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Microsoft's New Audio Format Cracked
Barcode (JPB) was one of the first to send us the word from
Wired that the new audio format Microsoft introduced (Two days ago), supposed to be a secure format (resricting playback) has already been cracked. Dimension Music first carried the news-and what a name the crack has *grin*.
tell me:
:-)
why would one buy a song which you can only play
in windows (on a computer with those noisy fans
and harddisks) ? i only (if ever) would consider
buying a song online if i had a chance of copying
it to a cdr and listen to it without a computer.
so... would joe dumb-user buy more songs over the
net after his first "oops. windows blew up and all my songs are gone. (what's a backup?)"-experience?
would joe dumb-user even find this "crack"???
then the industry would have no chance to
sell their music because no one would buy them.
anyway... only my own opinion.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
retract. My bad. Their site was down so I couldn't get their side of the story 'till now. it appears to be a true crack. The encryption is broken, the song is left in the compressed format.
honestly, couldn't agree more. I try to "download" some Sarah McLachian from NG (not loser ISP newsgroup, Newsguy.net), but only getting the latest CD from the there, even with search utility. And I know I have no shot in hell getting them from ftp sites with my carppy modem (completes with you guys' T1? I can't even upload mp3 to those ftps for crying out loud.) Now I move to ebay, buying them and dumping them back to ebay. -I have my defends, there are a lot of movie soundtrack I would like to listen. And I know I can't afford 10% of them. At least it's somewhat legal.
For example I don't care about Western but I'd like to put my hands on a couple of "How the West Was Won" soundtrack, and there's nothing short of paying amazon 26 bucks can I get them. These example shows that electronic music can really provide genre/niche music to broader audience. Just like what VHS did to movie. I say start electronic distribution from classical music and soundtrack, honor system works better in there. Or release the new songs to CD and release mp3 18 months later just like video tape. (If you can still remember "baby one more time..." 2 years later, the chance are you will pay it.
CY
IMHO, the term 'great hacker' does not NECCESSARILY mean 'great programmer' ... ask anyone who's been formally taught software engineering or computer science.
True though that intelligence does not guarantee programming talent, it might however allow one to express it and/or learn about it faster though.
Delphis
FWIW: in a warped sort of way, ASF _IS_ MP3. ASF is a wrapper around almost ANY video or audio streaming compression method. One of the encoding options for ASF is MP3. It probably won't play in an MP3 player because of the wrapper, but the sound quality is exactly the same. The wrapper makes it easier for the system to stream it over the Net.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Well, the government can supply music producers with their public key. The producers would then encrypt a copy of the key to the music with the govt's public key and send it along with the music. Then, the govt could decrypt the music when ever they wanted to. This is called "key escrow", is a terrible idea, but it's better than using weak or no encryption.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
All this is good in theory, but when it comes down to it the release of all the mpx encoding software into the internet there is almost no way for the companies to enforce such a standard. Given they coudl change some form of the encrytion but what's to stop Jow cracker out there from finding out the encrytion scheme? Many have tried this in the past, aka, MS, LINUX, IBM, the military, cellular phone companies, all are feasible attempts at putting out an encryption standard yet each one in time (some shorter than others had been cracked).
It seems to me that the sheep are the people who listen to the whole thing, in order, because that's the way they're meant to do it.
I listen to music because I want to hear music I enjoy. If 80% of a CD doesn't interest me, why should I listen to it just because it's 'part of the composition'?
The argument is partially valid. Art looks better when matted or framed. The frames/matte could be compared to the extra songs on a CD. But, nobody would say that the frame is as important as the art, just that it helps set it off.
It comes down to, do I know my own tastes, or does some musician know them better than me?
You may find that you can't arrange music in as enjoyable a way as the artists can, but I know my own tastes well enough to program music I want to listen to.
Thus, I'll buy singles of the songs I like, or maybe a package deal on great albums, but once I have them, I'll delete the crap that I don't like. This composition thing is for sheep who can't decide what they like.
Questions are always informative, or didn't you know that?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Oh, they could prevent an analog copy - simply introduce a sound format that's so secure, you can't play it! Attempting to play one of these files would make the analyzer bounce up and down, but the sound it would actually produce would be the Microsoft Sound over and over again. But optionally, for a small fee, you could click an 'ActiveListen' button which would cause Microsoft agents to barge into your house and point a secret device at your computer that would (a) make the music play, (b) delete any copies of Netscape on your computer, "for security reasons", and (c) check for anything recording the audio. If anything was detected, your personal information (and your Pentium III ID, if applicable) would be sent to Microsoft's servers, also "for security reasons".
Oh great, I probably just gave them ideas.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Did you post it as HTML or 'Plain Old Text'?
Look at the selector box when you post again, that's probably your problem.
And the Microsoft employee was telling the truth in the same way that Bill Clinton was. (i.e. not).
The encryption really was cracked.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Meanwhile, I'm keeping the pumpkin-fires burning for 5.004 and 5.005 maintenance.
Those of us who use laptops and/or crappy speakers certainly can't tell the difference between 16kbps mono and 128kbps stereo.
:P )
Nor those of us who still listen to vinyl. (It DOES sound better, you know...
-Chris
On one side I'm hearing that unfuck is a crack, on the other side MS says unfuck just samples the soundcard as the locked file is playing.
Can anyone state for sure which one it is?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Um, this is an utterly spurious argument.
It is capitalism. It is entirely compatible with laissez-faire capitalism that monopolies develop due to market forces, and preserve themselves and expand without recourse to force.
And that is one of the bases for those of us who aren't laissez-faire capitalists for criticizing capitalism.
Seeing as I cant afford a portable MP3 solution and tend to listen to independant or obscure artists, not to mention that I dont have the best computer/internet connection, I still would rather buy a CD than use mp3's. I like being able to stick my CD in any CD player and it working, getting artwork and lyric sheets. Anyway, if I can mail order most CD's that I want for 12 dollars or less, i can't see paying for some mp3, or even spending the time downloading it. If you really like the artist you would support them by buying their album and not pirating it, especially if you dont listen to top 40 crapola.
nuff said.
You can always try www.oth.net or mp3.pagina.nl for the latest .mp3-files.
-- DJ Kat is where it's at
Even if the decryption happens in the speaker, the signal has to be converted to analog to drive the individual speaker elements or the crossover. If the speaker enclosure were physically secure and shielded electromagnetically I suppose it could work. I have to go hug my turntable now!
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
I've never met a damn fine programmer who didn't.
--This is my damn fine sig.
Every time I try to download mp3's, I run into a banner site, or a ratio site which doesn't accept [anything I have to] uploads, or the site is down, or the password doesn't work, or the site is forever full.
Why can't I just *buy* mp3's? It would be a heck of a lot cheaper than the time I've wasted trying to download them for free.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
It sounds like this crack can easily be applied to other secured formats. Just out of curiousity, how do you stop something like this?
MS's reaction to unfuck.exe now appears to be incorrect -- it does not intercept the audio stream, but is a true crack. No D-A/A-D loss, not even any loss of compressed file size.
I wonder if MS's mistaken spin on this was intentional (i.e. make the crack seem as if it produces low-quality audio), or if they just sent a vacuous PR-drone to speak to the masses.
I think not...(*poof*)
"The only truly uncopyable music is also unlistenable music."
;-)
Then perhaps John Cage is the answer to all Microsoft's problems...
Actually, the cynical part of me thinks that mayhaps MS made this format easily crackible in order to assure acceptence and still seem above board. After all, only a small percentage of potential consumes will ever use a cracking tool. It may cost them millions or billions, but it has the potential to make them many times that much.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I think this is really good news.
I mean, if I buy a cd, I am able to record it to other medias, such as minidisc, without loosing quality. Mp3 should be used for music sold over the net for the same reason.
And also, imagine buying a song that could only be played in windows, with programs from ms.
Actually, albums as a 'concept' was short-lived anyhow. Albums started as singles surrounded by filler (often 80%) in the early 60s. Check out some of the pre-WHAT'S GOING ON stuff Motown put out - one amazing single, loads of rerecordings of other artists songs. And they weren't alone. I think the 'concept album' (really starting about 1965) still exists, but is currently much less successful commercially than the standard hits-and-filler format. There are exceptions (e.g., Radiohead's OK COMPUTER) but they are exceptions, much like they were in 1965.
--Philip
"It's amazing how our industry is strewn with beautiful, dead technology and bitter engineers." --M. Huyck
I for one welcome these restrictions. I don't think it should be _easy_ or _cheap_ to listen to someone like Celine Dion. Masochism is no fun if you don't have to work for it...
Insecure, copyable, free Music
Total Human Solutions Inc.
It's just a numbers game. A few M$ programmers pitted against thousands of crackers. The crackers take it as a personal challenge, it's fun, they'll stay up all night just to do it.
IMHO, I'm a damn fine programmer, but I know that there's some smarter programmers then me out there. On the other hand, there are many people who don't see the world this way. It's kind of funny, in a twisted kind of way, to see their code and their egos squashed like this. Maybe they deserve it...
>So what? I'm not going to ever be using anything
/%/)+Eddy
I believe the point is that MS once again show that they are incompetent when it comes to security.
But then, I don't know the details about this format, it's entirely possible it weren't designed to withstand this kind of attack.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
blah! you bored bastards!
MarNuke
An unknown option:
I have the DishNetwork box that includes an all-digital variation on VHS (DVHS). On the music channels I can record at CD quality, with onscreen titling and everything, and no commercials. When I have a handful of songs I like, I can run them through the computer (never hits analog format) and.... hooray! Perfect MP3 files. Not the easiest way to do it, but I can leave it recording for 5 hours overnight when it's not in use (I'm paying for it; may as well get what I can out of it).
You can record the signal going to the sound card, but to store it in any reasonable amount of space, you'll have to compress it. mp3 is lossy, and I'd assume WMA's compression is as well. At best, the end results won't be as good as the original; At worst, artifacts in the original will trigger worst-case behavior in the mp3, leading to something noticably worse.
This is similar to what happens when you convert a graphic from jpeg to a raw format and recompress it. The effects are bad enough that graphic artists keep uncompressed copies of their work in case any modifications are later needed.
It doesn;t matter
How will buy it but a massive amount of fools!
MarNuke
If the media streams are watermarked (or whatever they call it), you can of course still decrypt and redistribute cracks, but all the cracks will contain identifiers that will point back to you. When law enforcers come over such cracks, you are in trouble...
Watermarks can be removed if you know how/where they are inserted, but who knows if the watermarks you know about (the watermarks identified by e.g. law enforcer software, which will end up in some hackers hands before the law enforcers got it themselves) are all the watermarks the file contains? Later in court the movie distributer will pull out a piece of software that will still identify you as the copyright infringer even though you thought you removed the watermarks...
Now, tell me - how many (potential) millions of dollars does a distributor lose because of one crack? My wallet isn't deep enough at least...
This approach DOES NOT require decompressing and recompressing.
It is NOT a tap of the unencrypted stream.
The following is a copy of
a later article on dmusic.com refuting the misconception created by the Wired Article. I'm posting it here to quiet the flames, and because dmusic looks like they've been nearly slashdotted to death.
Microsoft's response to UNFUCK.EXE
by Angelo on August 18, 1999
Microsoft's attempt at an encrypted format has been broken, and that's
truely unfortunate but really not their fault. As explained in our previous
article, the CIA and the NSA put limitations on how encrypted a format may be.
To protect ourselves, and the integrity of our reports, we feel the need to
respond to Microsoft when they say unfuck.exe is no different from a program
named audiojacker or total recorder which takes audio from your sound card
and converts it to a WAV file. This has nothing to do with what UNFUCK.EXE
does! UNFUCK.EXE actaully breaks the protection on any file. There is no
loss in quality, the file isn't re-recorded or captured in some way.
A crack is just that, a crack. It's not manipulating the audio in such a
way that it can be captured, it is actaully destroying the protected [sic] on
an already recorded audio file.
We just wanted to clear that up as to not cause any confusion and sustain
our reputable name.
Rewrite the sound-card driver. With some luck, all the timing is done by the card so you can get to the music as fast as your processor allows.
Recompressing it in the MS format might not even be possible (is the compression software available), and if it is, being a lossy compression, would certainly degrade the music quality over the original copy.
Lossy compression algorithms for audio are usually based on removing certain frequencies which we don't hear too well anyways. The quality loss will probably be concentrated on those frequency ranges, while the frequencies we do hear will be preserved pretty good.
Did you read the post you responded to? I mean all of it? It is several lines long; you may have decided to skip some of it. Or maybe you just don't know what watermarking is.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
As long as sound waves exist you can record them.
- Simmz
--
Actually, if you read the "response" on dmusic's site, you'll see that this is NOT how the crack is performed. That's what MS is claiming, but that isn't the case.
I'm going to assume, although I couldn't actually know (and tragically enough, I didn't read the 2 other [at the time of this writing] replies to the comment I'm replying to), that you won't really ever be able to encrypt something.. software or hardware wise, etc., etc. This is because, in my mind, since it was encrypted in the first place, that means that there exists a code somewhere (or some "code" somewhere) that is the key to its undoing. Whether or not anyone else knows this besides the maker of said code is not important. As long as it was encoded, it can be decoded. It's inevitable, therefore, that it will be "cracked," as long as the actual cracking of it will be worth the while. Therefore, I figure they might as well give up. It's a waste of time. Besides, who likes M$? ;-)
Insert mind here.
'Plain Old Text' is broken on some browsers. Opera, for example, treats "POT" exactly the same as HTML, so I just use HTML as my default.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
i read it.
i disagree, the trick is *never to let microsoft get their foot in the door again*. mp3 has the potential to win because the internet has changed the rules and small companies can open wide distribution channels. artists (for the most part) would jump at the chance to rid themselves of the recording industry. here in the u.k. cd's are almost prohibitively expensive now (around seventeen pounds - twenty-five-ish dollars - for an album). artists would see more of the money they deserve if the likes of mp3.com can just gain momentum...
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Microsoft and the Record Industry both get screwed in one day.
There is a God !!!
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Just because authors and the music industry made huge profits in the past does not mean that they *have* to continue doing so in the future as a law of nature.
For several decades, replication and distribution of music was hard, something that only a well-funded mega-industry could do, and that process made people a lot of money. Now anyone can do it, for peanuts --- the rules that held before no longer apply, and the natural thing to happen to that money-making process and to the industry that goes with it is for it to die.
The horse carriage industry used to be massive, a backbone of everyday life and a very important source of income for hundreds of thousands, yet now it's dead except as a niche tourist concern. So what? Times change, and just because you've been coining it in for decades doesn't mean that you have the intrinsic right to continue doing so.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Attempts at protecting digital recordings are doomed to failure. In the case of music, there's nothing that can stop me from putting a vampire tap on the damn stereo cables and recording the unencrypted data stream. Similar objections apply to video data.
As far as watermarking the data files go, since the signal is analog (as it comes out my speakers), I can invalidate any watermarking that's encoded in the signal from the digital data file by the simple expedient of rerecording at a different sample rate than the original.
-- Cerebus
Remember folks, a crack like this would be illegal under UCITA because it purposefully circumvents a copy-prevention scheme.
You must fight the implementation of UCITA in your state!
Why? So people like you can get a free ride because you don't believe in intellectual property/copyright? No thanks... I prefer to reward people for their efforts, not rip them off.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Does Micro$oft honestly think that their new audio format will really take off? I have not heard it yet but people are not going to want to pay for music that they can get for free. And, if they think that they can release an updater that will get past the crack I am sure that a new version of the crack will be released. It is a complete waste of time.....
Being able to intercept the playback "is a reality of the music and PC industry," Unangst said. "It's like buying a pay-per-view movie and recording it on your VCR. People will still rent movies and buy CDs."
If they still think people will by CDs, why are they trying to market a secure music format? Their whole selling point was that CD sales will go down because someone can buy a CD and distribute the mp3 which will reduce sales, but now they're saying that because someone can buy a wma file and distribute it that this won't reduce sales?
There ARE other apps, namely "audiojacker" and "total recorder", that do capture the audio output.
<hint> All this I learned by reading the links in the article. </hint>
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I've never had to click banners or upload anything. All of the mp3's I haven't downloaded (because that would be illegal) I haven't downloaded (because that would be illegal) completely free: no hassle, no wasted time.
You just seem to be looking in the wrong spot. I could tell you some of the places I have never been looking for MP3's, (because that would be illegal) but that wouldn't teach you anything. You must learn that there are other protocols besides HTTP and FTP. (none of which I have ever got MP3's from, since that would be illegal)
THats what the previous stuff did. Ripped the adio to a wav (right from your soundcad presumably). But unfuck.exe is coolificated because IT ACTUALLY CRACKS WMA. Sqaushes it dead.
-Zack
-Zacker
to quote from trainspotting: "it's not bad, but it's not great either." I'm all for supporting new artists but honestly, I believe almost everything on mp3.com is not worth the time it takes to listen to it. There are a few real gems there, but there's a reason there's so many unsigned bands out there.
...the rebuttal to Microsoft's comments pretty much say "it doesn't interecept the outgoing data and rewrite it" - they claim it DOES actually strip the security settings from the WMA file itself. Wired is who claimed it intercepted/rewrote the data, Dimension says they're mistaken.
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
i love how the article quotes
"Some guy will create an easy-to-use [cracking] application and send it out to the world because they get a kick out of it."
reality check, dont you think most people would do this because they object to the restriction of free formats/music? rather than doing it for sport, granted people probabally do this just to spite micro$oft but i doubt that is the biggest reason. its all about freedom.
...According to Dimension Music anyways.
"To protect ourselves, and the integrity of our reports, we feel the need to respond to Microsoft when they say unfuck.exe is no different from a program named audiojacker or total recorder which takes audio from your sound card and converts it to a WAV file. This has nothing to do with what UNFUCK.EXE does! UNFUCK.EXE actaully breaks the protection on any file. There is no loss in quality, the file isn't re-recorded or captured in some way.
A crack is just that, a crack. It's not manipulating the audio in such a way that it can be captured, it is actaully destroying the protected on an already recorded audio file."
- DMusic's article
Considering DMusic were the orginal people with the story,and adamantly profess unfuck.exe's effectiveness, i would assume that they are correct on this issue.
-Zack Rosen
-Zacker
There is no such thing as an uncopyable sound.
I can put my Mic near the speaker and record the thing as a wav as it plays, then compress it to Mp3. With a decent mic and speakers and no background noise you can get an excellent reproduction from this. And, Lo and Behold! It's impossible to prevent!
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
>The cracking file intercepts the audio data stream as the file is being sent to an output device -- such as a speaker -- according to Kevin Unangst, lead product manager in the streaming media division at Microsoft.
:-)
HAH! I knew something like this would happen. If you can't defeat the system, just work around it.
Face it folks. There is NO way to defeat this type of crack. I've said this many times. ANY system to protect the music has the fatal flaw that, at some point, it has to come out the speakers.
I'm waiting for a generic version of something like this. One that will defeat ANY audio protection scheme they care to create.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
To solve the environmental security issue, we need a company that will sell computers with no ports for input devices that are locked inside huge steel boxes and buried in cement. Then the world will be safe once again for the large corporations who want to charge you for everything. (They really do need the money, how else can they try to put each other out of business?)
Part of the reason there are so many unsigned bands isn't because their music isn't good enough, it's all about marketability and selling out. I know that sounds cheesy, but it's true. One reply Elbo Finn got from a major label was something along the lines of "These guys are songwriters" and not somebody who would be easily manipulated into changing to fit the current in thing. Take a look at Blondie. If you know their old stuff you could see the change from punk to some mainstream disco fluff. Heart of glass wasn't a soft dance hit until they were told it would sell better in it's current encarnation. Luckily Blondie rocks no matter what they do.
Oh yes, there are quite a number of songs you'll never hear on radio but that are still much better than mainstream.
Or there are tracks, you can't even buy anymore. Just try to get your hands on a legal copy of "What evil lurks" by The Prodigy. Since I had no other choice but use MP3 I think it's kind of legitimate.
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
Guys whose studios are in their garage?
Sigh. First of all, true as this may be, remember that some of your vaunted classic albums of all time have been recorded in garages or on tiny budgets, just like the guys on MP3.com. All of them were at one point virtual unknowns, just like the guys on MP3.com.
I also infer from your comment that you believe the music quality (both technically and artistically) to be inferior because of this. A home studio can be whipped up with $35 shareware, a decent sound card, a lot of hard drive space for those tracks, and a couple of instruments. Also, if an artist is going to the trouble of creating an MP3.com site, he or she most likely has something of some quality, has something to say, and is probably simply interested in a little feedback. OK, I acknowledge that MP3.com is not really a forum for new artists to get "discovered", but just a interesting melting pot of the average musician looking for what any other musician is looking for--an audience, no matter how small.
I like the wide variety of types of music. I wouldn't be inclined to run out to the store and buy a (for example) trance album, but I'll download such music from MP3 to give it a try. Also, there is truly some unclassifiable stuff on there (as in the industry today), which always makes for an interesting and different listening experience--this is starkly in contrast to listening to radio today!
Give MP3.com a try. Pick stuff at random. Broaden your horizons, and cast away the shackles of your A&R men and marketing directors telling you that "Baby One More Time" is what you want to hear.
A4Joy (an MP3.com artist)
they should have waited to crack it until it became some standard and there was tons of music distributed with it....
i guess i'm just thinking like a criminal though.
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA
Yes, but there was other evidence in that case, i.e. he had the viral code on his hard drive.
And to answer someone else's statement, a watermark can be so designed so as to SURVIVE a Digital to Analog conversion, and back to Digital. Even several such conversions. At some point, depending on the quality of the watermark, You lose enough data to lose the watermark.
I once had a really amazing demonstration of watermarking, as applied to pictures. A watermark was inserted into a GIF. The GIF was printed on a color inkjet (NOT a color laser). The printout was photographed with a Polaroid instant camera, and the picture was scanned back in. The watermark survived all this, and was readable from the file from the scanner. And trust me, the final picture looked REALLY bad after all this stuff. It wouldn't survive that twice in a row, but hey..
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I am not familiar with the microsoft compression algorithm, but I assume that it is lossy, similar to mp3. By decompressing the stream, and then re-compressing it in mp3 format, you are likely to lose a substantial amount of quality from the original recording. This is not unlike making a copy of a copy of a tape using crummy equipment.
This is far from what you can achieve from a pure, lossless, digital to digital copy.
I've been there, many years too long, and I'm telling you that if Microsoft resembles me something, than it would be a Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In a lot of ways.
As a side note, if the people here just start thinking about the Open Source, the people there have grasped the concept long ago - look at the Netcraft stats on Apache - about 56% worldwide and up to 90% in some former SU republics.
OK, kids, now get away from appliances, we're gonna reboot the house
Notice one of the quotes down low on the article where some exec is quoted to say that the people who release utilities like unf*ck are doing it just to get a kick out of it.
I have to say, I can think of some pretty strong objections to that opinion myself. In classic political literature like Thoreau's (sp?) essay on civil disobedience, it is suggested basically, that if you morally object to some law or rule that it is incumbent upon you as a moral person to not abide by that rule. And I am not, AM NOT, saying that the person who cracked the MS format is doing this for that reason, but there are some principled and capable people who do things like this, testing security or routing around rules they feel are wrong.
I think that the committed allies of record labels and proprietary standards need to realise they aren't just fighting a bunch of bored 12-year olds in a basement, some people out there are actually trying to do what they think is right, or abolish practices they disagree with.
Perhaps this is one reason that "the man" is less effective at stopping such attacks, because in his heart he really believes that groups like cDc or the l0pht are just disenfranchised youths without any organizational abilities or communication skills. One of the CS profs here at the U is very active in his development on nmap because he believes in the open nature of security. I've known countless hackers and crackers that did what they did for more than "just some kicks..."
(sigh)
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
i was talking to a friend of mine who has a record label. we were looking over a vinyl of the new public enemy album and i was explaining to him that there is NO way to truly secure audio under windows (or any OS where peripherals are controled by OS-level drivers) because you can always swap your sound card driver for one that dumps data to the hard drive.
just like there's no way to prevent a user from saving graphics he sees on the web, there's no way to prevent him from capturing sound played from his computer.
my 0.02 euro
Hmm. I think it only reads from MP3 formats, but encodes in their own proprietary format, otherwise they wouldn't make claims that it is similar to MP3, but half the size. (I remember reading something similar to this at ``http://www.microsoft.com/asf", but there's nothing there left except for a download link to the encoder.) And, I just encoded an ASF with MP3 source, no MP3 output option. I suppose the ASF indexing is the 'wrapper' you're talking about that makes it easier (more efficient?) to stream.
Jeez, Dimension's site is crawling hard. Perhaps MS is taking out their embarassment on them.
Except currently AudioJacker only works on NT 4.0 ...
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
they didn't really 'crack' the encryption. all they did is circumvent the security. Nothing stops you from tapping the *uncompressed* and *unencrypted* digital stream to your speaker. if the format is lossy, a second lossy compression will less match the original sound quality. Not too much tho. :/
Or in the future pay $5 for a song you can only listen to while you are at home in front of your cmoputer (in Windows ONLY, cause MS won't make an ASF player for Linux.)
just put one end of a wire in "spk out", the other end in "line in" and start recording...
Maybe you could even use a combination of a good mic and speakers...
Point is, if you can listen to music, you can record/copy/distribute music. Same thing goes for movies, software, and information in general.
The answer isn't encryption and copyrights. The answer is in new business models (and being the first one to do it.)
-Derek
The only truly uncopyable music is also unlistenable music. Anyone who claims to have an encoder or player that can prevent copying is a liar.
Kevin Unangst's words from the Wired article ring true here:
"Okay. Okay. I take it back. Un-fSck you." -- Full Metal Jacket
---
Another way would be for Dimension to actually release more details on how their "crack" works.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Since the approach requires decompressing (and then presumably recompressing in mp3) the audio format, this isn't what I would term a crack.
I would not be suprised if this resulted in noticably lower audio quality.
Johan
It is good news. Microsoft is a mix between communism and viral marketing, and deserves to be shot down. It could have been a purposely crackable format, which I doubt, but it is still good news. And as for your comment, that is not the only three choices. Why would the release/crack of this format make everybody stop using MP3's? It just makes no sense. Yes, those three choices are some of the possible alternatives, but if you go into IRC, you can get mp3's quickly, Lycos is not the only source (in fact it is not really a source, most links are dead, and it is just leading you to other people's sites). Also, interesting fact, the file for cracking the format is called unfuck.exe, that's pretty cool. Well, with that said, I hope you see the error in your coments.
"Lazyness is the first step towards efficiency." -Patrick Bennett
This is true for a very few, but good programmers don't have enough time to brag.
"Good programmers walk everyone else talks."
As long as I've got an SB16 or similarly open-hardware card in my machine, there's no reason I can't basically write a driver to sit there and read what the card is getting, and save it to a raw file (which can later be mp3'd).
My (vague) understanding of unfuck.exe is that it actually intercepts the audio somewhere in the windoze pipeline (therefore architecture independent) -- this is also pretty easy under Linux.
On the (admittedly short) consideration I've given this, I just don't see a way around that problem for the secure music bastards of the world.
Questions/comments/snide remarks?
There is a Swedish system called Don't Bother Burn developed by a company called Wkit online which protects DVD and CDs among other things from being copied...they just got a big distribution contract. I'm looking forward to seeing how good it will be.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Rant. Part 2, I guess :-)
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
i'm too lazy to check all the sub-posts on this topic, so this might be already mentioned. anyways, even if they embedded a watermark into an audio file, it still would not matter because the mp3 file format already exists. why would someone go for something that can be traced back to you, costs money, and is probably very restrictive, when they can just get an mp3 encoder and rip some tracks off that?
SuPz.orG
Erm, Guys...
Why on earth was it decided that this was bad enough to warrant moderation to -1 and redundant? I dislike First Post! as much as anyone, but only when the poster has nothing else to say. This guy's making a valid point and the only possible crime is a silghtly OTT bias against MS, but I've seen far worse from many people.
Moderation's useful, but if too many people don't think about the grades the post is given, it's just going to be ignored becuase no-one will trust it.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
"We don't see this as a flaw," said Allen Beckerdite, chief
technology officer of Reciprocal. "It is a concern, and we'd
like to investigate how it happened."
Hmm did I miss something?
blade enc is good. you might be talking about the frequency cutoff it has at lower bitrates, which is true - but you really can't hear the highest frequencies on anything but the best headphones.. i'm sure the range at 128kbps is just fine for the rio crowd. however even at 128 it can only hold what, like 30 minutes of audio? when you start going below 128 that's when it really sounds ugly..
Interesting, but not even close to optimal. The problem is that the program just captures the output stream on the way to the soundcard.
Why is this bad? Because the data has been subjected to lossy compression, then decompression.
What you get is an uncompressed PCM file with WMA data reduction artifacts. This may sound OK as is, and you could always burn a CDR with this data stream, but I'll bet that if you compress it with MP3, the combination of the WMA artifacts and the MP3 artifacts will result in audible sound degradation.
Anyone have all the software together to try this experiment? I'd certainly be interested in knowing if I'm right about this.
When someone comes up with a way to resave the data as a WMA file with only the copy restrictions removed, I'll count that as a real crack.
Can someone explain to me how on earth music/video can *ever* be protected?? Everyone keeps going on about DVD and music formats but it seems to me that w/ music I should always at the very least be able to grab the stream right before it hits the sound card (i.e. uncompressed) and then convert it back to whatever I feel like. W/ regards to video, (such as dvd) why couldn't some enterprising kid grab the video images off the vram of the video card and then (given enough ram, cpu power etc etc) just recompress the stream back into whatever format they felt like. Basically it seems to me encryption formats are good and all but at some point the thing has to turn into something vaguely usable at which point it can be snagged. What am I missing here?
-avi
What was Microsoft thinking?!
OK, so Microsoft designed, brought to market, and apparently got paying customers for, a "security" product that is secure only against people who use the security product?
Either
.. I should have read the article first.
/%/)+Eddy
"[...]supposed to be a secure format (resricting playback) has already been cracked"
But the article does not mention anything about the format being cracked, only the security of it being circumvented.
Not very impressive, IMHO. Come back when the security envelope has been cracked in the cryptographical meaning of the word.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It's Windows-only... But ah well. http://pluto.spaceports.com/~cosmo/un fuck.zip or http://home.swipnet.se/mp3/unfuck.exe.
Well, there are textbooks that say A=pi*r^2. So if I tell you the area of a circle, am I plagiarizing them?
You really need therapy.
..Security trough stupidity. Way to go Microsoft.
.exe
I wonder if Wine will run the
I tend to take unsubstantiated claims with a grain of salt. And I can't help but wonder why they won't at least give out the app. Something is fishy...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Well, I didn't plagiarize a thing. What I wrote was not only what I was thinking, it happens to reflect what I believe.
I'm a college graduate (cognitive science) many years removed from social science textbooks.
As far as the usefulness of therapy in your situation: physician, heal thyself! (Or, perhaps it's a case of the cobbler's children going unshod.)
I've had enough of hearing the excuse of only wanting one song on a CD as a reason to pirate it. I don't listen to many bands putting out music these days, but I can't imagine that an album is just a random collection of songs. Albums are supposed to be carefully crafted around a theme or sound. Look at Pink Floyd, U2, or The Who. If you grab any of their albums and listen all the way through -- ignore the fact that you've only heard one or two of the tracks on the radio -- there's a good thing going between all the songs. I seriously doubt bands these days are so desperate to "make it" that they worry entirely about the one single that the record label will release to radio stations (because God knows that will be the only song people will like... they must have better taste than normal human beings) than the rest of their CD. People need to learn to deal with the fact there are OTHER SONGS on a CD than the one that you've heard on Z100, WHFS, KROC, or MTV. And some of it doesn't suck. -Chris
The industry has been trying this stuff for years. They effectively killed DAT in the US. DIVX was a failure because people don't want restrictions. They want to own it or give it back. MP3 caught them by surprise, and stood the challenge in court. Finally, as long as the computer is capable of reading the legitimate playback, there is always a way of recording it.
The cat's out of the bag, the genie's out of the bottle. When the Latin bible was translated and printed in lay languages, the monopoly on God was officially over. But there's still a Catholic Church, and home taping DIDN'T kill music.
I'm sure they are wringing their hands over the money they could be making in certain countries, but then again, maybe the only thing they are getting robbed of is the chance to lose REALLY big money by actually doing business in those kinds of places.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Aren't there cracks available for DVDs that work the same way? Don't even bother trying to decrypt the stuff, just capture the result of decryption.
Even if noone was ever able to crack WMA or SDMA (which I'm sure is succeptible to the same sort of crack), there is always the digital out on the back of a sound card. Simply record digital SMDA to DCC and then back to MP3. There's no way to stop this. But I don't think it will even be necessary
I've never met a damn fine programmer who thought himself a "damn fine programmer."
Hopefully it just captures a digital signal in the sound card. As for compression, why not MP3?
[here's the article from www.dmusic.com. Took me forever to get to it]
It took a month but we've got CRACK!
by Angelo on August 18, 1999
We all know Microsoft poured their hearts and talented minds into creating this new format which will prevent files from being illegally distributed. WMA files were supposed to allow one person to download a song after paying for it or registering to use it and that's it! No one else can play that file but the person who registered it. No copying no giving it out to friends. Copying was controlled, unlimited copies could no longer be created as was the problem with the MP3 format.
All of this changed three days ago when unfuck.exe was mailed to us by an anonymous visitor. DMusic once again broke the story which will send the brilliant and talented back to the drawing board.
The problem is, companies aren't allowed to create a serious encryption program. If it's too difficult to crack, that means the CIA, or the NSA can't crack it. The CIA, err NSA?
Involved with the development of SDMI, on some level, is the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and the NSA (National Security Agency) to ensure that the encryption format isn't too complicated. Done right, a truely complex encryption format would enable, for example another country to encrypt messages to one another effectively. I don't need to explain why the CIA can't have encryption formats they can't decrypt floating around..
So there you have it, there are limitations to how crypted an encryption format can be. And if the CIA can decrypt something, one geek out of the millions out there surely can too.
What does this mean? Files can't be protected? Everyone's tried, A2B was cracked, Windows Media (wma) has now been cracked, sooo... BRING ON SDMI!
Sorry we cannot give you a copy of unfuck.exe, it was given to us by a trusted source and we would prefer not to distribute it. However roaming around on efnet irc or by doing a few searches in the right places, you might get lucky... and you'll be able to UNFUCK YOUR AUDIO FILES AND GO WHEREVER YOU WANT, TODAY
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Better 'n mp3.com any day. And stop whining.
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
There's a crack for EFS too. :)
anal
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
ASF is also audio. I downloaded the ASF encoders and encoded an MP3 with it. The sizes were virtually the same, but I prefer MP3 and open standards.
Actually, they're not dead (or at least the few I tried). They're on sites that enforce `payment' (ie uploads) before you can down load. The files are there, you just can't read them. Try taking the URL over to a real ftp client (eg ftp) and see what happens (note, this is a little tricky due to the username/password being encoded into the URL, etc).
NOTE: I didn't actually try very many links, but 5/5 isn't a bad score.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
You must fight the implementation of UCITA in your state!
-jwb
Why doesn't somebody track down the MS sound driver spec and write a pseudo-driver that simply redirects the digital data back toward a userspace utility, which then saves the clean data in a file? Then you could... sanitize... any "secure" format on any computer, even one with no soundcard.
314-15-9265
I would think SDMI can be cracked in software. There will undoubtedly be software SDMI players. Then you can grab the digital audio off the loopback in your sound card and voyla! there's the unencrypted audio.
Does anyone know if unfuck is a crack or simply a tap into the loopback type of thing?
The era of IP rights is ending, plain and simple. They (music companies) should do damage-control while they still can.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
The bottom line is that there is no such thing as a secure digital format, and it's time that some of these legal-types realize that the most compelling reason to pay for music is a desire to support the musicians we love.
I have high quality digital outs from my computer, and DAT decks and a CD-R which all ignore SCMS. The best they could do for stopping digital copying would be to set the SCMS copy-protect bits on the digital-out, but that's not going to stop anybody who doesn't WANT to pay for their music, as professional gear all ignores copy-protect (well, not ignores... most of the time you can choose 0-copies allowed, 1 allowed, or infinite allowed from a menu), and anybody who is into digital recording is aware of the existance of SCMS strippers anyway.
Best wishes corporate legal-types.. my music collection is 100% legal, but I think I'm starting to be a rarity.
The relevant quote from the article:
This is exactly what has always been pointed out here on slashdot as the obvious reason why restricted playback isn't going to work.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
PKI may well be a decent way to approach encrypting music, but it will simply not succeed as true protection (nor will any other system) as the digital audio stream will always be available via the loopback on the soundcard which can then be re-encoded into MP3, etc.
/. posts already. PKI would need to be much simpler for Joe Q. Winamp to be remotely interested.
Additionally, PKI is really unlikely to catch on with the general public, IMO. If it were, we'd all be encrypting and signing all our emails and signing our
Finally, any format or distribtion mechanism that makes things more difficult for the end user than the current system (i.e. download or stream an MP3) will simply not fly. Why would it?
Could this be done mainly in hardware with the SB Live! digital out?
Bands of the future will make money more through live performances and less through record sales.
Uh, that's actually how it works today... A starting band can sell 10 million albums, but they only get US$0.54 per album, minus costs of recording, minus the advance, minus management/union/legal fees, minus the cost of the video.. Out of the US$15 you paid for that CD, the artist most likely will see no more than US$0.35 of it! The way almost all bands make a living is thru live show receipts (and the big money is made when they get a sponsor to cover the costs of the show) and merchandising. REM IIRC is a big exception to this, but they've been around nearly 20 years..
I know I'm going to be drawn out and quartered for telling people this - but secure music is most likely to succeed by using PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) & watermarking.
By encoding each file with somebody's personal key, or any "tag" that uniquely identifies the person, if the file is released it can be traced back to the individual. I'll leave it to future posters to describe the shortcomings of each, but it's a helluva lot better than the current approach. The main problem is coming up with a way to keep the watermark even after filtering the data. I'm not sure how far they've gotten on this, but I know it can be difficult to remove them from image files.
Since everything would be maintained by the record companies (ie: the distribution servers), they would force you to register w/ them before downloading. The PKI could be used to tell the user where/who it was downloaded from. You could also use symetric keys.. although the NSA might get upset with you if you use any non-trivial size. :)
--
It will soon be impossible to really make as much money as has been made before off of recorded music sales. Look for recording artists to start selling music by the track for cents apiece as they only thing they can possibly sell is convenience.
Bands of the future will make money more through live performances and less through record sales. Money will still be made from recordings. A million people paying $.10 a track on a few tracks will still make you money, but only the U2's of the world could count that as primary income for very long.
Unfortunately the current credit system isn't prepared for the myriad of $.02 transactions that will come with such business models. Music serving companies will have to set up their own credit lines and customer accounts payable montly to accrue enough dollars to make it worth the transaction. There's a long way to go still for online money development. Read "Earth" by David Brin for an appealing model of usage (implementation is left as an exercise to the reader).
Start Running Better Polls
The war has begun. This is just the first salvo, though. SDMI is coming and will prove more difficult to control. Why, because it will take a hardware hack to beat, not just stepping around the encryption as this seems to do. Be good consumers and don't bend over and give up your music dollar. MP3 is already seen as a music standard by the population at large, let's keep it that way. Don't let people tell you it is illegal, tell them how copyright takes away yours. Don't sell MP3's (unless you have the rights), but use them to promote sales, think little bits of radio. Fight the machine (or just hack it to something more attractive)
BTW: "unfuck.exe" was an excellent choice. 2 points to the cracker.
+&x
OK, we all know that there is no way to make this uncrackable and uncircumventable any time soon.
... if you already have a monopoly.
But if there is OS and hardware support for this encryption and rights management in the next decade, this could become *the* sound format.
This is a big bet that can only be played by the etremely wealthy. And don't forget that:
1) if OS and hardware support happen, all the major record companies will put all of their weight behind it!
2) Micro$oft controlls the OS market
3) hardware companies are aftraid to annoy their WinTel masters (see #2)
So it's a risk, but it's not an insane risk
- bridgette
I also helped a local band upload their songs from two albums to mp3.com and these guys spent alot of money in the studio and their stuff sounds great. You ought to check them out their name is Elbo Finn and maybe you can stop knocking garage bands...
I doubt the $25 boom box manufacturers would consider that proposal. Tamper resistant hardware cost a chunk of change. To the electronics industry, the cost of redesigning their lower end lines to make the record companies happy would sound ludacrous. Sanyo and friends generally don't care is an RC is screwed out of royalties as long as the sales are up.
Thank Dog for greed!
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
Disclaimer: Audio quality is subjective. Perhaps bladeenc at 128kbps is fine for some people.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
No Need for that. I'm not smoking anything, I wasn't talking about their sales, and no, they aren't the epitome of capitalism, capitalism involved competition and fair chances, being the only game on the market if you want to be compatible isn't capitalism, it's COMMUNISM. And the viral marketing part is about how they get schools and enterprises to use their software, and they in turn force their employees at home to use it, then their wife, then their wife's home business, and their kids, and their home business's employees, and their kids, and their spouse, and so on. Understand now?
"Lazyness is the first step towards efficiency." -Patrick Bennett
Record companies got really fat selling us their entire vinyl catalogs on CD, and now they want to get even fatter selling their catalogs all over again in digital files with all kinds of restrictions about where you can play them, and only after you've given them all kinds of personal info for the watermark.
... remember "remastered" CD's) then be my guest.
A CD ripper is their worst nightmare. I don't have to buy Led Zepplin IV from them again, I just transfer my CD (and license) to MP3. That is the heart of what they don't like, long-term. They know full well that most people are happy to pay for their music, even without being forced to, but nobody wants to pay AGAIN for their music, or again and again.
If you want to pay a dollar to download "Stairway to Heaven" in some proprietary format (and another dollar for it again in a few years when the format changes slightly
In this case, the CD is more comparable to a series of paintings - each one beautiful in its own right, but the whole forming more than the mere sum of its parts.
On the other hand, if you don't happen to like that sum of parts, I do agree that it should still be your choice. It could be that you like the artists' sense of individual works better than you like their taste in arrangement. For those of us who want it, we can always glance at the recommended playlist that the artists provide.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
The longer it takes to crack SDMI, the worse it is going to be for RIAA. Sure, it took two days for MS's format to start leaking. But suppose it was 6 months down the track and lots of people had invested lots of money in making Big Name artists available? Rather than egg on your face, you suddenly find yourself either living with an insecure format and accepting piracy, or taking all your infrastructure down and starting again (read: hose that $$$ up the wall). This'll be a truely amazing risk management exercise for RIAA. :o)
Antti
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
This scheme would reduce functionality of speakers in exactly the same
way as DIVX reduced functionality of DVD disks, namely you wont be able to
switch speakers between boxes. This makes this scheme very hard to sell
even if you could get the price down.
Dimension has now posted a response to Microsoft saying that unfuck IS a crack.
From Dimension article: "UNFUCK.EXE actaully breaks the protection on any file. There is no loss in quality, the file isn't re-recorded or captured in some way."
So MS says it captures and Dimension says it doesn't.
Which is it??
I read a lot of comments here about "how dare they.. now things are going to be that much worse", to which I reply - BS.
When DIVX died just over two months ago, it showed the entertainment industry that us consumers are not going to put up with some pay-per-play system in which they can yank the rug out at any time and keep us, the customers, from watching something we have in our homes.
Now, thanks to the guys who wrote UNFUCK, we can show the RIAA and their ilk that we are not going to put up with this SDMI crap either.
Ya know, we pay taxes on all recordable media for music. You pay a tax on cassette tapes, minidiscs, blank CD-R Audio discs... or you pay a huge tax on recording equipment so that you can turn SDMS off. What is SDMS? All it entails is flipping two bits of an 11 bit stream to make all the copies you want. Why do we pay this tax? Because the RIAA got congress to impose this tax so that the music industry does not loose money every time you make a copy of the Spice Girls album and give it to your friends.
However, I don't make copies of any of my CDs for any of my friends. I have old audio tapes from when I was two years old. Thanks the RIAA, I can not make multiple generation copies of digital tracks I made of these tapes. Yeah yeah, I know all about CDR and all that, and that is how I do it. But if we the consumers let the RIAA have it's way and let this SDMI crap succeed, we will not be able to make copies of digital stuff THAT WE OWN in the future.
Mister programmer
I got my hammer
Gonna smash my smash my radio
Unless you're going to send different datastreams for every single key out there
Well, that's precisely what Signal 11 is talking about! Each buyer gets a different stream with a different watermark. There's nothing stupid about that. It just takes a bit of processing power.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I'm surprise that the issue didn't surface in a Linux advocacy site, so there it goes: Artists should be paid for their work, we can understand the necessity for some control on pirated distribution. Now, suppose some solution is really feasible (trusted hardware, stronger protection than MS's, whatever).
This is NOT a good thing, because this means I cannot use the music I bought the way I like. I cannot freely combine my music gear (reader, mixers, amplifiers, etc.). I cannot edit the music to remove the vocals and do a karaoke, or something like that. Idem for video, what about pasting snippets of movies into personal productions just for fun?? Some guys I gave a course to decided to make fun of me (I wonder why?) and they grabbed a piece of Star Wars and edited it to put my face in Darth Vader's... it was just a good laugh, there was no financial implication, just a few seconds of AVI, I still pay for the video rental if I want to see the movie. And we have the right to use any media we paid for if it is for any kind of private enjoyment -- a good, common example is grabbing samples to make a personal desktop theme from your favorite band or movie. If you don't post the theme for everybody to download it, I see no IP violating, no piracy.
Remember, just because a sound file with your ID info tagged into the watermark happens to be the downlaod-du-jour from warez r' us does not mean that you were the one who committed the criminal act of distributing the file. Your system could have been cracked, the file could have been intercepted in transmission, your CC info could have been stolen, etc. The watermark is circumstantial evidence and anyone who tried to prosecute someone based upon it would get laughed out of court. This is the fatal flaw of all watermarking schemes, they may tag the file but a single watermark pointing to you as the culprit does not actually prove anything...