DVD Drives Defeat Cactus Data Shield

jsepeta sends in a story about Cactus Data Shield, one of the schemes to be used for copy-protecting compact discs. A reporter for TechTV notes that DVD drives see right through the disc corruption that Cactus uses to supposedly prevent those CDs from being ripped.

Soon to be illegal...

any machine that allows you to rip MP3s. They will probably put a time limit on the grandfather clause, say a year. And then everyone has to buy a "copyright compliant" macine. I can't wait to be considered an evil hacker for having old equipment. Does that mean that rotary phones will become hacker equipment too?

Re:Soon to be illegal...

But of course.

There is an excellent review of CPRM, SSSCA and the coming "Secure PC" on The Register [theregister.co.uk]. Here's a short excerpt from this article [theregister.co.uk]:

But the CPRM gambit was an early indication that the entertainment industry was deadly serious about removing the free movement of digital media on what has been, for fifteen years, on open platform. ... In August a draft bill called the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) was proposed by Senator Hollings (D). It proposed mandatory inclusion of copy-protection schemes for domestic and imported PCs, anything in fact, capable of recording digital media.

All DVD drives...or just that NEC model?

The article stated that the NEC dvd drive (which Dell uses in much of its computer line) read the TOC (table of contents of the CD) normally.

What it didn't say, however, is if other DVD drives, such as the famous slot-loading Pioneer (which I am blessed to have), also exhibit this behavior.

In any case, this whole copy-protection of audio CD's is a sham. If I use my computer as a CD player (which many people at work do), I should be able to play the CD normally, and do what I want with it.

Re:All DVD drives...or just that NEC model?

Ah, I see. Corporations are helping us to reach Nirvana by not allowing us to own property. They figure if we simply license everything, we won't own it and all of us will become Zen masters with no attachment to the physical world.... and here we are, all thinking that this is some scheme to gain power and extort more money from the hapless masses. Dammit, I knew corporations had the good of humanity in mind all along.

Now the big question: Who will cave in first?

Will this end up like the VHS market where VHS recorders started intentionally mis-recording Macrovision protected content, despite the fact they had fixed the original flaw that allowed macrovision copy protection to work? Or will the DVD drive manufacturers stand up to the recording industry?

Re:Now the big question: Who will cave in first?

Why should the DVD drive manufacturers stand up against anyone except their own customers? These are the wonderful folks who went along with CSS in the first place. Give it a couple months and we'll be seeing drives touted as having the "feature" of being able to "play" (not rip) "copy-protected audio CDs."

People will be lining up to buy them. When they notice that they can't rip, it'll be too late- and the only response they will get is "what, you want to pirate music? You are a bad person, I ought to report you." Makes me glad that I've already got a drive.

So?

That just means that another copy protection scheme to fail. They should pretty much just give up on all this copy protection stuff because no matter how advanced it is there is always somebody who can crack it or find away around it.

Time for a new media or new way around it perhaps?

Difference between copying and reading?

Look, I know that there is supposed to be a big difference between the error correction on Audio-CD players and the normal CD-R drive, let alone a DVD drive, but in the end, it is a digital bit stream. Bits can be copied, end of story.

Another point is that many drives have maingenance modes which allow the host computer to see exactly what is on the disk without correction. This is normally used for testing, but again would be very useful for breaking the DMCA. Just read track w/o correction and aply the correction at software level ignoring the bad bits.

I guess that a DVD-rom drive is more sensitive to errors on conventional CD's as they have much finer bit resolutions for DVDs so they alreasy have the modified error recovery built in.

Protection of CDs is pointless and it interferes with customers' own rights and annoys the customer. The original article mentions a class action against Universal about Unplayable CDs.

Alternative OSs?

The article specifically mentions that the player software on the disk is Windows only. Will I be able to play this disk on my Mac/PlayStation2/Linux/Car CD Changer? If so, what keeps me from draging the files off of the disk (on my Mac) and ripping them that way?

Am I missing something?

Re:Alternative OSs?

The article specifically mentions that the player software on the disk is Windows only. Will I be able to play this disk on my Mac/PlayStation2/Linux/Car CD Changer?

I was recently in a local music store that carried "The Fast & The Furious" soundtrack. (First off, figures Universal would start with a CD like this--no one wants it, so there won't be a huge outrage over it!) On the back, it states something to the effect of "This CD is copy protected and it meant to be played in standard CD Audio players or Windows-based PCs"

No, it will not play in your Mac. No, it will not play in your consoles. It may play in your car CD player, but that totally depends on the model. And to be honest, I'm not sure about Linux--I'm not going to spend $20 on that POS CD to see if it works under redhat or not.

On top of the fact that this protection decreases the quality of the CD-Audio, etc., it also further extends Microsoft's monopoly. Now if you want to play an Audio CD in your computer, you had better have Windows! This is something that needs to be fought immediately. (Some nice "DEFECTIVE CD" stickers would help, I think)

I nearly got arrested because of this!

I went to the store today and asked for a DVD player. The guy behind the counter started to scream and yell and threatening to call the police and have me arrested for buying a 'device that could be used to circumvent a anti-copy protection'.

A theory if you will

I strongly suspect something other than the usual theory of CD-ripping protection is going on here (inserting checksum-foiling bits or some such). These guys switched from Wintels (a lot of Dell-wintels to be even more generic) with CD players to DVD players, controlled by different automatic Windows procedures. No mention is really made of the difference in how DVD players *under windows* play regular CDs differently anyhow.

It seems to me this is just one of those CDAutoStart things that Windows responds to in particular.

I got tipped off to this by when they mention "Track 1" never plays. I BET they didn't notice the total track count go up by one, as the Windows software talking to the DVD player parses its error-handling differently (correctly), and the result is like putting a PC hybrid CD in a Mac. In fact i strongly expect this Cactus lockout thing would not work on a Mac by default, and very very likely Linux/*nix as well. The tracks would appear as normal, though possibly not that first track, because its header DOES get lost in the scrambling, maybe.

Perhaps this is hogwash, but I've heard about Macs seeing through similar schemes before. I think that these TechTV guys sort of percolated through the truth of older reports to home users that are kinda savvy but don't like leaving their Gates Paradigm Computing, thus only the windows DVD stuff, no mention of other platforms at all.

On the other hand, if this is not unique to Windows (I wonder about Mac DVD players) then maybe that program has low-level drivers which affect how the CD drive does checksums, but DVD players do differently anyway.

Yeah, another victory for the Fair Use groups, as the people designing this have their asses backwards because they're counting on all computer users (mass 37331 pirates) to be Windows computers. OOPS...

Universal, i will scout for your discs, and as a Mac user of self-proclaimed badassary, "hack" via insertion your CD, rip, burn and mail to your well-tanned California ass.... Mwahaaha... All right enough fevered fantasies of geek revenge... back to work...

Another way around it:

As described in a comment on FatChucks [fatchucks.com]

(Tested it on 'Natalie Imbruglia - White Lillies Island' with a Yamaha 6x4x16x SCSI CDRW drive)

1) Get IsoBuster [isobuster.com] (A Win32 app)

2) Rip the entire disc as raw data. May struggle/take a while. Tell it to ignore any read errors

3) Open the raw file in CoolEdit (or any decent audio editor) as a 44.1Kz 16-bit stereo sample (with Intel byte ordering)

4) There you have it! The entire CD as one big sample!

5) In CoolEdit, you can use 'Edit->AutoCue->Find Phrases and Mark' to split the tracks up automatically

6) Save 'em out, and convert to MP3/Ogg if neccesssary

Re:Another way around it:

That's an interesting method. Here's another that I prefer:

1) Take 'Natalie Imbruglia - White Lillies Island' CD.

2) Fasten the disc to your car's bumper with a chain.

3) Drive around until there's nothing left but the chain.

damnit, couldn't they be quiet?

Too bad this Cactus system didn't become the standard before this was discovered, then RIAA would be a laughingstock.

Dell.

That's cute.. Dell uses DVD drives which by-pass the copy protection...

If they enforce the DMCA on this, they can change there commercials..

"Dude, You're getting arrested!"

Once again, the VCR case.

So, the music industry would like to prevent you from ripping cds to mp3. I still don't see what prevents a hardware company from walking into a courtroom, picking up an mp3 player (flash memory of course) and jogging around the courtroom with it. "Fair use, your honor. I like to listen to music I bought when I'm jogging."

Now, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not a politician (Otherwise I'd be busy screwing around on my wife with an intern right now, or stuffing my pockets with money from lobbyists,) but this is fairly fucking obvious, is it not? What is it that these people don't understand!

First Track

From my understanding on a system that can see through the encryption you are unable to see the first track. Would this not in fact be illegal as they are not allowing you to use a product (i.e. the first track) that you purchased, even if it is unintentional.

The people who wrote this article are idiots.

They keep saying that they couldn't play the first track. Of course they can't play the first track, that's what contains the filesystem with the CDS player.

Correct me if I'm wrong (nobody's perfect), but this seems pretty simple to me.

Re:The people who wrote this article are idiots.

Well, The Screensavers is not a show for techies, it's a show for the average PC/Mac user. They usually go through the most simple of steps in great detail, probably so that normal users don't get frustrated and change the channel.

if you can listen to it, you can rip it

I don't understand why the record labels are expending so much effort and political capital on this. I mean, you can rip any CD by just connecting to the analog audio output. Sure, it's 1x, but you can do it while you listen to the CD or automate it with an audio jukebox. Given that MP3 is a bit worse than CD anyway, any theoretical loss in quality doesn't matter (and a bit of analog degradation might do the CD recording some good anyway). And once it's in MP3 format, you can send it to the whole world.

Not even watermarking is going to see them out of this. Watermarks can be removed anyway, and even if they succeed in a lunatic scheme to require that every computer audio board have some kind of watermark detection circuit, A/D and D/A converters that are fast enough and good enough are cheap, widely available, and easily hooked up to a PC.

Are the record labels just clueless or is there some other diabolical plan in the wings?

Just like the good old days!

Yep, just like the good old days of copy protecting software. They will lose time and time again.

The only way they'll win is if they make CDs connect to the Internet and verify with the record company everytime you play it, ala Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Or have some crappy activation featuers, ala Windows XP. Then again someone will work around that too ;-)

Read the classic Copy Protection: A History and Outlook [textfiles.com]

Perfect copy protection IS possible!

I have a CD with the only truly unbreakable copy protection I've yet tested. The publisher accomplished it by omitting the CD's the metal layer and, apparently, the dye layer as well. The result is a disc which is almost completely transparent. Sadly, the disc is unplayable on any of my equipment, DVD-ROM drive included. Perhaps the publisher anticipated that problem, and that's why he published it without a label, and distributed it for free with spindles of CD-R's.

All kidding aside— here is a formula that might be useful to publishers of digital data:

Rc = ( Cm + Ce + ( Ca * Pa ) - Cp ) * Vd

where

Rc = Risk of the data being illegally copied
Cm = Cost of recordable media
Ce = Cost of effort needed for duplication
Ca = Cost of being apprehended
Pa = Probability of apprehension
Cp = Cost of purchasing data
Vd = Value of the data

If L > 0, the data will be copied.

A publisher can control the level of his data's protection only to the degree that he can control these variables.

• Cm cannot be kept artificially high, due to market forces to the contrary;
• Ce continues to drop, as coding ingenuity continues to outstrip copy prevention standards almost as quickly as they are developed;
• Ca is relatively low for the end user, since it usually only involves paying for software you had anyway; and
• Pa is low because the crime is widespread and social costs are low, so enforcement at the end user level is minimal.

This leaves a publisher of digital data with two variables he can control: the data's cost and its value. This provides two options for perfect copy protection:

• make the product free, or
• make the product worthless.

Since neither option would be attractive to most publishers, it would appear that widespread copyright violations (and violators) will be with us for a long, long time.

Re:Perfect copy protection IS possible!

If L > 0, the data will be copied.

Perhaps you could define L? ;)

Formula is wrong

Rc = ( Cm + Ce + ( Ca * Pa ) - Cp ) * Vd
Has no one ever tried to understand the formala you posted ?
The risk that data will be copied rises when the cost of recordable media rises ? Your formula should have been:

Rc = ((Ca * Pa) -Cp) * Vd / ( Cm + Ce )

Normal CD drives can do it to...

But with a little effort. See, Talkback: Is Ripping a Crime? [techtv.com] on the same site.

Good for music trading after all?

By making it slightly harder to turn your CD into mp3/ogg's, by the techniques described above (Macs, binary imaging, then spliting with Cool Edit, etc), groups will end up doing the releasing, like in the warez scene. This will ensure a more organized (complete cd's, as soon as the CD is release), high quality (decent hardware used to extract the audio) music album releases.

The only thing hurting the warez scene is games being so friggin big nowadays... multiple CDs, etc. You can't run bladeenc, or oggenc on a game.

Maybe DVD-Audio will help combat music piracy, but that's a bit off.

As if this would stop mp3s from spreading

It's enough that a few people figure out how to copy the data and convert into mp3s, then the wonderful invention of the internet will take care of the rest. This is only stopping normal people from enjoying the music (my advice is to just simply stop buying CDs all together). I simply don't like their tactics, and I don't like the attitude.

These kind of findings are exactly what will ...

undermine the DCMA. Bear with me here, but as long as standard products are able to 'circumvent' the copyright protection via encryption etc (and i used that word encryption very lightly ...) because of how shockingly bad the implementations are the RIAA is going to be unhappy (yes the MPAA etc as well) and thus will eventually get greedy and try to prosecute some/many people.

And heres where the crappy DCMA really starts to leak water, because now these products (ie. DVD-ROM drives, etc) that are being manufactured by large corporations some of which don't give a f*** about the MPAA and the DVD Forum because they allow all of that to be handled by software, are circumvention devices, and thus illegal. All it takes is a lawsuit and there is no way that anyone can tell me that this crappy law can stand up in court when multibillion dollar industries go head to head with each other. Now IANAL but in my opinion the DCMA has the quality of construction roughly equal to that of M$'s software, and that under this much scrutiny it will (and forgive the really corny wording of this but i'm tired) BSOD.

Well at least thats what I hope happens.

The Question All Slashdroids Want Answered Is...

...so, if I rip Universal CDs in my DVD drive, will I be breaking the DMCA?

- A.P.

"fair use" is not a right.

It seems that everyone believe that "fair use" is a right. In fact, it is not a right but it's really a exclusion from prosecution. What this means is that if you use legally licenced copyrighted material (music, book, software, etc..) in a "fair use" manner, you cannot be prosecuted for violation of copyright. This does not mean that if you purchase a CD, you have the inalienable right to make a backup copy. There is a subtle but distinct difference.

Having said all this, record industry does have the right to implement copy protection. I'm not saying that it's good, I'm just saying that they have legal right to do so. Under current law, record company is not obligated to grant you the ability to use the material in "fair use" manner. At the same time, you are not obligated to buy copy protected CDs.

Re:"fair use" is not a right.

Blockquoth the poster:

Having said all this, record industry does have the right to implement copy protection.

I've thought about the following for a while. There ought to be a two-track system of copyright. Whenever anything is released for public consumption, the publisher would make a choice:

• Forego any technical copy protection -- the data is presented in the clear. However, stringent and heavy penalties accrue for copyright infringement, and the publisher can utilize the court system to recover these penalties.
• Encrypt the data or otherwise protect it by technical means. In this case, however, no penalties would follow from circumvention of the encyption ... the works would, in essence, be public domain, with only the encryption providing protection (= revenue stream) to the publisher.

In other words, the content publisher doesn't get to eat his/her cake and have it, too. By restricting Fair Use access, by cordonning off the material from the public domain (essentially forever), the publisher loses the protection of the courts. If you don't want to play ball with the justice system, you don't get to use it, either.

This approach is entirely justifiable, as copyright is a privilege granted by the state, not a right inherent in the content. As Litman and others point out, historically, copyright has been viewed as a bargain between the publishers and the public. If publishers try to unilaterally change the terms of the game -- by, for instance, encrypting data streams -- then the public has every right and justification to revoke the copyright.

Music ... Then & Now

Copy prot., shutting down mp3 distributions, watermarking...it all adds up to eminem! None of this crap would be happening if eminem & dre would've let their lame ass songs get pirated, same for metallica (guess they got scared of the 5 people that like them, 2 weren't paying).

All jokes aside, if it can be played by a normal stereo, all it would take is about $15 worth of Radio Shack happiness to record onto your HD.

I have not been researching or reading much about the schemes they are trying to coordinate, but I know that there are a lot of different "known" schemes so far. Exactly how much money do you suppose they are sinking into this battle for just these "known" protections? I would bet it is quite pricey, and to justly support their anti-pirating/anti-reverse engineering crusades (yes..) they'll happily stick the fool still buying cds...until of course s/he realizes, "paying $35/cd sucks" and just quits buying cds then goes back to tape recording the radio. HAHA! Never ending spiral RIAA has going, they need to learn to accept diminishing returns and be happy there still is a great number of stupid people happy to pay these increased costs. As for me, I love shoutcast =)
// TRiPTMiND //

This is idiocy, it's fundamentally a paradox.

The RIAA and MPAA are selling data to us-- and trying to protect themselves by making this data unavailable to us once we've bought it. If we can't get at the data, there's no point and we won't buy it, so the data will always be accessible somehow.

However, since the customer is allowed to hear the music or see the film, the data has been "released" into the wild and can easily be recaptured in other formats. In other words, they cannot use purely digital, "black-box" means to protect this data because we have nice analog visual and auditory systems that require this data to pass through the air in order for us to perceive and enjoy it.

Once the data is in the air, any microphone, nice camera, etc. etc. will be able to grab it out of the air again.

The only way I can see copy protection working is if in 50 years all "out-loud" music is strictly forbidden and illegal and instead, we have a DBC (digital-to-brain converter) implanted in our skull that accepts an input from the line-out jack on our "secure" digital music device.

There will have to be secret police everywhere to make sure nobody actually hums along, because if anyone does, someone with a hidden microphone (banned decades ago, but available on the black market, nevertheless) might capture it and distribute it, not to mention the 20 other people in the room who will hear this humming and thus "steal" the music without paying the original artist/composer for it...

My DVD drive defeats it

I've got a Toshiba laptop dvd drive (sd-c2502), and it had not trouble at all ripping the Natalie Imbruglia cd that was Cactus Broken^H^H protected.

A couple of friends have Toshiba laptop cd only drives, and they couldn't play the cd :(

In the Bad Old Days of diskette copy protection..

This Slashdot story ought to be a nail in Midbar's coffin. But, alas, it's just a passing curiosity of no real importance.

In the Bad Old Days of diskette copy protection, the good guys eventually won. You had the usual arms race, the usual idiocy, companies wasted time devising slightly corrupted disk formats that could be loaded but not copied, schemes that would allow you to install on a hard drive but forced you to deinstall before the diskette would allow a reinstall, and so forth and so on.

You also had legally-purchased diskettes that wouldn't install because of SQA issues with the protection scheme, or hardware incompatibilities with certain drives.

But you had vigorous free enterprise producing products like Locksmith and Copy II PC, constantly improving them and developing new "parms."

This meant that the companies using copy protection had to spend serious development resources devising new and better copy protection schemes, AND were constantly pissing off legitimate customers.

Eventually the Lotuses of the world got tired of it all and decided not to bother with copy protection. Lotus has declined, but as far as I know, not one person has suggested that the decline was caused by software piracy...

Right now, CD protection is in the same stage that diskette copy protection was... and we'll have these amusing stories for a while... and occasionally decent law-abiding customers will find that their new CD's don't play.

What we WON'T have is a vigorous free-market solution. In a free market, of course, the DVD-drive companies would realize that the ability to read "copy-protected" CD's gives them a valuable competitive advantage. But, instead, thanks to the DMCA, they will probably be FORCED to become Midbar-compliant whether they like it or not.

And it will only get worse.

Unless consumers wake up... and that, alas, doesn't seem likely...

Copy Protection taken to extremes.

There is one route all information must go through in order to be processed by the brain, which is the nervous system and specifically the optical and auditory nerve. Taking this to its logical conclusion, the corporations will buy the human genome and engineer "security devices" into the required nerves. Attempting to circumvent this and experience something which the corporations do not wish you to sense is of course going to be highly illegal and dangerous, so reproductive sex will be completely outlawed for a start.

You thought 1984 was bad?

DMCA = Communism?

Hmm... just had a thought inspired by some posts in here: Doesn't the DMCA's demanding that people use the products as they are defined start to sound like communism? Every time I read an article like this I keep picturing Adolf Hitler as CEO of whatever company is being written about.

You'd think the industry would learn that a new market has opened up and learn how to profit in it instead of trying to close it. The most damning thing for them is as long as Linux is around, there will always be ways to prevent copy protection from ruining our lives.

How many more subtle changes to the law will it take before it becomes illegal to not purchase a product because you saw the ad on TV?

No one picked up on this?

Cactus protection?

Don't touch the data or you will be subjected to thousands of lawy^H^H^H^H little pricks!

Talk about hidden meaning.

.

Music is Software?

Since Audio CDs that are CopyProtected only work with Windows because is uses a proprietary player, does that mean that the Copy Protected CDs are closer to Software than it is to Audio? Will we be looking for Windows Natalie Imbruglia Cd or OSX Blink 182 or Linux Metallica?

This is getting quite interesting. I wonder if there's any legal ramifications of this?

Finally. 800 pound gorilla vs. 800 pound gorilla

In this battle for power. Who will win?

In the red corner weighing 330 pounds and undefeated DMCA champion from Washington DC it's RIAA!!

And in the blue corner weighing 340 pounds undefeated Copyright champion from California it's the MPAA!!

Heh, sweet

On top of the copy-control stuff, we also have this small parenthetical note (that was news to me): "The CactusPJ player features difficult-to-see buttons and needs a second window to show track info. It also shows up as possible spyware on Ad-aware 5.6."

Why am I somehow not surprised at this? Anyone got information on what it sends and where, if it does turn out to be spyware? If I was the kind of fool to write software like this I'd probably have it look for mp3s on the assumption that all mp3s are by definition contraband. If I was more of a fool I'd have the program delete them or something. Has anyone studied the behavior of this apparently annoying and awkward program?

Author violates the DMCA in public, and CDs still?

While I doubt anyone is going to catch him on it, what the author describes doing here is a DMCA violation. The DMCA only refers to "effective" access control mechanisms... As has already been demonstrated, some pretty awful and flawed systems have been able to be called effective (*ahem* CSS). If, however, you are able to bypass the protection accidentally as the author did is there any doubt that the technology isn't effective? Sure this doesn't clear anyone for copyright violations, but it would certainly seem to clear the way for folks making a player application to end up scott free.

A less important issue is that they're never going to be able to effectivly copy-protect CDs... The cat is way out of the bag, and as long as they maintain interoperablilty with older CD players, there is going to be a way to go around it. People should be more watching the up and coming SACD (Super Audio CD format) which actually has a few hundred titles out, as well as a bunch of players. It uses a digital encoding called DSD (Direct Stream Digital) which is quite different from PCM. I head a demonstration of these puppies lined up against a normal CD player at this years Audio Engineering Society convention... It was incredible. They claim to have strong copy-protection built into the standard, but I have not been able to find details yet. With the squabling which has been going on with DVD audio, and the fact that many of the hardware manufacturers have not backed it, it stands to be the replacement for today's Red Book CD.

adam

Check out the "security" on Midbar's web site!

For a fun little diversion, go to the midbartech website and try to get information about one of the Cactus products. You'll get to a page that has a one-field form asking for a password. Get your browser to show you the source for the page, and groove on the unbelievably sophomoric obfuscated password verifier. Ha!