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'First Pirated Ultra HD Blu-Ray Disk' Appears Online (torrentfreak.com)
Has AACS 2.0 encryption used to protect UHD Blu-ray discs been cracked? While the details are scarce, a cracked copy of a UHD Blu-ray disc surfaced on the HD-focused BitTorrent tracker UltraHDclub. TorrentFreak reports: The torrent in question is a copy of the Smurfs 2 film and is tagged "The Smurfs 2 (2013) 2160p UHD Blu-ray HEVC Atmos 7.1-THRONE." This suggests that AACS 2.0 may have been "cracked" although there are no further technical details provided at this point. UltraHDclub is proud of the release, though, and boasts of having the "First Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc in the NET!" Those who want to get their hands on a copy of the file have to be patient though. Provided that they have access to the private tracker, it will take a while to download the entire 53.30 GB disk. TorrentFreak reached out to both the uploader of the torrent and an admin at the site hoping to find out more, but thus far we have yet to hear back. From the details provided, the copy appears to be the real deal although not everyone agrees.
How quaint.
So, these guys are some of the smartest hackers / rippers on the planet. They're the first to break a widely sought-after protection scheme.
And their first accomplishment is to release The Smurfs 2?
Of course the alternative to AACS 2.0 being cracked is that someone accessed the video pre-encryption. This could have been an inside job at the studio/production companies, or they could have been hacked.
Have all new movies streamed on a network to a secure consumer box that can be updated as needed.
No more disk issues. No internet, no movie. Order the movie overnight for next day playback on slow networks.
Recall the disks and release the disk released movies on streaming services only.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It'd take a week to download that here in Australia.
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
Slashdot is broken in multiple ways.
The mobile site doesn't display at all in Firefox. The page source shows that content was served, but it's broken enough to not display anything at all. There are features of the desktop interface, like the sliders to change comment thresholds, that simply aren't usable for mobile users.
On the desktop interface, links to older stories or to show all the stories on a previous day do not work at all. Instead, the front page is served up with the most recent stories.
All of these have been broken for several hours, and there are comments about it two stories ago. If there are issues with the server, the right thing is usually to notify users that there's a problem and it's being addressed. Nothing of the sort has been posted. I can't think of any good reason to test out changes on a production site.
If you're reading this, whipslash, this is a really bad experience for your users. Of course, you've made space to cram in more ads on comment pages, so all is well, right? Perhaps you should focus on building real value to this site instead of cramming in more ads to increase revenue in the short term. If you piss off enough users, that revenue will dry up in the longer term.
"mothersmurfer!"
From the past, we've seen plenty of linkages between 'software players' being hacked (i.e. encryption keys being grabbed from RAM) and encryption hacks. Perhaps it has to do with the recent release of the first software player being able to play UHD BD on PCs?
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
that it was uploaded from an IP tied to an employee or officer of the MPAA?
I think you mean, "That's smurfing hilarious."
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I haven't been to this particular tracker but can guarantee most regulars will have seedboxes. The original seeder included. Any member of the site will probably be able to have it on their home computer within a couple of hours. Gone are the days of spending up to a week just to download a 700mb avi.
DRM and Copy Protection are useless against the greatest hacking minds of the internet. Its pointless to spend money on these technologies. There are other ways to protect content and insulate profits. Ways that are far more effective. The Steam approach of LightDRM has worked better than most others, and even Kid-Gloving Infringers has had moderate success. Bugging the game, or gimping the difficulties or weapons has also been very effective for some studios. DRM is intrusive to the people who BUY the game, and typically does NOT interfere with the hacker community at large, who will just strip off the DRM and play the game with a much more streamlined experience than most DRM providers can typically offer. DRM, or at least the current DRM approach, is dead. New methods should be investigated and tested. We all know that these people deserve to be paid for their work. DRM just makes everything cost more. A lose Lose for Devs and Gamers!
I'm afraid you don't understand encryption at all.
And this *isn't* encryption of data, so much as (attempted) encryption of transit.
Any encryption method, you can openly publish the decryption method and hardware. If you can't, it's no good.
What you *CAN'T* publish are the decryption keys. If you publish these, you are an idiot. CSS, AACS, etc. and pretty much all DRM schemes mis-use transport encryption by giving you the keys too, in some convoluted fashion. They are able to revoke keys, they are able to issue keys to manufacturers, but they are giving decryption keys to you. That's the problem, not the decryption device or decryption method.
Any encryption that cannot survive a known-plaintext attack is useless in the modern era. It's as simple as that. That's not how encryption has worked since the days of the Caesar cipher - even Enigma wasn't really that vulnerable to that because working out the key-settings for a known plaintext was computationally infeasible for the time. Don't believe every line in The Imitation Game ("Heil Hitler! Turns out that's the only German you need to know to break the code!").
So, no, what the problem is is not the encryption. It's the intended use. You give EVERY DEVICE MANUFACTURER a decryption key. Which you can revoke. But which millions of people share.
The reason for this is that otherwise you have to give every viewer a unique decryption key and give them unique copies of their disc, and encrypt data on-the-fly to them (because you can't store 6 billion differently-encrypted copies of the movie). And that just means that one guy has one key, and if he doesn't care about that key being later revoked, he can decrypt his own personal copy and problem solved.
AACS was a little bit more complicated, with all kinds of virtual machines checking state, and things like keys that were generically derivable if you have enough device keys (which means that nobody can trace who actually broke it or blacklist them).
But those are security-by-obscurity and inherent flaws of using encryption as DRM instead of its intended use.
But if you have an encryption scheme where you cannot publish the algorithm, or encrypted known plain-texts, you are very much back in the 60's (e.g. "Modern ciphers such as Advanced Encryption Standard are not currently known to be susceptible to known-plaintext attacks.")
Clearly he meant "Of all the smurfs they could smurf to smurf, they smurfed Smurfs 2. That's smurf."
This torrent appears to be the actual disc itself -- .m2ts files and BDMV\STREAM directory etc. It looks like the full 72.5 Mb/s source movie at the identical quality as the retail UHD disc, minus the DRM -- you could burn this puppy back to a UHD disc and play it on your player (assuming the player will play these UHD discs without DRM), or, more likely, use your favorite software player. Or, you could use Handbrake and compress it to the bitrate and container of your choice. But it looks like the real deal.
53.30GB?! How many 1.44MB floppies is that?
#DeleteFacebook
That's like Terraquads of GigaRAM for sure!
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is my guess.
> This will last until people can't tell the difference between a format's video and their natural vision.
I predict it'll last much longer than that. Consider the audiophile scene. People spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on simple cables for digital, when it can be easily proven that any non-cable will deliver bit-for-bit identical data. They insist on clearly reproducing frequencies four times as high as they can hear.
1h45m = 105 minutes = 6300 seconds / 37903 = 0.16621375616706 second per floppy.
#DeleteFacebook
Ok, let's be clear on something. No matters how perfect your protection is, if it's on my screen, I can record it. I can output the signal and the audio on a HD recorder and there's no protection that will protect you from that.
Now, to my point, why the pirate even bother to pirate this encoding? I mean, why would I pirate the BlueRay image full of ads and pointless menu when I can download a perfectly fine and cleaned .AVI with all the Subtitles/Audio integrated?
Or am I missing something?
Elok
So, no, what the problem is is not the encryption. It's the intended use. You give EVERY DEVICE MANUFACTURER a decryption key.
Yeah, I'm sure that what's happened here is that someone extracted a device key and used it to decrypt the movie. I'm shocked that this is the first time it's been done. Actually, I doubt that it is.
Which you can revoke. But which millions of people share.
Actually, no. AACS provides a unique set of decryption keys to every individual device. Not model, but individual piece of hardware. Through a complicated (and rather cool, actually) sequence of derivations, every device can derive the keys needed for each disk, but if a player's keys are found to be compromised they can be revoked, and that player will be unable to decrypt any disks made in the future.
AACS was a little bit more complicated, with all kinds of virtual machines checking state, and things like keys that were generically derivable if you have enough device keys (which means that nobody can trace who actually broke it or blacklist them).
Again, no. AACS includes a traitor tracing scheme. I don't know if it's actually in use (but if we start seeing lots of UHD torrents, you can bet they'll start using it), but it allows the identification of the specific device that decrypted a movie, from the decrypted video stream. The way this works is that they encrypt some portions of the video twice, with keys chosen so that any given device can only decrypt one of the two copies. Then they apply different digital watermarks to each of the duplicate blocks. With n duplicated blocks they examine the decrypted output and identify which of 2^n devices decrypted.
But those are security-by-obscurity and inherent flaws of using encryption as DRM instead of its intended use.
True, but AACS gets about as close as you can get, I think, to a secure DRM solution that doesn't include a real-time, two-way negotiation.
Where it breaks down is that because "revocation" only affects future movies, an attacker who extracts the keys from a device on May 4, 2017 can use those keys to decrypt every Blu-Ray Disk pressed before that date (actually, probably before that date plus a few months). In addition, Blu-Ray players are dirt cheap. At the low end, they cost about the same as a disk. Given a cheap way to extract the key from one, it would be perfectly feasible to buy a new player for each movie you want to decrypt. But you don't even have to do that. Buy one per month and you can decrypt all the movies that come out -- at least until the AACS LA realizes that one model of player can be cheaply broken and pushes the manufacturer to tighten security to make it harder. They can make you work hard to keep up with changes in their security-by-obscurity.
Except they can't win that way, either. The trick is to break a set of devices and get all of their keys. Then identify the traitor tracing blocks in a movie and decrypt them with multiple players' keys, so you end up with both copies of many of the blocks. Then, when you construct the output to publish, choose among the traitor tracing blocks so that your output is different from any of the individual devices that you've broken. Examination of the published stream may finger some device in the world, but it will definitely not finger any of the ones you broke. You may cause some random individual's player to stop working (on future movies), but your keys will stay good.
At the end of the day, DRM is always breakable, because you have to distribute the keys. But it can be made pretty hard, and AACS is an incredibly good scheme, given the context in which it has to operate.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
As proven by this case, that doesn't work. They pirated Smurfs 2 of all things!
I really wonder why they mandated new drives for the UHD BD spec, when HVEC is much smaller than H264 anyway it could easily fit on dual layer BDs...
Systems like PS4 Pro (or even PS4 since it can do 4k at 30/24Hz) could easily play them if it weren't for the drive requirement
Twinstiq, game news
If all you care about is extracting the audio and video from a disc, it's not hard, provided you have the right equipment.
You can go the analog way and use expensive equipment to sample every pixel that appears on your screen as it plays.
You can go the digital way and disassemble your TV and monitor the signals that go to each LED in the display as the disk plays.
Audio capture is trivial by comparison.
Sure, it's expensive, but I'm sure there are several commericial-scale pirates that either have equipment like this or they could get it or make it themselves if they wanted to.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It is displayed on a screen? so just framegrab this. Your BD player is plugged via HDMI to your TV, all the DHCP stuff is handled there and it's ok, there in the TV the signal is converted to LVDS and there is a big flat ribbon that goes to the LCD matrix. Just here, insert a smal PCB that have a t-con in (and t-con out if you want to see what you will grab), on the PCB there is an FPGA and enough RAM to have 2 frames in memory (~16MB for 1080p), every clock time export the last frame to a PC via a pci-express card, while the new frame is being filled in memory (double buffering). On the PC feed the frame to an encoder like ffmpeg and you have your video.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
The extra colour and dynamic range with 4k, and even more so with 8k is really nice, but to get much out of it you need a dimly lit room and a TV capable of reproducing it.
Similarly with audio you need a dedicated room and to then sit in the sweet spot while listening.
Huh... nope. 8k and 10bits colour isn't the equivalent to 200$ monster digital cables and 192kHz sample rate.
- Ears have some physiological limits due to how physics work (your ears can hear very approx in the 20-20'000Hz range. your body can also feel vibrations in the 1-100Hz. There's no receptor in a human body capable of reacting to 90kHz).
- Physics of digital signals, and a whole bunch of signal processing science (e.g.: error correction) means that in the digital world, sometime a bit is just a bit, no matter the concentration of gold and diamond powder (sic!) in the cabling it goes through.
No matter the dedicated audio room you're sitting in, you'll never be able to hear ultrasounds (directly. though ultrasounds can cause distorsions in the audible range on some equiement), and monster cables will change nothing to the SPDIF link.
The "cinephile" equivalent of an audiophile insisting on 200$ monster cables and 192kHz rates,
would be a guy who insist on movie formats that not only record Red, Green and Blue primary colours, but also infra-red and ultra violet (i.e.: insist on frequencies/wavelenghts for which the human eyes doesn't have any receptors) and on buying a $10'000 silver screen to project projecting onto which, that should also perfectly reflect x-rays, gamma rays and microwaves (completely irrelevant given what is transmitted by the light of the beamer).
No matter if the movie room is dimly lit or not, insisting on wave-lenght outside the human range (like ultra-violets) is useless, as is insisting on a screen optimized for something completely irrelevant.
The same way, no matter the dedicated listening room and it's sweet spot, a human ear lacks receptors for 96kHz sounds.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I never understood why you couldn't just capture the encrypted key and feed it that and let it do it's thing.
And that's exactly how it was done with the very few generations of movies.
Some BlueRay player (i think WinDVD ?) stored they decryption key in an insecure memory location, and hackers used to tap there to find which key is used to decrypt a specific BlueRay.
Movie industry noticed and revoked the keys for that player (meaning newer disc produced after that where encrypted with a selection of keys for which the player had no corresponding keys).
Cue-in cat and mouse game, until hackers managed to find the master key that sits at the top of the whole encryption pyramid.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
if it's on my screen, I can record it.
Yes, as in "record it with a camera".
I can output the signal and the audio on a HD recorder and there's no protection that will protect you from that.
Not exactly.
Nowadays, the output signal is *digital* (HDMI mostly with standalone players, and HDMI mostly with computers).
There's an encryption standard HDCP which is supposed to protect this data during its transit to the screen.
In theory, you should NOT be able to directly hook-up the output to a recorder, that recorder will only see an ecrypted stream that only the screen can decrypt.
You can only use a *cam* to record the actual screen as suggested above, not the stream itself.
In practice, HDCP is done poorly. Its current form is cracked and can be bypassed, so the only actual real-world is not stopping pirate, but only failing in weird ways for legitimate users.
And in actual practice : nobody gives a damn about the latest cookie-cutter soulless movie. Chances are high that I'll be too busy doing some interesting outdoor sport (or some indoor one) rather than trying to see how I could pirate a copy of Smurfs 2 (what, they even made a *second* one ?)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
when HVEC is much smaller than H264 anyway
Yeah but not by that *much* (though it depends on the quality of both encoders - x264 is incredibly better visually than nearly everything else).
At least, not given the quality/bitrate that the industry has decided to use for Ultra HD (where it makes sense or if it's mostly a placebo is an entirely different can of worm).
Also HEVC is patent minefield (and thus hardware HEVC/H265 decoding isn't as widespread as AVC/H264), so perhaps they also want to keep a door open for content producers that can only afford the MPEG patent pool for H264/AVC and would prefer to keep that codec.
Of course, next-next generations codecs like AOMedia's AV-1 are right around the corner, with even better performance, less patent encumbremenent (xiph and google are onboard), and lots of industry supprot (youtube and netflix - ie. a huge chunk of all watched content - are behind it. As are most current hardware constructors), so perhaps will end up soon with actually smaller files (and thus smaller discs or - more likely - even smaller file to torrent)
it could easily fit on dual layer BDs...
And this movie is a nice example : it's 53GB, it DOES NOT fit on 50 GB dual layer BlueRays. You would need more layers, that would drive the price of pressing discs up (i.e.: less obscene margins for the industry).
Instead UHD discs have slightly higher densities: the dual layer goes up to 66GB (so you can fit this 54GB movie on 2 layers only).
Systems like PS4 Pro (or even PS4 since it can do 4k at 30/24Hz)
Thus it would depend it the movie is 24-30 fps or 48-60 fps, and/or if there's (alterning frame) 3D.
But yeah...
could easily play them if it weren't for the drive requirement
Now the big question :
are there really that many differences between vanilla and UHD blueray disks ? or is it only a slightly higher surface density ?
I would suspect that it's only a slight difference of density, and that it should be in theory possible to reflash the drive itself with an upgraded firmware that change the behaviour of the servos of the head and the focus assembly.
(The same way it was possible to obtain a little bit higher density with floppy drivers. Except that these where directly controlled so the controlling software actually ran on the PC's main CPU, no flashing required, just a device driver).
Not that any manufacturer is actually going to release such an upgrade (it's much more lucrative to have the users re-buy a new more expensive device which is actually the same device as before (no R&D costs !) but with slightly different constants in the firmware and a different model number written on the box).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
- Ears have some physiological limits due to how physics work (your ears can hear very approx in the 20-20'000Hz range.
And that's optimistic, for a young person. At the age when people have money for this stuff, a 45 year old man can generally hear up to about 4,000 Hz or so. Maybe barely hear 8,000 if they are lucky. So this 45,000Hz stuff is just plain stupid.
Breaking the encryption on Smurfs 2 is like counterfeiting a 1 lira note.
At that point the data is unencrypted, as it's set to drive all the individual pixels of your display. All the recorder has to do is collect the values of those pixels and store it again for later playback.
(NOTE: that you'll not find trace that drive all the individual pixels, but only lines and columns of a matrix, and the display is scanned.
Also, in *active matrix*, the display doesn't directly drive the pixels, but drives active component (transistors+capacitors) in the cell which are then in charge of keeping their corresponding pixel in its desired state between scans)
On an OLED display : yes, basically it makes 3 different type of protein fluorescent in an electric field, one for each R, G, B. You get one signal for each.
On a modern LCD display : not exactly, what you see is an LCD grid (pixels going on or off) overlaid over an RGB LED light source (That's how the obtain good constrast ratio : in the darker region of the image, the LEDs of the backlight are turned down or off).
So for each pixel, you get and R, G, B signal giving what fraction of the backlight should be allowed through, and for each region a LED signal (usually multiplexed: most modern RGB LEDs have a driver directly in the package) telling how much backlight that region of the image should emit.
So you either need to integrate those signal together (determine the composition of light at a given position, given the nearby LEDs in that region ; and then filter by the state of pixels in the LCD grid).
Or you go and disassemble an OLED instead.
Or you simply record it with a cam and let the integration be done for you by the screen.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There's dozen "On Screen" recorder software. So if I can read BlueRay on my computer, what kept me from recording the screen?
Probably depends on how the display is composited by the desktop on your screen. And how the real-time video compression hardware used by the recorder is playing along with the video decompression hardware used by the media player.
You might end up with a grey rectangle instead.
(see the problems of taking a screen shot of a video player that appeared 15 years ago when the first video acceleration overlay started to appear in Super VGA cards. Only much more complicated due to increased complexity of modern hardware and modern compositing desktops)
(Or if you go with the software solution :
depends if the OS allows the recorder software to access the screen buffer of the software player, and the player still accepts to play in such an OS.
Be ready to have to fumble around with an OS that implements DRM "secure computing", requiring a gpu device driver that implements "secure path" (i.e.: video-buffer memory protection) and a player that requires ton of signed code.
You might end with a "content cannot be player currently on your computer" pop-up.)
At that point, it's easier to get a second machine, a box that scrubs HDCP away (e.g.: a vew HD splitter), and a HDMI to USB3 lossless grabber (magewell).
Or go for the whole "disassembly" approach mentioned above by another poster.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"So the decryption keys, the encrypted data, and the plaintext data are all published."
AND ONLY THE DECRYPTION KEY MATTERS. Read the OP, rather than try to backtrack.
Encrypted data? Doesn't matter.
Plain-text data corresponding to it? Doesn't matter.
Decryption algorithm? Doesn't matter.
Decryption KEY - matters. It's in every device, yes. But not necessarily accessible (e.g. similar to TPM devices - you'd have to decap the chip to discover the key and we have trouble enough doing that to 1990's arcade cabinets with pure ROM chips that are secured by basic techniques, let alone a 2010's TPM chip designed for nothing more than securely encrypting using a key that's programmed once and never revealed - nobody's broken any TPM chips yet, but they're in almost every PC on the planet even if they're not enabled).
But everything else you could publish the source code on github and put a thousand examples of encrypted and plaintexts on the Internet on anonymous FTP. And it *still* doesn't help you.
Not saying that DRM can ever be fully secured.
But the details of the encryption algorithm / known-plain-text stuff helping you out when the opponent is using a modern encryption scheme is absolute bollocks.
Or from the movie studio's hacked servers, or perhaps master files from the blu-ray factor, etc. Of course it is very reasonable for us to assume they ripped it from physical media and not those other routes.
Rhetorical question: why do they keep trying to sell me physical media when I really don't want a physical copy?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
> 10K is an easy limit for most according to the charts I saw.
I can only guess the charts you saw didn't account for age, and maybe you're counting the range that we can only barely hear if it's really loud. For the same detection rate you get for 1 watt at 2K, you might need 1000 watts at 10K.
but the point is the data is there, unencrypted, it's a matter of tapping the signal, and pretending you're the display.
The problem is that, in practice, in the name of making this as dead-cheap as possible, component tends to be highly integrated.
So you have a single chip being fed the encrypted HDCP signal in, and directly spitting the desired signal out.
(Much cheaper to make a device than having different chips for each stage of the signal processing talking to each other)
So the unencrypted data you refer is actually between 2 cores inside a highly integrated chip.
That's also why you won't find screens with the exact unusuall feature set that you would like as a geek.
Because these features aren't done by mixing-and-matching chips with discrete functions,
but because the screen will basically use a single integrated chip for everything, and chip maker make chips with the most commonly needed features in.
(I'm oversimplifying. You'll still find some signal converters. e.g.: the chip only accept 3 HDMI inputs, so you need to add 1 DP-to-HDMI converter, 1 VGA-to-HDMI ADC (yup analog-digital-analog wrecks the quality, but that's the cheapest they managed to make it), but basically manufacturer are going to keep the chip count as low as possible. It's very likely that the decryption-core will be integrated tightly with the display core).
just have a word with the manufacturer to obtain some part. As they're all in China I'm sure you will be able to find one that can sell you the parts
Yup, given that there are genuine reasons to have a separate discrete HDCP stage (mostly to split signal between displays), you're sure to be able to find parts in china as you wish.
Again, in the name of as-chepa-as-possible-integration you'll also find a bunch of output that you don't need (the additionnal outputs of the splitter), but hey, it works all the same.
(e.g.: a ViewHD splitter)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
When you write $350, I have to read MX$6500. When you write $850, I translate to roughly MX$16,000. I have a net income of roughly MX$25,000 a month (little bit over US$1000), and I am well trained and paid in the range of the upper 10% of Mexico's population.
So, while this week's sale in Best Buy seems like a good deal, it's not something I'd rush out to buy. And, the price you paid three years ago? No, not by a long shot.
I do own a projector and screen combo (that would make something more or less that size) and often use it to watch movies, but the reasons for buying it was not purely entertainment.
You may have excellent hearing, and using hearing protection certainly seems like a good idea. The values I mentioned may also have been a tad low. You said you could hear 12K - that's of choose quite a bit less than 20K or 22K.
> I guess that those monitor speakers aren't as crappy as I thought. :)
Maybe, but actually maybe they are throwing off your test. Less expensive equipment has more harmonics, often called THD (total harmonic distortion). This is an effect where when you ask for 8Khz, your amp and speakers actually deliver 8Khz, 16Khz, 4Khz, and 2Khz.
It is time to nuke the planet. Nothing more that is good can ever exist.