Monday, 13. January 2003
Oma Willi
Heute morgen berichtete Neal vom Wochenende. Besondere Erwähnung fanden "Oma Willi" (= Opa Walter) und "Oma ...".
Heute morgen lag jede Menge Schnee, allerdings regnet es nun und alles ist pampig weiss.
Neal arbeitet weiter an dem Enumerationsproblem. Bisher übliche Varianten:
- eins, zwei, mehrs
- eins, zwei, vier, fünf
Jon Johansen/DeCSS win ... Is CSS actually an anti-piracy measure?
Everybody (e.g.g Aftenposten, Wired, Infothought, Copyfight, Heise, CNN, 2600, slashdot, NY Times, CCC, Freedom-to-tinker, EFF) is happy the DeCSS trial in Norway ended in favor of the defendant, a programmer which wrote code to view DVDs on Linux based OSes.
Seth Finkelstein points to a message by Mikael Pawlo which reminds us that the Norwegian laws are changed to conform to the European Copyright Directive so tinkering has no bright future in Norway.
I'm still wondering if I miss the point of CSS or everybody else does. (:-)
To my understanding CSS is no copy protection at all. Encryption can't be copy protection per se, since encryption is just a transformation and the transormed data can be copied as easy as the untransformed data. Do do copy protection you need more e.g. authentication. DVDs have some authentication measures to keep people from copying them: A program which wants to read protected data has to authenticate itself before it is allowed by the drive to read the data. This scheme was broken about 6 month earlier than decss. Since then you basically could encrypted video from a DVD write it to an blank DVD one and watch the copy in your DVD player. (I'm ignoring 'minor' technical problems like the absence of blank DVDs at that time.) No DeCSS needed for doing so.
So CSS is not for keeping you from making copys of DVDs but to keep you from watching them. You only get encrypted data from the DVD, but you want unencrypted MPEG Data you can feed to a decoder to watch the Film you are longing for. This is exactly what DeCSS does: it allows you to decrypt the Data found on a DVD to an MPEG stream you can actually watch. Sure you can copy the decrypted MPEG stream, but you also can copy the encrypted Data so DeCSS is kind of orrelevant for pirates.
So what is CSS for? To my understanding CSS is for making DVDs uninteroperable. Without knowing CSS you can't build a DVD player. So you have to buy a Documentation on how CSS work. When you buy the documentation 'they' force you to buy a licence to use CSS. This licence also would force you to implement ll kinds of so called 'anti-piracy measures' to the benefit of the content industry which would hurt your customers, the consumers using your player.
So CSS might be caled a copy-protection-technology-inclusion-enforcement-technology but not a copy protection technology.
Is this just fuzzy language or do I miss something?
Die Online-Miliz
Die Online-Miliz
Eine politisch einseitige, pro-israelische Gruppe aus den USA will im Selbstauftrag das Web überwachen und von extremistischen muslimischen Sites säubern
disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif
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