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Custom DVDs & Players For Academy Members
xyankee writes "In an effort to curtail the piracy and bootlegging of DVD screeners, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has endorsed a plan to distribute about 6,000 special DVD players to members that will play specially encrypted screener discs that would be earmarked for a specific academy voter and would play only on that person's machine. The Associated Press has the full story, while Laurence Roth, VP and co-founder of Cinea, Inc., the company behind the technology, says 'the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.'"
Cause it's not like the original DVDs were encrypted against hacking either.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
"the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked."
Setting themselves up for a MONSTROUS fall there...
I think this has quite a good chance of being secure. With such a small number of players that aren't publicly available, and with no need for backward compatibility, they can throw in more DRM than you can shake a stick at. Heck, it even appears to record on the disc each time you play it.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Someone give that Johanson kid a call.
Hate me!
If it has a video-out port, it can be used to copy the disk. Unless they plan on shipping integrated DVD players with a built-in screen it's not going to work.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Analog. Plug a VCR into the analog out and a $30 'video stabelizer' and you got a copy.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
..the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked..
I hope that quote gets used a little later on down the line, when some 14 year old writes a few lines of code that circumvents yet another uncrackable encryption / protection system...
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
"'the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.'"
uh huh.
In related news, "That gun isn't loaded" , "The dog doesnt bite" and "The Titanic is unsinkable"
Don't Tread on Me
You figure they would have done this straight out, instead of just shotgunning the discs out to everybody. Everybody wins - the voters get to watch the discs whenever they want, without having to deal with some crazy 24-hour mission impossible self-destructing DVD, the Academy is reasonably sure that some random relative won't be copying discs to put online, and they managed to do it without having to buy off any new politicians to pass another law restricting everybody's rights.
Yes, it isn't foolproof, but at least they're trying a reasonable solution, instead of poking everybody's eyes out with lawyers.
Of course, they could just say they were doing this, and then send everyone an el-cheapo DVD player with a special decal on the front. That might be enough to psych out someone.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
why hack when they can just get it analogically off the disc in extremely high quality as well?
somebody just invented a good way to milk money off from mpaa..
.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
but, wasn't decss possible only because one software player left its key out in the open? Seems to me you'd need to get hold of one of those special players if you were going to crack their partner discs.
Do you belive you can take 6000 people of any group and find one that isn't just flat out dirty and corrupt, or at the very least, easily corruptable? Or that many Academy members won't want to hook up a special DVD player each time they watch a movie? Remember, the studios want as many Academy members as they can to watch each movie, because only that gives them a shot of getting awarded. Every 'problem' a given member has with seeing a movie will reduce its chances come Oscar night.
These are all bandaids on a huge wound.
I thin this is the beginning of a new stratagem: In principle one could sell DVD players with individual signatures that can somehow burn a tag on an individual DVD, which makes it impossible to be read and played by any other player. Now THAT's DRM for you.
Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
whats it now..the alt key or the ctrl key?
They're using private, public key encryption. While this isn't impossible to crack can you imagine how long it will take to decode the data on a DVD? The film will be available to buy by the time you manage to crack it.
If the device is capable of outputting a standard video sognal for display on a monitor, encrypting the disc is almost pointless. The correlation between video quality and bootlegging worthiness is small. People in third world countries routinely rent movies filmed with handheld cameras- audience noise, mysterious shadows and crappy acoustics, etc.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Cinea will invest several million dollars to make and distribute the DVD players to academy members and possibly to movie critics and other awards groups.
Your movie-ticket dollars at work.
Just give 'em a private streaming video website...
<grrr>
You might not be aware of this, but one reason for certain pay TV stations being hacked as easily as it was (and I'm not talking about analog "encryption") was that sufficient information leaked.
And as stated elsewhere: There's still the analog output. Sure, they might put have in some watermarking. They most likely did. But I frankly doubt that there is something like *robust* watermarking for audio and video without significantly impair the signal quality, thus causing noticeable artefacts. (If there is, I'd love to see a pointer to scientifical papers, cause I'm quite interested in such methods myself.)
Actually, all a pirate would need is a fastscan wide screen TV and a video camera to make a distributable copy.
They could sit at the end of the room and just rip it straight to DVD-R from the camera.
For the authenticity of a cinema rip however, it would be necessary to have people walk past the TV eating popcorn every few minutes, slurping sprite and coughing regularly through the soundtrack.
It would be a trivial task to add out of focus Japanese subtitles later using a standard mpeg editor.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
DRM... MacroVision... special players & MAYBE one day special TVs... totally useless as long as the ultimate goal is to watch the movie... with unprotected human eyes
just take a digital camera, point it at the TV screen... et voila! Sure, won't be DVD quality, but, in home conditions, the quality will beat telesync =)
http://www.automatiq.se
How secure is AES 128+ bits anyway? MPEG streams have a pretty regular pattern that offers a lot hints to cryptanalysts. I wouldn't bet on the security of a system that encrypts 2-8 GB of data with such a regular pattern!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I don't really see why they need to go to the trouble of making each disc specific to one player, because that would just increase the cost of making a run of discs. There really shouldn't be a problem with playing a disc on another member's player. Adding a unique watermark to each player though, that shouldn't be much of a problem. But watch them screw things up so that the player firmware can be copied to a budget player.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I think that goes along the lines of, if the software on the machine can decode it, someone else's software can do it too. :)
They story says that they'd have on-screen indications of who's tape it was too. Probably something along the lines of a text across the screen somewhere saying "Screener serial# 123456".
Making a new disk isn't impossible. I've been toying with my DirecTiVo. It has wonderful outputs to go to my receiver, but not really good outputs for recording. I bought a DVD recorder, and got creative with the wiring. Now I get S-Video in, but I'm still lacking on the audio. The DirecTiVo has the choices of digital fiber optic, or L&R RCA jacks, and the DVD recorder doesn't have a digital fiber input (I couldn't find any with that). It still makes very nice DVD's.
Once I make the DVD, it's not a really hard task to take the resulting disk and edit as needed, such as blocking over whatever is indicating who's disk it is. That may be an unreasonable task, if the text is in the middle of the screen.
I can't imagine too many Academy Awards judges wanting to go through all the bother to release a bootlegged video though. I think their trouble comes when they loan it to friends, who make copies for friends, who make copies for friends (etc, etc).
It still doesn't remove the possibility of a slightly corrupt theater manager setting up a digital video camera in the booth beside the projector and hooking into their sound board, and getting an almost perfect copy of a movie though. They could still get a movie on the Internet the night before it's released to theaters.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The studios would be expected to pay for a machine to encode its discs and a licensing fee to use Cinea's anti-piracy technology.
"So you are a small indie studio with that incredible good movie (just picked up all prizes in the european festivals).
Sorry, if you can't pay a few megabucks for the license & machines and some more kilobucks for making a few thousand individual watermarked DVDs, then the academy award is not for you.
We hope for your understanding, but we have to protect the interests of our good clients from the MPAA who are in in for business and have no problem of paying these small academy consideration fees. Thank you!
Best Regards,
Mr. Big Boss of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
X IMPRIMITE "SALVE TERRA!"
XX ITE AD X
1) No one has ever successfully cracked the scheme. 2) The players could easily be manufactured again 3) The dial-up "feature" can be used to verify the academy award members are the ones watching the movie. I hated DIVX when it came out, but I can understand the studios wanting to protect their content, at least until the movie is out of the theatres. I can wait for the DVD like a good consumer, no need to pay bootleggers for someone elses work. Unless it is the original Star Wars DVD when Han shoots first.
'the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.'
You gotta be kidding. If I were some sort of technology bigwig and I wanted to buy a product and someone said those words to me I would do an about face and try real hard to not let the door hit my ass on the way out.
I would be much more impressed with the figures of what it would take to hack the discs. Cause in my opinion - encryption is made to be broken.
Now if he is saying that it cannot legally be hacked. Well that is probably true....
My understanding is that the DVD and player are matched. Each DVD can only be played on one player. This means that even if a DVD escapes, it likely cannot easily be played elsewhere. If a copy of the movie is made, then it was probably off the Academy Member's machine, and there is probably some way to identifiy the member based on artifacts within the movie.. This is quite different from the current situation in which a member can just claim that the disk was 'lost',
And yet one must wonder about the reason to go through such expense. Buying $6,0000 customizable DVD player that are hardened against attack cannot be cheap. Making sure that none of the unassigned DVD players hit the street must be expensive. Producing 60000 custom DVD cannot be cheap. From a bidness point of view, is there a real ROI from these costs? The theaters continue to rack up sales at astronimical rates. DVD sales continue at equal an equal nerve wrenching pace. But for some reason the Academy wants to concentrate on the management of custom DVD players rather than the creative act of making film. Madness.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.
He let something slip right there. My guess is that they're using a much longer encryption key, and that the key is not stored on the disc, but in the player. So to crack as easily as CSS was cracked you'd have to disassemble the player as well, and even that might not help unless you can read the code out from the inside of the chip, which may or may not be possible.
While nothing's "uncrackable", a disc encrypted with a 256-bit key that you don't have would take a while. And even if you did crack it, the odds are that the contents is watermarked, and they'd know who the release came through, and prosecute him. Then you'd have to get another source for the next disc.
Bottom line would be, you'd not get any more discs, if everyone who supplied a review copy to pirates got busted immediately. And that's assuming they CAN be hacked.
Yup - someone's making a ton of money and it's not the mpaa.
Cinea will invest several million dollars to make and distribute the DVD players to academy members and possibly to movie critics and other awards groups.
So, wait. The mpaa has millions to spend on this new way to prevent piracy? I thought they were losing money out the ass! (they'll have to reimburse Cinea somehow - so the mpaa is really paying the millions for the DVD players and the encryption)
Sounds like they need to read this.
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
It CAN contain noticeable artifacts. In fact, lots of movies these days have noticeable artifacts. You might occasionally see something in the middle part of the screen that looks like several little burns or dark spots. Those are watermarks used to keep track of what theater a film is being shown in. If it's good enough for the public, it's good enough for the Academy, who they aren't even trying to make money off of. Remember, we're talking specially coded DVDs here. They could just insert the Academy member's name at the bottom of each frame on the DVD as a "watermark" so they would be able to tell who leaked it.
Isn't it possible to route the output of the DVD unit to another recorder that would burn the film onto [video] tape or DVD? I am sure the graphics guys at the GIMP and MPlayer can find ways arround this new preventive measure.
Can someone explain why you couldn't just record the output from the special DVD player? You would still have to worry about the watermarking, but that's not so hard, if oyu can get two or more disks.
How secure is AES 128+ bits anyway? MPEG streams have a pretty regular pattern that offers a lot hints to cryptanalysts. I wouldn't bet on the security of a system that encrypts 2-8 GB of data with such a regular pattern!
If I gave you the transcript of everything ever said by every human that has ever lived and encrypted it with a random key and gave you the resulting cipher-text you'd still have to try 2^127 keys on average to recover the key .Knowing patterns in the plain-text doesn't help you at all!
In fact, even if you could choose what you wanted encrypted under my secret random key and I gave you the resulting encrypted text then even after billions of terrabytes you still wouldn't have any clue what the key is.
AES is a strong cipher by anyone's definition.
Simon.
Why are you so sure?
Time and again people have chosen laughably weak crypto algorithms and then plastered them with impressive-sounding quotes like "the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked."
They might have used a decent algorithm. But I'd put the odds at only about 50/50.
The OP is right; they're really setting themselves up for a fall.
It seems that everyone believes the point is that it might not be completely secure. BIG DEAL. The point is that the DVD's can't just be loaned out. Remember how the hulk was copied. A screener dvd, (one that was watermarked), was lent to a friend who decided no-one would catch him if he uploaded it. He was caught but that doesn't help that the movie was uploaded. I'd say the screeners are probably fairly trustworthy. This will 1: Keep them from loaning their disks out, (which is most likely the primary concern) and 2: make it a little tougher so that if their friend in batswana sais, "Hey, I'd REALLY like to see that", they can't say, "well, ok, let me copy it and send it over". Instead when a friend wants to watch it they'll go, "I'm sorry, it only works on my dvd player. Do you want to come over and watch it?" Yes, if they want to distribute a copy of it, they'll probably be able to, but I doubt thats the problem.
I do security
There is one and only one way that I could possibly see that you could make an "unhackable" DVD disc.
It is called "One-Time Pad encryption", and is what the NSA and CIA use when they really are paranoid about somebody trying to read some of their communications. Basically, you get a random noise source (often background microware radiation hiss or even more often some radioactive source and using the unpredictible nature of individual decay particles, that way producing true random numbers) and then with that source of numbers you produce something that would go into a custom player. Each person with this special player could recieve discs that could only be played on that individual player, and anybody else would litterally see just random noise on an individual DVD-disc.
Now here is the nasty part of that system: If you produce more than one DVD using the same one-time pad, the code can be cracked. That is why it is called one-time pad, because once used it can never be used again. The NSA has usually a pile of CD-ROMs or DVDs with these codes on them (or some other digital medium), and they burn/destroy the discs as soon as they use one, with a duplicate of that disc available with the person sending/receiving a message, who either decodes/encodes the data and then similary destroys the disk.
Now a modified version of this could in theory be able to stop a random hacker from getting a disc from the U.S. Postal Service and decoding it, but there is still one more place of vunerability:
The player itself must decode the movie. I think most Academy members would object to the disc being destroyed in the process of watching it (perhaps they got a phone call in the middle of watching a scene and want to back it up for a moment to catch what was going on), and then there is one other vunerability.
The movie must be viewed at some point, and regardless of what other encryption schemes are done, it must be decoded to some very simple colorspace (RGB or with video usually YUV triplet pixel values) that can then be displayed on some viewing system. The whole point of this is that Robert Redford or Tom Hanks can watch a nominated movie at home, in their underware, whenever or however they feel like it. Or with a few friends if they so choose. Even then what is stopping somebody from pulling out a camcorder and filming the TV/projection screen that is showing the movie, and don't get me to rattle on about Macrovision or watermarking... that doesn't work and ruins the image anyway.
I gave the most plausable system from somebody who has worked with multimedia systems before, and even with this hyper-paranoid system it can still be cracked.
Copyright violation acts are an inner ethics issue, like not killing somebody or not shoplifting. Some things can be done to help discourage breaking the law or stopping people from doing things like this, but if you are really interested in accomplishing the goal (like killing the President of the USA), there really isn't anything that can be done to stop it from happening. All security does in these cases is to simply put up "speed bumps" to make it harder to accomplish, and weed out the rank amatures from the professionals. Unfortunately in this world there are people who totally lack ethics and would do anything and say anything, sometimes just for fun, like feeding your grandmother to the Ravanous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
Someone says a tech cannot be hacked it creates a challenge. I think you are better off not trying to say you have the ultimate encryption.
Speaking of forgetting. The point isn't weither one can, or can not bypass these means. But the effort required to do so. It all eventually reaches a point were people will simply say "to hell with it"
Have you forgotten that we aren't discussing "people", but rather members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Frickin' Sciences?
I think any of them that are sufficiently motivated and skilled to rip a DVD in the first place can handle plugging a VCR into the video out jacks.
KFG
My ex-wife worked at a theater for years. The movies would come by truck shipment the day before release. The movies are delivered on multiple reels, so they have to be put together into one reel. You can spot the reel changes by a small black oval flashing in the top left corner. The first flash indicates the reel change is coming. The second one indicates it should happen now. They'd also need to make sure the aspect was set correctly.
To make sure that they put the reels together correctly, they'd run the movie the night before. This was required in this theater chain, as it's kind of embarassing to have a reel run backwards, upside down, or out of order.
What I don't understand is why they still distribute on film. LCD projectors have come a *LONG* way, and have far better quality than the film projectors. Instead of shipping several reels, they could be FedEx'ing single DVD's. I know some theaters are now doing this, but the majority are still film projectors.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.