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New Anti-Swap CDs Hit Shelves
floppy ears writes "Watch out for the new Anthony Hamilton CD, Coming From Where I'm From. The CD has two sets of tracks: one set of "encrypted" songs that can be handled by CD players but cannot be ripped, and a duplicate set of tracks in WMA format. In CD players, the disc plays normally (in theory). When put into a computer, the disc installs software to keep the music secure, but allows you to copy some or all of the Windows Media tracks to your hard drive. What a shame that I'm running Linux and my portable MP3 player doesn't support WMA."
High-end CD players and car CD players likely will not be able to handle it. Car CD players use a shock buffer which requires a true "random access" for reading ahead fast. The "encryption" usually consists of faulty bits on the CD, which results in read errors. Car CD players and high-end players try to correct for this, which does not work because there is no "true" faulty bit (which may be readable in some of the passes), but the CD is intentionally made as a faulty product!
The best thing you can do is to return the CD unopened. This way, the recall figures in the sales will go up, and even 60-year-old executives with business plans from the fifties will learn.
Fairly simple but time-consuming: if you play the CD in a standard (audio only) CD player and patch the output from said player directly into the computer's sound card (digital audio would be even better), you can simply record the music digitally. Granted, this takes longer than simply ripping from the CD, but without any particular "hacking" of your system or the disk.
Remember, only one person needs to do this - from there it can propagate across Kazaa, iMesh, etc.
William
When you're not looking, this sig is in Latin.
If it doesn't meet the Philips spec for a CD, then it can't be called a CD. Has anyone actually seen this disc yet? I sincerely hope it doesn't carry the CD logo, since that would be a breach of the license
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
blar@nath blar $ mount
blar@nath blar $ cp
blar@nath blar $ mplayer blah.wma -ao pcm -aofile blah.wav
blar@nath blar $ lame -h blah.wav blah.mp3
blar@nath blar $ rm *.wma
You loose a little quality, but who cares? At least it's not WMA!
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
Got 'Hail to the Thief' today
It's the first 'Copy Controlled' disc I've ever got, and it's quite interesting how they've worked it.
The disc, ISO Buster tells me, is written in two sessions. Session 1, has the tracks, Session 2 has the software.
When I put it in the CD-RW drive, and open it's contents, all that shows up is the software "Player.exe" and it's associated files.
Windows Media Player refuses to recognise that the disc has any music tracks. As does Quick Time.
Winamp (2) when instructed to play the disc in my CD Drive, plays it, without problem. The Creative 'Play Center' that came with my soundcard is able to play it also.
The 'Player.exe' on the disc, insists on "modifying files" on my computer. It also then plays crippled versions of the songs, at only 96Kbps. Winamp and Play Center, play the tracks at full quality.
My CD Ripping software (and Creative's Play Center software) have no problem ripping the tracks to WAV, MP3, or whatever.
When I tried the disc in my DVD-Rom drive, it made grinding sounds, crashed my PC, and I had to reboot.
So, it's called a 'Copy Controlled' disc, but what it really is, is a 'Windows Media Player Blinding, DVD-Rom Drive Fscking, Otherwise Rip It And Share-Away As Normal' Disc.
What a complete waste of time for them.
Still, on the bright side, the record company is paying good money (or it's ill-gotten gains, depending on how you look at it) to license the "copy protection," er... system, and it's associated software. Which means less money for them, and the RIAA! Hurrah!
Silly tossers.
Am I missing something?
/. had the story and umpteen million other related artcles can be found in the older stories..
Yes, you are. When this technology first came out years ago
Anyway, to save you some trouble, the idea behind the "copy protection" is that they fudge the error correction on the disc's in such a way that a less complex (i.e. your home stereo cd player) will read them just fine and ignore the garbage and your more complex, cd-rom drive in your computer will barf attempting to use the error correction and be unable read the disc.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
EMI has been releasing high profile discs from artists like Radiohead, Jane's Addiction and Blur in Canada for a while now. The problem is that these high profile discs do not play in many conventional players, such as my 1-year old Sony Discman.
I wrote a nasty email to EMI about it, and they replaced my Radiohead disc free of charge with a non-crippled version, including delivery. I suggest that everyone who's against this technology actually buy the CD, write a letter to them and have them send a second disc at their expense.
Here's an open letter I wrote to EMI and the RIAA
and here's an entry about a technology I found to circumvent it. It can be done with software:
How to Rip these tracks
My biggest objection with this technology is that they call them CDs, when they don't conform to the CD standard. If you look for the official Compact Disc Constortium logo, it's missing. Putting these crippled discs alongside regular CDs in a store is misleading. They should be in a seperate section of the store, in very clear packaging (a small sticker or bullet on the back of the CD isn't obvious enough)
I also don't think the artists know what's happening to their work. People who play these CDs in computers receive a far lower quality version of the song than they'd even get by downloading them online. They can't say that they're "all about the art" and release crap like this which sounds hissy and loses the bass-line.
The WMA files are ripped at very low bitrates, something like 96kpbs, presumably to prevent people from just extracting them off the data layer and using file sharing. I personally never rip anything less than 192kpbs.
-RW
Ummm... My crack?
CD player'Line Out' to PC 'Line In'. Where's the flaw in that?
...and that's the end of our show. Donk!
Yep. If only someone were doing this.
Oh, wait. They are. EMusic.
Tons of great stuff. Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, TMBG, Ornette Coleman... No Britney, etc., but then, is that a bad thing?
Seriously, they don't have quite the catalog breadth of iTunes, etc. but for a flat fee you get all-you-can-eat, actual MP3 downloads.
No, I don't work for them; and no, that's not an affiliate link. EMusic just never seems to get mentioned when we're busy bashing all the DRM and music-rental strategies.
-paul
"Irony is so September 10th"
Matt Miller, alt.fan.spinnwebe
..autorun on CDs is bad, mmkay!
Then disable it.
the little .exe that is started by the autorun "feature".
Autorun is and always was a security hole. Microsoft should have known already when they implemented it, that it was a security hole. A similar but more subtle hole was fixed in AmigaOS five years earlier. That hole was used by multiple viruses, and caused the computer to get affected as soon as an infected floppy was inserted in the drive.
It is possible to disable autorun in Windows 9x, the setting is very well hidden, and you need to use regedit to change it. Find the setting named: "HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Software / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / Policies / Explorer / NoDriveAutoRun" and change the value to 0x03ffffff
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Or just download Tweak UI (for Win NT,95,98,2k, or for Win XP), which lets you turn off autorun and lots of other retarded misfeatures as well.
:%s/encrypted/corrupted/g
Seriously, they might call it encryption or some shit like it, but it's just really well-placed (or poorly-placed, depending on whose side you're on) corruption. If they were encrypted, normal CD players wouldn't read the disc (and I'll bet some won't anyway because of the corruption). They're trying to rely in the fact that some audio CD players will be more tolerant than CD-ROM devices. However, that's not certain. Either don't buy this kind of garbage, or make sure you return it after buying it to prove a point (it is defective).
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Well...there's "encrypted" and encrypted. I can wager a guess as to which one this one is. If your audio CD player had no hardware/software to decrypt the music (and all of my audio CD players are old) how can it possibly be encrypted?
Also, it looks like the music on the media can be easily shared anyway:
If I can burn the music onto a CD, it would serve to reason that I could just rip from there...or can you only burn the WMV files to a CD?-Turkey
Or just hold down Shift when you pop the CD into the drive...
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
It's a lot easier than that really. Just right click on your CD-ROM device in device manager, go to properites, and uncheck the "Auto Insert Notification" checkbox.
As an alternative, if you want to leave autorun on, but temporarily disable it, just hold down SHIFT while you're inserting the CD.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
Anthony Hamilton is apparently (more likely his producer is) not very knowledgable about all his record and distribution deals. He is featured on the iTunes Music store, where his MP3's can be downloaded burned and shared, obviously giving a chance for thoose of you wiht iPods, because the iTunes store is supposed to come out with a windows port soon. The true irony in this is that his "Anti-Swap" CD is selling on amazon.com for $10.99, while the entire cd can be bought on iTunes for $9.99
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
Just rip the individual tracks to WAV as per usual (as it usually works in 'nix wherein certain mechanisms in winblows attempt to thwart this) then either convert to mp3 or ogg... less quality lost than using a lossy WMA file (which was probably DRM'ed=unreadable anyhow)
Just right click on your CD-ROM device in device manager, go to properites, and uncheck the "Auto Insert Notification" checkbox.
Wrong. That disables detection of disc changes. What you want is disabling just the autorun feature without breaking something else. I really don't know why they make such a broken option so easilly available, while hiding the setting people should be changing instead.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
"With all the money invested in trying to build a better lock, they could have changed buisness models numerous times."
There's a reason for that. Any fair business model that rewarded the artists and didn't control distribution would most likely limit the RIAA's power. Why would the RIAA want that?
It'll get worse before it gets better.
Or click Start > Settings > Control Panel > Device Manager, get the properties on the CD drive, and uncheck the "autorun enabled" option...
At least, I recall being able to do that in Win98. WinXP is a different story.
Someone mod this man up!
Not to sound like a pro-Mac weenie (although I am), but this is yet another reason why my primary choice of operating systems for day-to-day use at home is Mac OS X. Then again, I suspect that the primary goal of the "copy protection" on this CD was to lock out the majority of music pirates, who run MS Windows. I doubt that the major labels care that Linux and OS X users can rip the audio tracks by mounting the Red Book session directly.
Not true. The DMCA makes circumventing any access control technique illegal. It doesn't matter if the technique is encryption, corruption, or some other technique.
This is why the word 'effective' was added in the first place. The DMCA isn't talking about security devices per se, but about anything which has the effect of a security device, whether it was intended to do security or not.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
You're right. They aren't under any obligations, other than to their shareholders, to make money, and wouldn't it make sense to offer a product to consumers that would afford them that option? That's one of the aspects of this whole thing I don't understand.
If a guy buys an album on record, and then records it to tape so he can listen to it in his car over and over without ruining the record, where is the harm in that? Similarly, if I listen primarily to mp3s because of how easy it is to sit at my machine and dump them into a playlist and let them roll, where's the harm in that?
So its in a digital, sharable format now. Big deal. I can still record it to tape and toss it over the wall to my neighbor, who can listen to it until he's sick of it for absolutely nothing.
Do you see where were getting at? It's really silly of an industry whose primary goal is to make money with the sale of their product, limit that product of it's intended usage. That's like shooting yourself in the foot.
So that kind of copy protection might stop a few people. I guarantee that the kind of people they don't want it to work for will still find a way. Hell, I can take that CD, toss it in my CD drive, open up Sound Forge, and press record. Boom. Done. And I just realized that I could be nabbed under the DMCA for having written a scheme for circumventing copyright protection. A precedent set by the RIAA.
Senseless...
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
This is still true, for the time being.
Unfortunately, Microsoft and the music industry are already taking steps to prevent this from happening in the future.
Way, WAY off topic, but it's worth mentioning that maturbation is now legal in all fifty due to the Supreme Court's sodomy ruling. Good news for geeks everywhere!
In case anyone is interested...
:L/Disk-Validator, which contained the virus code. Other than this exploit, there is no way a disk can force the Amiga to load and run something just through disk insertion.
:L/Disk-Validator file containing the virus on any write-enabled floppy disk that was inserted, and would deliberately invalidate the bitmap again after every disk write operation finished. There were numerous clones of this virus.
If you inserted a disk where the "disk blocks in use" bitmap was corrupt (it had a checksum), Workbench would usefully repair it by scanning all existing files on disk and writing a new block usage map, before allowing you to write files to the disk. To use a UNIX analogy, the Amiga would fsck floppys before mounting them.
However, the 256Kb Kickstart ROM did not have room for this disk repair code. So, the disk repair code was loaded from disk. Unfortunately, the first place Workbench tried was on the corrupt disk itself, the executable code ":L/Disk-Validator".
The SADDAM virus (it was released during Gulf War 1) used this as an initial infection vector. It was initially spread on a damaged disk. Upon inserting the disk, Workbench 1.3 would automatically load and run
The SADDAM infection code would create a
It became completely obsolete in Workbench 2.0 (released in 1990, available as standard in low-budget Amigas in 1991/1992), as the 512Kb Kickstart ROMs had plenty of space for the Disk Validator code, so it was no longer loaded from disk.
I hope this doesn't have the "Digital Audio" logo on it, which would incorrectly imply that this is in fact an Audio CD. Such discs violate Philips' RedBook (Audio CD) format
If you buy a CD and discover some sort of idiotic copy protection on it, return it to your vendor as DEFECTIVE. If the product claims to be an Audio CD and has copy protection in the form of encryption, unreadable tracks, etc. it is violating the specification and is defective.
Either that, or false advertising. Either way it's grounds for making a complaint and getting your money back (I have done this at Future Shop, had to see the Manager).
I the case of broken CDs, it's not quite that black and white.
These CDs have a data track, which has an autorun file on it. The autorun starts a silent installer that quietly installs some shitty DRM music player on your computer to play the WMA files. At least the CD that I put in on my work machine did that. At home, of course, I disable autorun on all the drives.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
The Auto Insert Notification isn't the same as Autorun. Autorun isn't even entirely dependent on Insert Notification. Insert Notification essentially means Windows mounts the CD drive as soon as you insert a disc and close the drive. Autorun means that specified commands are run upon mounting of the CD.