MacBooks Enter a Golden Age of Anti-piracy Cruft: HDCP For All
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Could you fire up the movie in a Windows VM on your Mac? Presumably it would play, and the output at the Mac end is unencrypted?
The conventional wisdom maintains that all DRM schemes can be broken, and that's true, if you ignore cost. It is far from proven that all DRM schemes can be broken with costs proportional to the rewards.
I wonder when they will do the same to their desktop computers. It is not as if companies haven't tried that scheme (see Microsoft "certified software" and stuff like that).
You just can't put apps on the app store or your phone without having a cert. There's a slight difference.
However, ultimately the OS either enforces it or doesn't. And the OS has been pretty weak so far.
Addenda: I'm not talking about iTunes, I'm talking about the OS, which iTunes uses to display video.
But sure, if the Blu-Ray replacement happens to have a working protection system they might finally pull it off. Too bad for them that the last part of the delivery chain will always be unprotected, unless they find a way to put HDCP in Eye 1.0 wetware.
That won't help you record it if there is sufficient pressure on the small number of manafacturers of recording devices:
I would imagine it would be possible to create something like a EURion for video and audio.
The obvious example: What if a guy robbed a bank wearing a EURion t-shirt? None of the security cameras would record him, unless you had some exception for security cameras. And once you have an exception for security cameras, do you have an exception for, say, home security cameras? If so, anyone will be able to get a circumventing camera; if not, a lot of people will be upset.
e.g. the output of a video camera could be tagged with "allow 3 copies only". Each DRM-aware copy produced would decrement the # of allowed copies. The copied file would have an allowed-count of 0.
If a EURion-like image triggered this mode on the camera then that would probably be sufficient for manufacturers to avoid liability, but still serve to effectively close the "analog hole" (not really analog, but hey).
Yes, it all does seem unlikely. But so does tagging of printer output with yellow dots and EURion, and DRM in general.
The basic technical approach of the current DRM systems is sound, which is why they're a problem. High quality implementations would restrict people.
In terms of pattern recognition, you're not exactly doing facial recognitiion. The hard part would be putting a signal in there which was:
- distributed through the whole picture (so you can't just mask off the logo in the corner)
- sufficiently unobvious to humans threshold so that quality doesn't go down too far. Dunno about this one, apart from the fact that we have a lot of bandwidth here to hide a signal
- could survive basic disruption attempts by 'hackers' (colour filters etc)
It is a fairly tall order, but so is convincing the entire PC parts industry to put crypto in all their components against the interests of their customers.
It's might seem like a chicken and egg discussion, but it isn't: the crack needs to come first. But once one person cracks it, the content is available for everyone else.
What's left?
There's two obstacles:
(1) The VM emulation has to be perfect, and the Slysoft and open source emulation is reverse engineered. Reactos is Win32 reversed from one of the easiest platforms in the industry to reverse, and it's not perfect; BD+ was designed to be hard to reverse.
(2) Once the VM is perfect, so that the next 20 revs of Macrovision's protection code can't just go peek at some dark corner of the VM that Slysoft didn't know about, you still have to use that emulator to beat every successive program that Macrovision chooses to run on it.
A major challenge for SPDC, the underlying technology behind BD+, was that it had to be implemented autonomously by numerous consumer electronics companies, most of whom have no expertise in the areas of CS (compilers, virtual machine runtimes, content protection) that BD+ plays in. I expect it to get better over time, not worse.
Disclaimer: Not me.
If you have any suspicion about it, get a friend to buy a random MP3 from Amazon using her account and buy the same file yourself using your account. Compare the two MP3s using whatever tool you want; I did, and they seemed to be absolutely identical.
FWIW, there is a field in the Amazon MP3 ID3 - under 'Comments' - which says Amazon.com Song ID: 20XXXXXXX (I Xed the last seven digits). That's a unique song identifier, not a user identifier.
I still prefer my MP3s name-free, but that only means that I would pay more for name-free than for named MP3s.
I wonder what the laws are on selling the track and then deleting it though. Is that as legal as selling a cd, or do you get sign some sort of legal agreement when you purchase the track? I've never purchased a single track online so I don't know much about that.
Also, maybe you could just remove the information from the file if it bothers you.
You can probably imagine how silly it would feel to make sure you lose your MP3 after selling it, and what would you even ask for the MP3? Fiddy cent ?
Pirated films are available anywhere on the planet, without wasting time waiting for international shipping, with a broad variety of subtitles, good enough image quality (often even HD) and play on commodity computer hardware, without buying any special devices. They also don't take up any shelf space.
I am amazed that films are not globally released simultaneously, both paid download and theatrical release, yet another competitive disadvantage for legal content. Almost all the english-speaking people I know would much rather download a film today than wait a year or two for it to hit the local cinemas.