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Flash Memory with Copy Protection
Castar writes "Mercury News is reporting that SanDisk has created a new type of flash memory with copy-protection logic built in. From the article: "Today, much of a consumer's digital content is held hostage on a particular kind of device, such as an iPod or a PC, because that is the only way to prevent massive piracy. But with the SanDisk flash memory card, a consumer can move the digital content to another device. If the music company insists the data can only be copied five times, the memory card itself enforces that policy in the new device, be it a cell phone or music player." Rejoice that your data can be "liberated" from the confines of your PC or iPod!"
I was getting sick of all that freedom, good thing sandisk's taking care of that, so i don't have to
So, the only difference between this new flash and ordinary flash is that this one can do LESS ?
Step 1) Copy once
Step 2) Remove protection from your new copy
Step 3) No more DRM.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
What does `copied' mean? From the perspective of a storage device, the data being read and put on a CD, which is then duplicated a million times, is exactly the same as the data being read, decoded, passed through a DAC and fed into someone's ears. It seems that these constraints are either unenforceable or just plain silly.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So, the only difference between this new flash and ordinary flash is that this one can do LESS ?
Yes, and that's the key to its success! Isn't it nice?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I feel so much more free now that I no longer can copy my own files. Thank you!
What will they think of next? DRM fruit? Apples you can only take five bites out of!
The industry seems bound and determined to put copy protection on everything, whether it be ringtones or MP3s. Flash memory makers are doing their best to help them, and OS makers are doing their best to take advantage of those features.
We speak of Freedom as if Linux could provide it, but the question is gradually becoming whether it is better to be the canary in a gilded cage or the crow eating garbage in the snow. Having an isolated "free" system that can't interact with other "non-free" systems is not really how we expected things to turn out, I bet.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Well, I imagine they'll be an licensed encryption key required. That'll be cracked in about ten minutes (probably by DVD Jon), but using hardware implementing his crack in the US will magically turn you into a felon.
Hooray for the DMCA.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Cheap and secure DRM -- looks like San Disk has done it.
There needs to be integration with the processor (e.g. processor starts up, decrypts and runs a boot program using a special key) -- but that's already been done. Secure storage makes those two things work better. Note: if your processor is old school and non-DRM, you just snoop the bus and get the secrets.
Looks like a real home run: this is the "right place" (from an economic standpoint) to put the DRM. It will be cheap and secure.
However, it then becomes a juicy target for attack: if they are selling these chips by the millions, and they are protecting IP worth billions, then it is time to break out the acid and electron microscopes, and figure out how to deactivate it. And then it is busted.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
That's the New Freedom(c). Get used to it. Flash drives that can't copy, cameras everywhere (London), not owning your own house (eminent domain), being held without charges indefinetely (patriot act). It's all part of the New Freedom (c). See everything is turned upside down. It's easy.
Some thoughts I am still mulling over:
a) Any device encumbered by DRM will fail if there are alternatives available on the market. If there are no alternatives the product might enjoy a limited success until the product becomes so successful that alternatives/clones/ripoffs become inevitable.
b) All forms of drm can be corrupted/broken/negated, and most will be broken within a matter of days or even hours.
c) Most new technology will be used in ways the inventors never imagined. Trying to restrict this behavior with DRM will surely kill your product.
This 'Gruvi' (what a horrible horrible name) probably falls under cat. A, and will disappear soon.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
And the encryption stuff won't be available for linux.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
As a fan of the music industry but not music itself, I wait with great anticipation for the day when we are finally rid of the antiquated notion of personal rights.
I propose a mandatory tithe of 10% of each individual's monthly earnings, that would be put straight into the coffers of music industry to stamp out music piracy once and for all.
Obviously to accomplish this worthy goal we'd have to make some sacrifices, the ability to purchase music online would be one of the first to go. As many slashdotters have pointed out in the past, DRM and similar technologies are always beaten and thus are unenforceable in the long term.
Instead of listening to music in the privacy of your home, I suggest RIAA-run facilities allowing a selected number of people to listen to carefully selected 'Top of the Pops' singles in a structured environment. Obviously a strip-search with full body cavity check, careful screening, drug-testing and metal detectors would be necessary to prevent unauthorized reproduction of the music. Needless to say, RIAA goons would be on hand with truncheons and electroshock equipment to assure proper relaxation and enjoyment.
This utopia can only come about with the help of right-minded individuals such as yourselves. I ask slashdotters to delete their mp3/ogg collections, turn themselves into the RIAA for re-neducation and fight for this glorious future.
I really don't like the increasing complexity of devices that don't need to be complex. Complexity tends to decrease reliability.
My last motherboard, an ASUS, had an in-BIOS MP3 player. That qualifies as "unnecessary, reliability-decreasing feature", in my opinion.
As for the latest sky-is-falling-on-copyright-infringement alarmist crap from Slashdot, pay no heed. This whole thing is a lot of horseshit that companies are using to extract money from the publishing industry. Many, many companies try to do this. If you make a commodity device (Flash storage, for instance), you're desperate to do *something* to make more money on it.
So, let's take a look at what this system is probably going to do.
Assume that the engineers *really* knew what they were doing and made *no* errors (and that security in hardware is pretty hard to do and there isn't much of a culture of that in the hardware world).
It's a pretty good bet that if properly designed (*not* necessarily the case), each device has some sort of embedded public-private keypair. They use this to transfer symmetric keypairs to do bulk data transfer between each other.
This means:
* Everything is on one IC, and there is no inter-IC bus involved. Tapping busses between ICs within a DRM-using device is a good way to break the protection. bunny broke the X-Box by using the fact that not everything is on one IC. Probably reasonable for the Flash world, where this is already the case.
* The hardware's pseudorandom number generators (that symmetric key has to come from somewhere) are secure. An attacker can twiddle power to screw up PRNGs...maybe zero them, induce current, screw with the power lines at just the right frequency, whatever. This is not trivial to avoid.
* There are *no* diagnostic interfaces left in the hardware. Trying to make every hardware engineer lose their diagnostics in the release product is like trying to convince a fish to jump out of water and stamp around on land for a bit.
* The crypto algorithm involved doesn't get broken (once it is in lots of products, you are irrevocably committed).
Remember that this is a system that relies on *zero* breaks. Maybe the manufacturer can have an "update key" and release new protected content with hidden "updates" to invalidate existing compromised keys, but this takes a while to propagate around the system. Once such a system is released, the manufacturer is gambling that not a single person, in any lab, with microscopes and the works, anywhere, can break the thing. Once it gets broken, that person can distribute all the protected content (and possibly even create a "modification" to disable the protection on other devices, if the break involves the compromise of a key). The math is *wildly* against the publishing world here. It's a safe assumption that the publishing world will make dire legal penalties, heavily watermark content (and probably tag with the IDs of devices that it passes through) to try to track down any such break, but it's still a seriously long-shot gamble for them -- and a break is likely to happen after they are widely deployed and are committed to the scheme, as happened with DVDs.
And remember that nobody gives a damn about simple data transfer. That data has to go somewhere -- the Flash drive. So now every device that *consumes* this data (sound cards, video cards, etc) has to also be similiarly secure, and not have any breaks. That is a *huge* undertaking. If one consumer is Windows running under Palladium (e.g. a trusted software MP3 player), then you have to secure a vast software system, as well as much of the hardware in a computer system, against any breaks. That means *Windows local kernel security must be airtight*. Every bluescreen you see is a violation of that! Even better, you can't use a single good prepackaged solution, because then you run into the bus-attacks-across-multiple-ICs problem -- every single device needs a custom chip, and that chip has to perform *all* the t
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
This press release is filled with double-talk and flat-out Orwellian nonsense. Like: Preventing people from backing up their data 'gives them more options'.
We get a bad feeling about all this because so much money and resources is going into developing a technology that no one who is actually buying the technology actually wants. The chip designer firm is working with the chip manufacturer who is negotiating with the global entertainment corporation who is linking with the agent who interfaces with the artist who toots up with the liaison of the technology company.
So who's missing here? How about the people who are actually putting out the money to actually pay for this stuff. One person buys an entertainment product and a little while later discovers that they can't do the simple and obvious things that they had come to expect that they could do with it; like backing it up or moving it to another medium like the car stereo. Suddenly the perceived value of this entertainment item drops to half or less of its previous value. So the consumer is only willing to pay $8 for the same CD that they were willing to previously buy at $16 when the CD or CD player has copy prevention technology built into it.
Now the entertainment corporation is raising the price to pay for the development of this new technology and also raising the price because the competition (from easy copies) is now restrained. So the perceived value (and price) is going down at the same time that the price for the entertainment product is shooting up. How exactly is this supposed to be good for the entertainment company or the artist? It must be that they fundamentally assume that because they are so cool and beautiful that the vast dork masses will buy the product regardless of how much it costs or difficult it is to use. This is what happens when entertainment people start talking business with computer people. The greed goes recursive and you end up with the worst mentalities of both industries in one package.
In the long run (10 years plus) this mentality will only act to reduce the importance and viability of the entertainment corporations. The board of directors will look to spin off the entertainment divisions in the way that everyone is now trying to dump their record companies. Maybe DRM is nothing more than a long term plan on the part of the technology companies to seriously depress the value of the entertainment companies so that ten years from now (when all the ultra-fast download-entertainment-directly-to-the-home technology is in place) they will be able to buy the entertainment companies for a tiny fraction of what they are worth now. Or maybe it's just the fantasy of immature greedheaded yuppies with too much access to other people's money.