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Blu-Ray To Punish Users for Modifying Hardware
datemenatalie writes "As reported on Engadget, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players, for instance to remove regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any "hack" and the device can be disabled remotely. As the article asks, "Are they talking about PVP-OPM techniques and rejected HDMI keys, or something else far more sinister? Because apparently "A hacked player is any player that is doing something it's not supposed to do," which open to a pretty fair amount of interpretation--most of which egregious.""
Verification systems that require any work on the consumer end will never work 100%. It's just too easy to get around.
And why am I buying the assinine secured player instead of the grey market Chinese one, exactly?
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Is it legal to program a Linux server to emulate the player, then respond to any unrequested IP packets from the manufacture with the II'm hacked' message whatever it is? Who owns/controls/deterimine what is legally acceptable hand-shaking after all?
Software freedom...I love it!
It's very ironic to me that one of the industries that benefits most from globalization makes such a concerted and futile effort to hamper trade in their own global market.
As a person keen on foreign films, I know I won't be buying a Blu-Ray that can't be made region-free. If no such player exists, I'll just end up pirating films released exclusively on Blu-Ray.
This reminds me a lot of the failed DivX format that would 'phone home'.
The original Reuters article is pretty light on details though. What happens if you don't have an internet connction? And where will these players be supposedly 'reporting' to? Not to mention who is going to be paying for this whole infrastructure of 'player monitoring'? This is one step away from becoming a 'service' rather than just a piece of hardware.
The Blu-Ray folks should remember why DivX failed in the first place.
I think that the concept of Regional Coding is largely dead now anyway since they tend to release everything at the same time to avoid piracy. Regional Coding was really a violation of WTO rules anyway.
I don't like the idea of hardware that reports back to base. If we go in that direction our TVs will report us when we channel flip to avoid commercials.
YOUR TV HAS BEEN DISABLED. SKIPPING COMMERCIALS IS THEFT!
Slashdot already ran a story on this exact subject, and that contained much more information-- it appears that all this new story is is that at some point this week Reuters referenced the announcement from last month, and engadget, which hadn't heard about it the first time, ran it as a new story.
It's worth noting that at the time the last story was run, at least one slashdotter was disputing its veracity, but I don't know how much credence you can put in that.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Just hack it to report everybody else's players and cause Blue Ray to suspend service to all their legitimate clients...
Oh well, what the hell...
#37:
#7:
Between 'em, these two posters say it all.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Heck, if something in my house that needs to be plugged in doesn't have a missing screw, then I automatically know it's broken.....I have to get inside and give it "more power". My wife insists that certain "toys" of hers are off-limits, but little does she know what 9 volts can do compared to 1.5.
If I open something up and tinker with it, then fine, I void the warranty. But for companies to think they have the right to monitor what we do with their products to the point that they can deploy countermeasures just has to be stopped.
I think it's time for www.{stop|avoid|donotbuy|FU}blu-ray.com sites to start popping up. As previous posted stated, hopefully this will go the way of divx (the old crippled DVD players divx that is).
Now of course this would have been a nice way to kill off the floppy drive...have it phone home when it detects user-modified DSHD.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Why did the parent post get moderated as a troll? Someone with modpoints, please undo that injustice.
Granted, the parent post is making a joke, and whether you think it's funny or not, it speaks to the fact that once we relinquish control of our hardware to a 3rd party, there's a precident for things this silly.
If your Blu-Ray player can tell on you and disable itself because you've violated some sort of EULA, that same sort of mechanism could enable governments to turn off your hardware when they decide your doing something with it they don't think is kosher.
"Gosh honey, I shouldn't have tried to play that Fahrenheit 9/11 Blu-Ray disk. GD Patriot Act 3."
Here it is, and I know you Hollywood types are going to dig it:
Your Obsessive Compulsive Hardware
+ Your Intellectually Devoid Content
= Chapter 11 Bankrupcy Protection
Enjoy the show!
kulakovich
One of the reason's I pick at Microsoft is because they aren't developing DRM to protect their own content so much as they are striving to expand their business to get a piece of every entertainment industry transaction.
KFG
Because the companies are the ones who buy the laws, not the consumers.
This is why it is, in fact, illegal for the consumer to tinker with the product that that consumer has purchased. (So long as you aren't a believer in that whole "a legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law" thing.)
The companies can do things like write a law which completely alters the fundamental balance of copyright law, and pass it directly to Jesse Helms who drops it into congress where it passes unanimously on a voice vote because not one single member of congress has read it. The consumers... well, maybe if they write enough letters and make enough noise for enough months they can convince a congressman to give a speech in their favor, which will be written into the congressional record and then forgotten about. If the same group makes enough noise for over a decade maybe a law on the subject they've been agitating about will be put up for debate, though God knows what it will look like by the time it gets through committee.
I mean, okay, in theory the consumers are the ones 'buying' the laws, because the consumers are the ones who vote. However
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This is a new technology. The mainstream users won't pick it up until there is enough content product and there is a compelling reason to abandon their current DVD players. For that to happen, the product needs a sufficient number of early adopters. But early adopters are technically savy and won't put up with this type of stuff. So will this product ever take off if they do this?
You don't have an internet connection?
Why is this marked funny? Ok, so it is funny. But in all seriousness, that'e EXACTLY what is going to happen. When people want a Blu-Ray DVD player that they can control rather than the Blu-Ray "admins", they'll just..
1. Hack it the way they want, including completely disableing the internet protection.
2. Buy one from a company that doesn't HAVE the dial home stuff. You honestly think there aren't going to be a million asian knockoffs that work just as well but without the built in assholeness?
Wouldn't it be trivial to packet sniff the DVD player's "All's good, go play the DVD!" packets, then set up an emulator on a LAN and outsmart the player?
Or if you REALLY wanted to nip this asinine practice in the bud, DDOS the idiots' servers, so suddenly all these people wanting to play their new Blue Ray DVD players get a "Timeout error. Authentication cannot be accessed. Please try again later." error. Enough times of THAT happening and the public will be out for blood -- the company's blood.
It's exactly this kind of paranoid, 'the consumers are our enemy trying to rip us off' thinking that is going to lead to the major electronics corporations losing very large amounts of money for the next several years. And I have no sympathy. They want us to buy new hardware because DVD players have become so cheap they don't really offer much opportunity for profit. Okay, but what reasons are they giving people to want to buy them?
"They have high-definition picture quality!"
So what? 99% of people don't have HD TV, and aren't likely to for at least 5 years, maybe 10, unless HD TV undergoes the same kind of astronomical price-drop that we saw with DVD players. So no advantage there.
"Er, you'll be able to get the definitive versions of your favourite movies!"
So the Original, Special Edition, Director's Cut and Ultimate versions that we've been buying for the past seven or eight years are just chopped liver?
"Oh, um, shit... I know! If you don't buy our pirate-proof new versions of movies you already own on boring old DVD, the terrorists will win!"
And since 9 out of 10 people wouldn't even think to buy pirate copies of DVDs in the first place, they get offended at being accused of being criminals. (And then some of them will think, 'Wait, I can get pirate DVDs? Where?')
Considering the dismal state of cinema at the moment, there's no 'killer app' for BR/HD-DVD. Are millions of people really going to drop the best part of a grand just on a player to watch the new King Kong in HD? I already have all of my favourite movies of all time on DVD. I have no intention of buying some expensive, DRM-crippled, home-phoning piece of kit that won't even offer better image quality without me shelling out thousands of pounds on a new HD TV so that I can watch them again with a sharper picture.
For most people, DVD is 'good enough', and that's how the corporations have made a rod for their own backs. It's the same reason why DVD-A and SACD failed miserably to replace CD. The increase in quality is negligible when weighed against the increase in price. It's not like VHS vs DVD, where all the failings of the old medium (low quality picture, tedious FF and REW, dropout over time, etc) instantly became obvious the first time you watched a DVD. With DVD vs BR/HD-DVD, the only way to tell any difference is to spend the price of a car on a new HD TV set. This may come as a surprise to the electronics companies, but very few people are willing to do that!
Also, slowly but surely, even Joe Public is starting to realise that obtrusive DRM that's there entirely for the studio's benefit is not necessarily a good thing. It might be something as simple as frustration when the tracks he got from Napster don't work on his iPod now, but when he wonders, "Hey, why the hell does my new DVD player need to be connected to the phone line to work? What's that all about? Is it going to add to my bill? What if someone tries to phone when I'm watching a movie?" as well...
And something that the studios don't seem to have considered - right now, they're making a huge amount of unexpected profit from releasing old TV shows on DVD. One problem: they won't be able to do the same on BR/HD, where the selling point is the better picture quality. Most of these shows were edited on video, so bar minor sprucing-up, that's as good as the picture will ever get. Sure, being able to put a whole season of Star Trek or Buffy or whatever on a single disc is convenient... but then trying to charge between 50 and 100 dollars/pounds/euros for just one disc (that looks no better than the DVD version) doesn't look like very good value to the punter, does it?
You must think in Russian.
All you'd have to do is crack the DNS box of whatever provider they're using.
Then you re-route their lookups to your own site.
Then all of them download the destruct code.
Maybe you guys who get bad rips should rip your own DVDs. I hardly ever download movie XviD rips because I can't trust quality from most people (especially non-scene groups). Some people are encoding 192kbps AC3 audio to MP3 for their DVDrips, and that's just stupid. I do download TV rips because I have no way currently of receiving HD and getting TS streams and all that fun stuff. I've done a lot of squeezing for movies into 700MB XviD. The quality is quite fine on my 47" widescreen. The resolutions are 640x352/336/272/256 for widescreen, and 512x384/368 for fullscreen. I use my PS2 to play them. I've ripped about 80 movies so far (some are 2 CDs of course). By the way, try ripping something like Jurassic Park to 2 CDs with XviD. You'll see true quality there. Impossible to see the difference between DVD and XviD in most cases.
There will not be anything to interdict. When these items are shipped and cross our borders they will be perfectly legitimate. What will happen is that the "secret" of applying an "overvoltage" to a specific set of components/connectors will "accidently" disable the Digital Rectum Manacles (TM) and leave the normal functionality untouched will be "leaked", probably by selling the instructions on e-bay (preceeding business method patent pending). With the added benefit that such actions void the warranty and when it breaks 23 months later a new player will have to be purchased.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Well it only took Ralph Nader to make Ford behave a bit better. A market solution isn't the only solution, someone shouting loud enough and long enough to embarrass corporations into behaving is all that's really required.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Can someone explain why I would have hooked my Blu-Ray player up to the Internet in the first place?
Maybe you wouldn't have to. You'd only have to plug it in to the power outlet...
But seeing how there is major development happening in turning AC power grids into broadband delivery systems as well, it'd be the same thing.
Hell - it's probably going to get to the point of your microwave reporting to a server what brand of RFID tagged popcorn your having at 8:41 PM, Monday.
I wonder if there would be a market for AC line broadband blockers...
Nevermind. They'll probably make that illegal, too.
or what about the time we only needed just two cables plugged into our standalone players; power and content.
/and/ a copyright-cable. And maybe a dedicated ATM/bank cable too.
Soon we'll need power, content, internet
Oh, and special eye-stabber headmounted units just in case we do see un-paid for content.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Savvyness in the AV world doesn't necessiarly translate to technology at large. I often help support professional video and audio people with computer issues, for example. So they may know and undrestand the video benefits of Blu-ray but not the DRM restrictions. Further, they might think them irrelivant and say "Well it's just hackers that will have problems."
Well what you explain to them is that in the case of ANY mod it might get disabled, espically mods they like to do.
The media industry is paranoid about people getting high-resolution digital copies of things, so it's all locked down. DVD-As won't play at full resolution via the digital out, they only play via the analogue outs. So what some A/V philes do is mode their DVD player to have 3 S/PDIF outs to get full resolution digital audio to their own high quality outboard DACs.
Same goes for video with Blu-ray and HD-DVD. The analogue outs will only do 480p, and the only digital out for higher rez will be HDMI. Well many videophiles don't like DVI/HDMI, they mod their players to use SDI, the pro standard. It has much longer cable runs (up to 1km if done right) and can be fitted to non-digital players and TVs with a converter. Again, making this mod could result in player deactivation. This means that none oftheir old, high quality SDI-mod displays will work, they'll have to buy new displays that suport DVI/HDMI with HDCP.
So, if you have friends in this category, just make sure they understand the full implications of this, that if it catches on, their right to modify their players to work with the gear they want will be taken away.
So if you have friends that might adopt this eairly, make sure they understand how in the long run it will affect them, not just computer hacker types. Make sure they understand what they would be trading in the long run to have higher def now.
Re "I, for one, think it is criminal act for a company to destroy *my* property because they didn't like what I was using it for."
I agree. But the answer is to destroy their property. The revolution is here. They started the war. It is up to us to finish it and fight back and win it. I won't be happy till I see all the Bill Gates and their ilk hanging by their necks on the street corners.
What about you?
"Under the terms of this License Agreement, Ford Motor Co. may revoke your right to drive this automobile if you buy parts or seek service from any person or entity not officially licensed by Ford to provide such parts or services..."
This is nothing new. Nor, for that matter, is it new for the entertainment industry to seek control not only over the content of the media but also the physical equipment upon which the media was played.
Along the Camden, New Jersey riverfront once strode a mighty giant: The Victor Talking Machine Company, maker of the famous Victrola talking machine, Victor records, and owner of that little dog peering into the horn of a gramophone. Back in the early days of the 20th century there was no copyright in sound recordings - instead the records were protected by patents. The record labels, until the last patents ran out in the 1920s, carried notices to the effect that the record was not sold but LEASED under their patents, and would only be owned by the consumer when the last patents ran out.
But that was software; the hardware was even more fun. Until they were stopped from doing this by the US Government in the early 1920s, every Victrola had a license notice affixed inside the record cabinet stating that, among other things, if records or needles made by competitors were used on the instrument, ownership of the instrument reverted back to the Victor Talking Machine Company, who would exercise their legal right under the sale contract to repossess the machine!
There is nothing, absolutely nothing new under the sun...
Trouble is that this stuff won't be marketed at Videophiles.
It'll be marketed at Mom and Pop who want a theatre experience in the home they can share with the kids without forking over 80 dollars plus per viewing.
It'll be marketed at that guy from accounting who took 2 years to understand that "right mouse button" mean't the other button on the mouse rather than a second mouse (one for left, one for right).
It'll be marketed at the general domestic applience consumer who generally hasn't got a clue what they are really buying.
It'll be marketed at your neighbour, you know, the guy with the $10,000 home theatre system that has a half dozen clocks all blinking at 12:00.
I can't help but wonder what it would take for a small-fry manufacturer to create and release a player that can play MPEG-4 video from DVDs. It would be exactly the same as DVD, keeping the same menu formats and everything, except that the video would be higher resolution and compressed with a different codec. The major hurdle, I guess, would be that there would be no content to play on it and so most people wouldn't buy it.
"Super-DVD" would be useful for home-made discs, though, as was SVCD. Many DVD players can already play VideoCD and SVCD, so why not add Super DVD as well?