It's true that cable and ISDN ISPs are trying to change their fee structure to make more money.
Of course they are. Just like a car salesman or a cellular phone plan, their goal is to make the deal as complex as possible to prevent you, the customer, from understanding just how you are getting ripped off.
Sadly, the solution is not to somehow force companies to provide service for flat fees, but to embrace the whipping boy of bandwidth hogs, pay-per-byte.
If you download 100KB, you pay $.0001. If you download 1MB, you pay $.001. If you download Suse 8.1, you pay $.60.
Of course, you say, that sucks because right now you are getting your Internet subsidized by the yuppies next door who only read Slate and Salon, and don't ever trade music or download linux distributions. Get used to it. You will get screwed, eventually, whether you notice it or not.
Paying for your bytes is the only path to useful competition in this market.
So you are saying that users, customers, citizens have an OBLIGATION to prevent IT professionals from becoming 'devalued'? That doesn't sound like a free market to me.
Or are you saying that the the fact that the fact that compilers cost hundreds of dollars is going to INCREASE innovation?
Congratulations, you have now explained the faulty reason why YOU do not contribute to open source.
Now please continue and explain why public agencies should have their software choices dictated to them, or why people who believe that free software are tools that the world deserves to build bigger and better things instead of a way to make a few bucks should change their mind?
According to the article, the company that manufactures the machines is Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., who
have been in the Florida papers for having a VP who has been indicted in an elections
kickback scandal in Louisiana. You must read this URLon the subject!
Further research on the web suggests that an unwholesome number of people involved
in selling election services and products have, not backgrounds in (say) accounting, but
instead, backgrounds in (you guessed it) politics.
"New York safemaker Jacob H. Myers invented a mechanical voting machine in 1892 and his company later became Automatic Voting Machines, which Sequoia acquired in 1984.
"[Sequoia is the] only company whose touch screen product has been successfully tested in
an actual election in a large county -- the 2000 general election in Riverside County, Calif.
"[Sequoia] has installed other older systems in three Florida counties. Sales are down 90 percent after the 2000 election as local officials await federal funding before buying new equipment.
Sequoia is a subsidiary of Jefferson Smurfit Group, a leading manufacturer of paper
products."
Jefferson Smurfit, who in reality only owns 15% of Sequoia, is primarily a manufacturer of paper and packing products, based in Ireland.
The remaining 85% of the company is owned by
De La Rue
of Hampshire, England, an
enormous company of 7000+ employees with a background in secure printing (providing paper for over 150 national currencies, including of course the UK) and a strong interest (20%) in Camelot, the operator of the British lottery.
Other than not seeming to take their security as seriously as they ought to, DLAR seems like a squeaky-clean company, and probably has a bright future. Especially if they can keep U.S. elections secret from the population.
Globalization is the process by which the new computer-literate rulers, having pulled ourselves up from the struggling upper middle class by reading 'Wired', ascend to our rightful positions as Nietzschian supermen!
Hmm. That capability doesn't seem to be in the Phase 1 standard.
A picture of the Phase 2 standard is beginning to emerge then. Detection of content that has been ripped from watermarked content and compressed with a perceptual encoding scheme is clearly part of it. I think we can safely assume a more detailed set of permission flags than the Phase 1 "no more copies".
I wonder how companies that sell compressed content on the net like e-Music and Liquid Audio will get the "full" watermarks? Will their client software be able to watermark content?
Perhaps it will have to have a different watermark. Maybe the differences will give people clues on how to hack the watermark. Interesting.
And what's up with Napster? I hear Napster wants to charge a subscription fee now. If I pay money to Napster, and Napster pays the record companies for content, then I expect quality content with the "full" watermark.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Hey you're right about the watermarks being to detect compression.
Now I will dissect the rest of your post.
How does such a watermark "break" MP3 files? Does adding macrovision to videotapes make older players unable to play new tapes? Hardly.
Speaking of Macrovision, it's as close as we have to a historical precedent for something like your assertion that "Even if the watermark is inaudible, people will think that they hear it. They will be dissatisfied, and will want unwatermarked music." I have to tell you, the vast, vast majority of videotape viewers have never heard of Macrovision, let alone started a movement to get un-macrovision content.
"If SDMI succeeds, and it becomes impossible to play a song once it has been compressed to MP3, then people will be forced to stop using MP3."
I'm still not getting it. As near as I can figure, the only way SDMI will 'break' MP3 is if every MP3 player both software and hardware is able to decode the watermark. Fortunately, the open source movement isn't likely to shell out the $$$$$ for SDMI membership and $$$$$$$ for the Verance watermark license fees.
The message at the beginning of this thread is only one of about 20 messages posted about this article that say something to the effect of:
"Boy the SDMI sure is dumb. Don't they know their watermark will be removed as soon as the file is compressed into MP3. The reason I know this is [insert pseudo-logical justification based on hearsay and a world view lacking in both common sense and several laws of science]"
Can we please assume that before some of the biggest companies in the world began pouring money into watermarking technology, they included in their specification something like 'Watermark must be robust enough to survive a process performed on essentially every audio content available on the Internet'.
"I wonder if we'll start seeing CDs with SDMI-only tracks (i.e. you get the whole album normally, but there are two extra bonus tracks that only play on an SDMI device)."
If you take a slide photograph, and you watermark the slide, how exactly do you prevent an existing slide projector from showing the watermarked media?
This is a very well written and eloquent plea. It's also completely wrong.
"The main purpose of SDMI watermarks is to detect if a watermarked song has been compressed."
The SDMI doesn't claim that this is their goal, the record companies have never expressed any interest in this, and the hacksdmi challenge doesn't indicate anything other than the purpose of watermarks being to encode information into a song that remains intact whether or not the song is compressed, or even passed through the analog domain.
I could continue pointing out the problems with your wild assumptions and predictions, but the fact that even non-compressed music will have the watermark information pretty much renders moot the rest of your message.
It really doesn't matter whether SDMI is hacked before or after music starts being released with either the Phase 1 or Phase 2 watermark.
However, all the watermark can do is identify a track, and give some sort of guidelines of the rights the 'licensee' has.
** The whole plan hinges on software that pays attention to the watermark. **
SDMI's plan is simple: Divide and conquer. The 'big' software companies pay attention to the watermark because they are rich targets for lawsuits, plus they want to use popular (i.e. big five label) content.
After the big software companies have signed up, SDMI can start going after the small players. Having a link to Gnutella on your site might make you a target!
Let's get anonymous, reliable transfer and hosting for open source audio software going!
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
EAX is not like A3D. EAX is reverb. A3D was a proprietary API and hardware for 3D positional audio. In computer games. Implemented on sound cards.
It makes me feel like a rebel to cheer for the underdog, too, but I think we should be fighting for open standards, not just turnover among proprietary corporate initiatives.
PS: I could have sworn we were talking about MP3 players anyway.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Unfortunately, I have transferred my CueCat license and hardware to my local Waste Disposal Service Provider.
In case of recall, you may contact their corporate headquarters at:
Allied Waste Industries
15880 N. Greenway-Hayden Loop
Suite 100
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
Sincerely,
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
The samples they have available for downloading contain both a watermarked and clean copy of the content.
"Two of the samples in a triplet contain the same music, where one is encoded with a digital watermark and the other is a clean, unmarked version of the same music."
CSS is encryption. You can speak of 'cracking' it in order to access the encrypted data.
SDMI is not encryption. It is a watermark. (SDMI does claim that some of the "Phase 2" technologies are not watermarks, but whatever they are calling it, the functionality would seem to be necessarily similar in concept.)
The SDMI challenge is not to decrypt music, the SDMI challenge is to remove the watermark.
However, having said that, 'crack' is such a good word, I will use it hereafter to mean 'removing the screening technology from the music file.'
SDMI has previously announced that the watermark is inaudible, and can survive transfer from PCM to frequency-band-based compression like MP3 and even to analog.
However, the samples for download are not watermarked with the current Verance "Phase 1" technology, but with contenders for the "Phase 2" technology.
There are samples both with and without the watermark, so comparing the two samples and statistically analyzing the differences would seem like the clear place to start.
It seems to me like there are several things that the hacker community could do to really poke SDMI in the eye with a sharp stick:
1) Crack their Phase 2 screener, tell them $10K isn't nearly enough, and have them fly you in to discuss your terms.
2) Crack their Phase 2 screener, and don't tell them about it until the Phase 2 "trigger" comes out in CDs. Then tell the world how to crack it.
3) Those are both hard. Note that SDMI doesn't provide any tools so that we can determine for ourselves whether we have cracked the screener. Instead, they ask us to upload the files with the screener removed to their site. You have gigs and gigs of audio samples. What are you waiting for? Start uploading!
An entirely new reality will emerge in cyberspace, ruled by a cognitive elite based in cities like Frankfurt, London, San Jose, Singapore and Tokyo.
Am I the only one that thinks this sounds like a rotten idea?
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
The audio sounds very good, but in fact it gets sample-rate-converted up from 44.1KHz, put into the mixer at 48KHz (because the AC97 DACs run at 48KHz only), sample-rate-converted back down to 44.1KHz, sent across the bus and into your wave file.
If you do an A-B comparison, you can easily detect with your ears (or graph in cooledit or soundforge) some differences in frequency response.
Voluntarily? I think you need to have that reading comprehension class again.
The Phase 2 trigger will be embedded in content. As soon as it is detected, your Phase 1 products will no longer rip content until you upgrade to the Phase 2 compliant version.
The trigger will come on every CD manufactured by SDMI member companies. If Napster and Gnutella are still around, then the trigger may well come in a pirated MP3 file.
Can you imagine the newsgroup and chat room postings? DON'T PLAY THE NEW MADONNA CD! IT'S GOT THE SDMI PHASE 2 TRIGGER!
Time for the 'Bring Slashdot Up To Speed Show!' SDMI is using Aris watermark technology for its phase 1 screening. Aris used to be a seperate company, but is now merged with Verance. I will quote from their feature list for you: * Transparency The presence of the audio watermark has been shown to have no discernible effect on the audio quality under studio listening conditions with expert listeners. * Survivability The watermark data is detectable after the audio has been subjected to a wide variety of distortions introduced by broadcast, audio compression algorithms and Internet distribution, home recording devices and studio manipulations. I now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting. -- Scalveg
So if someone downloads a song they have been looking for, and it turns out to be the wrong song or a low-quality encoding, they can leave negative feedback on the person who served the song. All Napster has to do is publish each person's rating next to the songs they provide Handy for the record companies trying to figure out which Napster users to concentrate their attention on too.
I keep hearing that Napster is a tool for struggling artists. If that is the case, I'm looking for the search tool that says 'Please enter search terms to look for a struggling artist playing the kind of music you like' and you know what, I don't see that feature.
You know what I see? I see my girlfriend searching for 'Britney Spears'.
A sample of 1 isn't good statistics, but I suspect if we do a larger survey, the results will be strikingly similar.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that cable and ISDN ISPs are trying to change their fee structure to make more money.
Of course they are. Just like a car salesman or a cellular phone plan, their goal is to make the deal as complex as possible to prevent you, the customer, from understanding just how you are getting ripped off.
Sadly, the solution is not to somehow force companies to provide service for flat fees, but to embrace the whipping boy of bandwidth hogs, pay-per-byte.
If you download 100KB, you pay $.0001. If you download 1MB, you pay $.001. If you download Suse 8.1, you pay $.60.
Of course, you say, that sucks because right now you are getting your Internet subsidized by the yuppies next door who only read Slate and Salon, and don't ever trade music or download linux distributions. Get used to it. You will get screwed, eventually, whether you notice it or not.
Paying for your bytes is the only path to useful competition in this market.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
So you are saying that users, customers, citizens have an OBLIGATION to prevent IT professionals from becoming 'devalued'? That doesn't sound like a free market to me.
Or are you saying that the the fact that the fact that compilers cost hundreds of dollars is going to INCREASE innovation?
Congratulations, you have now explained the faulty reason why YOU do not contribute to open source.
Now please continue and explain why public agencies should have their software choices dictated to them, or why people who believe that free software are tools that the world deserves to build bigger and better things instead of a way to make a few bucks should change their mind?
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
According to the article, the company that manufactures the machines is Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., who have been in the Florida papers for having a VP who has been indicted in an elections kickback scandal in Louisiana. You must read this URLon the subject!
Further research on the web suggests that an unwholesome number of people involved in selling election services and products have, not backgrounds in (say) accounting, but instead, backgrounds in (you guessed it) politics.
According to a St. Petersburg Times article:
"New York safemaker Jacob H. Myers invented a mechanical voting machine in 1892 and his company later became Automatic Voting Machines, which Sequoia acquired in 1984.
"[Sequoia is the] only company whose touch screen product has been successfully tested in an actual election in a large county -- the 2000 general election in Riverside County, Calif.
"[Sequoia] has installed other older systems in three Florida counties. Sales are down 90 percent after the 2000 election as local officials await federal funding before buying new equipment.
Sequoia is a subsidiary of Jefferson Smurfit Group, a leading manufacturer of paper products."
Jefferson Smurfit, who in reality only owns 15% of Sequoia, is primarily a manufacturer of paper and packing products, based in Ireland.
The remaining 85% of the company is owned by De La Rue of Hampshire, England, an enormous company of 7000+ employees with a background in secure printing (providing paper for over 150 national currencies, including of course the UK) and a strong interest (20%) in Camelot, the operator of the British lottery.
Other than not seeming to take their security as seriously as they ought to, DLAR seems like a squeaky-clean company, and probably has a bright future. Especially if they can keep U.S. elections secret from the population.
And you thought the Digital-Logic Microspace Mini-PCs were dumb to have on /.!
Globalization is the process by which the new computer-literate rulers, having pulled ourselves up from the struggling upper middle class by reading 'Wired', ascend to our rightful positions as Nietzschian supermen!
Hmm. That capability doesn't seem to be in the Phase 1 standard. A picture of the Phase 2 standard is beginning to emerge then. Detection of content that has been ripped from watermarked content and compressed with a perceptual encoding scheme is clearly part of it. I think we can safely assume a more detailed set of permission flags than the Phase 1 "no more copies". I wonder how companies that sell compressed content on the net like e-Music and Liquid Audio will get the "full" watermarks? Will their client software be able to watermark content? Perhaps it will have to have a different watermark. Maybe the differences will give people clues on how to hack the watermark. Interesting. And what's up with Napster? I hear Napster wants to charge a subscription fee now. If I pay money to Napster, and Napster pays the record companies for content, then I expect quality content with the "full" watermark. Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Hey you're right about the watermarks being to detect compression.
Now I will dissect the rest of your post.
How does such a watermark "break" MP3 files? Does adding macrovision to videotapes make older players unable to play new tapes? Hardly.
Speaking of Macrovision, it's as close as we have to a historical precedent for something like your assertion that "Even if the watermark is inaudible, people will think that they hear it. They will be dissatisfied, and will want unwatermarked music." I have to tell you, the vast, vast majority of videotape viewers have never heard of Macrovision, let alone started a movement to get un-macrovision content.
"If SDMI succeeds, and it becomes impossible to play a song once it has been compressed to MP3, then people will be forced to stop using MP3."
I'm still not getting it. As near as I can figure, the only way SDMI will 'break' MP3 is if every MP3 player both software and hardware is able to decode the watermark. Fortunately, the open source movement isn't likely to shell out the $$$$$ for SDMI membership and $$$$$$$ for the Verance watermark license fees.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
The message at the beginning of this thread is only one of about 20 messages posted about this article that say something to the effect of:
"Boy the SDMI sure is dumb. Don't they know their watermark will be removed as soon as the file is compressed into MP3. The reason I know this is [insert pseudo-logical justification based on hearsay and a world view lacking in both common sense and several laws of science]"
Can we please assume that before some of the biggest companies in the world began pouring money into watermarking technology, they included in their specification something like 'Watermark must be robust enough to survive a process performed on essentially every audio content available on the Internet'.
Thank you.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
"I wonder if we'll start seeing CDs with SDMI-only tracks (i.e. you get the whole album normally, but there are two extra bonus tracks that only play on an SDMI device)."
If you take a slide photograph, and you watermark the slide, how exactly do you prevent an existing slide projector from showing the watermarked media?
This is a very well written and eloquent plea. It's also completely wrong.
"The main purpose of SDMI watermarks is to detect if a watermarked song has been compressed."
The SDMI doesn't claim that this is their goal, the record companies have never expressed any interest in this, and the hacksdmi challenge doesn't indicate anything other than the purpose of watermarks being to encode information into a song that remains intact whether or not the song is compressed, or even passed through the analog domain.
I could continue pointing out the problems with your wild assumptions and predictions, but the fact that even non-compressed music will have the watermark information pretty much renders moot the rest of your message.
Have a great day,
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
The goal of corporations is to make money for their shareholders!
SURPRISE!
It really doesn't matter whether SDMI is hacked before or after music starts being released with either the Phase 1 or Phase 2 watermark. However, all the watermark can do is identify a track, and give some sort of guidelines of the rights the 'licensee' has. ** The whole plan hinges on software that pays attention to the watermark. ** SDMI's plan is simple: Divide and conquer. The 'big' software companies pay attention to the watermark because they are rich targets for lawsuits, plus they want to use popular (i.e. big five label) content. After the big software companies have signed up, SDMI can start going after the small players. Having a link to Gnutella on your site might make you a target! Let's get anonymous, reliable transfer and hosting for open source audio software going! Chris Owens San Carlos, CA
EAX is not like A3D. EAX is reverb. A3D was a proprietary API and hardware for 3D positional audio. In computer games. Implemented on sound cards. It makes me feel like a rebel to cheer for the underdog, too, but I think we should be fighting for open standards, not just turnover among proprietary corporate initiatives. PS: I could have sworn we were talking about MP3 players anyway. Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
The SDMI watermark is designed to survive being encoded into MP3 (and back, even).
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Unfortunately, I have transferred my CueCat license and hardware to my local Waste Disposal Service Provider. In case of recall, you may contact their corporate headquarters at: Allied Waste Industries 15880 N. Greenway-Hayden Loop Suite 100 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 Sincerely, Chris Owens San Carlos, CA
The samples they have available for downloading contain both a watermarked and clean copy of the content.
"Two of the samples in a triplet contain the same music, where one is encoded with a digital watermark and the other is a clean, unmarked version of the same music."
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Just a few notes.
CSS is encryption. You can speak of 'cracking' it in order to access the encrypted data.
SDMI is not encryption. It is a watermark. (SDMI does claim that some of the "Phase 2" technologies are not watermarks, but whatever they are calling it, the functionality would seem to be necessarily similar in concept.)
The SDMI challenge is not to decrypt music, the SDMI challenge is to remove the watermark.
However, having said that, 'crack' is such a good word, I will use it hereafter to mean 'removing the screening technology from the music file.'
SDMI has previously announced that the watermark is inaudible, and can survive transfer from PCM to frequency-band-based compression like MP3 and even to analog.
However, the samples for download are not watermarked with the current Verance "Phase 1" technology, but with contenders for the "Phase 2" technology.
There are samples both with and without the watermark, so comparing the two samples and statistically analyzing the differences would seem like the clear place to start.
It seems to me like there are several things that the hacker community could do to really poke SDMI in the eye with a sharp stick:
1) Crack their Phase 2 screener, tell them $10K isn't nearly enough, and have them fly you in to discuss your terms.
2) Crack their Phase 2 screener, and don't tell them about it until the Phase 2 "trigger" comes out in CDs. Then tell the world how to crack it.
3) Those are both hard. Note that SDMI doesn't provide any tools so that we can determine for ourselves whether we have cracked the screener. Instead, they ask us to upload the files with the screener removed to their site. You have gigs and gigs of audio samples. What are you waiting for? Start uploading!
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Maybe I'm the only one who caught this, but the article didn't say anything about giving power to the PEOPLE.
"An entirely new reality will emerge in cyberspace, ruled by a cognitive elite based in cities like Frankfurt, London, San Jose, Singapore and Tokyo."
That doesn't sound like democracy to me. Try looking up 'oligarchy' in your dictionary. Mine (http://www.m-w.com) says:
"a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes".
I guess if you feel you're likely to be part of the group in power and you're unashamedly greedy, you have found your new Bible.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
An entirely new reality will emerge in cyberspace, ruled by a cognitive elite based in cities like Frankfurt, London, San Jose, Singapore and Tokyo. Am I the only one that thinks this sounds like a rotten idea? Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
aha but even the SB Live! isn't perfect.
The audio sounds very good, but in fact it gets sample-rate-converted up from 44.1KHz, put into the mixer at 48KHz (because the AC97 DACs run at 48KHz only), sample-rate-converted back down to 44.1KHz, sent across the bus and into your wave file.
If you do an A-B comparison, you can easily detect with your ears (or graph in cooledit or soundforge) some differences in frequency response.
-- Scalveg
Voluntarily? I think you need to have that reading comprehension class again.
The Phase 2 trigger will be embedded in content. As soon as it is detected, your Phase 1 products will no longer rip content until you upgrade to the Phase 2 compliant version.
The trigger will come on every CD manufactured by SDMI member companies. If Napster and Gnutella are still around, then the trigger may well come in a pirated MP3 file.
Can you imagine the newsgroup and chat room postings? DON'T PLAY THE NEW MADONNA CD! IT'S GOT THE SDMI PHASE 2 TRIGGER!
Have a good evening!
--Scalveg
Time for the 'Bring Slashdot Up To Speed Show!' SDMI is using Aris watermark technology for its phase 1 screening. Aris used to be a seperate company, but is now merged with Verance. I will quote from their feature list for you: * Transparency The presence of the audio watermark has been shown to have no discernible effect on the audio quality under studio listening conditions with expert listeners. * Survivability The watermark data is detectable after the audio has been subjected to a wide variety of distortions introduced by broadcast, audio compression algorithms and Internet distribution, home recording devices and studio manipulations. I now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting. -- Scalveg
So if someone downloads a song they have been looking for, and it turns out to be the wrong song or a low-quality encoding, they can leave negative feedback on the person who served the song. All Napster has to do is publish each person's rating next to the songs they provide
Handy for the record companies trying to figure out which Napster users to concentrate their attention on too.
I keep hearing that Napster is a tool for struggling artists. If that is the case, I'm looking for the search tool that says 'Please enter search terms to look for a struggling artist playing the kind of music you like' and you know what, I don't see that feature.
You know what I see? I see my girlfriend searching for 'Britney Spears'.
A sample of 1 isn't good statistics, but I suspect if we do a larger survey, the results will be strikingly similar.