Building the AACS Next-Gen Copy Protection Scheme 491
Anonymous Slashdotter writes "The IEEE Spectrum has a piece that discusses the proposed encryption scheme for the upcoming HD-DVD standard. 'The key to the spirit of compromise is an agreement that the AACS specification will allow consumers to move the data on an optical disc to the various devices they own, including video servers and portable video players, either directly or via a home network.' AACS will use a so-called strong key, the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard approved by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology."
So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:3, Funny)
I was wondering how they industry would know what player it was that was compromised. Sounds like a bunch of suits have been sold some snake oil.
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:2)
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
First indication was the word [well acronym] "DRM". Just because it uses AES doesn't mean it's secure. It's very easy to use AES insecurely [hint: constant key in ECB mode...]
Likely another 17 yr old from some europe'like nation will break this and "deacss" tools will appear on the net.
Why don't the media producers focus on more talent and less "blockbuster stars".
Instead of paying one star 20 million for a picture why not pay 200 actors 100,000 for several movies? Duh cuz that would make sense...[well not for the self-centered power-tripping millionaire fake people].
Tom
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:2)
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally what I look for in a movie is depth. Superficially weak dialog [re: 99% of TV shit] annoys the hell out of me, even if it's someone of super-star status like Keano, whoa.
So if you take some "no-name" talented actor and put them in a movie with some real depth to it [even if it's a comedy] then people should be able to enjoy the experience.
I mean, you can't honestly tell me you saw any of the Matrix movies for anything more than the special effects. The story is very weak about as a deep as a Crest toothpaste commercial.
Tom
Dialogue. (Score:3, Funny)
Or Scrubs, and the little rants that Dr. Cox goes on. (A doctor I know assures me that the portrayal of hospital life in Scrubs is far, far more accurate than that in ER. Go figure.)
Are there any other shows I should fetch for their scintillating dialogue? Please don't tell me "CSI". I've been refusing to watch "CSI" ever since the on
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, you do that. And I'll pay 199 actors $101,000 for several movies. And then my competitor (and yours) will pay 198 actors $102,000 -- wash, rinse, repeat. Guess who is going to get the better actors over the long run? The guy who pays the most. Welcome to capitalism. Now go enroll in Econ 101 so you can follow this out yourself. It's important, trust me.
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are, in market terms, a limitless number of actors/actresses. Just judging by the number of people who "wanna make it", it's pretty easy to see that supply outweighs demands. This isn't just true for movies and plays, it seems to be true for ALL the fine arts. In fact, that's one of the reasons why we have starving artists. There's just so damn many artists out there.
Repeat after me: if you have a commodity skill set, you a
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:5, Informative)
Bingo! I like your style. In a perfect world, the market decides the $$$ worth of a job, and I think we all can agree than John Travolta, Collin Farell, Hillary Duff, Sandra Bullock, Jeniffer Aniston and all those other frauds deserve a big fat realty bitch-slap.
Philip Dick lived in poverty and ate fvcking dogfood when writing so that idiots like Tom Cruise and Ah-nuld could make millions off of PKD's plots.
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:3, Interesting)
PKD died before his first movie was optioned. My point still stands.
You cannot possibly argue that Brad Pitt's salary is justified compared to say, a teacher or a garbage man. (Pull your kids out of school or don't empty your garbage for a week and see what I mean).
Are Hopkins and Washington your idea of good actors? That point means two different things depending.
I'm a cinema snob, I admit it. And I laugh at how people on this board (not you) clai
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:3, Insightful)
If stupid 10x larger blockbusters didn't overshadow [in terms of mindspace via advertising] the indy films they wouldn't do as well.
Tom
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:4, Insightful)
If Jack Nicholson, Robin Williams and Nichole Kidman in a "verysexy" scene movie was $60 and the third remake of "I was a nut" by 5 poorly paid actors was $4, then, some people would spring for the talent, and the masses would go fo the $4 movie.
But if enough went to the $60, they would be able to pay JN, RW and NK 20 mil each. And I guess you'd really have a killer movie.
It happens in DVD sales. Really good movies with good actors never dip below the $20 mark. the crappy stuff falls to 7.99.
The movie theatres are at fault here. They should demand-price the movies.
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:2)
However, that still leaves a major problem. So, you know that the key was stolen from a Sony DVD player - do you now make every Sony DVD player useless for playing new movies? What would the cost of the resulting recalls be?
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. From TFA:
The basic idea in recovering from cracking is to make a compromised player key obsolete. Compromised players could continue to play old discs, but not new releases. And crackers would have to start all over again.
Consumers are really going to be interested in continuously buying new players or upgrading their current firmware to play new realeases because someone broke through their brand of player. Save for the fact that once someone breaks it once, it will just get easier to do it the second time.
I can see how this would solve the cracking problem entirely. Consumers have the money, thus, consumers have the power. The simple fact is, people won't buy a disc that won't play in their player -- At least I'm not about to new player to play their new disc every time this happens.
In case they think up some scheme that means I won't have to pay anything for the upgraded player: my time is as valuable to me as money, so I had also better not have to spend any of that on getting my machine to work again either.
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I can see how the consumer wins in that scenario.
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:3, Interesting)
(c) Consumers hear from friends that Buddy Cop Movie #83 can be downloaded from the intarweb, and join the P2P masses. Vow never to pay for another physical DVD again.
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:3, Informative)
The data is encrypted using key "A", but can be decrypted with key "B" (similar to RSA). However, in this case "B" is computed via a function that has inputs "A" and "C", where "C" can be an one of a very large keyspace. And, "A" can't be determined by "B". This allows you to have a unique "B" decryption key for every player.
In other words, you have:
* encrypt(A)
* decrypt(B)
* B = hash_of (A, C), for any valid value of C
* C = on
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is that the "key" is little more than a hardware serial number, that the decoder is a program on the disc that uses a fixed decryption key, also on the disc, and that the program includes a list of "keys" (serial numbers) on which it should refuse to play.
Even with such a scheme, though, it could be broken by:
- A. reversing the algorithm used to detect whether a s/n is valid (which isn't usually that hard once you figure out how the code that verifies it works), thus allowing Linux to randomly pick a different key for each playback if desired within the entire potential key space
- B. altering the program in-flight to remove the stolen key from the rejection list (also probably easy unless the list is encrypted, and even then, the key has to be on the disc somewhere unless it's based on a common hardware key, in which case you're back to the original DVD situation which still wasn't hard to break)
- C. simply reading the decryption key and using a standard AES algorithm to decrypt the contents instead of the program.
Any mechanism in which you refuse to play if your hardware matches a particular key must either involve the hardware being trusted to verify its unique key against a list or must require the hardware to "phone home" to the MPAA and get the real decryption key based on its serial number. I don't see the public accepting either of these. "What do you mean I have to wait two whole minutes to start playing the DVD and I can't be on the phone?"Long story short, the MPAA is being sold a lot of snake oil. It's too bad that they're too technologically clueless to realize it.
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slight correction:
Long story short, the MPAA is being sold a lot of snake oil. We are very fortunate that they're too technologically clueless to realize it.
The keys appear to be symmetric (Score:3, Interesting)
The key appears to be symmetric; it's just blazingly complicated to calculate the actual device key ... and allows for multiple derivative keys from a master key stored in the hardware of the device. Masks included in the decode area on the disk provide the path to get the unique key to decode the disk... which (from a 30 minute review of the technical document) could theoretically(?) be used to provide different derivative keys per disc, so even if you c
Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? (Score:2)
Imagine this: Vendor sells a million players. Suddenly, (oopsie!) the key becomes "compromised". Now the customers have to buy new players, all over again!
Here's what I'd love to see: a no-name Chinese outfit makes 10MM players for, say, Sony; and then key gets "compromised" (wink wink). Suddenly, outfit gets an order for 10MM more! Yay!! Sure, the customers won't buy Sony again; but they'll probably buy some other brand, again made by one of these no-name outfi
mpeg4 (Score:4, Insightful)
What's going to happen is simple: the HD-DVD thing isn't going to take off; not if you have to keep upgrading keys all the time. Joe and Jane Average are probably going to stick with the regular DVD from Netflix, Blockbuster, or whomever, knowing that it will work every time.
If the new formats can be gotten to "work every time", perhaps by having the keys downloaded from the internet or something like that, then they might do better. Anytime you make something too complicated, though, it's bound to fail. Look at 3D movies with those uncomfortable cardboard 3D glasses. Where have they gone? Look at DVD-Audio or the SACD? Going nowhere fast. Lossless compression formats from iTunes or other services? We're not really there yet - if people are willing to settle for mp3 or aac quality sound, why would they want to spend extra money on a DVD-audio quality sound?
The movie industry risks entering a situation not unlike the music industry finds itself in today. Many of the same symptoms are there; the same attempt to control is there; the same low-quality, high-budget, intellectually lacking content is being pumped out. A new format that is harder and more expensive to use just isn't going to cut it. It would not be surprising to see mpeg4 take the place of mp3 files, with people cramming movie after mpeg4 movie onto a DVD5 or perhaps a DVD9 that they either downloaded from a legitimate service, or if no such legitimate services happen to spring up in the near future, a p2p network.
The popularity of iTunes and other legitimate music download services goes to show that consumers don't care so much about the absolute highest sound quality, but that they care more about convenience, selection, ease of use, accessibility, and things like that. These new formats are probably more or less doomed to not do as well as they could.
These new disks, though, the Blu-Ray especially, these are going to be GREAT for backing up systems, documents, and also for businesses to do backups and things like that. The technology is awesome; what Hollywood is trying to do with it is the part that isn't going to work very well.
Heh... (Score:5, Funny)
I can see the ads in the theaters already. "I'm John Weiner and I design ciphers for the movie industry. Downloading movies hurts me."
Re:Heh... (Score:3, Informative)
Not that its really feasible to make an unbreakable encoding for movies. Allowing the user to have the player in their house is like giving the British an enigma machine encased in concrete during WW2; they can't immediately break your codes, but its not like they're going to refrain from cracking it out and using it.
Ladies And Gentlemen... (Score:3, Funny)
*makes sure his copies of john are all up to date*
Re:Ladies And Gentlemen... (Score:2)
More likely, someone will dissassemble a player and read the key out of an eprom. Most likely, once it's been done for one player, it will be relatively trivial to get a bunch of keys from different brands.
Personally, I won't be buying into this technology until I can play the discs with MythTV.
May I ask a simple question? (Score:2, Interesting)
What's next, encrypted books, newspapers, and magazines?
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:May I ask a simple question? (Score:2)
Actually, they really want to move on to the next step, encrypting your ears and eyeballs. After that, the brain.
Re:May I ask a simple question? (Score:2, Interesting)
What's next, encrypted books, newspapers, and magazines?
Stallman seemed to think so, eight years ago [gnu.org].
Distribution control (Score:5, Insightful)
The movie business is going to hit the same wall as the audio business did, and the solution the audio business came up with (well, more accurately, were forced into) was to make the downloading of songs relatively cheap (under $1). As soon as it's not worth it to go through the hassle of copying the data, it is once again a viable product. At the moment, the movies are not viable products...
Simon.
Especially considering (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Especially considering (Score:3, Informative)
how?
on this website we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Re:Especially considering (Score:2)
Whats always confused me is that one channel that has the "DVD-on-TV" specials, why the hell would I want you to lower the quality of your broadcast to DVD quality?? I don't get it.
Re:Especially considering (Score:3, Interesting)
Economics isn't the problem for the movie industry (Score:5, Insightful)
It was only when DVDs came out that the industry's policy shifted to issuing new releases priced for sale. That's because there was a guy in the industry somewhere that convinced everybody that a durable media format (vs. shoddy VHS tapes) that contained a high-quality version of the movie was something a large number of people would be willing to own, rather than just rent. And he was right! People are buying DVDs in droves. DVD players were adopted by the mainstream public faster than any other electronic gadget in history, from what I've heard.
What I'm saying is, this theory that people download AVIs because DVDs cost too much just doesn't ring true. DVD sales have been phenomenal. If you think there's a DVD piracy problem in this country, think again -- check out the situation in Asia if you want to see a DVD piracy problem. I think people download AVIs because they're there. They can get the AVI before the actual movie comes out, and they can get the AVI for free for a movie that they probably wouldn't have bothered to buy, or even walk down to the video store to rent.
I mean, come on -- you can still rent DVDs. Are you honestly telling me that a price point of $3 for three nights (or whatever Blockbuster is doing right now) is more than most Americans are willing to pay to see some random shitty Hollywood movie? Of course it's not. But downloading AVIs, for many people, is just too easy.
Try before you buy (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't sit in front of your computer monitor along with your wife and kids to watch a divx movie on your media player. Generally divx users are 20-30 yo's, or even kids who downloaded the latest anime episode.
So who gets the benefit of a downloaded movie? ONE person per family. If the movie wasn't good, the guy wouldn't watch it along with his g/f, wife, kids/friends/etc.
So what does this mean: "Try before you buy". Simple. Here I'd be questioned: "Oh come on, what perso
Re:Distribution control (Score:2, Insightful)
You have the luxury of (usually) having the first cinema screenings of films and the first releases to DVD. You also don't get the shitty $1 = £1 currency conversion that the media companies think is perfectly acceptable.
I personally don't think I'm getting value for money (£30) every time I take my wife and three kids to a cinema filled with chavs and twats that don't know where the "off" button is on their mobile phone.
It's not just
Re:Distribution control (Score:2)
At one time, people were usually quiet while the film was playing. Now it sounds like a childrens playgroup all the way through the film.
The cinema is now usually half empty... probably not a coincidence.
If I want to see a film I'll download it just to avoid that, then buy the DVD later (usually 6 months after it's been on at the cinema).
Re:Distribution control (Score:2)
Where I come from, so is Wal-Mart. And they have more rare and hilarious movies in their $5 bin that you could find on any bittorrent site.
Re:Distribution control (Score:2)
How is this gonna stop large scale piracy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mabey I'm wrong?
Re:How is this gonna stop large scale piracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't. There is nothing you can do to stop a copy like that unless they figure out how to put data on the disk in an area that can't be burned to (say like the disks serial number or information type on a CDR/RW or DVDR/RW). Even then, the proffesional piraters will probably still figure out a way since they use the EXACT SAME EQUIPMENT that hollywood uses to make their own disks.
Re:How is this gonna stop large scale piracy? (Score:2)
Think about it. Does Microsoft's Product Activation stop real counterfeiting? Nope, Asia is filled with nearly free copies of Windows XP.
Does the music industry's attempts to stop CD ripping stop files from showing up on P2P? Nope. The Velvet Underground's CD had DRM, but it was widely available on all P2P applications weeks before the CD was even released.
Does CSS stop bootleg movies from being sold? Nope, once again, cites
Everyone re-encodes anyways. (Score:2, Insightful)
Bah (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Bah (Score:4, Interesting)
If it comes down to MPAA vs. [the set of people who are unwilling to use closed, propreitary DRM systems], MPAA is gonna win.
They can live without the 3% of their market that's made up of hardcore nerds, but the nerds probably won't live without the 25% or more of their entertainment that comes from mainstream media distributors.
I want the same thing you want, but if you think you can just write them off, you're sadly mistaken.
Re:Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Then explain why Divx failed [edn.com].
Re:Bah (Score:3, Informative)
The only reason we can watch DVDs on Linux (and other OSS) today is due to some clever hacking that I'm sure was/would now be illegal under the DMCA. I thought it was purely a matter of recovering keys from a faulty player, but Andreas Bogk [cryptome.org] explains it was more complicated than that.
Unlike most people here, I think it's entirely possible the HD DVD standard will remain unbroken for a
Feature? (Score:5, Funny)
Copy protection my butt (Score:5, Interesting)
What I mean is, the problem isn't preventing people from copying a Blockbuster DVD, it's more a problem of preventing one guy, dedicated enough, from making a unencrypted copy and posting it on P2P. Once that's done, the cat's out of the bag and the copy-protection scheme will just annoy legit users. All the others will download the free copy.
So, what will happen is, when Joe Pirate wants to make a copy, instead of just sticking the disk in the drive and wait, he'll make himself some setup to capture the video from the DVD player and he'll re-encode the video. Added cost: a capture card and a cable. Period. And once the captured video is on the net, the game's over. And I'm ready to wager there's an awful lot of people out there who hate the *AAs enough to take the (small) trouble of doing exactly that, just to shaft them.
Copying your butt (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Copy protection my butt (Score:3, Insightful)
Much like the challenge today of posting the highest quality captures of currently running movies, whomever has the best rig and knows an insider to grab a copy of the disc shortly before release will go to extrordinary lengths. Like today, and as it's been in "warez" since the 80's Apple ][ and C64 games on BBSs, they'll get to promote their sil
Re:Copy protection my butt (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Copy protection my butt (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Copy protection my butt (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Copy protection my butt (Score:3, Insightful)
If most else fails, I will film my own TV screen with my camcorder, the line from headphone-out plugged into it. Plain old cinema-piracy-style. And *then* put it on the internet or make a million copies and sell it cheap through illegal thrift stores. How do you prevent this? Mandatory watermark detection for all camcorders? What if I import them directly from China, Mexico, Russia or else? Arrest me for using illegal media equipment? Need t
Realistically, this can't work. (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt that the industry is foolish enough to force consumers to upgrade their televisions to support some form of signal encryption, therefore this must fail.
Re:Realistically, this can't work. (Score:3, Insightful)
And where can you buy an analog HD component capture card?
I doubt that the industry is foolish enough to force consumers to upgrade their televisions to support some form of signal encryption
They did; it's called HDCP. If your HDTV doesn't support HDCP, you'll only get an analog signal.
Re:Realistically, this can't work. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Realistically, this can't work. (Score:2)
I'm just arguing for high quality encodes, because there is absolutely no way of preventing low quality encodes. The cat is, as has been said, out of the bag; we all have VCRs, and camcorders.
Re:Realistically, this can't work. (Score:2)
How hard would that be, really? And it only has to be done once, unless they can kill the P2P networks, also...
Same old, same old. (Score:5, Insightful)
The authorized user and the attacker are one and the same. You can't protect against that, not with cryptography.
Re:Same old, same old. (Score:2)
How many keys to they plan on issuing? Unless they plan on having an individual key for every individual player, they'll be in trouble when a key gets out. If they want a billion keys out there, then they'll need about a gigabyte of disk space just to store the session keys for each disk..
Encryption? (Score:2)
And if it doesn't have to decrypt on its own, once I move it out of the encrypted realm, I can move it anywhere. P2P, torrent, whatever.
Or will this trigger a new round of hardware buying. Only an approved, decryption capable, iPod can be used...
FTA, this appears to be true.
"The basic idea in recovering from cracking is to make a compromised player key obsolete. Compromised players could continue to play old discs, but not new r
Such effort to prevent such an easy workaround... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently they just don't get that people - who seem willing to buy cheap videos recorded on consumer cameras in movie theaters - are going to be completely unable to see the difference in a re-recorded playback of what they see on T.V.
Folks - if you're too stupid to realize the network effect will swamp the casual copyright infringement, do something simple: don't release it. That's your only option.
Re:Such effort to prevent such an easy workaround. (Score:2)
And exactly what length is that?
Last I heard, the royalty for macrovision is about 5 cents per disc.
It was news (here on slashdot some time ago) when the 2nd Happry Potter disc was released without macrovision enabled (just a single flag on the disc) to save the royalty cost. Many, many millions of copies sold within the opening days. That was the e
Re:Such effort to prevent such an easy workaround. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't play discs 3 and 4 (the appendices) of the Two Towers Extended Release on my standards-compliant Zenith DVD player, because of a botched copy-protection attempt by the manufacturer.
If this problem keeps getting worse, the number of movies I buy will continue its asymtotic approach of zero.
What I want to know is (Score:3, Funny)
This is a social issue (Score:4, Insightful)
We can throw all the technology and litigation we want at the problem, but it won't be solved until we come up with a social solution.
Re:This is a social issue (Score:3, Insightful)
And therefore insolvable.
A question for the crypto-experts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A question for the crypto-experts (Score:2)
They'd be insane to put the key into executables (again...). As to trying to remove the key from hardware, Google for "tamper resistant" and browse Ross Anderson's papers. From the MPAA's point of view, tamper resistance is a hard property to achieve. From the basement hacker's point of view, tamper resistant hardware is pretty hard to crack. Have a look through Andrew Huang's "Hacking the XBox" to get a feel for the difficulty.
Analog Hole Anyone? (Score:2)
1) Video recording off a flat-screen TV. Right refresh rate and proper camera setup make this one darn near impossible to defeat as long as the camera is going to work in any reasonable setting.
2) Grab it off the RCA leads that are likely to be attached to the player to allow it to still talk to the large number of TVs and other A/V equipment that is out there.
3) Develop a player that doesn't "honor" the bloc
Last paragraph sums it up well (Score:2)
"They are living in a fantasy world," he concludes.
Nice article (Score:4, Insightful)
In any case, I am less worried about the crypto, which doesn't affect video quality. Fingerprinting of video and audio with watermarks can affect quality; in copy protection circles, you'll see iffy technologies proposed simply because they "can't hurt" to throw them in---but then some of them are detectable by golden eyes/ears. IMHO even that much quality loss is not worth whatever security a watermark offers.
Caj
For androids only? (Score:2)
Like this fellow? [tripod.com]
Goldeneye? (Score:2)
in copy protection circles, you'll see iffy technologies proposed simply because they "can't hurt" to throw them in---but then some of them are detectable by golden eyes/ears.
Shh! Please don't give Sony/MGM an idea for the next James Bond film.
Also for Blu-Ray? (Score:2)
Optical disks? Pffft (Score:2)
They must be on crack... (Score:2, Insightful)
There will be a lot of time to crack this (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not like bandwidth is fast enough that there is huge demand for slinging around high definition 4 GB movies. Most discs are ripped and compressed to around 700 MB. It's going to be years before there's any demand to rip the new format.
Worry not.... (Score:2, Funny)
At what point does it become (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't go after the hardware and software, you go after the criminals. The *AAs are treating the population the way the government treats us via the war on drugs: irresponsible and guilty.
The hard costs of a DVD and all its sexy packaging? A dollar. The value of the IP (how badly peopl
Accept it and move on **AA (Score:2)
When, exactly will the "industry" get that message? I wonder which eats more money? Letting petty personal copies fly about at random on the net, or buying politicians to write laws, designing ever more ridiculous measures and etc? These measures do nothing to curb hard-core counterfeiting which is th
impossible thing (Score:2)
This Too Shall Pass (Score:3, Insightful)
"It is not a matter of if--it is a matter of when. As long as I have the technology in my living room to watch it for myself, I can modify the system to extract the video. They can make it hard, but they can't make it impossible."
How true. In other words, a lock only keeps an honest man honest, a thief will find a way to pick the lock and steal what you have.
Seemingly ever since there have been personal computers, there have been one form or another of copy protection. Usage such as backup copies (critical in the floppy days, nearly as much so with CDs and DVDs) have always been looked down upon by the content providers, and at the end of the day, all of the barricades that they have thrown at the user have eventually been thwarted and bypassed. Now comes HD-DVD and the same principle. I suppose some never learn from the past.
Working against the encryption is the simple fact that on the average, computers get more and more powerful (for a given price point), and that their encryption must remain a relative constant due to compatibility. That said, it is only a matter of time before the encryption is overwhelmed and utterly defeated. This will happen again, always has, and always will. One only has to look at the DirecTV versus the signal pirates to see that. Coupled with human nature, that is, to show and share a "dirty little secret" -- disaster for the encryption advocate. After all, are theyu going to disable dozens of models of players, and disable their own market in the process, not to mention alienating the hell out of their customers? No, no and no.
The key to copy protection is to make the content affordable enough to make the inconvenience of counter-enryption not worth doing. They (the collective they) never seem to get that, and they always seem dumbfounded that their elaborate measures are made to look foolish. Perhaps with realistic pricing, enhanced value they would find that most people find it easier to be honest, and not bother with cloning over-priced half-rate films and music. After all, that's their only realistic choice, but the one that they dread making the most.
hoodwinked - everything to do with royalties (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source players (Score:3, Insightful)
The big question for the Linux/FOSS community isn't how hard is it to crack: it's can we be included without being forced to crack it.
I'm sure I'm not alone in not wanting to make pirate copies of DVDs, but just wanting to be able to watch my discs on the equipment of choice, including open source players.
This boild down to: i) will the algorithm be well known (ie rely on secrecy of keys not the algorithm) and ii) how do you get allocated a key
CSS sucked because it used weak keys and tried to keep the algorithm secret. The first rule of cryptography is to assume the algorithm is known, and thanks to DVD Jon we got it reverse engineered. And it sucked for the FOSS crowd because you couldn't make a player without paying a huge sum of money and signing all sorts of agreements.
If the new system removes these barriers to entry, then it at least it won't be as evil as the original CSS. It'll still be useless, but not actually evil.
This is *playback* protection, not copy protection (Score:4, Insightful)
No form of encryption will not make it harder to copy the original disk. Constructing a bit for bit copy of a digital stream in no way requires you to be able to understand the data being copied.
Rather, this is a playback protection system.
It's to stop you from watching the media when the distributors don't want you to be able to. Such as, for example, should you try to play a movie released in the US which is only just being shown in movie theatres in Western Europe. Or Asia. Or anywhere other than Region 1.
Encryption of the media is only there to force DVD player manufacturers to obtain a key -- which will only be provided if they also sign a contract to adhere to certain terms and conditions that, in essence, states that they're not allowed to undermine the distributors' business model.
Re:One step forward... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about...
Stealing using recorders ??? (Score:5, Funny)
Correct. It is technically impossible to steal a thing using a recorder, unless you do something really odd like club a victim witha VCR during a mugging, or heave a reel-to-reel unit through a jewelry store window in order to break in and burglarize it.
Advances from Wonkatech: single-play (Score:2)
Re:digital hole (Score:2)
Re:Hardware crypto (Score:3, Insightful)