Microsoft promised that the new graphics standard for Windows (DirectX 10) will not be applied to anything older than Windows Vista. This was enough to push some people in looking for ways to make it work on Windows XP (WinXP), or on Mac, or on Linux. A guy, named Cody Brocious from San Diego, California, claims to have had the first success at this. He created a wrapping code to make those DirectX 10 appplications (mostly games) run on Windows XP and even on some DirectX 9 hardware.
That could quickly become one of the most interesting development in video games for Windows this year.
It’s all over the place today: German MusicLoad revealed that 75% of its customer support calls were about complaining around the problems created by the inclusion of Digital Rigths Management (DRM) in the MP3 files they sell.
Coming from a company that is living from the sale of legal MP3s, it has a lot of weight. Up to now, that was repeated in many circles, but the music major producers where denying it or downplaying it. Now, it comes from one of the inner circles.
We told you that DRM is annoying (or more) the legal-minded user who bought a DRM-infected file, but leaves the pirates able to plainly use the files in the most usual and natural way. More than one user decided to download the file from P2P just to get rid of the annoyance.
I have at home an “English patient” DVD that repetetively refuses to start in my Home Cinema PC (I don’t have any other DVD player). Maybe I should download a copy from BitTorrent, leave the DVD box on its shelf and watch the movie.
My suggestion is not “go and pirate!”, but it’s call to arms for the marketing departments of these music producers. The customers want music, they are ready to pay for it (look at iTunes and MusicLoad, to name two), but they don’t want the hassles of those protections. Being blind to customer needs is a doomed approach to business. Start listening and P2P will become less of a problem (being free is not an overwhelming advantage: Perrier is selling bottled water and does not complain about the virtually free water on tap).
Believe it or not, this is what Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, just told to financial analysts. He was trying to explain why the actual sales are already considered as much lower than the initial MS estimation. Apaprently, the most exotic countries (China, Russia, South East Asia) are on the list of the accused. But wouldn’t it be possible that the reason lies in selling Vista at an horrendous price while bringing only a cute new interface and potential problems with a rights management technology that will lead to more problems than solutions for the average user?
The solution (according to Steve): A re-inforced fight against piracy and a stricter WGA system. It’s only the beginning…
The music industry is a large ship that moves slowly. But when they saw the arrival of the Internet, most of this industry decided to jump onto technical measures to close and protect the music they produce in order to protect their rights: Hence the Digital Rights Management (DRM). Today, things did not really change, but they could.
Two informations of today:
Warner is loosing money (benefits reduced by 74% in the last quarter of 2006). Its CEO commenting on the recent call by Steve Jobs for dropping DRM, said that they do not intend to stop DRM. Ever. [1]
According to the Wall Street Journal, EMI would be talking to music distributors about the possibility of removing all copy protections while publishing electronically the largest part of its catalogue. Since EMI was also the company that actually tried distribution without DRM in the recent months, they may have learned that it’s what the consumers want in order to by music online. [2]
If you regularly read the news on this site, you know that I am not fully in favor of buying an OS software that could well be more expensive than the computer holding it (more than 500€ for the richer version of Vista). But I did not expect the announcement made by Alex St. John, chief executive of video game producer WildTangent.
Security went to the front line while developing Vista (who could complain?), but this comes against functionality. And video games are definitely sensitive applications because they include so many different functions. In-game saving may become difficult with the presence of the Rights Management feature of Vista, game network features will soon become a nightmare and ESRB video game classification (allowing total control for parents over what their children can or can’t do on their computer) has decided to deny games already installed or not yet rated (the vast majority).
Again: I advise you not to rush to install the yet-to-be-sweetened Vista…
We already talked about it here at length: Devices willing to handle High Definition (HD) video have to (or will have to) be all HDCP-compatible in order to be able to display anything. Recent Christmas holiday season sales will probably soon appear as somewhat lacking in this section (most of the HD-Ready TV sets don’t even include an HDMI connecteor that is a needed but definitely not sufficient pre-requirement).
Today, we start to hear about incidents for users of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) game console from Sony. When connected to TV-HD sets, some consoles see their display cut by some blacks and their sound dropping, etc. It is now confirmed that this is caused by a bug in the communication between the TV set and the console. Since the TV does not respond fast enough to the HDCP challenge from the console, this one decides that it is connected to a non-HDCP display peripheral and unilaterally cuts the outputs (sound and image).
It seems that the previous news about HD-DVD copy protection being broken are true since, this week, BitTorrent users started to see an unprotected copy of Serenity (a 2006 Science Fiction movie) flowing on the P2P network.
I was preparing a small post to talk about what I was envisonning as the future of anti-piracy measures included in HD DVD and BluRay DVD. According to me, there were two possible angles of attack:
Break the AAS coding on the disc itself.
Use the weaknesses of the HDCP protocol that is a requirement in all HDMI conexions to protect the trasmission of high-quality digital flows.
I admit that I was ready to comment more on the second issue to remind the theoretical flaws (already mentioned here in: “HDCP/HDMI broken or nearly broken“) and the technical blunder it was becoming for graphics cards, monitors, Windows Vista and others.
But the news are faster than me: A programmer hidden behind the muslix64 psuedo just posted on a Doom9 forum a small Java application, BackupHDDVD, claiming to crack the AAS protection of a HD DVD. It is preparing a second version on 2nd of January to improve on it (for the time being only video is fully cracked). ‘DVD Jon’ Johanssen promissed earlier to work on cracking AAS (he had broken the Content Scrambling System (CSS) protection system of DVD a few years ago). Apparently, he was too slow.
It is now easy to forecast that High Definition DVD will be cracked, opened, decoded, pirated and thus distributed through various pirate channels in the very first days of 2007.
We already wrote here about it when the HD-Ready and HD-TV programs were launched, the nice black and white little logos supposed to bring the guarantee of compatibility of electronic devices with High Definition (HD) video are only adding to the confusion of the consumers.
At best, the buyer wonders what is really covered by the HD-Ready branding. At worst (and it is often the case), it ensures that purchases are done without understanding and lead to future disappointments.
Let’s be clear and simple: HD-Ready doesn’t mean a lot. In most cases, it only means that you can plug the device one onto the other. Practically speaking, if you want your screen to be really high definition capable, it needs to have a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. Less is not HD!
Public-Key Cryptography is a very common technique used to protect sensitive information by encoding it in such a way that decoding relies on the extreme difficulty of some mathematics techniques (like finding the root factors of a prime integer). Today, a large part of our security is relying on this (including most of the secure communications over Internet).
But German cryptologist, Jean-Pierre Seifert (Universities of Haïfa and Innsbruck) seems on the bring of reavealing an unusual line of attack to this critical technology. He is set to present this in the next RSA conference in 2007. This could be a shattering blow to Internet security as we know it.
Essentially, the attack relies on the possibility to observe the operation of the CPU itself. Today’s microprocessors include a technique known as predictive branching that tries to anticipate results of some calculations. If the prediction is right, everything is very fast, if not the microprocessor still has to do a lengthy calculation. This results usually in huge performance improvements, but for the cryptologist it means that without knowing too much you can identify (from the exterior) what the microprocessor calculation results are, just by looking at the time it takes to do the computation steps.
This opens the door to a new generation of spying software that could rather easily crack the secret keys of some of the communications we consider quite secure. For the moment, since no precise details have been given, and since no demonstration has been made in the public, we are rather secure, but the vast majority of the specialists already consider that approach will certainly lead to a flurry of new easy-to-write spyware (before that cracking the secure key of those communications could take from years to millions of millenia of heavy computation; now we are speaking of near instantaneous break through).
Solutions exist. In most cases, it involves either a heavy modification of the microprocessor (Intel security manager is currently reported as unavailable for comments for the coming weeks and it does not look like an easy solution) or many software modifications that could have impacts from minor to nearly-impossible-to-implement in the real-life computer (software patches may not be possible to create for some of the applications since the problem comes directly from how the microprocessor makes its computation).
The last figures have now been published: Sony finished counting the beans after several months of news of exploding laptop PC batteries and of worldwide product recalls. instead of 130 billion yens, they forecast to dive into a loss of about 50 billion yens.
It is left to be seen what impact it will have on a company for which bad news were piling up (last year’s fiasco of the digital rights managemetn software on Sony BMG music CDs, the delays/problems of the PlayStation 3, exploding batteries). But the worse may well be behind them now, and Sony strengths may shine again (PlayStation Portable – PSP, Vaio laptop PC line, digital photo, Bravia line of high-end television sets).
AllOfMp3.com, the MP3 music web site publishing from the territory of Russia is in real trouble. Probably really pissed of by the very low prices found there and because AllOfMp3 does not include Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the downloaded MP3 files (some of the copyright holders even tell that the sale is completely illegal in the absence of a direct contract between AllOfMp3 and them), some American companies apparently pressured Visa and MasterCard into denying the music site the means to collect online payments using the credit cards of these two major networks.
Of course, this is threatening directly the short-term viability of the company. They are currently thinking of both legal actions and offering completely free downloads that would be financed by advertisment.
I guess that such a title had you think that you would find the address of a pirate web site. But Universal announced the signature of a two-year deal with SpiralFrog : all the Universal catalog in free legal download. Two things are included in the deal (to explain it): The whole thing will be financed by advertisment (You can think that there may be a lot of it) ; Music titles will be protected by the Microsoft DRM solution (It’s worth noting that a few weeks ago a hacker announced a full crack to this; Up to now, it was merely a technical news flash).
Those hoping that the future graphic cards supporting HD-TV (High Definition TV) and being compliant with the HDCP encryption standard would stay easy-to-hack will have to forget about their dreams. Just one after the other, nVidia and ATI announced that they would not stay long with the graphic chipset + HDCP chipset solutions of today and would quickly bring integrated chipsets.
The hopes of seeing one or two hackers finding a way to trick these cards to display full resolution 1080p HD-TV onto a display not including the HDCP interface will have to llok elsewhere. It seems that HDCP will not be circumvented this way (or not for long, if it happens).
It has been a long time since I started to tell you about the lack of HDMI-ready PC graphics cards on the market. It leads to the impossibility to display correctly HD-TV from a HD-DVD or BluRay DVD from your PC (even with the most powerful graphics cards). But, today, MSI announces such a card. Few details, but it should be available within a month (maybe two months in order to get it on the cheaper markets).
All information points to June 2006 being the month when we will see the first graphics cards compatible with the HDMI standard for HD television and screens.
Up to now, none was available. But ATI and others are preparing their first HDMI-compatible cards and it seems that the price difference between HDMI-compatible and plain cards will be around 10-20$ (quite reasonable).
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I was preparing a small post to talk about what I was envisonning as the future of anti-piracy measures included in HD DVD and BluRay DVD. According to me, there were two possible angles of attack:
