Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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...
I believe the intent for this is more for software than music or video.
Consider this the logical evolution of the hardware dongle that 3DS Max once did, and possibly still does.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
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
Try an hour. This uses standard readers. Spoof a ligitamate read and you've got the key. Sniff the IDE bus and you've got the key. The decryption algorithm has to be unencrypted and easily disassembleable on the disk for this to work in a standard reader.
Don't invest in this company.
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!
you've missed the point here. First of all these are CD-ROMS NOT Audio CD's. The copy protection only works on computer cd drives for computer software or data. The data on the cd is encrypted and can only be used via software on the CD. So there is an un-encrypted bootstrap program on the cd used to install or read the encrypted data. The data cannot be un-encrypted without the encryption key which is not on the cd data tracks, but is buried in the cd substrate in the form of a smart chip. You can burn a copy of the cd but not the contents of the smart chip buried in the substrate. A real cool idea here!
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
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.
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.
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
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.