Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Flaw Allows Full Movie Downloads For Free
webax writes with this excerpt from Reuters:
"[An Adobe security hole] exposes online video content to the rampant piracy that plagued the music industry during the Napster era and is undermining efforts by retailers, movie studios and television networks to cash in on a huge Web audience. 'It's a fundamental flaw in the Adobe design. This was designed stupidly,' said Bruce Schneier ... The flaw rests in Adobe's Flash video servers that are connected to the company's players installed in nearly all of the world's Web-connected computers. The software doesn't encrypt online content, but only orders sent to a video player such as start and stop play. To boost download speeds, Adobe dropped a stringent security feature that protects the connection between the Adobe software and its players."
webax also notes that the article suggests DRM as a potential solution to the problem.
Eriouslysay.
Wow, so even Bruce Schneier is subject to the DRM double think now? What part of this is hard to understand? You have to give the viewer the key so it can decrypt the video stream and play it to the user.. if the user can see it, the user can record it. Game over. No amount of "encryption" can change the facts.
How we know is more important than what we know.
...at how fuckin dumb this all is. If you can see it, you can copy it, maybe it is more difficult, but not impossible. Do these idiots never ever learn?
sadly, axxo and fxg and their black market friends already figured out years ago how to get movies for free to most anyone willing to look for them. it brings the end of an industry in it's current form.
There are better models: allow people, if they choose, to take media without paying for it, but give them credit, additional access, and membership benefits when customers do sponsor/pay for the media they consume. It is really not that complicated... find something you can sell because you can no longer technically control the distribution of your product.
Major media producers cannot change the progression of technology with policy and lawsuits. They would be so much better off to adopt what tech can enable, and build effective business models around providing customers with real value when they do pay for media, instead of using fear and lawsuits to force them to pay when they don't have to.
Typically, DRM related security bugs get fixed markedly faster than do security bugs that threaten the security of the computer the software is installed on. Just to remind you who the customer is, and who the consumer is, y'know.
Restrictions pitting a computer against its owner (and wasting time and energy to further a business model built on distrust) are always a problem, and the proof that some technologies can be inherently evil.
The free demo version of Replay Media Catcher allows anyone to watch 75 percent of anything recorded and 100 percent of YouTube videos. For $39, a user can watch everything recorded.
One Web site -- www.tvadfree.com -- explains step-by-step how to use the video stream catching software.
[snip]
Forrester analyst James McQuivey said he doesn't believe the video stream catching technology will entirely derail the advertising-supported business model used by the networks for online video.
"It's too complicated for most users," said McQuivey, noting that file-sharing services like BitTorrent already exist but only a small percentage of people use them.
See? He (whoever he is...) thinks piracy won't be a problem... it's too complicated to pirate stuff... people would rather pay... something like that anyway. And he's an analyst, so that makes it official, right?
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
As we all love to repeat, DRM is folly, giving a man a locked box and the key, security through obscurity, mere obfuscation, inevitably cracked, etc. So, a story about yet another broken DRM system is hardly exciting.
What is amusing, in this case, is that we have a DRM system so broken that it includes a vulnerability of the kind that is theoretically fixable. Essentially, Amazon streams the first couple of minutes of whatever it is to you for free. To get more, you have to pay. However, thanks to this bug, Amazon doesn't actually stop streaming at two minutes, just sends a command to the player to stop playing. The video that you aren't supposed to see ends up, inadequately obfuscated, somewhere on your system.
That is the pathetic bit. It is ultimately impossible to control what another computer does; but it is merely a matter of good engineering to control what yours does. Server access control vs. DRM. Here, the system is so broken that Amazon's servers are essentially handing out video that they don't want copied to anybody who asks for it, at which time it is protected only by the usual doomed local DRM. Thanks to badly designed DRM, the system is less secure than that ever so early 90's "on payment, we email you a one time use link to a direct download" content protection scheme. Ha-ha.
You know what else allows full movie downloads for free?
THE INTERNET.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Doesn't everybody know that all flash video is easily accessible? Most of the time it's just a case of dragging it out of the cache. Sometimes you need to jump through more hoops, but I thought it was common knowledge that you could download it all.
You have to re-encode it if you want to, say, burn it on dvd, but that's not too hard. I use winFF (yes, I use windows).
Uh, the pirates were already uploading the full HD rips to Usenet days before the movies were even released. No pirate would want the shitty version Amazon is offering.
My other car is first.
There are two separate issues mentioned in the article.
1. HTTP and RTMP are not encrypted and thus it's trivial to record any video sent over these protocols. This is well-documented and I'd hardly consider it a flaw. Flash 9u3 has DRM (RTMPE+verification), but most Web sites don't bother to use it.
2. Apparently Amazon's movie store server will send the whole video whether the customer has purchased it or not. This is a bug, but it's Amazon's fault not Adobe's and Amazon should be able to fix it easily enough. Also, they're apparently not using all the DRM features available in Flash so their videos aren't as protected as they could be.
AFAIK Flash DRM hasn't been cracked yet because no one uses it. I'm not an advocate of DRM, but as a practical matter I find it works better when you actually turn it on.
In summary:
Amazon.com is staffed by idiots... They thought it would be safe to stream the ENTIRE MOVIE, to anyone, FOR FREE. The ONLY protection being that they send a command to the Flash Player to "pause" playback after 2 minutes for those that haven't paid to watch the whole thing. Cheap software and instructions have sprung up all over the web, and everybody knows Amazon.com is going to get a boot up the ass by the media companies, and fix this "security" issue any second now.
DRM is utterly redundant. They just need someone with 3-digit IQ in the company to teach them how to make a 2 minute excerpt clip that is free and publicly accessible, while keeping the full video password-protected.
This is about on-par with an Apache "security announcement" that even if you don't make a link to a document on your HTTP server, it's still accessible! The horror!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Adobe Flaw Allows Full Movie Downloads For Free"
its not a flaw, its a feature!
-I only code in BASIC.-
What's the easiest and fastest way to take complete advantage of this?
I want links!
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Actually I do have a bulletproof method of DRM that customers will accept. There's no patent - it's currently a trade secret. I could show them how it works without revealing the secret, and they could license it from me.
I only want $40m cash up front, and 10% of the back end.
I'm calling it MP[34]. Of course with licensing comes naming rights. I think "Plays For Now" is not yet taken.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's just like their instant delivery service, available for items that you've put on your wish list in advance. The way it works is that, when you put an item on your wish list, they ship it to you. Then, if you buy it, they give you the tracking number, you go to the shipper's site, and find that the item is on your porch, at which point you bring it inside and open it. If you don't buy it, eventually the shipper notices that it's been sitting on your porch for a while unclaimed and brings it back to Amazon.
In related news, researches have discovered that Gutenberg's printing press has similar flaws. By using modern technology such as photocopiers or cameras, or older technology such as monks and pens (or additional printing presses) criminals can create nearly identical copies of items printed with the press, depriving the original creators of the material of much needed compensation.
Gutenberg did not immediately return calls for comment, however it's theorized that he did not build in an encryption option to his printing press in order to boot comprehension speeds (Simple substitution ciphers were well established at the time of the creation of the printing press, and Gutenburg could have easily applied their techniques in the creation of his press, however it's not entire certain how effective it would have been at preventing piracy. (Somewhat (at most) effective DRM techniques were developed centuries later.))
Any site that try to protect their content with stupid tricks
Actually, what they did was trade-off stream security for the user experience - if the stream does pre-load, then the viewer can start viewing the movie much faster after they pay.
Its a good trick if most of your users do pay, as they get the video they pay for much faster (since it's already pre-loaded) than would be possible if the paid content was sent in a separate stream that did not start until after the payment was processed.
Mainly, this is an artifact of delivering video via http/progressive download vs. rtsp - you have a few options:
1. deliver one stream - tradeoff - geeks can view for free
2. deliver two streams - tradeoff - slow, annoying start up while you wait for the second stream to load enough to start playing
3. use rtsp - tradeoff - reduces the quality of the video to match minimum bandwidth between the server and the viewer
For really secure video, you'd use either RTSP or DRM (or both8-0), but they both have other problems with quality and user experience.
I guess a system designed by a video geek would probably lean towards providing the best quality viewing experience while making it possible for a geek to get the video for free:-).