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Breaking Google's DRM
An anonymous reader writes "Google's new Google Print service (that lets you see scanned pages from printed books) has a pile of advanced browser-disabling DRM in it ('Pages displaying your content have print, cut, copy, and save functionality disabled in order to protect your content.'). This works with JavaScript turned off, even in Free Software browsers. Seth Schoen has posted preliminary notes on some breaks to the DRM (beyond just automating a screenshotting process), including a proposal for a circumventing proxy that would fetch Google Print pages and strip out the DRM. A full exploration of the html obfuscation and DRM employed by Google would be very interesting; certainly the ability for a remote attacker to disable critical browser features like save, right-click, copy and cut against the user's wishes is a major security vulnerability in Moz/Firefox and should be fixed ASAP."
Knowing how to develop stuff like this is not a skill everyone has. This might explain why Google recently hired some browser-type software developers (as discussed on Slashdot).
certainly the ability for a remote attacker to disable critical browser features like save, right-click, copy and cut against the user's wishes is a major security vulnerability in Moz/Firefox and should be fixed ASAP
While I agree it would be nice to fix this from a convenience point of view, and a "it's my computer - it'll do what I want" point of view, how is this a security risk? How do I get a trojan, or lose files, because of an inability to copy & paste on a particular page?
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Facts :
i) To display the books, they've got to send that information to the browser, on your machine.
ii) Once its displayable on your machine, there is *absolutely* no way they can stop a determined person from printing it.
iii) If its going to work on Open-Souce browsers, the DRM must be fairly transparent.
iv) If it works on Open Source browsers, someone cleverer than me will modify that browser so that it works as the user intends, rather than the sender. Their only protection is the DMCA, which may stop a US coder from writing/distributing the hacked app, but the rest of us will be laughing.
Frankly, if Google were as smart as they're hyped to be, they'd know this.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Whilst I'm all for breaking DRM that hinders the rights you have to use your content in the way you want - this just looks like breaking DRM to get stuff for free.
If that really is the case, then I'm extremely concerned that someone is doing this. Mainly because it adds extra ammunition to those who (wrongly) try to push the line that the only people who want to break DRM are those who want to rip people off.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Information, by its very nature, is copyable. DRM schemes may stop a casual user from copying information, but it is theoretically impossible to make an invincible DRM system like this due to the very nature of information.
That having been said, Google is smart enough to know this. They have to put what they can in place in order to convince publishers to agree to their system.
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
We're entering an age where all data is passed as objects. OS'es won't have common facilities to save data, merely to access the storage HW. Objects might or might not have facilities to save themselves, depending on their producer. PCs are probably a lost cause, but once phones submerge in the viruspam tide, their OS'es will prove the perfect platform for "trusted computing". Software distributors will control your gizmos, and you won't even be able to turn them off.
--
make install -not war
They're preventing people from walking off with free books. If Google doesn't do that, then they cannot offer this service. Sometimes it is better to accept a little inconvenience. There is nothing stopping you from retyping an entire small passage if you want to quote it.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
... another can undo.
:-)
It seems rather futile to try and restrict what people can do with images on the net. Given that fundamentally it's an open easily-parsed format, and wget is your friend, it ought to be relatively easy to write a harvester, if anyone could be bothered.
And there's the rub. Unless Google publishers are suffciently stupid (I've not seen much evidence of online stupidity in book publishers to date...) to put significant excepts from the book online, who'd care if you could download the images ?
At the end of the day, the best protection is to make sure that the good information is kept in the book, and the online imagery gives an indication of what you get when you pay for the book. This all presupposes the book is worth buying, of course, and perhaps that's the market they're trying to protect...
I guess this will protect against casual copying by the clueless, and that's probably all they're trying to do, but Google is every tech's favourite lovechild (brought about by those clever marketing peeps, which, er, aren''t most tech's favourite people. Well, moving swiftly on...). So Google are popular, and they do something that those tech peeps will react to (DRM), and quick as a flash there are workarounds. Hell, I expect a firefox plugin by tomorrow! A waste of time, perhaps ? Or just another example where the clueful (Mozilla users) have the advantage over the clueless (IE users
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Wow, move to Cuba or N. Korea why don't you. Just because a company (or an individual, I want to make money and lots of it :o) wants to make money doesn't make it Evil. This is propoganda fed to you by socialism. There is nothing wrong with money or wanting to aquire it. It's the lust for money that get's people into trouble. When earning money becomes more important that your own morals, this is when earning money becomes evil.
The human propensity to obsess over their wants and wishes is rather puzzling, in my view. This viewpoint reeks of indivduality, a curiously human trait. Sometimes, bowing to the greater good is more beneficial than stubbornly sticking to one's own particular desires.
In the case of 'Windows', that particular piece of programming follows the philosophy of utilizing the combined knowledge of specialists to guide the less sophisticated users of the software and ease their work. That some people object to this on the grounds that it forces restrictions on them is understandable to a point, but this scheme of things is beneficial on the whole. Opponents of this approach may call this approach 'Appealing to the lowest common denominator,' or some variation thereof, but I myself prefer to call it 'Sacrifice for the benefit of the greater good.'
Discussion on this issue is something that I very much look forward to seeing.
Without the darkness, how would we recognize the light?
They have to show the suits at the publishing houses that they are being responsible, safeguarding the suits' ``intellectual property''. It doesn't really matter whether it actually works, just as it doesn't really matter if the features in the checklist on the box of software work. It's a tool for the salesman to use.
If this feature exists but really doesn't work, then the suits get the illusion that their ``intellectual property'' is protected, and they get free advertising of the try-before-you-buy variety. For this best of all possible worlds scenario, it has to work well enough to fool the suits, but not well enough to stop the rest of us.
Sounds to me as if Google has gotten it to work just about well enough to do a good job for all concerned: Google, us readers, and even the suits.
See what I've been reading.
You are adding to the fire by allowing them to change the definition of copyright. Copyright gives holder no right to determine how one USES content, it merely gives them a monolopy right over copying the content for distributation. There are some copyright limitations on use, such as public displaying and the like, but fair use clearly says once you give ME a copy of your work, I can do anything I damn well chose to it.
It already gave me a copy of the work for free, if I chose to burn it, make a hat out of it, or print it out, it's my business.
Burn Hollywood Burn
It's about time books went digital, and google is in a great position to do it. But there is fear on behalf on content owners. For google to proceed forward (legally) they HAD to address that fear. Yes, yes, we will implement DRM and all of your content will be safe. The whole while, they knew it would be cracked. I don't think Google deceived themselves, they just placated content owners. Exactly like mac did with iTunes. As an aside, what do people think of taking images and fracturing them into single pixel lines for DRM purposes? The browser can nicely reconstruct the image, but you can't save it without doing a printscreen.
Google me!
I seem to recall them using a simiar trick on the official site for Lord of the Rings when it came out.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Oh c'mon! You only need to change the user-agent string with --user-agent to something generic like MSIE or whatever.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
What's next, banning cell phone cameras in book stores, or libraries?
This sort of HTML onfuscation abuse is just the beginning. This is a general problem with any sufficiently rich presentation language. There are hundreds of different ways to obfuscate things.
Just wait until MS finally decides to properly support PNG alpha transparency! Combine this with CSS absolute positioning, and you'll start seeing images which are composited from many different layers of semi-translucent images; each of which is just noise of it's own. You also have already seen for a long time the cutting up of images into many small pieces.
This could be taken to an extreme as well. With absolute positioning you could also do this with text as well as images. Just position each letter on the page separately and randomize the order in which they appear in the HTML stream. Or even worse, use a custom downloaded font, where the glyphs are all randomized, so although it may look like an "A", it's really in the slot for a "Q"...try to cut and paste that.
Consider the PDF format as an extreme of where XHTML+CSS+DHTML+PNG can go wrt. obfuscation. Sure, the determined and savy can always get the text copied out; but that doesn't mean its not going to be very difficult.
Maybe we should all go back to ASCII and lynx.
This was always intended as a "feel good" feature of the Google print system so that pulishers would feel safer sending tons of books to Google.
/. But it's good enough for Google to run the business, most likely.
/. isn't going to spread enough FUD to publishers that would have otherwise sent in their material. Google print is still in its infancy, and could fail if Google doesn't assert some spin control on the situation, I suppose. Maybe I overestimate /.'s influence.
The "real" DRM here isn't DRM. As a previous post so astutely pointed out, DRM is schitzophrenic by nature: it involves trying to give someone something without *actually* giving it to them.
Google's "real" protection is that the service won't let you view more than a certain percentage of the book in any given month. That percentage is determined by the book's publisher at submssion time, anywhere from 20% to 100%.
Even if you can copy/paste/print, you're still only going to get a portion of the book - certainly not enough to replace a valid sale. Disabling that functionailty basically returns us to the age of photocopying a few pages of a book/article in a library. Except now we can search, so it's faster.
If one solution is as simple as "grab th data from your browser's cache" this is clearly meant to only stop the "average" user, something that is in very short supply here on
Here's to hoping this headline appearing on
And really, why should I be forced to pay $20 for a whole book when only a few chapters in it are any good, and I could just download those from google or have a friend make me a copy.
That argument is already stretching pretty thin when it comes to CDs -- it's complete bullshit in this context.
A book is not a CD with a bunch of (mostly) unrelated tracks. Each chapter adds to the overall story. If "only a few chapters are any good" why bothering reading the damn book in the first place?
There are many reasons to be opposed to this (don't seize control of my browser you worthless SOBs) but your reasoning sounds like an excuse to justify outright theft to me. If most of the book sucks so much then don't bother reading it to begin with.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This is fantastic! The authors and publishers agree to some DRM control over their content so that they can make the content available through Google, because otherwise they wouldn't make the content available at all, so lets just abuse the service, rip off the DRM, and work around it so that we can steal the content without paying for it, and before you know it, the content will be removed, and the publishers will never trust the users any more.
(slightly tongue in cheek)
I'm sick of wanting interesting and new content services, only to find that as soon as somone tries to do such a thing, using DRM as the "protection", that everyone gets in a huff at the mere mention of the work DRM (oohmigosh they are restricting _our_ rights
Most people arn't aware of that workaround. But browsers are supposed to work for the user not the website designer. "Features" that irritate the user in order to placate designers are antithetical to that the concept.
Designers didn't pay for my machine, why should they have any right to control what I do with it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
1. This is not *your* content.
Let's say that you buy a song/movie and it has DRM which restricts the way you use it - you would be justified in removing the DRM to use it in your own way (provided that you engage in 'fair' use). The content that Google displays in its book search results are *NOT* your media. You do not own it, you have not paid for it and Google is providing it to you as a courtesy. To provide it, they have to ensure that you do not make copies of it since even Google does not own the media to be able to give it away to you. Nothing wrong in restricting your options here.
2. OMG they have control over the browser!
Yes they do not ask you before disabling your browser options. But this does not install a trojan, or do anything permanent with your computer like other sites do. If you do not like the fact that your options have been reduced on that page, all you have to do is hit the back button and scram. (It's like complaining that a particular room in someone else's house is too hot - if you don't like it, get outta there!)
3. The DRM can be disabled.
Sure, it can. If one man can enable it, another man can disable it. The point, as has been noted in several places, on several occassions is that the average person cannot disable it. And no, you cannot automate the process to get complete books since the guys sitting at Google are not stupid and they will have measures built in to prevent automated downloading of entire books (through whatever strategies - searching repeatedly etc)
And yes, I have to mention this : Google has shown me how to push the limits of HTML and scripting - First with Gmail and now with Google Print - they are doing stuff that looks like pure art to the programmer within me. Hurray for ingenuity!
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
So yes, I see it as a security vulnerability... because it means that a site has control over software installed on the user's computer and doesn't ask for consent before it goes changing how that software behaves. Maybe for some people it's not a big deal to find that the cut button doesn't work, but who says it'll stop there? What else is the browser going to roll over and obey? Allowing such basic functions to be turned off is a mistake that no software should ever make. It is indeed a security problem.
You seem to misunderstand something. The content that you access through your browser is NOT YOURS. It belongs to someone else and they should be free to restrict your access in whatever way they see fit. I agree that certain functions of a browser shouldn't be able to be modified, but only ones that effect data on your computer. I think by visiting a cite you are implicitly agreeing to certain terms of service, one of which is that the content owner owns and can control access to that content. You can secure Acrobat files so that you can't copy or print them, is this a security flaw in Acrobat? No, and you'd never say that it was because you knew this was possible. Just because you didn't think or know that this could be done with a web browser doesn't make it a security issue.
...the ability for a remote attacker to disable critical browser features like save, right-click, copy and cut...
These are critical features? What alternate universe are you living in? Since when is the ability to save a web page that someone else wrote a "critical feature"? Not to mention copying and pasting?
Good lord, people... get over yourselves! The things you're complaining you can't copy and print are COPYRIGHTED WORKS. I don't care whether you don't like the law. It's STILL THE LAW. I don't like the law that says I'm not allowed to carry a sword, or run over people who step out in front of my car without looking. The police don't care whether I like those laws; they're going to arrest me if I break them.
Publishers (and Google) don't care whether you like the current copyright laws. Their goal is to make it hard for you to steal from them. Yes, I said steal! If you take something without paying for it, you've stolen it. You want to scream "Fair Use!"? Fine. You've got a text editor. you've got a computer that can run it at the same time as a web-browser. Do it by hand. What? You DON'T have a computer that can run both at once. I feel for you. Somewhere, out in that place with the (sometimes) blue ceiling, there's a place where you can buy this outmoded things called "pens" and "paper." Go buy some, and do the copying by hand. It won't kill you, trust me.
Sorry to rant, but this "I have the right to anything I want, and I shouldn't have to pay for it because The Man is just trying to keep me down by stealing my hard-earned money" ethos pisses me off. People like you are the reason Loki went under. People like you are the reason several bands I liked broke up. People like you, only a little less tech-savvy, are the reason store owners have to put $5000 security systems in their stores so their merchandise doesn't get stolen. People like you are, in general, a bunch of fucking jackasses. Go out and get a job, then buy the freaking book. Or get it from a library if you don't want to pay, but give it back to them when you're done.
I can't imagine a bigger security vulnerability than an inability to copy/paste someone else's graphic! Dear God, whatever will we do!
Jesus, people, do we have to break everything just for the sake of breaking it? And do we have to bring in the melodrama? As someone mentioned above, the only reason Google *can* offer this is because of the DRM. Why do we have to immediately set to destroying every new toy we get with a hammer?
At some point all information will be digital, and if we don't ever let people have a way to make money from creating content, they'll STOP CREATING THE CONTENT. And then I guess we'll have gotten our way, huh?
>> You can talk about your "rights" all you want, but the world doesn't revolve around you
Nor does it revolve around a "content provider". My "rights" are equal to their "rights", as both are provided for by the same body of law.
>> Why should copyright violations be consequence free?
By saying this, you're completely missing the entire point of the discussion. There isn't a copyright violation unless you make a copy contrary to copyright law - and copyright law PERMITS me to make copies without the consent of the copyright owner under certain conditions.
Someone earlier had a link to a nice discussion on DRM by Cory Doctorow (from a talk he gave to some Microsoft employees).
>> And the flips side which is never heard here, is that Google doesn't have to deliver a free service to you.
You're right. And they don't have to offer it if they don't like the way the law is.
No, it means that they, like all other human-created organizations, is flawed, and lives in a shade of gray. People who only see black and white will detest anything that isn't pure, and so will dismiss a company that mostly does good, with an occasional misstep in the wrong direction.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Didn't you get the memo? DRM stopped being inherently evil around here the day Apple started using it.
Why does Slashdot seem to think that every piece of DRM, no matter where implemented or why, is a bad thing?
It's perfectly appropriate in this case. You are not permitted by law to download copies of books...or photocopy books in the copy machine, beyond a certain number of pages.
So why do we want to break Google's DRM, used in exactly the way DRM should be used? You have free access to something you wouldn't otherwise access, but you still don't own it, and thus can't copy it.
Slashdot,and F/OSS in general, distaste for authority is never going to allow it to be taken seriously. Until people learn to get a clue that they don't need to break something just because it exists and they don't like it, F/OSS will never be taken seriously precisely for this reason.
If I don't like some new windows you installed, I can't break them. That's illegal.
Why is it any different to break the obfuscation of the material Google is letting you access as a courtesy?
Unfortunately, that is the idea behind "trusted" computing. You no longer have full control over your own machine, you can only run applications "trusted" by those controlling the DRM.
This used to be called "Mandatory Access Control" (MAC, as opposed to the kind of multiuser protection most people deal with... "Discretionary Access Control") before Microsoft decided to change the definition of "trust".
As soon as you run an untrusted app, you cannot run a trusted application.
This is one way of doing it. Another way is to create a compartmentalised environment, where applications can not get information from compartments with a higher classification, nor transfer information to compartments of a lower classification.
Ironically, THIS kind of MAC environment under administrative control can be a major security enhancement. You could create a compartment with "untrusted classification"... which would effectively have fewer rights than even a normal application... and force users to run their web browsers and other untrusted applications inside it. Not only couldn't they bet attacked through the browser, they couldn't even be suborned or tricked by a social engineering attack into breaking the security (that's the main point of MAC, really). Unfortunately, Windows doesn't seem to have any kind of generic MAC mechanism that could be used this way.
Take your pick:
Google offers book searching with DRM
Google does not offer book searching
I'll take door number three: Google implements DRM using an application intended to provide that kind of protection, rather than taking advantage of a security hole in a browser. If that option means Google doesn't offer the service, or if that means I can't run their application so I end up in the Google does not offer book searching box, that's still better than if I end up in the my browser can be subverted box.
I have only bought one DRM-protected ebook in my life, and that was a very very special case. I normally won't buy ebooks that only run in one application, or that encode my credit card number, or that I can't read if the seller goes out of business.
I have already chosen, and I'll make that choice again and again. No DRM, no copy-protected games, no encrypted eBooks. Why is that so hard to understand?
Google is smart. They know that circumvention of copy protection is something most 4th graders are well versed in and it is impossible to stop.
If it can be observed, it can be recorded. If it can be recorded, it can be stored and duplicated. DRM and copy protection are physically impossible and serve the short term to make content producers more comfortable that someone can't "steal" their content.
Long term, the market probably won't see the need. If you have information for the general public, then the general public will have it. If you have specific information for specific individuals, then they will probably buy it because you will withold it. But you can't have it both ways. Either some of the public gets it or no one does.
The law as an enforcement mechanism. Speeding is a crime that many people do every day. It is usually harmless but does _kill people_ from time to time. If the law was serious about the crime of speeding, automobiles capable of violating speed limits would be outlawed on public roads and gps-aware governors would be placed on the cars for when they are driving by schools. But they aren't that serious about speeding even though it can kill.
Has anyone ever _died_ from making an illegal copy of a book? How about an mp3? Are people starving in the streets with no hope of a job because someone copied a book? Keep some context on this. No real damage comes from copying some crap off the web that you will probably forget about in a day anyway. Information doesn't want to be free it already is.
Google probably spent way too much money developing this dumbass copy protection scheme that only limits the usefulness of all the OCR work they are doing when they could have used that money to help cure cancer or something else important...like making gmail faster and have more space for all of my mp3 collection. Instead, to get buy-in from the publishers who "control" the content, they had to waste their time doing this. I'm sure they didn't want to...at least the people in google who have a clue probably didn't. Just don't let the publishers see how crappy the copy protection is...or they may not feel like they are getting their money's worth...oh wait...the only thing they gave up to allow a wider audience for the work was --- let me get this right --- _one_ copy of the book for google to scan and index.
Both sides should quit whining. Send your content to the distributor and let people see what you write. If they copy it themselves and reproduce it BFD. Its much easier for me to click once and hit buy right now then be surprised when it shows up on my doorstep because the purchase was so easy I forgot it.
Welcome to 2004.7726.
If anyone can cite a serious proposition from any source that goes beyond this
While you are correct that Trusted Computing does not prevent you from running software, I can indeed cite a source that Trusted Computing is intended to go WAY beyond what you suggest. I cite the Pressident's Cyber Security advisor! He gave a speech at a Washington DC Gobal Tech summit, he called on ISP's to plan on making Trusted Computing a mandatory conditions of Terms of Service for internet access! Obviously they need to spend a few years rolling out Trusted machines, but the plan is that you will have no choice but to run the MANDATED software, or be denied internet access. Cisco has alread started advertizing routers to impose such restrictions.
So the claim that you can run any software you want is PURE DECEPTION. If you do not run the mandated software, if you run software of your own choice, then you get locked out of essentially all new Trusted software and essentially all new Trusted files, and you can be denied any internet access at all. Under those conditions you in fact have NO choice or freedom to run different software.
If you don't believe me I will happily dig up a link to the Global Tech summit speech calling for making the system mandatory, I will happily dig up a link documenting Cisco's routers to impose exactly such a system.
You don't get an automatic, blanket right to do whatever you want with content just because you can see it in any other field; computing is nothing special in this respect.
You are absolutely right that there is nothing special about computing! When I play a vynal record on my record player the copyright holder has absolutely no rights over my record player! I can change and control it however I please! So long as I do not commit copyright infringment I can do anything I like and the copyright holder has no right to say squat about it. When I When I engage in perfectly legal and legitimate Fair Use the copyright holder has no right to say squat about it.
The same goes for a CD or a book or whatever. I do not have a Trusted record player. I do not have a Trusted CD player. And I most CERTAINLY do not have Trusted lightbuls in my house for reading books.
What *I* want to know is why people think computing is somehow different and subject to different and vastly more restrictive rules that goes INSANELY BEYOND COPYRIGHT LAW. Under copyright law copyrightholders have NO right to restrict fair use.
Just because the RIAA and MPAA and whoever are constantly sreaming for more power and more control and entirely NEW and UNPRECIDENTED rights on computers that no copyright holder has ever had in any other area.
What's wrong with keeping your side of the bargain, or if you don't like that side, not accepting the bargain in the first place?
The only bargain I am aware of is the copyright bargain. Under the copyright bargain I have fair use rights. If copyright holders are not happy with their side of the bargain then they are perfectly free to decline that bargain and not give me the content. They cannot simply say they are not happy with that bargain and expect some sort of rights over MY property. So long as I do not infringe copyright I have every right to do whatever I like with MY computer.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.