#9 Deception is 'Honorable': ATI Claims HDCP Then Covers Its Tracks

ATI Claims HDCP Then Covers Its Tracks: "Re:Awww
(Score:5, Informative)
by StikyPad (445176) Alter Relationship on Friday February 17, @09:51AM (#14742487)
(http://slashdot.org/)
It's no mixup, as the 'related story' (aka dupe) explains. There's no method of retroactively enabling HDCP. From TOldFA:

'The boards themselves must be designed with an extra chip when the board is manufactured. The extra chip stores a crypto key, and you cannot retrofit an existing board after the board is produced.'

ATI knew this. Everybody knew this. Somebody in marketing decided to advertise it anyway, nobody corrected them, and now they're trying to clean up the mess."
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Re:Awww

(Score:5, Insightful)

by ratboy666 (104074) <fred_weigel@hotm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Friday February 17, @10:34AM (#14742910)
(http://www.weigel-mohamed.org/)

Actually, wrong.

*IF* the driver is trusted, the chip is not needed. But, such a driver *may* be trusted by Microsoft, but won't be trusted by the "copyright industry".

So, no content for you. The CI has spoken.

If Microsoft said "HDCP" will be supported in Vista, why wouldn't the video board manufacturers believe it? Microsoft cowed to the CIs, and ATi and nVidia can't put the feature in the driver, and customers are left holding the bag of shit.

Go ahead -- sue suE SUE!!! It will be fun to watch. Class action against ATi (and nVidia). Who, in turn sue Microsoft, who, in turn, sues (?) in the CI business.

Ratboy
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http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=851 ATI Makes False Claims on HDCP Support
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his WAS going to happen

(Score:5, Informative)

by ratboy666 (104074) <fred_weigel@hotm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Friday February 17, @10:22AM (#14742757)
(http://www.weigel-mohamed.org/)

Of course all those video cards are "HDCPI Ready". They *can* generate the encrypted content. No sweat.

But (and here's the rub), the content providers (strike that, the "copyright industry", or CI) have decided to not trust any "home-brew" system. Which means that the keys won't go to the cards (because the *system* isn't trusted) and the feature is now useless.

Of course, a new system can have exactly the same chip, and it will then work.

Its the CI backlash against the DVD crack (which, of course, a vendor of playback equipment was responsible for -- which is NOT being forgotten). Coupled with some bad crypto choices, and DVDs are now wide open. The CIs would want to prevent this, and are now qualifying everything (my opinion).

External boxes can only produce SD (DVD) quality output on analog, which is what Vista will generate as well.

ATI make chips, boards and drivers. They (in my opinion) couldn't care less -- they just implement the spec. They put it the feature, and now can't use it because of key control concerns; they have been caught with their pants down.

Is is possible for ATI to sue the CIs? Because if I were in ATI, I would be as mad as a wet hen right now. //Ratboy
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Re:they won't

(Score:5, Insightful)

by WhiteWolf666 (145211) on Friday February 17, @10:38AM (#14742943)
(http://nutsncents.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday August 08, @06:47PM)

Does anyone honestly _want_ HDMI support?

I own 3 30+ LCDs. I've got a 42" plasma, and a 60" plasma. None of which support HDMI or HDCP. Guess what, I don't give a flying fuck (pardon my french).

My cable boxes output beautiful HDTV through DVI. So do my various (Mac and/or Linux) computers. So does my xbox. And I'm expected to replace _everything_ for absolutely no extra technical capabilities?

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHA

Hardware solutions like this: http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/15/spatz-techs-dvi magic-killing-on-hdcp/ [engadget.com] already effectively crack HDCP. Do you really not expect mplayer/vlc/xine for Linux and OSX not do to the same? The technical details of how to break it are already public knowledge: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/20/025 1206&mode=nested&threshold=3 [slashdot.org]

HDCP is dead on arrival, as far as I'm concerned. All it will mean is that the good, more functional equipment that supports standard DVI will be cheaper. I can get that 30" LCD for my bathroom, and maybe an outdoor one for my hot tub. No offense to the rest of slashdot, but its people (like me) that spend a substantial amount of their income on home "tech" that drive the industry, and most people I know are NOT going to replace their setups unless they see substantially improved features.

HDMI + 4 times HDTV resolution + Real 3D versus Standard HDTV on DVI? Yeah, maybe we'll upgrade.
HDMI + Standard HDTV versus DVI + Standard HDTV? Bwahahaha. Tell me another.

--
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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Re:they won't

(Score:5, Insightful)

by dgatwood (11270) on Friday February 17, @01:05PM (#14744163)

How? The DRM'd "Trusted" drivers won't let you do that, and the drive won't work without "Trusted" drivers.

Uh... that's not the way it works, generally. The drive might not decrypt content without trusted drivers, but at a low enough level, it's still an ATAPI block device, and an ATAPI block read still reads a block. The only way they could even make this difficult would be to make the drive reject read requests to a particular "special" region of the disc containing decryption key data, much like DVD-R drives reject writes to those regions. However, since the hardware must, by definition, be able to read those blocks, even if they put limits on what blocks can be read, it would still be a mere firmware limitation, and we've seen just how well firmware limitations have worked with region codes....

At some point, it comes down to this: an ATA bus isn't encrypted. The bus is easily snoopable. Ditto for USB, ditto for FireWIre, SCSI, etc. Any key data that leaves the drive can be snooped, so if the drive hands the key and the data to your video card to do the decoding, you can snoop it on the ATA bus. If the reverse happens---if key data is sent from the video card to the drive---it can be snooped on the ATA bus. Either way, there must be a key exchange. That means that it is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. Any technology not vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, by definition, is a shared secret algorithm, which is inherently vulnerable to the revelation of the shared secret by unscrupulous people (social engineering), which is how CSS was broken, I believe.

Fundamentally speaking, HDCP will be a joke, just like CSS, because all content protection is, my its very nature, a joke. It relies on an inherently flawed premise, specifically the assumption that you can give someone a piece of data and a decryption key and then somehow dictate how and when they can use that key to decrypt the data. It doesn't work that way. The only way to prevent decryption is by withholding the key, which would prevent it from ever being decrypted in any way. The best HDCP can do is add more initial shared secrets to steal.

Besides, unless they have improved it in recent years, HDCP has already been broken [dataloss.nl].

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Re:Whoa... How did they get away with this?

(Score:5, Informative)

by ScottLindner (954299) on Friday February 17, @10:15AM (#14742701)

HDMI does not inherently include HDCP. The specific is a bit loose in the way people interpret it. HDMI is the physical standard, HDCP is essentially a data layer standard. It's the same as wondering why you only get two channel audio if you use an SPDIF interface (AC-3/Dolby Digital). Sure, SPDIF can carry full 5.1 audio, but that doesn't mean it has to. This is the same with HDMI and HDCP. What I think most people are confused or frustrated with is some displays say HDMI support, and don't tell you that they require HDPC as well. You gotta figure that one out by visiting forums.
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No big surprise...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by PFI_Optix (936301) on Friday February 17, @10:23AM (#14742777)

The conscious mind tends to miss details. We spend so much time on the big issues that we don't notice little things. The problem is that we control our thoughts a little too well...if we don't see immediate relevance in something, we drop it. Our subconscious can take everything into account.

I'm quite fond of telling people that they think too much, or are overthinking a problem. They spend so much time fretting about how difficult the problem is that they don't actually devote any time to solving it.
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Re:No big surprise...

(Score:5, Interesting)

by kbielefe (606566) * <.moc.liamekaens. .ta. .20fl7uopb.> on Friday February 17, @11:35AM (#14743474)
(http://bielefeldtpapers.blogspot.com/)

You just described my in-laws perfectly. They rarely go out to eat because it is too difficult to decide what to eat. They never go on vacation because it is too difficult to decide where and when. He has worked at a company he dislikes for decades because it is too difficult to decide what other company to work for. They've been trying to decide between getting a master's degree in engineering or business for so long that he could have had both by now.

Meanwhile, they lose thousands in financial investments that were entered too hastily, and are jealous of the fun vacations and outings we do -- with less income -- while they wait for the perfect opportunity to come along. Usually, being able to ignore unimportant problems is a big asset.

--
The best argument is that which seems merely an explanation. -- Dale Carnegie
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Thanks for making me waste 3 minutes of my life figuring out why Chuck Norris jokes are suddenly funny. [wikipedia.org] I call lame-meme.
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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8732&feedId=online-news_rss20

Sleeping on it' best for complex decisions

• 19:00 16 February 2006
• NewScientist.com news service
• =====================================

  Re:Security Problems...

  (Score:5, Insightful)

  by SatanicPuppy (611928) <Satanicpuppy@NoSpAm.gmail.com> on Friday February 17, @11:06AM (#14743212)
  (Last Journal: Wednesday October 26, @08:50AM)
  Barring a few stupid corporations (*cough* Diebold *cough*), most ATMs accept extremely limited input, and have a very narrow range of possible actions they can take with that input, so there really isn't much to gain by hacking an ATM, and no real way to do it, because it's not really set up for that, and isn't running other, exploitable, services.
  
  Now, those Diebold machines that run Windows, on the other hand...I've seen screenshots of those things after a bluescreen, with the browser up, and the media player going. I'd bet there was a way to get them to spit out their complete internal cash supply. That's a good 250k, if it's full. Can you insert a buffer overflow on the back of an ATM card?

  --
  argumentum ad ignorantiam Fallacy of taking a statement not provably false and implying that it is therefore true

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REXX

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Shag (3737) <danbirchall+slashdot@@@gmail...com> on Friday February 17, @11:04AM (#14743194)
(http://danbirchall.multiply.com/)

I used to code in REXX in 1989. [me too, 1986@PWC, 1989@LehmanBros.-- DJWI for WSJ ]

It was pretty handy for scripting, useful as "glue" between different things and all that.

By 1989 standards, mind you.

I think modern things (like AppleScript/Automator) can probably do everything REXX could ever do, and more, while being more readable to us humans.

--
http://danbirchall.multiply.com/
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Re:Rumors

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Golias (176380) on Friday February 17, @01:45PM (#14744504)

No matter how stupid, useless and over-hyped the Segway was, Dean Kamen is still a facking genius and the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.

His insulin pump was so brilliant, it looks obvious in hindsight (as the best inventions often do.)

Even the Segway, which is a silly gadget, makes a sort of sense. He was hoping to make a consumer product which (had it caught on with people) would apply economies of scale to his gyroscopic concepts, which would eventually make his stair-walking wheelchairs cheaper.

If he wants to turn his mad skillz to the problem of getting clean water to people, I gotta take off my hat.

--

Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

============

The Segway was useless and overhyped.

(Score:5, Interesting)

by Valdrax (32670) on Friday February 17, @02:31PM (#14744866)

The big problem with the Segway was the hype, not the merits of device itself. When Jeff Bezos said that he could see cities being redesigned around the thing, we all thought that it had to be something revolutionary and amazing that would lead us all to change.

What he really seems to have meant was that for the device to sell, cities would have to be redesigned first. It's too heavy, fast, and unmaneuverable to ue on sidewalks, and it's too slow, unprotected, and unmaneuverable to use on streets. In essence, for the Segway to work, there'd have to be a completely new set of lanes for it. Additionally, it has all the problems of not protecting against the elements or having cargo space that prevent it from truly replacing cars. It's also far too expensive for the average person to justify the limited utility.

To sum up, it costs too much and can't be used in a majority of outdoor situations. It was overhyped when it had commercial flop written all over it. The Segway was brilliant example of promising the world and delivering nothing.

Snowmobiles and trail bikes at least have thrill-seeking element that the 12.5 MPH, no off-roading Segway did not.
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The slippery slope

(Score:5, Insightful)

by TheCrayfish (73892) on Friday February 17, @01:39PM (#14744449)
(http://www.thecrayfish.com/)

From TFA: A satellite picture of the earth at night shows swaths of darkness across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. For the people living there, a simple light bulb would mean an extension of both their productivity and their leisure times. -- Yes, and then it's all downhill from there: first light bulbs, then telephones for telemarketers to call, televisions for advertisers to stuff with their ads all aglow, microwave ovens to provide late-night high-fat carbohydrate-laden heart sludge, personal computers from which to have one's identity stolen, not to mention thirty-five clocks to set forward every Spring, etc. I hope these people who have lived in the beautiful nighttime darkness for so long know what they're getting themselves into.
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Re:Err..

(Score:5, Insightful)

by moosesocks (264553) on Friday February 17, @01:29PM (#14744358)
(http://www.last.fm/user/schmod)

It's part of the price to pay for development.

Every industrialized nation at some point or another went through a period of dirty industry.

Also think of it this way.... London today has the highest air quality it's ever had. Think about it.... first you had cooking/heating fires, then you had dirty industry, and now you've got a clean economy. I don't doubt that the rest of the world will eventually go through the same process.
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I love this guy.

(Score:5, Insightful)

by DrEldarion (114072) * on Friday February 17, @03:25PM (#14745268)
(http://www.dealmein.net/)

"Vague suggestions that inadvertent release of exempted documents might occur are insufficient to outweigh the very tangible benefits that FOIA seeks to further--government openness and accountability," he wrote.

This judge is my new personal hero (temporarily displacing Alton Brown), and exactly the type of person who SHOULD be a judge. He actually seems like he cares about people and knows what kind of stuff gets pulled behind the scenes.

He may as well have come out and said "Sorry, guys, you're full of shit. Give us ALL the records, and soon."

--
Hot deals [dealmein.net] on games, electronics, computer parts, and more - updated daily.
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Re:So then..

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Reducer2001 (197985) on Friday February 17, @04:03PM (#14745542)
(http://techjamthings.blogger.com/)

This story ain't gonna get buried.

I wish I could agree with you on that. I really do, but this is 21st Century (We're afraid of the terrorists, so please do whatever it takes to make it safe for me to shop at Target) America. The mainstream press, which used to include heroes like Edward R Murrow [wikipedia.org] and Woodward and Bernstein [wikipedia.org] taking time to gather facts and check them thoroughly has been replaced by the 24/7 "we don't care what's important, we only care about what's NEW" now, now, now press.

For example, the biggest story out of Washington this week was Dick Cheney shooting his hunting partner. What about the almost lack of debate in Congress about the pending renewal of the Patriot Act? What about Dick Cheney saying that he has the right to declassify information whenever and to whoever [cnn.com] he wants?

Listening to NPR these past couple of months regarding this issue, it's become VERY clear to me that most people simply don't care that this is going on. They say, "Well, I've got nothing to hide!" and the people I've spoken with at work about this feel the same way. If this was as big of an issue to American public as a missing white girl, or celebrity divorce, this story would be the headline on CNN today, instead of Harry Whittington apologizing the Dick Cheney for being shot!

Whatever, maybe I shouldn't have had that second mocha!

--
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
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The law is the law

(Score:5, Insightful)

by MikeRT (947531) on Friday February 17, @03:39PM (#14745358)
(http://www.blindmindseye.com/)

To turn the "law and order" types' favorite phrase back on them, the law is the law. If the government will not obey its own laws, then it has no moral authority to operate. Ironically, that's a Biblical concept, not a liberal idea. According to scripture, God's authority to stand in divine judgement handing down damnation or salvation comes from his perfection and consistency. God follows his own laws, thus he has total moral authority. But how many Bush supporters would freak out at such an argument?

In pure secular terms, the only result of giving discressionary power in 99% of all cases out there is to have the government not obey the law. The government must obey its own laws in order to ensure law and order, and having a law that says "the state shall do what it wilt, shall be the whole of the regulation of the government's conduct" is not a law. It's a license to anarchy in the pejorative sense of the word.

If our government is unwilling to even use its Article IV powers to shut down the borders in violation of NAFTA and all travel from rogue states and Saudi Arbia, then it doesn't need to even speak about new powers.

--
My blog [blindmindseye.com].
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Re:Deceptive headline

(Score:5, Insightful)

by FungiFromYuggoth (822668) on Friday February 17, @04:15PM (#14745660)

Actually, some spy intercepts were purely domestic [nytimes.com] - but that's not the point. It's called "Domestic" because one person is in the US, and it isn't a purely international communication.

Since this program resulted in thousands of dead end leads [nytimes.com], only an idiot would claim that only terrorists were monitored under this act.
If the NSA was only spying on terrorists, then FISA would have granted warrants (even after the wiretap had started). Given that the administration decided to end run around FISA, it's reasonable to speculate who else was being spied upon - particularly considering this crowd's track record with honesty.

No rational person can make the case that the disclosure of this program has damaged national security, so by making it you prove your irrationality. It's not like Al Qaeda didn't know that the NSA existed, or that the NSA was spying on phone calls. No one, and I mean no one is arguing that the NSA shouldn't be able to spy on terrorists. Why in the world would terrorists care whether or not the NSA got warrants to do this? The best excuse this administration can offer is that reminding the terrorists that the NSA taps phone calls damages national security, otherwise "they forget". If keeping the NSA out of the headlines is that important, then they'd damn well better follow the law.

It's not about eavesdropping on people who want to kill us - otherwise those thousands of dead ends wouldn't have happened. It's about whether the President can pick and choose which laws he wants to follow by invoking the excuse of a perpetual war, relegating Congress to a powerless debating soceity.

The candy asses are on the right - people who will happily give away this country's proud heritage because they're terrified of the big bad swarthy bogeyman. Grow a spine.
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Re:Deceptive headline

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Minwee (522556) <dcr@neverwhen.net> on Friday February 17, @04:14PM (#14745652)
(http://www.neverwhen.net/)

"That's surviellence of an enemy, and given the Presidents power to wage war, it's not any stretch of the imagination that this sort of activity is within his authority."

Richard Nixon thought so, but somehow that didn't help him any.

"A significant majority of the US population approves of this activity, and they will be voting next election"

A significant percentage of the US population also believes that Saddam Hussein personally piloted both of the airplanes used in the attack on the World Trade Centre. And yes, many of them will somehow figure out how to vote in the next election.

"Sure, why not- but we're not talking about civil liberties here, we're talking about monitoring the communications of people who want to kill us, and their agents in our country. The fact that so many don't realize this- or plainly deny it because of a visceral hate for the current administration- sickens me, and you have just read the result of that disgust."

Actually, you're talking about the laws of your country and the principles upon which it was founded. You may want to try reading books instead of burning them, you may learn something.

I question your seriousness about preserving our country.
I question your patriotism.
and most of all....
I question your judgement

I question your motives. Wrapping your country in plastic and then never sitting on it will "preserve" it, but I wouldn't want to live there.

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Re:Deceptive headline

(Score:5, Insightful)

by dcocos (128532) on Friday February 17, @04:10PM (#14745616)
(http://www.dcdan.com/)

That's surviellence of an enemy, and given the Presidents power to wage war, it's not any stretch of the imagination that this sort of activity is within his authority.

Congress determines that authority.

Do you think that Britain and the US got warrants when they were trying to break Germanys enigma code in World War 2?

Last I checked Germans weren't American citizens and afforded the rights granted by the Constitution

A significant majority of the US population approves of this activity

Apparently you have read any polls lately.

If you don't want to be monitored by the government, then don't talk to overseas agents of an organization that has killed Americans, wants to kill more, and is killing our troops every week. It's not that complex.

The FOIA request wants to make sure that that is really the case. Negligence and poor planning is what is killing a lot of our troops every week.

To those who are worked up about this,
I question your seriousness about preserving our country.

Preserving our country means preserving the system of check and balances and assures that no one is above the law.

I question your patriotism.

Blind following of leadership is not as patriotic as questioning it.
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Re:Whats the problem?

(Score:5, Insightful)

by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Friday February 17, @06:43PM (#14746563)
(http://slashdot.org/)

No, not really. It's a bit short, but not ridiculously so.

Most creative works have no copyright-related economic value at all. Slashdot posts fall into this category; no one is publishing compilations of their best posts and selling them because they'd never make money at it.

Of the small fraction of works that have such value, the value usually is front-loaded. That is, the vast majority of all the value the work will ever have is realizable right away. For example, a movie makes most of the money it will ever make from theatrical releases on opening weekend. When it hits pay-per-view, it again makes most of its money on the first weekend. Ditto for when it becomes available to rent or buy. The amount of money that can be extracted later on typically declines, and is pretty small compared to the initial amount. We're talking about 70-90% up front, you see.

Of course there are exceptions, but remember that they are tremendously rare. It is foolish to design copyright policy around aberrations. For an author to make a work like that is on par with winning the lottery. They would make a lot of money even with short terms. We don't need to help them. Rather, help should be tailored around the needs of more common artists. After all, copyright is a subsidy in the form of a monopoly on commodity goods and it's just dumb to give subsidies to the people that need them the least.

Some studies have been done as to the economic life expectancy of works. IIRC, the number tends to be 10-20 years. For some works, such as software, I can easily imagine the number being a lot shorter.

Life terms are totally unacceptable. They make the system unpredictable: author A could have a copyright that lasts fifty years, and author B could have a copyright that lasts one. Adding yet more time doesn't help. And as already noted, the economic worth to authors is usually minimal. The CTEA extension was valued on average at about a nickel, IIRC, and that was 20 years more. Better to have a fixed length term (or better still, to make it granular with many short terms that need to be renewed) so that artists know that there is a time limit, and the public can anticipate the regular release of works into the public domain and act accordingly. (E.g. you can run a business when you know that you can reprint a book in 20 years, but you can't when it could be any damn time in the future)

Long copyrights do not help provide for artists in their old age, or for their families, except in the rare cases mentioned above (in which case it is almost certain that the author already got a lot of money). This is because old copyrights are usually not valuable. If artists want to be secure in the future, they should rely on the same things everyone else relies on: savings, investments, pensions, social security, life insurance, etc. Not only is it more fair, but artists have far, far better odds of being better off with these things than betting that their book will still sell very well decades in the future and against all odds.

Long copyrights as a widows and orphans fund is as irresponsible as giving them scratch off lottery tickets would be. The only people who do tend to come out well are the ones that got rich right at the beginning, and they don't really need our help to become much more rich, do they? They're not going to be struggling in their old age, unless they're crazy irresponsible, right? Why are we treating them specially then?

--
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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