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Activist Defends DVD Hack
LordStrange writes "CNN has posted a pleasantly Linux biased story about the DVD hack." Yet another chapter in the DVD crack saga. The article makes it a point to say that specs for DVD were being withheld, and that this crack opens up the DVD market to Linux users. I just hope that when they redesign
the scheme that they decide to open up the specifications so that other OSes aside from Win32 and Mac can gain proper DVD support.
The biggest problem is a lack of support for decoder cards.
After Creative's recent support for several of their soundcards (which isn't too big of a deal anyway, as their soundcards were among the best supported anyway) makes me hope they will release drivers for their dxr2 card.
Anyway, DVD support and mpeg decoder support goes hand in hand. If linux can read encrypted dvd's, then there is an incentive to have drivers for decoder cards. Alternately, the best use for supported decoder cards is to play DVD movies.
Either way, as linux moves towards the mainstream, this type of hardware will by necessity be better supported.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
They don't just give it out to anyone who wants it.
DIVX only needs the phone line because of its pay-per-view nature. The player has to report back the serial numbers of the discs you watch, so that they can bill your credit card.
Note that there's really no such thing as "tamper-proof" hardware. It's all a matter of how difficult you make it. And naturally, the more valuable the content is, the more money people will be willing to spend to try to crack the system.
I've always thought that the best way to advance research into factoring very large numbers would be to adopt a digital cash system based on the RSA cryptosystem.
Creative did release drivers.
See http://opensource.creative.com.
First, to CNN: Pretty good article - you gave a very balanced view of the issues.
However:
Why does everyone persist in calling this "hacking". Sure, it was hacking in the traditional (computer) sense of the word, but surely, now days, that word has bad overtones.
Perhaps it wouls be more appropriate to play up the reverse engineering aspect of this. Is it illegal for a non licenced manufacturer to design and sell replacement door panels for your car? Of course not! What the manufactures of those door panels do is exactly the same as what these people did.
Yes, they had to break some (pretty weak, and bungled) encryption, but is that any different from the door manufacture not releasing the specifications of a special bolt needed to attach the door to the car? Not really - and it was perfectly legal to do.
These people weren't trying to pirate movies, they weren't trying to steal national secrets, all they were trying to do was allow people to watch the movies they had legally bought, on a player they had legally bought.
This is no different from trying to get one of those programmable remotes to work with your VCR. Do you think the manufactures (originally, at least) gave out the codes for those remotes? People had to work them out by taking them to bits, checking the chip types and reverse engineering them. Does anyone complain about that? No! They just think is is stupid the manufactures didn't make it easier to do in the first place.
--Donate food by clicking: www.thehungersite.com
Note that there's really no such thing as "tamper-proof" hardware.
;)
heh. It's impossible, for the near future, to physically extract significant information from the human brain (such as a PIN or password). Some work has been done in biological computing to use the "brains" of smaller insects to store information - because it shows promise to being 100% tamper resistant. Though, nothing working has any practical use yet - as far as I'm aware.
But actually what the newer sat decoder boxes do is have a slow smart card that decrypts a new key every second or so. The smart card is "tamper-resistant" to a large degree and passes the key to the decoder hardware which is not tamper-resistant.
No one has broken the smart cards yet... but that's not to say it can't be done with a lot of money. Getting a key for 1 second doesn't do much for you. However, if you can buffer your transmission data and delay it for a few seconds, you can have someone else continously send you the decoded keys over the internet. Having to send data continously makes the operation risker because there is a way to trace you... though you can send "almost untraceable" data by using ICMP to ping-with-data to a remote host and a forged return address. With all that money flying around, I'm sure someone will give it a try.
-- Virtual Windows Project
I'm just having difficulty parsing pleasantly and biased in the same sentence. I hope you're not saying that bias and prejudice are ok so long as they match your views - only objective facts are worth reporting.
...yet no mainstream media mention this. The reason the studios want encryption isn't to reduce piracy, it's to try to move back towards the days when viewing a film required paying for it on each and every occasion. You'd have to get a local theater to schedule a showing, then the reels would have to be rented, then the audience would pay. In comes the VCR and suddenly people can record those same movies from television, uncut full-length movies in the case of pay TV. So the movie industry gives in and starts selling those video tapes instead of renting or selling expensive 35mm reels. Since people copied these movies, we got Macrovision for cutting down on it. But real pirates could eliminate Macrovision anyway, so the real purpose is just to keep the average joe from copying tapes. Then comes the chance to move to a digital medium which can be encrypted to prevent piracy--by home users, that is, since real pirates can still get equipment to get at the decrypted video stream and save it, then eliminate Macrovision. And don't forget about DIVX, which is what the companies would really love--paying for every single viewing, or to "unlock" the DIVX permanently meant that it could only be played in the same DIVX machine in the same single place.
Fortunately the public didn't buy into DIVX, but it's all very revealing. The studios--especially Sony, which is notorious for taking extreme measures to eek every last penny from film and music consumers--want to prevent any copying at all, even for backup: eventually it's going to get scratched or gnawed by the dog, and of course you have to go buy another. And heaven forfend, no you can't make a quick copy for a friend to borrow because $30 per film is a single-user license no matter how much money they've cleared from that 30-year-old classic already. Never mind that film and music are the art of our age, and the price for enjoying that art has become too steep (just consider CD prices, versus the 70 cents per CD sold an artist would be lucky to get). And of course, thanks largely to Sony, companies now want to move to a "secure" DVD-like encryped form of the CD. Wow, it's great to live in an age when so many arts are so accessible to the masses--nevermind that most musicians would be happy to give the recordings away for free and make their living off the concerts, since it takes a Madonna to make anywhere near 70 cents per CD sold--most only break-even when advertising and production costs are factored in. It's also unfortunate that Congress has seen fit to increase the length of copyright for music and film--common sense dictates that they should move into the public domain a reasonable period after the death of anyone involved and the profit margins of the studios have been inked-in, but that's not the case.
In Shakespeare's day, even the poorest could afford to see a play once or twice a week. Film is today's equivalent, and yet a theater ticket usually costs upwards of seven dollars--add popcorn and a drink, and maybe a hotdog if you're hungry, and this gets into serious cash. Nearly all movies at least break even at the box office, and most make a good profit. Then they make a mint in video rentals. You wouldn't think it would be such a big deal, then, to have sales of unencrypted digital films--copying one in digital quality is expensive anyway considering the storage space required. It's cost effective to just buy a DVD anyway instead of a bootleg unless...unless...unless the studios want to keep DVD prices at a high level even when the infrastructure is paid for and costs of production go down. Which they do, if the lesson of continually rising CD prices isn't lost on you. Consumers really ought to fight this sort of thing, and give the industry a blunt message: no encryption, you've already made millions in profit by the time DVD sales roll around anyway. No artificially high prices once the profit is there. I am a capitalist, and I hate to say it, but ideally the government would prevent such repeated gouging considering the need for art and entertainment. How much profit is enough--150% of the costs, 300% of the costs, 1000% of the costs? Enough is enough, studios and recording industries...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Quite simply nobody has any respect for those who setup DVD encryption. The official reason from encryption is to stop duplication. This hasn't worked. Other 'unofficial' but blatantly obvious reasons are:
- To promote differential pricing between regions.
- To create a closed group of manufacturers who are capable of producing DVD.
- To have the ability to remove manufacturers from the allowed group.
- To create a closed group of manufacturers capable of producing DVD players (and remove them at will).
What they have actually suceeded in doing is:
- Creating an industry in player chipping.
- Creating an industry which sells massive amounts of region 1 discs to the rest of the world.
- Ruined sales in countries not in region 1.
If it weren't for this encryption nonsense, we would have had DVD years earlier. In region 2, we get DVDs with barely any features, sometimes in the old dual sided (not dual layer) format and for double the cost of a region 1 disc. Not to mention the players are about 50-100% more expensive too.
No, I don't have any respect for the people who brought about DVD encryption, nor should anyone else.
I personally *applaud* the actions of MoRE and think of them as wonderful people. I think their source code should be spread far and wide. On the other hand, I wouldn't be too proud of myself if I believed what you do -- that people should be sheep, led around unthinkingly by the great cabals of industry.
Sometimes, two wrongs make a right.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
There are lots of ways to copy DVDs even if the encryption on them hadn't been broken. You could intercept the video stream and dump it to videotape (Beta would be a good format for your masters) or even just make a binary copy of the whole DVD, encryption codes and all. The only two REAL results of encryping DVDs is that you prevent non-MS OS users from being able to play them (I wonder if MS had a hand in that) and you prevent the honest users from exercising their legal right to make a backup copy (Fair use and all.)
As an ironic sideline, this whole DVD thing broke about 2 weeks before the industry REALLY started pushing DVDs. I've seen several commercials touting the benefits of DVDs in the past week or so and all of a sudden there are a LOT of DVDs in the video store.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Whether a movie sucks or not has almost no impact on whether or not it is successful. I have seen way too many terrible movies (Godzilla anyone?) That were quite successful and even more really great movies (Highlander anyone?) that were total flops. It seems to me that the key to making a successful film these days is to appeal to the broadest cross-section of the american public. This of course means that films cannot be too strange or clever because people will then find them inaccessible. I mean come on, do you really think that a film like 2001: A Space Odyssey would get made today?
No, the ethical condemnation comes when people disrespect the wishes of the author *without consulting him first*.
XEmacs is the classic example of a "moral fork". The XEmacs people enhanced Emacs and contributed the changes back. The FSF wasn't interested, and XEmacs forked. No problem there; just different goals.
The same is true here. People have been asking for DVD support in Linux for a while now, but the big manufacturers didn't want to talk. (Probably a "not enough money in it" argument.) So, after getting rebuffed by the official channels, the Linux community went to the next step: do it ourselves.
If the manufacturers are sore, they have only themselves to blame. A free-beer (or really cheap) software decoder would have gone a long way towards preventing this outcome. Too bad for them; I agree that I should be able to play my legal DVDs on my legal hardware, no matter what the pointy-hairs at Sony say.
Actually, copy protection in software started more than 10 years ago. I got my first modem for my Atari 800XL around 1985, and found a thriving pre-existing market in cracked software. I'd estimate it as being closer to 20 years old. And the abandonment of these copy protection schemes was not a quick process. People were cracking software for years before the software companies finally gave up.
-- $SIGNATURE
Journalistic objectivity is a complex thing.
...
There are some news sources which claim to be 'objective' but which have evident long-term biases in their coverage. You can probably think of a few on both sides of the usual "left-wing" / "right-wing" spectrum -- And that's just as Americans use the terms.
Is the New York Times unbiased? Is the Washington Post? In this context, is PC World? Is Network Computing?
There are other sources which make no bones about their editorial preferences, but which nonetheless make good news sources, because having a bias is not the same as being willing to lie or stomach distortions. In fact, it makes it easier for a reader to realize what parts of a story may have been emphasized or de-emphasized.
In the context of slashdot, an article which exhibits none of the usual FUD can be seen as pleasantly "biased" toward Linux. Think of the bias of a tape -- a known reference point based around which other information is encoded. (That's poor phrasing, but is the analogy fair?)
just thoughts
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5