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Copy Protection Galore
Posted by
timothy
on Fri Dec 22, 2000 04:17 PM
from the betcha-saw-this-coming dept.
from the betcha-saw-this-coming dept.
Kirk writes: "SecurityFocus is reporting that the cable industry submitted an FCC filing last week indicating that digital cable systems will use a patented, Hollywood-approved copy protection scheme called Dynamic Feedback Arrangement Scrambling Technique (DFAST). Under the scheme, HDTV-compatible recorders will refuse to tape movies, shows and sports events that have a 'don't copy' bit set. Consumer electronics makers fear an end to fair use rights, but cable companies will force compliance with DVD-style licensing agreement and the DMCA." And the Register notes that all hard drives will include copy protection by next year, under a plan put forth by the manufacturers to please the entertainment industry. Alan Cox doesn't like it, but Alan Cox doesn't call the shots here. T13.org has more information, including the specifications and some presentations explaining the system.
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Cable TV Copy Protection Coming Soon
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Simple solution: give up on them! (Score:4)
Does this mean you can not listen to music anymore? Of course not! People will still make music, and they'll probably still publish that music for wider consumption in 'canned' (or downloadable) formats. They may want to be paid for the privilege, and they will.
But the 'media industry' is on a fast track to extinction they way their heading right now.
Think I am joking?
I'm not. Guess who got rid of his TV set last month? I still have cable, but that's for my modem
OK, they can buy some laws to outlaw all this, and we'll find some other means to connect. As long as the true '1984' vision of forced television consumption does not come true, there is a way out. And should such a scheme ever come to pass, well you only have to read Orwell to learn how it will end...
"Omnis enim res, quae dando non deficit, dum habetur et non datur, nondum habetur, quomodo habenda est."
Shaking Head In The Sand (Score:3)
SCSI is terribly, terribly expensive in comparison. And it's the *principle* of the matter, because once it's been done with ATA, it'll be done with SCSI, it's just a matter of time.
No, this has to be seen for the very, very bad idea that it is. This is about *control*.
And what's to keep them from denying storage of all unsigned/unvalidated media? Let's meditate on why having all media centrally approved is *bad*.
grendel drago
A matter of Marking Blocks. (Score:5)
I will certainly grant that this misfeature provides some wonderful exploits for the nefarious. After all, how long will it be before some hacker constructs a WinTel virus that marks the whole disk as being "copy protected," thereby rendering it into so much chaff from the perspective of anyone that was planning to actually store data on it.
Western Digital, Quantum, Seagate, and friends will be gloriously happy at that one; it's a wonderful opportunity to sell people more disk drives.
But as for the number of ways that this is a Spectacularly Stupid Idea, I'm not sure I have enough fingers and toes to cope with counting it... I'll probably need a Pentium processor, one without the FDIV bug, hopefully!
And so begins a new paradigm... (Score:3)
The corporations want to dominate our content, but why do we need them to? Without the huge chunk of profit these corporations take from artisits, why will the artists stick with this?
And why would the people tolerate this? They will not, and the corportations like the idea, because it keeps us trapped in their distributional paradigms.
But we can just push forward with our own.
Free content.
Free music given away on Napster, web sites, etc.
Free stories and novels given away for the masses to enjoy.
What kind of content can we expect? The odd, the fringe, probably not the best. But the people will grow more and more dissatisfied, and the fringe will grow. People will find ways to pay the creators, beyond just advertising support. T-shirts, small print run books, etc.
A perfect example of this new paradigm is web comics. The web comics make money off merchandise, from books to t-shirts to mousepads.
It will be a low start, but eventually quality content will leave the domain of multinational corporations and return to the people.
All sites with Linux source code will be illegal.. (Score:5)
Simple... The MPAA/RIAA will go back to their favorite puppet, "Judge" Kaplan and get Linux/BSD and anything else that can use ext2 illegal as a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. Furthermore, the Linux source code, as it contains this "illegal" code.
Scary shit. This demonstrates how dangerous rogue judges are, and why the power of the judiciary needs to be curtailed and accountability increased.
Alan Cox (Score:3)
Alan Cox doesn't like it, but Alan Cox doesn't call the shots here.
You silly Linux people. Always pulling out your Alan Cox at the last minute.
Re:Well, the gist of the HD article (Score:3)
Get up on your soapbox, and nail that fucker to your feet, because you'll die up there before a statistically noticable portion of the population boycotts RIAA products.
The Evils of Planned Obsolescence (Score:4)
but I wonder what the odds of a class action or other suit would be?
After all, they would not be forcing us to buy *their* hard drives etc. We could always buy someone else's, Right? Except that someone else's also has the same junk. And everyone has conveniently stopped carrying the older technology at the same time. Complete with re-designed controller cards, motherboards, etc. Everything else would be "obsolete"
Further on down the road, can you imagine:
We obviously need to get a law passed ensuring Our property rights, and ensuring our ability to do the things we need to do.Strangely enough, according to the Register article, even Microsoft is upset with this. Maybe we need to make an alliance with them on this? [shudder]
Agreed, it sounds paranoid now, but who knows about later?
Re:Virtualize (Score:5)
First of all, this whole scheme is intended for media recording devices, such as TiVo, not for computers. The intention is to make it so that a movie recorded on the media cannot be played elsewhere, or copied by means other than what the media recording device permits.
That said, the answer to your question is this. The media recording device will interact by sending a challenge hash to the drive, which encrypts it and sends back the result. This is essentially authenticating that the drive really does have CPRM implemented, enabled, and activated. The software emulator, not having the necessary keys, won't be able to complete the challenge, and the media recording device will know it does not have CPRM media (it may still function at some level without such media, for example to record only movies without copy protection).
CPRM further is intended to prevent taking the hard drive media to a computer and copying individual files or cloning the whole drive to make an uncontrolled copy. The way this is done is via the encryption which will be different for every drive. Although the computer can use the CPRM device commands to access the read/only area, it won't have the recorder keys to make any sense of it.
Swapping an older controller onto a newer drive with the same platter configuration may not work, as the recording of the keys, and possibly of all the data on the platter space, could be done with a totally different low level format which the older controller would not understand. The best you could hope for is being able to use the older controller to low level format the platters, but that would wipe off all the keys, so all you now have in a drive w/o CPRM.
In it's current spec, CPRM is NOT something that interferes with normal computer functions, aside from reducing available capacity by 1 megabyte (get it back by low level formatting with an older controller, if you know how to) and increasing the cost by $0.17 or less. Whatever is written on the drive w/o the use of CPRM will read back the same on any computer. So you can still store "freed" movies on the drive with your BSD or Linux machine, and quite possibly even with Windows.
This copy protection mechanism requires cooperation between the recorder (subject to laws requiring implementation of copy protection logic) and the media (not subject to those laws). The recorder could be implemented to not record copy protected content on media that doesn't implement CPRM, and this would probably be it's way to be compliant with the law. Non-CPRM media can still be made, but may not work in new recorders. Manufacturers of the hard drives will probably be happy to implement this on at least some of their production to sell to the media recorder market. They may also implement it on the entire production line simply to save inventory and production scheduling costs which would likely be more than the patent royalties involved, knowing that normal computer functionality is not impaired.
What crackers will be seeking to do is extract and crack the keys, and probably implement some device that goes between a recorder and the media to completely fake the recorder into believing it has CPRM compliant media. What gets recorded may then be in the clear, or may at least be cloneable. Other potential cracks could be the ability to make a successful clone by emulating a media recorder with 2 interfaces and no copy protection. Whether crackers can crack these keys remains to be seen. Maybe the movie industry has learned and is using larger keys. OTOH, crackers have been way more resourceful than most of us have expected prior to successful cracks.
Shaking Head (Score:5)
I guess it all comes back to corporate control...I always knew there was more to HDTV than met the eye, and I wondered why, ever since I heard about it, alarm bells were going off in my head. Now I know.
Am I ahead of the Weltanschauung, or what?
Interrobang
De[a]DFAST already exists. It's called cfs! (Score:4)
The firmware in a new drive will refuse to store data if it contains a "don't store me" message. Actually, it's a single bit, but I want to generalise the technical issue to allow for more sophisticated (e.g. cryptographic or stegged) signalling.
It seems to me that if the HD firmware never sees the no-copy message because cfs (or PGPdisk) has encrypted it, then the firmware can't do anything but assume that it's okay to store. Treating all data as no-copy by default would be the only counter-measure to this, and that would defeat the whole point of a HD. I can't see any manufacturer (or OEM or anyone else) falling for that.
Do tell me if I've misunderstood the technical issues.
How fast can you say (Score:3)
Hard drives... (Score:5)
When people find that their mainstream hard drivers don't have the functionality they want, they'll simply buy hard drivers from smaller manufacturers. No big surprise there -- we already saw the same thing happen to Circuit City's ill-fated TiVo. I don't see how this situation merits such doomsday predictions; it might be inconvenient, but people aren't stupid. They know what to buy, and it won't be copy protected hard drives.
Remember, ultimately, companies are dependent on your dollar to keep them in business. Don't like their products? Don't buy them, and watch everything start to change.
Yu Suzuki
Re:New file systems (Score:3)
Re:Don't mess with Joe Sixpack's TV (Score:3)
Ah, but what if Joe Sixpack wants digital cable. In fact, what if he wants any cable.
Y'see, the cable companies will only broadcast digital. And they will switch to only broadcasting DFAST. So if Joe wants more choice from his TV, he's going to have to give up being able to record certain things - like PPV movies, major sporting events, etc.
Of course, they'll still let you record the soap operas, the evening news, Friends and all the other shows that people get addicted to - but probably only on a 'one copy' basis. And so most people wont even notice that they don't have the ability to make two copies - most people don't try. And they'll accept that they can't record a PPV movie, because that's a sacrifice worth making if they want cable in the first place.
So this technology can be introduced without upsetting the populace. And it will be.
Don't worry, it'll get hacked. And someone will decide that you can't go to jail for hacking it, and that if you don't mass-copy (or put onto the Internet) your personal copy then you don't owe anybody any more money. And the studios wont like it, but hey, they'll buy a couple more laws to help them out.
If it matters that much to you, then don't get cable, don't pay them the money in the first place, and don't watch any films or sporting events. You have that choice - most people just seem to forget it.
~Cederic
Re:backups (Score:3)
This is so incredibly wrong-headed, I can't even begin. It's applying the DivX DVD-pay-per-use system to hard drives. What happens when it goes under? Do we all get 'free' aaccess to our hard drives for a year before they become paperweights with all our data locked on them??
My ass. Time to start stockpiling non-compliant HDs and other devices.
Re:what about the hard drive makers? (Score:5)
What the F*#*!! (Score:5)
I do not understand how this kind of garbage keeps happening. We used to have, under "fair use", the right to "time-shift" any publicly accessible media. Television and radio shows, broadcast movies and sporting events were allowed to be recorded by law. So, how do the media companies propose to remove the capabilities that the legal systems says are perfectly allowable? By introducing a "no record bit" in the signal. These proposals (well, they are more than proposals now aren't they? But I refuse to call them "standards") are seriously just another attempt to gather more money.
But the thing that the industries involved here don't understand is that they are only going to hurt themselves in the end. Now, all of the people that have to work during their favorite shows will not only not be able to record those shows to watch them later, but they won't be able to watch them at all. How does that improve viewership of the shows that these companies claim are so important to their livelihood? If we have an evening where we are busy and we can't watch our favorite show, we can't watch that show at all. Forget about recording it because the industry says that's piracy. Be a good little consumer and sit in front of your TV when we tell you to. Well, what if we have lives beyond our television, but we still want to watch our favorite shows? Sorry, that's no longer allowed.
It just seems utterly ridiculous to me that companies keep thinking that by "getting tighter control" of their media they are going to make more money. All they are doing is wasting a lot of money on things that are going to garauntee lower viewership, alienating viewers, and pissing people off in droves. The electronics market will suffer. The consumers will suffer. And eventually, when people get so sick of trying to find ways to watch their favorite shows that they stop watching altogether, the media companies themselves will suffer.
Well, that doesn't really hurt my feelings too much. But it is amazing to see so much money wasted on something that is so utterly stupid. But, it seems stupidity is the only thing these companies are good at anymore. Once a business hits a certain size, that's it. You cannot be big and still play smart. It just doesn't seem to work.
Now, having said all of that, is it possible that the FCC will reject this? It would be nice if there were that much common sense in a government agency. The whole intention of agencies like the FCC is supposedly to uphold the law of the land. The law of the land says that time-shifting is allowable. But the law of the green (as in the green of the money of the kickbacks the FCC is bound to be getting from the industries involved) says that time-shifting is just another way of sayhing "piracy". However this turns out, I'm sure it will be another "consumers are evil, business is good" turn of events.
At what point will business realize that people are not evil just for being consumers? Legally, at least in the US, you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. But when it comes to business anymore it is automatically assumed that anyone that purchases any good is guilty of the most evil and vile crime that is possible with that good (or broadcast). It is not even thought, even for a moment, that a "consumer" may just be using something as it was intended, or if not exactly as intended, it isn't the evil and disgusting nature of the person causing them to do something "different" (Oh, that's a naughty word now isn't it?). It is just that they need to do it differently or they can't do it at all (especially in the case of recording a show because you aren't home at that time).
But let them do it. Once a few million consumers are pissed off and stop watching/recording their shows every day while they are working, maybe these people will finally wake up. But I doubt it. They will probably just assume that we are illegally tapping into someone else's feed.
A Note I Sent About The Hard disk Copyprotection (Score:5)
I'm glad that John spent the time and energy to write a good summary of what is going on in the hard disk area. He's spot on about the dangers to our liberties.
But I was quite worried until I began to see the dangers for IBM and Intel in the scheme. This is not an easy play for them because it threatens much of the entire industry in these ways:
1) This is going to increase the cost of using PCs dramatically. Hard disk crashes are going to go from major disasters to utter catastrophes. When the disks go bad, you'll need to buy all new copies of the software, images, movies, and what not. Backing up? Well, that will be another headache that won't be possible without the right permissions. They can wave their hands, but there's no getting around the fact that installing software is going to have plenty of new red tape.
I don't see how they will be able to distinguish between the truth and a lie when a guy calls up and say, "uh, my hard disk crashed. I need to install it on a new machine." They either authorize it or they don't. In fact, they'll probably have to automate the process because it's so expensive to have an actual human on the other end.
My mean time between hard disk failures is about 2 years, but I'm a heavy user. Can we really afford to create a new class of technicians who do special hard disk replacement for 20% of America each year?
2) This really changes the nature of the business. Right now the PC and software manufacturers sell you a box, wave good bye and say, "Good luck." Support is a joke. Actually fixing the machines costs too much money. Anything worth under $400 is essentially disposable.
If they put trusted hard disks in place, then there needs to be someone to care for these disks. They can't just keep waving good bye when you walk out the door. The business model needs to change to be something like cable television. That means hiring thousands if not millions of technicians who will come to your house and fix your hard drive.
3) This is really going to slow innovation and that's really going to hurt IBM and Intel. Already the hardware guys depend heavily on upgrades to keep people buying machines. If people can't move their software to a new zippier computer, then they're not going to buy a new zippier computer. Take a look at the cable television world. Most people are still using 1970's era technology. It just takes too long for the service technicians to go to each house and replace things. But that's the only way you can run the world when you have trusted corrals for special data. You can't just let any schmoe upgrade their hard disk or any schmoe is going to be able to pirate Hollywood movies. Gosh, that's all us proles do all day long you know. Pirate content.
4) This is another opportunity for the open source community to come in and steal market share. If the press reports in Slashdot and other places are to believed, it was only a few months ago that Microsoft marched into the offices at Virginia Beach and asked them to produce the certificates for their copies of Windows. You know, those neat hologram embossed slips of paper. They didn't have one for each PC so they had to pay more than $129,000. (http://slashdot.org/articles/00/12/01/0532206.sh
This is another opportunity for Red Hat or some other Linux box company to walk into companies and say, "Use Red Hat, Mozilla, and Star Office and you'll never have license problems again. The hardware guys claim that they can take care of rights management issues for you. So can we and we cost alot less."
I think this may be the greatest thing that's come along for open source OSs yet. As Princess Leia said in the Hollywood content "Star Wars", "The harder you squeeze your fingers Vader, the more planets slip through the fingers." Do those content wrangling lawyers down there ever look at the content they protect?
http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for information on my book on open source software.
p3@wayner.org
Lauch an anti-trust trial against MPAA/RIAA (Score:4)
Now seems like a good time to consider the entertainment industry's giants as a big cartel and launch an anti-trust trial at least twice as big as the one we just saw against Microsoft.
May all Actors and Musicians who have been shagged by those industries please take a stand now and help their audience put an end to the industry's disgusting monopoly and their influence on politicians, police and other industries!
--
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:4)
See with drugs, they are fairly easy to produce (even the toughest once require little more than a diligent chemist or botanist and a little inginuity - above the ability of the "average man" but not the average "trained chemist")
This means you have laws aimed at stopping the supply and distribution. That never works. You simply can not stop people from obtaining goods that exist, or can be made in sufficient quantities from distributing them.
However, in this case its different, only slightly, but still different. It is a long term process to be done in stages see...because this isn't the law stopping distribution, its the producers.
This is just the first step. They start with little copy protections things. They seem "token" and silly. Easy to bypass, hardly a threat.
Next thing you know, VCRs are a thing of the past, noone makes them. DVDs and DVD recorders replace them. The same for hard drives without copy protection etc.
As time goes on, the switch to HDTV, your VCR dies out, VCRs are no longer produced etc etc. Next thing you know, the majority of devices automagically respect the copy protect bits. You can't even find hardware that doesn't. Old hardware that doesn't is no longer produced...and so supplies will begin to dwindle.
its a stepwise process...eventually it leaves the producer in control. Fair use is gone, not by law but by media control. Check mate, in fact thats a good analogy, cuz its alot like chess....
You can move around, but slowly, your world gets smaller and smaller, they move in, and the next thing you know, your trapped, check mate.
The ONLY things that can stop this are renegade hardware manafacturers. Individuals doing things like "fixing" their own hardware will always be far and few between, wont even show up on the radar.
If they do it slowly enough, then they win, because people will just get used to it, and will just accept the limitations...slowly. People tend to be accepting of slow changes and react violently to fast ones.
-Steve
Humans to have copy protection by 3Q2001 (Score:4)
"It's quite simple," said a spokeswoman for the group. "The Human Genome Project was in some financial difficulty, so we stepped in and cut a deal. By leveraging the techonology already in place in hard drive copy protection, we will be preventing unauthorized duplication of humans."
Unauthorized human reproduction -- also known as "childbearing" to hackers -- has been estimated to cost content producers over $3 billion per year. Implementing copy protection at the genome level, the Holy Grail of the industry, is predicted to prevent up to 97% of "childbearing".
But not all industry figures are thought to be onside. Microsoft in particular has been vociferous in its opposition to the plan, saying that it would effectively eliminate the potential market for its software rental scheme.
"We demand the freedom to innovate," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently. "And that means being free to innovate for lots and lots of paying customers."
Free Software Foundation guru Richard M. Stallman was unavailable for comment. A source close to the programmer said he was "scanning the personal ads frantically."
Re:Don't mess with Joe Sixpack's TV (Score:3)
Isn't this the kind of rational thinking that we've been hoping the courts would start using for a long time now? Personally, I'm through giving them this much credit. At this point I'm more likely to think something like the following:
It'll get hacked. A scapegoat will be found amongst the millions who wanted to see it hacked. He will be humiliated, have all his computers confiscated, and will be brought to trial. Everyone here will remind each other of what we all already know, that this is all stupid, and it won't do any good. In the meantime another breach of our privacy/rights will happen and everyone will think "oh, they'll finally realize how stupid this is." I've noticed the cycle by now, haven't you?
hard drive protection timetable (Score:3)
From what I understand of this technology, market acceptance is nearly impossible. But if all the big bad corporations get together and cram it down our throats, it'll take absolutely YEARS to make the transition. For example, the first article I read about this indicated that a protected disk and a real disk wouldn't be able to interoperate at all, ie: you couldn't copy a file from one to the other, in either direction.
And at any rate, I can't imagine anything at that low of a level actually working in a meaningful way. An HD processor hardly has the spare cycle to do the heuristics to see if I'm writing an MP3. And it wouldn't know how to read through the filesystem layer anyway.
Call me overly optimistic, but I don't think this will ever happen.
MoNsTeR
I'm looking for the Man in the Middle... (Score:5)
The easiest thing to do is simply open two files on the drive, one secured and one insecure. Then, whenever the paranoid app asks to write to the secure file, send that block of data to the insecure file, and send the same block to the secure one. Let the challenge/response mechanism built into the drive satisfy the app's desire to assure that it's talking to the Real McCoy, returning the status codes that come back from the secure file to the app.
As an added bonus, throw in the old BBS download quota bypass, and when the last block of data is written, return an error code to the app, indicating that the file is not correctly committed to disk. Also, you can have the app tell the drive to delete the secure file, releasing one "lock" (some supported schemes allow you to make 3 "portable" copies at a time, requiring verified deletion of a copy before another can be made).
Since the interface to the device has to be well-specified, this sort of approach is how the security will be circumvented. Having a copy of the .DLL will be a violation of the DMCA, of course, but so is having pirate copies of movies. Therefore, a version that can be loaded from a floppy will probably be quite popular.
And another thing... (Score:5)
Putting copyright protection on the HD, presumably requiring the participation of the OS (not likely in the case of Free software anyway), essentially means that the PC must become a trusted client when running software.
Bruce Schneier (the very same) speaks to the idea of trusted clients in the 15 May 2000 Crypto-Gram [counterpane.com]. Here he says:
Besides, such a thing would put such a damper on PC sales as to make the last quarter look like a windfall...
We need Legislation (Score:4)
Maybe a good idea (Score:5)
My first reaction is, of course, this is terrible, but then I realized, the more they push me away from tv, the more of a favor they are doing me.
Re:Cracked (Score:4)
It's called book burning.
As long as... (Score:3)
But all that aside, I do agree that this bit is necessary particularly for cable and premium channel -- broadcast channels should NOT be allowed to set this bit at all because they don't make their money sending data out ot the consumer, they make it in commercials. On the other hand the consumer is paying for the content on the cable stations (ehhh, somewhat), and since it's not broadcasted freely to everyone, there is need to copyright protection. Particularly in the case of premium stations like HBO, etc. However, there should be significant penalties for abusing the don't set bit -- Nick at Nite, for example, has no reason to use it.
What needs to be developed, besides the HDTV equivalent of he VCR, is the TIVO like thing where programs with the 'don't copy' bit set can be recorded locally on the machine but in no way can be pulled to any other device or media. Yes, that means propriatary hardware, but this would take care of fair use time shifting problems for the cable people.
But this is going to the Supreme Court at some point. I'm hoping someone follows the Aussie lead and take DVD region encoding to the Court, and the deCSS case will be taken there as well. The entertainment industry is trying to fight piracy from the wrong end, and instead should be looking more to the problem of offshore data pirates. Once the implications of these 'restrictions' hit JQ Public, there is going to be a major outroar on this.
Failures (Score:3)
However the situation has changed since then (the 1980's). Several factors have come into play which did not exist back then. The first is in the pre Windows days people expected computers to work more or less correctly, and they noticed when copy protection broke their machines. Most computer users raised on Windows 9X don't have any expectation that computers work reliably ; Windows 9X crashes so often that most people accept computer crashes as a fact of life . Most people have never operated a machine which will run for months without a reboot - and don't believe that such a machine can be built.
Secondly Windows has conditioned people to expect that doing anything with a computer involves a fight with the computer to get it to do what the person wants; in the simplistic MSDOS days one gave commands to the computer - and the computer did what it was told without argument - so people noticed when the machine failed to do as told - this made copy protection hassles stand out like a sore thumb.
Under Windows everything you do is a hassle, and people are used to wrestling with their machines to get something done.
Example:
That is what I mean by 'wrestling with the computer'. Because everything in Windows is a hassle adding more hassle to the process is not very noticeable . Don't expect the average person who never does backups anyway to notice that he now can't do backups. Most businesses don't even do backups.
The third factor that has changed is the DMCA. Because most people just obey laws without questioning them - the DMCA has the effect of causing most people to just blindly go along with it; sheep don't mind being herded.
By the way - under the DMCA any hard drive that doesn't have the copy protection scheme is a piece of hardware for circumventing copy protection and thus illegal. That is what the IBM spokesman meant when he said that the scheme would be on all hard drives by next summer - the manufacturers have no choice in the matter.
Don't count on consumer outrage to stop this mess - it won't be like it was in the 80's. This is going to happen the same way that DVD region coding happened - it will be a fait acompli before most people realize what is going on.
History Repeats Itself (Score:5)
A nifty little defeat (Score:3)
In this instance, buying foreign alternatives is also a quick-fix, albeit one that will serve up to a certain point and then run out of steam, as the problem isn't exclusive to the United States. Eventually it will no longer be an option, and what then?
I offer a permanent defeat. It isn't strictly technological per se, but there is a way to render all legislation harmless to oneself. For those that haven't heard yet, it's sovereign citizenship, a way to opt-out of federal and what most people think of as state government. It's an individual option, not requiring voting for a certain candidate or lobbying for a cause (which means you don't have to wait for a statistically significant portion of the lemmings to wise up). You just opt out, with the appropriate paperwork. You then are able to lawfully live in the united States, but are out of jurisdiction in terms of legislation and so-called income (actually excise) taxes. Nothing is illegal for you. If someone challenges you on that, you're welcome to sue them in court; courts have been consistently backing sovereign citizenship up against johnny-come-latelies such as the IRS. Personally, I'd like to see the outcome of a soveriegn citizen's lawsuit against these people for intentionally crippling a drive to be compliant with legislation of the federal United States, which the courts have declared to be "a legal fiction" with no sound basis in law.
There are also a few crafty offensive weapons here for anybody who feels like going on the offense. One that springs to mind is a commercial lien against the people setting this attrocity into motion. A commercial lien was designed to give merchants an equitable way to reach justice... it's done out of court, and involves filing papers against specific individuals which damage their credit rating.
I think the most effective weapon is propogating awareness of sovereign citizenship itself. The mainstream media is too well-heeled to touch it, but as awareness of it continues to snowball, a lot of the assumptions we've previously had about the way things are run and exactly who is working for whom will become challenged. Legislation like this wouldn't even be seriously considered if the majority of people understood that federal legislation binds only entities who admit to engaging in interstate commerce (and most Americans are tricked into it via fraudulent wording in common forms). This also means that n a business not engaged in interstate commerce isn't subject to the legislation either; any sovereign citizen who wants to start churning out non-compliant hard drives is welcome to do so... and depending on the wording of the proposal, all they'd need to do is sell them to a third-party who would distribute them coast-to-coast. It works for every legislation one wants to circumvent... and allows a company in this country to do things which are simple legally impossible for other companies to do. As government contnues to encroach, I imagine that will make the prospect increasingly profitable.
For more on sovereignty, have a look at my write-up [go.to]. Antishyster [antishyster.com] has more detailed info on commercial liens, among other things.
"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce."
-- J. Edgar Hoover
Wishful thinking (Score:3)
They keep calling these schemes encryption, when in fact in this situation it cannot be anything but fancy, CPU hungry, data scrambling. You don't have the encryption situation when your key and the "encrypted" data both reside at some point in the hostile hands.
Re:Well, the gist of the HD article (Score:5)
Virtualize (Score:5)
How do you know that you're really talking to the hard drive, instead of a software emulator that makes all hard drives look the same?
This will only work in absolutely closed systems, where 3rd parties never have the ability to write drivers, and where the CPU doesn't have the ability to trap on I/O. Even MS Windows (as we currently know it, at least) running on x86 is waaay too open and functional for this to ever work.
Pet Peeve: This is not copyright protection. It's copy protection. The bad guys' goal is to make the public think that these two wildly different terms are synonymous.
Copyright protection is something that protects copyright. An example of this would be a watermark that identifies who a copy has been sold to, so that if it ever turns up in the public, the copyright infringer can be prosecuted. I don't have any objections to copyright protection.
Copy protection is a completely different beast: it makes it difficult for people to make copies, even copies that do not infringe copyright. I have objections to copy protection.
When people (innocently or otherwise) confuse these two terms, they should be corrected.
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