"Besides, why would I buy a cheap copy of Windows instead of the real thing? After all, you get what you pay for - or, more precisely, you pay for what you get. What am I not getting when I buy this cheap Windows clone? Clearly I'm not getting SOMETHING, or it would cost the same."
"If the computer thinks you're saying a command, it should disable output to the speakers. If I am talking to my computer then it should stop making its own noises. Otherwise, that's just rude."
The computer hasn't realised whether you are commanding it until about a second after you stop speaking. (Your silence is a trigger to process whatever has just been recorded.)
Wow, that's amazing! Now I just need to buy Enterprise or Ultimate (almost 2x more expensive in the UK) to get that amazing functionality which every Mac will have in a few months!
Microsoft seems to advertise all of its features together without indicating that only the most expensive version actually has this stuff.
To some extent, this is already true for Windows Vista: all the DVDs are from the same master (although they do look different on the non-data side). When you enter your product key, it picks the right version to install. After purchasing an "authorisation" from Anytime Upgrade, all you need to do to get Windows Mobility Centre, Tablet PC features, Media Centre, ability to join a domain and other features is to re-insert your original DVD. (Actually, I'm not sure even that is necessary.)
I always understood "crippleware" to mean that the restrictions on the free or demo version were ridiculous to the point of being unusable. Lack of a "save" feature is a common one.
No, it wouldn't. The five (ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred) people would just act as clueless as everybody else.
Worst of all, they would have to stop their normal lives because people would keep canvassing and "educating" them on issues. Say hello to your new parliament.
However, your new parliament will not be able to pass anything which could raise taxes, since the population always agrees overwhelmingly on that.
"What are the large practical problems with revoking player keys?"
A product recall and replacement, including a publicity campaign to advertise the recall. Either that, or risk facing a class action lawsuit and, of course, tarnishing your image. (You know those horror stories about AACS LA bricking your player? The people who write them would be falling over themselves if it actually happened once.)
"What makes you think that the windvd keys havn't been revoked? Do you have a movie that was mastered after the crack was made public?"
I thought that if the WinDVD keys were revoked, AACS LA (and Slashdot) (and Arstechnica) would have said so. That's far more interesting news than "AACS LA denies that AACS has a fundamental flaw." Also, I haven't heard about WinDVD offering a patch, although technically they don't need to offer any patch until new remastered discs are published.
"I don't know if this is what they do at the moment, but there is really nothing to stop them."
They haven't done that yet because no player was compromised. I agree that it is possible, and I suppose that the people who can afford HD discs are very likely to have a good connection to the internet once a month. (I'm not sure once a month is often enough, though.)
The problem with it (for Hollywood) is that if an old version is revoked, there is still a massive library of discs whose title keys can be extracted. As you said, the software won't suddenly stop working, it will just stop playing new discs. I also imagine that the cost of remastering all (or most) of the discs that are *currently* out and being sold, every month, is high.
Perhaps software players will build in the "functionality" of bricking themselves (for all discs) as soon as they encounter a disc whose title key they cannot decode. They will also refuse to run under VMs (if they don't already). However, I know of some stuff which can restore your disc to a known state with a reboot. (That allows somebody with a bricked software player to unbrick it and try a different disc.)
Basically, DRM cannot stop piracy for another 3 years... quote me on it.:-)
To give a bit more detail: later on, if it went to court, BlueJ can show their prior art. If the court realises that it is valid prior art (which it clearly is - just look at the screenshots) then they can revoke all the claims except for #18. Then, Microsoft would have a patent on BlueJ's idea in the field of.NET.
Consumers know that pirates can't send stuff down the power lines (or change pressed discs) to stop their movies from playing. They will want a refund, but I suspect (if a player is ever actually revoked) they will only receive refunds for the discs, not the players. They are also likely to just receive equally useless replacements.
"Your Foobar 1000 will play discs produced in 2006 and 2007. It ceases to work for discs produced between February 2007 until you buy a disc produced a few months later that happens to contains some code that query the player whether it's a Foobar 1000... and if so, to automatically/silently patch the firmware. Then all your discs work again.
That's a good thing for the user, and a bad thing for the industry, because as soon as you've got a firmware patch on a DVD, the obvious thing for an enterprising hacker to do is to put his own firmware patch on his own DVD"
An enterprising hacker *with the private keys of the AACS group* in order to sign their new firmware. Unlikely.
"I've read the spec and I think you are wrong. Every player has what amounts to a serial number in rom, and a corresponing key. "
Yet again... the spec doesn't reflect current practice - for software players.
I don't know whether all hardware players (of a certain model) share the player key (because it's difficult to see on the outside) but all the discs/downloads of a certain version of WinDVD and PowerDVD share the same player key.
One day, maybe AACS will move to individual keys for every player. Until then, they will face difficulties revoking player keys.
"AACS has such a large keyspace that every single player can get its own individual key.
AACS also allows cheap and secure revokation of just a single player key.
If the entire production run was flawed then all 10000 playerkeys can be revoked at the same cost as revoking a single player.
There is (sadly) no hostage situation possible with AACS."
It's true that every player manufactured (hardware, CD, or download) could be given a different key, but currently, each version of the software and each production revision of the hardware gets a different key. This *does* create a hostage situation.
Besides, there are serious practical problems with revoking keys - whether it's one individual player sold, a production run of players that all share the same key, or a production run of players with different keys. The only "easy" thing to deal with is software players.
If AACS thinks their system is so secure (see their recent statement), why don't they revoke the player key of WinDVD? As it is, they haven't taken that action, so new HD-DVDs and BluRay discs can still be copied.
I see a lot of people faulting this person over his comparison to chess.
"pitched somewhere between Checkers and Chess but probably not as deceptively complex as Go"
He (she?) obviously meant it in terms of the simplicity of the rules, and perhaps the amount of thought required for each turn. He doesn't expect it to become the next chess.
That said, if he hasn't even played the game, the whole discussion is pointless.
He should also try to explain the game to somebody with less patience than a wife. Some critical friends, for example.
It only plays unprotected HD-DVDs. You take protected (AACS'd) HD-DVDs, use BackupHDDVD, and then you can play the resulting unscrambled files in Videolan.
It's time to say "scrambled" instead of "encrypted"...
"As opposed to the company that charged you to play dvd on they're media player"
You mean Microsoft? The technology to play DVDs (CSS) has license fees. Business users don't need to pay the license fees (by not buying the functionality), home users do. Seems reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
"And yes, they would be able to, since if they voted 90% to raise taxes and the population only voted 60%, it would be passed."
The population would probably vote about 5% to raise taxes, and 95% not to.
Actually, the Windows Update (or is that Microsoft Update?) in Vista no longer runs inside IE.
Also, Automatic Updates on XP doesn't (as far as I know) use ActiveX or IE.
"Besides, why would I buy a cheap copy of Windows instead of the real thing? After all, you get what you pay for - or, more precisely, you pay for what you get. What am I not getting when I buy this cheap Windows clone? Clearly I'm not getting SOMETHING, or it would cost the same."
Damn right. Firefox, Apache, Perl, bash, vim, emacs - they're all absolutely awful!
No, there's nothing wrong with them - they just cost less then their competitors.
"If the computer thinks you're saying a command, it should disable output to the speakers. If I am talking to my computer then it should stop making its own noises. Otherwise, that's just rude."
The computer hasn't realised whether you are commanding it until about a second after you stop speaking. (Your silence is a trigger to process whatever has just been recorded.)
Wow, that's amazing! Now I just need to buy Enterprise or Ultimate (almost 2x more expensive in the UK) to get that amazing functionality which every Mac will have in a few months!
Microsoft seems to advertise all of its features together without indicating that only the most expensive version actually has this stuff.
To some extent, this is already true for Windows Vista: all the DVDs are from the same master (although they do look different on the non-data side). When you enter your product key, it picks the right version to install. After purchasing an "authorisation" from Anytime Upgrade, all you need to do to get Windows Mobility Centre, Tablet PC features, Media Centre, ability to join a domain and other features is to re-insert your original DVD. (Actually, I'm not sure even that is necessary.)
I always understood "crippleware" to mean that the restrictions on the free or demo version were ridiculous to the point of being unusable. Lack of a "save" feature is a common one.
No, it wouldn't. The five (ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred) people would just act as clueless as everybody else.
Worst of all, they would have to stop their normal lives because people would keep canvassing and "educating" them on issues. Say hello to your new parliament.
However, your new parliament will not be able to pass anything which could raise taxes, since the population always agrees overwhelmingly on that.
"5. The operating system of claim 1, wherein the at least one add-on module enables installation of a non-certified application program."
Either:
1) You pay more for software because all your software has to be certified by Microsoft, or
2) You let Microsoft take away your right and sell it back to you - i.e. you pay for this add-on module, or
3) You crack it and live in fear of Microsoft pulling the trigger
That's google.com in Chinese, not google.cn in censored Chinese.
No wonder you can get Wikipedia.
"What are the large practical problems with revoking player keys?"
:-)
A product recall and replacement, including a publicity campaign to advertise the recall. Either that, or risk facing a class action lawsuit and, of course, tarnishing your image. (You know those horror stories about AACS LA bricking your player? The people who write them would be falling over themselves if it actually happened once.)
"What makes you think that the windvd keys havn't been revoked? Do you have a movie that was mastered after the crack was made public?"
I thought that if the WinDVD keys were revoked, AACS LA (and Slashdot) (and Arstechnica) would have said so. That's far more interesting news than "AACS LA denies that AACS has a fundamental flaw." Also, I haven't heard about WinDVD offering a patch, although technically they don't need to offer any patch until new remastered discs are published.
"I don't know if this is what they do at the moment, but there is really nothing to stop them."
They haven't done that yet because no player was compromised. I agree that it is possible, and I suppose that the people who can afford HD discs are very likely to have a good connection to the internet once a month. (I'm not sure once a month is often enough, though.)
The problem with it (for Hollywood) is that if an old version is revoked, there is still a massive library of discs whose title keys can be extracted. As you said, the software won't suddenly stop working, it will just stop playing new discs. I also imagine that the cost of remastering all (or most) of the discs that are *currently* out and being sold, every month, is high.
Perhaps software players will build in the "functionality" of bricking themselves (for all discs) as soon as they encounter a disc whose title key they cannot decode. They will also refuse to run under VMs (if they don't already). However, I know of some stuff which can restore your disc to a known state with a reboot. (That allows somebody with a bricked software player to unbrick it and try a different disc.)
Basically, DRM cannot stop piracy for another 3 years... quote me on it.
To give a bit more detail: later on, if it went to court, BlueJ can show their prior art. If the court realises that it is valid prior art (which it clearly is - just look at the screenshots) then they can revoke all the claims except for #18. Then, Microsoft would have a patent on BlueJ's idea in the field of .NET.
Consumers know that pirates can't send stuff down the power lines (or change pressed discs) to stop their movies from playing. They will want a refund, but I suspect (if a player is ever actually revoked) they will only receive refunds for the discs, not the players. They are also likely to just receive equally useless replacements.
Now that we know some real title keys, somebody can play 20 different movies, take 20 memory dumps, and compare them to find the title keys.
"Your Foobar 1000 will play discs produced in 2006 and 2007. It ceases to work for discs produced between February 2007 until you buy a disc produced a few months later that happens to contains some code that query the player whether it's a Foobar 1000... and if so, to automatically/silently patch the firmware. Then all your discs work again.
That's a good thing for the user, and a bad thing for the industry, because as soon as you've got a firmware patch on a DVD, the obvious thing for an enterprising hacker to do is to put his own firmware patch on his own DVD"
An enterprising hacker *with the private keys of the AACS group* in order to sign their new firmware. Unlikely.
Look at BD+.
"I've read the spec and I think you are wrong.
Every player has what amounts to a serial number in rom, and a corresponing key. "
Yet again... the spec doesn't reflect current practice - for software players.
I don't know whether all hardware players (of a certain model) share the player key (because it's difficult to see on the outside) but all the discs/downloads of a certain version of WinDVD and PowerDVD share the same player key.
One day, maybe AACS will move to individual keys for every player. Until then, they will face difficulties revoking player keys.
I was impressed by your analysis at first, but then I realised:
"Their friends in the Asian device production plants that make all these motherboards slip them copies of the current keys."
Each (individual) motherboard gets a different key.
"AACS has such a large keyspace that every single player can get its own individual key.
AACS also allows cheap and secure revokation of just a single player key.
If the entire production run was flawed then all 10000 playerkeys can be revoked at the same cost as revoking a single player.
There is (sadly) no hostage situation possible with AACS."
It's true that every player manufactured (hardware, CD, or download) could be given a different key, but currently, each version of the software and each production revision of the hardware gets a different key. This *does* create a hostage situation.
Besides, there are serious practical problems with revoking keys - whether it's one individual player sold, a production run of players that all share the same key, or a production run of players with different keys. The only "easy" thing to deal with is software players.
If AACS thinks their system is so secure (see their recent statement), why don't they revoke the player key of WinDVD? As it is, they haven't taken that action, so new HD-DVDs and BluRay discs can still be copied.
I see a lot of people faulting this person over his comparison to chess.
"pitched somewhere between Checkers and Chess but probably not as deceptively complex as Go"
He (she?) obviously meant it in terms of the simplicity of the rules, and perhaps the amount of thought required for each turn. He doesn't expect it to become the next chess.
That said, if he hasn't even played the game, the whole discussion is pointless.
He should also try to explain the game to somebody with less patience than a wife. Some critical friends, for example.
It only plays unprotected HD-DVDs. You take protected (AACS'd) HD-DVDs, use BackupHDDVD, and then you can play the resulting unscrambled files in Videolan.
It's time to say "scrambled" instead of "encrypted"...
It's Sony. They get to:
a x
1) HDCP protect their own movies playing on the PS3
2) Sell their Sony Bravias to people burned by the requirement
Look at the other post on this story from somebody who describes Windows MCE's ridiculous "protection" of analog content.
Also: http://davenet.scripting.com/2001/04/30/strategyT
In the UK, it's the Data Protection Act.
"Problaley when one of these content protection schemes goes haywire due to a bug or bad design and prevents them from using leagally obtained media."
You mean DVD region protection, Macrovision, StarForce, the Sony rootkit, WMP10 (doesn't allow license transfers)?
Consumers take it happily.
"As opposed to the company that charged you to play dvd on they're media player"
You mean Microsoft? The technology to play DVDs (CSS) has license fees. Business users don't need to pay the license fees (by not buying the functionality), home users do. Seems reasonable.
Why would the record companies want to make CD ripping eve esier and more reliable?
Pandora saves unencrypted MP3s in a temporary folder when you use their service.
The only hurdles to using them are:
1) the files are deleted as soon as you close Pandora (so copy them while Pandora is still playing)
2) the files must be renamed to "blah.mp3" instead of "blah"
They've been playing music from major record labels for a long time now. (I've heard REM and Rufus Wainwright at least)
You can also put in an artist's name and the first track it plays will be some song by the artist.