Illegal Numbers?

Is 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 f3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 99 bf an illegal hex number?

Nope. I made a transcription error.

So what is all the excitement? Inquiring minds want to know.

THE MPAA is having a go at erasing the fairly public HD-DVD processing key number from the Interweb.

The key, Hex 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 77 gg, [not the real number - ed.] was discovered months ago and has been distributed amongst netzines everywhere.

However stories where the key is mentioned have been attracting the attention of MPAA spooks. DMCA take down notices have been issued to sites like Spooky Action at a Distance and Digg.

The Digg users who published them have even had their accounts closed by mods.

But this has created a bit of war between users who have been working to keep the number in the public eye.

In the case of Digg, the entire front page comprised only stories that in one way or another were related to the hex number. You can also find HD-DVD song lyrics, coffee mugs, and shirts.

Google reports that there are 283,000 pages containing the number with hyphens, and just under 10,000 without hyphens. There's a song. Several domain names including variations of the number have been reserved.

That looks like a lot of take-down notices that the MPAA is going to have to issue.

This is all about keeping secrets which can't be kept and making copies which are not copies.

It is all about preventing copies from being made where copies must be made. It is all about violating the laws of nature. I discuss some of that and have links to a lot of good information on copy protection schemes in New Vistas which is about the copy protection schemes in Microsoft's Vista operating system.

Well any way it has the folks at digg up in arms.

It has Charles at Little Green Footballs up in arms about "theft" of intellectual propery. How is it theft if you figure it out on your own or some one tells you? I'm still working out that one.

As one commenter after another has pointed out encrypting an object and then decoding it on a given machine makes the encryption key vulnerable to the owner of the machine. The key will be somewhere on the machine. Even if it isn't, comparing the encoded data with the decoded data allows the key to be teased out.

The system has more holes than swiss cheese. In addition in order to make the software distributable you have to have the same key for every disk if the disc is not coded for a specific user. You have to wonder how the MPAA or the RIAA or any of the other royalty collectors hoped to get away with this one.

Let me leave you with the music maker's lament about coyright:

"Why should I let my fans steal from me when the record companies already do such a good job?"

Here is a band doing something about it Stuck Mojo. You can listen to one of their tunes "Open Season" for free on Youtube. They are giving their music away. Not just one song either. A whole album. The Stuck Mojo link above explains how to get free music without risking a lawsuit.

I might note, as a long time Dead Head, that the Grateful Dead pioneered free music. Going so far as to provide those with tape recorders live feeds from their shows in an area called the "taper's section".

Cross Posted at Classical Values

New Vistas

Reader Paul has sent me a couple of links on what Microsoft's Vista will mean to computer users.

This link is for non technical folks. Let me excerpt a bit:

...reviews have focused chiefly on Vista's new functionality, for the past few months the legal and technical communities have dug into Vista's "fine print." Those communities have raised red flags about Vista's legal terms and conditions as well as the technical limitations that have been incorporated into the software at the insistence of the motion picture industry.

The net effect of these concerns may constitute the real Vista revolution as they point to an unprecedented loss of consumer control over their own personal computers. In the name of shielding consumers from computer viruses and protecting copyright owners from potential infringement, Vista seemingly wrestles control of the "user experience" from the user.

Vista's legal fine print includes extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user's knowledge. During the installation process, users "activate" Vista by associating it with a particular computer or device and transmitting certain hardware information directly to Microsoft.

Even after installation, the legal agreement grants Microsoft the right to revalidate the software or to require users to reactivate it should they make changes to their computer components. In addition, it sets significant limits on the ability to copy or transfer the software, prohibiting anything more than a single backup copy and setting strict limits on transferring the software to different devices or users.

For the more geeky among us here is a look at Vista by a computer security expert.

Here is a really neat geeky explanation of what Microsoft is trying to accomplish. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, which is another way of saying copy protection:

Note C: In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied numerous times. For example if you're reading this document on the web then it's been copied from the web server's disk drive to server memory, copied to the server's network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC's network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser's disk cache, copied to the browser's rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache, and finally copied to your screen. If you've printed it out to read, several further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista's content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get weird or very weird. So in order for Windows Vista's content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.

When I first got into computers (1975) the promise was that what was once the province of the big guys (IBM) would now be available to the average citizen at a modest price. People would be able to do things never before possible (on a mass scale) and users, not software/hardware priests would be in control. Vista looks like a reversion to the bad old days.

Cross Posted at Classical Values