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JVC Announces Technology To Prevent Software Copying
An anonymous reader writes: "JVC and Hudson soft Co. of Japan have created a technology that they claim to have tested on 200 CD-ROM devices that prevents users from copying software CDs. They plan to have special encryption keys hidden in software and which are pressed onto CD-ROMs and which can not be read with ordinary procedures. They claim that the location, length and number of embedded keys can vary making it more difficult to hack."
... what about my right to make a backup copy of my software? Nobody's ever described a CD as durable.
But how does this differ from the keys on a dvd you have to circumvent when you rip them? I dont think any company can possibly safegaurd their software with a system that is up against millions of users....eventually there will be a way to get past it.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
sounds like it is designed not to allow a cd-cd copy.
Why can't I just rip an image, or at least open the cd and copy the files to my hard drive?
Why can't I patch the program after the above not to decrypt?
I seem to remember that DeCSS came about cause of these "no one will ever get our keys" security.
What about older CD drives?
Why do people think that it is possible to make bits uncopyable? Have we not been over this before? Has this changed since the last time we went over it? I am not even going to bother reading the article for this 'technology.' A design for digital copy protection is like a design for a perpetual motion machine - It may be interesting to look at, but you know from the start it is impossible to build.
Why not make CD copies have this instead of the original source discs?
For example, making backups of your software or music files. At least then you can guarantee copies of the original you own and prevent multi-generational copies of copies.
I would think both the software barons and the customer would find this win-win.
It is about time some one comes up with an unhackable security standard. I am tired of having to make back up copies of all my games and apps (esp VS. NET academic, 7 fucking cd's). Now with this technology deployed I can simply ask for a replacement disk when one of mine fail.
Wait, companies don't offer that protection even if my media fails? You mean I will have to pony up another 50-300 dollars for a piece of software?
Damn damn damn, I hope it gets cracked faster than IIS on a bad day.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Well, at work we make backup copies of our software then store the master copies in a safe place, that way we can send the copies out with our techs so if they get scratched and stuff it's no big deal.
Fair use is a nice thing, and it actually saves us money because we don't have to buy new copies when one gets scratched.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
They claim that the location, length and number of embedded keys can vary making it more difficult to hack.
"more difficult" != copy protection.
The copy protection arms race has continued unabated for what, 20+ years now?
No matter what they build, it will be circumvented. If a human can design it, another human can dismantle it.
It's sad, really, watching these companies dump millions of dollars into useless protection schemes while watching their profits and stock values shrink day by day.
Look -- it's not the pirates that are hurting your businesses. They have always existed and will continue to exist.
It's your stubborn unwillingness to admit that you cannot recoup every single penny from every single installation of your software throughout the world.
I'm not so sure. Using the analogy of the CSS decryption keys on a DVD, why not decrypt the keys and write out the unencrypted data back to another disc, then eliminate the security wrappers (whatever those may be) that are embedded in the formerly protected software?
Seems to me that it's no different than old protection methods on floppy discs, except that you've added another layer by decrypting most of the executable data with keys stored in the hidden "uncopyable" areas of the disc.
If someone wants that software bad enough to steal it, it will get stolen.
To me, it seems similar in concept to how one would steal a motorcycle. You can lock the handlebars, put an alarm on it, lock the wheels, etc. but there aren't any passive security mesaures that prevent 5-6 guys from just picking it straight up and into the back of a truck, where they can disarm it at their leasure.
Aaron
If I can read the contents of the disk, I can write it to another disk. If I can't read it (with my existing hardware and software) then it's broken.
/. in a week.
Not only that you can probably quite easily find parts of the data which are readable, but which break the relevent specs in some way or other.
This sort of thing has been tried before, it's more likely that crackers will just treat such software in the same way as that which uses a hardware dongle.
From the user POV having to always have the CD in the drive is far more hassle than something which simply plugs into parallel, USB or even PCI. This is the second "CD dongle" idea posted to
You're missing the point. No one cares about pirates. Pirates bulk-copy CDs, and a bulk copy is going to contain these odd keys. The target here is the guy who backs up his software. That guy is hurting business because we know that if he loses his copy of a piece of software, he's going to march right back into Best Buy and pay for it again. That's revenue, and we all know that revenue is a good thing!
The anti-consumer attitude that the software and hardware industry is pushing is just beyond belief.
From the post:
The data _must_ be accessible, in order for any normal CD-ROM to be able to read it, but you have to use, like you said, low-level access to the device. It's not impossible, but it's more difficult. First, there's the difficulty of determining where the software looks for the information. Presumably, it's reading the disk, and sorting out that one line that it's requesting the key from is difficult. I'm not saying it's impossible. But it would probably have to be done on a CD-by-CD basis. So likely, you'd have to either develop a very sophisticated program to determine, given a copy-protected CD with its program running, which data contains the key, or crack each CD one at a time.
It's not foolproof, but it at least is a new thing. When are producers of products going to learn that they CANNOT STOP people from ripping off their product until people have the MORALS not to do it? Face it, there's no unbreakable copy protection except for a populace who refuses to copy copyrighted works!
So the producers just have to keep coming up with new measures which will be either less or more effective than past ones, and hope that the crackers will be inconvenienced enough that they'll just wait for someone else to crack it and use the other person's crack. The more difficult the protection is to crack, the fewer people will be able to crack it, and (hopefully) the fewer people will be disposed to take the TIME to crack it.
Crackers will find a way for anything, if they feel like the rewards (free (as in beer) software, the pride of having cracked something, or whatever else motivates them) compensate for the trouble of finding a crack.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
This is not Copy Protection, because it doesn't protect your "copy" at all, and in fact they're trying to mislead you into believing that making a copy is forbidden. There is nothing at all wrong with copying a music CD. Your purchase price INCLUDES the right to make a copy.
Please begin to call this by it's proper term.. Copy Prevention .
Companies like Sony, JVC, and others who are implementing these technologies want to take back the right you've paid for at the register, to make a legal copy of the music you've bought. These companies are taking your rights away, not giving you more rights.
If you want to retain the rights to the music you've already purchased, don't support companies who support or develop technologies like this. This includes going to see movies in the theaters that are sponsored by Sony Pictures and other companies who back or support these restrictive technologies. This is not a joke. Let them realize that their "decrease in revenue" is not because of piracy, but because people are getting annoyed with this stuff, and are boycotting the company's products (not to mention this economy thing these companies seem to ignore in their marketing reports on how piracy has quintupled in the past year).
Once people start using the right terms en-masse, awareness is sure to increase along with it.
Copy Prevention , not Copy Protection . Just remember that.
Now it looks like the whole batlle is going to be repeated with CD's and DVD's. Guess who's going to lose that battle?
If they vary on different copies of the same CD, it's trivially easy to run diff and isolate them. If they're the same across all copies of the same CD, they're a bit harder to find, but someone finding them can distribute a patch for the disk image to disables them. There should be a map to where the keys are, and if that's hidden, its address needs to be kept somewhere. Do they plan to rewrite the codes that handles this for each CD, so that its fingerprint can't be simply found and the rest unravelled?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
CDs are durable, and I doubt whether the software will still be in use in 5 years, certainly not in 10 years, and the CD will last at least 15, so no problem there.
Spoken like someone with absolutely no experience of flatmates, coworkers, animals, or children.
Sure, for a company that copies the install to their server and then stores the CD in a safe, a backup is not needed... but for regular home users who don't have secure storage facilities, realities inevitably intrude.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
I think it will go the other way: without the threat of people being able to get Windows for free, the price will go UP, because without warez it's either pay for it or do without. But so long as it's possible to warez a software title, major retail publishers have to consider the price point at which the average consumer will buy, vs. a point beyond which they see the item's pricing as a ripoff and would rather steal it.
And this growing presumption that the consumer is the ENEMY is self-defeating. Look what happened with the price of WinXP (with its activation sca^Hheme) -- it retails for roughly double the price of previous versions. And an awful lot of people who'd bought legit copies of all versions before XP, said "if that's the way they're going to treat us, I'll just warez the damned thing and serves 'em right."
If software publishers want this to become the prevailing attitude, hey, go ahead, protect away!
Not to mention that the risk of breakage in some situations (LAN parties, technicians' use such as someone mentioned above, etc.) and the unwillingness of some publishers to provide replacement media, are now incentives to break the protection if only so you can make a legit backup.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Server side.
Why did everyone pay for quake3 instead of copying it? ID did not put anti-copy measures on the CD. They just had a CD key which used an encryption mechanism that was contained on the server.
Would I make a copy of quake3 for a friend? Hell no I wouldn't! If I did, I sure wouldn't give them my CD key, because then I couldn't play.
The only way around this mechanism of copy protection is to hack the server that the decryptor is on. Good luck.
Of course, if you employ this method of copy protection, you have to require your customers to be hooked up to the net.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Remember that the software developer doesn't have to make their program uncrackable. They just have to make it so time consuming as to not be worth the effort
Um, no. The more challenging it is, the more people will target it. The really good cracker groups get tired of generating keygens and hacking winzip for the 10,000th time, so they really savor the opportunity to go after challenging targets.
Like playing a game of chess with a good opponent that you have to work on, as opposed to a weak opponent that's boring to play...
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Ghandi & King weere advocates of civil disobedance, that is of publicaly violating a law as a protest against it's unfairness. They were not scoffalaws that refused to obey laws because they saw a financal advantage in ignoring them. (Something I can't say about many of the posters to this forum)
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
I read the article about the copy protection scheme and was not even lightly amused.
This is going to be so easy to crack that it is not funny. The article said that each TITLE may be given different keys and what not, this will have to mean that every CD of a given software title is identical.
Now, here is how to handle this:
1. Get a CD of the title.
2. Analyze what the program asks for from the CD.
3. Write a filter that intercepts the requests from the program and returns the correct data. The original program does not have to be modified.
Copy protection schemas are not going to prevent copying. My company produces a very expensive system that can be downloaded for free off the Internet. We know people copy it, but none of the people who copy it could afford to buy it nor would they fork out that much money for the program. But, it is better that you donwload it and get used to it, then you'll ask for it when you are done with school and starts to work. More revenue to us, payraise to me. Ergo, it is good for everyone! When are other companies going to realize this?
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!