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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.""
You have been watching too much porn your dvd player has been locked to watch G rated movies from now on.
Enjoy bambi!
The world's smartest bug zapper www.zapstats.com/kickstarter
When we tell kids about a time when it used to be possible for people "own" things.
Savage times, those were.
Just hack it to not report certain of its hacks
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!
I think this is where this has to be stopped ... under such conditions everyone will be locked down by DRM and will be puppets to server their master, the corporations ...
But unless all the consumers band together ... I dont see anything else stopping this :-(
"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
Pick at Microsoft all you want....I think RIAA and the rest of the entertainment industry are about 100 times worse.
Can someone explaine to me why its not illegal for a company to punish a consumer for tinkering with a product that that consumer had purchased?
And why, if your going to be tinkering in the first place, you don't just remove the internet connection? Does it serve a purpose? Or is it more like the DirectTV systems, making sure your only getting what you paid for?
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
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!
... before the term was co-opted.
Any tethered, DRM-laden DVD player will be about as successful in the marketplace as a 220-volt rubber duck.
Do they just not care if they sell any of these, or what?
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.
If this is the future of Blu-Ray, then it will probably go into the junkheap of history next to DivX.
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.
Did NOBODY learn from Betamax? When will the industry learn that the ONLY thing DRM ensures is that the next high density optical disc standard will be whatever China turns out?
Wait a min.. that might be a GOOD thing.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
They tried this "internet verification" crap with divx players too. Everyone smelled the tremendous stench of "ripoff" and told the salesmen where to stick it. Anything involving internet connection for "verification" engenders some very strong language which quite frankly I don't want to put into slashdot, but even the average consumer will be saying "what the hell, NO!"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
And life goes on everywhere else. Get over it.
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
I've just bought an XviD-capable DVD player for my TV. I can now watch DVD-quality movies that fit onto a standard 700MB CD-ROM, courtesy of BitTorrent.
AFAIK, Blu-Ray and its equivalent (HD-DVD or whatever) are being developed in order to provide Hi-Definition video and/or longer video per disc.
Why would I want Blu-Ray? As soon as Hi-Def becomes standard (or even before), it'll be available via BitTorrent compressed to less than the size of a standard DVD at HD quality. I can then watch Hi-Def films on my existing hardware.
So if this hack-proof protection is designed to foil copyright infringers, it's going to fail. Copyright infringers will simply use their existing hardware to view Hi-Def on standard DVDs on standard XviD players. Why would we criminals buy Blu-Ray in the first place?
Argh.
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."
Because as far as I can tell, there is absolutely no way that ANY PC-style computer is going to be able to even come CLOSE to implementing the kinds of "security" features that the Blu-Ray Association has been talking about, without the kinds of OS+hardware-level "DRM" that Microsoft has been promoting a move toward for the last four or five years...
The entertainment industry is running around shooting at people, and Microsoft just happens to be selling them guns
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Refuse to use Blu-ray if they plan on using draconian methods. the competing format is cheaper, and hopefully its custodians will not be as large of assholes.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
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
Can someone explain why I would have hooked my Blu-Ray player up to the Internet in the first place?
4 Years ago I bought a Sony Clie that still rivals the quality, resolution, of todays PDAs. The problem I had with it was the lack of hacks for it because of how locked down they made it. They didn't make it easy to be hacked and all the software for it was proprietary. They didn't release an SDK or anything. People want to hack their toys. The PSP is hackable and consumers find this kind of intriguing. Although Sony is fighting to lock the consumer out of doing this. I've observed that if people can do more with their toy than what is intended by the manufacturer this usually drives sales. Sony still hasn't figured this out and is setting themselves up to lose the media format war just as how they lost out keeping up in the PDA market(The completely stopped manufacturing their whole PDA line)
Seeing as how they're getting away with this shit, do you people still feel as though we should obey and respect the laws designed to protect them?
I don't.
See, I read stories like this, and regardless how many people tell me I'm wrong, I honestly do feel justification for all the movies I download.
I feel no pity for them. They've done this to themselves, and apparently they haven't learned their lesson.
If they can fuck us, then there's absolutely no reason for us to fuck them harder (ooh dirty).
Just stop buying the DVDs and download them instead. Do your part and fight back since none of us have billions to persuade lawmakers with.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
where this type of extremely anti-consumer idea was ORigINally HATCHed0 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59298,0
(yes, i know. missing an R)
PC's with DRM, DVD players with DRM....software that gets automatically turned off if you unscrew the case..ect..
Don't the Major players understand that they are creating a market for for the off-brand Korean/Chinese/Asian manufacturers to sell consumer electronics without all this crap?
Unless the U.S. starts seriously inderdicting consumer electronics that don't meet RIAA/MPAA standards people ARE going to buy these things via mailorder from overseas.
The Chinese already don't respect copyright OR patents. What makes them think they will not see this as an opportunity to make money and jump into the market? They already make practically ALL of the components that go into the "Branded" versions that will go to the U.S. It's gunna be trivial for them to duplicate (in quality) a Blue-Ray DVD player without all the DRM crap on it.
Viruses could be expected to come to the rescue. Like one which screws-up the drive so it has to be sent back for warrantee repair. When manufacturers will be swamped with "defective" drives, they will soon throw the towel, either by refusing to fix them (and then pissing-off the customers with that technology) or simply no longer making remote-disablable drives.
There's tons of fun and functionality in blizzard's games that don't involve logging onto bnet. I should know, I've played every Blizzard game (except for WoW) here in India and never once logged onto bnet - for the simple reason that the ping times are literally from the other side of the planet. Blizzard's games are excellent and once I could afford them, i started buying them, ridiculously expensive though they are, relative to my (above average) salary for the simple reason that Blizzard makes, IMO, the best computer games.
... stupid.
Forcing me to connect to the 'net to play my Blu-Ray disc on my Blu-Ray player is just
I'll never buy a Blu-Ray disc or a Blu-Ray player.
K
"I'm not so enamoured of HD quality that I'm willing to put up with the "Next Generation DIVX" player in my home."
Ditto. I have an HDTV camcorder, I'd love to be able to buy HDTV DVDs, but I'm sure not going to do so if they put this kind of crap on them.
I just don't think the early adopters are going to accept this, and if they don't then Joe Sixpack will continue watching his DVDs. To me this seems to be DAT Mark 2, where a good format is destroyed by stupid 'copy protection' nonsense.
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?
While Blu-ray association may provide this as a security option to the Studios to get them aboard the format. Since all this talk about self-destructive players and punishing pirates must be the MPAAs wet dream. However, its a support nightmare for the hardware manufacter. Most hardware manufacters don't directly profit from media content (other than the one's like Sony who own studios), most will likely forgo this feature or water it down due to the flood of technical support calls from enraged owners of their product. With the emergence of cheap Chinese and Taiwanese brands profits from hardware themselves is incredibly small, In reality, I doubt manufacters are willing to deal with potential law-suits, tech-support issues, and angry retailers that get returned players that people tried to hack.
In Russia you own the DVD player; In United States, DVD player owns you....
I think your new DVD player will see no reason to play DVDs in that case. Face it, the public will buy this and you will be left in the dark.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
If you just refuse to buy this shit. Encourage everyone you know to boycott Blu-ray. Remember Divx? No not the MPEG-4 compressor but the orignal Divx, the one from Circut City. It was to be the DVD replacement. Take DVD, remove some of the cool features and require people to pay per view. Hollywood couldn't stop drooling on themselves over the PPV idea, and the fact that consumers couldn't sell used discs. All the major studios cast in for Divx and most said they were only doing Divx, no DVD.
Well, an effective consumer boycott was organized. People were informed about how much Divx sucked, and so they didn't buy it. Their VHS tapes were good enough and they stuck with that. In the end, Circut City took a bath to the tune of $100 million and Divx died.
The same can be done here. DVDs are good enough for most people. Those without HDTVs really couldn't give two shits and even for those with, it's not like DVDs are an eyesore. Yes, I'd love to have more HD content, but I don't cry when I have to watch a DVD.
So work to convince consumers you know to boycott Blu-ray, they can keep buying DVDs, just no Blu-ray discs or players. Most importantly, convince the videophiles you know. These are the ones who will spend the money on the inital players that will allow the price to lower for the mass market. If the videophile community decides not to buy it, it'll be a major financial hardhsip.
That's all it will take. The electronics companies are happy to play ball with the media companies when it doesn't affect their bottom line. However if they are producing devices no one will buy, they'll get pissed and stop making them. They are also the ones with the real power, the electronics industry is FAR larger than the entertainment industry.
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.
Maybe people would even start watching Bollywood and Chinese movies released in that format (if you could just get them used to subtitles) :-)
We apologize for the inconvenience.
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.
A HOA isn't a company telling consumers what to do, it's owners voting on what to do. When you are in a neighbourhood with an HOA, you have a vote by owning a house. It's a fairly powerful vote, too, as there usually aren't many houses in a given HOA. Where I live, it's a 1/54th vote. Anything and everything about the contract can be changed by vote, including dissolving the HOA. If you have a problem with the way things are being run, it's easy to talk to the leaders, they are your neighbours. It's also easy to go around and try to rally people to vote how you want, also your neighbours.
The difference here is that consumers have no vote, no control. They are told "Here is how it is and there's nothing you can do." They won't give you your money back for your disabled unit, and since it's disabled you can't sell it, you have no recourse.
I'm not a huge HOA fan, but they really are different. If I have a complaint with my HOA, it's usually not that hard to come to a compramise. If I have a complaint with Sony, they'll tell me to pack sand.
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.
If the transactions are encrypted for each individual player, you wouldn't know from traffic analysis exactly what the player was retrieving. It might be pulling back an applet to test whether it was hacked or not. If the proper response does not come back, you never get another disc key ever again.
This is not to say that the manufacturers aren't likely to screw things up again (or even several more times), but after a few cycles of lockdown and hiring some decent crypto experts they're likely to wind up with something like that.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Or what about the seriously disabled? They just don't want to work, right? It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that no one in their right mind would ever hire them.
Americans are such monstrous, horrible people.
Off-topic, and probably not the place, but... I'd like to meet these so-called "kilohumans" the parent mentions.
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.
Cause I'm in Australia.
Yet the dufus in the US can still disable my player because I want to play legally purchased material that happens to be region 1 ?
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Microsoft has been successful in doing exactly this with your Xboxes for years now. No Xbox Live for you Master Tickerer... you modded our Xbox and we don't stand for that. And, people continue to mod their xboxes and play with themselves while others go along with it so they can play in the 'sanitary community' called xbox live.
It'll always be that way - people that want to be different are on the outside looking in in order to exercise their rights to freedom, until, that is, everyone decides to WAKE THE FUCK UP and see what it is we are allowing ourselves to be turned in to... a bunch of servile cattle at the hands of the older generations who don't understand the technology or the issues, yet have the power to decide how the people using it should be treated.
There. I used to be a republican.
Looks like I'll be skipping this upgrade since holographic tech is just on the horizon. Plus DVDs will be hard as hell to kill.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Okay. A slashdot article on the blu-ray spec posted at least a month ago (2 or three dvd-related threads ago) had a link to the spec, a pdf. A 15 minute skim of the paper scared me and I posted about it, then reiterated it in the last 2 related threads. Does anybody read the technical material? It's like /. is just a bunch of 12-year old wankers who don't even like programming or studying that much.
The encryption system uses a broad tree of keys and subkeys so that the player can disable an entire subset of media by denying decryption functionality for parts of the tree.
The player can be Internet connected but does not have to be. However the spec IIRC does allow executable code or related commands in part of the DVD, which seems to be protected with a different key.
The player is proposed to have a wireless LAN adapter which may be sold separately, presumably this would simultaneously serve media to clients in your home while providing a keyring and monitor to police usage across the LAN.
The spec as proposed appears to guarantee that there will be events from time to time triggered by media or net connection (or even from media or programs on another pc on the LAN) causing portions of the key tree to be disabled, enabled, or updated. The ultimate thermonuclear threat on this platform is to disable the entire tree which may either render the device unusable completely, or may just let you use DVDs that are unprotected (if any exist in that format).
It sounds like each player will have a unique ID as well. While disablings of keys may not discriminate between IDs in the beginning, it is entirely possible that hacking your player could even end up in your being blacklisted in some way, or "infecting" your entire network with commands destroying functionality.
Personally I despise this introduction of military-grade security into my home by big entertainment companies and will boycott and fight against this any way I can. I already do not buy CDs or DVDs outright and do not feel I suffer unduly. This initiative is sure to make your home a battleground for all kinds of cyberwarfare that make you nostalgic in 10 years for the cute and relatively limited and harmless spyware and spam threats of today.
Or maybe that won't even matter, considering no one's going to create movies for your player since it's not DRM enabled.
It may turn out that the only thing the consumer CAN do is not buy. That works great as long as DRM only affects the entertainment market, but what happens when digital control works its way into the more essential parts of life?
"Sorry pal, you can't pay in cash. We only take transactions via human RFID chip implants. What, you don't have one? You know that RFID chip implants are the law right?? You must be a terrorist! I'm calling homeland security!"
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