Nice. My hope is that the market for eBooks (and Video) end up going the way of digitally distributed music and ends up DRM free.
iBooks DRM has been cracked.
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Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.
#42There's one thing about cracking DRM that has me puzzled. Consider DRM on music, for instance. Suppose we have a 4 minute song, stored as an MP3 with DRM. The ideal crack results in a 4 minute audio file, without DRM, that is the same audio quality as the input MP3, and is about the same size. If we didn't care about size, there would be an easy way to crack the DRM. Just play back to music and capture the digital au…
The mathematical term you're looking for is Idempotence [1].
I'm speculating that the difficulty of such a feat depends on how many free variables an encoder has to choose from.
For example, in the case of a compressor, there are probably quite a few arbitrary choices that can be made at the compressor side that make little difference to compression quality in general -- but may make reproducing the exact same result difficult. The search-space might be very large.
I'll also speculate, though, that even if perfect reproduction is not possible, a compressor that's designed to work on the digital output of a decompressor of the same algorithm can probably be designed to do a better job on that particular example.
Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to mean. Maybe if you rephrased it?
I don't believe it actually helps them economically, though Hollywood has a pretty funky take on accounting so you never know. I can't imagine a sane business being glad that they were able to successfully delay selling things for X months. I understand the rational explanations for that, but I'm just as sure that people aren't that rational. Essentially, they're trying to be too good at the negotiating game. Ever be…
Piracy is not the reason there's a new-release window in which most titles make a plurality of the total return for the title.
Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the odd case where BD was never properly broken, because it's never been needed. People have just depended on broken players, which has worked remarkably well so far.
I think this is what shows that DRM really is hopeless. For DRM to work, it has to work every time. For DRM to be broken, it only needs to fail once. After one guy has extracted the media, it can then be distributed to the world even if nobody else can break the DRM.
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Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe my statement needs to be modified a bit, but the general idea still holds. DRM needs to work to prevent (a) and (b) for everybody , whereas if just one person can break the DRM with high-quality results during the new-release window, they lose.
That's true, of course, but modern DRM schemes anticipate exactly that, and so they put lots of effort into making it cost-prohibitive to break the scheme in under 2 weeks. Maybe it's the case that everyone has backed off Blu-Ray because of Slysoft, but either way: BD+ has protected the new-release window for Blu-Ray disks in several instances (you can check out the Slysoft message boards to see when that's happening…
The crypto cards in modern satellite TV systems haven't remained unbroken. I know of several people personally that are pirating satellite TV right now. It just required a lot more work and physical access to hardware and not just a simple software hack.
The other thing about satellite TV is that once broken for one person the knowledge has to be given to many other people for them to gain anything from it. With breaking Blu-Ray one person has to rip it to 1080p video and the rest can download it...
Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't believe it actually helps them economically, though Hollywood has a pretty funky take on accounting so you never know. I can't imagine a sane business being glad that they were able to successfully delay selling things for X months. I understand the rational explanations for that, but I'm just as sure that people aren't that rational. Essentially, they're trying to be too good at the negotiating game. Ever be…
Piracy is not the reason there's a new-release window in which most titles make a plurality of the total return for the title.
I don't believe I said otherwise?
EDIT: I was referring to the DRM part of it. The fact that people are impatient (and that this drives piracy) is kind of my point.
Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true, of course, but modern DRM schemes anticipate exactly that, and so they put lots of effort into making it cost-prohibitive to break the scheme in under 2 weeks. Maybe it's the case that everyone has backed off Blu-Ray because of Slysoft, but either way: BD+ has protected the new-release window for Blu-Ray disks in several instances (you can check out the Slysoft message boards to see when that's happening…
The crypto cards in modern satellite TV systems haven't remained unbroken. I know of several people personally that are pirating satellite TV right now. It just required a lot more work and physical access to hardware and not just a simple software hack. The other thing about satellite TV is that once broken for one person the knowledge has to be given to many other people for them to gain anything from it. With brea…
This isn't so much a refutation of my comment as it is a quibble about what it means to be "broken". A little over a decade ago, any moron could visit one of several web sites, pay around $100, and have shipped to them everything they needed to watch DirecTV for free.
Today, you apocryphally know of several people who are pirating satellite TV.
I'm going to go ahead and call this one for DirecTV.
Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.
#48Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.
#49I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip? But the instant you create exclusive content that everyone wants on such a service, the DRM will be broken faster than you can say "DMCA". The downside of this is it lets companies d…
"When StarForce 3.0 was released, it initially provided extremely strong protection - the StarForce 3.0-protected game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was uncracked for 424 days.[11][12] It also marked a significant step up in the effort required to reverse engineer it.[13]"
Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
You totally hit the nail on the head: DRM 'works' if it makes it difficult to get access to content, not impossible. And of course, I say that having spent the majority of my teenage years reversing DRM. Nobody believes that DRM will hold up forever, but there's a huuuuge imbalance here that favors the DRM creators, which is that it's really, really easy to put together modifications on a DRM system that make a rever…
This actually seems to paint a nice picture where everybody wins. Content producers win because DRM only needs to work for a short time. Everybody else wins because it can still be cracked in relatively short order.
If you merge these 2 aspects: DRM first, free(er) one later, you could get most of the money, and the PR bonus of being DRM free, which, as more people get annoyed by cumbersome DRM, could even give you a 2nd sales bump.
The problem would be to avoid the situation where it's released, and nobody buys it for the first week/month/whatever, and then it's immediately distributable.
The answer might lie in the 'ransom model', which is a bit like kickstarter, except "Once we've made $n million or sold 5M copies, we'll open it up"
You then get that money almost guaranteed (avoiding the simple delayed purchase option), and if done carefully, you might even hit your targets before it's cracked, which if you can do that with any regularity, crackers may just stop bothering (Or they'll take it as even more of a challenge - hard to say)