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MPAA Developing Digital Fingerprinting Technology
Danathar writes "The MPAA is looking to use digital fingerprinting technologies that in conjunction with legislation will enable and force ISPs to look for network traffic that matches the signatures. " From the article: " Once completed, Philips' technology--along with related tools from other companies--could be a powerful weapon in Hollywood's increasingly aggressive attempts to choke off the flood of films being traded online."
And ISPs are going to search for fingerprints in encrypted downloads how exactly?
It would be relatively easy for the next generation of P2P applications to add very basic encryption. Possibly based on a captcha (just a regular zip file encrypted against the random letters contained in a gif).
Or will the MPAA's next trick be to purchase legislation banning encryption.
Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. -- Bruce Schneier
While I'm certainly no a fan of the **AA, and I don't believe we need any more legislation, this to me is the least offensive method of combatting piracy. Assuming the technology works properly, this stops the actual illegal activity (i.e., trading copyrighted material) rather than needlessly infringing upon your right to make a legitimate backup or degrading the image with copy-protection schemes.
I've long argued that such upstream measures are unfair. By moving the enforcement downstream to the proximate illegal act, we may be free to legally digitize our collections. Opinions?
Even if they managed to get the fingerprinting to work, it is dead easy to circumvent.
Instead of splitting a torrent they way it is done today, just put every N bytes in the first block etc.
Another approach can be to just encrypt each transmission from a peer to another peer with a key unique for that particular connection. XOR will work just fine. (Unless they extract the key of course, but that will require more sophisticated sniffing software).
Imagine the sheer amount of data that has to be processed...
It is sort of amusing that this technology is being developed by Philips, makers of the Philips DVP-642, probably the most pirate friendly DVD player on the market today.
"legislation will enable and force ISPs to look for network traffic that matches the signatures."
Its a good thing the MPAA can essentially create legislation at will now.
So they start sniffing networks for bits with the "acoustic properties" of music.
... why? I would not continue to do business with any ISP running this sort of software.
And just by coincidence-- maybe a glitch or something-- they happen to latch on to a VoIP phone conversation I'm having with a friend about a sensitive personal matter. Maybe the dryer's running in the background. And their algorithm decides it's "acoustically" music.
And they send out a subpeona, and they check, and they find oh no, you weren't trading music, you were just using the phone. And everything's dropped, and there's no problem.
But in the meantime my intercepted phone conversation is sitting on a computer at Verizon somewhere.
And this is acceptable
We have 1TB disks coming up soon.
I don't know how many terrabytes of released music exist in the world, but I imagine it's a finite number.
We'll probably have 100TB disks, and then 10,000 TB cubes at some point in the future.
Perhaps all the worlds music will fit in the space of a cubic centimeter.
You visit your friend's house, put your cube-disk next to his cube-disk, hit "copy", and then walk home with your copy of the entire world's music.
Really, there's not a whole friggin' lot you can do about that.
Perhaps the possesion of world-music cube-disks will be the next marijuana possesion.
First I read this story today, and I swear I still want my 5 minutes back from wasting my time reading it. Then comes along this story about the MPAA developing "fingerprinting" technology. I suppose that when someone rips a DVD using DVDShrink or DVDDecryptor or any number of other programs that said program is going to copy said fingerprint wholly intact into the resulting file even if it compresses said file. Then, after I convert it to DivX format, I'm sure the fingerprint is still going to be intact. Then after I transfer it with (Insert any of BitTorrent, WinMX, IRC, FTP, etc, etc, etc, etc) the fingerprint is going to be sent intact without using a fragmented TCP packet. Assuming all this to be true, my ISP is supposed to then pick out this needle-sized fingerprint in a galactic-sized haystick.
This is pure science fiction.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Wouldn't this digital "fingerprint" just be erased/garbled when it is encoded in a different format, like, say, DivX or XViD?
And who exactly is going to pay for the Equipment to scan all IP packets? I'll be DAMNED if the government forces ISPs to pay out of their own pocket book which then has to be passed down to the consumer!!!
...
MPAA
1. Get government to pass laws.
2. Get government to force consumers to pay for equipment the ISP needs to enforce MPAA cartel.
3.
4. Profit WITH YOUR FUCKING TAX DOLLARS!
Life is not for the lazy.
Don't think so. The DMCA is there to protect media rights holders, not the common man.
... oh, wait, all privacy laws have been stripped away from US citizens since 9/11, so I guess that won't work either.
You can't, say, have a encrypted hard disk, then sue the MPAA for decrypting it when they arrest you for movie trading, based on the DMCA.
You might have a case with regards to privacy
Face it America: You're screwed.
Perhaps this will lead to a division in society between the people who know the MPAA can't take our money and those who don't. These companies exist only because of us, the customers. I have no problem at all telling them to %$#@ off, because I know entertainment is cheap and very easy to come by. Take my kid to a movie vs. take my kid to a park vs. take my kid to a ball game, whatever. Movies really are not that big of a deal. Sure I might miss great movies like Dr. Strangelove, but, ultimately, movies are just a medium for these stories and certainly not a requirement. Indy productions, stage adaptations, etc. are all different ways for the talented people out there to tell their stories. Big company execs can kiss my ass for all I care.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
IANAL and IRECTAL, but why do ISPs have to then shoulder the responsibility of policing all this traffic and enforcing this proposed law? I don't think it could even be accomplished, considering how many ISPs are out there, and how hard it would be to make them all put in the same effort and follow the same procedures. It seems to me the only way to force such an internet-wide filtering scheme would be to pass all the data through a government server (or servers), and that's not going to happen considering how everyones so used to things being the way they are now, infrastructure-wise.
The MPAA/RIAA need to realize that these measures they keep proposing time and again are futile. Even if your ISP started policing your traffic, you could switch to a smaller ISP that's being more lax in its enforcement and is "below the radar".
And how does the MPAA propose getting these digital fingerprints onto ALL media? And how long would it take for someone to figure out how to strip the fingerprint from the file?
When it comes down to it, *any* DRM in audio files is defeatable by playing it back on a high quality speaker and re-recording it with a high quality recorder. A similar set-up could be used (with more difficulty) for video I suppose as well.
The MPAA/RIAA need to change their tactics in a big way and figure out how they can give the market what they want at a price they want, so that everyone who's downloading movies and music today decides that the MPAA/RIAA's new way is easier, and downloading isn't worth the hassle. I think one of the big things they're releasing is that people will pay more for special features and other things that add value to their product which are simply unavailable online.
The MPAA/RIAA's realization will come, I just don't know how many more years it will take and how many eras we need to go through (Usenet era, Napster era, Kazaa era, BitTorrent era) before they realize that people out there are innovative enough to come up with a new filesharing means, always. Maybe the current crop of CEOs and managers need to be gone before that will ever happen.
I think what the MPAA and RIAA wants to do with p2p is not to shut it down (because that will be an impossible goal), but to make it so hard to copy stuff that 99% of the people will not want to even try. People will get on-line, look for a few websites, try to make a copy, and when it fails, three hours later, they will say fuck it. They did it with napster when they flooded them with mp3's that had high pitched noises in the music, or worse, gave you a loop of 10 seconds of the song. It was not usable. Then they went after torrent websites, leaving a few left that you have to register with.
I suggest that everyone who wants music go to the library and copy it while you can. Who knows what the RIAA and MPAA have comming down the pike.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
We have implemented a box at work that monitors all traffic for 'stuff', and its slowed us down significantly. Regardless if its Internet web traffic or simple SQL queries on internal servers.
Having this stuff mandated on our isp will just about kill our connection. ( and raise costs ) Between this and spam it will drive people off line ( which might be their ultimate goalanyway, cant download if you arent on the 'pirate-net' )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Testing that against a known file is trivially simple. Simply take two blocks, and subtract them. You'll have (A+XOR)-(B+XOR) = A-B. If you're going to, use proper encryption. With OpenSSL it is fairly easy anyway.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wow, is this a kind of an april's fool or something? I don't even think I need to comment much on the infeasibility of this...
Next thing you know, the RIAA will be solving NP-complete problems in constant time or something...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Greedy men build new system to catch people who will never buy their products. Men with a differnt opinion break it. Personally if I pay to go see a movie one time I don't feel any need to pay for it again.
Until you produce a recording of the above compositions, the only space required to store them is the algorithm you've described above, which fits into the eminently finite space of one Slashdot post.
Even if we accept that computers can produce an infinite number of pieces of released music, the number already in existence at any moment in time is finite. The number of items of proper, human-created music that someone would conceivably want to listen to is still finite, and smaller.
Therefore, a sufficiently-large storage medium can hold all the music created and available at a given point in time.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
"This topic is absolutely chock-a-block with discussions about which burglars' tools work best to fuck over and steal from our neighbors. What next, discussions on how to cut through school zones and take kindergarten-age hostages to elude the police during a high-speed chase? "
I look at it like this. A discussion on how to preserve the privacy and liberty of those of us that do not commit copyright violations. Allowing this is like allowing the cops to tap my phone becuase my neighbor was caught committing a crime. It's unacceptable.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
A "little" off my own topic since I submitted the story....but the result of this I would imagine would be that p2p will start using SSL to encrypt the traffic (I put this in my text blurb for the story...but slashdot editors chopped it). Anyhow...this will NOT only defeat the MPAA, but MANY universities use trafic shapers to fingerprint Bittorrent and p2p traffic to keep it from saturating their bandwidth to the Internet. SSL encrypted p2p will effectively make packet shaping these services impossible.
Of course, my right to "fair use" will stand, so I can make backup copies and time and format shift for my own personal use.
You figure it out.
I think the banks of the world might have something to say about that, and last time I checked, they are way bigger, and wield *much* bigger sticks than the MPAA/RIAA
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
lets ignore the increase in computational power, MITM attacks require the attacker to _know_ the encryption alogorithm. If [insert your favorite p2p app] supports plugin type encryption modules, a select group could write their own encryption module and keep it in their little circle. This would effectively keep the ISP from MITM (unless the module gets leaked)
Second is the ISP has to recognize that the people are encrypting it, if someone engineered a different handshake protocol, then this could become troublesome for the ISP to MITM.
The MPAA will always go for the biggest targets, but people are dispersing onto smaller, closer knitt communities. I currently use two, one that uses IRC and another that not even google caches. The little groups could easily implement their own encryption methods thus keeping safe from the idiotic MPAA.
Quote frankly I'm having way too much fun with books at the moment. Real, Dead Tree Format books. There's some great stuff being produced, not like the pap that is a "blockbuster" movie.
I walked away from new music ages ago. I neither buy new stuff nor download anything. Because I also don't listen to the radio (*shudder*), I have no idea what music is out there. Thus I don't buy any. I'm watching less and less TV, I don't download movies and I don't go to the cinema. Movies are coming out now, I don't know what they are. When I do finally find out about them, I wonder why anyone pays money to see them, apart from being able to say they paid money and saw them.
Instead of going on for a hundred messages about the miniscule details of P2P, encryption, and the rest, let's assume that the MPAA can stop P2P and think of what the effects would be and the unintended consequences.
So... Assume that someday,
Super DRM is in place on Hollywood movies. When you download a Hollywood film, they have a record of the film and the PC address that it went to.
Now what are they going to do? Will they just have an automatic robot prosecutor (like the photo-radar that automaticly sends you a speeding ticket)? What will the fine be? $100,000 per movie? And what if no one pays? Do they automatically link to your bank account and deduct $100,000; or $10,000; or maybe just 50% of whatever's in the account? Will they have the ability to automatically garnish your wages so that 35% of whatever you earn for the rest of your life goes to them before taxes?
And just exactly how many people do they think that they are going to do this to in a country that has more guns than people before the leader of MPAA gets his pointy-little head blown off?
There are millions of people out there trading movies. Not one thinks that there is anything wrong with doing it. Not one thinks that the movie that they just spent hours downloading for a crappy little image is worth paying hundreds of dollars for, never mind hundreds of thousands of dollars. If they did, then they would pay $20 for the DVD. Or ten dollars to go to the theater and watch it.
So, what are they going to do? Have a lottery?
They gather data on 100,000 movie downloads and then pick one at random. Throw every lawyer in Hollywood and this poor schmuck, destroy his life, and require you to watch a five minute summary of it in the theater between the Pepsi ads and movie previews?
And if they did do this? Would it make their basic product any better? Would you be more willing to shell out $12 to go see White Cop, SmartAss Black Cop XXXIV and the local 12 screen multiplex? Or the latest braindead-on-arrival CGI cliche-ridden mess from a film industry on auto-pilot?
There are thousands of movies made each year. Hundreds of them are good and some are mind-boggling excellent. Most will never get seen by the people would be willing to pay real money for the opportunity to enjoy them.
P2P is the only way that Hollywood is going to get this vast reservoir of good movies together with the willing and eager audience. Frankly, P2P is the only way that Hollywood is going to be around fifty years from now.
I wish I could say to these people to just take their head out their ass, stop trying to fight the future, and start paying attention to all the people who are seriously interested in keeping the Hollywood entertainment industry in good health through this period of epic change.
But I don't really have much hope for them anymore. Hollywood is its own worst enemy, not the P2P film freaks.
Finally somebody says something smart! Ok so what if the plan isn't feasable? So what if all we need is encryption? While all these things are good ideas, in their own sense it doesnt get to the meat and potatoes of the matter! So what if the DCMA is messed? So what if it took away a lot of creativity? Coward made a good point in saying even if they do this (which even with the DCMA its a long shot) they cannot force the ISPs to monitor this. So lets look at this logically? What it will come down to (hell its the main issue for both sides: MPAA and "Pirates") is MONEY. What the MPAA will try to do is bargin with the ISPs. Use money or some sort of incentive. HOWEVER many pirates will be pissed (as well as customeers just concerned about their privacy, like me for instance) will drop their ISP for something different... A new high speed ISP that wont hand over the logs! So the its not really in the MPAA's hands, its the ISP who have the power. And they will ultimately have to choose between MPAA or the growing pirate crowd.
Mallory must use the same public key every time, otherwise Alice or Bob will notice something fishy when they reconnect in future.
For this reason, Mallory must either keep a database of every user and the corresponding fake key to use, or always use the same fake key on all connections.
If Mallory always uses the same key, then that key could become known, also all Alices would share the same key which would become suspicious to the Bobs.
The database idea is big and all Mallorys would have to share the same database.
Otherwise Mallory must rely on Alice and Bob not looking too closely at keys, or their software not looking too closely at keys, or communications between an Alice and a Bob being one offs and not repeated.
Of course, in the latter case perhaps the MPAA/RIAA have good cause to go after you. For communicating between friends, the man in the middle attack is far harder. You can always check fingerprints in person and build up a PGP like tree of trust. Currently too much trouble for many users, but if the MPAA/RIAA push harder, I expect many users will find themselves becoming far more competent in applied encryption.