HD-DVD: Mockery of a sham
May. 3rd, 2007 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andygatesAh but it's a funny one, isn't it? The MPAA - the American movie copyright goons - trying to get a takedown on websites posting a number. What number? This number: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0. Scary stuff, no? But it's an encryption key, in a relatively feeble and cumbersome and egregious and misdirected technology, and because of the basic stupidity of the DMCA, it's illegal to publish.
Sorry about that.
Of course, I'm not a Yank and I'm posting in the UK and I've no idea where on Earth the Livejournal servers are or what route my blethering is taking to get to you, dear reader, but at some point in it the blunt instrument of the DMCA would probably give the MPAA's sweaty legal thugs the ability to issue a takedown. But they did it on Digg, which has a huge userbase who were having nothing of it, and flooded Digg with postings about it. By now there are over 300,000 pages in a Google search for the super-secret number (and of course it's also Google's cache). Not to mention being published in formats that won't Google, like these:
That'll be a very public key then, unless the MPAA want to issue legal warnings to a lolcats site and a tattooist. Or the person. Is that illegal skin? It's not digital any more - oh but this photo is, they'll try to nobble that.
This sort of "illegal words" nonsense fundamentally fails to understand the phenomenal mobility and virulence of wired memes. It's back to the whole "this is Rumour Control: here are the facts" approach in which an Authority presumes itself to be the source of informational goodness. The truth is that the Authority's only special characteristic is their legal status, and that butters no parsnips with most of the world. The Authority is only one voice in a storm of voices.
The whole debacle is eerily reminiscent of the encryption-code farce of the mid-1990s, where source code for public/private key encryption was rated by the American Powers That Be as illegal for export or to be shown to foreign nationals - it was considered a weapon. So of course, geeks made up T-shirts carrying the code.
Information likes to spread. It's teleological but close to true: good memes splurge out all over. This damn number's on skin and in caches forever. Trying to stem the flow of information will predictably fail given enough spread-attempts, and is just plain perverse for an industry which makes its buck from the, er, flow of information. Insert my standard memes-make-DRM-broken-at-its-core rant here.
Sorry about that.
Of course, I'm not a Yank and I'm posting in the UK and I've no idea where on Earth the Livejournal servers are or what route my blethering is taking to get to you, dear reader, but at some point in it the blunt instrument of the DMCA would probably give the MPAA's sweaty legal thugs the ability to issue a takedown. But they did it on Digg, which has a huge userbase who were having nothing of it, and flooded Digg with postings about it. By now there are over 300,000 pages in a Google search for the super-secret number (and of course it's also Google's cache). Not to mention being published in formats that won't Google, like these:
That'll be a very public key then, unless the MPAA want to issue legal warnings to a lolcats site and a tattooist. Or the person. Is that illegal skin? It's not digital any more - oh but this photo is, they'll try to nobble that.
This sort of "illegal words" nonsense fundamentally fails to understand the phenomenal mobility and virulence of wired memes. It's back to the whole "this is Rumour Control: here are the facts" approach in which an Authority presumes itself to be the source of informational goodness. The truth is that the Authority's only special characteristic is their legal status, and that butters no parsnips with most of the world. The Authority is only one voice in a storm of voices.
The whole debacle is eerily reminiscent of the encryption-code farce of the mid-1990s, where source code for public/private key encryption was rated by the American Powers That Be as illegal for export or to be shown to foreign nationals - it was considered a weapon. So of course, geeks made up T-shirts carrying the code.
Information likes to spread. It's teleological but close to true: good memes splurge out all over. This damn number's on skin and in caches forever. Trying to stem the flow of information will predictably fail given enough spread-attempts, and is just plain perverse for an industry which makes its buck from the, er, flow of information. Insert my standard memes-make-DRM-broken-at-its-core rant here.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-04 08:47 am (UTC)Information does not like to spread. Information couldn't give a rats arse about anything. Instead, humans like to spread information. Because we have mouths and haven't quite worked out when to keep them closed.
Feeble and cumbersome technology? Cumbersome, maybe. Feeble it was not. The issue was in the way that a single piece of software operated, and how it could be analysed whilst in memory to enable key extraction. If that is feeble lets watch you crack the next version which is being rolled out as we speak along with the new encryption key.
Anyway, I am only responding to this thread because no bugger knew what the hell I was going on about when I mentioned it in my LJ, so think of this as a rather ratty show of solidarity.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-04 09:31 am (UTC)As for feeble, that's a matter of semantics surely: bombproof encryption with a weak key *is* feeble because only the weakest link matters, and, I'd argue (from my DRM-sucks soapbox) egregious DRM makes its technology weaker by simply drawing the focus of more brains which might defeat it.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-04 11:02 am (UTC)But putting that aside, it's not the key that is weak. They key is strong. It was the implementation of a particular piece of software which was bad. If the software hadn't been created then none of this would have happened as nobody was going to start reverse engineering the hardware to attempt to extract the keys. Well, not until the SERIOUS organised crime syndicates decided they wanted to make money from pirating again.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-04 11:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-04 12:20 pm (UTC)I'm not sure whether or not the memetic argument is also teleological or cargo-cultish, because there doesn't seem to be a satisfactory mechanism for the "why" of it, and "it just does" is a bit feeble. But it certainly does. Your medical records will spread from one store - the GP - to the main IT store in all its dozen or so instances, plus backups, plus networking caches and probably regional caches too, plus GPs... it's out there.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-04 01:41 pm (UTC)Any software player is going to have to make use of the decryption key to decrypt the content, so software quality isn't really the issue here. The existence of a software player is, and best of luck introducing a format with no software player. The basic problem is that, until someone comes up with better math, you need to give the user the keys that you don't want him to have if he's going to be able to watch the movie.
...nobody was going to start reverse engineering the hardware to attempt to extract the keys.
Sure they were. These guys are already pulling the drives apart to poke at the firmware, and the only reason they're not taking apart standalone players yet is because they're still too expensive for destructive shenanigans.