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Sticky Tape Defeats Sony DRM Copy Protection
cybrpnk2 writes "As reported by InformationWeek, Sony BMG Music's controversial copy-protection scheme can be defeated with a small piece of tape. According to thinktank Gartner analysts Martin Reynolds and Mike McGuire, Sony's XCP technology is stymied by sticking a fingernail-size piece of opaque tape on the outer edge of the CD. 'After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs. Gartner believes that it will never achieve this goal as long as CDs must be playable by stand-alone CD players.'"
i'd like to see some picture-demonstration for the less language-savvy.
Gee, all I need to do to avoid the backdoor* software is to stick a piece of tape to the CD and risk the tape coming off and damaging my CDROM drive?
BTW, when explaining the Sony CD fiasco to non-techie folk, using the term "installs a backdoor" seems to be very effective.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
In 2003 some of the HP Labs researchers looked at the related issues and published a paper titled: "If Piracy is the Problem, Is DRM the Answer?" http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2003/HPL-2003-11 0.pdf
You might find the white paper interesting if you've not read it before. This caused quite a stir when it was released, both inside and outside HP, and is still quite relevent in light of the Sony issue. This provides an counterpoint even inside HP where we try to maintain some form of management across all the issues.
The conclusion reads:
"We pointed out that unauthorized use and unauthorized acquisition are two aspects of piracy. A key concept is how licenses are bound to content. We saw that various kinds of DRM technology address these issues in very different ways, but that all of them have some kind of flaw that make it highly unlikely that they will be able to solve the problem of piracy. The real problem with piracy is that it takes only a small fraction of users who are capable of dissociating licenses from content to make managed content available to a significant fraction of users in unmanaged form.
We explored the concept of draconian DRM in which devices that handle managed content do not handle unmanaged content at all. Draconian DRM could potentially be effective at eliminating piracy if it were ubiquitously adopted, but introduces a new problem of how to handle public content.
Our conclusion is that currently proposed technical measures will not be able to completely stop the illegitimate distribution of pirated content. We believe that content producers must take steps to compete with the piracy as an alternative."
I still maintain that the best way to defeat Sony's DRM is by simply not buying their music. All the fuss and legal backlash is nothing if we are two-faced in our dealings with them, and indeed all big industry. If we're chiding them on the one side for their vicious tactics and financially supporting them on the other, they hear the message loud and clear: we're pushovers. I think that's the answer they were prodding for when they first decided to include XCP on their CDs in the first place.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
Not to mention September 2005 (http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_sea
"Organizations increasingly need to create, store, retrieve and manage rich media files. Those that successfully cultivate a digital asset management environment can cut their associated operational costs in half."
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Oh, this is too funny.
.01 cent piece of 'write-protect' tape. And now, Sony repeats it with the same level of hubris... that's too funny.
Many years ago in the Apple ][ era... Lotus 1-2-3 was a great spreadsheet. They invested a huge pile of money to make certain that you could not run their program without possessing the original disk. And try as we may, we couldn't figure out how they did it... there was one sector that was funky, but it didn't make any sense.
Then, by chance, my neighbor had a nice RANA drive - and it had a 'write protect' button on the face, that you could manually toggle. We stuck a (non-working) copy into the drive to begin the arduous task of single-stepping through the code, and accidentally hit that button while doing so. The result?
Lotus fired right up!
They spent way too much money using a laser to create a specific media defect in a specific place; upon startup, the program would attempt to write to that location. If it failed, it knew it was the original. If it succeeded... then there was no defect there, and it was a copy.
All that time and god-knows-how-much-money they invested in this scheme... only to be defeated by a
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
People buy CDs to get the best 44.1Kbs uncompressed audio usually available for purchase. Yet the DRM'd versions are highly compressed audio files (hence things like the illegally included LAME decoder in the XCP package) where true quality is sacraficed in order to achieve compression levels allowing it to be sandwiched onto a standard CD.
Some very fine audio chips and speakers are available for computers these days, and certainly some people use their computers as their primary audio system. Yet were on the packaging, or EULA (an astonishing concept for a music CD in and of itself), does it tell you that you'll receive inferior quality playback when played on your computer. How many people believe that the DRM'd discs are actually playing back the .WAV files, instead of WMA or other crap files? It's fraud to not inform consumers that even after they agree to the DRM that they'll receive degraded audio as a result -- and Sony should have to pay for that as well!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sadly enough, that's actually true, isn't it? Even this /. story violates the DMCA...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
> the drive made funny noises faintly reminding to 1541
> (that's the C64 floppy drive for you youngsters) read errors.
It may have been the very same thing.
The 1541 would recover from read errors by telling the stepping motor to position the head WAY past the outer track. Of course, this would cause it to bang it repeated against the cam stop. This would insure that the head was properly aligned for track zero (and probably why those damned drives went out of alignment so often!). Then, it would count forward the right number of tracks, and try to read the data again.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Actually, you can't measure any fidelity-related parameter in audio systems with an oscilloscope (or any other cheap, readily-available instrument). Distortion, for instance. Anyone can easily hear 1% THD, on any system. You'll see visible distortion on the scope only when it's at about 10% (when you get visible clipping). In fact, most digital scopes use 8-bit ADCs -- try listening to music on an ancient 8-bit soundblaster.
A very precise spectrum analyzer designed for low frequencies would be much more useful, but you likely won't find one even in a well-equipped lab; a really good one might be _very_ expensive ($50k to millions of dollars).
Quality is very difficult to measure, simply because the ear is a hell of a lot more sophisticated and sensitive to nonlinearities than any man-made instrument. I think listening to a system is much more useful than trying to measure it with cheap, primitive instruments (like THD meters or oscilloscopes). You can have two systems that measure the same THD but sound drastically different, simply because THD is a simplistic measurement.
I hate audiophile snake oil ($500 power cables, $20k "interconnects", and magic boxes) as much as you do, but don't assume you can measure everything. Nobody knows how to quantify, for instance, the taste of something. There same applies to audio.
I've got my bookshelf stereo hooked up to a pair of 3-way Audio Research speakers, with some decent 16, possibly 18 guage wire, and it shakes the floor quite nicely. The speakers probably cost about 4-5 times what the whole stereo, including speakers, originally cost, but that's where the big difference is.
I've hooked a pair of Bose speakers to a cheap-as-hell(TM) RCA bookshelf stereo, and it sounds great. Put a pair of cheap speakers on a $1000 Pioneer or Kenwood receiver, and it'll sound like hell. 99% of the sound quality is in the speakers, provided you've got an amp with enough power to drive them. And I'm meaning 5-10 watts, not 250.
My component stereo is an old circa 1985ish 20W/channel Hitachi, with another pair of Audio Research Speakers. Again, good speakers, decent speaker wire about 16 guage, and it blows away the sound of anything else in the neighbourhood.
There are nutcases who'll say you need to spend over $1000 on every component, and at least $100 on speaker wire, but there are people who spend $1500 on a pair of GeForce 7800 GTX cards as soon as they come out, too. Yes, it's sweet, but what's the point? It's hardware junkie orgasm-inducing, that's all.
Spend the money where it counts. In home theater, that's the speakers.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Back in the 1980's when computer game piracy was at its peak(?) I heard firsthand that copies of this game would deliberately reformat the disk they were on upon detection!
:(
As with the case of Lotus 1-2-3, a write-protect tab solved that 'problem' and a copy of this once-popular gamesim worked as normal.
After enough consumer backlash, game copy protection became more subtle or was somehow integrated into the gameplay of the games themselves somehow.
To this day, the best example of this I know of were the 'launch codes' from another EA hit game STARFLIGHT (I).
It's a shame Electronic Arts has devolved into a tool of major sports franchises and not as the cutting edge computer game company they used to be
with such releases like STARFLIGHT, its sequel, and the 2 'CONSTRUCTION SET' gamesims they put out for pinball and music composition....
Another major copy protect annoyance are the 'gotta-have-the-CD-in-the-drive-at-all-times' kinds of protection -- very lame and potentially destructive to your valuable investment in the CD game itself and CD-ROM drive it is spinning needlessly in....
The simple solution to all forms of media/IP piracy are low, competitive prices but that would conflict with the corporate duty to make as much profit as (legally?) possible. Because of this, we now live in a world filled with DRM, DMCA violations, and IP copyrights that will likely outlive everybody alive who reads this post....
The corporate stance of the media industry as a whole is essentially this: Your purchases have worn out and you want them again on 'replacement media' for a small replacement charge? Fsck that! Buy another damn copy at full retail price! (If it's still in print if you're lucky.)
This happened to me years ago when my cassette tape copy of John William's E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial soundtrack wore out from playing it constantly (and enjoying it). Fortunately(?), I was able to rebuy it again on CD. In a perfect world, the term 'out of print' would be unheard of and licensed media bought could be replaced for just 'materials, shipping, and handling'. But the industry model of artificial scarcity brings with it corporate greed and eventual subsequent consumer dissatisfaction. Notice how the advice nowadays is to wait for 'ultimate edition' DVD releases of favorite movies instead of buying the bare-bones release now and the 'ultimate edition' later if/when it comes out? Perhaps the 'shining' example of this 'atrocity' is the 'two DVD release' of KILL BILL as 'two separate volumes' instead of as one, complete 'set'.
Touching on DRM for a bit, look at the hypocrisy of USA government/big business persecuting 'DVD Jon' and that guy from Russia that cracked DVD Content Scrambling System and Adobe's protected PDF format respectively. Why is it, due to DMCA, legal to import strong cryptograpy into the USA to protect the secrecy of your own affairs but to reverse-engineer domestically created encryption schemes that 'protect media' for personal uses only is a felony offence worthy of serious fines and jail time? Has society come to the point that human life is so cheap that we can throw them away (in prison for 'minor', non-violent offences) and just make more in 9 months or less so long as the 'precious cash' keeps flowing between big business and big government here in the USA?
'Twould be nice if the USA copyright system went back to the original 14-year max format established by the Founding Fathers. If that were the case, these and other 'Slashdot Favorite Films' for example would be public domain by now....
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)
Alien (1979)
Blade Runner (1982)
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Aliens (1986)
Superman (1978)
Star Wars (1977)
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Return Of The Jedi (1983)
The first six STAR TREK movies (1979,1