The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you
blog.lon.tv
blog.lon.tv
The electromagnetic spectrum is OURS collectively. Public broadcast licenses are rooted in the idea of a well informed public is good for everyone.
Encryption is just a move to monetize what is otherwise a public resource.
I object to that and will be making a comment to that effect.
Thanks for the heads up.
Sadly not all that far from reality given how Booz Allen Hamilton has profited off of running recreation.gov. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
But the content being played over it likely isn't.
Please do some critical thinking. There have been 3 new versions of HDCP since that leak and they have all broken backwards compatiblity. Do you think they still use that leaked key? Or do you think as they have improved the security of HDCP they have replaced the key?
If you went and looked at the security of Linux from over 10 years ago you would find some bad security vulnerabilities which have now been since patched. Similarly the security of HDCP is getting better over time and newer content is requiring the higher security that is available.
How does that work in practice though? Does it mean I cannot read recent blu-rays with older blu-ray players with the old key?
Yes, newer blurays may require a new player or a system update for your player in order to play if they require a newer security baseline than what you have.
>planned obsolescence
Intel did not plan for older HDCP to be broken.
What's the maximum time a DRM system worked before being completely broken? 2 years? 3 years? It'd be surprising that they did not anticipate that. But then again, I'm not sure why they would really care, they don't really make movies as far as I know.
Are you trying to be pedantic? Technically the MMU prevents the copying. That is just an implementation detail. To content creators the distinction isn't important.
>DRM has never worked.
The barriers have seriously increased over time. Now you have to dump or buy a L1 key to decrypt content. Devices store the key securely which means that you either need to find a hardware vulnerability to leak the key or have a man on the inside to steal keyboxes. If you get caught your key / device will get blacklisted. With each year the price to break the DRM will increase.
Money makes the rules, the mainstream media pushes it out into the public and politicians set them in stone. The public has no say in this. At all. Any consent you perceive is either pushed hard for by the media, or is fabricated by pushing the screaming people into everyone else heads. Please stop being naive.
The only reason, why the groups in power even care about creating the illusion of massive public consent about anything, is because that's what they need to do to make sure their respective parties get re-elected.
(I'm a huge proponent that all infrastructure should be public, but I still think that carrier usage should be paid by the users, at least beyond some minimal usage)
Broadcasting is a "one-to-many" operation, where the target "many" is indeed the public. Concern about public interest is relevant.
Carriers create a "one-to-one" service. Users of the service are not being addressed in a public manner except in an infrastructural way (broadcast addresses in a content-oriented as well as infrastructural method). Concern about public interest can only be limited to "can any member of the public obtain this service?"
This can also be achieved with signing. These arguments are spurious. Please comment to oppose encryption.
[1]: https://a3sa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Security-Systems...
That being said that argument is still BS because the attacker can just send a non encrypted signal.
So yeah, it is not much of a pressing issue.
Huge loss if this happens. Looks like it probably will, though.
I hope this is quickly cracked and spread far and wide. Fuck these grifter station groups and networks.
Encryption is not necessary for authentication.
[1]: https://a3sa.com/
[2]: https://a3sa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Security-Systems...
Only "certified" devices are allowed access to the encryption keys. Only closed, fully locked down black box recording systems will ever be "certified". Don't have a Windows machine with a fully verified HDCP chain? Sorry, you can no longer watch OTA TV.
I of course think the practice is disgusting regardless, but it surprised me that they'd do it on their business-class product too. Would be really nice to see some regulation aimed at prohibiting this sort of thing.
(To be fair, I recently called Optimum for cable internet setup at another address, and told them I wanted to use my own equipment, and they still gave me the same price. At least some companies aren't engaging in this bullshit. They did try to upsell me to a much faster package than I wanted, and tried to get me to add their cellular product, but I guess that sort of thing is a normal practice anywhere, and at least the sales rep wasn't pushy and it was easy to say no.)
But this reminds me of the day a nice telecom call center person wanted me to get their router. The argument he gave me was: „with our router we have access and can automatically fix update and optimize the router for you“. My answer was down the line of: „that’s precisely what I don‘t want“. A few years later a huge Telekom blackout happened across west Germany or so. Apparently the error was a faulty update which misconfigured the user credentials. All boxes went offline for the users (I guess the service ports where still available) Classic Murphy.
EDIT: I've written before about an issue caused by a miswritten provisioning file on their end that involved eventually writing their executives to get it resolved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595663
I was sick of the way that Comcast prices creep up so I switched away anyway.
Nah. You are just paying for the privilege of breaking their unified management platform.
As an ISP "power users" break the uniformity that leads to economies of scale in management, and often over-estimate their own abilities leading to increased support costs.
Because of this the real point of demarcation is the approved modem/gateway’s Ethernet port not the coaxial junction box.
- unmanaged clients ("power users") get an ONT that is very easy to monitor remotely, and we never had a situation where they were unable to setup a DHCP client
- managed clients pay a bit more and get an AP/router that they cannot directly configure, except for things like the wifi password and some NAT mappings.
It would not make sense to price it this way if we were selling data about their home network, and I suppose that's part of the reason other big ISPs here prohibit their users from connecting to the ONT directly.
Plans that run on other networks (in Comcast's case it's Verizon).
(Of course, having spyware cable boxes helps with other revenue streams, too)
No contract rates available without turning in the cablecard. Switched symmetric GB fiber provider for $65/mo and pay for streaming TV during the NHL season.
Good, everyone who is able to switch away from cable should switch away from cable.
Signed, a time warner spectrum hostage
Cable wasn't exactly great, well, ever ... but, even through perhaps about 2015, it was at least somewhat watchable. In the past few years, I've had the ... (mis)fortune of being in a household with cable (after years of only even being able to watch when I went to someone else's home). Commercials were bad enough 10 years ago. Now, they hardly show any scenes in shows / movies before there is a commercial. Movies with runtimes of 1.5 hours, will run for 2.75 hours on TV. This can be on "broadcast" stations as well as cable-only. The barrage of ads only drops off after about 10pm.
Even worse, they now have very "dynamic" time slot ads, 5s ads interspersed with 15s ads etc... Plus, the ads themselves often enough feel made for the "TikTok" generation.
Just an absolute mess.
I'll never look back at TV with any deep nostalgia, though there is a bit of nostalgia for some aspects. It was never a highlight of life - like Seinfeld quips in one of his stand-ups: "... everyone on TV is doing something better than what you are doing ... you never see someone on TV sliding off the couch with potato chip crumbs all over their face ..." (something to that effect). But, it's really "jumped the shark", these days.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/obituaries/john-j-rigas-d... (I can't quickly find some of the material I was looking for - practices of companies in the 90s, fighting any kind of innovation while fees exploded etc. ... There were noteworthy laws enacted, incl. 1992 cable-related act and the notorious 1996 telco act ... lots of bad anti tech anti consumer crap mixed in all of it, and lots of private corralling of money, in any case)
I haven't had cable since 2005 or so, when I canceled it. I think I got cable TV just because I assumed that was just what I was supposed to do, since I'd had it for nearly all my life. But after a year or so of living on my own, I realized I rarely watched it, and got rid of it. Haven't looked back, and I aggressively avoid being exposed advertising as much as possible. When I'm visiting family the TV is usually on in the background (with some cable channel on), and it's astonishing to me how little actual programming is there these days. Feels like mostly ads, and, as you point out, normal-length movies have their time slots expanded by at least 50% to account for ads. Gross.
Either way, kudos to you for voting with your wallet here. I wish we could all do that in every situation.
I'm a little bit surprised they didn't offer you a better rate when you called to cancel. A friend of mine has been riding a 1-year signup promotion for a good 5+ years now; every year when they're about to switch him to regular pricing, he calls them and tells them he's unhappy with the new rate and will cancel. But in your case, I guess Comcast's profits are solid enough (and they know most people don't have an alternative) that they can be choosy about their customers.
I really think the basic broadcast channels should be free to watch on whatever medium you choose. These should be free on clear QAM cable without needing a cable card.
I really really hope this doesn't go through, but if it does, I can't wait for the day when these keys are inevitably leaked.
If any device is cracked/leaked, they find out which one is cracked and send out new keys for every other device except the one that was cracked.
Through clever use of key hierarchies, you only need to send out a small number of new keys over the air to make sure every legit user gets a new one, but your leaked key doesn't get replaced so anyone using that gets locked out.
There is no master key to leak - if you leak one key, you only lock out one device. All other keys are ephemeral.
Wouldn't broadcasting a unique stream for each client increase bandwidth?
Group all your customers into leaves of a binary tree. 100 million customers is a tree ~27 levels deep.
Issue every customer a private key on a smartcard. Also generate keys for each node in the tree, and have the smartcard also preloaded with the keys from that customer to the root. (ie. 26 extra keys on the card - easy to store).
Now, whenever a customer leaks their key, you cut that customer out of the tree and regenerate all nodes up to the root. You transmit over the air, every few minutes, all the modified keys. Each new key is transmitted multiple times encrypted with the children of that node.
Now every legit keyholder either has the master key, or some set of keys that can decrypt the master key (as a combination of the keys on the card and the keys transmitted over the air). Any banned cardholders do not.
Using this method, even banning hundreds of keys, there won't be more than tens of thousands of keys that need to be transmitted over the air, even though you might have 100 million cardholders. That's very transmittable every few minutes, meaning that honest cardholders won't have to wait more than a few minutes for service, even if their tree-neighbour is a hax0r.
And nothing of value was lost.
Except radio spectrum was lost
And your privilege of multiple ISPs and the ability to afford switching to one that may not be included with your rent.
We manage to keep power and comms running.
You want to stop this in its tracks? Convince Amazon to start buying some TV stations. Congress would be livid.
It's disgusting, and the FCC should be ashamed for not flatly rejecting encryption on OTA channels in all its forms.
I would much rather prefer it become an unlicensed spectrum. I absolutely abhor the idea that spectrum goes to the highest bidder in our current regulatory environment that greatly favors incumbents.
The ISM bands at 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz used for WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. are the best-known examples.
[0] The R stands for "range"
As far as I know, that's mostly due to these bands simply having more spectrum available, in addition to actual physical propagation characteristics (lower frequencies indeed propagate a bit better across obstacles like walls or floors, and slightly better through air, but not at all through free space).
In addition to that, unlicensed bands arguably work precisely because they are (by regulation) limited mostly to short-range applications, using maximum transmission power as a proxy for range. One person's signal is another person's noise, after all.
There's other unlicensed bands available that are more suitable for long-range communication, but these usually come with duty cycle restrictions for the same reason.
I’m guessing it will be good enough out in the middle of nowhere or something that needs just reliable low speeds?
I’m always for more unlicensed spectrum.
But I strongly disagree with your distaste for the FCC’s reverse auctions of spectrum. Wireless Spectrum is a limited public resource and an auction is a much better way to allocate it than to have those same companies instead hire lobbyists to try to convince the FCC to allocate that spectrum to them.
There has to be a better way than to allocate spectrum to any one company and give them the rights to buy and sell this spectrum for ninety nine years. If the government needs money, raise taxes!
I am not saying big telco should get wireless spectrum allocation for free. I am saying nobody should get wireless spectrum allocation at all. At least not in the way we currently do things.
If we really need money so much, why not put billboards left, right, and center all over our interstate highways? Why not let companies sponsor the Washington Monument, the White House, and the US Capitol? Lets have an auction and let the highest bidder paint these buildings with whatever they see fit.
Why not give all our federal land to Monsanto for a ninety nine years lease?
/s
Sorry for yelling. I feel very strongly about this. I don't have a solution to how we can allocate spectrum better than an auction. The best I can think of is reduce the number and amount of licensed spectrum.
I want there to be something left in the wireless spectrum when in maybe a few decades hopefully future humans will have a little bit more brains than us come up with a better way to allocate spectrum.
Just to be clear, I am not arguing for repealing Highway Beautification.
Heh. Along those lines... When I was an Amazon Product Manager back in 2020, I was tasked to work on a plan for ATSC 3.0 support in Fire TV. I actually suggested that one of the opportunities was to buy/invest in digital broadcast towers as a way of multicasting large amounts of data wirelessly. Some people in AWS were interested in the idea as well. Note - I'm talking about using the towers for one-way digital data transfer, not owning stations.
Everything about my proposal - even the basic support stuff for Fire TV - was rejected wholesale and I left soon after. (In case you're wondering why Sony, Samsung, HiSense, LG and other TVs you can buy today have ATSC 3.0 support and Fire TVs don't.) The lack of forward thinking at Amazon has become endemic.
BTW, it's surreal to spend nearly 6 months deep diving into a technology from hardware to software, tower to TV, then hearing absolutely nothing about it for 3 years, then suddenly seeing two front page links about it in a span of days. Truly surreal.
We should definitely do this, at least. Maybe keep educational stuff like PBS going, but no need to waste bandwidth on soap operas or sports.
But getting more low-frequency spectrum would be great for longer-range mesh based use cases. For example, I find it quite absurd that I can't message friends a few hundred meters away (e.g. on an airplane sitting in a different row, a few aisles over in a supermarket in a basement etc.) without the both of us having an internet connection via Wi-Fi or cell signal.
This was undone a year later. This time, there was another period of public input, but the public consensus was ignored in favor of giving Ajit Pai's corporate BFFs what they wanted.
Right now the FCC is in a 2-2 partisan deadlock, but that will likely change shortly with the nomination of a 5th comissioner making it to the senate.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/06/80-of-the-22-million-comme....
I'm still a user of OTA tv, and use HDHomeRun with TVHeadEnd on a NAS to record any shows I like. This definitely would affect me down the road.
I still hold a grudge against Rogers (back when I had cable), when I recorded a bunch of sports from the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and liked watching them on the go. The Rogers PVR, I think it was the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 HD PVR, had a firewire port, and my old macbook had a firewire port. With that, you could play your content from the PVR, and recorded it directly onto your computer as a .ts (transport stream) and then convert it to a smaller file.
Then of course, without my permission, they pushed a firmware upgrade and wiped all my recordings before I could get them off. Jerks.
It's sports. Local games are often shown on broadcast TV while packages to view them in other regions are expensive. There's a huge network of sports streamers with ATSC tuners, most of whom who charge (a lot less than the package).
It'll maybe shut down the sports streamers for a year or two, at the cost of social good. Doesn't seem worth it to me!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
[2}: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
You can easily bypass any HDCP signal with $25 worth of stuff off Amazon and record it to your local PC with FOSS like OBS or even the built-in camera softwares.
All this does is make people have to spend more money to get less service. It disproportionately negatively affects the poor for no social good.
These people, and their customers, have a very different use case and this won't block them at all.
They can just use an HDCP stripper and an HDMI capture card and then re-encode it.
Failing that, they can just point a camera at a TV.
Sports viewers care a lot less about quality.
I'm not saying you're wrong that they are doing this because of sports, but, it won't do anything to curtail that.
Like any other drm, this will get worked around quickly at the cost of a worse experience for those following the rules.
>> It's sports.
That's silly. Sports are way more valuable to the consumer when watched in real time. There is very very little value in saving a copy.
> There's a huge network of sports streamers with ATSC tuners, most of whom who charge (a lot less than the package).
IMO this encryption can be interpretated as "you are supposed pay to view this channel". They could have foregone encryption with just a flag except that it would be trivial for any Aliexpress atsc hdmi dongle to simply forget that about that flag.
That being said yeah they probably require hdcp which.. Well you can find HDMI splitter (that goes from 4k to 4k on hdmi1 and 1080p on hdmi2) that "simply forget" about hdcp 1&2. (no idea whether that's on purpose but that's not the reason I bought it in the first place)
Growing up, I didn't have cable and only had OTA networks. This was before FOX was a network at all, so VHF was only the Big 3. During the day, they only aired soaps, so it was the UHF bands that offered anything different. One of those was TBN, and I would tune in for laughs. One day, Paul Crouch said that if you were watching his program "right now" and did not send him money, you were stealing from him. So your "you are supposed to pay for this channel" is not too far off from the beliefs of some of the broadcasters.
Encryption turns every dataloss into something catastrophic. Now, instead of 1 byte lost, you are talking about 1 mb lost (or whatever the size of the encryption chunks are).
That becomes especially bad as codecs get more bandwidth friendly. That 1mb can represent a lot of data, which ultimately gets corrupted until the next keyframe flows through.
You can sort of think of it in terms of a bitmap vs jpeg. If you corrupt 40 bytes in a 1mb bitmap, no problem, it will still mostly look like the original image. However, if you turn that bitmap into a 30kb jpeg and corrupt 40 bytes, now that's a much more significant amount of the information changed.
Encrypted pay tv exists (in the form of satellite transmissions) but there, interference is minimized by having a geosynchronous satellite high in the air directly beaming a signal. Only bad weather interferes. Further, because it's being beamed from a single source (rather than multiple towers around an area). you can point your dish directly at the satellite to get a relatively perfect directional connection. Other signals, the sun, power lines, etc don't generally interfere because you are concentrating a focused signal.
That math all changes when talking about receiving multiple terrestrial signals with a non-directional antenna.
If you've watched satellite tv, you know that whenever a storm rolls through it becomes unwatchable. There's not really any sort of graceful degradation, it's either a perfect signal or a blank screen with "no signal". SOMETIMES you might see giant swaths of green blocks or whatever if the corruption is just right, but generally speaking it's all or nothing.
Meanwhile, I get relatively weak signals from a couple of weak OTA stations. For the most part, the images are perfectly passable.
Broadcasters have given some bogeyman reason of deepfake edits of broadcasts being possible. But I’m sure that will still be possible after encryption.
The last time this came up it this anti-feature was called the “broadcast flag” bit that would instruct hardware to refuse the viewer’s command to record.
Some cable TV operators let you DVR most channels except for premium channels or PPV events. Others block recording on every single channel just because they can. In either case any recordings are lost when the box breaks or is otherwise swapped.
Literally everyone even remotely interested in TV content?
Proceeding(s):16-142
Confirmation #:202307140526319305
Submitted: Jul 14, 2023 11:20:36 AM
Status: RECEIVED
I am writing in opposition to DRM Encryption being part of the ATSC 3.0 standard. I am a household, like many others, that still use an over-the-air antenna to receive local channels.
I depend on free TV signals for general news and entertainment and I am concerned about costs/accessibility if DRM encryption is included. My concern is that broadcasters will force/coerce encryption on their signals, since it is part of the ATSC 3.0 standard, which will result in an restriction on which antennas can be used. I will have to purchase a new antenna to view the channels that I can currently see with current antenna.
Thank you for you attention
It also comes with some of the other benefits of commercial space.
One of the amateur radio clubs I've joined pooled up and basically offers it as a service to its members.
> Lawyers for the broadcasters have effectively stopped every large scale retransmission effort making encryption unnecessary to protect their broadcast exclusivity rights. What this is really about is making it more difficult for everyday consumers to watch free over the air TV in an effort to push us back onto paid subscription services.
This is a pretty muddled message, as written. It’s odd to say “the reality is…”, and then to say that that is a cover for something else. Based on what’s being said here, it seems like the entire retransmission tangent should be left out entirely.
That being said I understand the uproar is about channels switching from FTA to subscription, which isn't legal for channels here
[1] all those channels belong to the same company, but realistically they are the only long-term subscription based channels in France
Are you under the impression that the BBC is the only television in the UK and it doesn't have other networks?
BBC is funded through an annual Television license fee, and supplemented through international distribution.
While US Public Television (largely PBS affiliates) and BBC have similar goals, fill a similar role. They're very different. Though maybe what you meant was that this is as close to BBC as the US has...
but this must have something to do with the deep understanding rePUBLIC (continuous re-negotiation of this public/private boundary ? but i'm guessing having been unable to finish reading that old Plato book)
why this is scary is because of deep connections between privacy and identity (sense of self even) but I'm already rambling
I thought about it some more, and think you need encryption to authenticate the broadcaster to the viewer. For example, without encryption I can drive by the old folks home and broadcast my video of "the world is ending, kill yourself before it's too late" and do a lot of mental damage to people. With encryption, this attack is blocked; I don't have ABC news' key, so I can't pretend to be them.
All in all, I'm not sure what the right public policy decision is here. I guess analog TV worked pretty well. Broadcast intrusions are fun to read about anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_signal_hijacking
I mean, yes, you can take a homebrew transmitter and do that, just like you could have done for decades. But you're still operating an unlicensed transmitter and are performing broadcast signal intrusion.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-A... already defines specific limits which prevent pirate broadcasting.
Why is DRM necessary? And why is it only necessary now?
First, they want to be paid. Second, they want to know who you are so they can provide “targeted” advertising to their clients.
DRM forces both.
Signing the signal is all you need to be able to validate that the signal came from the broadcaster. But even this assumes that the public key will be transmitted often and the rogue pirate broadcast a bad key.
Yes.
Encryption is for keeping communication private. There's no benefit when communication is meant to be public.
If you want signal integrity, you can sign the signal. But even that is overkill. The threat and harm of intrusion is extremely low.
Additionally, I haven't seen an old folks home that doesn't have cable in many years. OTA signal is more common for the under privileged and rural communities. where a local transmitter wouldn't reach many anyway.