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Sticky Tape Defeats Sony DRM Copy Protection
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Nov 22, 2005 02:04 PM
from the not-much-you-can-do-about-that dept.
from the not-much-you-can-do-about-that dept.
cybrpnk2 writes "As reported by InformationWeek, Sony BMG Music's controversial copy-protection scheme can be defeated with a small piece of tape. According to thinktank Gartner analysts Martin Reynolds and Mike McGuire, Sony's XCP technology is stymied by sticking a fingernail-size piece of opaque tape on the outer edge of the CD. 'After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs. Gartner believes that it will never achieve this goal as long as CDs must be playable by stand-alone CD players.'"
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Does this violate the terms of the DMCA? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does this violate the terms of the DMCA? (Score:5, Funny)
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in other news.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:in other news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Does this violate the terms of the DMCA? (Score:5, Funny)
Telling us that we can use tape to defeat the DRM violates the DMCA. Gartner should be hearing the arrival of the black helicopters within the hour.
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Re:Does this violate the terms of the DMCA? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Does this violate the terms of the DMCA? (Score:5, Funny)
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Sony thought so (Score:5, Funny)
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Damn yo (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Floppy Disks (Score:5, Insightful)
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And they always said (Score:5, Funny)
They didn't always; sometimes they got it right. (Score:5, Informative)
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In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
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It's sticky tape now, huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's sticky tape now, huh? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:It's sticky tape now, huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It's sticky tape now, huh? (Score:5, Funny)
As if that wasn't absurd enough, he later told me how he breaks in his AC power cords by running a current through them before using them on his stereo, because otherwise the sound is too, well, I don't even remember what adjective he used. Yellow? Impudent? Octagonal? Whatever. He said that a new electrical outlet takes even longer to break in. OMFGBBQ! I'm ashamed to say that at that point I completely lost the ability to debate rationally with him and try to educate him, and told him what an idiot he is. Well, at least he doesn't bother to ask me any electronics-related questions any more.
Sometimes I find myself thinking that I should invent some electrical snake oil to liberate audiophools from their excess money, but I just don't want to sink that low.
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Re:It's sticky tape now, huh? (Score:5, Funny)
And yes there are people like that and no for the love of all that is holy I am not one of them! It is a joke, true but a joke.
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Sandpaper trick (Score:5, Funny)
Make sure you get a good headstart before he destroys his cd collection.
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Re:It's sticky tape now, huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Monster Cable? Feh. Their power cords are only 100 bucks.
This is the ticket: the US$1500 power cable [soundstage.com].
Whoops, old review. The new improved model of that cord [audio-magic.com] goes for US$2200.
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Re:It's sticky tape now, huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
A very precise spectrum analyzer designed for low frequencies would be much more useful, but you likely won't find one even in a well-equipped lab; a really good one might be _very_ expensive ($50k to millions of dollars).
Quality is very difficult to measure, simply because the ear is a hell of a lot more sophisticated and sensitive to nonlinearities than any man-made instrument. I think listening to a system is much more useful than trying to measure it with cheap, primitive instruments (like THD meters or oscilloscopes). You can have two systems that measure the same THD but sound drastically different, simply because THD is a simplistic measurement.
I hate audiophile snake oil ($500 power cables, $20k "interconnects", and magic boxes) as much as you do, but don't assume you can measure everything. Nobody knows how to quantify, for instance, the taste of something. There same applies to audio.
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Freedom cannot be defeated! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Freedom cannot be defeated! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, obviously all they need to do is put a stop to this sort of nonsense.
KFG
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DVD stands for (Score:5, Informative)
Well, originally the "V" stood for "Video". That presumably made some marketing guy from some DVD Consortium company that made non-video devices unhappy, so it was renamed to "Versitile". After many more dollars spent debating this crucial issue, nobody could agree, so officially the "V" stands for nothing.
You probably think I'm joking; I assure you, I'm not [wikipedia.org], sad as it is.
I once had a boss that kept marketing people off of his back by generating busywork to occupy their time. Every time they had a meeting in which they wanted to influence anything technical, he'd bring up the fact that something lacked a name and emphasized how crucial it was to the product's success that the name be appealing. They'd vanish for a month. It was amazing to see this guy in action.
Of course, we had to put up with silly names as a result, but we didn't have to deal with technically broken things, so it was worthwhile.
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When office supplies are outlawed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When office supplies are outlawed (Score:5, Funny)
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Restricted Technology (Score:5, Funny)
* Sticky Tape
* Magic Markers
* Shift Keys
When will these companies learn? 3M, Sharpie, and Dell-- stop trying to get me to break the law!!!
Easier way (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easier way (Score:5, Funny)
How do you know my girlfriend?
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Re:Easier way (Score:5, Funny)
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Low tech hacks (Score:4, Informative)
I predict (Score:4, Insightful)
What is next will Sony try and outlaw mics and wires?
Dear Sony. I will not steal your music. In fact I will not listen to or buy your music anymore. I am sure that eventualy artists will move to a label that treats it's customers with a bit more respect.
Re:I predict (Score:4, Funny)
Sony will likely call your bluff here, as they know there is no such thing today as a label that treats its customers with any respect.
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Any Linux-proof DRM... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, since I do all my music work using Linux, do I need to worry about any of the protection methods currently out there?
I'd like to see a list of all the drm methods that are "in the wild" along with their prevalence and effectiveness agains various OS's & tools.
Re:Any Linux-proof DRM... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, there is. There are a few different versions of this, but the general idea is to intentionally put bad data in the tracks (or the TOC) that would be error-corrected out by an audio CD player, but cause a CD-ROM to fail while attempting to read it. Some modern CD-ROM drives still have trouble with this type of copy control. Since the error correction layers have been subverted, the tiniest scratch will usually render the CD unplayable.
More info here: http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq02.html#S2-4-3 [cdrfaq.org]
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Copy Protection Drilldown (Score:5, Informative)
- Zeroth Generation (the Click Generation):
* Weak Sectors in ATIP: TTR Technologies MusicGuard (never deployed)
Flat out doesn't work at all, you probably wouldn't even notice they'd done anything. Any Lite-On, BenQ or Plextor wouldn't even skip a beat. Only CD-ROM tested which even gave a damn was a Sony (heh), the drive in the PlayStation 1 to be precise. Didn't get a contract, so TTR partnered with Macrovision, and tried harder. Much harder. Much too hard, in fact.
* Weak Sectors causing C2 Errors in Audio: TTR Technology/Macrovision SAFEAUDIO (limited deployment), Settec Alpha-Audio D-Type (data type, never deployed)
Extremely rare, no longer used; the market overwhelmingly rejected it, which is to say, it broke a music exec's speakers. High channel return rate because of obscenely low compatibility, duplicators returning whole batches as bad pressings because they couldn't perform any useful QA on discs deliberately damaged to this extent. Useless. (TTR apparently liquidated.)
Archiving: Alternate CDFS.VXD tools for Win9x may work, as they interpolate in exactly where SAFEAUDIO puts corruption. Other than that, deliberate damage = not perfectly playable, or rippable. Effectively an analogue medium with huge deliberate noise spikes. Use a mint disc, do the best you can, and high-order-interpolate over the scratches (Adobe Audition or something), just like archiving vinyl.
- First Generation (The Anti-CD Generation):
Archiving all first-generation formats merely needs a Good Drive and Good Software with Good Settings. Can be divided into roughly three groups:
* High Jitter Spike: Cactus Data Shield (classic): CDS-100/CDS-200, First4Internet XCP-Aurora XCP "Red"
(0'09", insert bad CIRC sector, 1200 weak sector/desync, 2 *blank* sectors with no sync, then start again with normal data.) Intent: Cause a "hiccup" during a burstmode rip which would be absorbed by a CD player's (tiny) buffer. Reality: Any quality drive firmware, buffer, or jitter correction, means you won't even skip a beat. Might slow down a little, but that's all. Now only marketed for internal releases/promos.
* Malformed TOC/Evil Session with no player: Early Sony key2audio (1.0), Settec Alpha-Audio S-Type (session type), First4Internet XCP-Aurora XCP1
Bread and butter, it's simple; include a normal or malformed TOC, and sprinkle liberally with a seriously malformed second session, relying on CD-ROMs being multisession and CD players being single session only.
* Malformed TOC/Evil Session with autorun player: Sony key2audio, SunnComm MediaClòQ
Differs from the above only in the second session being malformed, but having a valid data track containing a DRMv2 WMA player (or downloader). Players have evil EULAs, and may interfere with ripping while the player is running (although the first version of the key2audio player that appeared actually shifts the session enough to allow flawless ripping while the player is running...!) but as far as known, they don't leave behind malicious software.
- Second Generation (The Autorun Generation):
Rate of returns was still high, so Macrovision tried a weaker system with a much higher false negative, but a much lower false positive. Actually caught on; almost no returns. They could actually put the CD logo on these if they wanted.
* Valid CD-Extra with autorun player: Macrovision CDS-300, Macrovision TotalPlay CD, Alpha-Audio M-Type (main type)
Player (MS-DRMv2, as usual) interferes with ripping (while it's running) but doesn't seem to leave any malicious software behind. If the autorun isn't run (disable it, or hold SHIFT while inserting CD and be careful in Explorer) or supported, it's a normal CD-Extra. First session is valid Red Book.
- Third Generat
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Re:Any Linux-proof DRM... (Score:5, Interesting)
> (that's the C64 floppy drive for you youngsters) read errors.
It may have been the very same thing.
The 1541 would recover from read errors by telling the stepping motor to position the head WAY past the outer track. Of course, this would cause it to bang it repeated against the cam stop. This would insure that the head was properly aligned for track zero (and probably why those damned drives went out of alignment so often!). Then, it would count forward the right number of tracks, and try to read the data again.
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If Piracy is the problem, is DRM the solution?? (Score:5, Interesting)
In 2003 some of the HP Labs researchers looked at the related issues and published a paper titled: "If Piracy is the Problem, Is DRM the Answer?" http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2003/HPL-2003-11 0.pdf [hp.com]
You might find the white paper interesting if you've not read it before. This caused quite a stir when it was released, both inside and outside HP, and is still quite relevent in light of the Sony issue. This provides an counterpoint even inside HP where we try to maintain some form of management across all the issues.
The conclusion reads:
"We pointed out that unauthorized use and unauthorized acquisition are two aspects of piracy. A key concept is how licenses are bound to content. We saw that various kinds of DRM technology address these issues in very different ways, but that all of them have some kind of flaw that make it highly unlikely that they will be able to solve the problem of piracy. The real problem with piracy is that it takes only a small fraction of users who are capable of dissociating licenses from content to make managed content available to a significant fraction of users in unmanaged form.
We explored the concept of draconian DRM in which devices that handle managed content do not handle unmanaged content at all. Draconian DRM could potentially be effective at eliminating piracy if it were ubiquitously adopted, but introduces a new problem of how to handle public content.
Our conclusion is that currently proposed technical measures will not be able to completely stop the illegitimate distribution of pirated content. We believe that content producers must take steps to compete with the piracy as an alternative."
Best way to break Sony's DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't spell analyst without... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention September 2005 (http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_sea
"Organizations increasingly need to create, store, retrieve and manage rich media files. Those that successfully cultivate a digital asset management environment can cut their associated operational costs in half."
Annoyances.org (Score:5, Informative)
HISTORY REPEATED!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Many years ago in the Apple ][ era... Lotus 1-2-3 was a great spreadsheet. They invested a huge pile of money to make certain that you could not run their program without possessing the original disk. And try as we may, we couldn't figure out how they did it... there was one sector that was funky, but it didn't make any sense.
Then, by chance, my neighbor had a nice RANA drive - and it had a 'write protect' button on the face, that you could manually toggle. We stuck a (non-working) copy into the drive to begin the arduous task of single-stepping through the code, and accidentally hit that button while doing so. The result?
Lotus fired right up!
They spent way too much money using a laser to create a specific media defect in a specific place; upon startup, the program would attempt to write to that location. If it failed, it knew it was the original. If it succeeded... then there was no defect there, and it was a copy.
All that time and god-knows-how-much-money they invested in this scheme... only to be defeated by a
FRAUD !!! (Score:5, Interesting)
People buy CDs to get the best 44.1Kbs uncompressed audio usually available for purchase. Yet the DRM'd versions are highly compressed audio files (hence things like the illegally included LAME decoder in the XCP package) where true quality is sacraficed in order to achieve compression levels allowing it to be sandwiched onto a standard CD.
Some very fine audio chips and speakers are available for computers these days, and certainly some people use their computers as their primary audio system. Yet were on the packaging, or EULA (an astonishing concept for a music CD in and of itself), does it tell you that you'll receive inferior quality playback when played on your computer. How many people believe that the DRM'd discs are actually playing back the .WAV files, instead of WMA or other crap files? It's fraud to not inform consumers that even after they agree to the DRM that they'll receive degraded audio as a result -- and Sony should have to pay for that as well!
Sony is a "serial DRM offender". (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony has other DRM software. Here are quotes:
MediaMax also "phones home" every time you play a protected CD with a code identifying what music you're listening to.
Ed Foster says Sony management has a "scum" profile. Quote: OK, so let's see what we've got here. A company that seems bent on sneaking files onto unsuspecting users' computers, pretending they've gotten permission to do so from a vaguely-worded EULA, transmitting a constant stream of usage information back to their servers, and using that information for who-knows-what revenue generating opportunities. Does this sound like a familiar profile to you? Of course, it's the profile of all the spyware/adware scum that have come very close to destroying the Internet just to make a few bucks peddling their trash.
Issues that remain concerning Sony's rootkit software and other DRM software:
As is shown by Ed Foster's analysis linked above, attacking customer computers seems to be the kind of thing that is part of the Sony corporate culture. There has been no apology [userfriendly.org], and Sony management makes statements giving the impression they intend to continue infecting customer computers.
A music retail store spokesman said that Sony's rootkit attack has become public just before Christmas. Customers can easily choose some other gift now that they are scared about computer attacks. Sony's attack has hurt the entire music industry, not just Sony. Also, the damage will continue after Christmas.
Few people are technically knowledgeable. The Sony rootkit CDs will be causing problems for many, many years, as they are traded or borrowed or sold to thrift stores.
The number of computers already corrupted by the Sony rootkit is probably far larger than the 500,000 quoted in articles about the Sony attack. That number is just the number of Domain Name Servers that show evidence that a computer has tried to contact the Sony phone home address. The average server would almost certainly service more than one corrupted computer.
Following Microsoft's lead years ago, some businesses treat all their customers as crooks so that they can stop a few.
If you can play it, you can copy it (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, the only form of copy protection that can hope to work against any low-level data extraction tool is one that involves partially invalid data or unreadable regions. And even then, you can do a straight 1:1 copy, and whenever it starts having read errors, put a 0 or something in those bytes and skip them. That is easily achieved using a utility like dd. In many cases, you can also read the disc in a virtual PC (e.g. VMware), and save the audio output to a disk file - and then delete the virtual PC in case of malware installed by the CD.
Unless the disc is in a proprietary format which can only be read by a specific player, which has no standard output connections, you can copy anything that you can play, simply by plugging the output of whatever you use to play it into the line-in on your PC. If they somehow prevent that, you can still record anything using a microphone, as long as you can somehow get sound waves out of it.
Also, is it really right to try and stop all copying? I absolutely cannot stand any kind of data being held within a single physical object, especially such a fragile one as a CD. I keep most of my CDs backed up onto two locations, but I steadfastly refuse to play the music on more than one location at a time, or share it with a friend. There can't be very many people in the world who would want to rip the musicians off, and not posess the necessary technical skills to bypass copy protection. The slightest hint of copy protection on a CD in my posession prompts me to try and create a "pure" copy, just because I can't stand my data being defiled by such things.
Certainly, it is stupid to incorporate Windows trojans into the CDs. People trust the music companies; at least, they did. Things like this must really lower people's trust - especially since they try to disuade people from piracy by saying that pirate copies may contain trojans. I will certainly be very reluctant to insert a CD into a Windows computer without the shift key held down in the future.
Re:PRM: Penis Rights Management (Score:4, Funny)
Kind of like a wedding ring.
"Of course, since it is designed by SONY it will most likely work in the complete opposite way: women will be enticed to play with a cock using such technology!"
Kind of like a wedding ring.
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I GOT A DIFFERENT APPROACH (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Not a smart solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Also in describing the Sony Rootkit problem it's good to mention that the disks are "infected with DRM". The person won't know what DRM is, but it helps to associate it with a bad word like "infection". And in the case of the Sony CDs, it's not overhyping the facts either, so your conscience can remain clear.
Bottom line is, "these discs are designed to infect a computer with DRM, which breaks Windows, and lets Sony and viruses take over your computer."
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And in more news... (Score:5, Funny)
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