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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.
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!
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.
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
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?
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.
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