Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, stuart wrote: Now, when DRM gets into windows, I'm sure Virtual Audio Cable will stop working, RealAudio will stop making linux clients (why bother?), RIAA will (try to) make CDs that can only be played with windows clients, etc. Then someone will crack the formats of the audio streams and the CDs, and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. As things are now, it's easy to get the digital signal before it reaches the DAC, you don't need to go to DAC - ADC, you don't need to plug your line-out to your line-in and degrade your signal. If the RIAA get their content to only work on Windows-type boxes, and if MS gets DRM to work in their Windows, things will become much more difficult. But these are big ifs that can quite possibly be circumvented even if they do come to fruition. There's always high-end sound cards that don't even use analog. DRM is not going to stop file sharing. They're trying to catch smoke with nets. Yup, check out this dvd unit: http://www.220-electronics.com/dvd/daewoo5800.htm where it says: Custom modification with code free automatic and manual selection of regions and macrovision disabled. Excellent quality dvd player with all the features. and Price just reduced by over $100. Was 249.00 Now only $129.00 The Daewoo 5800 custom modification has been designed to make life a lot less complicated. It has superb Audio and video components outperforming major brands such as Sony, Panasonic and Pioneer. So it won't be long before bypass systems will be commercially available. At least in some parts of the _free_ world. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 10:40 AM, Peter Fairbrother wrote: A curiosity, only tenuously related - I just came across a Feb 1994 copy of Elector magazine, with plans for a S/PDIF copybit eliminator (for SCMS). Seems people have been defeating copy protection for a while.. I've owned an Audio Alchemy SCMS-stripper since 1991, when I bought my first DAT machine. It cost about $99, was about the size of a deck of cards, and stripped the SCMS bits out of the digital bitstream. A later DAT machine I bought, a Tascam portable pro deck, has the SCMS stripped by default. (It takes in digital signals and writes to the DAT with the SCMS code set to unlimited number of digital copies allowed.) Likewise, a professional CD writer I own (HHB) bypasses SCMS. (Not just allowing a digital copy to be made, but making the resulting CD-R copyable freely.) A friend of mine bought his DVD player on EBay: it bypasses all region coding (i.e., it makes all DVDs region-free). Region coding is a different issue, but part of the DRM universe. Until George W. Bush and the Carlyle Group start putting money into these things and thus discover that SCMS strippers are terrorist tools, such tools will likely continue to be available. Use a logic analyzer, go to jail. --Tim May He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. -- Nietzsche
idea: brinworld meets the credit card
Authentication is Something you have / know / are. A simple plastic credit card + PIN provides the first two, including a photo provides the third something you are. A face is more often checked than the readily forgable signature, in live authentication. But as cameras become ubiquitous (e.g., in cell phones) some extra security could be obtained for *remote* authentication by sending a trusted photo of the account holder plus a live picture of the card user. A picture glued into the card could be forged, but a smartcard (with more data area than a magstripe) could include a picture of the account holder, so a thief has no idea what to look like. But the vendor can check the encrypted smartcard face to the face on the phone or webcam. For high-value remote transactions, where you pay someone to check faces, this might be viable in a few years. In a few years after that, machines might be able to check faces more cheaply, as reliably. The live face-check with embedded digital photos is already standard practice on high-security building-entry cards (and passports?), with the guard comparing the card-embedded face to the one before him. Ubiquitous cameras will bring that face-check to remote transactions, reducing cost due to lower fraud. Thoughts?
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
At 02:55 PM 7/8/03 -0400, Billy wrote: On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 01:26:46PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: While the ear can't hear above 22KHz, signal above that *can* effect the perceived sound, by heterodyne effects. For example, if you play a single tone of 28KHz, or a single tone of 30 KHz, you can't hear them. Play them together, however, and you *can* hear a beat frequency of 2KHz. Bullshit detector buzzing. Is this *really* true? Have you tried it? I haven't, but it does ring true. You'd get 2 Khz as well as other intermodulation products. Standard EE stuff. You've read about the company trying to sell highly localized speakers? They modulate two intense ultrasound beams, and the air does the nonlinear mixing where they meet. In the audiophile, lower-intensity case, the ears' nonlinearity would do it. Interesting info, Peter.
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 03:52:54PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: Billy [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Bullshit detector buzzing. Is this *really* true? Have you tried it? Not personally, but The Net holds all knowledge. ... http://www.bostonaes.org/archives/2003/Jan/ http://www.acoustics.org/press/133rd/2pea.html Very interesting.. Thanks!
Re: idea: brinworld meets the credit card
On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 12:16:36PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Authentication is Something you have / know / are. [..] A picture glued into the card could be forged, but a smartcard (with more data area than a magstripe) could include a picture of the account holder, so a thief has no idea what to look like. But the vendor can check the encrypted smartcard face to the face on the phone or webcam. For high-value remote transactions, where you pay someone to check faces, this might be viable in a few years. In a few years after that, machines might be able to check faces more cheaply, as reliably. The live face-check with embedded digital photos is already standard practice on high-security building-entry cards (and passports?), with the guard comparing the card-embedded face to the one before him. Ubiquitous cameras will bring that face-check to remote transactions, reducing cost due to lower fraud. Thoughts? How does it allow the merchant to view the picture while preventing the thief from doing so? Saying it's encrypted is, at best, sweeping a very large problem under a small rug. Who holds the key? How does the card or the user authenticate a real merchant vs. a thief posing as a merchant? Those are the hard problems. No one in biometrics has yet been able to solve them in a general way. Eric
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Tyler Durden leaves the fight club and writes: Do you have a reference? I don't remember reading that SACD was encrypted. What I DO remember is that the reason there's no standard SACD or DVD-A digital interface is because the Industry wants that digital interface to be encrypted. The detailed technical specs are apparently secret, but an overview of the multi-layered SACD copy protection is at http://www.sacd.philips.com/b2b/downloads/content_protection.pdf. If you don't like PDFs, most of the same information is at http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/dvdaudio/dvdaud_sacd.htm. Alan Clueless writes: Furthermore, people have come to expect that they should be able to play whatever disc shaped media in their computer. At some point there will need to be a software based player. Both of the documents above specifically deny that software based players will be allowed. I get the impression that the decryption will always be done in hardware, and if a PC is ever able to play one of these gadgets, it will be a Palladium system or something similar that can be locked down. Steve Shear writes: If you believe the article Myths and Misconceptions about Hardware Hacking, http://www.cptwg.org/Assets/Presentations/ARDG/ARDGHardware_hack05-28-03.pdf , recently posted to the Content Protection Technical Working Group, access to affordable commercial technology for reverse engineering has given hardware hackers the upper hand. That's mostly about how hardware hackers can use modern chips and custom PC boards without spending more than a few hundred dollars. Fine, but it's a long way from that to being able to pull an algorithm and/or device key out of a chip which has been designed to make that difficult.
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
At 03:14 PM 7/8/03 -0700, Tim May wrote: As for hearing heterodyning in 28 KHz and 30 KHz signals, maybe. CD players have brickwall filters to of course block such frequencies. Some analog groove-based systems can have some kind of signal up there at those frequencies, but not much. Regular vinyl is (was) also recorded with all kinds of filters, too, including the lowpass ones. If you cut vinyl (or metal) through a signal chain that didn't impose the filtering, perhaps the ultrasonics would remain, which is perhaps the analogophiles claim. You would need a special vinyl cutter though. Some of the filtering imposed on vinyl was to not fry the cutter, or otherwise deal with its inertia. (BTW, I thought your Monster USB cable was a prank.. its not.. some folks just don't get digital..)
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
okay I'm a bit pissed now. actually i'm raging pissed! Wh!!! the nyquist/lindquist/someone-else-who-was-pissed sampling theorems are based on the possibility of mathematically extracting frequencies from digital information in a STEADY_STATE situation. That doesn't mean that a speaker will properly reproduce those frequencies. Consider the dynamics of energy transfer. A digital signal at near-1/2-sampling frequency will have two datum points. The transitiion between them will be dramatic! the possibilities of energy transfer will not be comparable to an analogue sinusoidal waveform. And that's why good analogue is better then good digital. Doug Self etc. did some work on ultra-fast analogue systems in the mid 90's, and designed some amps that were and are regarded as pretty good - but afaik he didn't get the theory right. YHHH!-- Peter Fairbrother
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 04:09 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 03:14 PM 7/8/03 -0700, Tim May wrote: As for hearing heterodyning in 28 KHz and 30 KHz signals, maybe. CD players have brickwall filters to of course block such frequencies. Some analog groove-based systems can have some kind of signal up there at those frequencies, but not much. Regular vinyl is (was) also recorded with all kinds of filters, too, including the lowpass ones. If you cut vinyl (or metal) through a signal chain that didn't impose the filtering, perhaps the ultrasonics would remain, which is perhaps the analogophiles claim. You would need a special vinyl cutter though. Some of the filtering imposed on vinyl was to not fry the cutter, or otherwise deal with its inertia. (BTW, I thought your Monster USB cable was a prank.. its not.. some folks just don't get digital..) Yes, they are real. I perhaps should have inserted a this is not a joke, but I didn't think to. When I was the judge in the First Internet Witch Trial, one of the examples I used was how believing something doesn't make it so, despite what the believers think (though the psychological effects may be real). An example being some audiophile nonsense, such as the Tice Clock (which is/was also real...some people bought the snake oil about how an LED clock plugged in could soften the harshness of digital. With the Tice Clock, with the Monster USB cables, one can examine the effects on bit error rates, and even look at timing jitter (a claim some manufacturers of snake oil make). For any of us with a remotely scientific bent, seeing that the bitstream is unchanged, that the bit error rate is unchanged, is pretty convincing evidence that no matter what we _think_ we hear, especially in non-double blind listening tests, there simply _is_ no difference. And yet there are people who claim to hear differences between 5 dollar digital cables and thousand dollar digital cables, even when the bitstreams are identical. (And even if they are not, they are within the capture window of the next digital gadget, and hence are for all intents and purposes absolutely identical.) One might as well sell Monster Cable Power Cords for PCs, claiming they make the Pentium 4 perform more accurately. Actually, I'll bet the tweaks are already buying special power cords for their Athlon 2200+ homebrews. Most so-called high end tube amps do in fact sound different, perhaps better, perhaps not. This is of course because tubes are usually rich in odd-order harmonics. That $4000 Krell tube amp is actually _coloring_ the sound. So much for 20-bit DACs in the signal source: the amp is altering the sound at about the 6th or 8th or whatever most significant bit. Bob Carver and a few others have emulated the tube sound so well with DSPs that double-blind tests using audiophiles cannot tell the difference, and where the waveforms look identical.
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 01:39 PM, Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer wrote: As an audiophile (Krell+Levinson+Thiel gear at home), I definitely don't want to grab an analog signal. Doing that the signal is sure to retain characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P kids won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second. -TD I'll ditto that - my brother is an extremist audiophile - he writes reviews for the high-end stuff (google Mike Trei). Many (by no means all) top end audophiles prefer all-analog equipment, and direct-cut vinyl records (ie, the master disk was cut directly at the performance, without a magtape master). I've listened to some of this stuff, and it just blows digital away. What else do you expect, when any audiophile who denies that inaudible frequencies make the music warmer proves himself to be a philistine with ears of tin? Remember, it was the fashion and clothing EXPERTS who were the most insistent that the emperor's new clothes were absolutely marvelous. The harshness of a digital bitstream can be softened by operating LED clocks in the same room as the bitstream. The Tice Clock, for example, works by plugging in to any electrical socket in the room where the listener is located...of course, all that matters is that he _sees_ the Tice Clock plugged-in, and remembers that he paid $399 for this piece of wondrous technology, for the effect to work. That the bitstream as measured with a logic analyzer is unchanged with any of these digital enhancers is beside the point. Monster Cable, by the way, is doing a nice business selling Extra Special, Oxygen-Free Copper Shielded, Insulated with Rubber Hand-Rolled on the Thighs of Taiwanese Virgins cables for _USB_. Yep, for USB. Never mind that the bitstream either is there or it isn't...some people think they get superior data with special $80 cables. As for hearing heterodyning in 28 KHz and 30 KHz signals, maybe. CD players have brickwall filters to of course block such frequencies. Some analog groove-based systems can have some kind of signal up there at those frequencies, but not much. Very, very few microphones are rated at 22-25 KHz, so I have to wonder just where this signal is coming from. If not coming from actual musical instruments, and detected by the microphones, why bother? Sure, we may as well push the CD spec up to 24 KHz or so. That will probably even satisfy Neil Young. --Tim May
