billy(c)rap

Crap and Rap about my life

Archive for July, 2007

DRM ? … No thank you

Jul 9

Posted by Binoy in Technology | No Comments

Ever since it became possible to store media in digital formats, there as been a ongoing war between publishers and pirates. The vicious circle of buying , cracking and copying has been giving sleepless nights for the biggest multimedia houses across the world. Napster, Yahoo iTunes and even Hollywood have tried selling protected media in in every possible format. They said DVD will hold, they said wma is secure. They went into shell for 5 year and came out with HD DVD and Blu-Ray, but the cracking brigade took one snoop and took them both out in one go., by a simple RAM dump and a HEX edttor.

The only thing that this copy protection did was force legitimate users to buy pirated cd of their favorite songs and artists, because of copy restrictions or incompatibility which were put in the name of protecting content. If Akai did not have a deal with Sony (which are competitors in the same country) you are out of luck with a Akai player, you either have to wait for Akai to start creating cd’s or buy sony artist. So next time you are choosing your favorite artist , make sure it has a big publisher name on its cd’s.

The first march of the cracking Brigade

The two most popular online DRM schemes are Microsoft’s Play for sure and Apples Fairplay. Infact Apples Fairplay is so huge its ranked fourth among all music dealers in the world courtesy itunes and ipod.

Meanwhile other services like Napster (after it was shutdown and restarted by MS for distributing pirated music) and Musicload distribute media with Microsoft DRM platform.

Fairplay

This format was introduced by Apple in 2003. Mr. Smart Steve Jobs knew it was not a good idea to restict users , Apples DRM allowed free copying your personal music collection to unprotected audio cd’s, which can be played anywhere. The digital audio files were however restricted to the computers you use them on and the number of computers. Although FairPlay was pretty fair to users, hackers set out to open the format further. A Norwegian software engineer called Jon Lech Johanssen wrote a program called QTFairUse in Nov 03 which removed the drm part from the audio file and converted it fully unprotected audio file. Apple tried to fightback and released another version of fairplay in 2006 but another group of hackers ripped it apart in a matter of days after release. This time they did not edit and audio file, instead they simple captured the audio when it was streaming from your soundcard. Apple decided to create DRM hardware and we have the new generations Ipod and Iphones with DRM chips in them, which created more intelligent hackers and the story still goes on. Steve Jobs in his recent blog Thoughts ON music said, he was not the one that proposed DRM. The media companies have forced him to use DRM if he wants to sell music online and he would love music to be free of DRM. Smart did I say ? Steve did actually walk the walk after his talk. iTunes now has a new (and seperate )version called iTtunes Plus , that sells drm unprotected music from EMI. Steve says he is trying to convince other companies to follow suit. The problem is these multi billion dollar music companies are not technical, they just dont want even a smallest drop in their cash counters.

PlayForSure

Microsoft released its `PlayForSure`DRM platform in 1999 and by the time it got popular to be used by sites, it was cracked by a hacked called Viodenti. The tool called FairUse4WM plays a part of the protected content and then tries to sniff the key, thus enabling complete decryption of the audio file.. Once the decrytion is complete, the DRM information in the file can be ripped. You could download the song for $10 from Napster rip it and remove the 30 day distributing restriction. MS dragged Viodenti into court and inspite of all the lawyers MS hired, Viodenti was proved was innocent, saying he only used the tools MS provided for development. MS was quick to release Windows Media 11 which has ridiculous number of layers for protection. Customers however never felt the need to upgrade and mp3 and wma 10 were suffice for their needs, and didnt care if it was drm protected or cracked.

Sony’s Adventure

When it comes to distributing audio CD’s, nothing comes close to Sony. Sony has the media rights to almost every artist out there. Sony tried its hand at DRM in a very funny way. They produced intentional errors in their CD’s to confuse software based players, while their hardware played them fine. Recently the media giant had its fingers snapped with its ill fated plan to hide rootkit enabled XCP software into its audio CDs. The rootkit application would install itself into computers with administrator rights and stopped playback of any of its audio on computers. They even went to the extent of disabling CD writes on the system to disable copying their cd’s. Some hackers found a vulnerability in their rootkit! and used the ports to hack the systems. Users complained and sued sony, after a long leagal battle, sony ended up paying $7,50,000 as penalty to state additional it had to pay $175 to each buyer which were in lacks

HD DVD

The best example of content protection overkill was exhibited by the release of HD-DVD and BluRay discs. When companies found they cannot fight alone, they decided to team up. One group was headed by MS(HD-DVD) and the second by Sony(BluRay). Enormous amount of money was spent to make the formats as secure as possible, even to pushing the release of BluRay to 8 months. The Encryption was at various levels, there was encryption on the dsk, on the data stream that passes through the computer and even between the path when it passes to the monitor. There is an encyption mthod called AACS that protected the film itself and another called HDCP that secures the data path between the hardware components.

Al this encoding required specialized hardware to actually play the content PCs needed HDCP enabled graphics cards, powerful processors with DRM technology embedded and compatible cable and monitor! those who didnt want to shell out the extra cash and upgrade were left in the cold like me, no new music for them. By the time everything fell into place and HD DVDs came into the market AACS was cracked. The hardware and software encoding caboodle seemed pretty impressive, and virtually unshakable with 128 bit AES encryption protecting AACS. There was a key assigned to the player as well as the disk. The combination of these two generated a new key called the VUK (Volume Unique Key) , similar to what SSH protocol has used for years. Its known to be uncrackable.

Hackers simply had to find out the VUK for every CD. What the DRM manufactures forgot was a computer has to store everything into computers memory, and the hackers had enough time and knowledge to dump the memory and scan every bit for the key. Soon tools were available which would detect the DVD in the drive , connect to the internet and download the correct VUK key from their database(which was spread all over the world) and insert itself into the computers memory, fooling the players. Popular media players like Windows media player and powerDVD quickly modified their code to dump random content to computers memory to fool the hackers,slowing down machines and crashing other apps. However soon it was discovered that the VUK key is not the random key that everybody thought it was, it was simply the date and time of the DVD creation encoded in a simple encryption. Hackers all over the world were laughing, how stupid they were to expect the media giants could create something worthwhile.

Now every few days every media company releases a new key, which is updated to the media player companies and they update their software. So if you are not connected to the internet, you will be missing all the latest movies and audio. The war goes on. The future is bleak for DRM and pain for the users. No one can complain, because the monopoly. The GNU foundation warned us about this 30 years ago, they said no to DRM and patents. Open Source have adopted free (as in freedom) formats like ogg for video and audio which apparently beats all other digital audio format, because they had more time to work on the compression and quality while others were busy restricting users. Security can NEVER be implemented by adding more layers and restricting users. Apple and EMI have apparently started selling DRM free music for a sightly higher rates than the usual iTunes rates. Dave Goldberg, head of Yahoo music has spoken agaist DRM. Where this all leads ? we just have to wait and see.

Taj Wonder How

Jul 8

Posted by Binoy in other | No Comments

So taj finally got its name etched in the so called new seven wonders! Wow what a feat, never before have I seen a country of a billion people, acting blindly. It is easy to appeal to the patriotic fervor of Indians, especially when hard work is not involved, but what many did not realize is that the whole New7Wonders (N7W) campaign was a private commercial enterprise.

When I first read about this new seven wonder poll, I said what the fuck, why do we need new wonders, are the old ones destroyed.

Next they tell me u can vote online and by sms. sms huh, wont that be a international number?

Surprise its a local number. wtf. did UN setup that to work with all operatos in India! In a week its all over the media. Vote for taj somehow got linked to patriotism ( which after RDB seems to be the buzz word among youth ). So the media is on crusade to get ‘INDIAS TAJ’ in the top seven.

I decided to do some research. the site newsevenwonders.com is owned by a private organization. all my efforts to find their links with UN or UNESCO go in vain. hmm i say. Searching more I find out NewSevenWonders is a brainchild of Bernard Weber, a Swiss businessman who has also dabbled in films, the campaign was orchestrated by his for-profit corporation called New Open World Corporation (NOWC). Weber roped in Federico Mayor, a former UNESCO director-general, to be part of this project, but UNESCO itself was not involved. Needless to say, this campaign has miffed experts who question the integrity of a private body that will declare a new set of seven wonders. History gives sanctity to only one list of Seven Wonders, the one that was compiled by Greek mathematician Philon of Byzantium in 200 BC.

The sms number distributed in the media here turns out to be what I call the cash vending sms machine. The more sms u send, the more money someone makes. so whose eating all this money. turns out 15% went directly to the government in the form of a wireless planning coordination fee. 64% went to the cellphone operator you used to vote. The bulk of the remaining rupee was divided in equal halves between a company called IMI which collected all the votes in an electronic vault-like space and media partners like IMCL. Weber made two to three paise for every rupee that was spent on the voting. Wow this is one hell of a collaborated effort to save our national pride. Wonder why they cant think of something like this for the prime ministers relief fund. A remarkable aspect of this poll was that nothing stopped a person from voting many times. LOL I should have made a script and flooded their server with taj sms’s.

I wonder dosen’t India have the unfair advantage of 1 billon people to vote for, or the United States where pagers and mobiles are so common. Poor Turkey’s monument dosen’t stand a chance.

This shows what media has come to become in a country like India. the news has gone from being irresponsible to vague. when a plastic eating goat is the top headline of the day, something is terribly wrong. Radio jockeys and advertisements tried to whip up a fear. They said grimly that the Taj is lagging by millions of votes and that Indians must quickly do something about this. They said, if you really loved India and by that association, the Taj, you must vote. A commercial even had a blind boy asking Indians to vote. “I have heard it is beautiful,” he said in a heartbreaking way. The N7W campaign proved how overtly and how easily nationalism can be exploited to make money for a few.

Meanwhile, the Taj is yellowing. The pollution around it is slowly destroying it. The Yamuna, on whose banks this monument has stood for centuries, is a national embarrassment. And Agra continues to be a miserable, filthy town, an unworthy host to a magnificent symbol of love. Saving the Taj will require the kind of heroic political effort that has not been witnessed in free India. And it is improbable that such an effort will be undertaken. When it comes to expressing vacant patriotism, Indians have always chosen the easier option. In the case of Weber’s gambit, lakhs of Indians had to just press some buttons. And they apparently did.

I hope the media grows up, and understands, that they are going to have the most powerful influence in shaping the future off this country.