Slashdot Mirror
Blu-Ray to Include New Copy Protection
Lord Haha writes "In an announcement (warning: links to a PDF) last night, the Blu-ray Disc Association, led by Sony, representing one of two competing high-definition DVD formats (the other being HD-DVD, led by Toshiba), stated it will simultaneously embrace digital watermarking, programmable cryptography, and a self-destruct code for Blu-ray disc players. Will this be the continuation of the trend into more and more restrictive DRM? Or something that will fade away like Betamax Tapes? Two articles on the topic can be found at Tom's Hardware and PC World."
Self-destruct code? What the FUCK?
I take this to say "We concede all control over this device to the **AA."
Am I the only one that finds this disturbing? Isn't this a violation of fair use? Will the public buy a player with BD+ in it?
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
This disc (and player) will self destruct in 5 seconds.
The life of hardware manufacturer is tough. You need enough DRM to convince copyright owners to develop/author for your platform yet it's DRM needs to be flawed enough so Joe Six-pack can easily circumvent it.
The former insures there's enough content on your platform to make it an enticing to a consumer. The latter makes your platform doubly as enticing because your customers don't have to spend an insane amount of money getting a large body of content for your platform; they'll just copy it.
The problem is that Sony just can't make the DRM flawed enough to capture public interest because their media division just wont stand for it. So once again, someone else will come along and give the public what they want: media that's easily copied.
Is there precident for this? Absolutely, Why did the Sony Playstation crush the N64? Because you can copy easily for the Playstation. Copying a cartridge is just too much hastle to be worth it. Even better it was trivial to chip a playstation so you could get loads of games for the price of a few CDs.
Rather than learning this lesson they ignored it. Before the IPod, Sony products were the market leaders in portable music. Sony could have got an Ipod like device to market first but the Sony record label were scared so it never happened: Apple did it instead. Far from being a match made in heaven, the symbiosis of Sony media and Sony technology is becoming increasingly schizophrenic and it is punishing them right where it hurts any company: their bottom line.
Simon.
Doesn't anyone think that Sony is really pushing the market at this point? I mean, what with#%#%(*#^A^A^A;x00;x00NO CARRIER
Now they can load "gator" code into ur firmware!
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. -Heinlein
I got 3 sentences into one of the articles and it said that BluRay will have proprietary versions of all these stated techniques. Given Sony's track record with proprietary stuff (Beta, MD, Memory sticks, etc.), I'm not going to lose much sleep.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
High definition is not good enough increment in technological value to supplant present day DVD's with a crippled DRM technology.
HD-DVD will be stillborn.
People will take convenience and the facade of ownership over crippled technology any day. Just look at divx (not the Mpeg 4 technology - the rediculous pay for play disks that were stillborn).
-- Mean People Suck
The thing that always frosts me, is whenever The Industry talks about piracy they always bandy about numbers like (from TFA), three billion dollars per year in lost revenue. I would really love to see their methodology.
It seems to me that, people who are going to pirate content, probably come in three basic groups
Has anyone ever done a study on what percentage of users of pirated content, would have purchased that content, had it not been available outside the legitimate distribution channels?
Has that study been done, and The Industry discovered that it is such a tiny fraction as to make no difference?
Of course, I can see how large-scale commercial piracy really does hurt the distribution system. If a retailer buys three dozen copies of a title for sale as the genuine article, and those three dozen copies SELL as the genuine article at retail price, but were knocked off by a Chinese plant, then that represents a true loss of revenue. What percentage of the discs sold world-wide (I know this is a serious problem in Europe and the Orient) as legitimate are really pirated?
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Eh. First off, according to the Tom's Hardware article, these players would have to be permanently connected to the internet. Where have I heard about something like that before... Perhaps from DivX, which required the players to be connected to a phone line to "phone home" every now and again... and I'm sure we all know how well that turned out.
Besides, what's to prevent a hacker from filtering out this self-destruct code from the downstream content anyway? I mean, it's not like this internet connection is protected or anything. If the content provider sends a packet to reflash the player, just don't let it get to the player. Have something in between to filter it out.
As usual, there are a bunch of fundamental flaws in DRM that will always keep coming back no matter what the content providers try to do. I see DVD Jon cracking this in a week after it's put out on the streets.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
If history serves my memory correctly, this is bound to fail like all the other DRM schemes. History does after all repeat itself, and usually all it takes is either a really good hacker, or a really lucky foul-up to make the DRM go to hell.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
The sun rises, the tides fall and rise, and it becomes cold in winter.
Seriously, you knew this was going to happen. The only surprising thing here is the "self-destruct code for Blu-ray disc players". And that isn't so much surprising as sad and hilarious.
I wonder if they'll be implementing the self-destruct code in the PS3. If they do, if you thought the class action lawsuit over the DRE'ing PS2s was bad, wait until the first moment that some kind of vulnerability-- like buffer overflow in Phantasy Star Online for the Gamecube-- is found in an internet-capable PS3 game. Then watch as everyone playing that game gets targeted by a little bit of wormy executable code that triggers the Blu-Ray destruction tripwire and kills the console permanently...
There's no such thing as a "violation of fair use". "Fair Use" isn't a right guaranteed to you. It's a principle that exonerates you, under specific circumstances, from what would otherwise be a violation of someone else's copyright.
This is a serious issue that concerns all of us and shouldn't be joked about by dilettants.
If the HD-DVD decide to go down the same slipery road as the Blu-Ray and the content lobby I'll stick to good old inexpensive DVDs.
How many hours after the first commercial sale of one of these "registered" blu-ray burners will a hack be announced?
I'm putting a dollar on the "25 hour" square
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
So now they'll be giving viruses the chance to take out hardware? One up for HD-DVD.
If Blue Ray requires the device to be connected to the internet then that will spell the death of it before it even is sold anywhere. Same thing for HD-DVD. People will not want or be able to run internet connections to their tv area just to be able to play hidef dvd's. If people have to do anything more than plug it into the wall for power and plug the player into the tv and/or receiver then it won't sell.
Man, the second these guys think they have some level of dominance they think they can do anything...
Just like what will happen with PS3 vs the XBOX2,
they loose site of market and try to control it.
I can smell massive lawsuits from State Attorney Generals a mile off ...
Seriously, this is almost as farcical as Lotus 1-2-3 introducing copy protection and spawning the Copy II Plus massive sales increase.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
1. Create DVDs with self-destruct technology
2. Sell DVDs to public
3. Profit
4. After the DVD is viewed, self-destruct
5. Repeat steps 2 - 4 as necessary.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
KIRK: Destruct sequence one. Code one, one-A.
SPOCK: Destruct sequence number two. Code one, one-A, two-B.
SCOTT: Destruct sequence number three. Code one-B, two-B, three.
KIRK: Begin thirty second countdown. Code zero, zero, zero, destruct, zero.
Having this new copy protection stuff should just seal the deal (great for studios, terrible for consumers). The fact that only one manufacturer is expected to ship a HD-DVD player this year (and for $1000) doesn't bode well. Early next year Sony will be shipping the PS3 which will not only play the blueray discs, but will also play PS1/2/3 games and DVDs. All for $500 (my guess at their "high price", but even at $700 it would be a bargain compared to $1000). There will be so many PS3 sales, it would be hard to beat that installed base even if HD-DVD was in the initial X-Box 360s (now we don't even know if that will happen).
The war is over. The only people who don't know it are the HD-DVD group.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The only way this scheme is coming into my house is if they give it to me, and I can change them for bandwidth usage.
If TV/Movies are that important to you, then GAFL.
This controversial technology would require that disc players maintain permanent connections to content providers via the Internet, making it possible for discs that fail a security check to trigger a notification process, enabling the provider to send the player a sort of "self-destruct code." This code would come in the form of a flash ROM "update" that would actually render the player useless, perhaps unless and until it is taken to a repair shop for reprogramming.
Is it just me or does anyone else envision a virus that can actually destroy hardware? Its been a long time since hardware damage from virus's has been any concern but if something like this were actually implemented it would be all over. I can just see a piece of malware that crafts malicious packets to reply to ?software? that is running to ensure the disc is legit and wellah a dead drive. There is any number of ways that this could be abused to kill drives.
Betamax may have been a failure, but Betacam SP was a big hit and is a defacto standard for professionals.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
>a self-destruct code for Blu-ray disc players
That's waaaay over the line.
Not gonna buy it.
You think I'd let a mistake by some techie or program destroy a few hundred bucks of my hard-earned money?
I'm tired of people treating me like a thief, when I never pirate ANYTHING!
I've got lots of CDs and DVDs I already bought in the 80s and 90s, and I can always just walk along the street and whistle (or daydream).
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
These matters of DRM protection matter not. Hackers crack them always, they will.
All these new systems will fail for one reason: Porn.
Porn producers are very realistic, and very saavy. Do you think people are going to buy "Buttbandits 23" if they know that every time they queue it up, some manufacturer is getting a record of it?? Even those without tinfoil hats know this is a bad idea...
My prediction is that the pornographers will use a version of the high-def discs WITHOUT the phone-home feature, or will stick to DVDs.
Pornography: Saving Western Civilization since 1826.
It's not what you know, or even who you know- It's how many people recognize your damn
*BOOM* Gee thanks Takei, now everybody knows.
If they have to be connected to the net, I think it is a foregone conclusion that they will fail completely. Most consumers know notihng about the net, don't know how to configure a wireless router (assuming it allowed a wireless connection) or do not have a reliable wireless connection throughout their entire house. I don't. And if it requires a wire will it require a phone line connection? Probably not if it needs to connect to the net. It needs a CAT5 connection. That requires a wire. It was a huge pain just to run a wire from my room to my dad's room, and we had the luxury of hiding the wire behind heating vents in that case. But if we had needed to run a wire downstairs that would have been impossible to hide.
They'd have to be absolutely bonkers to make a DVD player that needs to be connected to the net all the time in this day and age. It's much too early to assume every room has a net connection.
each blu-ray disc (for dvds) had on it's file system a space reserved for a code block to be run by a VM on the player? This code would be loaded to decrypt the content, and you'd use a digtally signed (ala xbox) and TrusedComp platform (TCPM, ala the new x86 DRM) system to choose which CD's to load code from, and limit execution of code to just those disks. They could make players that will only play 'original' media; movies from outside their studio releases could play on it, so by definition anything else is piracy. Use this fact to completely stop the influx of burned CD ****from the analog hole*** (less quality on the conversion = different checksum = unable to hash out a code block that the player will accept (aka has to be signed with that hash in it)
This would set the stage for other manuvers on a strictly cryptographic basis. be forewarned - be forearmed.
jro / whereyou _at_ gmail.com
"Besides, what's to prevent a hacker from filtering out this self-destruct code from the downstream content anyway?"
I'd be willing to bet a month's salary that they are going to use public-key cryptography with a bigass key to protect it. RSA2048 will keep anyone from screwing with it. Hard-code the SSL public key, and the only way you're going to launch a man-in-the-middle attack against it is by rewriting the key.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
I'd love to see a virus that teaches the early adopters a lesson in consumer research!
while(disc->isDestroyed)
::Profit();
{
disc = new CrippledJunk();
theMasses->purchase(disc);
theMasses->view(disc);
disc->selfDestruct();
}
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
George Takei: Let's take them out with us. Do you guys have a self destruct code? Like "Destruct Sequence one-A, two-B, three"--
(Bender's head explodes instantly.)
Bender: Thanks a lot, Takei! Now everybody knows!
Reminds me of the old Divx players that they tried to foist on us several years back, when DVD players were just starting to become popular. They had to be connected to a phone jack so they could phone home and let their masters know what you were up to. Ok, they didn't self-destruct, but the potential was there. I was elated to see that crappy technology flop. I remember a Circuit City sales guy trying to sell me one. He failed miserably when trying to explain how it was better for me to have discs that would expire and a player that would inform on me.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Even worse: what about when hackers can start sending these self destruct packets themselves. Imagine how pissed you'd be when someone "destroys" your dvd player!
HARDWARE-based DRM, on the other hand, while it does have some fatal flaws, is proving to be increasingly difficult to crack. Read that description of hacking the XBox. It's starting to get a little insane the lengths one has to go to these days to break into a box, and it'll get worse over time. It's impossible to say if manufacturers will eventually win or not, but you CAN say that over time, there will be fewer and fewer hackers who have the skill, experience, and money to get around this kind of thing.
Okay, so these companies have a right to protect content that they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating.
However who is paying the price for all this hardware and copy protection. Permanent internet connections? Players that render themselves inoperable once a copyright violation has been detected? It might sound like a sweet deal to industry lawyers, but these machines and discs are going to be needlessly expensive and few people are going to buy into a technology that resembles a copyright minefield.
People like simple funcional things, like disks that you slot into a machine and watch movies on, not permanently internet-connected, big brother-esque machines that throw a fit and need to be repaired if you try and watch a naughty, naughty copied movie on. "Bad consumer, very baaad consumer!"
People (by which i mean the 95% of people who are happy with DVD and don't see a reason to upgrade to HD) won't buy into a new technology unless it is simple, reasonably cheap and offers a clear advantage the DVD player they bought a few years ago.
I, for one won't be buying a Blu-Ray machine. My money is on HD-DVD. A lower capacity disk yes, but probably cheaper, probably easier to make +R discs of (which is what I REALLY want them for) and probably better overall.
At the same time, I may end up downloading my HD movies from Apple through iTunes (or whatever) , which is the way things may well end up if these people don't get their s**t together.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Blu-ray appears to have developed its own approach--in some cases, proprietary--to each of these three technologies
Time and time again we've seen these "proprietary" techniques developed, and invariably, propriertary means it has a questionable design, buggy implementation, and inadequate testing. So invariably some clever hacker will figure out how to circumvent it and make it all a moot point.
Aside from that, fine, if they want to rig up my PS3 to blow up when I put in a bad disc, go right ahead. I just won't buy a PS3, or the movies that go with it. Gee, I won't be able to watch movies in high def. Well as it turns out, good movies play just as well on my 27" low def Magnavox without surround sound hooked up as they play on a wall encompassing high def with 7.1 surround.
Eventually these media companies will figure out that we can keep ourselves entertained for free via the Internet. That we don't need them, and if they want to sell us stuff and make it easy for us to watch it, we probably will. But if they try to make it hard, then we'll just ignore them.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
These companies think we're stupid. They don't think we'd notice watermarks or stuff like that. And the sad thing is, people give these companies more power by not being involved in the technelogical aspects of thier lives. If I get a HD-DVD player ande am unable to play a video because some pansy executive takes away my privacy in the name of "ant-piracy," I will demand my money back. On a related note, I head that the players tested with Gigli discs self destructed immediately.
*MOVE SIG*---*FOR GREAT JUSTICE*
So, if I read this right, to use this thing I'll have to have a live internet connection, and if I do something "suspicious" with it, content providers can send the "Packet 'O Death" and kill my player? And they expect me to pay them for this?
I find the studios' obsessive need to "protect" their content, well, stupid. The content will get out one way or another. I don't think early adopters of Crippleware (tm) will give positive reviews to the mainstream, who are pretty content with DVDs, and so they are already digging the grave for this format before it is even released.
One day, the idea that content is pretty easy to duplicate and hardware, is, well, HARD to duplicate will penetrate their little minds, and they might start to emphasise better/more convenient ways for people to watch content, and figure out how to make money from that. Apple's pretty good at that. They might figure out that the first time someone's player goes poof by remote control, they just lost the sales to all that fellow's friends and family. Maybe I'll even live long enough to see these realizations penetrate. Maybe.
Sigh.
bollocks
Don't buy 'em. All I need to see are the words "self destruct" and I'm done with it. If people don't buy the damned things because of DRM then eventually they might get the idea. Count me out.
I can't think of a single media playback device that did not enjoy a healthy kick in sales simply because it allowed a buyer to make/playback copies of original media... or from hacks which allowed the machine in question to do more than originally advertised.
Beta tapes and VHS recorders --"You mean I can go to the store, set one deck to playback on channel 3 and set the other to record channel 3, and I have a copy? Schmeet!"
Audio cassettes -- Same deal.
CD Burners -- Again, essentially the same deal.
Playstations -- I can play imported games and as a side benefit, play "backup" games? Where do I get one of these mod-chips? See: CD-Burner sales.
Dreamcast -- Homebrew games and backups? All I have to do is use a special boot-cd? I think I'll pick one up since they're so cheap. See: CD-Burner sales.
DVD Burners -- I can backup my important data plus burn movies and games? I want one!
XBOX -- Relatively shitty sales compared to the gold-standard Playstation2 'til the modders started to have fun with the internal hard drive. Drop some NES/SNES/Genesis emulators on there...
Sony PSP --Aside from the weak (IMHO) "I have one before you!" factor... probably the only thing driving sales... the ability to make it do things it didn't do out-of-the-box.
Anyone denying that the sale of almost every new format's success was riding on the possibly of pirating is damn near delusional. Maybe it isn't the deciding factor for every single person buying the widget, but it's definitely a sizable minority... if not majority.
Frankly, this time around, we're really faced with a stalemate between Hollywood and consumers. Sure, early adopters will buy whatever hits the market... but not in droves.
This time around, if the hardware makers don't follow the wishes of Hollywood, prices probably won't decline, volumes will remain flat, and Toshiba and Sony both will be faced with a format that's dead right out of the gates.
However, without laying the DRM on thick, Hollywood won't play ball with the next generation of video players. Catch-22.
It's silly not to attribute a sizable portion of the success of DVD to the cracking of CSS -- like it nor not.
Ahhh . . . never mind television or HDTV. I'm going to play in the big blue room outside my house later.
the Blu-ray Disc Association, led by Sony
A textbook perfect case of one division of a giant conglomerate looking out for another division. Does Toshiba have any fingers in the movie/music/whatever content business?
I read last week that the PS3 release may be tied to the success of lack there of the the xbox360. If the xbox360 is slow out of the gate, the article said that the PS3 may have its US debut pushed into late 2006 or even sometime in 2007.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
The HD-DVD peoples published the specs on their DRM scheme months and months ago.
Meanwhile to counterpart Blu-Ray's "interesting" copy control features, at least as the standard stands, HD-DVD discs MUST CONTAIN DRM in order to be played in an HD-DVD player AT ALL. This is not like DVD, where CSS was an option which disc creators could choose to follow or not follow and you could just freely stick into a DVD player a DVD-R you burned. An HD-DVD drive is not allowed, by the current compliance rules, to play ANY HD-DVD disc which doesn't have a digital watermark granted directly by the central HD-DVD authority. Interestingly these watermarks include a "banned" list-- HD-DVDs keep an internal list of watermarks that have been "revoked", and every new HD-DVD printed will contain an up-to-date copy of that "revoked" list which the HD-DVD player must update every time you put in an HD-DVD. If the HD-DVD player sees a disc whose watermark has been placed on the "banned" list, it refuses to play it.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
> > ur firmware
> *your* firmware.
Hey Gramps, you're so *square*. Get with the in-crowd! It's the way all the grooviest hep-cat kids are talking nowadays.
(Cut to scene of teenagers in preppie clothes and polka-dot dresses dancing to some catchy little number.)
Plus, do they seriously expect people to take in their PS3, home theatre receivers and whatever else in for reflashing when it "self destructs?" Yeah right.
Apple wouldn't have sold half the iPods it has were it not for the fact that it plays MP3s and it isn't cumbersome to transfer your MP3s to it (legal or otherwise) and that it doesn't convert the MP3s into DRMed files or some silly nonsense. I wonder how well those "Napster" enabled players are doing? Hmmmm. I think the fabled "iPod video" will follow in its older sibling's shoe, because that's what people want. If you can't play your DVDs on it (Blu-ray or HD), people aren't going to be interested.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
where the non-protected version will be available for 1/10th the cost, and play all the Blu-Ray DVDs you want.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The players won't have to be connected to the Internet; the self-destruct code can be delivered on discs.
Good. I say we stop resisting this and let them have what they want. Let these companies create all kinds of complicated consumer-angering technology. Let people be forced into experiencing the entertainment they "buy" only how the providers want. Let the consumer be forced into restrictive pay-per-view models for movies they purchase. Make it impossible for me to let my mom borrow a DVD I "bought." Just let it all happen.
That will give the rest of the entertainment community the chance to create smaller, niche forms of entertainment, while hollywood continues its downward spiral of making worse mass appeal crap. Same for music, TV, etc.
_______
2B1ASK1
For what purpose would I buy their product?
It has self-destruct code built in I would gladly spend money to buy one that does not.
They have to sell me on why I should buy their product despite the built in restrictions. I could easily wait a year and buy the competitor that offer the exact same thing but with out the restrictions?
They worry about individual piracy too much. They need to stop it at its source. The only pirated movies I have seen have come directly from a movie rep or reviewer. Hell I can get the unprotected copy newest movie prior to the release to the theatres - it is not that hard. I watched one movie like this and it sort of ruined the experience. So I stay away from them and see the movies on the full screen in all its glory with a crowd. Even it the movie sucks I do not feel too bad about it. It is the movie going experience I am actually paying for. It is a big plus if the movie is any good. It is good movies I will later purchase it (much like how a serial killer keeps mementos of their victims).
Actually, they will, if the AACS draft isn't changed by the time these ship.
From the Tom's Hardware article:
Interestingly though, you DO have a point: If someone were to slip a hacked disc into your machine, it would trigger a notification back to the provider, who would presumably then SEND the self-destruct code. This means that anyone could destroy your player simply by inserting a hacked disc.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
It's simple supply & demand, really; the additional restrictions make the technology less desireable, which means the price has to come down to compensate. Let's say Sony wants to sell fully DRM'd self-destructing one-time-use HiDef BluRay movies at WalMart. At $20 apiece, they can frickin' eat my shorts. At $1 each, I'm a customer because it's better than PPV and rentals.
The only thing we (customers) can really do is not buy it (literally) which will force this whole DRM/Fair Use thing to work itself out in the marketplace.
I'm not talking about a single dramatic event such as a boycott (which will almost certainly happen and which almost certainly won't work), but rather over time they'll push a few customers out of the market here, then they'll push a few more customers out of the market there and pretty soon they aren't moving as many units as they need to. Oh, they're making great margins on the units they are moving, but volume *will* *suffer*. Count on it.
After blaming the lost revenue on a myriad of non-existant causes (including "phantom" piracy that isn't really happening because their DRM really is working), they will hopefully come around to realize that fair-use circulation gives them more value in exposure than they lose to piracy, just like the software business did 20 years ago.
That or we'll just give up on them and cut them entirely out of the loop -- a few of us customers out here are pretty good at making music, tv and movies all on our own without a big studio telling us how to do it.
All the DRM in the universe is useless if it causes the cash flow to stagnate.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
In particular, software-only copyright protection is usually fairly quickly cracked, since it's not hard to put it inside a box and debug it.
MS has solved this problem in Vista: if you have a debugger installed, an HD DVD or Blu-ray software player will refuse to start. It's not foolproof, but it will make DVD Jon's life harder.
Partly because it's a hard thing to proeprly empiricly test for, partially because the media industry would rather just throw out numbers than potentially have science prove them wrong.
The only good study I'm aware of that relates to this is a P2P study done by Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill. They looked to see if people getting music on P2P had any effect on CD sales. The study concluded there was no stastical effect. The industry rejects it, of course, but so far it's withstood peer review.
I'm sure Sony et al. want to make a medium that's not DRM-equipped, but remember--say it with me now--Sony is a company, and one that seeks money to operate. The guys with the real money happen to be the music/movie publishers, who are begging for a useful form of content protection so that the Internet doesn't continue to obsolesce any physical publishing that would tie the cost to the disc, and the disc to the music.
It's what we get for lauding an otherwise perfect disc format from a proprietary music/movie/game maker. I hope a Free Hardware Foundation, along with non-money-hungry media companies, counter this.
Oh, and (judging from the parent post) if you thought the SOCOM II lag was bad, wait for the SOCOM III viruses...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Didn't they learn their lesson from the DivX debacle?
What the hell are they thinking? Like I'm going to spend my hard-earned money on something that might self-destruct if they don't like the disc you're playing. Do they seriously think people are going to buy that?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Just to answer the question (not to defend the stupidity of DRM systems) they'll encrypt the entire phone-home channel. The players are not going to even spin up the discs unless they're online to the mothership, and have an "approval to play" ticket in their hands. As an outsider without access to the contents of the encrypted stream, you won't be able to tell a good packet from one with the evil bit set. They might not even be "individual packet" based in that they could require a complete, continuous stream. A simplistic way to look at it would be to give them numbered packets, meaning don't process packet #38 until you've received and processed packet #37. Even if you killed off the "evil bit" packet (say you somehow knew that #37 was the self-destruct packet), the protocol would have your player re-requesting #37 before it would proceed to #38 to authorize your new BLU-RAY of "Star Wars Episode 10: Venegance of the Billionaires." And when #37 arrives it turns your machine into landfill.
This is going to take some tricky secure hardware to pull all this off. The guys who used to decrypt satellite TV used some pretty fancy equipment to read the firmware in the smart cards so they could reverse engineer the protocols. I expect these players are likely to be eggshell fragile, destroying themselves at the drop of a pin rather than let some hacker have his way with a logic probe. And that means Joe Sixpack is going to have a lot of dead players initially, meaning these things will get a crap reputation right out of the blocks. Viva DivX!
John
same guy here, i read
...The difference is less pronounced for video programs, which admittedly is the primary market with which the CRI researchers are concerned...
5 216&tid=109&tid=172&tid=158&tid=155 ... this slashdot story? (it's the Longhorn might require a DRM'd Monitor)... /moment of clarity.. you tenuous thing!
http://www.giantstepsmts.com/DRM%20Watch/spdc.htm
and saw that video content is one of the things they mention could be more practical:
So the scenario I laid out above could be true.. your association was spot on! They could make the players still play unoriginal content - just at a lower resolution. Sounds a little something like...
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/15/15
hhahahaaaaa....
:-)
Who are all these sorry asses that still use media hahahahaa...
As long as they put a price on the media, instead of putting a price on the actual content they will hunt after theire own tail
Do the math: buy a cd, a dvd and the LP thing... you will pay for the right to listen to a single song 3 times. I demand a refund... (I really would, if id payed anything hihi)
And I think this would be more likely than typical. I'm sure some would do it out of spite of such a stupid concept.
Why cant people read. I see many posts saying this will kill hd-dvd and they are getting blue ray. Read the article. THis is blue ray that is doing this.
Several industry insiders on AVS Forum have stated that HD DVD and Blu-ray players do not require any Internet connection, and I believe them above Tom's Hardware. (I guess we could try to read the AACS spec, but it's not finalized, it's not all publically available, and I'm too lazy.)
Neither, it will be cracked in a matter of hours.
Bring it on!
Six months on the market, and the flood of RMAs, and the tidal wave of backlash when customers figure this out, will quickly correct this foolishness.
--Mike--
If I'm renting the player and the media, this is all fine and dandy.
If I'm buying a perpetual-use license, which after all is what "buying" a DVD means today, and I intend on playing it on hardware I own, then it's definately NOT okay.
Perpetual-use licenses imply permission to convert to different formats, particularly formats that may not have existed at the time. It's called "fair use."
I dare any bookseller to deny me the right to scan my book into my laptop for easier reading on the road. It would make a VERY interesting court case, and if I lose, a VERY interesting political case.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You read the slashdot headline, but you didn't read the linked article. The source for that wasn't Sony, anyone connected to Sony, or anyone in a position to know. The source was an "analyst", an independent individual making up a prediction. It had no basis in reality.
Intel and AMD CPUs shipping this year are going to support easy virtualization. Those hardware companies are pouring money into VM software, and that VM software is free, so anyone and everyone will be able to run VMMs on their stock machines. One way to limit some of the damage of viruses/spyware is to make it a habit to run with multiple VMs. Even grandmothers should do this. (on top of security, VMs have a wide range of other benefits that make them hard to sideline)
On the other hand, DRM is becoming more popular. MS will have its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base that will try to have sections of memory that are very secure and protected. Grandmothers are going to want to play their DVD's inside a VM, and play her secure .WMA files, and...
Multiplayer games are often hacked, and hacks can ruin a multiplayer game. Microsoft's new NGSCB promises to have a secure authenticated path from the USB hub to the software. Hackers come out with things like fishing bots that multiplayer game authors would really like to prevent. Normal players would like to play hack-free games, within a VM.
Is there an inevitable train wreck here?
"We will continue to promote further penetration of the format."
Funny, I feel pretty penetrated already.
Howard Roark, Architect
I believe in a Man's right to exist for his own sake.
Where the fuck is DVD-Audio now? Surround sound quality music with incredible DRM included? Who couldn't see the benefits of that? No one apparently.
I saw a handful in the corner of my local HMV, and they quickly died a death. Everyone stills buys CD. There is going to have to be compelling benefits to adopt a new standard, and since DVD is as deeply entrenched you're going to see BluRay and HD-DVD restricted to consoles if at all.
"lose sight" NOT "loose site"
Yeah, and I'm sure it won't require an internet connection when it ships, I'm just going by what the article says. No company in their right mind would require the end user to have to wire out an ethernet connection to these boxes in order to simply play a disc.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
That hardware sales any more are either near 0 margin, or loss leaders. Especially in the case of playstations/xboxes. Its one thing to not get to sell games to customers, but when sony/ms essentially PAYS you to take a console that you will buy no games for, it stings pretty bad.
sure its good for the hardware, but the company making it won't feel the same way.
How about a little lipservice to the **AAs and you start valuing your customers.
If you build it to play fair, We will buy it, Studios will distribute to the MARKET. Don't let the media producers dictate to you the formats.
This is a little fuzzy in Sony's case, I understand. But they know it too. Sony sells music on all formats not just their own atrac or whatever its called. DVD & UMD, CD and ATRAC.
The Consumer is in charge, like it or not. If you fence us in, we will let you starve. There are far too many options available to us to try to force an exclusive one now.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
- Users who don't have phone lines or Internet connections? (Yes, there are lots of them.)
- My Internet connection is down... Well, I can't surf the web, so I think I'll pop in a DVD, instead. ERROR - UNAUTHORIZED!
- Invasion of privacy - Please wait while your DVD player connects to Sony Headquarters to inform them that you're watching an illegal copy of Horse Humpers Volume 7.
- Warning stickers? WARNING: This device will stop working if an invalid disk is loaded. Yeah, that's good for sales.
- Headaches for retailers (dealing with returns/repairs of "self destructed" uints).
Not to mention that people just won't like the idea. And it's untrue to say that it won't matter, because the general public won't know the difference, because the first people who are going to buy next-generation DVD players are the tech-savvy crowd. And they won't buy this garbage. It sounds to me like the battle is over... They've showed their hand, and they've got nothing.This all just sounds like a little bit too much hassle to me. I really don't think many people will be prepared to jump through all these ridiculous hoops just to watch a movie. All these DRM vendors are going on about it like they are gonna control the earth's water supply, when in fact it won't be anything more important than, say, Scary Movie 3. Somehow I expect none of is gonna work like the DRM merchants expect it to and the Hollywood studios are probably gonna shoot themselves in the foot with these hillariously overblown measures.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
Another thing they could do for updating the firmware on these players is to embed the firmware updates on new DVD's that come out to the market. Every time you rent a new movie, it can check to see if you have the latest firmware and if not, flash it for you in the background. No internet connection necessary. Most of us here are technical folks. We are frequently called upon to help non-technical people make purchasing decisions. Ensure they buy no HD-DVD or BlueRay products that are crippled in this fashion. The real downer is that I was hoping for higher capacity discs for lawful backups on my pc but I guess dual layer dvd's will have to fill the void for the next few years.
Anyone else find it completely amusing how these "leaders" of technology make these bold claims only to be made to look like complete jackasses when a 15 year old kid breaks their uber-1337 "copy protection"?
Nice try, I guess, but data is data - you can't copy protect a fuckin thing. You figure they'd learn their lesson by now. Ah well, the stubborn fuckers will realize it as soon as the shit's cracked.
Most of this is FUD anyhow. Do you REALLY think people will buy these players that require an internet connection? Nope. Not gonna happen.
The end!
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I will never buy a device that will self-destruct. I have enough trouble keeping the Windows Box from self-destructing.
If Internet connection is required to validate a movie what is stopping them from logging all sorts of user info. IE the length of time I freeze frame on someone's naughty bits. Or the number of times I replay a scene.
I doubt anyone would want a log indicating that out of the 100's of movies I (temporary leased in their minds) how many porno's I watched and how many times.
Next thing you know the government will be recording which books I buy or check out at the library.
Why not just tax everyone 100% of their income and provide everything they need for life as seen buy a government regulated board. The collected tax revenue can be split up amongst the providers. Eventually big business can convince the rest of the world to work like this and we have truly free society with no money, no dreams, no choice, no war. It is easy to imagine!
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Yeah, there are Blu-Ray players out already. In Japan, of course, but they are consumer goods that one can purchase on the street. They are damn expensive, but that doesnt matter.
So, what about this news that Blu-Ray will require a permanent connection to Sony Headquarters? The current players have no such bullshit in them...
This implies that the debugger can be detected. There are many ways you can implement debugger stealthing at the debugger level, and there's always the option of modifying/removing the debugger detection routines. I've done quite a bit of research in automated removal of debugger detection routines, some of which is available at http://www.datarescue.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi ?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=000320;p=0 if you're interested.
Most of what stops normal people won't stop a good reverse engineer with a good debugger and disassembler.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
"As usual, there are a bunch of fundamental flaws in DRM that will always keep coming back no matter what the content providers try to do."
The one, real fundamental flaw in DRM is that you need to be able to access the "protected" information. If the "DRM-enhanced" player can do it, everyone can do it. No Matter how complex (read: annoying) you design it, it always get's completly decoded by your player, else you couldn't see anything anyway. So they give you all the needed tools to "break" their "protection".
Well, I guess I am a technological dropout. I didn't buy an iPod nor another portable mp3 player. Heck they still haven't decided on a standard format for all of them to play. Why would I want more than one to legally play the different formats just to hear a song?
I haven't purchased a HDTV for much the same reason. They are wanting excessive prices for them and they are still not down to acceptable distrubution and cost. After the debacle of the broadcast flag, I am sure that I did right in that one. We still have to see a standard set down and made THE STANDARD everyone will use with no changes that may require the purchase yet again of something else to make it work.
This idea that it is ok to damage my equipment that I spent money on for their sake is nuts. They can go twiddle their fingers till they figure out where their rights end and mine hold sway. It's my money, not theirs. I won't invest in such types of schemes anymore than I will downloan what is now offered for legal consumption.
There is a very important fact here that all these cartels and megacorporations have forgotten. The customer is king, if you don't satisfy them and they don't come away with a certain satisfaction that the money was well spent, there comes a time when the customer says, "No More".
I have reached the point of "No More" long ago with the idea that I have to have a new player that meets this or that standard to play what I wish to play. My old cd player in the car works just fine. I don't need to spend the cost of an additional player just because the cartels have decided this or that scheme better supports their holy grail of no copy.
DRM == egg's in one frail basket.
Cripes, not only is there then incentive to crack the key, but also attack the servers. The last would prove doubly interesting, given you could not only decrypt the content of the media, but potentially send out false destruct messages that would look legitimate.
Hell, a coding error could open up huge liability for them.
DIVX self-destructing disk guys wanted my money, too, and they didn't get it and blew away, mere dust on the winds.
my dollar rules! not your anality
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It's not just hardware anymore...
web sites can be similar:
Search for "Visual Basic" and
here's what you get:
"There has been an error with your search
This search query has been -BLOCKED-
at the -REQUEST- of the copyright holder,
in compliance with the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act ("DMCA")"
Of course, one can always search for "Visual"...
thepiratebay and mininova are where the torrents are at.
The majority of the people were able to appreciate the transition from vinyl to CD and from VHS to DVD. The difference was clearly noticable and the new medium was much more practical. As a matter of fact, CD and DVD are so succesful that they will be very hard to replace!
Many people are quite happy watching DivX movies at 800Kbps and I imagine that the DVD format is already good enough for most. Why bother with the new technology, especially if it is so bothersome (copy protection etc)?
P.
Little else is known about ROM Mark at this time, except that the statement describes it as being undetectable to consumers. This is noteworthy in itself, since a previously heralded watermark applied to first-generation DVDs was notoriously defeated by someone writing over it with a permanent marker.
Huh? Wasn't this instead the first generation or two of CD copy protection that used sessions to lock out computers?
Watermarking was defeated by Edward Felten as part of the SDMI challenge. I never heard of it in the DVD market aside from so-called special codes encoded into screener discs to add traceability and prevent their distribution.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Sega's hardware sales never rose enough to convince game makers to release A list titles for it. The fact that you could run pirated games sans mod chip made it way too easy for people to copy games rather than buy them. Video game consoles enjoy margins less than the cost of a budget title, so increased hardware sales, while nice, aren't going to do much for a company's bottom line unless there is a corresponding increase in the sales of software. Also, I doubt that there has been a huge increase in sales of PS2 or XBox units due to copied media. The average Slashdotter might be eager to play old NES or Super Nintendo games on his/her modded console, but the average consumer doesn't want to risk fucking up their machine by soldering in a mod chip.
Nowadays communication lines are speedy and wireless, hard disk storage is cheap, and we have way too many standards for removable media.
Is it possible that by the time a removable media standard is consolidated, no one would want or need it?
...anyone and everyone will be able to run VMMs on their stock machines. One way to limit some of the damage of viruses/spyware is to make it a habit to run with multiple VMs. Even grandmothers should do this. (on top of security, VMs have a wide range of other benefits that make them hard to sideline)
I've read about this scenario in various places, but I don't see how its usability would be much better than a spyware-infested machine. (It's easy enough to test: give grandma a copy of VMware Workstation and see how much safer it makes her. I suspect the result would be multiple spyware-infested VMs...)
The more they seal their doom.
[rant]
On what planet does the RIAA think they're on? Newsflash -- this is a buyer's market. The Internet is a nearly insurmountable blow to copyright control. The sellers neet to *attract* customers through *increased* incentives to buy. They're doing the OPPOSITE.
What the recording industry continuously fails to recognize is that copyright violations (be they illegal or immoral) will *always* *always* *always* remain the option of the end user. The RIAA *CAN NOT* prevent copyright violations from happening. Given that the option to violate copyright (albeit illegally) will indefinitely remain ours -- THEY NEED TO WORK ON *ATTRACTING* CUSTOMERS.
Once more (you logic challenged RIAA drones): IF IT IS PLAYABLE IT IS COPYABLE. NOW GO RETHINK YOUR BUSINESS MODEL -- BECAUSE YOU'RE IN A BUYER'S MARKET!
[/rant]
INVESTMENT ADVICE: Short Big Entertainment Stocks. The evidence of clueless management is overwhelming.
No company in their right mind would require the end user to have to wire out an ethernet connection to these boxes in order to simply play a disc.
At least, not again.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
What about movie rentals? I think this is something they seem to have overlooked entirely. Rental discs are sent around to hundreds of players which means that it could not be assigned to one player. This means all you would have to do it copy a rental and it'd be open season again. After all, you only need 1 copy to get it out there.
I have to wonder what protection mechanisms will be in place to stop things like buffer overflows in their security code. The problem is that a break in the "chain of trust" anywhere could (and probably would) cause a security issue.
Running everything in a memory-protected VM would be a solution, but that's simply not practical on typical embedded hardware. Perhaps we'll start seeing more powerful processors being used for embedded systems soon...
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
Maybe I should find out what it takes to get into Blu-Ray player reprogramming market;) And for an extra $100 mam I can reprogram your unit to not " self destruct"
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
HD Video, the mainstream application of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD has no market.
HDTVs aren't finding their way into homes nearly as fast as DVD players did. From what I've read, HDTV had a US installed base of something like 14M in 2004 with growth to 74M in 2010. Now, consider that the DVD player installed base was 73M in 2003.
Therefore, Joe Blow has absolutely no reason to replace his $50 full-featured DVD player with a new model and buy new discs for it and probably won't for several years.
Other applications are pretty much irrelevant with regards to success of these formats.
The overwhelming majority of computer software still ships on CDs!
PCs won't need to read BD/HD and without easy copying, no one will want to write them either.
With use of these crippled discs limited to gaming consoles, the format is no more relevant to the world at large than the various cartridge formats of the 8 and 16-bit gaming eras.
DVDs are pretty good, and you can get a cheep read/write one for your box.
But I don't expect that to last.
I was happily using an old 4x CD burner which I got many years ago. I paid over $500 for the thing at the time! It worked fine and it did everything I needed done and I never had any desire to replace it. Then one day, I went down to the friendly neighborhood business supply store to pick up a new spindle of blank disks, and when I got them home, they crashed my system just by putting them in the tray.
Huh?
Turns out the new pack of disks were 700 MB as opposed to the 650 MB ones which my burner knew how to deal with. Fine. Annoying, but whatever. I should have read the package. So down to the store I went once more. Guess what? They no longer sold 650 MB blanks. I mean, anywhere. I spent the better part of the afternoon hunting around, and in the end couldn't find a single blank which my old burner would swallow.
So I came home instead with a shiney new burner, (which sold OEM, naturally looked almost identical to my old one.)
"So," I thought. "THAT'S how they plan to force me into buying new products I don't need!"
Honestly! --It seems as though being satisfied with your computer as it currently sits and having no desire to upgrade it is a cardinal sin these days. I like having an old clunker, because it's plenty fast and can run everything I need. I like having trusted machines which do their job well.
So now I can see a day when I'll come back home with a new digital camera or replacement hard drive or monitor which won't operate because my old OS is no longer mentioned in the operating manual, (let alone on the driver disk). So I'll have to upgrade to a new OS, which means I'll have to buy a new platform powerful enough to run it, which means I'll be buying some of those pre-installed DMR chips I was laughing at a couple of years earlier from my legacy-built ivory tower.
And that's how they'll sell hardware DMR.
Soon to be followed, I imagine, by extra bits of government code in the DMR chips which also watch what you do and report back any 'suspicious' behavior to your neighborhood Inquisitor.
Remember those TV sets people couldn't turn off in Orwell's 1984?
Oh, do sign me up.
-FL
actually not true - the analog hole will produce copies - but not with the exact checksum of the original. Players couild be built to reject movies that have been altered. Cryptography lets them do this.
;) . we've gotta be real about it - and stay on our toes. it's chess.)
(don't be so smug! they can get it right so close as does make no difference, and we provide *excellent* natural selection of algorithms
With the Sony having self-destructing CD drives, and the Xbox having hardware security checks to lock out unauthorised accessories, they're going to just be appliances.
Who cares about appliances?
The idea of needing to verify content over the net before playing it is an AWFUL one.
A DDOS against the verification servers and NO ONE will be able to play anything. A few million people unable to use their players ought to put a quick stop to this kind of DRM, to say nothing of people spoofing the self-destruct update to peoples machines and rendering them useless.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
So this would mean you can't watch your films if you r net connection goes down or you don't have one! Ok most homes in the developed world (and it seems China is getting up there too) have one, but what about portable players? What about wanting a second player in the kids bedroom which hasn't got a phoneline/network/wifi signal?
Sounds like a great way to kill the product. Maybe in 15 years when you can embed a cellular chip which can send low bandwidth data over a 3g (or 4g, 5g, ng) network this isn't going to make it a practical product.
these players would have to be permanently connected to the internet.
If the content provider sends a packet to reflash the player, just don't let it get to the player.
I'm still a little sketchy on the details (maybe I should read the article). However, I had a different take on this idea. If the player requires a connection to the Internet, what will a DDOS attack against the player's server do? If it's a situation where a movie won't play if the player can't connect, then suddenly, a lot of players simply won't work. Another thought; I've been reading a bit lately about DNS poisoning. What happens when somebody thinks it funny to spoof the server and instruct millions of players to self-destruct?
Personally, I have no use for this new technology. I don't own a high-definition TV, nor do I want to see the latest reality show in high-def. I can see where it might be nice to set up your own mini-home-theater. However, I still prefer to go out to the movies. I'm already a hard sell. The more unfriendly they make the hardware; the less likely I am to buy it.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
More fundamentally...
If they screwed up my player for some reason, and if I were wearing a black hat at the time, I'd pretty soon write a wittle worm (pun intended) that would DDoS the service to hell so they'd have to replace all the players on the market.
(Of course, I never wear my black hat, so it's a moot point, but I can see this happening in no time.)
I don't remember everything that DIVX had for content protection, but they required a dedicated connection so you could only watch movies when you paid up. Sure, DVDs that cost half as much are nice but not when you need to pay over and over. And DVDs proved without any doubt that people don't want to bother with complicated DRM bullshit.
But hey, if companies like Sony continue to want to spend millions to ruin a potentially good technology, then more power to them. I waited until DIVX was on the way out before I picked up my 1st DVD player, and even if HD DVD and BluRay go south, something will pick up the slack if there's a real demand for it.
I think he meant that *he* would never buy something like this, so it would never run on *his* hardware, but only on *your* hardware.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't..... like, mellow out man. When the revolution comes, and the flower children run the country, it'll be *everybody's* firmware, maaaaaan.....
Back in a minute, I need to sponge some money off my parents to fill up my VW and buy some food. Bummer.
After the bit about taking every thing we own "...I don't care, I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me..." It's not just a mater of Them taking away all our rights with media, a lot of it is that the general public has given up on entertaining themselves. It's time to look for alternative forms of entertainment. If we became a culture of book readers, that watched backyard scifi we downloaded off the Internet for a fee and learned to play our own musicale instruments then the big corporations could DRM the entire system and take away all our rights and it wouldn't mater a bit. We would still have the sky, we could still enjoy our selves without the big corporations.
We are the Borg...
If they make the media self-destruct, the consumer is supposed to pay around $20 each time s/he wants to see the movie. But if you make the player self-destruct, that will go up to $499. Higher profits are a good motivation, but I doubt anyone will be that stupid.
Just like CD's with mp3's can hold 200 songs- I am putting entire seasons of TV shows (26 episodes) on one DVD in divx6 avi files. They look super sharp. New players starting to come out (at the $600 level) will play these disks.
So if I can get a season of DVD quality shows on one DVD in HD format, it kinda undercuts the need for BLU-RAY.
Some of the new dvd players are also recorders and can record straight to AVI. They also network and you can copy files from them to and from your computer over your home network. Sub $600! Just can't see Blu Ray making it with the masses compared to an "Mp3" player type video player.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
great.. so take a "bad" disc into your local eletronics shop and destroy ever demo player they have.. niiiiice. way to go sony!
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
" High definition is not good enough increment in technological value to supplant present day DVD's with a crippled DRM technology."
If a person buys/rents a DVD and it works, they won't consider the technology crippled. On the other hand, if there is an obvious difference in picture quality between standard DVD and the new technology, the new technology will win. Apple has proven people are willing to accept DRM if it isn't noticable for most of the things people normally do.
Vote for Pedro
Ahh, peddling those service plans back when I worked at Best Buy now suddenly seems worth it. Anything that hurts BB's bottom line is okay in my book.
That's just fucking brilliant; now M$ won't let software developers watch DVDs?
:D
The players need to phone home?
The Blu-ray is doomed already - and that's a shame because with the capacity they are touting it would have been the clear winner, if it weren't for fascist "you do not have fair use rights" DRM.
BTW: I rip every single DVD I buy to my PC and my PocketPC. I'll pass on Blu-Ray.
Oh, and if Blu-Ray does hit the scene with 2048-bit RSA encryption, watch for new distributed computing apps and a network larger than the seti at home network ever was.
Say there's a new player technology that has to be connected to the internet at all times, and release a bunch of movies in that format. N people will care enough about the increased resolution to buy or rent them. Say you remove the internet restriction this making it easier and safer and more anonymous. M people will then go for it. M >> N. Will the difference make up for the reduction is losses via piracy? I don't think so.
Besides, it's inevitable that somebody will find a way to send bogus self-destruct codes to every player connected to the internet. Instant worst nightmare for Sony. Unless there's some secret back door to automatically un-destruct them... Viola, no more protection!
I have at least 6 DVD players in the house, of which 3 are actually connected to TVs, but they haven't been used in years, except to play music CDs (or load computer software). DVD players are becoming irrelivant due to PVRs, cable and satellite services. The DVD copying paranoia will just hasten its demise.
Oh well, what the hell...
"One part of the announcement that had been anticipated by experts was Blu-ray's embrace of Advanced Access Content System (AACS), one version of which has also been adopted by the HD DVD Forum. This controversial technology would require that disc players maintain permanent connections to content providers via the Internet, making it possible for discs that fail a security check to trigger a notification process, enabling the provider to send the player a sort of "self-destruct code." "
This is our worst nightmare, DIVX meets Mission Impossible!
"This controversial technology would require that disc players maintain permanent connections to content providers via the Internet, making it possible for discs that fail a security check to trigger a notification process, enabling the provider to send the player a sort of "self-destruct code." This code would come in the form of a flash ROM "update" that would actually render the player useless, perhaps unless and until it is taken to a repair shop for reprogramming."
And this is different from Broadband Modems how?
--
The "are you a script" word for today is eureka.
(FTFA:)
So, on each protected DVD, they gonna include the code to decrypt it, code that WILL HAVE to be executable by all sorts of DVD players. In order to do so, obviously, it will have to be written in a higher-level language or some sort of for portability.
This will make writing a ripper a cinch, since all one will have to do is to write an emulator for that code...
Picture a car system with wi-fi. You pull into the garage at night, and your car media player says "Oh, good, here's an internet connection, let me quick update my media player authorizations." It's good for another 30 days. Or your portable media player, when you bring it online to upload more music, it'll establish the connection then.
And those farmers out in Bumblestump, North Dakota, who may never get internet access? Sony'll will be happy to sell them a "car-authorizing-kit" which will just be a secured wi-fi to phone internet bridge (and probably a $5.00 month subscription.)
Yeah, this is the greatest marketing idea evar. They'll probably sell over a hundred of them!
John
I may find it more exciting to know that 'Buttbandits' are encoded with 2048-bit RSS key.
My key is bigger than your key!
This thing is the worst idea since region codes. I mean, come on, every crappy 1988 Lorenzo Lamas $3.50 flick has a region code. What's the reasoning behind that?
Next thing you know that friggin' Bounty Tracker is going to wreck your DVD player. For $3.50.
Watching movies you've LEGALLY obtained is getting harder and more arduous all the time. And on the other hand, you could just download them for free without those pesky content control schemes...
Not that anyone would want to watch Lorenzo Lamas, anyway.
As long as I can see it with my eyes and hear it with my ears it can be copied.
Requiring someone to have their DVD player plugged into the net reminds me of the old DivX players that died a horrible death. For those of you that don't remember. DivX death
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
of attack. Whomever tries to reverse engineer the discs once they are out, use a rented disc from one of the chains. They will be forced to have only one key most likely, unlike consumer retail for-sale disks. It will be closer to a "master key" than the retail sale disks.
If I recall, wasn't China working on an alternative to the standard DVD player? Are they working on a next gen alternative? Maybe powered by their dragon chip?
Who would have thought that the system is in such a bad state that I would need to buy a communist designed and manufactured player in order to sidestep the bullshit and limitations that a supposed free capitalistic society builds? This is definitely not for the people and I don't ever remember hearing that this is what we fought for in wars.
yeah, and people will say "at least the government isn't spying on you or telling you what you can do with the equipment you bought!" what's the difference? The only difference is that now it's a corporation spying and telling me what I can do with the equipment I bought.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
I'm still trying to figure out how the Blu-Ray consortium is planning to spin "devices may stop working for no apparent reason" as a selling point to consumers.
Even if they try to keep it quiet, there's still going to be a devastating word-of-mouth campaign against it once users start having to return "dead" units to the store because they suddenly "stopped working" the day after they tried to play that $5 disc we bought from the street vendor over in Chinatown...
A little while ago i was supprised to findout that Foxtel (One of Australian Cable TV Providers) digital box will require a phone line (adsl) for some of it's features to work. I found that strange as foxtel is owned by Telstra (Australian telco) who olso own Bigpond (Telstras internet connectivity department) who use thesome cable as Foxtel for their cable internet.
/.ters. In fact I'm said to say, a lot of people are sheep. And they will buy a player like that and won't think much of it until they have a bad experience, untill their movie collection is blacklisted. When it's too late.
If you are wondering what the hell this got to do with Media Copy protection, I'm getting to that.
Some time after that i found out that Optus (Another bit telco in Australia with their own cable tv and cable internet services) has different plans, that they actually intend to use the same cable to provide content and send information upstream from the decoder box back to Optus.
Now, there's a lot of people here saying that people will not buy a player that requires a permenant internet conection. Someone here said that the forum had decided against permenant connection which doesn't rule out a connection.
Most of us who have cable internet, already do have an internet connetion where the tv is. So it's not that much of a problem to connect a player to the internet.
And remember, not all people are
I'd be willing to bet a month's salary that considering all the different manufacturers who will have access to the key, somebody would leak it (accidentally or on purpose) really quickly.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Every HD-DVD is individually watermarked, thus personalizing each disk.
This way only people who get their disk rendered unusable are the ones who put it up for 'sharing' in the first place and the ones who downloaded or bought a copy of a copied disk.
The only drawback is that it will kill the rental market.
Can they kill the ability to play a legal disc that you already own? I would expect all heck to pay the first time this happens.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
[a "self-destruct code is] stepping a little too far over the bounds of protecting *your* content. If you destroy *my* hardware you have invaded my private space which is unacceptable.
What's the problem? If you chose to buy a product that self-destructs under certain conditions, is it really unacceptable for it to make use of that feature?
If you knew about it beforehand, it's just a case of the device doing what it was supposed to do. Perhaps you'd have a point if information about the self-destruct feature was kept hidden from consumers (as it may well be, for all we know).
I expect it to fail in the movie market, for the same reason laserdisk never beat VHS - ye olde DVD is quite adequate, already here, and much cheaper. Also, I expect the early-adopter market to be surprisingly hostile to obtrusive DRM. See the original "DIVX" fiasco.
Blu-Ray might actually succeed, ironically, in the writable-media and DVD-ROM market, to which DRM does not apply. Movies don't grow to fit a bigger disk - software alays seems to, and backups certainly do.
As to the "self destruct" - it's a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen, not to mention a PR nightmare. The distributor's legal department would veto any such a daft proposal long before any booby-trapped disks were cut.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sony Corp of America
550 Madison Avenue
New York NY 10022
Absolutely no way in hell am I going to buy a DVD player with a self-destruct code. The penchant for control of the DVD industry has crossed the line. They're only going to end up with lawsuits and wasted capital on their hands.
Aside from the practicalities and the potential pissed off customers, is that even legal?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Heh, you would love my story about repeated free computers due to the service plan's "no lemon" policy! The most recent one is a $1900 20" iMac. : )
I wonder how long it will take someone to write a program that takes an .MPG file, interpolates it with DDT (Data-Dependent Triangulation), and outputs it at a higher resolution? (read: HDTV-ready). It won't be the same as "real" HD, but DDT is very fast and gets you very close. For a simple 2x blowup, it's plenty good enough and gives far better results than bicubic interpolation.
So the combination is one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
Blu-ray is going to be crap. No Poo-Ray for me! I'm not that in love with Sony that I can't adopt China's EVD disks instead.
Remember Divx from circuit city? The media player that had to be on a phone line to authorize your access?
Same junk, different day.
I say, if you like for a third party to be able to disable your whole music collection with a click, and know what you watched, when you watched it, which scenes you forwarded through, how long you paused stuff, where you watched the same CD, buy this player.
For people that care about their privacy and refuse to allow spyware in a pretty case to be shoved in their face, let this thing rot on the store shelves.
I backup my fair share of DVDs, and the porn disks are always a pleasure and backup so easily because they rarely if ever now use copy control. I agree, they are savvier than Hollywood.
I doubt many people at all will have access to the private key. Getting the public key will be trivial, but that doesn't help you a bit unless you have a few thousand years to factor it.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
HDTVs aren't finding their way into homes nearly as fast as DVD players did. From what I've read, HDTV had a US installed base of something like 14M in 2004 with growth to 74M in 2010. Now, consider that the DVD player installed base was 73M in 2003.
Why buy now when the $4000 HDTV they want to sell you today will cost $500 in 2 years? Better to spend that money on a few laptops for the kids.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
DRM will be a problem only to those who are foolish enough to commit to it. And don't even start with that stale cop out 'I had no choice, I HAD to because of work/study'. That's BS. Everybody has a choice: be your independent self or become a Faust! It's easy enough: if you see a trap, avoid it...!
I'll say the Over/Under on a crack is a liberal 36 hours.
The consumer DIVX players flopped to a large extent because of the fact that they needed to be connected to the net. It seems that though the average joe may tolerate their computer being hooked up to the net because the good outweighs the bad, they are savvy enough to question why their DVD player would need an internet connection.
Also, people generally don't seem to be flocking towards HD. You don't know how many people I know using HDTVs with non-HD content without being the wiser. Many will comment about their DVD's looking grainy, but ultimately few would actually care enough to spend money on extra hardware, and a good percentage of those who do would probably be happy with standard non-DRM players that upsample to HD resolution.
There's a good chance both of these standards will flop unless one of them eases up.
THis is blue ray that is doing this.
Unfortunately HD-DVD is also doing very nearly the same thing
You really have to be completely fnarking divorced from reality to think that consumers are going to buy into any product that includes a "self-destruct" feature.
Legalize drugs now. It's not fair that Sony marketing people get to have them if we don't.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
System crashes? Call up Microsoft and grovel for the right to use the OS or media files you paid for. Video card doesn't support Macrovision? Sorry, I'll turn of TV out if you play a DVD, because maybe you'll try and hook up a VCR. Want to play Half-Life 2? Okay, let me phone home and ask for permission. Monitor doesn't support HDCP? Okay, no HD content for you. Now... does Sony think your Blu-Ray disc is copied? Melt the player. It was bound to come to this some time or another.
Next on the list: Computers that automatically execute their users with 50,000-volt charges. That'll teach 'em to use P2P.
I 'buy' a CD or DVD for $30 (yes $30)... there is only two possibilites:
A: I own the entire disc and contents, meaning I can copy it for backup purposes and if it dies or I break it - then I have to pay another $30 for a new one.
B: I own the media only, meaning I can't copy it for backup purposes and if it dies, or I break it or lose it - then all I need pay is another $0.50 for new media.
My question is - which of these two are we expected to go with ?
Or are the large companies trying to have it both ways ?
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
I guarantee that as soon as it trashes a player you will lose that customer for life.
Nope. As you said, we're talking movies here, and nobody but a few slashdotters is willing to just live without them for the sake of making a point about digital rights. The loss of 10,000 Star Wars fans is chump change compared to what the MPAA have convinced themselves they are losing to casual copying.
People bought macrovision. They bought CSS. They bought music DRM in many forms. They'll buy self-destructive players, and chalk up the price of a new movie machine every few years as the cost of entertainment. If the only way to get new movies is to submit DNA samples, hand over the keys to your bank accounts, and agree to random anal probing, I think most people would do it.
0 1 - just my two bits
That's going to be a popular format for home-made wedding videos then, isn't it?
I don't know why these Studio wonks are wasting our time. DVD is good enough for my purposes. They can all go screw themselves.
K.
Theres been a trend in computers and technology in general. As we get faster processors, more memory and overall more general power, the ammount of work goes up.
A cd player used to be able to boot instantly and play a cd. Cd players and steros now can take upto 20 seconds to start playing. The one I own takes almost 20 seconds to just turn itself on and start reading a disk.
I was at a friends house and found a pre ATX box, it booted up faster than my fastest home computer while it was only a 133mhz.
Our technology increases, but it also slows us down.
WHY?!
> what about when hackers can start sending these
> self destruct packets themselves
Been ther, done that:
http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-99-03.html
No offence, but what you just described doesn't make any sense. If the public key of the device is in the firmware I would imagine that somebody will get a hold of it pretty quick.
Also it's fairly easy to implement a man in the middle attack for what you just described. Once you have the player's public key you can intercept all the traffic going to it and decrypt it. Besides, since public key cryptography is usually used for key exchange for a symmetric cipher you could also start collecting the server's symmetric encryption keys, and then from there you could start making educated guesses on what kind of encryption alogrithm they're using... but I digress
If you capture enough data you could figure out what messages were going to the player, and then if necessary you could just capture the (presumably encrypted) responses from the player to the server. So lets say that your player gets a "self destruct message" you just intercept it and throw it away, and then just replay a previous "ok i'm dead" message back to the server.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
They too have a simple fix. Imagine the update containing not only code to keep pirated disks from playing but code needed to play the disk the patch is on. So you can aviod the update but can't watch the movie.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
"Apple has proven people are willing to accept DRM if it isn't noticable for most of the things people normally do."
True, but Apple has not really prohibited the copying of music, which is something that people normally do.
Are the movie studios willing to accept DRM that does let people make copies of their movies? Not according to this article they aren't. They want to lock it down so tight that consumers will squeak when they watch a movie. I don't think people are going to embrace something like that.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"Thanks freeloader for not bringing down the price by buying it"
Ah, that old myth that if there was no piracy prices would be lower.
If that was true, games for video consoles would be really cheap, because except for really hardcore hardware hackers, the DRM is pretty good on the Nintendo, XBox and PS2. And yet prices are going up even as more people buy the games.
The truth is, the selling price of an item is only marginally related to its production costs. There is a market price for a DVD and if one person buys it or many million people buy it, the price is the same.
Now morally, you have the high ground by buying the movie but you aren't affecting the prices by buying it. If all the pirates in the world would buy the movie, it would have no effect on the movie or the price. It just means more money to the film's distributors.
In fact, you can make a pretty good argument that piracy keeps prices low, because the distributor must compete with "free".
Please understand I'm not in favor of piracy, just pointing out a logical error in your thinking.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
...they still sucked rubber donkey dong! If you had reel to reel though you could make an even worse copy! -> screech scratch scraww twang thump crash CLICK whirr, screech scratch scraw /me, been there, got the tour T shirts
Err, uhh...anyway, I think the main problem is perception by the mass entertainment media executives, the guys who make the final say-so on these decisions. Ya know, Joe Sony, Frank Paramount, Fred **AA, Harvey moovee star, Seymour rock star, whatever. Them dudes, the guys who really want all this drm nonsense.
There is one critical difference with these guys, they are millionaires already and most of us *ain't*.
They actually think what they charge is fair, cheap, and have NO IDEA why people think it's a ripoff and seek to make cheap copies. To them, 20$ a plastic disk is chump change, it's as close to "free" in their minds as it can get. They leave 20$ as a tip for a coffee and orange juice and bagel. They can't relate. No clue. Zee-roo.
And they won't ever get it, either. You'd have to drag them off and slam them on reality working class island someplace for a year to get them to come close to having a clue.
IF they had consistently dropped prices at the retail level to follow tech advances that made reproducable media cheaper,and then cheaper, then cheaper again, they would never have had much of a "piracy" problem. They DIDN'T though, and got used to mega profits. Not just ordinary profits, YEEE HAWW FAT CITY sized profits, and for some reason they think that should not only continue, but to increase, for the SAME EXACT PRODUCT. CDs should be one dollah at the store. DVDs two bux. And I don't want to hear it can't be done either, you can waltz into any walmart and get a DVD for 2$ now of some old movie or TV show, seen it with me own eyeballs and bought a Flash Gordon and a few more like that. Making copies is CHEAP, so at the retail level it needs to be CHEAP. They cannot keep the same pricing for basically the same crap, and expect to see the market stay the same or for people to stay "loyal". Just ain't gonna happen, was doomed from the start when they never dropped prices. Tech got better, it got cheaper to make product, yet they actually increased prices over the years. Of course people will notice that and use "anti price gouging circumvention methods". It's obvious as crap the lame government won't step in and demand an end to price gouging (LAWS, same as the anti piracy laws, NOT ENFORCED MUCH), they can't even get them to quit payola, and that has been around for what, like 50 years now?
Industry collusion, clueless on pricing, lame bribed off government. that's what we have now. obvious as anything. So the people ripped off give them a mostly "we're number ONE!!1!" middle digit salute. This is basic human nature here, it's not even all that advanced marketing or economics. People hate to get gouged is the real bottom line that these execs need to "leverage" into their "business strategy".
...and in future news:
The copy protection on new 'Blu Ray' disks has been broken by hackers in [insert location]."
As noted in a comment I made a few weeks ago in the thread about the Blu-Ray spec, the thing is intended to control everything in your house that is wireless and compatible. Imagine an 802.11 mesh starting where your TV set is. Now I don't know how this stuff propagates on the electrical lines down the street but certainly in an apartment building if there is a LAN antenna in your box it could piggy back other players all the way to the evil ISP (tm).
"Imagine how pissed you'd be when someone "destroys" your dvd player! "
About as pissed as how pirates are destroying the "legitimate" image of BT.
But then all these discussions aren't about addressing the real problem.
This is why they'll likely have per-player keys, or at least per-manufacturer keys. If they had one key for the entire Blu-Ray medium, that would be pretty stupid. The idea is that they can revoke said player keys, preventing any player with the leaked key from being able to play discs (as it wouldn't be able to connect to the server).
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
"I'm tired of people treating me like a thief, when I never pirate ANYTHING!"
Will the REAL pirates please stand up? Anyone? Don't keep me waiting. I have a point to make, and I don't have all day. Yeah! You with the "I'm a pirate" T-shirt. Why'd you do it? Why'd you make the poster look bad? He's innocent don't you know? Just look at that face?
- DDOS of ssl.sonyupdate.whatever
- DNS Cache poisoning of the same
- Window's worm of the week screwing with the drive.
Oh, they don't have a plan for that? I see... <sell-SNEi hope there's someone out there that's gonna bust this content copy protection wide open... again.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
The reason DRM will always ultimately fail is this: when you give the attacker the ciphered content, the keys, and the password, they will always be able to decrypt it. You can make it difficult, but you cannot stop it. If you didn't give the attacker the content, keys, and passwords, the player couldn't decrypt the content. They can't escape this fundamental fact and it pisses them off. Makes me laugh.
The crack is quite simple....All you need to do is write a BD Player emulator that behaves exactly like the real player except that is sends the results to an unencrypted file. The keys will be leaked though some poorly made BD player software as before with CSS. The rest of the keys will come mathmatically as before.
Oh yea...and only one guy needs to do this. The rest can use P2P software.
Will it also include new Dry Water and new Perpetuum Mobile?
Free as in mason.
"No offence, but what you just described doesn't make any sense. If the public key of the device is in the firmware I would imagine that somebody will get a hold of it pretty quick. Also it's fairly easy to implement a man in the middle attack for what you just described. Once you have the player's public key you can intercept all the traffic going to it and decrypt it. " Yes, you can get the public key, and yes, you can decrypt the content going down the line. You, however, can't change the content, as you need to re-encrypt it to do so. (You could alter the ciphertext in hopes of getting the proper resulting plaintext, but it'd take forever) "If you capture enough data you could figure out what messages were going to the player, and then if necessary you could just capture the (presumably encrypted) responses from the player to the server. So lets say that your player gets a "self destruct message" you just intercept it and throw it away, and then just replay a previous "ok i'm dead" message back to the server." The problem with this is that rolling encryption or salting will completely fuck over the idea of message replaying. Yet again, it falls down to the fact that you need the private key to mount these attacks, if the systems are implemented properly. I don't think they're going to make the standard mistakes again.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
"No offence, but what you just described doesn't make any sense. If the public key of the device is in the firmware I would imagine that somebody will get a hold of it pretty quick.
Also it's fairly easy to implement a man in the middle attack for what you just described. Once you have the player's public key you can intercept all the traffic going to it and decrypt it. "
Yes, you can get the public key, and yes, you can decrypt the content going down the line. You, however, can't change the content, as you need to re-encrypt it to do so. (You could alter the ciphertext in hopes of getting the proper resulting plaintext, but it'd take forever)
"If you capture enough data you could figure out what messages were going to the player, and then if necessary you could just capture the (presumably encrypted) responses from the player to the server. So lets say that your player gets a "self destruct message" you just intercept it and throw it away, and then just replay a previous "ok i'm dead" message back to the server."
The problem with this is that rolling encryption or salting will completely fuck over the idea of message replaying. Yet again, it falls down to the fact that you need the private key to mount these attacks, if the systems are implemented properly. I don't think they're going to make the standard mistakes again.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
Correct... However, I wasn't talking about DRM. I was talking about the self-destruct signals.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
Unlikely - there are extremely tough restrictions on cryptography export and import for high strength keys like that.
1) The XBox used RSA2048 and I don't believe that was US-only.
2) We're talking about the entertainment industry, which has more than enough influence to legalize high-strength encryption. Of course, they'd make it only usable in DRM situations, so they screw everyone else...
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
New formats will suffer the same problem as CD. CD is deemed good enough and the lack of a standard copy protection for CD means consumers can copy and compress the audio for use in their different devices.
Once CSS was broken it put DVD in a similar position to CD. DVD owners are able to compress DVDs for their mobile devices and also backup their discs.
Any DVD follow up will fail to win over the tech savvy. Once someone has purchased media they expect to be able to do what they like with it. We realise we don't own the copyright. But that's just like a print of a famous painting, we can alter it, photocopy it and so on, but we don't own the image. So why can we only watch a DVD on a DVD player?
Frankly, I am convinced that the arduous DRM provisions built into both standards mean *both* standards are doomed to failure. The first group that comes out with a disc at least as good as DVD and that people can actually use as they please will succeed.
A disc that plays no better than a DVD on a non-HD television - or alternatively on an HD television with a screen size too small to notice the difference anyway - will achieve little more than subjecting the public to even more arduous restrictions on how, when and where people choose to watch movies. Such media is forever doomed to failure.
A disc that can play a movie in at least as high quality as DVD, that will work with existing AV/TV equipment, let you fast forward advertisements, play media purchased from anywhere in the world and play media on your computer/portable player/home cinema how and when people choose would be an instant success.
"If 100,000 people pirate a $40 game, that's $4 million dollars that the company didn't get for those copies." ...yes, assuming that every one of those people would buy it for full list price.
But to be realistic, there is only a certain percent that would buy it. Probably a lot of people pirate the games just to try it. If you had iron-clad anti-piracy, a lot of people would just rent the game. Or wait until they got it used.
I say it wouldn't pass any GAAP rules because you could only claim the actual demonstrated loss. And in this case, game companies/movie companies can't demonstrate any actual loss from the piracy. If they could, the IRS would let them take it as a loss (i.e. somebody broke into your factory and stole 100,000 widgets) on your taxes. They could probably claim the cost of production, but as they didn't actually produce anything, there is no loss.
Piracy doesn't explain anything about game innovation. EA didn't make the 18th verion of "Madden" just because of pirates. They did it to make money because that's what their customers want.
A self-destruct code ? What the hell are they inhaling? Whether it's permanent or a temporary condition, that's going a bit far.
Don't these profit-maximization obsessed cretins understand that the more cruel you make DRM the more holy the crusade to defeat it? Give. It. Fucking. Up. and learn to accept the fundamental concept that digital data is, by it's nature very easy to copy, and find some other way to line your house with excess $100 bills.
"Hey, 16-year-old DVD salesdweeb, I want to buy a DVD player, but it has to be able to play my favorite DVD, which I have here. Can you show me one of your players running my DVD?"
237 destroyed players later...
There's one difference (okay, two) this time around.
The minor difference is that the public is more in tune with DRM (thanks, Apple) and is more accepting of it. Remember how pop-ups/on screen advertising killed Prodigy, but are a mainstay of AOL other online services now?
The major difference is that, when Divx was tried, there was a competing, non-invasive DRM included on DVDs. I say non-invasive primarily because copying and swapping of content, either physical or over the internet, was not practical. This time the competing formats are both DRM-hamstrung. Both are lousy - there's no "good" version to crush them into oblivion.
That said, HD-DVD just might win out. Given the possibility of hardware failure on BR, regardless of the software lockout on HD-DVD, the hardware failure "stick" may be the deciding factor in a typical household purchase.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
And it always has been with DVDs. All a pirating house has to do is make a simple bit for bit copy of the media, and the player will look at it like any other manufactured disk. What happens when you see complete disk images of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs floating around on Usenet or Bittorent, just like we see of DVD's now?
DRM doesn't stop piracy. DRM cannot stop piracy. DRM only protects the underlying content from being extracted and converted to new media, but that doesn't accomplish anything when you can make a bit for bit copy of the disk. Sure, you won't be able to put the latest copy of whatever crappy movie based on a previously popular TV show Hollywood decides to put out on your Sony PSP, but that won't stop the pirate DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-Ray market. The only way to stop that is to individually watermark each disk and try and blacklist duplicates, similar to what HD-DVD is calling for. But since the disks themselves all still look the same, it's a non-issue. One copy of iRobot in HD-DVD should look identical to another, so an ISO of the disk should appear as normal to the player.
Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...
Besides, what's to prevent a hacker from filtering out this self-destruct code from the downstream content anyway?
Because jack-booted thugs will be required to install the device in your house, and will lock the internet connection into it. The central office will be sending a constant stream of encrypted pings. If your player misses two or more pings in a row, the JBTs come back and break a kneecap. If it happens again, you lose a thumb. After that, well, let's not get into that, will we.
Seriously, I'll just stick to DVDs. I haven't even upgraded to a progressive scan big screen TV yet, why would I want this?
<RANT>It tough enough to make a device that works 100% correctly as it is. Any device that has copy protection in it, will have that copy protection fail at sometime. Tell me, why, as a consumer, would I want a device with code in it, that is designed to make it fail? </RANT>
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Ok, so if it connects to the internet, and gets disabled by recieving a "firmware update", does it need a direct internet connection? I mean, I can see how you could redirect the traffic after finding details about it, but why not just limit its abilities through your router's firewall?
Seems to me that simply blocking the packet from getting through is enough here.
This will never fly. The DVD/Video industry that is currently booming for automobile installs will kill this. How are they supposed to connect to the internet? Are they going to have a phone jack in the headrest that you have to run 100 feet into your house? No one is going to want to do that and the cords will get lost and damaged. It might take a year for the word to spread, but it won't be too long before anyonw who has one spreads the word that they are a hastle.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Too late for Karma, but it seems like a bad movie plot that you play a disc, and 7 days later your player dies.
You didn't hear it from me, but if you could produce a "reasonable-looking" knockoff of a rental HD-DVD that had this new "The Ring" trojan/virus on it, and return it to NetFlix, Blockbuster, Hollywood, etc, then random people's players would start self-destructing and bad press would kill this technology.
Maybe this information is being leaked to the public to cause us to worry about our hardware being destroyed so that they can, in a few months, announce that they've removed that particular feature. So when they do come out with their real DRM, we won't be outraged since connecting it to the Internet it will seem benign compared to hardware destruction.
Please remember to remove you tinfoil hat.
Oh, more and more DRM Figure it: This DVD will self-destruct in five seconds, Yippie Kye Ay!
Codexcast, the first Spanish podcast in the world made in High-Resolution parchment. (I think so
Yes, you can get the public key, and yes, you can decrypt the content going down the line. You, however, can't change the content, as you need to re-encrypt it to do so. (You could alter the ciphertext in hopes of getting the proper resulting plaintext, but it'd take forever)
But if the device were to never get the self destruct message, the man in the middle attack would be successful as far as the user is concerned. Telling the server you're dead is just icing on the cake.
Salting would be inconvenient, but there has to be some way of generating the salt, and I'm sure if the DRM was restrictive enough on players people would figure out how that is generated as well.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
There is no DRM. There is no DRM.
All that can be stopped by this is the fair use.
Pirates will open a box, solder the wires (carrying the (digital) HD video to the HDTV and sending the digital audio to the receiver) to a black box with a DSP and voila: an non-DRM-encumbered version is on the fscking internet in a few hours time.
This is just stupid.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
My regular DirecTV receiver connected to my inexpensive HD projection TV went out last month. I had bought it before the projection TV so it only supportted SDTV. I thought, "what the hell, I'll go with the HDTV receiver replacement. The NFL will look so cool in HD." The replacement SDTV receiver was $49. The HDTV receiver was $449.
I stuck with SDTV. I'm not paying $400 to see a wrinkle on John Madden's face.
no comment on the fact that it is electronic /
binary / digital media and the fact that binary /
digital is made to be easly multiplied.
Copy protection is a "dumb down" technology.
"information (digital anyway) wants to be free."
anyway if this new rlue bay formats is going to be
as super safe as they claim, i propose that i get
a rlue bay dvd whenever i go to a real movie
theater and PAY to see a movie! i mean with all
the extra cash they're going to make with this
un-copyable format they could that!
in my philosophy, if i paid legitimed money to see
a movie in the theater i'm intitled to a
hard-copy! yup, i have "pirated" copies of movies
i have seen in a cinema!
What is to stop a company, say company X, from coming out with a blu-ray drive that doesn't do these horrible things, as a 'manufacturing malfunction'.
Everybody will say ' well, sony's ok, but the drive from X- they play anything and wont rat on you.'
It seems that if 1 company chooses to bypass this 'agreement' they can lay waste to all the sales made by any other company.
you aren't even buying a movie, because chances are it won't even play with your player self destructing in your face the second you put the disc in wrong.
i dont think sony realizes that most people are happy with DVDs and probably aren't going to take this DRM garbage.
Sweeet, now I can finally get revenge on that motherfucker who stole my Cloudsong.
Fair-use and other exceptions are based largely on "case law," the ever-evolving list of judicial ruling made by judges, aka lawmakers in robes.
Case law gave us things like the rights like the right to make limited photocopies, the right to copy over-the-air to tape for time-shifting, and I think - I don't have a case on this one - the right to copy CD to tape for playing in our car.
As far as the book in the original form being perfectly functional, tell that to the blind man who can't afford a traditional book-reading machine but who does have use of his brother's computer, scanner, OCR software, and text-to-speech software.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Or, you could just write a layer that goes between BD hardware and it's driver that prevents anything besides start/stop/seek commands from getting through to it. That would make it so that the hardware would not be updatable... that is unless SONY hacks MY DRM (protecting my pseudo driver) and I can then sue them.
No man is an island... But I wouldn't mind having a bigger moat.
if it's their property, then i'm going to call my congresscritter and suggest that they tax the living shit out of it... a property tax, just like they do for my car... every year! Gotta pay to play, pal!
Well the story I read mentions developers...not analysts, but you are right in that there is no official word from Sony on such a date change.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I have a *cough* "friend" who circumvented the "self-destruct code" on a satellite receiver by simply attaching a dip-switch to a couple of the leads on the EEPROM. If the firmware's write-protected, you cant toast it. At least that's what my friend tells me...