ATI Claims HDCP Then Covers Its Tracks

BigControversy writes "It looks like a big can of worms is being opened. The DailyTech.com is reporting that ATI sold millions of video cards knowing that HDCP support was not enabled. Despite that, the cards were sold and advertised to its customers as having HDCP capabilities. A day or two after this information was revealed, HDMI.org went completely password protected and ATI is now modifying key areas of its website, removing any mention of 'HDCP-ready'."

Comments

Ridiculous

[Wulfstan]

Making a mistake? Fair enough. Treating your customers like idiots and trying to hide what you've done, though, is not something that is going to fly in this day and age. ATI are going to pay through the nose on this one and doing stupid things like this to try to paint over the damage done is just plain stupid.

Come clean, apologise publicly, recall products, do whatever you can to ensure that you have supported and looked after your customers. But to do this sort of thing smacks of burying your head in the sand.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

devil's advocate...

[ltwally]

"and ATI is now modifying key areas of its website, removing any mention of 'HDCP-ready'."

While I'm not saying it's cool to advertise features that do not exist in a product, isn't it the responsible thing for ATi to remove references to HDCP-ready on its websites, so as to not further mislead potential customers?

That being said, of course ATi should roll out a driver that has hardware HDCP enabled, or offer some form of compensation to previous buyers whom were mislead.

Let's hope the "best" for HD

[Opportunist]

Well, it's time to admit something: I loathe "HD-ready" and all that surrounds it. DRM, TCPA, all that 3-4 letter acronyms that smell like "hand over your consumer rights".

Now, I'm normally not a person to hop onto FUD and vent it 'til it stinks, but can't we hype that a little 'til no moron buys that crap anymore, and see the whole DRMism bomb like a tacnuke? It would certainly help prevent stripping us of any of the few rights left on our scale in the "balance between producer and consumer" when it comes to content.

So far the consumer drones would buy it for the simple "booooooyehy, look at the stunnin' crystal clear display!" without realizing what comes behind it. They don't care that the content industry dictates what they may see and what not, after all, what they want to see is that latest blockbuster movie and not some small movie maker's gems.

But hearing that their $500 piece of hardware ain't gonna do it should surely be an argument.

Re:Google Heaven?

[tomstdenis]

Really? I think the number of people who bought the cards for HDCP support and not the 3000fps they can get in Doom3 is fairly low.

Basically do what I do. If I buy something that says "AC'97" or "PCI-Express" compatible and doesn't have linux drivers [or compatible drivers] I just return it saying it's defective. So far I've been 100% successful with only having to be marginally rude :-)

So if you bought the card assuming HDCP support worked out of the box and it doesn't return it. If everyone did the same you'd see retailers scrambling to avoid selling them like the plague.

Tom

they won't

[TheAxeMaster]

Like the first post said, it'll end up as a class action suit most likely. Nvidia has the luxury of blaming the board manufacturers, ATi can't hide behind that. Vertical Integration isn't that bad until you screw up and get caught lying about it...
 
Now, this doesn't make nvidia the smarter purchase choice at this point, because none of their boards support it either. Maybe when the 7900 comes along in about a month or so though. Hopefully the board makers (evga, bfg, xfx, etc.) realize that they'd better get it out there after this fiasco.

Re:they won't

[WhiteWolf666]

Does anyone honestly _want_ HDMI support?

I own 3 30+ LCDs. I've got a 42" plasma, and a 60" plasma. None of which support HDMI or HDCP. Guess what, I don't give a flying fuck (pardon my french).

My cable boxes output beautiful HDTV through DVI. So do my various (Mac and/or Linux) computers. So does my xbox. And I'm expected to replace _everything_ for absolutely no extra technical capabilities?

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHA

Hardware solutions like this: http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/15/spatz-techs-dvi magic-killing-on-hdcp/ already effectively crack HDCP. Do you really not expect mplayer/vlc/xine for Linux and OSX not do to the same? The technical details of how to break it are already public knowledge: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/20/025 1206&mode=nested&threshold=3

HDCP is dead on arrival, as far as I'm concerned. All it will mean is that the good, more functional equipment that supports standard DVI will be cheaper. I can get that 30" LCD for my bathroom, and maybe an outdoor one for my hot tub. No offense to the rest of slashdot, but its people (like me) that spend a substantial amount of their income on home "tech" that drive the industry, and most people I know are NOT going to replace their setups unless they see substantially improved features.

HDMI + 4 times HDTV resolution + Real 3D versus Standard HDTV on DVI? Yeah, maybe we'll upgrade.
HDMI + Standard HDTV versus DVI + Standard HDTV? Bwahahaha. Tell me another.

Re:they won't

[dgatwood]

How? The DRM'd "Trusted" drivers won't let you do that, and the drive won't work without "Trusted" drivers.

Uh... that's not the way it works, generally. The drive might not decrypt content without trusted drivers, but at a low enough level, it's still an ATAPI block device, and an ATAPI block read still reads a block. The only way they could even make this difficult would be to make the drive reject read requests to a particular "special" region of the disc containing decryption key data, much like DVD-R drives reject writes to those regions. However, since the hardware must, by definition, be able to read those blocks, even if they put limits on what blocks can be read, it would still be a mere firmware limitation, and we've seen just how well firmware limitations have worked with region codes....

At some point, it comes down to this: an ATA bus isn't encrypted. The bus is easily snoopable. Ditto for USB, ditto for FireWIre, SCSI, etc. Any key data that leaves the drive can be snooped, so if the drive hands the key and the data to your video card to do the decoding, you can snoop it on the ATA bus. If the reverse happens---if key data is sent from the video card to the drive---it can be snooped on the ATA bus. Either way, there must be a key exchange. That means that it is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. Any technology not vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, by definition, is a shared secret algorithm, which is inherently vulnerable to the revelation of the shared secret by unscrupulous people (social engineering), which is how CSS was broken, I believe.

Fundamentally speaking, HDCP will be a joke, just like CSS, because all content protection is, my its very nature, a joke. It relies on an inherently flawed premise, specifically the assumption that you can give someone a piece of data and a decryption key and then somehow dictate how and when they can use that key to decrypt the data. It doesn't work that way. The only way to prevent decryption is by withholding the key, which would prevent it from ever being decrypted in any way. The best HDCP can do is add more initial shared secrets to steal.

Besides, unless they have improved it in recent years, HDCP has already been broken.