If you just copy the.vob files, and don't decrypt them, the DVD player software will get interesting results, as it assumes that the files are not protected, and uses the scrambled data. The players I've used on Windows usually crash soon afterward. If you copy from a non-CSS disc, things are fine.
If you want to make most player software play an encrypted.vob file that you copied straight, you've got to hook in somewhere and simulate the CSS protocol to get the key to the player.
By the way, one natural place to hook in on Windows would be to just rename wnaspi32.dll to something else, and put in your own wnaspi32.dll, which passes most calls through to the original. Interesting observation: the ASPI that comes with Windows 98 checks the file name that wnaspi32 is loaded from, and if that doesn't end in \system\wnaspi32.dll, it doesn't work. It looks like someone decided they don't like Adaptec or Microsoft doesn't want that kind of thing going on.
One interesting thing that is apparent from css-auth.c is that it is clearly the product of reverse engineering. Note that it contains four static tables that are 256 bytes long. These can be replaced with three 256 byte tables if you notice that there are only three places that use the full tables.
(Yes, some bytes from table2 are used in a couple of other places, but in those places, they are just xor'ed with constant bytes from other tables that are only used once...so those other tables can just be changed to contain the xor'ed values).
Basically, if you take css-auth.c, and use it as the basis to write a spec for what css-auth has to do, and then optimize that spec and give it to someone to implement, they will end up with something that looks nothing like css-auth.c.
I assume that the DeCSS authors didn't optimize because they wanted to document exactly what the code they reverse-engineered was doing.
However, can anyone explain why that original code wasn't optimized. We aren't talking anything deep here...these are trivial optimizations.
My guesses: (1) perhaps it was an attempt to obfuscate, to make it more confusing to reverse-engineer, or (2) the hashing used in css-auth (I say hashing rather than encryption because engine() is not one-to-one) is not just from DVD but is used in something else and they just copied that implementation, and that something else makes more use of those tables in such a way that it does make sense to have four tables.
Furthermore, even after FreeBSD got DOS filesystem support, it was only primary partitions. Extended partitions took quite a bit longer to come in.
From the start, Linux did a better job of fitting in with whatever OS might already be on your PC, and did a better job of fitting in with existing hardware.
There's no real polite way to put this, so I'll just be blunt: a few years ago, the FreeBSD were a lot more snotty than the Linux people when it came to cheap hardware. If you were the kind of person who thought that spending $350 for a SCSI CD-ROM was silly when an IDE CD-ROM was only $100 because you only use the thing for installations, then FreeBSD was not the system for you.
The FreeBSD people have gotten a lot better in the last few years, and I believe they now try to support cheap commodity hardware well.
Yeah, "The Matrix" is pretty big. Another big one is, surprisingly, "Pulp Fiction". The smallest I've seen is "Reefer Madness", at just a bit over 2 gig.
I agree that it's probably not worth the trouble. I've got metered bandwidth at a penny a megabyte. About the only thing that would be worth it to me would be something like "This is Spinal Tap". That's out of print and goes for around $100 on e-bay, so $40-$60 to download would be a bargain. Everything else would be a waste.
People without metered bandwidth on things like cable modems could have a field day at first, but if too many people start shlepping 4-9 gig files over cable,the cable companies will either have to meter bandwidth, or stick caps on. Either way, we won't see big time video piracy at DVD quality.
As far as low quality copies goes, I don't see passing around low quality digitial copies on the internet being all that more convenient than passing around tapes, or just buying the bargain VHS version.
Thus, as far as I can see, the only serious piracy threat is from people who have DVD manufacturing equipment--e.g., the big Asian pirates. Those people don't give a damn about CSS. They'll be doing a sector level copy of the disc, and they want to keep the encryption, so the disc will work just like a regular disc with all players. At most, the only aspect of CSS they care about is that part where the drive requires the software to authenticate itself before it will let the scrambled sectors be read, and you don't need to break CSS to get around that: just put the disc in a DVD-ROM, start the movie playing using PowerDVD, and then exit PowerDVD. The disc/drive is now authenticated, and you can access all sectors. No hacking requires.
DeCSS came from the Windows community, not the Linux community. It was then ported to Linux.
The DeCSS authors don't seem all that interested in open source. All the copies of the Windows version I've been able to find have been without source, and the Windows version checks for Soft-ICE and refuses to run if Soft-ICE is present, so it looks like the DeCSS authors don't want their code to be reverse engineered. Anyone else find that hilarious?
Your size estimate is way off. Most typical DVDs have about 3.5 to 4 gigs of data. If you've got a DVD-ROM, you can check this pretty easily--just put the disc in, mount it, and do a du on the video_ts directory.
RIS 1.0 has more of one of the little gears. One of the robots in the first book (the one with the cool worm gear differential drive) needs all those gears if you want to build the grabbing arm.
Comparing my RIS 1.5 set with the 1.0 set someone at work has, another big difference is how many basic Legos are included. 1.0 has tons more of the "normal" Lego pieces.
As far as we can tell, the 1.0 set is better in basically every way.:-(
OK, I can believe that there has been an "explosion" in ecommerce this Christmas season, and so online merchants are having trouble meeting demand. Most of them are relatively new at this.
Eventually, I suppose, all the orders will arrive. Invariably, some of them will be unacceptable--the merchandise is damaged, or the wrong item was shipped, and then we will have round two of the ecommerce explosion: how well these companies handle returns.
So far, I've had two occasions to return things to Amazon. First was a defective CD, second was they goofed and shipped the wrong thing (I ordered the DTS edition of "Saving Private Ryan" and they send the Dolby Digital edition).
In both cases, I sent an email explaining the mistake, and within a day or two, they sent back an apology, and entered a new order for the replacement item. With that, they sent a prepaid shipping label, so that when the new shipment arrived, I could put the old item in that container, attach the label, and mail it back.
When I opened the replacement CD, there was a note inside the jewel case telling me that they had opened it an inspected it to make sure that it would not be defective like the prior one.
Anyone know how the other online merchants handle returns?
There are many kinds of contracts. One kind is essentially as I described. This not being a lawyers forum, I tried to put it in ordinary language, rather than dig up my contracts hornbook from my law school days and put it in precise jargon.
Ever hear of a thing called a "contract"? In one form, a contract occurs when party A makes a promise to party B, and party B relies on that promise, and party A knows that B will rely on the promise.
The usual remedy for a broken contract is a lawsuit. Why shouldn't there be one here? Toys-R-Us got the benefit of the bargain here--numerous people bought from Toys-R-Us online rather than buying from alternate sources, and then Toys-R-Us failed to uphold their end of the bargain.
No, the only people who can sue for a copyright violation (which is what a suit based on violation of the GPL would be) are those who own the copyright.
A "use" tax doesn't count as a tax on exports from other states if the rate is the same as the sales tax rate for the same item purchased in-state. If the rates are different, then the tax is screwing out-of-state merchants relative to in-state merchants, and violates the Constitution. If the rates match, the merchants are treated the same, and it is only the in-state consumers getting screwed, and the Supreme Court says that is not against the Constitution.
Pretty much every state that has a sales tax also has a "use" tax that applies to items purchased out of state, and requires the consumer to report said items. Of course, no one actually does report them (except for big things like cars that you've got to register).
All that's novel here is that they are putting the reporting form on their income tax form and specifically mentioning online purchases.
I suggest that everyone buy a dictionary from Amazon, and look up the word loose.
By the way, the stock price does not go up because of their losses. The stock price is going up because they would be quite profitiable if they were not expanding so rapidly. They have chosen to lose money now in order to grow big and make a lot of money in the future, rather than making a small profit right away.
B&N are unrepentent spammers. I've been trying for months to get an address off their mailing list that was accidently signed up (someone apparently typed the wrong domain name when giving their email address for an order). There have been many reports on nanae from people who have received spam from them who have had no prior contact with B&N.
FatBrain also spammed early (soon after their name change), but I haven't seen any reports since then.
Last I checked, Corel was not bitching about Microsoft Word being closed source. For the analogy to hold, Corel would have to bitch about Word's license, and then start a project to make a free word processor for Windows, and try to organize the project on the Microsoft support groups.
It's a competitor in the sense that someone with an X86 system is unlikely to need or want both VMWare and Bochs.
So he's giving his time to a cool project. It's his motives I question. He went to VMWare's news server and tried to recruit people for his VMWare clone right there. That's rather obnoxious.
His major criticism of VMWare was that it was not open source, yet Bochs is not open source. If he can blast them for not being open source, I don't see any reason I shouldn't blast him. If I wanted to make the correspondence perfect, I suppose I'd have to go blast him on a Bochs mailing list.
One thing particularly interesting to note about FreeMWare is that the project probably would not exist if it were not for the fact that VMWare is a competitor to Lawton's non-free x86 emulator, Bochs.
If Lawton want's to make a useful contribution to free software, instead of trying to clone an innovative and inexpensive commercial product (VMWare is only $99 for personal use), perhaps he could release Bochs under an Open Source license first, to show his sincerity.
FreeMWare is just the kind of project, from a technical point of view, I'd love to work on (and I've had some experience in that area, so could contribute usefully). However, I'd feel like an asshole doing so, and so won't.
The following quote is just wishful thinking on their part. It's flat out wrong.
You are confused. They are not talking about fair use. They are talking about consumer recording rights specified in the Audio Home Recording Act, which added several sections (starting at 17 USC 1001) that give specific recording rights to consumers in addition to fair-use.
What RIAA is arguing is that the definition of a digital recording device given in the AHRA is not met by a computer/CD-R, and so no AHRA rights are conferred to record with computers. Reading the definitions (see 17 USC 1001), it looks to me that they are right, perhaps. I could see it going either way.
If they are audio CDs of musical recordings, you don't have to resort to fair use to justify copying for your own use. Here's what 17 USC 1008 says:
"No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings."
This was part of the revision of the Copyright Act that gave us the so-called "DAT tax" on digital media. The proceeds from that are distributed to the music publishers, and that is their compensation for the lost revenue from noncommercial consumer copying.
Note, by the way, there is nothing in 17 USC 1008 that limits its applicability to copies you make for your own use. If you want to borrow a CD from a friend, and make a copy of that, that is legal in the United States (if it is a musical recording...can't copy spoken word stuff).
I think the music publishers got screwed here. They clearly anticipated DAT becoming the consumer format of choice, and expected the money to be pouring in from the DAT tax. Instead, we consumers got the right to make legal copies, and th publishers got virtually nothing.
If Bruce had planned to actually sue Corel (and I'm not saying it's a bad idea...) he would have made an official announcement. That would have been the time to actually cover the "story"
That's kind of like saying that the press should not cover the statements made by Congresscritters when debating a bill until after the bill passes.
Almost all copying a minor would do would be civil copyright infringement, not criminal copyright infringement. It is relatively hard for anyone not going into professional pirating to run afoul of the criminal copyright laws in the United States.
Every so often, someone comes along who does something to some free software that is allowed by the license, but clearly against the wishes of the author.
When this happens, there is widespread condemnation from the community, with people saying that the morally correct thing to do is to respect the wished of the author, even when the license says you can do something else.
Why doesn't this respect for authors apply to breaking DVD encryption? If respecting the wishes of authors is a moral principle, then it should be followed even when the wishes of those authors mean that we won't get the benefit of their work. If we are only going to apply our morals when the outcome directly benefits of us, those are not morals to be proud of, it seems to me.
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If you want to make most player software play an encrypted .vob file that you copied straight, you've got to hook in somewhere and simulate the CSS protocol to get the key to the player.
By the way, one natural place to hook in on Windows would be to just rename wnaspi32.dll to something else, and put in your own wnaspi32.dll, which passes most calls through to the original. Interesting observation: the ASPI that comes with Windows 98 checks the file name that wnaspi32 is loaded from, and if that doesn't end in \system\wnaspi32.dll, it doesn't work. It looks like someone decided they don't like Adaptec or Microsoft doesn't want that kind of thing going on.
Actually, it's a list of young innovators. Gates and RMS (and Bezos?) are probably above the age 35 limit they used.
(Yes, some bytes from table2 are used in a couple of other places, but in those places, they are just xor'ed with constant bytes from other tables that are only used once...so those other tables can just be changed to contain the xor'ed values).
Basically, if you take css-auth.c, and use it as the basis to write a spec for what css-auth has to do, and then optimize that spec and give it to someone to implement, they will end up with something that looks nothing like css-auth.c.
I assume that the DeCSS authors didn't optimize because they wanted to document exactly what the code they reverse-engineered was doing.
However, can anyone explain why that original code wasn't optimized. We aren't talking anything deep here...these are trivial optimizations.
My guesses: (1) perhaps it was an attempt to obfuscate, to make it more confusing to reverse-engineer, or (2) the hashing used in css-auth (I say hashing rather than encryption because engine() is not one-to-one) is not just from DVD but is used in something else and they just copied that implementation, and that something else makes more use of those tables in such a way that it does make sense to have four tables.
Anyone have the real story?
From the start, Linux did a better job of fitting in with whatever OS might already be on your PC, and did a better job of fitting in with existing hardware.
There's no real polite way to put this, so I'll just be blunt: a few years ago, the FreeBSD were a lot more snotty than the Linux people when it came to cheap hardware. If you were the kind of person who thought that spending $350 for a SCSI CD-ROM was silly when an IDE CD-ROM was only $100 because you only use the thing for installations, then FreeBSD was not the system for you.
The FreeBSD people have gotten a lot better in the last few years, and I believe they now try to support cheap commodity hardware well.
I agree that it's probably not worth the trouble. I've got metered bandwidth at a penny a megabyte. About the only thing that would be worth it to me would be something like "This is Spinal Tap". That's out of print and goes for around $100 on e-bay, so $40-$60 to download would be a bargain. Everything else would be a waste.
People without metered bandwidth on things like cable modems could have a field day at first, but if too many people start shlepping 4-9 gig files over cable,the cable companies will either have to meter bandwidth, or stick caps on. Either way, we won't see big time video piracy at DVD quality.
As far as low quality copies goes, I don't see passing around low quality digitial copies on the internet being all that more convenient than passing around tapes, or just buying the bargain VHS version.
Thus, as far as I can see, the only serious piracy threat is from people who have DVD manufacturing equipment--e.g., the big Asian pirates. Those people don't give a damn about CSS. They'll be doing a sector level copy of the disc, and they want to keep the encryption, so the disc will work just like a regular disc with all players. At most, the only aspect of CSS they care about is that part where the drive requires the software to authenticate itself before it will let the scrambled sectors be read, and you don't need to break CSS to get around that: just put the disc in a DVD-ROM, start the movie playing using PowerDVD, and then exit PowerDVD. The disc/drive is now authenticated, and you can access all sectors. No hacking requires.
The DeCSS authors don't seem all that interested in open source. All the copies of the Windows version I've been able to find have been without source, and the Windows version checks for Soft-ICE and refuses to run if Soft-ICE is present, so it looks like the DeCSS authors don't want their code to be reverse engineered. Anyone else find that hilarious?
Your size estimate is way off. Most typical DVDs have about 3.5 to 4 gigs of data. If you've got a DVD-ROM, you can check this pretty easily--just put the disc in, mount it, and do a du on the video_ts directory.
Comparing my RIS 1.5 set with the 1.0 set someone at work has, another big difference is how many basic Legos are included. 1.0 has tons more of the "normal" Lego pieces.
As far as we can tell, the 1.0 set is better in basically every way. :-(
Eventually, I suppose, all the orders will arrive. Invariably, some of them will be unacceptable--the merchandise is damaged, or the wrong item was shipped, and then we will have round two of the ecommerce explosion: how well these companies handle returns.
So far, I've had two occasions to return things to Amazon. First was a defective CD, second was they goofed and shipped the wrong thing (I ordered the DTS edition of "Saving Private Ryan" and they send the Dolby Digital edition).
In both cases, I sent an email explaining the mistake, and within a day or two, they sent back an apology, and entered a new order for the replacement item. With that, they sent a prepaid shipping label, so that when the new shipment arrived, I could put the old item in that container, attach the label, and mail it back.
When I opened the replacement CD, there was a note inside the jewel case telling me that they had opened it an inspected it to make sure that it would not be defective like the prior one.
Anyone know how the other online merchants handle returns?
There are many kinds of contracts. One kind is essentially as I described. This not being a lawyers forum, I tried to put it in ordinary language, rather than dig up my contracts hornbook from my law school days and put it in precise jargon.
The usual remedy for a broken contract is a lawsuit. Why shouldn't there be one here? Toys-R-Us got the benefit of the bargain here--numerous people bought from Toys-R-Us online rather than buying from alternate sources, and then Toys-R-Us failed to uphold their end of the bargain.
No, the only people who can sue for a copyright violation (which is what a suit based on violation of the GPL would be) are those who own the copyright.
A "use" tax doesn't count as a tax on exports from other states if the rate is the same as the sales tax rate for the same item purchased in-state. If the rates are different, then the tax is screwing out-of-state merchants relative to in-state merchants, and violates the Constitution. If the rates match, the merchants are treated the same, and it is only the in-state consumers getting screwed, and the Supreme Court says that is not against the Constitution.
All that's novel here is that they are putting the reporting form on their income tax form and specifically mentioning online purchases.
Tapes speed is comparable to disk speed, dude. It's only when you've got to seek that tape sucks.
By the way, the stock price does not go up because of their losses. The stock price is going up because they would be quite profitiable if they were not expanding so rapidly. They have chosen to lose money now in order to grow big and make a lot of money in the future, rather than making a small profit right away.
FatBrain also spammed early (soon after their name change), but I haven't seen any reports since then.
Last I checked, Corel was not bitching about Microsoft Word being closed source. For the analogy to hold, Corel would have to bitch about Word's license, and then start a project to make a free word processor for Windows, and try to organize the project on the Microsoft support groups.
It's a competitor in the sense that someone with an X86 system is unlikely to need or want both VMWare and Bochs.
So he's giving his time to a cool project. It's his motives I question. He went to VMWare's news server and tried to recruit people for his VMWare clone right there. That's rather obnoxious.
His major criticism of VMWare was that it was not open source, yet Bochs is not open source. If he can blast them for not being open source, I don't see any reason I shouldn't blast him. If I wanted to make the correspondence perfect, I suppose I'd have to go blast him on a Bochs mailing list.
If Lawton want's to make a useful contribution to free software, instead of trying to clone an innovative and inexpensive commercial product (VMWare is only $99 for personal use), perhaps he could release Bochs under an Open Source license first, to show his sincerity.
FreeMWare is just the kind of project, from a technical point of view, I'd love to work on (and I've had some experience in that area, so could contribute usefully). However, I'd feel like an asshole doing so, and so won't.
You are confused. They are not talking about fair use. They are talking about consumer recording rights specified in the Audio Home Recording Act, which added several sections (starting at 17 USC 1001) that give specific recording rights to consumers in addition to fair-use.
What RIAA is arguing is that the definition of a digital recording device given in the AHRA is not met by a computer/CD-R, and so no AHRA rights are conferred to record with computers. Reading the definitions (see 17 USC 1001), it looks to me that they are right, perhaps. I could see it going either way.
This was part of the revision of the Copyright Act that gave us the so-called "DAT tax" on digital media. The proceeds from that are distributed to the music publishers, and that is their compensation for the lost revenue from noncommercial consumer copying.
Note, by the way, there is nothing in 17 USC 1008 that limits its applicability to copies you make for your own use. If you want to borrow a CD from a friend, and make a copy of that, that is legal in the United States (if it is a musical recording...can't copy spoken word stuff).
I think the music publishers got screwed here. They clearly anticipated DAT becoming the consumer format of choice, and expected the money to be pouring in from the DAT tax. Instead, we consumers got the right to make legal copies, and th publishers got virtually nothing.
That's kind of like saying that the press should not cover the statements made by Congresscritters when debating a bill until after the bill passes.
Almost all copying a minor would do would be civil copyright infringement, not criminal copyright infringement. It is relatively hard for anyone not going into professional pirating to run afoul of the criminal copyright laws in the United States.
When this happens, there is widespread condemnation from the community, with people saying that the morally correct thing to do is to respect the wished of the author, even when the license says you can do something else.
Why doesn't this respect for authors apply to breaking DVD encryption? If respecting the wishes of authors is a moral principle, then it should be followed even when the wishes of those authors mean that we won't get the benefit of their work. If we are only going to apply our morals when the outcome directly benefits of us, those are not morals to be proud of, it seems to me.