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Building the AACS Next-Gen Copy Protection Scheme
Anonymous Slashdotter writes "The IEEE Spectrum has a piece that discusses the proposed encryption scheme for the upcoming HD-DVD standard. 'The key to the spirit of compromise is an agreement that the AACS specification will allow consumers to move the data on an optical disc to the various devices they own, including video servers and portable video players, either directly or via a home network.' AACS will use a so-called strong key, the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard approved by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology."
According to the article, a compromised key will be dropped so that device will no longer be able to decode new content. So the vendor has to explain to his customer why his product doesn't work anymore, likely through no fault of his own? Yeah, that'll fly...
I can see the ads in the theaters already. "I'm John Weiner and I design ciphers for the movie industry. Downloading movies hurts me."
Trolling is a art,
START YOUR CLUSTERS!
*makes sure his copies of john are all up to date*
It's only an insult if it's not true.
like the title says
So, who's going to go to jail for breaking this encryption scheme? Any takers?
allowing customers to do what ever they like with the files as long as their devices can some how communicate with home base...
umm..................
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Why is encryption necessary on a product that the user must be able to read in the first place?
What's next, encrypted books, newspapers, and magazines?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
The main flaw I can see in this is that as soon as it has been 'cracked' (which could be as simple as re-digitising the stream being sent to the video device), it can be reformatted into an MPEG2 / H264 stream and put onto BitTorrent. The simple fact is that it only needs to be broken *once*, and *everyone* can get it.
The movie business is going to hit the same wall as the audio business did, and the solution the audio business came up with (well, more accurately, were forced into) was to make the downloading of songs relatively cheap (under $1). As soon as it's not worth it to go through the hassle of copying the data, it is once again a viable product. At the moment, the movies are not viable products...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Mabey I'm wrong?
So all it takes is a DirectShow filter, frame capture to re-encoding program... what, it'll protect content for all of a week. Maybe?
Unless I can extract the content to a non-encrypted format that I can play using non-proprietary software on stock hardware, it can go to hell.
...but that's GNU-plus-AACS.
Thanks for your cooperation.
Isn't not being able to copy "Who's Your Daddy?" multiple times a feature and not a bug?
The only thing they can hope to achieve is to make it harder to copy originals.
What I mean is, the problem isn't preventing people from copying a Blockbuster DVD, it's more a problem of preventing one guy, dedicated enough, from making a unencrypted copy and posting it on P2P. Once that's done, the cat's out of the bag and the copy-protection scheme will just annoy legit users. All the others will download the free copy.
So, what will happen is, when Joe Pirate wants to make a copy, instead of just sticking the disk in the drive and wait, he'll make himself some setup to capture the video from the DVD player and he'll re-encode the video. Added cost: a capture card and a cable. Period. And once the captured video is on the net, the game's over. And I'm ready to wager there's an awful lot of people out there who hate the *AAs enough to take the (small) trouble of doing exactly that, just to shaft them.
I don't care how secure the encryption is, as everyone has already said, all it takes is a "legal" DVD player outputting a high quality signal into a capture card, and you have a decrypted copy.
I doubt that the industry is foolish enough to force consumers to upgrade their televisions to support some form of signal encryption, therefore this must fail.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
This has the same flaws as all of them.
The authorized user and the attacker are one and the same. You can't protect against that, not with cryptography.
And if it doesn't have to decrypt on its own, once I move it out of the encrypted realm, I can move it anywhere. P2P, torrent, whatever.
Or will this trigger a new round of hardware buying. Only an approved, decryption capable, iPod can be used...
FTA, this appears to be true.
"The basic idea in recovering from cracking is to make a compromised player key obsolete. Compromised players could continue to play old discs, but not new releases. And crackers would have to start all over again."
"there are actually two keys--one is on the disc itself, but it doesn't work until it is decoded by a second key installed in each player."
Making everyone's new players obsolete? HA!
With positive reinforcement from /. he'll have this thing broken in a week.
Sorry.
It'll never ever fly. Simply put the motion picture industry wants total and complete control over everything. They don't even want you copying this. How do they expect this to be accepted??? Word has it that even the old Beta vs MCA thing is about to come up again in a strong lobby attempt to kill the idea of consumers having access to recording equipment. Part of me wonders how true is that, but on the other hand, they're not much different then the way Mr Gates, and Mr. Balmer have acted either.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about...
Honestly - I work in the industry, and I'm still amazed at the lengths content providers will go to to try to prevent a single D-to-A, A-to-D conversion.
Apparently they just don't get that people - who seem willing to buy cheap videos recorded on consumer cameras in movie theaters - are going to be completely unable to see the difference in a re-recorded playback of what they see on T.V.
Folks - if you're too stupid to realize the network effect will swamp the casual copyright infringement, do something simple: don't release it. That's your only option.
Will this work on linux or will we have to rely on a HD-DVD Jon?
Mod parent up!
I think that a lot of people do not want to have to have keys to look at their own content. And they would like to share their material with others freely.
The problem that I see with the model of requireing a key to view saved video or audio is that if I don't want to use a key for what I do, then I shouldn't have to use it.
The Entertainment Industry assumes that all uses of recorders is for stealing copyrighted material. But that simply is not the case.
They assume we are all guilty, no innocence allowed.
They want everyone to always have to do a 'mother may I' when ever they want to watch or listen to content that they produced themselves.
What are the long term effects of this? Eventually all content might be unviewable or unlistenable. It will be like those Incan knotted ropes. We will have the physical device but be unable to ever know what it means.
Don't you mean the Americans? !!!!!
:)
>
that re-digitized HDTV stream will have better quality than direct rip from a DVD.
Copy right violations and the like are a social problem, and are going to be solved with a social solution.
We can throw all the technology and litigation we want at the problem, but it won't be solved until we come up with a social solution.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
a way to re-enable keys? If so, then the meta-encryption is what will get cracked, not individual keys. Actually, that will happen anyway - if these things are networked, just wait for something that disables mass blocks of keys all at once as an attack against a given hardware manufacturer. That or someone will pass out free HD-DVD's that disable competitor's machinery completely.
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
It's not necessary, but the movie industry has the illusion that if they make it harder to copy then somehow they will sell more. Remember, in their fantasy world each illegal copy is retail price lost.
So the proposal seems to be, content on DVD is encrypted with AES, using some random key. The key is stored on the DVD, but encrypted against another key, which is part of the player. How do you distribute this key inside players, without people being able to dig it out? Is it by putting it in a hardware-only form, like the chip on a smart-card? How easy is it to hide such a key in compiled software?
Correct. It is technically impossible to steal a thing using a recorder, unless you do something really odd like club a victim witha VCR during a mugging, or heave a reel-to-reel unit through a jewelry store window in order to break in and burglarize it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
1) Video recording off a flat-screen TV. Right refresh rate and proper camera setup make this one darn near impossible to defeat as long as the camera is going to work in any reasonable setting.
2) Grab it off the RCA leads that are likely to be attached to the player to allow it to still talk to the large number of TVs and other A/V equipment that is out there.
3) Develop a player that doesn't "honor" the blocking flag (when moving from the source to a mobile player) and rip directly.
How is it that the industry still doesn't "get" it? Copy protection is at best a road bump, and in most cases only prevents the users who are least likely to share from doing so.
Are we still going to be having this debate in 20 years? I certainly hope not...
---
Home Media Manifesto
What if you have a device that can play it "legally", but at the same time stream it out to another device that records it without the encryption (a la DVD to VCR copying)?
Is this device compatible with DRM?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
OR there might be a totally oposite effect: The pirated material could be encrypted and the keys only given to trusted people. Thus only the one who is involved in the illegal activity will be able to view the video or even know what it is. And if they all keep their mouths shut they could never be prosecuted because there would be no way to know what the material is, if it is copyrighted or in the public domain or what. It might be stolen, and the holders would never be able to know what it is.
Scary. Stick to your area of 'expertise' if you don't know the difference between a copyright act and an encryption scheme.
"They are living in a fantasy world," he concludes.
In any case, I am less worried about the crypto, which doesn't affect video quality. Fingerprinting of video and audio with watermarks can affect quality; in copy protection circles, you'll see iffy technologies proposed simply because they "can't hurt" to throw them in---but then some of them are detectable by golden eyes/ears. IMHO even that much quality loss is not worth whatever security a watermark offers.
Caj
Then I'm sure you should be aware of the difference between a specification and a piece of legislation (as the original AC was pointing out).
Do not open the link in the sig. It automatically spawns many shitty pr0n windows... :(
It seems that mozilla popup blocker does not work for that link
And exactly what length is that?
Last I heard, the royalty for macrovision is about 5 cents per disc.
It was news (here on slashdot some time ago) when the 2nd Happry Potter disc was released without macrovision enabled (just a single flag on the disc) to save the royalty cost. Many, many millions of copies sold within the opening days. That was the exception.
Just keep the "lengths the content providers [are] will to go" into perspective. It's several pennies per disc that retails for about $25 (US), and sometimes discounts to about half that.
Those pennies add up quickly, and there are plenty of folks who'd love to "tap that market" by offering DRM to the content providers. But ultimately, it's all about money. Studio execs aren't sitting around thinking about crypto. It's just a product they buy.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Does this mean it will now take two days from the release of the first HD-DVD player for 'DeAACS' to appear online?
Or will this be the movie industry's dream DRM solution? Something so secure that you can't even watch it!
I can't play discs 3 and 4 (the appendices) of the Two Towers Extended Release on my standards-compliant Zenith DVD player, because of a botched copy-protection attempt by the manufacturer.
If this problem keeps getting worse, the number of movies I buy will continue its asymtotic approach of zero.
This is presented as being for use with the HD-DVD standard. What about the competing Blu-Ray standard? Are they planning on using this, too, or do they have their own approach to the perceived problem?
I'm waiting for the keychain 50 gig driveto be available RSN; just copy the film and go. You can keep your plastic wafers.
Yeah, right.
Now, understand that the encrypted content will be encrypted with a different key for each piece of content. This is just obvious and similar to how CSS works. The reason is so if you break one DVD, you don't break 'em all.
But this means that the key to decrypting the content must also be on the DVD itself. So that must be transferred to the portable device as well, in order for it to be playable.
So there's two ways this can work:
Method 1: Transfer the key along with the encrypted content in a plain form. In which case the attacker figures out where the key is, decrypts the content, creates an unencrypted version. Tada!
Method 2: The player key system whereby every company/player has a key and they are each used to encrypt a copy of the content key, which is placed on the disc. Thus this keyring must be transferred to the portable device and the portable device must itself have a player key to decrypt the content. I'm betting this is the method they're going for.
In which case the crack is simple: Compromise the player key. The player key must be embedded in the device somehow. In fact it'll have to be embedded in *every* device. All it takes is one hardware hacker to yank out a player key and voila, every disc up to that point can be decrypted.
So they invalidate the player key for future releases, breaking all existing hardware using that key. They could have done this with CSS, BTW, but they didn't for fairly obvious reasons.
In any case, this helps them not in the slightest. Because now you have a means by which to crack the rest of the player keys. Look, you get one player key. You have a disc with encrypted content for all player keys. You know the plaintext for what these are encrypting (the content key). Furthermore, every disc made that you can decrypt (probably a lot) gives you a new data set. How long do you think it'll take some bright boy to come up with a known plaintext attack on AES to retrieve these keys? It might be computationally intensive, but certainly it'll be less than a brute force attack.
And then what do they do when all keys are broken? They're straight fucked then.
The very idea itself is stupid. It's bound to fail in the same way CSS did. It'll just take a little more time, that's all.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Like this fellow?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
...analog hole.
There was a time when DVD's were purchased for a single use.
This business model worked fine for a very short term then *gasp* failed.
Are we again moving toward the day when dvd users must request permission to play their DVD's?
This is a sure business model that will stand the test of the week.
If somebody made a hardware that captures from DVI output, it should be possible to make perfect digital copies, or am I wrong? This would by pass just about anything including hdtv broadcast bit.
in copy protection circles, you'll see iffy technologies proposed simply because they "can't hurt" to throw them in---but then some of them are detectable by golden eyes/ears.
Shh! Please don't give Sony/MGM an idea for the next James Bond film.
As long as a signal (video, audio, whatever) is sent to an output device (monitor, speaker, whatever), it will be easy to capture and duplicate.
There will never be an end to 'undesired' duplication.
Radar detectors, speed guns, copy protection, eavesdropping...
/. insider trading. Who can be the first to tell me which fabrication plants are going to get the lucrative production contracts for these players? I just want to know where to put my money to earn a profit.
Let's try a new discussion thread:
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
I run my Tivo's RCA outputs (S-video is reserved for actual viewing and connected to TV) through an inexpensive Canopus digitizer, and into a Powerbook to save movies and shows (DirecTivos have no Home Media Option). The result with nice cables and tight connections is suprisingly good when burned to DVD. iMovie and iDVD work really smoothly for this.
--- Ban humanity.
Current plans seem to have HD-DVDs embedded with a traditional DVD layer to work on older players. We could still rip that DVD layer.
It's not like bandwidth is fast enough that there is huge demand for slinging around high definition 4 GB movies. Most discs are ripped and compressed to around 700 MB. It's going to be years before there's any demand to rip the new format.
The point is, it's not necessary to crack the encryption, only to bypass it. CDs can have all the protection in the world, but if I can play it on a CD player, I can sample it on a PC - the same principle applies to video.
....DVD Jon has come up with a crack already, just from the text of the article! :)
an attractive nuisance? Based on all the suggestions in the posts above, everyone is sick of the adversarial relationship with the motion picture industry and a lot of people have adopted a "bring it on!" mentality.
You don't go after the hardware and software, you go after the criminals. The *AAs are treating the population the way the government treats us via the war on drugs: irresponsible and guilty.
The hard costs of a DVD and all its sexy packaging? A dollar. The value of the IP (how badly people want to see/own it) on the disk? Varies wildly. What are the options the studios have? 1) price according to IP value, 2) sell disks only to video rental places, who rent them out until the cost is recovered and then sell them used, 3) keep trying the crap with copy protection, 4) go after the IP thieves. I wonder how often they'll have to choose before they try something other than 3?
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
The single-use DVD is on the way back. New technologies are being designed by Wonkatech. The prototype can be seen here. The delectable chocolate delicious disc won't last long in the typical household: someone will find it and eat it before it gets played much at all. A surefire profit machine!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
As consumers, we're taught "there's nothing you can do about it... it's just the way things are... everyone does it... maybe it's not right but that's the way it is and there's nothing you can do about it."
When, exactly will the "industry" get that message? I wonder which eats more money? Letting petty personal copies fly about at random on the net, or buying politicians to write laws, designing ever more ridiculous measures and etc? These measures do nothing to curb hard-core counterfeiting which is the real problem.
The only reaon I think they would benefit from this sort of thing is convincing people to get away from published and recorded media and to subscribe to transmitted media instead... because it's "easier" or whatever the reason might be.
How long before users have to start registering their recording equipment with their local governments? After all, there's a certain twisted logic to making that requirement... so that even if copies are made, they can potentially be traced back to the perpetrator right?
Where are they going with this? Or are they really that stupid and short-sighted with all of this?
This kind of job requires competent engineering, and I sure hope that people employed by the DRM industry are incompetent (or can hide their competence well enough :)
You can encrypt all you want, in the end you have to ship the technology to decrypt to the customer or he can't see his movie. So it doesn't matter what fancy-pancy algorithm they use, all hackers have to do is put a wiretap between decriptor and D/A convertor, or even just hijack the analog signal to get 99.9% of the original. Wish these guys would grow up...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
It was only when DVDs came out that the industry's policy shifted to issuing new releases priced for sale. That's because there was a guy in the industry somewhere that convinced everybody that a durable media format (vs. shoddy VHS tapes) that contained a high-quality version of the movie was something a large number of people would be willing to own, rather than just rent. And he was right! People are buying DVDs in droves. DVD players were adopted by the mainstream public faster than any other electronic gadget in history, from what I've heard.
What I'm saying is, this theory that people download AVIs because DVDs cost too much just doesn't ring true. DVD sales have been phenomenal. If you think there's a DVD piracy problem in this country, think again -- check out the situation in Asia if you want to see a DVD piracy problem. I think people download AVIs because they're there. They can get the AVI before the actual movie comes out, and they can get the AVI for free for a movie that they probably wouldn't have bothered to buy, or even walk down to the video store to rent.
I mean, come on -- you can still rent DVDs. Are you honestly telling me that a price point of $3 for three nights (or whatever Blockbuster is doing right now) is more than most Americans are willing to pay to see some random shitty Hollywood movie? Of course it's not. But downloading AVIs, for many people, is just too easy.
Breakfast served all day!
How does this in any way meet the definition of theft? Are these "thieves" copying the IP and destroying the original, in order to meet the "taking" that is required by theft?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"It is not a matter of if--it is a matter of when. As long as I have the technology in my living room to watch it for myself, I can modify the system to extract the video. They can make it hard, but they can't make it impossible."
How true. In other words, a lock only keeps an honest man honest, a thief will find a way to pick the lock and steal what you have.
Seemingly ever since there have been personal computers, there have been one form or another of copy protection. Usage such as backup copies (critical in the floppy days, nearly as much so with CDs and DVDs) have always been looked down upon by the content providers, and at the end of the day, all of the barricades that they have thrown at the user have eventually been thwarted and bypassed. Now comes HD-DVD and the same principle. I suppose some never learn from the past.
Working against the encryption is the simple fact that on the average, computers get more and more powerful (for a given price point), and that their encryption must remain a relative constant due to compatibility. That said, it is only a matter of time before the encryption is overwhelmed and utterly defeated. This will happen again, always has, and always will. One only has to look at the DirecTV versus the signal pirates to see that. Coupled with human nature, that is, to show and share a "dirty little secret" -- disaster for the encryption advocate. After all, are theyu going to disable dozens of models of players, and disable their own market in the process, not to mention alienating the hell out of their customers? No, no and no.
The key to copy protection is to make the content affordable enough to make the inconvenience of counter-enryption not worth doing. They (the collective they) never seem to get that, and they always seem dumbfounded that their elaborate measures are made to look foolish. Perhaps with realistic pricing, enhanced value they would find that most people find it easier to be honest, and not bother with cloning over-priced half-rate films and music. After all, that's their only realistic choice, but the one that they dread making the most.
The funny thing here is that by trying to have more control over customers they are just creating more reason for people to go to the internet to download thier movies. Who the hell is going to want to buy a DVD player than can become unusable because someone on the other side of the world cracked the key that was being currently used? If they really wanted to stop piracy all they would have to do is sell DVD's at $2! Not many people would even consider piracy anymore because of how cheap it was! All they have to do is make it cheaper to buy DVDs than to pirate them. But ofcouse then they wouldn't be making trillions ever year it would only be billions. The other thing Hollywood never seems to realize is that if your eyes can see it, it can be copied! Guess its time to ban all video recording devices as well. And might as well ban PC's too while they are at it. mahahhahahahahah
They are on the same chip. Go ahead.
or even just hijack the analog signal to get 99.9% of the original.
Sure thing, and 300% of the original gigabyte count. Or get same file size with 50% quality, because compression artifacts from two different codecs will amplify each other. Or spend for years researching an exact duplicate of their algo (which only exists in hardware, remember?) and then they change it. Your choice.
I don't quite get why people are so optimistic regarding this nightmare.
the great thing about high capacity optical media and dirt cheap electronics designed by engineers working for slave wages is you can redefine the standards every couple of years and keep backwards compatibility with the old disks. The reason the industry wasn't doing this has nothing to do with pissing off consumers and everything to do with the fact that electronics were expensive and space was limited.
When the standards change people will buy new hardware. They'll have to if they want to keep watching (and they do). And who cares really, when the play is $30 bucks at Walmart? Heck, you might see the player industry become like video games (razor blade model), although I'm sure the guys in charge of making players aren't happy with that thought....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Apparently they just don't get that people - who seem willing to buy cheap videos recorded on consumer cameras in movie theaters - are going to be completely unable to see the difference in a re-recorded playback of what they see on T.V.
If the movie/record companies are truly more worried about digital copying than about analog copying, they should make degraded versions of their movies/albums available for free or for a small fee. Dries up some of the bootleg market, but there's still an incentive for some to go out and buy the CDs/DVDs.
Here's a newsflash to the industry: NOBODY WANTS TO COPY THESE RIDICULOUS PIECES OF PLASTIC. WE RIP DISCS NOW.
Does the music industry suffer more from copied CD's, or do they suffer from the practice of ripping cd's and the sharing of MP3's.
Look at the obvious facts: Within the next 3 years the number of HTPC's is going to be off the charts. Everyone's going to be streaming digital video content directly from their HTPC drives. And they'll be sharing and downloading that content by P2P / Bittorrent or other networks.
What the industry is terrified of accepting are these simple facts:
Copy protecting next generation discs is an enormous exercise in futility. Discs are unnecessary. Players are unnecessary. The content is the valuable commodity in this equation and it is uncontrollable.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
It remains unclear to me how all this elaborate encryption stops me from copying the disc. Encryption does not defeat copying, it only obscures the plaintext. They can use the strongest 2^10,000,000-bit encryption all they want. They can make sure that people with gazillion node clusters capable of a million computer hours a second couldn't decode the information in a trillion years. They can do all of this and they will be no closer to their goal.
The fact remains that we're still dealing with bits. Those bits can be read. Bits that can be read can be stored elsewhere. Oh, and devices for recovering the plaintext will be sold at Best Buy for $59.99.
Join Tor today!
After thinking a bit about public private keypair I was thinking the best way to keep people from pirating would be to burn the DVD for the consumer IN THE STORE.
I'm sure there are lots of holes in this...but what do you think?
1. Consumer buys DVD player that "generates" a unique public/private keypair with a passphrase the consuerm enteres when they first hook the unit up and provides it to to the consumer (bundle a USB stick or something with the unit and engineer the unit to write to the stick). The private key is stored on into rom on the player.
2. The consumer takes their USB stick to the DVD store and wants a copy of a DVD. The store has a high speed burner. They take the public key on the consumer's USB stick, and encrypt the burned DVD using the consumers public key. The public key could be stored on the DVD store database for future reference if needed so the consumer would not have to bring the stick back for future purchases.
3. The movie could be altered slightly when burned...with some sort of numeric code within the movie video identifying the original purchaser (how could you do this?..Is it possible?)
4. If somebody decrypts a movie using their private key and it ends up on the internet, you would not be able to stop it, but you could find the original purchaser and come down on them like a ton of bricks to "make an example".
Of course this only works with physical media...or maybe not.
I had an experience that backs up StevenMauer's posting:
I went to visit a friend this weekend past. He was very excited to show me his new plasma TV.
It was big, and it was expensive. But the video looked like total shit. I pretended to be as delighted as he was.
Big mistake: I had to watch a movie from his DirecTivo, non-HDTV. The video was stretched such that folks looked insane, and such that the digital artifacts that you normally can't see were just AWFUL. You'd figure that with familar circular logos now looking egg shaped, he'd get it. Nope.
In other words, his big investment gave him a video picture that is significantly worse than what he had. And that's the key here: my friend spent the money to make him feel like he has a bigger penis, the video itself be damned. He can't see the difference.
And if he can't see the difference, then he'll take any copy of video content with the lowest price - no matter the quality. I have a feeling that analog video is going to make a big comeback for some folks, whether they realize it or not.
JH
There's not enough energy in the Universe to brute force a single 256-bit key.
The defence has no further questions.
Very good point.
Of course, you still have to pay to license the logos and trademarks if you want to sell in US Wal-Marts.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Instead of paying one star 20 million for a picture why not pay 200 actors 100,000 for several movies?
:w
Not particularly on topic, but...
For the same reason that music that doesn't fit neatly into the pop, rock, blues, folk, etc, buckets doesn't get made: it's much more cost effective to market a megastar or three than it is to market many hundreds. Who will pay to see a big stinker movie if there's no "star power" in it?
As many have pointed out, the encryption scheme does nothing to prevent someone from capturing the decoded digital stream out of the recorder. It's not a whole lotta real protection.
What is IS, however, is a plausible play to invoke the DMCA. "Hey, you cracked my encryption, therefore you're going to jail." DCMA doesn't provide the same hammer to the industry if they didn't encrypt their content.
Oh, say hey and by the way, if there's an encryption scheme they need hardware to support, it's also a nice ploy to lock out freeware/commodity hardware. DCMA, again. Now the MPAA can charge a hefty premium to "license" their encryption technology. And the hardware manufacturers can pass along a hefy charge over and above the actual hardware cost to consumers...
You can copy the encrypted content however you wish, but it's only playable in your player, not anyone else's. So sorry, no $59.99 decryptors at Best Buy.
You can't really stop the professional pirates as another poster stated above since they can afford equipment to make perfect copies and sell them. However, I don't believe this is the intention. Casual piraters out number professional pirates many times over and are much harder to stop due to the large number of lawsuits required. So they just make it difficult for the casual pirater and for the professional, there are fewer in number, so they can go after them with lawsuits.
Now I WOULD NOT want to have to download a movie via STEAM, but if they required online activiation (via phone line or internet connection) of any and all encrypted content could'nt that work?
Has STEAM been hacked yet? I know there are fixes to let you play purchased versions without DVD or CD, but has anybody actually hacked the online authentication yet? If not...it would seem to me that would be a way content providers could protect their stuff
The industry is trying to enforce a "copy protection" bit on digital devices.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if, in the future, "legal" players would refuse to talk to any other device unless that device presented its "credentials."
If done correctly, consumer-end pirates would be back to hardware-hacking or videotaping their monitors.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Honestly, if I can see it, I can rip it. There are more or less convenient ways of doing this from a time perspective, but once it is done once, it is done forever.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Yes actually, if you get a properly cracked verion of half-life it comes with steam emulation.... thats all you need...
and the PostIt sticker with the passphrase which was affixed to it. And family silverware, and car keys, your honour.
We can always just play pirated content, until they make watermark detection hardware mandatory for every device capable of playing back A/V.
does your stream comes from a DVD in the first place? I guess not.
microsofts product activation doesn't work because any pirate with half a brain cell got windows xp pro anyway,
A man walks into Best Buy, he has this strange black T-shirt on with uniteligible white characters. No Matter. Its a slow day as he walks over to the wide selection of Movies. He picks one up, and then another. After squinting at the back of several, he carries a copy to the nearby customer service counter.
"Excuse me," he asks politely, "I'm really interested in buying a copy of this movie, Return of the Kings."
"Of course!" The young clerk replies, "I can ring that up for you right here."
"But.... " the customer continues, "I'd like to exercise my rights as a consumer and buy it in a format that doesn't have the encryption scheme indicated by this little logo on the back. Do you have it in a different format?"
"uh.... you don't want the movie?"
"No, I just want it in a different format, one that will permit fair use."
"You can use that one."
"I can't copy it at home."
"Oh!" says the clerk, eyes brightening, "We can sell you a second copy. In fact, if you buy two you can get the third at half off."
"No, I only want this one movie."
"Sure thing, I can ring that up for you here."
"But I want it in a different format, something I can use."
"well sir, you'll need a player."
"I have a player... but I don't want the movie with this little encryption scheme!"
"Uhm, can I get back to you, there's a line of other customers I need to help."
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
How many ms do you suppose it'll take to read the content of the ROM chips in next-gen DVD players and extract the key(s)? Even if I don't have the hardware resources to read the ROM chips, I'll bet some cracker somewhere does -- I'll just wait for him to publish to the internet. Even if the key is rendered invalid, I'll still get access to all of the media made before that point (and just have to wait for the next crack to get more content).
Perhaps it's time for us to rethink the intent, meaning and form of intellectual property protection?
Just how long Palladium will last. This is the exact same idea, with the player booting into a known state. The only problem is the level of motivation, on a world-wide scale, that is available to address this game.
This goes back to part of Bush's "everyone must have broadband" agenda. The ability for your refridgerator, toaster, oven, microwave, deep freezer, and optical disk player to phone-home whenever they fancy.
You are correct if you say people have other things they want to be doing and they'll just buy a new player every six months. For the first six months, you are absolutely correct. The next six months, you'll be mostly correct.
It's that third time at bat that's the clincher.
Of course, the pirates will love it - just work for a store that sells DVDs and you get instant access to a high-quality stream of videos.
However, yours is probably the best way round the problem I've seen. At least it makes it easier to track down the guilty party (unless, of course, they paid with cash).
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
It doesn't matter how strong their spy-agency grade encryption is. In any DRM system, the customer will always have the cyphered content, the cypher, and the key. If content can be decrypted for watching/listening, it can be decrypted for copying.
0 1 - just my two bits
You're right. I should have mentioned that. That corporate edition ISO was available before XP Pro was even for sale. And then tweaktown had a work-around to install SP1 about two weeks before that was released. I'm curious as to whether users of that corporate XP Pro ISO can install SP2?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Have this chip. It's a decryptor, a decoder, and a DA convertor all in one. The key is in the silicon. Go extract it.
Your approach has a lot of problems, privacy being the formost.
/., most movies on the P2P networks are "high end" jobs, they'll find ways around any kind of watermarking.
A more rational approach is to make each disk unique, as you suggest, and track them to the final point of sale.
Customers paying cash would still be able to buy them anonymously, but you would at least know which store sold it and when.
IF a perfect copy showed up, you'd know from where.
On the other hand, this scheme shares a fatal flaw with yours:
Most ripping is not a bit copy, and many involve significant lossiness which will destroy any watermarks. If a 700MB rip of a "unique" 4GB movie starts circulating, you may not be able to tell which "unique DVD" it came from.
Besides, as was pointed out in the last few days here on
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I beleive it can be done, there's a keygen for a perfectly valid SP2 key which works on Windowsupdate to boot.
In addition, the "loss of payment" is a pretty bad term for this when you think about it. Only some of the time does unauthorized copying (piracy/etc) result in loss of payment.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
a clean room environment and lots of expertise. Which are not exactly things most people can find in their basement.
...fantasy worlds often pay handsomely.
I'm sure the AACS people (or whoever gets the gig) will clean up on whatever gets put in, ultimately futile though it may be.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Delicious, Very Delicious :)
Someone rate the parent funny please.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There's no need of more then 6 monthes since official launch until the DRM scheme is cracked.
You know I'm telling nothing but the truth.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Well, that's great. Not that people get software for free. But that it proves my point that DRM never really works.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I haven't rented from a store in a very long time. recently I decided I really wanted to see "Hero" so I stopped at Blockbuster. I didn't have my card because it's been so long, I asked to fill out a new one.
Then she asked for my credit card. Duh, no problem. Then she asked me for my fucking DRIVERS LICENSE.
To rent a movie.
And they already have my credit card number.
So I told her Blockbuster can go to hell, I went home and rented from Netflix. Then, whn the movie came, I ripped it to my hard drive because sometimes I fall asleep, and I fucking hate hearing that menu trailer loop over and over in my sleep.
DVDs are NOT the most convenient media. I've had to shitcan several because they just quit playing over time. They're also not the highest quality, nor are they first run. Go download one of the "dtv-lol" avi rips of the latest season of Enterprise and see for yourself why I download AVIs. Hell, I don't even bother with trying to watch it on TV anymore.. the local station's video quality is worse than the 350MB AVI some guy in Toronto "broadcasts" from his apartment.
this scheme, as with decss, has nothing to do with copy protection. that is merely its disguise. it has everything to do with mandatory royalties to the consortium from all dvd player manufacturers and dvd mass producers. its all related to control over who makes and sells media players and what they are capable of doing or not doing out of the box.
What's stoping them from having a tamper-resistant hardware crypto processor? I mean, you can already buy some of them on the market. They're designed to resist such low tech attacks as slicing the top of the chip off and scanning it with an electron microscope.
If such a chip becomes spec equipement for HD-DVD players. And such a chip must be bought from one trusted source, then It might be possible to make it secure.
If there's a, say, 100 megs keyfile at the start of the HD-DVD, containing content decryption keys for 4 million player keys and the chips contained a randomly picked, non-revocated, key for the content, then the break one key, invalidate one million player would be a non-issue, it'd be break one key and invalidte 7 players from 5 manufacturers sold under 7 brands. Handle the replacement as a "failure," maybe even have some hardcoded routine to reboot the player, it'll be non-obvious why it is rebooting.
These ideas are copyright (c) 2005, Alexandre Carmel-Veilleux. Viewing these ideas does not constitute a license to use them for DVD protection schemes without negatiating terms with me. ac (dot) vca (at) vca.
You can copyright a particular expression of one. For ideas there are patents. Just so you know, and good luck.
But critics of the technology say it is bound to fail in achieving its most important objective--blocking wholesale pirating of DVDs--and it may irritate consumers
Repeat after me...
"There is no copy protection scheme that increases revenue, by defeating pirates, to make up revenue lost by pissing off legitimate customers."
It has been tried many times, by many suppliers, since the '70's, and it still doesn't work! They are stupid for even still trying!
Almost all domestic anime companies do not use macrovision. In fact, they keep getting calls from them. Ive heard that they have a game called "keep macrovision on the phone as long as possible." But they never actually buy into it. :)
The folks that work at anime companies are very technologically inclined. The head of the company knows that the copy prot can be broken by a pc program, or, failing that, 30$ at radio shack. So why give them money?
Heck, you can even argue that macro hurts video quality. That alone should be enough to crush the idea.
Macro is dumb!
no
Who'd do that? You'd miss part of the movie if you went to the bathroom, and the sound would probably be WAY too loud for half the audience, and the room would probably be kept freezing cold in the summer. Plus you couldn't watch the dirty parts five times in a row. It'll never fly.
Freedom: "I won't!"
because the originaql stream is either analog or comes from a mpeg2 decoder (DVD, cable, sat, they are all likely using mpeg2.) You are able to re-encode it without much loss of quality because it keeps throwing away bits that were already thrown out in the original encoding process. Now if you chain two entirely different codecs, and try to keep file sizes reasonable, you might get a lower quality rip with lots of visible artifacts.
All this discussion about "analog holes" is silly. If you want to make a copy of a movie, are you are going to fiddle with re-encoding analog data streaming down your RCA cables or pointing a movie camera at your TV screen? Or would you simply use DeCSS to get a perfect 480p copy of the same movie? Minus whatever extra bonus material you don't get with the regular DVD, and Lucas' latest batch of changes, but who cares?
Actually what may have drove down the price of Video tapes were CED and Laser disks. RCA wanted to get their new video disk format off the ground and priced their software well below what pre-recorded video tapes were going for. Pioneer followed by dropping prices on laser disks. I remember getting video disks in the $20-30 range for movies that were selling for $75 and up on VHS. KMart was the Wal*Mart back then, and they started selling VHS movies (probably they bashed their suppliers heads against walls to do it) in the $19.95 range to compete against the video disks. The rest is history. DVD movies today are about in the same price range (adjusted for inflation), but when DVD first came out Laser Disk software was cheaper. Maybe stores just didn't have the room for the larger format disks, or consumers liked the cd sized disks better. Some will still argue that video laser disks have a better picture, but they were a dead end. HDTV belongs to DVD.
All this discussion about "analog holes" is silly. If you want to make a copy of a movie, are you are going to fiddle with re-encoding analog data streaming down your RCA cables or pointing a movie camera at your TV screen? Or would you simply use DeCSS to get a perfect 480p copy of the same movie? Minus whatever extra bonus material you don't get with the regular DVD, and Lucas' latest batch of changes, but who cares?
... is if the DVD players streamed the encrypted bits out to your TV monitor, and the monitor itself did the decryption. A "digital in" on your TV set, much like the "digital in" on surround sound receivers.
... until a key was cracked, and the new HD-DVD's used a new key. "Sorry folks, you don't need a new player; you need a new TV, with a new decryption key." Well, technology moves along, so you might want to upgrade to a better TV anyway, right? But the resale value on your current TV would drop, because it can't play newer movies. I don't think so! Obviously, a way to install new keys is needed ... but since the TV is already IP enabled, this shouldn't be that difficult.
That way, those people who make devices that can capture S-Video, Component, or Composite video (and audio) won't have a decrypted signal to work with. You'd have to take apart your thousand dollar high-definition TV in order to find the decoded RGB signal you wanted to capture. [Or you'd have to capture the video via a Video camera, with the degradation that entails.]
As a benefit, since your TV now accepts encrypted bits, you could stream HD video from your computer, or any other source, since it is the TV that does the decryption. I'm thinking the digital in on the TV, and out on the HD-DVD should be IP-based.
[Of course this needs new TV sets, with the encrypted "digital in" port. To support older sets, you'd still need composite out, etc. So the copy protection would only apply to the HD video. You could copy & pirate the lower quality video, but not the High Definition video.]
This would be great
If it decrypts on hardware I own, I have the decryption mechanism. End of copy-protection scheme. Unless I can't touch any of the hardware that it's playing on, I can copy it.
;)
And I'm not meaning I'm an uberl33t crakz0r, someone else will have done the hard work of figuring it out first.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
The player(s) will get a new key instead of the revoked one. And if the players are done "right", you won't be able to reverse engineer their keys in your lifetime. Somebody else would crack them easily, provided that somebody else is NSA.
people don't get it. THE COMPROMISED TV WILL GET A NEW KEY VIA NORMAL SOFTWARE UPGRADE. Probably transparently too, if it can phone home via your broadband connection. End of story.
The copying can be over the internet (that's just a big "home network", isn't it?). So I think that either
- This scheme isn't going to prevent copying over the internet (unlikely, because that's the whole point of it)
- The claim that I can copy to any other device that I own is going to turn out to be a lie.
My money would be on the second possibility.or
"But downloading AVIs, for many people, is just too easy."
I'd argue that it's not only too easy. Downloading movies takes time, and in many cases can be frustrating for the avg person (grandma doesn't know how to use/install xvid,ogg,etc). As well as,many cases whare quality is lacking (cam shots with tilted perspective and people standing in the way).
Several factors play a role:
1) Theaters suck. Sound quality is attrocious (thin walls where you can hear explosions of the next theater over). People in #'s suck (screaming babies, cell phones, people spilling drinks on the floor behind you). Sticky floors, lines...you name it. Avg movie ticket is $8.5 here(Seattle) for the typical theater. There are better venues true - the cinerama comes to mind (http://www.cinerama.com/), but the average theater is a pain.
2) Bandwidth goes to waste. If you don't use it you lose it. I pay for monthly service, not per gigabyte, so my line downloads all day, every day.
3) Downloading opens your experience up to try something new that you haven't before. It doesn't cost anything extra so why not download a foreign film that you wouldn't be able to see in local theaters.
3) Home theater equipment has surpassed theater's in the last 5-10yrs by leaps and bounds. Even a low-end home theater ($1k-2k $US) would be able to acheive what theaters have now in the comfort of your home. To be honest even if I couldn't download a movie I would wait for the dvd.
4) Crappy movies. Ever since the writer's guild went on strike the # of quality films has deteriorated. Hollywood has gone back to re-makes and comic books for it's ideas. Take a look at the big hits of the last 3-5yrs and you'll see that very little new ideas have come out. Maybe I'm getting old though (29 too old for movies?).
5) Cost. Theaters don't make money off the tickets anymore - the studio gets all that. So they have to make it off the popcorn/soda. $8.5 per ticket plus food for 2 people is usually $30.
6) Time. Last time I went to the theater, I had to wait in line for 30min to get a ticket (opening weekend for a movie I was able to download the next day). Waited for 15min after getting my seat, to watch 15min of commercials, before watching 15min of previews, before the 90min film.
I honestly don't know why people go to the movies anymore, but really in the end it's what you get for your money, so economics really is part of it.
As of now, it is entirely possible and even feasible to make a very tamper-resistant DVD player. As in, you'll need $5,000,000 worth of equipment to break in. The technology is here.
I just got back from a deployment to Afghanistan. The locals there set up bazaars just outside the gate of every single compound I visited, where they sold all kinds of junk. Everything from fake gemstones to fur coats to swords and electronic toys. They sold DVDs for $3 each, unless you knew to haggle, in which case they'd sell them for $1.
Most of the DVDs had four or five movies on it, and I saw one that had all seven of the "Police Academy" movies. (Compressed, of course - but that made no difference as everyone buying them was watching the movies on a 7" portable DVD player or 15" laptop.)
It took, on average, about a week for a new release to show up over there. I remember watching Spider-Man 2 in my tent before my brother back home saw it in the theater.
(By MPAA-approved math, every 5-movie DVD sold over there was a $75+ loss, and they'd probably count that $1 Police Academy abomination at about $100.)
Of course, I'm sure the MPAA would rather those guys be growing poppies and selling heroin
I remember the old times of the commodore 64 when the floppy disks (less than 180K per disk - wow) had copy protection.. that could be circumvented by good disc copying programs.
These programs were made to BACK UP your software and games.
And then with the PC came the dongles and all that stuff.
But a very good scheme that worked, was the "registration card" that you filled in and put in your mailbox, and then you received the crtificate that the program was all yours.
Add that to the CD key, and voila.
regarding movies, etc... the movies could be watermarked with the serial number, etc - in a way that whenever the movie got redistributed due to piracy, the original owner could be sued. But then what if it's an anonymous buyer? More privacy issues appear (insert tinfoil hats references here).
The lesson: hardware Copy protection NEVER WORKED AND IT NEVER WILL. The Movie industry will just have to coexist with piracy. It's a "fact of life".
Remember that income comes from: a) Movie tickets, b) Merchandising (mousepads, t-shirts, etc). c) DVD sales are a "plus". And it's only _THIS_ issue that you're complaining about.
Don't want pirates? Don't sell your movies. And stop whining about your "profit loss". You STILL earn profit, don't you? Then shut up and enjoy your money.
I am an evil one.
I make DVD's of content I record on my replayTV. I also download AVI's of tv shows that were preempted in my location because of some stupid Basketball game. once in a while I will look at an AVI of a movie to decide if I want to buy that DVD.
i ALWAYS end up buying the DVD though. I spent gobs of cash buying the entire Invader Zim collection on DVD as well as Bablyon 5 and can not wait for the Venture Brothers to show up on DVD so I can ditch my self made DVD's of their entire show's run of episodes.
as for avi's that i download? if I like it in the first 20 minutes, I stop and buy the DVD. if I like the bootleg in the first 20 minutes I go see the movie... example? meet the Fockers. sequels usually suck hard, espically comedy sequels.. i downloaded it, watched a bit of it and then bought 4 movie tickets online for a showing that night for myself and friends. Why did I not trust the reviews and trailers? Simply because they lie horribly to try and get you to go watch it.
If the movie industry was ran by smart business people they would realize that embrace and extend will get them more money faster than the piss off your customer approach.
Oh, and I certianly am not alone. many people I know use the same tactics I use to see if a movie is worth buying or going to see.
the MPAA is lacking real business leadership, and their current tactics show this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Imagine this: your DVD player is your primary keyserver, configured by the factory to recognise and serve at most 3 secondary key servers and at most 10 players. Each of your secondary key servers work with at most 1 tertiary key server and 3 players. You now have a system which is more than scalable and robust enough for home use.
Now you can move encrypted files however you wish, but your player will constantly ping your keyserver for the key, and if it gets worse than say 1ms average response time it stops playing.
OK so this scheme is full of holes too, but I don't want to give them any more ideas.
If the movies are encrypted with AES 128 bit, the players and any software to play the discs can no longer be exported to China (or most other countries) where most of the piracy takes place. Of course they lose out on 100% of the legitimate sales too...
I'm not defending it. Calling it piracy, not theft (as you did), does not make it any less of a crime. However, it is pretty clear what it is, and what it isn't. While Person A is liable for monetary damages, he is still an arsonist, and not a thief. He's not a murderer or a jaywalker, either. By recognizing these facts, am I somehow defending this arsonist?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I hated the idea of DVDs until I got my PS2. Then for kicks I rented a DVD. Later I rented a few more. I don't remember the last time I rented a tape. Same goes for my sister who resisted DVDs just as I did. Say it again for my brother who was also converted by the presence of the PS2. Duplicate as many times as you think necessary for all the PS2 owners out there who got twice the bang for the buck with the PS2.
Now think about all those extras such as deleted scenes which I LOVE to watch, and you can begin to appreciate why DVDs have conquered VHS tapes.
Oh, yeah, let's not forget the fact that you can now get a pretty good DVD player for about the same $60.00 US a VHS tape player would cost you.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
I say that you can't chain different codecs without either quality or size degradation. The emphasis is on two words: chain, implying there's more than one, and different, implying they're not instances of the same codec. I hope this is clear enough. Did I say two or more different codecs? This has nothing to do with pipes, files, processes, kernels, drivers, or your toaster. All you need is to encode a raw stream, decode it, and then encode again. By the way, the second codec should not be the same as the first, in case you missed that. Oh, and the compression ratio should be reasonable at both ends. It is completely immaterial what's between the two codecs: files, pipes, sockets, carrier pigeons, or stone tablets.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/04/1 748210
The HD-DVD and the Blu-Ray players both support the mpeg4 formats. While the disks you buy from the store might be all messed up, either play or not play, there isn't really anything stopping anyone from taking some mpeg4 content and placing that on a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD blank; those will probably play every time, more or less. It would not be surprising to see iTunes-like services springing up around the mpeg4 format.
What's going to happen is simple: the HD-DVD thing isn't going to take off; not if you have to keep upgrading keys all the time. Joe and Jane Average are probably going to stick with the regular DVD from Netflix, Blockbuster, or whomever, knowing that it will work every time.
If the new formats can be gotten to "work every time", perhaps by having the keys downloaded from the internet or something like that, then they might do better. Anytime you make something too complicated, though, it's bound to fail. Look at 3D movies with those uncomfortable cardboard 3D glasses. Where have they gone? Look at DVD-Audio or the SACD? Going nowhere fast. Lossless compression formats from iTunes or other services? We're not really there yet - if people are willing to settle for mp3 or aac quality sound, why would they want to spend extra money on a DVD-audio quality sound?
The movie industry risks entering a situation not unlike the music industry finds itself in today. Many of the same symptoms are there; the same attempt to control is there; the same low-quality, high-budget, intellectually lacking content is being pumped out. A new format that is harder and more expensive to use just isn't going to cut it. It would not be surprising to see mpeg4 take the place of mp3 files, with people cramming movie after mpeg4 movie onto a DVD5 or perhaps a DVD9 that they either downloaded from a legitimate service, or if no such legitimate services happen to spring up in the near future, a p2p network.
The popularity of iTunes and other legitimate music download services goes to show that consumers don't care so much about the absolute highest sound quality, but that they care more about convenience, selection, ease of use, accessibility, and things like that. These new formats are probably more or less doomed to not do as well as they could.
These new disks, though, the Blu-Ray especially, these are going to be GREAT for backing up systems, documents, and also for businesses to do backups and things like that. The technology is awesome; what Hollywood is trying to do with it is the part that isn't going to work very well.
The next paragraph they talk about keys instead of players. Each player could have multiple keys. If one KEY is cracked, new movies wouldn't work with that KEY, but they would still work with other KEYS on the same player.
Say, $10 worth of protection will guard against an attacker with less than $1,000,000 to blow for five years. How many people in the world are willing to share at this point?
There's something we've forgot.
You don't sit in front of your computer monitor along with your wife and kids to watch a divx movie on your media player. Generally divx users are 20-30 yo's, or even kids who downloaded the latest anime episode.
So who gets the benefit of a downloaded movie? ONE person per family. If the movie wasn't good, the guy wouldn't watch it along with his g/f, wife, kids/friends/etc.
So what does this mean: "Try before you buy". Simple. Here I'd be questioned: "Oh come on, what person watches a movie TWICE"? Ask the starwars fans who watched "Star wars: A new hope" the day it came out in theaters. They watched it once. Twice. Even 20 times.
So, if a movie is REALLY WORTH it, I'm sure people would actually purchase the DVD or go to the theaters, even if they already watched the downloaded thing. Why? Because the movie DESERVES IT.
The real enemy here is not piracy... but freaking poor quality overhyped movies with pre-paid (as opposed to impartial) reviews.
The movie producers are committing FRAUD by telling us the movies ARE WORTH seeing, when they're not. Same with videogames. I remember playing FFX-2... and I could compare my feelings with a girl who didn't achieve climax on her most expected date. "What? This is it? WTF?" Same with Robotech: Invasion (79 bucks thrown to the trash, man!) and Spider Man for the PS2.
So, MPAA and associates: Want more profit? Make better products, and stop complaining.
Addendum: Maybe the MPAA is actually whining because they CAN'T FOOL the public with hype (Pearl Harbor, anyone?), and people won't purchase bad movies DVD's or go to the theaters if the "evil pirates" already review the movie and say it SUCKS. And _HERE_ is the profit loss. In any case, this reinforces my opinion:
Make better products. Period.
The big question for the Linux/FOSS community isn't how hard is it to crack: it's can we be included without being forced to crack it.
I'm sure I'm not alone in not wanting to make pirate copies of DVDs, but just wanting to be able to watch my discs on the equipment of choice, including open source players.
This boild down to: i) will the algorithm be well known (ie rely on secrecy of keys not the algorithm) and ii) how do you get allocated a key
CSS sucked because it used weak keys and tried to keep the algorithm secret. The first rule of cryptography is to assume the algorithm is known, and thanks to DVD Jon we got it reverse engineered. And it sucked for the FOSS crowd because you couldn't make a player without paying a huge sum of money and signing all sorts of agreements.
If the new system removes these barriers to entry, then it at least it won't be as evil as the original CSS. It'll still be useless, but not actually evil.
No, I'm not saying this would solve the "problem" per se. I'm just saying I can imagine these people trying to use it in order to further protect their interests.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
They are not going to futz around with software players this time. Hardware only, and tamper-resistant to boot. You will get "your" key with "your" player, and you will like it.
Well, I don't think DVD has saturated the market yet, or seen its peek. VHS is still dying. So I think that the next-gen format has an uphill battle to establish itself in wide circulation. It will have the customary early adopters, but I think the majority of us can comfortably sit tight for this to get cracked before we adopt it. And that may not be a long wait.
Before you call me a stinking pirate, realize that I only have a DVD reader on my system (I don't own a TV), and no burner. Incidentally, I just rented Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which had a newer copy protection scheme from Sony. It didn't play right on my computer because of the protection scheme, the audio was fucked. It ruined the movie experience for me completely and I got pissed off. I found there are utils out there to circumvent this protection (like the beta of AnyDVD). That allowed me, a legitimate user with a legit copy, to actually view the content.
I'm kind of pissed over this experience. I feel sorry for the content producers, it looks like a lot of effort and money went in to making an entertaining film for me and I think they did a good job for an action film (even though I think they ruined the dark creepy theme and perverted and bastardized it into blockbuster hollywood action thriller that's besides the point). People that put together good art ought to get paid for it, but I can hardly find fault with pirates when as a consumer I have to resort to circumventing the copy control in order to enjoy what I paid for at all.
I get pissed at the people who illicitly profit, but I doubt this is more than the tinyest speed bump, will they even notice? It just hurts consumers and makes me more wary when I'm planning on spending money. The other people who piss me off are the ones who refuse to buy anything, those scumsucking freeloaders that abuse everything to the fullest and never drop even a penny in support of all the things they illicitly enjoy. I think the majority of people who get screwed by copy protection are outside of these two extremes and those that are within that extreme will just get the latest cracks and warez and move along.
Use a non-standard optical encoding method.
Don't allow PC's to play disks.
Players refuse to play unencrypted content.
Use a smartcard to do all authorization.
Require an internet connection or phone line
to authorize playback each time a disk is loaded.
Don't store any keys on the disk.
Build the display into the player.
Pot the inside of the player with a potting compound which when compromized, causes the player to burst into flames.
A normal mpeg2-encoded stream is far from perfect, the artifacts are clearly visible if you pay a little attention. Please don't tell me that my encoder is lame (that's for sound, not video). And I'm talking about adding another set of artifacts on top of that.
can't play HD content, so you need to get everyone to throw the old equipment out anyway.
If they made a software patch containing a new player key available, that patch would surely fall into the hands of an attacker. They might encrypt the patch with an "update key", but, remember, the "player key" has already been extracted from your player. If the player key was vulnerable, the update key probably will be too.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Get sued when someone burns himself trying to repair a broken set.
Back in the 1980s, the movie industry propped up the video market by charging a fortune for movies. Most were priced in the $90-150 range, well out of the market for the common consumer.
Kids today don't know how good they have it with $15 new release DVDs.
The 80s was also the era when it made good sense to buy a laserdisc player. You could buy a movie on VHS for $100, or on laser for $30-50 (and get better quality too, and often extra scenes and such).
I like things better today. Anyone wanna buy some laserdiscs?
Just wait till the best selling, low cost, Wal-Mart DVD player's key is compromised.
All those Wal-Mart shoppers aren't going to want to shell out $40 every few months for a new player, or wonder why they have to take their player back to Wal-Mart as ofter for upgrades.
Like hell you say. I only buy non-RIAA affiliated music from CD Baby, or download free tracks with iRate. You know what? I like this stuff a lot better than most of the crap that passes for music on the advertising clogged radio and TV stations.
Want some? Here's a small sample:
- Metal - Celldweller (CD Baby)
- Electronic/Industrial - More Machine Than Man (CD Baby)
- Acoustic - Okkervil ("Westfall" via iRate)
- Rap - Poverty ("I'm Hatin'" via iRate)
- New Age - Circle of Mansions ("Sky Machine" and "Number Nine" via iRate though I cannot google a link for either ATM. Try "Left Me." That's good too)
- Electronic - Atari Baby ("Share your love (Aspect Mix)" via iRate)
- Easy Listening - Sheryl Clapton ("Magic Door" via iRate)
- Hard Rock/Metal - Dazychain ("Too Much God" via iRate)
- Industrial - Firewerk (CD Baby)
- Punk Rock - Limit ("Mr. DJ" via iRate)
And so on... All great stuff IMO. So yeah, I'm doing just fine without contributing a penny to the RIAA. (They're not even getting their blank CD tax from me. I bought an iPod + iTrip.) You can get plenty of music without them.The same will happen to the MPAA. It's only a matter of time. The MPAA fears bandwidth and BitTorrent. They say it's because of piracy. Either they are really stupid, or they think we are. They just don't like competition.
Let's assume that someone cracked, or otherwise somehow got the decryption key for a specific model player. They then re-encode the movie to DVD or some other format then release it onto p2p networks.
When someone from the MPAA (or whoever would govern this) sees said movie for download, how would they know what hardware was used to rip it, and thus what key(s) to revoke?
This is a bunch of bull. Leave it to the Movie and Music industry to screw over its costumers by adding some bull**** incription to it. Their resistance is futile. We will watch out movies because we effing payed for them. Besides, some 17 year old guy from a europe'ish country *will* probably break it and we will in fact have some soft of HDDVDCSS gnu packages. :|
( much is quoted from an below article )
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
No, games and movies don't work the same way. If I authorize Half-Life 2 and play it, I can't give another person that copy without it breaking. If I were to authorize a suggested Steam-movie, I could just re-record it without the copy protection and send it to someone else.
Omnes stulti sunt.
The key appears to be symmetric; it's just blazingly complicated to calculate the actual device key ... and allows for multiple derivative keys from a master key stored in the hardware of the device. Masks included in the decode area on the disk provide the path to get the unique key to decode the disk... which (from a 30 minute review of the technical document) could theoretically(?) be used to provide different derivative keys per disc, so even if you capture one of those, it may only help with that print run of that disc. The key is getting back to a master key and its seed; the problem (to the crackers, at least) is that once that is done, the licensing association can disable that key without killing any consumer devices.
The amount of computation back to the original keys makes any attack against the system imprudent at best, and the use of derivative keys and multiple master keys per device means that even if one were cracked, the others in the device would continue to allow consumer devices to function... which avoids consumer backlash.
From my (semi-educated) analysis, it looks "good" (for the *AA) so far.
They can live without the 3% of their market that's made up of hardcore nerds, but the nerds probably won't live without the 25% or more of their entertainment that comes from mainstream media distributors.
Yes, and then that 3% of hardcore nerds is going to give the MPAA the finger, and, in retaliation, code up a bunch of P2P protocols and video codecs and whatnot, making piracy of their precious movies far easier than it has ever been before. They effectively shoot themselves in the foot by neglecting or outright keeping us from their product.
Secure content is just part of their forumla. They are also introducing encrypted transport systems that will ensure that the data will remain encrypted all the way from the source material to the display device. Might not make it into this generation if they plan to release content in the next 2 years, but that is their end-goal, complete control over every aspect. The only way to bypass anything like this is to find chinks in their encryption or use a hardware mod, such as ones used in console devices sold today to bypass various artificial restrictions.
Zoom Player Lead Dev.
I'm sure the drug use and the moderate insanity were all tied together, but I think it was the severe paranoia brought on by his amphetamine use (which itself was an attempt to avoid his depression) which really made him the nutball (brilliant nutball, though) we all remember.
So it was really a combination of the drugs and the chronic mental illness.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm not an anal video freak but I notice these things sometimes. I do get reasonably good equipment though.
Sorry, I didn't quite finish reading your post before I hit reply.
Duuuhh... Blockbuster had my address, too. Right on the fucking "blockbuster card" application. If it's good enough for them when I go home and rent from BLOCKBUSTER over the fucking internet, why isn't it good enough for them in the store?
Idiot.
They also had my address associated with the fucking credit card.
Jeezus - not only a moron, but a belligerent one.
Just to make that more clear, ahem, "THERE IS A GAME THAT I WOULD BE WILLING TO PAY FOR, BUT I WOULD RATHER PIRATE IT THAN ACCEPT ONLINE AUTHENTICATION!"
Oops, sorry for the screaming. When everything starts using online authentication, I hope everybody else gets as pissed off as I am.
[javac] 100 errors
However, this is easily solved: require the public keys to be signed by an authority trusted to the content providers to ensure that the corresponding private key is secure. This could be the equipment manufacturer, for example.
You could've hired me.
So, what would you recommend for good dialogue? I really enjoyed the rhythm and style that everyone in Firefly spoke with. The dialogue wasn't just there to advance the plot.
Or Scrubs, and the little rants that Dr. Cox goes on. (A doctor I know assures me that the portrayal of hospital life in Scrubs is far, far more accurate than that in ER. Go figure.)
Are there any other shows I should fetch for their scintillating dialogue? Please don't tell me "CSI". I've been refusing to watch "CSI" ever since the only episode I ever saw centered on "look, perverts! perverts murder people!". As a pervert, I felt insulted.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This was never about copy protection.
No form of encryption will not make it harder to copy the original disk. Constructing a bit for bit copy of a digital stream in no way requires you to be able to understand the data being copied.
Rather, this is a playback protection system.
It's to stop you from watching the media when the distributors don't want you to be able to. Such as, for example, should you try to play a movie released in the US which is only just being shown in movie theatres in Western Europe. Or Asia. Or anywhere other than Region 1.
Encryption of the media is only there to force DVD player manufacturers to obtain a key -- which will only be provided if they also sign a contract to adhere to certain terms and conditions that, in essence, states that they're not allowed to undermine the distributors' business model.
I still don't think that mailing smartcards is an acceptable solution. It's simply an unacceptable hurdle to go over. Consumers will see this as a particularly odious sort of planned obsolescence.
DirecTV, you buy a subscription to. Maintaining the service might involve hardware changes. If the company's willing to largely underwrite the cost of it, clearly the consumer won't mind. But one doesn't buy a subscription to be able to play DVD content. DIVX showed that that model is doomed.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Indeed! If unencrypted content were illegal to play on the new HD-DVD players (yes, illegal now that hacking the players is illegal), then content producers will need to pay exciting royalties to have their content encrypted. And forget getting your own content encrypted if you're not selling ten hojillion copies.
There exists open video content out there, see some parts of archive.org for examples. (See that Mario 64 speedrun? Frickin' awesome.) Goddamn it, if I want to burn my homemade amateur porn to HD-DVD and play it, I shouldn't need some twit over at the MPAA to personally bless the disc.
This sort of thing would never fly with file formats, because a project can create and distribute a free and open codec to supplant it. But hardware has such a high entry and distribution cost, this isn't feasible, no matter what sort of goodies you have from OpenCores.
Pfah. I don't own a DVD player, and this is all shaping up to ensure that I don't ever buy a HD-DVD player either.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Because half of going to see a movie in the theater is the experience. A comedy is a hundred times funnier when you have a whole crowd of people laughing around you. An action movie is more fun when you're in the third row and things are blowing up on this huge screen right in front of you. I love watching movies at home on DVD, but the experience simply cannot compare to going out with your friends on opening night and seeing the same movie in a theater.
Maybe you don't have any decent theaters where you live, but we've got a great chain of local theaters where I live. (Omaha, NE) The seats are great, the walls are insulated enough, the popcorn is great, and the place is almost never totally packed. We can get there ten minutes before showtime and our third row center seats are typically open.
If going to a theater seems too expensive to you, then go to a matinee show on the weekend, and eat before you go so that you're not hungry.
Too bad money fuels the direction these things take.
Plus, I have kids. Exposing them to a confrontation (which will usually get aggressive and involve excessive swearing) is unfair.
When I was a kid, my parents adopted the same outlook. I wish they didn't, for when confronting situations arose, I could not fend for myself -- I was helpless. Many years later, I'm still learning. See, knowing what was not enough -- how to do was the key.
You must ensure your kids learn to look out for themselves. If not, you have failed as a parent.
Good luck,
CD
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
What a marvellous advance this will be! At long last, 128-bit encryption will be broken. And all it will take is the concentrated effort of 10,000 geeks whose Enterprise episodes get encrypted.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Okay, let me get this straight. Lokitorrent was able to raise $30,000 USD in DONATIONS in, what, four days, to fight the MPAA-- and so rather than opening iMovies, these frog-fkuckers decide to spend their money on trying to make it hard to copy material?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Okay, "Twat" I know, but...please enlighten me, what the fuck is a "chav"? I'm from U.S., never heard that one..
Sleep is futile.
Heh.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
It can... I tried it on several pirate machines.. M$'s website doesnt even detect it as pirated when I opened up "Click here to see if you have a legitimate..." Good Job Microsoft
Lets look at the past, shall we? Fast forwarding thru Wax, LPs and 8-tra(c)ks to cassette tapes (pun kinda intended)... Cassettes were nice (agh, ubiquity) but they had issues generally relating to their format: tape. No random access, rewinding required, etc., etc. Enter CDs. You can go to any track at any time, the sound quality is better, no rewinding/fast forwarding, no flipping, randomize tracks, etc.
What have we had since CDs? MP3s and SuperAudio disks. Which "advancement" is more popular? The general population only care about quality that is "good enough". CDs weren't dropped in droves in the rush to buy SuperAudio disks (quite the opposite, actually). Why? Cause CDs are "good enough". Hell, CDs are really better then "good enough" as MP3s are really the medium of choice and their quality is less then that of CD audio. The lesser quality of MP3s is more then made up by their ease of transport (read: file size) over the internet/iPod/thumb drive/whatever. The next advancement after CDs was not an improvement in quality, it was an improvement in portability!
OK, now to the point - why in the hell will DVDs be any different? We graduated from VHS to DVD just like we graduated from cassettes to CDs. Why will people drop their DVDs for the next, wis-bang technology? Sure, HD-DVD will look a bit better on the $10,000 uber-sized plasma screen (SuperAudio sounds a bit better on those 10k tube receivers), but for the average Joe with the average 20 inch TV, DVDs are more then "good enough". And as the parent suggested... DivX (the MP3s of the movie world) are preferred because of their size. PMP (portable media players, read: video iPod) are already on the market, trying to do for your DVD collection what your iPod has done for your CD collection. In this realm, DivX (et la) is going to kick the shit out of HD content, because just like the iPod... you can carry 20 CDs at CD quality, or you can carry 200 CDs at near CD quality.
So, based on the past... The next advancement after DVDs will not be an improvement in quality (HD-DVD), it will be an improvement in portability (near DVD quality)! Couple this "advancement" with annoyances such as "Sorry sir, your HD-DVD player/recorder with all your recorded TV shows from the past 3 seasons will no longer play new HD-DVDs because someone somewhere used the same model for something we didn't like. You'll have to buy a new player to view Star Wars Episode III - The Search For More Money Edition" and "Sorry miss, you can't put the HD version of LotR onto your new vPod... <wispers>...But if you know anyone with the DVD version...</wispers>". People will be more then happy to stick with their current DVD collection.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
HD disc security requirements and AACSLA
Do it slowly.
This is common with first adopters, always has been. RCA introduced color TV in 1954 and had to pull back because it's sets were too complex and unreliable for home use. In time the market learns and becomes more demanding.
But the pace has accelerated. High definition DVD players will enter the consumer market after digital TV sets have reached mass market prices, and both cable and broadcast networks have gone digital. It is happening now. Entry level for HDTV has dropped to $700-$800 for a heavyweight Toshiba with a CRT display.
I noticed a simple, telling, change over the holidays. It is becoming hard to find "Full Screen" DVDs even in the supermarket bargain bins. The wide-screen format and theatrical sound, sells. I suspect high-definition will sell as well.
AES is not yet proven resistant to known plaintext attacks. Several possible theories for AES have been advanced to make such an attack easier than brute force, although none have yet been implemented or shown to work in practice. Search google.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Call me ignorant here, but surely if one key were cracked (by whatever means) on a specific device, wouldn't the others likely be vulnerable to the same attack?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
With hardware prices continuing to drop, at a certain treshold-point in time, it'll be so cheap to buy a player that the model inverses to the shaver-model; people will start paying through the teeth (relatively) for discs, while paying fsck-all for the players. The players will be kept up-to-date with DRM with the discs, and cracking it will only benefit you for three months or so. Of course you'll have to buy a new player every year or every six months, but then again, that's a trend already started ! I can buy a DVD player for thirty euros at the grocery store, or I get them as a promotion with a magazine-subscription. The only thing they (the MPAA) need to do now, is bring the form-factor down, so that my new player of the day can fit in my shopping bag next to the milk and the newspaper and they're good to go !
The system proposed by the IEEE article sounds like the same system. And the whole thing sounds like a sales brochure - full of hype and promises, but short of any real substance. We've heard the same thing twice a month for the last two years regarding CD's and DVD's. New product; same old hype.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
Let's not forget backwards compatibility. The greatest competition for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD comes from DVD itself. Most people do not have ultra high quality screens or plainly don't care for top quality. So, who is going to change from DVD to next generation media? And who is going to buy the same movies again?
Sure, those systems are supposed to offer backwards compatibility, but why bother? How many of you have explicitly migrated to SACD or DVD-Audio (which are both backwards compatible)? I'd bet that 95% of SACD owners out there just got SACD playback bundled with their new system and would never care to buy a SACD. On the other hand, below-CD-quality iTunes is highly succesful!
As a side note, let me also remind you that these players will also feature a watermarked analog output or no analog output and an ENCRYPTED digital output (HDMI or DVI-D). It's going to be pretty hard capturing anything from them unless of course some Taiwanese manufacturer makes a region-free, macrovision-free, encryption-free player which will probably generate milions of plain DVD copies.
The fact is that the enormous success of the DVD and the CD is the single greatest problem that the content creation companies have to face.
P.
Big deal. Most pirated disks (mostly in the Far East, for whatever reason) are just faithful copies of the source disk (i.e. bit-for-bit copies) -- no decryption required. How can this stop them?
Full-length movie on DVD for $30, movie with no extras on CD in SVCD format for $10.
Something like that at least.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I've even consulted internally on techniques used by military-grade security ICs that not only defy structural or e-beam attacks but also detact indirect attacks such as power analysis. Keep in mind that these security tricks are also used by "smart cards" and the like that you hope are actually fairly secure.
Would those be the same uncrackable "smart cards" that satellite TV pirates have been cracking, cloning, emulationg, and extracting keys from regularly for the last 10 years?
In theory you may be able to hide information on the silicon in such a way that it's nearly impossible to recover, but all past experience with copy-control technology shows that you can't give the keys (in *ANY* form) to a reasonably motivated attacker and not have them compromised in short order.
0 1 - just my two bits
I can't believe "civilisation" has come to a point where content providers can go to such lengths to annoy legit customers and still stay in business.
We now have:
But the capper:
- CD's that don't play in CD "ligitimate" players
And as comments in this article are suggesting, we will soon haveMy mind still boggles that all of this can be a good business practice.
So, how long until there's DeAACS@Home? Since it is going to use 128-bit AES...
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
(still has LD player hooked up)
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
I have to agree, what an incredibly funny movie. The sequel was also hilarious.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?