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Microsoft Introduces Its Own CD Copy-Inhibition Scheme
M.C. Hampster writes "MSNBC is carrying a Reuters story about Microsoft's new CD protection technology. At the heart of the technology is the laying of songs "onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC.""
Can I download a version for linux?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Wait a minute, could the evil and fearless RIAA/MPAA take on the mighty Microsoft?
This reminds me of something ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Since the music industry is probably going to try stuff like this anyway, (as a consumer) I'm glad to see they're trying something that's supposed to play on everything. As an individual, I'm still annoyed that they're trying this shit, but I'm glad Microsoft is in on it because of their "amazing" security track record.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
If that's all it is, it's not going to stop anyone from ripping it on pre-Palladium systems, nor from CD players with digital I/O (although that'll only work at single speed).
And what does the article mean by "layered"? Surely not an actual multilayered disk like a DVD? Is that backwards compatible?
More details anyone?
Jon
Where is the protection if the cd can still be played on a stereo, or PC?
Can someone explain this further? What does multiple layers have to do with protecting the CD if it can be played regardless?
user@host$ diff
I could care less. It's good that it will play in normal players and computers. But I'm still going to mp3 it through the analog hole, so they can go fudge themselves.
They could have spent that $1/2 billion buying out senators,buying a win in court, or even...dare i say... redesigning Windows!!!
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
>one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC.
Uh-huh. That's nice dear. Well done. I'm sure we'll all be using it in 3 years time.
Morons.
Couldn't eject CDs from the drive. Ha. You'll wish for those days...
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
probably not.
windows xp anti-piracy was cracked.
so was most of the other anti-piracy software.
I think these companies need to wake up and realise that the reason noone is buying their products is because they are trash.
not because of piracy....
piracy is a scapegoat they use with the shareholders to avoid the 'your products are trash, fix them!' response from shareholders.
I found it interesting that when M$ said it may pay a dividend, and that it beat the streets expectations, the stock price dropped.
looks like consumers are watching.
if they could played back on any PC they would have to be capable of being played back on a virtual sound driver designed for the purpose.
.. impossible - NO
And products like totalrecorder will take them in.
Harder to copy ? yes
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
The idea of a copy-protected CD won't work. The only feasible way would to have your computer control everything you do on it (kinda like Soviet Russia), which is what Pallidiam is trying to do.
If you can play a CD, you can get the raw sound data off of it. From that raw data, you can make an MP3. If the CD is playable anywhere, you can copy it. What's to say someone won't modify their PC CD-ROM drive so it reads the "normal" data that isn't copy-protected. Someone would figure it out sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later. And if copy-protection is implemented in Pallidiam, then it probably won't be long before someone finds a way around it, knowing Microsoft's record on security.
I have a copy inhibition scheme too - Sell Crappy Music.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is a very dumb move by Microsoft. Digital media is one of the biggest reasons people are upgrading their computers and operating systems.
You can run a Word Processor on a PII with Windows 95 without any problems. Ripping and burning CDs are a different story.
So why on earth would they cave-in to DRM pressure? They shouldn't give a darn what the music industry thinks. Technology is the lifeblood of our economy, both directly and indirectly. The Music industry is a bunch of annoying, overpayed execs and stars. In a PR battle technology would win hands down, especially if the battle was over taking rights away from the consumers.
My guess is Microsoft wants to monopolize the music and movie industry. They want the next CD you buy to only be playable in a Microsoft OS. Sure they may release some half-hearted buggy specs (for a price).
Brian Ellenberger
Yes, copying music is sweet because it is free.. but what's even better than it being free is the convenience.. that you can have everything at one place instantly accecible.. now, limit me to an hours' worth of music from one artist per one shiny silver disc, and that becomes a showstopper. I want big playlists of thousands of songs at my convenience instantly playable, nothing else is good enough. That's where they should start.. I still buy CDs, but that is simply because I like to encode my songs myself, as I please. Now, take away my ability to rip these CDs, and what am I left with? That I can play them whenever I want to on my stereo, or even PC?? What good does that do me when I haven't actually played a cd off a cd player in years. It's a BIG HASSLE.
Whoa there! How about the fact that people are sick of proprietary software vendors and their expensive update/release cycles? Or in the case of audio media, prices have doubled in 15 years of being on the market, and being forced to lower prices by the justice department (having been shown guilty of essentially collusion and price-fixing).
Until these companies start listening to the consumers, they'll continue to write their own stories explaining the industries problems that allow them to justify witch-hunts (remember the RIAA seeking authority to hack computers suspected of carrying illegal media?).
Something tells me that history will repeat itself here...
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Ummm...
XP's anti piracy wasn't cracked. There were a half a dozen volume activation keys that were leaked, those got shut down with XP SP1. And someone reverse engineered the code in setup that validates the CD key - which is NOT the same thing as cracking the anti piracy. All that does is allow someone who already has a stolen CD to come up with a CD key of their own, after about 4 hours of crunching on their computer. Once they activate the computer with that key, the key is worthless to anyone else, since it won't work on another computer.
The ONLY keys that have any worth to pirates are the volume activation keys (since the work on multiple computers), and (as I said above) those keys haven't been cracked. Until someone cracks the algorithm to generate the volume activation keys, it hasn't been really cracked.
And M$ has NEVER EVER EVER said that the anti piracy stuff in XP was uncrackable. They've just said that it was harder than was worth the effort for most people.
Let me guess.. this layer will have to be read, parsed and then the file run with some controls deactivated in Microsoft Windows Media Player(tm) and nothing else. Any other software will gladly ignore it (unless MS intercepts this at the OS level) and burn it just fine. If Windows stops you, go Linux. And then reburn as a 100% plain CD Audio disk. Would be a rather nice thing to add to the "Things Linux do that you can't do on Windows"-list. It's not a very long one really...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This sounds like some of the things Microsoft has been kicking around for a while...
Wonder if they're somehow making it WMA based on top of the whole layering thing... crazy old Microsoft.
Can someone explain to me how an industry that reports record profits, year and year, can be called ailing?? That's like calling Microsoft an "ailing software company" because they have the minor inconvenience of the Justice Department. It's just not relevent.
Oh wait, I'm not a pirate, because I've never illegally sold someone elses art, and in fact, I am not bound by any agreement with the recording industry with regard to music that I've downloaded off the Internet, any more than I would be for music I taped off the radio!
Grrr.
The ultimate solution to revive the recording industry is NOT copy-protection. Ultimately, the industry must figure out how to serve the consumer's desires (this is the basis of all business and economics practices, something that the RIAA among others must have forgotten). What other industry can produce a product that is 90% crap and 10% okay, and expect the consumer to willingly pay for all 100% of it? If this were the standard business model, our Dell computers would be running P4-2.5 GHz processors with 64K RAM and 50 MB hard drives, and we would pay $3000 for them! The recording industry must acknowledge that if consumers are not willing to pay for its product, there is something wrong with (a) the product or (b) the distribution strategy (the 90%/10% ratio). I would have no problems shelling out $20 for a CD if it had more than one or two good songs on it.
By the way, the recording industry in Canada has managed to lobby a 20% levy on each blank CD-R that is sold (21 cents on a $1 CD). That eliminated the last moral reservations I had with copying music (now that the artists get my money anyway), and I bet one could mount a substantive legal defense if one were ever charged with copyright infringement based on that fee.
Although the article skimped on any sort of technical details (beyond describing it as some sort of multi-layered CD), you won't *need* to crack the protection on such CDs.
They should rip just fine in any machine that doesn't support Palladium. You don't need to circumvent the DRM, just don't use it at all.
With whatever the next format of DVDs uses, we may lose the ability to play on untrusted devices, since they don't care about backward compatibility. With audio CDs, however, not making something backward compatible guarrantees it as DOA (look at DVD audio or SACDs... Or more to the point, try to find one to actually purchase).
People don't care about quality, above a certain point. People don't care about physical form, as long as they can carry one in their pocket. People care about *convenience*. Want to know why *I* first switched from tapes to CDs? One reason, and one reason only - The ability to (nearly) instantly seek any track. And I *do* care about the improvement in quality, very much so, but in the reverse situation (if tapes could seek tracks and CDs only played in-order), I would never have switched.
So, any attempt to copy protect an audio CD will fail, as long as they try to maintaining backward compatibility. And if they abandon backward compatibility, plain ol' market pressures will doom such an effort to a rapid demise.
Oh, as an aside, I just checked MS's site, and they don't seem to have any better info than what the article mentioned. Guess we'll just have to wait on this one, or hope another Slashdotter digs up and links to something juicy...
"It enables music labels to lay songs onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC"
s/PC/PC running Windoze/
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
1. Lock the recording industry into the Redmond One-Ring (TM) licensing system. ...
2.
3. Profit!
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
No... kinda like X-Box.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned such a scheme doesn't do anything for newer CD player playback, Car CD playback, or Linux playback, or Mac playback, and (of course) still doesn't allow you to consolidate your music collection onto one computer or bring it with you on a Rio (solid state music being essential for certain activities, such as jogging or mountain biking).
So, in essence, Microsoft has offered a solution that would increase the reliance upon Microsoft products, and would increase the cost of transitioning away from them. TBNT.
(Hmmm... now where did that old single-speed CD ROM without error checking go?)
- C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
While my better instincts counsel me to follow a policy of laissez-faire, there are a couple of Microsoft's statements I feel I cannot let pass. First things first: Microsoft is willing to promote truth and justice when it's convenient. But when it threatens its creature comforts, Microsoft throws principle to the wind. Microsoft can fool some of the people all of the time. It can fool all of the people some of the time. But it can't fool all of the people all of the time. The long and short of it is that corrupt Neanderthals are unable to see that one could argue that unconscionable litterbugs have traditionally tried to piggyback on substantive issues to gain legitimacy for themselves. That's self-evident, and even Microsoft would probably agree with me on that. Even so, I do not have the time, in one sitting, to go into the long answer as to why behind its mask of benevolence stands a complete plan for world government, world power, world conquest, and the promotion of nefarious negativism. But the short answer is that it is doing everything in its power to make me fall into the trap of thinking that all major world powers are controlled by a covert group of "insiders". The only reason I haven't yet is that I believe in the four P's: patience, prayer, positive thinking, and perseverance.
It is hard to decide what is stronger in Microsoft: its incredible stupidity as far as any real knowledge or ability is concerned, or the gormless insolence of its behavior. Microsoft will defy the rules of logic long before it can convert me into one of its assistants. As I mentioned before, fatuous clericalism is one of the most effective tools of tyranny. But let me add that I cannot promise not to be angry at it. I do promise, however, to try to keep my anger under control, to keep it from leading me -- as it leads Microsoft -- to borrow money and spend it on programs that turn us into easy prey for clumsy Microsoft clones.
We must expose Microsoft's machinations for what they really are. Only then can a society free of its salacious hatchet jobs blossom forth from the roots of the past. And only then will people come to understand that it uses the word "flocinauinihilipilification" without ever having taken the time to look it up in the dictionary. Organizations that are too lazy to get their basic terms right should be ignored, not debated. At first, Microsoft just wanted to con us into believing that it is the one who will lead us to our great shining future. Then, it tried to corrupt our youth. Who knows what it'll do next? It's an interesting question, and its examination will help us understand how Microsoft's policies work. Let me start by providing evidence that when Microsoft tells us that the most foolish louts I've ever seen are all inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive, it somehow fails to mention that anger is contagious. It fails to mention that all it wants is to demonstrate an outright hostility to law enforcement. And it fails to mention that it is reluctant to resolve problems. It always just looks the other way and hopes no one will notice that I'm willing to accept that its worshippers are in league with unbridled kooks who portray meretricious wackos as spoilsports. I'm even willing to accept that it contributes nothing to society. But its hypocrisy is transparent. Even the least discerning among us can see right through it.
It is imperative that all of us in this community provide people the wherewithal to stand up and fight for our heritage, traditions, and values. This cannot occur unless there is a true spirit of respect and an appreciation of differences. Throughout history, there has been a clash between those who wish to announce that we may need to picket, demonstrate, march, or strike to stop Microsoft before it can stretch credulity beyond the breaking point and those who wish to seize control of the power structure. Naturally, Microsoft belongs to the latter category.
I don't want to overstate this point, but if Microsoft gets its way, I might very well lose my temper. Microsoft is too vulgar to read the writing on the wall. This writing warns that I've heard of unambitious things like diabolism and racism. But I've also heard of things like nonviolence, higher moralities, and treating all beings as ends in and of themselves -- ideas which its ignorant, unthinking, pea-brained brain is too small to understand. In closing, all that I ask is that you join me to stop Microsoft and turn Microsoft's sinister drug-induced ravings to our advantage.
Ok, we know that a significant percentage of MP3s online did not come from a ripped CD that someone purchased, but rather, from an advance copy, studio DAT, recording studio leak, label leak, manufacturing leak or other non-consumer source. That's no surprise to anyone, and nicely illustrated by unmastered advances (3 months early) of the last Korn and Pearl Jam CDs.
So, exactly how is this expensive MS technology going to affect that content stream? It won't. All it will do is complicate matters for people who actually are honest and purchase the CD.
Also, as someone else mentioned, if the playback device has 2 RCA jacks or a pair of cannon connectors, anyone can get a great copy via analog. Hey, there are already "Analog Rip" options in many major media applications, so what's the point here?
Rule 1: the audio degradation caused by analog copying is LESS than that caused by MP3 compression. So...I don't care what fancy DRM they bring out, if you can hear it, you can copy and distribute it.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Does this mean I'll have to renew the license on my music CDs every two years?
And will there be a logo on my CD that says "Designed for MusicXP"?
Someone came up with an ingenious way to circumvent the new copy protection scheme. Rumor has it you can buy a strand of copper, and push one end of it in a special socket labelled "Audio Out", and then take the other end of this same strand of copper and connect it up to the "Audio In" socket on the recording device.
Apparently, the theory is, the electrons inside the strand of copper get so excited that they begin to affect neighboring atoms in sort of a cascading fashion.. This happens zillions of times per second, as fluctuations in signal level travel through the copper core of the strand. In order to prevent this power from getting out of hand, they've even got stuff in development right now that uses a vinyl plastic or rubberized outer coating.
Totally fucking awesome. I want one!
No word yet on how much these strange "copper strands" are going to cost (probably hundreds of thousands of dollars considering how difficult it is to create a long, thin, flexible piece of copper in the lab, but, i'm sure the price will go down with time. Regardless, Microsoft aught to be shaking in their boots by now!
Bowie J. Poag
>How do they think it's possible that, one way or
>another, the people who want unauthorized copies
>of multimedia won't be able to make it?
By controlling everything from the bit to the out. It is the only way possible. You have a CD that is digitally encrypted, which plays through a special device that knows you have the license to play it, which encrypts it again and sends it through special wiring to your speakers which also know you have a license for it and allows the sound to pass through. All of your input devices would listen for a watermark that would be embedded in the system and stop recording if they heard it.
Now, is any of that possible? Sure. But how long will it take for all of that to come to pass? Pretty much never.
Random Musings
Do I own the cd? the content? both? If the RIAA has its way, I don't own anything I buy. Ridiculous.
I'm glad to see they're trying something that's supposed to play on everything ...I'm glad Microsoft is in on it because of their "amazing" security track record.
Worse, you make the very rash assumption that this will work. M$ and friends could care less about your anoyances, after all they consider you some kind of criminal for wanting to make backups of the things you own. We've been here before.
This reminds me of M$'s entry into backup programs for floppy disk storage. They bought out everything that worked, such as Fith Generation Systems's Fast Back program, and shut it down. What they offered instead was M$ backup, which was slow and never worked. Needless to say, CDs came along and largely replaced the need for such things and you can now get free software that will break up work larger than a CD into volumes. No rampant "piracy" ever surfaced and no real pirate was ever discouraged. It's the whole thing all over again with CDs. It did not work for floppies and it won't work here.
Another $500,000,000 down the drain, nice work M$! Is that what you spent the last 15 years of dividens on?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The bbspot released an article about Microsoft's CDS initiative (cant do sh*t)... which i thought was pretty funny.. but seems to be coming true ;)
MS CDS initiative from BBspot
It's amazing how, in the face of lowered demand and lowered sales, the Music Industry response has been to make their product LESS valuable to an end consumer. $15 for 1 hour of music that can be used across all of the devices in my home, car, and at work is a lot more compelling than $15 dollars for 1 hour of music that can only be listened to in the living room.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
the laying of songs "onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC."
:-) Or is there a difference between "normal playback" and "copy" that I missed?
I guess we all need more technical information for this not to sound like a real dumbass copy protection.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
No, I think the intent is that an audio CD player sees one "layer" of bits, and a CD-ROM drive sees an entirely different "layer" of bits.
As they both only have one laser, operating at the same wavelength. If you want different layers, it'll have to be something like SACD, which has one SACD layer, and one normal CD layer. But SACD players require another laser for this. So unless you want to ban conventional CD-ROMs in favor of only CD-ROM+"DRM laser" players, that's not possible.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Pardon me if i'm being a complete moron here, but i simply don't see how any copy protection scheme for any audio or video playback devide could ever succeed.
That was a big sentence, so i think i'm going to repeat it:
i simply do not see how copy protection on audio and video could ever work
My argument goes something like this - for playback of an audio file to happen, a digital signal (typical for CDs is 2 16b channels per song) is read by the device, and transformed into an analog signal, which is then piped to speakers. Similarly, an identical digital-to-analog conversion takes place when an image is displayed on your monitor or your tv or whatever.
there is nothing that prevents the interruption and recording of that analog signal before it hits the speakers - or even removing the speakers and replacing them with a recording device.
of course, my argument may be flawed, and i'm no electrical engineer... comments, corrections are welcome.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Sorry, you can't patent that... there's too much prior art...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
And this is different from mp3 encoding, how?
Thank you, drive through
--Dg
The quality would not be too dreadful. Once you have done it once, you have a digital version that you can copy as much as you want without losing any more quality (unlike the situation you would get if you had to keep making analogue copies).
One would think they had got the idea by now but no, lets keep trying to make that perpetual machine! The holy grail of the music industry is a bedtime story never to be fulfilled in real life.
1. If you can listen and see you can copy.
2. The quality isnt as important as the content.
3. Restrictions in use applies mostly to legit buyers since the not so legit users tends to use nonrestricted copies.
4. Pissing of legit customers tend to make them not pay for the goods.
5. If there are two versions of the same goods and one of them is unusable what do people choose?
They can never ever succeed in making a hackproof music or video format. All they can do is push their legit buyers over to pirating. I think that is a very stupid thing to do if you have a music business. Then again, not using the net to distribute music back in 1997 was a pretty stupid move too.
HTTP/1.1 400
When are they going to finally understand that anything you can play can be copied, and anything you can't play won't make money??? Instead of every industry learning the hard way, they should all learn from Hollywood's example: initially, they fought VHS technology, but when they *finally* figured out that they could make money through rentals, they rolled with it and now make far more than they ever would have without VHS.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
To my surprise he threw it into my oven and turned it on. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said, "Do not worry, it is unharmed."
After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said, "Take a close look at it."
To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, an inscription finer than anything I had ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth: "12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE820945092OF923A40EEl OE5IOCC98D444AA08E324"
"I cannot understand the fiery letters," I said in a timid voice.
"No, but I can," he said. "The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English, this is what it says:
"One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." It is only two lines from a verse long known in System lore: "Three OS's from corporate kings in their towers of glass, Seven from valley lords where orchards used to grow, Nine from dotcoms doomed to die, One from the Dark Lord Gates on his dark throne In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie. One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all And in the darkness bind them, In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie."
~Just a cute little joke I found somewhere... Somewhat relavent to the topic... Smilingirl =)
The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. - C.S. Lewis
All these copyright protection schemes do is prevent me, the consumer, using the copyrighted work in a way which is legally supported (at least here in Australia, where the DMCA isn't used as a catch-all...).
It's been said before, and'll be said again: if someone truly wants to violate copyright, there'll be a way to do it - so in the end, the only losers are Mum and Dad users.
Sigh.
Even then, all it would take would be a pair of aligator clips on the posts of your speaker drivers, along with a device to step down the signal to line level (and undo any crossover splitting if it's a multiple-driver system), and you've got yourself an analog dub, ready to create a new, unprotected digital master with.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The way I see it there are three primary considerations here.
1. The first is whether or not your PC, running the OS of you choice (Linux, MacOS, Windows, Lindows, etc), will be able to read the disc in existing CD-ROM drives. I believe that the likely answer to that question is yes, because the music industry and Micro$oft have seen the results of violating the Redbook Standard and rendering CDs unreadable. This approach leads to widespread incompatibilities, confusion, and frustration on the part of consumers about which CDs will or will not work in which devices. Thus people refuse to buy them.
2. The second question is whether or not it is possible using multiple layers on the CD to render the CD-ROM drive capable of reading only the WMA digitally encoded tracks and not the standard audio tracks. I am not an expert in CD-ROM drive hardware and drivers so perhaps one of you other slashdot people know the answer to that for sure. Let us assume for the moment that CD-ROM drives can only read the WMA encoded data tracks and move on to point number three.
3. WMA is a proprietary file format which is readable only by Windows Media Player (as far as I understand it). Thus this constitutes a "security by obscurity" type system scheme because presumably Micro$oft will keep the file format secret and somebody will have to write a program which parses the file and extracts the audio. History has shown these types of "encryption" schemes to be vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before some information about the WMA format leaks or somebody cracks the format encoding (case in point the CSS scheme employed on DVDs).
In closing, the only other alternative for additional protection beyond proprietary files is to use a real cryptographic scheme. However, it is difficult in practice to operate a public key encryption scheme under these circumstances. Basically, the more people who have access to a decryption key, even though it may be buried or hidden in the Windows Media Software, the less secure the system becomes. This was a problem faced by DVD manufacturers in the early DeCSS days (As I understand it, the original program used a key which was leaked from a manufacturer, Xing technologies I think, to decode the mpeg streams). The problem became even worse when some enterprising hackers discovered that it was possible crack CSS and decode the DVD without a key. I will bet that even the hardware player manufacturers don't bother with the keys anymore because it is cheaper to put a DeCSS based decoder chip in the box instead. Thanks for reading.
Afterthought:
The only truley secure solution would be a single all in one device (speakers and everything) with end to end encryption. I dont believe anybody would accept that draconian of a solution and even if it were somehow forced onto people they could still record the sound coming out of the speakers. The music industry will only be happy when it becomes possible to pipe the music directly into your brain so that nobody else can hear it and you cannot copy it. Oh wait! what if I remember the song and it sticks in my head? did I violate the DMCA? lol friggen hillarious.
Any interference with the redbook standard (oh, notice that word standard) will have to have some interference on the audio, and no matter how small, it's still going to be negative. And surely this kind of defeats the original marketing of CD's as "The best audio quality available".
MySQL is an example. We of course use PostgreSQL, DB2 or whatever the situation calls for. The reality of the matter is that most of our customers simply don't need anything beyond My or Post. We are talking MD practices, clinis and small hospitals. In most cases, they are NOT already paying for licenses on MS SQL. If they have it, and it works, we don't typically recommend replacing it...our competition does this sort of thing (replacing and or upgrading needlessly) and that is why we win the bid. ;)
to get into a permanent arms race with crackers is potentially expensive.
/expensive for most people so we don't often see photocopied book at swap meets.
Media people want a reasonble barrier to copying.
Photocopying a whole book is too time consuming
The fact that one can rip it via analogue is an unescapable fact so spending millions on developing a foolproof anti-digital copying mechanism is generally a waste of time.
Rememebr the VHS-VHS anti-copying machanism where some sort of modulation is inserted so that the sounds & colour fades in and out when the modulated signal is introduced as aliasing?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It seems funny that Microsoft should build MP3 ripping software into Media Player and win XP then do this. Even if they make somthing that works it still doesn't stop people from playing it in a stereo and then straight into the computer.
cat
Lets say this is implimented. Since it's on the OS level, it'll be kinda hard to bypass and since there is nolonger a lower level OS like DOS running below XP, what if things moved to the hardware level?
Whats to stop peopel from creating a cheap PCI device, much akin to a PS2 mod chip (without the licensing shit), where it will intercept the CD-DA signal from the CD-ROM drive's Digital Audio cable, and create a WAV from it just as if it were captured from the Analog inputs, but without the DAC->ADC loss? Hell, all you really need is to reprogram a cheap soundcard and it'll do the trick.
Even better if you had a board that intercepts via the IDE cable.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.