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Newest Audio CD DRM Proves Ineffective
The Importance of writes "As noted previously, a couple of weeks ago BMG released a new CD by Anthony Hamilton that included DRM. Slashdot readers speculated that the system wouldn't work. Now there is a report proving it doesn't work by Alex Halderman, a graduate student at Princeton's computer science department and the author of an earlier, definitive report (PDF, HTML version) on first generation CD copy protection. Famed computer scientist Ed Felten asks: "Is this the end of the road for CD copy protection?" His answer? "It ought to be.""
As long as I have an audio-in port on my sound card and an external player, drm is a waste of their time and money.
Apparently this text is on the back of the CD:
THIS CD IS ENHANCED WITH MEDIAMAX SOFTWARE
Enhanced! Since when does taking functionality away from something mean you're enhancing it?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
So they rely on the autorun setting on cd's to load the device driver for them? that's pretty stupid -- on windows it's enabled by default (typical) but most companies disable it because it's a security risk.
The Mac got hit pretty hard with an autorun virus that ended up shipping on many cd's. As a result many Mac users disabled this in OS 9, and I believe OS X has it disabled by default.
This might be effective on most windows home computers whose owners don't change the default setting, but I'm wondering how long before that driver gets infected with a virus....
A couple of dozen security and cryptography expersts vs thousands of talented hackers and ameture tinkerers. I am not nocking the guys who made this protection but they and there bosses have to understand that they are going to push this rock up a hill for all eternity. Maybe thats there goal: 1. create a DRM scheme 2. Sell it to RIAA dolts 3. DRM broken day it comes out???? 4. Profit
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
The bastards will never learn.
There will never be any copy protection scheme that will work.
If you can listen to it, you can copy it by just connecting the output to the input for another device.
Unless they make it so that nobody can listen to it, copy protection is an exersise in futility.
Death has been proven to be 99% fatal in lab rats.
It's not supposed to be uncrackable. I know it's crackable, you know it's crackable, they sure as hell know it's crackable. Just like any other protection mechanism on anything from a PC CDROM to the XBOX.
What it's supposed to do is limit casual piracy. Make it tougher for the average slob to make a copy with the EZ-CD Copier that shipped with his Dell and give it to his buddies. That's it. Most folks would just give up if it didnt work the first time they tried, they aren't going to jump through any hoops, scribble on it with a sharpie, open up a hex editor, solder a mod-chip into their player, run a distributed cracking engine to decode it, whatever. It sure as hell has nothing to do with preventing some geek from leaking it on the 'net.
That's a *large* chunk of the sales they actually lose. Bob Magoo who gets a copy from his buddy Turd Ferguson because he's too lazy or cheap to run down to Wal-Mart and get his own.
So just friggin relax already, and dont be so proud of yourself that you figured out how to "hack" the technical equivalent of the safety pin that keeps a babies diaper in place.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
> "Hey...I guess we can't do this."
then: "I wonder if I can download the song off kazaa"
At which point he spends about 30 seconds searching for the song, which some more technologically clued in person has kindly made available.
Users don't grok shift keys and drivers and EULA's. They do grok kazaa however.
An Autorun will be effective against the vast majority of Windows and Mac users.
This doesn't matter. Who cares if you lock out all those people that aren't technically savvy enough to really use their computers to begin with? These people probably couldn't figure out how to even get on Kazaa anyway.
If you can't even lock out those who know well enough to use the shift key, or to simply disable auto-run to begin with (as the author rightly points out many people have already done), then there is absolutely no hope of keeping this music off of file-sharing networks, or out of black-market pirate CD rings. All this is doing is locking out people who don't need to be locked out, and keeping the music easily accessible to those who (in the record industry's eyes) do need to be locked out. It is therefore completely ineffective and arguably counterproductive.
In fact, it's no better than the pen trick on the old schemes. I mean, if you didn't read Slashdot or CDfreaks or whatever, you'd have had no idea that that worked either. The average consumer probably still knows nothing of the pen trick. But the fact that people who generally do a lot of copying did find out about it made that copy protection method completely useless to the record labels. The whole point is to stop people from copying (and sharing), not to punish those who just want to listen to their CD's (much as it seems otherwise so much of the time).
About the only good thing I could see coming out of this (for the record industry) is a conditioning among average consumers to begin to accept DRM. Over a long period of time, that may change prevailing attitudes among the public. But it won't stop people from copying that want to copy and know anything at all about PC's, which has to be the end goal of all this in the minds of the RIAA and their cohorts.