slowing down this section or that section barely enough that a computer could detect the
change by comparison to the master.
In instances where large-scale piracy (such as commercial reproduction of audio CDs, for example) are being investigated, yes, this would be very useful to show that "this is a copy," but you could achieve the same thing by altering a single sample by one bit anywhere in the entire CD... you could then compare that to the original bit and have prima facie evidence it ain't the same.
This doesn't work in the sort of distributed-enforcement scenario that keeps coming up... the idea of Media Player or any other disconnected software or device attempting to determine the difference between a legal and "illegal" copy, where comparison to a known master is not possible or practical. This would work OK in court, but the time factor for Federal intellectual property prosecution makes it literally impossible to prosecute more than Extremely Big Fish.
The core idea of watermarking is distributed, possibly disconnected verification of authenticity. I submit that to make a practical watermarking scheme as described in the article, it would have to stick enough of its head up above ground (in order to function) that it would be easily decapitated. What's more, the concept of "authorized" versus "unauthorized" copy, in light of the Fair Use Doctrine, makes it pretty damn hard to create a system which "knows" what's authorized and what isn't.
And then you have to think about the idea that humans passed the DMCA, and humans can change it, but if you wrote a watermarking system assuming that DMCA was eternal, and then a more liberal Congress shows up and gives more rights to consumers to reuse content, any hardware and software based on the old assumptions is instant and unusable junk. Much like DivX (the CircuitCity disaster of a couple years back).
Yep, MP3 fans running through the Redmond campus, pillaging and looting old 3-ring software binders.
The thing I have heard over and over relative to watermarking, SDMI, and almost all other "secure music" issues, is that "Microsoft is working on this" and "Microsoft is working on that," and "Microsoft will modify the code underlying MediaPlayer to do this and this and that."
This is all well and good in an all-Microsoft world. The entire thing falls apart the moment you consider the existence of non-MS entities. Even one would cause the whole house of technocards to collapse. Within two years, you'll have a truckload of phones and PDAs (none of which have to run Microshit) that can play and record audio and/or video. You'll be able to do much the same, probably, on PlayStation/2, which MS has nothing to do with. There's BeOS. There's Macintosh.
And then there's this penguin...
All it takes is one developer, on any one of those platforms, to write some nice code in a country not bound by United States intellectual property law or treaties, that will let consumers do what they want to do (like DeCSS) and the air will come out of the whole tent like a fart at a ballgame.
Sure, all the producers of content are gonna line up with Microsoft against their own consumers? Who the hell does RIAA think buys CDs? I'll tell you, from lookin' at my Gnutella traffic, it ain't anybody at microsoft.com...
Microsoft can claim to have The Solution, but... there ain't one. To believe there is requires the belief that there's only One Problem, and there are many, among them, the belief that there's a Solution out there if only we can keep users from using all that non-Microsoft stuff.
Turtle
(who thinks the whole secure-music debate is eerily similar to one about fifteen years ago regarding copy-protection. Consumers spoke with dollars, and most copy-prot disappeared in months) ---------------------------------------
A biologist friend of mine likes to point out (usually at parties, which is why he doesn't get invited to all that many) that "mutations" are not in and of themselves, bad.
Without them, we as a species wouldn't be here, of course. The problem is, we have derailed the mechanism by which members of the species with marginally adaptive or marginally maladaptive mutations are selected (or not). Children born with truly horrendous and fatal mutations do, indeed, still die off and that particular mutation vanishes, but for the borderline ones, we're increasingly encouraging and supporting reproduction by people who probably oughta keep their marginally-maladaptive mutations to themselves.
What do you think: would this report help start a dialogue that could return some sense to reproductive and fertility policies, particularly in Western countries and most specifically the US, encouraging people who have genetic diseases or demonstrably-problematic mutation-induced conditions not to reproduce, but to adopt instead?
Or, will it just make people paranoid about all sources of radiation, including that big thermonuclear furnace that flies across the sky every day, to where we just hide in caves (breathing radon, of course)?
Please pipe all comments which contain the terms "eugenics," "Mengele" and "Hitler" to good ole/dev/null... that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm getting at is, if the mutagen is that pervasive, is there a way we can figure out to USE it for our own purposes instead of just getting hosed randomly by it?
"During a security panel, reported McCullagh, a Microsoft research scientist demonstrated how the hidden copyright infringement fingerprint is so securely affixed to the audio that it remains intact even if a song is played aloud on speakers in a noisy room, then re-recorded. "
I've now read this in three or four different places, and I'm sorry, there's a raucous technical problem in there. While this might be feasible as a lab stunt, a watermark that's usuable even after several A/D and D/A conversions cannot help but be apparent to the listener, and if it's that apparent, the content will be rejected by the listener regardless of the technical advantage to the content creator. This isn't a situation like those shareware PrintShop clones that stick their logo in the background to remind the user they're just "evaluating" the content or the tool, they're going to try to embed this in content they expect people to pay for.
Think about this, based on your experience with MP3 and Napster. Lemme guess, those of you with dialup connections gravitated toward the 96kbps or 112kbps rips initially because they're small, right? Then you found out that they sounded (mostly) like crap, so you went for the 128s and then the 160s, and if you're hardcore the 192s and 256es. If the listeners can hear ANY artifact in recordings that interferes with listening, they'll reject it eventually. And any watermark obvious enough to survive a trip through speaker cones, air and microphones would have to be obvious enough to be heard by consumers.
And of course, if it's THAT obvious, it'll be a cinch to write tools to identify and obliterate it. This is a loser all the way around.
Turtle ---------------------------------------
You know, one of the things I used to warn people about in the early days of fax machines was, "if you want your fax to last a long time, under no circumstances should you have hundreds of people send you page after page of 70% gray bars, as this will cause the thermal printhead to overheat and melt, and when it jams, the motor may catch fire and your mom and dad's house will get all stunk up with ozone whiff."
This is very good advice, it's served me well down the years, and I impart it all to you now.
The FTP daemon's running, too.
Their upstream feed is from nac.net, but that's odd, because NAC doesn't show that their service area extends anywhere west of West Virginia. Hmmm, so we're talking interstate wire fraud at a minimum, and mail fraud if any of his billing was done through the mail.
You gotta hand it to the kid, that WHOIS listing is as pompous as any I've ever seen. Wonder if Paul & Debbie, his 'rents, have big hand-lettered signs taped to all the interior doors of their house...
NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTER on the bathroom, ADMINISTRATION CENTER on the basement door, BILLING DEPARTMENT on his bedroom door, probably pasted over an old "New Kids On The Block" sticker from 1994. Probably has a Britney Spears poster on the inside, and some old Monogram "Snap-Tite" monster truck kits sitting on the top shelf of his bookcase, which is otherwise loaded with Visa and Mastercard AR summaries...
About two months ago there was an interesting study published showing that if minor children were injured or killed in a car accident involving alcohol, and where the driver was old enough to be their parent or guardian, more than half the time, the person who had been using alcohol was... their driver.
In other words, the odds were good that their parent or guardian was wasted.
We felt that they should start an organization called Mothers Who ARE Drunk Drivers (M/WADD).
Turtle
Slashdot Mirror
In instances where large-scale piracy (such as commercial reproduction of audio CDs, for example) are being investigated, yes, this would be very useful to show that "this is a copy," but you could achieve the same thing by altering a single sample by one bit anywhere in the entire CD... you could then compare that to the original bit and have prima facie evidence it ain't the same.
This doesn't work in the sort of distributed-enforcement scenario that keeps coming up... the idea of Media Player or any other disconnected software or device attempting to determine the difference between a legal and "illegal" copy, where comparison to a known master is not possible or practical. This would work OK in court, but the time factor for Federal intellectual property prosecution makes it literally impossible to prosecute more than Extremely Big Fish.
The core idea of watermarking is distributed, possibly disconnected verification of authenticity. I submit that to make a practical watermarking scheme as described in the article, it would have to stick enough of its head up above ground (in order to function) that it would be easily decapitated. What's more, the concept of "authorized" versus "unauthorized" copy, in light of the Fair Use Doctrine, makes it pretty damn hard to create a system which "knows" what's authorized and what isn't.
And then you have to think about the idea that humans passed the DMCA, and humans can change it, but if you wrote a watermarking system assuming that DMCA was eternal, and then a more liberal Congress shows up and gives more rights to consumers to reuse content, any hardware and software based on the old assumptions is instant and unusable junk. Much like DivX (the CircuitCity disaster of a couple years back).
Turtle
---------------------------------------
The thing I have heard over and over relative to watermarking, SDMI, and almost all other "secure music" issues, is that "Microsoft is working on this" and "Microsoft is working on that," and "Microsoft will modify the code underlying MediaPlayer to do this and this and that."
This is all well and good in an all-Microsoft world. The entire thing falls apart the moment you consider the existence of non-MS entities. Even one would cause the whole house of technocards to collapse. Within two years, you'll have a truckload of phones and PDAs (none of which have to run Microshit) that can play and record audio and/or video. You'll be able to do much the same, probably, on PlayStation/2, which MS has nothing to do with. There's BeOS. There's Macintosh.
And then there's this penguin...
All it takes is one developer, on any one of those platforms, to write some nice code in a country not bound by United States intellectual property law or treaties, that will let consumers do what they want to do (like DeCSS) and the air will come out of the whole tent like a fart at a ballgame.
Sure, all the producers of content are gonna line up with Microsoft against their own consumers? Who the hell does RIAA think buys CDs? I'll tell you, from lookin' at my Gnutella traffic, it ain't anybody at microsoft.com...
Microsoft can claim to have The Solution, but... there ain't one. To believe there is requires the belief that there's only One Problem, and there are many, among them, the belief that there's a Solution out there if only we can keep users from using all that non-Microsoft stuff.
Turtle
(who thinks the whole secure-music debate is eerily similar to one about fifteen years ago regarding copy-protection. Consumers spoke with dollars, and most copy-prot disappeared in months)---------------------------------------
Seriously, thanks for investing in 24/96, it's definitely a worthy technology that isn't quite at critical mass yet.
Turtle
---------------------------------------
Without them, we as a species wouldn't be here, of course. The problem is, we have derailed the mechanism by which members of the species with marginally adaptive or marginally maladaptive mutations are selected (or not). Children born with truly horrendous and fatal mutations do, indeed, still die off and that particular mutation vanishes, but for the borderline ones, we're increasingly encouraging and supporting reproduction by people who probably oughta keep their marginally-maladaptive mutations to themselves.
What do you think: would this report help start a dialogue that could return some sense to reproductive and fertility policies, particularly in Western countries and most specifically the US, encouraging people who have genetic diseases or demonstrably-problematic mutation-induced conditions not to reproduce, but to adopt instead?
Or, will it just make people paranoid about all sources of radiation, including that big thermonuclear furnace that flies across the sky every day, to where we just hide in caves (breathing radon, of course)?
Please pipe all comments which contain the terms "eugenics," "Mengele" and "Hitler" to good ole /dev/null... that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm getting at is, if the mutagen is that pervasive, is there a way we can figure out to USE it for our own purposes instead of just getting hosed randomly by it?
Turtle
---------------------------------------
"During a security panel, reported McCullagh, a Microsoft research scientist demonstrated how the hidden copyright infringement fingerprint is so securely affixed to the audio that it remains intact even if a song is played aloud on speakers in a noisy room, then re-recorded. " I've now read this in three or four different places, and I'm sorry, there's a raucous technical problem in there. While this might be feasible as a lab stunt, a watermark that's usuable even after several A/D and D/A conversions cannot help but be apparent to the listener, and if it's that apparent, the content will be rejected by the listener regardless of the technical advantage to the content creator. This isn't a situation like those shareware PrintShop clones that stick their logo in the background to remind the user they're just "evaluating" the content or the tool, they're going to try to embed this in content they expect people to pay for. Think about this, based on your experience with MP3 and Napster. Lemme guess, those of you with dialup connections gravitated toward the 96kbps or 112kbps rips initially because they're small, right? Then you found out that they sounded (mostly) like crap, so you went for the 128s and then the 160s, and if you're hardcore the 192s and 256es. If the listeners can hear ANY artifact in recordings that interferes with listening, they'll reject it eventually. And any watermark obvious enough to survive a trip through speaker cones, air and microphones would have to be obvious enough to be heard by consumers. And of course, if it's THAT obvious, it'll be a cinch to write tools to identify and obliterate it. This is a loser all the way around. Turtle
---------------------------------------
This is very good advice, it's served me well down the years, and I impart it all to you now.
Turtle
You gotta hand it to the kid, that WHOIS listing is as pompous as any I've ever seen. Wonder if Paul & Debbie, his 'rents, have big hand-lettered signs taped to all the interior doors of their house...
NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTER on the bathroom, ADMINISTRATION CENTER on the basement door, BILLING DEPARTMENT on his bedroom door, probably pasted over an old "New Kids On The Block" sticker from 1994. Probably has a Britney Spears poster on the inside, and some old Monogram "Snap-Tite" monster truck kits sitting on the top shelf of his bookcase, which is otherwise loaded with Visa and Mastercard AR summaries...
Turtle
Not in and of itself, but this isn't about crime, it's about liability (or the potential) which is a completely different thing. Turtle
About two months ago there was an interesting study published showing that if minor children were injured or killed in a car accident involving alcohol, and where the driver was old enough to be their parent or guardian, more than half the time, the person who had been using alcohol was... their driver. In other words, the odds were good that their parent or guardian was wasted. We felt that they should start an organization called Mothers Who ARE Drunk Drivers (M/WADD). Turtle