while??
I'd guess it will tend to deteriorate, and worse, may be DESIGNED to deteriorate, to make it attractive as part of a forced upgrade cycle. (See my other post where I talk about copy protection being used for exactly that -- with a real example.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
if so it bears repeating. B/c a lot of effort is
being expended on something that's effectively impossible.
As I understand the scheme: the info on the cd -software, music,
whatever, is encrypted. And there's a little chip on the disk that
decides if a read request is valid. If it is, then it also gives
you the key for decrypting the info. But then you've got the key. So you can copy the disc, encryption and all and use the
key. Or the decrypted info. All of these schemes are wasted effort,
b/c to enable an arbitrary person to use these things you have provide the means for decrypting the whatever-it-is along with the whatever it is. It really is ludicrous.
as long as they still make CDroms that can be played in regular CDplayers like the one in your stereo or walkman or whatever non-computer based CD players the audio can be streamed in to a computer and ripped...
hahaha, give it up RIAA you suck dirt clods, and if you do not give it up you will end up spending all your resources fighting a losing battle...
My 4-year-old can operate a DVD player from turning it on to starting a movie. My mom can't even do that.
If she scratches the DVD in the process, I wouldn't think of even scolding her for it. If a child that young can learn to operate a home theatre component system, or even a computer, I would encourage it.
I would demonstrate the proper way to handle the discs and only hope she catches on, but I wouldn't expect an immediate result with such a thing that my co-workers can't even grasp. Maybe I should be giving my co-workers copies of discs, too.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
interesting that this got modded off topic.
the legality of copying cds does not relate to a copy protection scheme in any way. this is interesting news.
I agree... especially with your last line. As usual, it's the honest consumers who pay the price - and get aggravated at the stupid tricks the companies pull to try to prevent copying.
In essense, this is similar to the off-disk copy protection from days of yore - I remember Battle Chess and RailRoad Tycoon - both of which I legally purchased for my father and both of which I used a binary editor to crack so he didn't have to enter codes.
In the same vein, the program is asking the CD for a code instead of the user. All someone has to do is track where that code is being requested (through a debugger), and bypass that section of code.
They couldn't do it with off disk protection, and they're not going to be very successful with on disc protection - unless success is defined by how many people you can piss off.
The worst part about this whole deal, like every other protection scheme, is that the honest customer is the one paying for the research and development into the methods the company uses to make it harder to use the legal product. It truly is a case of them trying so hard to prevent copying that consumers are going to use copied media just to avoid the hassle associated with using legally purchased media.
Like the princess said to the dark lord, "The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers."
It's already happened with a lot of us - I don't buy/use pirated software, but I don't buy commercial software anymore, either - except old bargain bin stuff, at least, and even then it's few and far between.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
see my previous post, but I spent a good couple of hours at the lab craking this, and it wasn't hard, so to all of you people trying to do better freedom protection than this, good luck. I live in a free-ish country, unlike you, and I will take advantage of it. PS. I would have been at the pub if I hadn't been bypassing your protection, so as soon as I know it's leagal for me to publish my info (1-2 days) I will. Down with the american government.
That isn't a troll, but it is offtopic and/or flamebait. Do you dumbfuck moderators even know what a troll is, or has the economy gotten so bad that you can no longer get 5 dollar crack but now have to resort to huffing keyboard duster?
A troll is where you post something for the purpose of fishing for predictable stupid replies. Flamebait is where you post something for the purpose of fishing for predictable stupid, *angry* replies. Offtopic simply means that it has nothing to do with the topic of the article.
This is offtopic.
This copy protection system is not cheap to either use, or press discs on
I expect prices to be a lot higher for discs that use this system
No More Sharing - The customer will be able to install no more computers than defined in the user agreement.
I'm not sure how sophisticated this toy may be, but my guess is that it might just read some sort of hardware address for the CD-ROM to prevent multiple installs. I wonder if all that's needed to defeat this would be to do your installs from a CD-ROM that's shared on a network?
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Someone go to uspto.gov and get the specs. Then again maybe they aren't published yet.
Copy protection is a paradox for one-way media (like CDs/DVDs/TV/Radio/etc... Plain and simple.
As long as the end-user, i.e. the viewer, cannot be trusted in all circumstances, there is no way on earth to protect it, because at some point along the line from the DVD to the TV electron cannon or LCD crystals the signal must be deciphered.
There will always be people that will capture that and put it out as an mp3 or DivX.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
It's not hardware, it's software on a smart chip. This will be just like the DSS cards I make all the time, that was "un-crackable" too. I give it 6 months before someone has a working fix.
http://www.BackYardParty.com
I think one missing link in the article is the concept of how the 'released' key is read by your computer. The 'smart card' in the protected CD will receive impulses from the CD drive's laser and then will 'release' the decryption key.
How, exactly?
The standard cd-rom drive can only get data from the CD by using its laser to read the pits and bumps. Does this 'smart card' change the laser's impression of the CD? And what prevents us from reading the 'released' code once it is 'released?' I think you are right and that there are serious holes in marketing's description of this product, and I believe that not all of the claims will hold up if this even gets mass produced.
I have still never played the copy of CivIII I bought because the copy-protection somehow conflicts with my CD-ROM (according to their tech support). There is apparently no known fix for my CD-ROM. So, I just won't buy games from that company ever again... (No, not Firaxis, but Infogrames Interactive -- the worst support I've ever seen)
Come play Moral Decay!
I recently ran into the trouble that I could not reinstall Quark XPress 4.0x on my mac.
You see, they provided a license key on floppy, and I bought my mac after the Crusades. Ipso facto, no floppy drive.
I tried sticking it into the slot loading cd drive, but it doesn't go.
Quark's tech support was less than helpful. "You'll need to upgrade to 5," is not a valid answer to a developer who needs to test on 4.0.
Luckily, we have a warezkid in the office who was able to get me a cracked installer. So I could install software we paid for -- out the ass, too, considering Quark is little more than some boxes and perfectly calibrated text.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It figures. Speak the Truth, get Modded down. Fuckers.
Yeah, right.
what's funny is that you always see statistics estimating how much money is lost due to piracy yet never see statistics regarding how much money is lost by consumers not willing to mess with copy-protected CD's or how much money all of these copy-potection schemes save companies each year. how much money did blizzard lose due to people being unhappy with Diablo II's CD's not working all CD-ROM drives? how many customers did they lose after chasing the bnetd proejct? i'd love to see a report that said "CD protection schemes saved $2B last year... meanwhile, 20,000 customers demanded refunds due to inoperable discs.". maybe one day the companies will realize that they are just going through the motions and spending alot of money while doing it.
I don't know about anyone else but I can't stand software that makes me put the original back in the drive every time I want to use the thing (games somewhat excluded, of course).
It's trying to make it easy to use for those with lesser abilities, and harder to use for those with greater abilities, which is impossible
It's trying to make it easy to use for those with lesser abilities, and harder to abuse for those with greater abilities, which is probably possible. All it means is that "they" have to find someone smarter than "us".
Synergy is your friend
"If the card deems the request legitimate"
How exactly is this possible? What authenticates the disc?
Anyway, there is a latency problem as the hardware gets faster. There will be latency in answering the above question...the chip has to decide if the requests are legitimate and then spit out data to the photosensor in the DVD/CD drive. What happens when spin rates get faster? The computational latency will be greater than the rotational speed of the drive....the drive will be waiting for the data, but the card stalls and doesn't produce the data. Current drives won't deal with these "read errors" very well.
This technology has "snake-oil" written all over it.
-ted
Think of the "vast" amount of information provided on the website and the number of fantastic claims per sentence. I think we know better from past records that this probably is not even real.
What surprise me though is to realize it made it to the front page, and I lost my time reading it.
I don't like this because it will be a pain in the ass to use. My experience, limited though it is, with smart cards hasn't made me very comfortable with the technology. I rant and rave about the stupid serial numbers that I have to type in to reinstall software upon the occasion that I have to. This seems to be more inconvienent.
Now each time you run the program, say OFFICE, you will have to "Authenticate" with the installation CD (If it runs without the 'Smart CD' where's the security?). And what happens when the smart card goes bad? Buy a new version for full price? I make copies of CD and use the copies to avoid buying new copies each time the CD gets damaged. This 'Smart CD' would preclude that.
Yep sounds like I'll be avoiding this product like the plague that it is.
Funny thing about security is that it cannot be convienent. Security makes things harder to do, not easier. And if entertainment has a lot of security, then it isn't very entertaining. Therefore the value of the product drops. This seems to be obvious to most consumers, but not to many marketing trolls.
Perhaps we should be contrarian: Enact really tough and inconvienent copy protection laws and mandate that they be used on all non-GPL'd stuff.(A special class of non copyrighted materials like home movies, music etc.) Then the market will get to choose from GPL (or something like that) and strictly copyrighted material. If we do it right, the copy protection will drive most folks nuts and the entertainment industry as we know it will die...Like a woman alone with the Boston Strangler.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
All your drives/discs are belong to us....
still can't get over that line
Will the drives be backward compatible to play normal CDs DVDs? If yes, then there will be no problem ripping the damn security card off your CD, DVD and copying the software, music, video to your computer, where a simple decoder program will decifer the contents.
You can't handle the truth.
I seriously doubt that many companies will put enough care into this to come up with a version that's any different than the stock, and don't see how the crack could not be put into a simple, easily distributable program roughly equivalent to a stock cd ripper from the end-user's point of view.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Someone should ask DirecTV how effective "smart card" technology is. Took about a month to crack their most advanced access card.
Everybody gets upset about these security measures. I say fuck 'em. If they want to waste their money trying to keep us from using the products we buy, we'll just keep cracking their archaic and poorly-planned "solutions". We'll always be smarter and move faster.
You probably mean "ASCII tastes bad, dude." Otherwise, you run the risk of this being interpreted as "ASCI tastes 'bad dude'," which really isn't what I think you intended.
...that schemes like this should be cracked. Why? Because such blindingly stupid methods of "protection" are an insult to even a basic understanding of computer security and data flow, and deserve to be annihilated. This protection isn't going to actually help anyone; it might make a few people feel better (assuming it's even for real; my vaporware sense is tingling), but it's not actually going to stop any serious cracker from getting through it.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
There is no such technology. The website is absolutely vacant of any serious discussion on how the supposed technology works, not to mention no close-up shots of the disks and not even light technical specs.. No word as to how the surface area taken by the security device would affect overall disc capacity, nor how the Cd drive is going to "talk" to the smart card in the disc (it would require special software drivers to pulse information like a disc write--maybe not even possible to do without firmware upgrades to each manufacturer's drive).. nor any word as to how the chip itself would be powered (devices don't work without a power source).. and finally, it mentions this is an Israeli based company.. who aparently has no other products to sell other than this yet they have a laboratory for doing research of such high levels.. WELL.. as if we didn't know that a large number of Israeli 'tech' companies are just fronts for out-and-out fraud! Add it up, and you'll see two plus two equals about five on this one...
The card checks if a request is valid, and then returns a key to decrypt the contents of the disc. Straight onto a hard drive.
All we have to do is change formats again (like the industry seems to do every six months) and this will no longer work.
Yes indeed. More silliness.
We've had "uncopyable" CD-ROMs for years (either physically damaged or written with funky pit lengths). We've had dongles for years, usually connected to a serial or parallel port.
Now we get both, in one tidy little package. I really doubt this will do anything more than raise the level of difficulty. Once publishers realize they're paying extra for nothing special, it'll go away by itself.
Neat technology though.
This method would make CDs and DVDs cost more. IF they implement this, and CDs cost $30.00, DVDs $40.00, nobody will buy them, and they will still try to blame "piracy," and try to get Congress to give them corporate welfare. This is a stupid idea. The main reason people today don't buy CDs is because of the outrageously marked up prices.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
I've been wanting to get into this type of field myself now. Promise copyright thugs the world "I can stop them from copying your precious material" and deliver something that gets cracked in about a day or so. No skin off my back and I just took a couple million off your hands (RIAA/MPAA) to boot. I think we should all start selling schemes to them. Remember it's like telling them " I can make water not wet"... and the unbelievable part is they are stupid enough to believe it.
I don't see the point.
If you have the original disk and its all above board the data will stream off that disk like any other. i.e. You can make copies to your disk just like you could from any other CD / DVD. And even if the software trys to prevent it in some way I'm pretty sure hacks will be all over the net within a few days of its release.
+ If you make a disk to disk copy of the 'encrypted' disk to a CDR the CDR will be the unencrypted version.
Let's hope it caches on!
it implies that there are no people who have need for making copies of their cds (and legally).
WHY is it illegal to make copies of software or music I buy?
I never will understand. I am forced to purchase software or music over and over again if the friggen equipment fails, or my 3 year old grabs the cd (along with my keys --- Yikes)
Please, someone inform me with a good reason (in laymans terms) why I am FORCED to repurchase the same software/music time and time again
I don't remember the name of the technique, but it's so simple it hardly needs a name. Rip it via analog over and over and over again. 8 times, 50 times, whatever you have the patience for. Then merge the copies. The "true" bits will be in the ripped version more often than erroroneous bits, so you just take the most frequent bits. Works best if the rips are done from multiple systems. A dedicated CD ripper could have the exact copy that was encrypted on the CD. Burn to mp3, distribute, enjoy with milk or non-dairy creamer.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
It would, of course, be possible to just ignore the smart chip (unless it somehow obscures the data physically while not in use). Then just strip a reader from a drive and write some extraction software to get any encryption keys or whatnot you might need.
;).
Ooops, did I just violate the DMCA with this post? Well, I can at least say that I didn't get in to specifics since I haven't even read the article
BlackGriffen
Mod 'im up!
Fair use isn't a valid argument against copy protection. It might be a valid argument against being sued by the DMCA, I would hope
It makes me wonder exactly how much variation there is, really.
It's trying to make it easy to use for those with lesser abilities, and harder to use for those with greater abilities, which is impossible. That's like trying to come up with a math problem that an elementary student can answer, but a college math professor cannot.
Impossible?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Hoax ?
"The CD you are trying to read... Has been pissed on."
Kentucky Fried Movie was HILARITY.
.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
The default mode of an LCD is transmissive, so the power off mode will be to allow the data to be read... use a sharpie to prevent the photoreceptor from seeing the laser, and all should be done. It won't see the light, and won't wake up the smart chip.
If the sharpie ink isn't opaque enough, a piece of black electrical tape should do nicely.
--Mike--
So basically, all they're doing is putting state on the CD itself so that you can't, say, install a piece of software again without first uninstalling it. Since the key is accessible to software, the scheme will be cracked quickly enough. Meanwhile, the legitimate users won't be able to re-install after a disk crash, won't be able to just carry around one installation CD to install the software on a bunch of computers and won't be able to make backup copies.
;-).
Those of us who used computers in the 80's are all feeling deja vu right about now.
And if you recall, the software companies that used copy protection back then are all gone now. The inconvenience of having to cope with copy protection was enough to drive away a lot of users. The companies you still hear about now mostly didn't copy-protect their software.
So here's hoping that Microsoft adopts this protection scheme for all of their products
> The card checks if a request is valid, and then returns a key to decrypt the contents of the disc
That's a "dongle", even if it doesn't connect to a PC port. It's old, expensive and already cracked.
Once the data is decrypted it can be copied everywhere.
They just can't understand that simple principle: if it can be read it can be copied.
What about weight distribution on the CD? If not properly balanced, these smart cards, photodectors, and diodes could cause big wobble problems when spinning up at 48X+ speeds.
RTFA
Thank you
It's exactly like a dongle
Only it's on the CD
For software
Not for music/movies
Not a surprise, its another attempt by a Jewsih (Israeli based) company to keep tabs on what people do. Anything can be programmed into the central chip. Read about Comverse InfoSys, a company (again Israeli based) that "...is suspected of having built a "back door" into the equipment permanently installed into the phone system that allows instant eavesdropping by law enforcement agencies on any phone in America.". Dirt on Comverse Infosys
In this day it will be a debian GNU/linux version for head chips. After all they have ported it 11 different processors
I have no sig and I want to scream
Yeah, I read the fucking article the first time.
I repeat myself - what's the fucking deal?
Scratch the film with the card ('dongle') off your disc, now your disc is just that - a plain disc with some data (encrypted or not does not matter) on it.
If you can't scratch it - use a black magic marker and draw over the diod that signals back to the reader - and again, you have a simple cd/dvd.
You can't handle the truth.
Copy protection...I'd like to propose a new verb: Gatesed. As in, to be Gatesed, or, bent over.
We own our shoes. We own our cars. We even own our ever aging organs but we don't own software. We license it. In the parlance of intellectual property, that simply means that we rent it at the rentors discretion.
Rather than just click through a MS EULA the other day, I read it. Every word, every limitation, every restriction, every whining reason why MS doesn't have to stand behind their product. Check one out. Consider the outcry from our tech savy members of Congress if the auto industry felt they too should tie on the software feedbag.
I can sell my car within an hour but transferring a MS program to another computer (I use 3 but MS only allows 2 installs per license boning) is an odyssey. I went to their site to find out how, typed in transfer, license, license transfer, etc. and got nothing but XP sales crap.
I'm not trying to produce copies for sale at a flea market, I'm just a user, not a programmer or hacker. The more EULAS I read and copy schemes I hear about, the more I want to make like Snoop Doggy Dog and find some nice crack.
Where is all that nice crack?
I disagree. RIAA (or its member companies DO NOT produce something of value. They DISTRIBUTE something of value. The ARTIST produces the item of value. Consumers say that this method no longer works. Artists say that this method no longer works... The only ones that seem to like it are the media companies, and the polititions they bought.
Here's the scenario.
Implement a bi-directional communication channel with the smart card. It has to work in a standard CD-ROM drive and you can't modulate the laser itself. However you can make the laser either shine on the smart chip sensors or not. Assuming a reasonably consistent spin rate, you can use head position to communicate information into the smart chip (think serial bit banging and maybe manchester encoding).
Such a com channel would be slow. Max of one bit per rev probably less including encoding and error correction. A single spin cd-rom does about 540 revs/sec when reading from the inside of the CD.
Next, you set up a secure com channel with the smart chip using Diffie-Hellman-Merckle key exchange and transmit the decryption key over the secured channel.
Assuming a 256-bit session key and a 1024-bit content encryption key, there's about 1.5K of data that needs to be exchanged, so the low-bandwidth of the com channel isn't really that big a deal.
Still you could break into the installer and grab the key, but Palladium is supposed to prevent unauthorized debugging and allow you cryptographically tie data to a particular computer and user. Maybe Paladium will work and maybe it won't -- all a know about Palladium I learn from Bruce Schneier's analysis.
Assuming that Palladium works, you you have a secure channel between the CD and installer as well as a secure channel between the installer and a particular machine/user combination (through the hard disk).
That leaves the only method of circumvention to be chip tampering or maybe memory buss snooping, which, while not impossible, certainly raises the bar. It only takes one crack per title -- still knocks me out of the running and I'm not exactly a newbie. It will certainly stop the script kiddies.
It all hinges on bidirectional communicaton with the smart chip. Given that and a working Palladium this is reasonably tough but not impossible to break. You have to crack Palladium.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
Since music companies actually pay about 50 cents for the media and another two bucks to print a cover and a jacket, won't this add some serious cost to their productions? I can see this on AutoCad or Photoshop maybe. In addition, with Moore's law stating that we'll essentially have a teraflop computer on our desks in about 10 more years or less, how hard is it to strongarm these codes? even 128 bit encryption shouldn't take that long if it's a simple key type method. You spend an hour scanning possible keys, write down the answer, and write app to apply it to the data. Then you just rip your backup and use your program. The nice thing about backwards compatibility in this design is that the code can't be changing constantly. It's on a cheap little microcontroller. I vote that this method be used exclusively. Anyone else?
I remember a product for the Amiga called Brilliance. This product was a direct competitor to Deluxe Paint, and it supported the (then new) AGA chipset. Brilliance was dongleware -- the dongle plugged into one of the Amiga's mouse/joystick ports. The company was very proud of their copy protection, saying they had spent many extra months implementing dongle checks throughout the software. This dongle apparently didn't just provide a unique signal that it was there, or an encryption key or a serial number. The dongle apparently had some circuitry in it that was used to perform part of certain calculations in the code, and so was an integral part of the software. Difficult to crack, right?
Well, as some of you may know, there was plenty of dongleware for the Amiga. Most high-end commercial Amiga software required a dongle -- Lightwave, for instance (although for the longest time, the Video Toaster card was the dongle). Several software packages also demanded that you plug a dongle into one of the joystick ports. Since one port was needed for the mouse, that only left one port for all those dongles, and most didn't have pass-throughs on them! Since hot-plugging devices in these ports could fry chips on the motherboard, chips that were soldered in place in some revisions, you had to turn the computer off, unplug the old dongle, plug the new one in, and then start everything from scratch.
The solution came in the form of a crack -- some teenage Amiga hacker spent about 48 hours straight cracking Brilliance, even reverse-engineering the few computational tricks that this uber-dongle supposedly performed. He did it, he said, for he challenge, but probably also because he, like many Amiga users, didn't want to be forced to plug anything into the spare port except a joystick or other I/O device. The company that released Brilliance decided to release a slightly more expensive un-dongled version of their software.
Fast-forward to today. I see three main copy protection applications for this new device:
Having said all that, I think that this technology is interesting, but not for the purpose of copy protection. Imagine enterprise application software that could keep track of what systems it was installed on in a company, how many times it was (re)installed for each seat, and when the master CD had to be used to do a repair or to install optional software components. I know a lot of system administrators who would love to keep metrics like this, and the beauty is, the metric are kept with the distribution media!
OK, you could do this without the smart card inside the CD, but unless the software publisher gives you the option of setting up a central server on your own network for keeping these metrics, where do you think the metric data is going to go? Yeah, probably to some server that the software vendor controls. And maybe for internal security reasons, a company might not want any metric data being transmitted, even encrypted, over their intranet/extranet.
At this point, I'm just throwing ideas out, but the bottom line is, I'm sure some clever person could find a use for this technology that isn't related to copy protection.
Side note: How come Slashdot now filters out entities such as (non-breaking space, commonly used) and ü? I tried using the ü entity above to insert a U with an umlaut over it, but Slashdot filtered it.
Damnations! They've got a computer in my CD! Oh, Wait- I have a computer, too!
The medium of storage is irrelevant because ultimately the content of the CD has to be transferred onto the computer in order to be of any value, and at that time a copy can be made. The same has been said of music files with embedded limitations of playability. At some point it has to become an audio stream, which can be intercepted and dumped to a file.
The most recent CD I bought was supposedly copy-protected, using that scheme that prevents it from playing on a PC. Even though the disc wouldn't play properly on my PC, Audiograbber was fortunately able to rip it perfectly, presumably because the CDROM drive is quite old and not as bothered by the copy protection as more recent drive. The first thing I did was to burn a new disc without the copy protection, so now I can play it anywhere I like. Likewise, this clever little protection scheme they think they have come up with will only last as long as it takes for the first copy to be made.
If it's human-observable, it's machine-recordable.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
by definition, 50% of everyone is HALF!! not Average...
Here's an example:
1. 4 people, two of them with $25, and one with $99 and one with $251.
2. That Adds up to 400 / 4 people = average of 100 per person.
3. But as you can plainly see that 75% of these people are below average, being propped up by the one with the greater amount.
So I'm supposed to tie up my CD-ROM drive instead of just copying their software to my hard drive? Am I the only one to remember the Lotus boycott?
Even if this worked, which I doubt. You would need to make a copy of the cd to an an iso image and mount it virtually. Then you would need to hook into your cd virtual cd driver and simulate the hardware functions of the chip. Then you would need a crack for the software portion of the installer, since it will probally ask for different set of keys each time it accesses the CD so you will need make it ask for a known key, which you can get by intercepting the cd hardware driver and listening in, and walla. Now, if you ever break the base security of the card then it is a no brainer. You can leave the software as its and just emulate the smart card elements of the CD using a plain copied cd. Regardless, if some figures out the information any given CD needs and can mimic the installer. There is not even a need for all those procedures, I mentione above. Just copy it and install.
Lots of questions..
blurred
Some guys in Slovenia cracked this baby open 18 hours ago.
It seems all you need to beat it is a felt-tip marker.
... and then there were none
any form of copy protection os very east yo get around. just hook up a portable cd player to the audio in jack on your computer, record, and convert to mp3!
Carpe ductem: Sieze the tape!
Well i'll be ready to discuss the OpSecure, on IRC server 62.90.52.98, PORT 1080!!!, channel #opsecure, on August 23,24 08:00 - 22:00 (GMT+2). Anyone who have some questions and willing to discuss -- is wellcome to join.
Well i'll be ready to discuss the OpSecure, on IRC server 62.90.52.98, PORT 1080!!!, channel #opsecure, on August 23,24 08:00 - 22:00 (GMT+2). Anyone who have some questions and willing to discuss -- is wellcome to join.
One more addition: now much money did the companies send on developing copy protection systems? Who pays for that? Aren't those the consumers who _buy_ the products? This means that actually the ones who buy, who may have difficulties using the products - _they_ sponsor this whole crazyness.
Better get on that one folks, it's better to fight the fire while it's still small...
If I buy something, they can put it in as many safes with as many locks as they want, but since I bought it, I should have all the keys. Aka, I'll take it out and use it whenever I want. And once it's out of the safe, I can do whatever the hell I want with it, such as giving it to someone else.
Magius_AR
Juiz de Fora IRC fotos
Another dumb a$$ ideal that comsumers including myself will not stand for also it doesn't work in existing CD/DVD players it's adaptable to new drives with minor mods. Is short another lame ideal that should be never implamented and then forgotten. Another thing what techi could invent something to help the RIAA and MPAA and beable to live with themselves I couldn't.
who's to say there is a chip if the ittle laser cant see it?