CDs or not? An interesting take on Key2Audio 48
Erik K. Veland writes "Mathew Ruben of MacOpinion has written a long article titled Celine Dion killed my iMac!. An interesting take on the whole CD-issue, the criminalization of the user and a comparison of the technology to cable box-zapping."
CDs or not? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Summary: Not.
Celine Dion Killed My iMac (Score:1, Insightful)
Those were the days.
Now CDs cost $19 or $20. The dot-com boom is, well, you know. Napster's gone. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has survived a legal challenge, which has only encouraged our fine Congress to pile on more onerous legislation.
Granted, none of this is as alarming as the apparent suspension of habeas corpus in the extended detention of more than 1,000 unnamed people in the U.S. since 9/11, but it's pretty darned ominous just the same.
Added to this heady mixture in recent weeks is a new generation of digital copy protection that's been showing up on music CDs distributed by Sony in Europe. Fast becoming known as the case of "Celine Dion Killed My iMac," initial reports indicate that these discs are not only unreadable by computers, but may actually crash them and prevent them from rebooting, necessitating a service call.
Aside from the immediate hardware questions--"Where the !@#$% is the iMac's manual CD eject hole and how the !@#$% do I get to it?!?"--several major questions about this situation have gripped the Mac universe. Here, without further ado, are the Curmudgeon's curmudgeonly answers to the top five. Some are techical, some are legal, some are political, some are a mix of all three.
Dayplanner note: if you already know exactly how CDs and copy protection work and you're pressed for time, feel free to skip right on down to Question #3. That's where things get, as they say in New England, wicked controversial.
QUESTION #1: Why do Macs and other computers choke on copy protected CDs?
When you look at the business side of a normal audio CD, you see one continuous semi-glossy surface that contains the audio information, or the "program". Bracketing the program are the lead-in and lead-out sections, which are the high-gloss rings at the inside and outside edges of the disc, respectively. The CD's audio tracks are not arranged in a particularly orderly fashion on the disc. As Robert Starret explains in an old but still definitive Emedia Professional article [emedialive.com]:
So an audio CD basically contains raw binary data without a filesystem. The reason for the lack of a CD-audio filesystem, as Starret explains, is as follows:This is why the same "74-minute" CD-recordable disc can hold 747MB of audio but only 650MB of data. Each 2,352-byte sector of a data CD-ROM holds only 2,048 bytes of your data because the other 304 bytes are used as overhead for the file system (specifically, for header information that tells the computer exactly where the data is). An audio CD, by contrast, uses the full 2,352 bytes for each sector. If you divide 2,352 bytes into 747MB you get the same result as when you divide 2,048 bytes into 650MB.So what a computer sees when it looks at an audio CD is not a foreign language, as when a Mac sees a DOS-formatted disc. Rather, it sees no language at all. There's no map, no file cabinet. Everything's just strewn out on the floor. This is why you can't just double-click an audio CD's icon in the Finder and drag one of the files to your hard drive. (If you do, the copied file will be zero k and contain no data.) Instead, you have to "rip" the file with a special digital audio extraction program or utility that manually searches out and extracts the tracks on the disc. That, by the way, is most likely why the term "ripping" came about. The kind of translation necessary for digital audio extraction no doubt struck many folks as analogous to the process of printing postscript-encoded fonts and images on a printer. Converting postscript to bitmap (so a printer can shoot ink droplets or laser-heated toner dots onto the paper) requires a Raster Image Processer, or RIP; hence "ripping."
Now, the key thing to understand here is that since audio CDs have no filesystem, and therefore no real data files, audio CD players do not need to be able to read data. Any data on an audio CD is ignored.
Computers, of course, come at CDs from the opposite perspective: data is their first order of business. So computers look for--and, if they find one, read--a data track on a CD before they look for, or read, an audio track. Data first, audio second, with each being treated separately.
You will be able to see this separate treatment in action if you have an "Enhanced CD" that contains bonus data material in addition to the audio program. Sara McLaughlin's 1999 release Mirrorball [sarahmclachlan.com] is one of the best-known Enhanced CDs. Stick it in your Mac and you'll see two separate CD icons, or volumes, show up on your desktop, one for the audio CD tracks and one for the data.
Look on the underside of the CD and you'll see that a very shiny band interrupts the normally continuous semi-gloss surface. This band is the lead-out for the audio disc, which is normally at the edge of the disc. But on an Enhanced CD, there's a second patch of program material after the lead-out. This is the data portion. Now look at a picture provided by German Magazine Chip [www.chip.de] of the underside of a disc that uses the Key2Audio copy protection technology Sony has employed most famously on the European release of Celine Dion's most recent album (ignore the disembodied hand holding the felt-tip marker for now).
Note the shiny band about 1/4 of the way in from the outside edge of the disc, just like you'd see on the underside of Mirrorball. The material from that band out to the disc's edge is a data track. Unlike a normal Enhanced CD, however, the data track on this CD is corrupt. I don't know exactly how it works, but it is formatted in such a way that a computer will initially recognize it as a valid data track but will not in fact be able to read it successfully. This situation will result in: the computer endlessly trying to read the disc; the computer giving up and ejecting the disc (or asking you to eject it); or the computer giving up with the disc sitting in the drawer, unmounted on the desktop and invisible to the OS. The second possibility is annoying; the first and third possibilities are potentially disastrous.
So computers choke on Sony's copy protected discs because (1) computers read data tracks first, and (2) Key2Audio data tracks are corrupt. Audio CD players, on the other hand, aren't capable of reading data tracks--remember, audio CD tracks lack a filesystem and there are no directories or headers to read. So audio CD players simply ignore the data track, just as they do for normal Enhanced CDs.
QUESTION #2: What's with this magic marker trick to defeat copy protection? Does it really work?
You betcha. Computers read data tracks first, but the data track has to be located at the end of the CD. Sounds confusing, but it has to be that way. In computer parlance, an Enhanced CD is a form of multisession CD. The CD is written to more than once; in the case of Enhanced CDs and Mac-PC hybrid CDs, this happens because you want to write two different types of data to the same CD. Audio CD players can only read the first session on a CD--again, no need or ability to know what multiple sessions are since an audio CD is expecting to see only audio CD tracks. So the audio content has to be the first thing on the disc, located on the inside of the disc surface. The data track is on the outside.
So if you take a magic marker--or, more dangerously a piece of electrical tape or a Post-it note--and use it to cover over that shiny band that divides the audio program from the data track, your computer won't realize that there even is a data track as it scans from the beginning of the CD--the inner part where the audio stuff is--to the outside looking for data. What your computer will see is a final audio track that seems to go on and on until it reaches the edge of the disk. This will put a whole lot of silence at the end of the last track when you rip the CD (a problem you can rectify using the Quicktime Player as an audio editor), but otherwise you'll be good to go.
QUESTION #3: Is Apple liable for the damage caused to my iMac by these CDs?
The answer to this one as far as the Curmudgeon is concerned is a big fat hairy NO. Before I explain why, I must say that I find it disheartening that so many folks on Usenet and the Mac Web are complaining about Apple in regards to this issue. Yes, it sucks to have to take your iMac to a repair shop and pay something on the order of $250US just to get a stuck CD removed. Yes, it's annoying that modern Macs have manual-eject holes that are difficult to see and hidden behind decorative outer CD doors. But I think the root of folks' complaints is that some Apple machines seem to be damaged more seriously by these disks than most WinTel PCs (largely, from what I can tell, by the aforementioned difficulty in detecting and accessing Macs' manual eject holes). While I don't want to downplay the real expense and misery some folks have experienced, it seems to me that the knee-jerk blaming of Apple comes from a kind of Mac inferiority complex run amok: "Why do Apple machines have to react worse to this than WinTel machines?!? My PC friends are going to rake me over the coals on this one! I thought Macs were supposed to be easier to use and better-built, and yet my PC just let me eject the CD!" And so on.
These sentiments are understandable, but they don't form the basis for a proper understanding of whether or not Apple should pay to fix this problem. Putting aside the question of legal liability for the moment, it's just not right to expect Apple or any computer manufacturer--or any CD player manufacturer whose machines won't play these new CDs, for that matter--to anticipate technology that hadn't been invented when the machine was designed. Early CD players were confused by Enhanced CDs; many home and car CD players still can't play CD-RWs; many DVD players (which are always labeled "DVD/CD/VCD") can't handle CD-Rs. In fact, the different CD formats are covered by different technology standards: Red Book for normal audio CDs, Yellow Book for data CDs, Orange Book for CD-R and CD-RW, and Blue Book for Enhanced CDs. Incidentally, the fact that CD-R and CD-RW are grouped together under a single standard explains why manufacturers are hesitant to certify that their CD and DVD players will play home-brewed recordable CDs: unless a player can handle both CD-R and CD-RW discs, it's not Orange Book compliant.
Now the funny thing is that much of the debate over Apple's responsibility here has skipped over this simple, and to my mind obvious, fact. Instead, the debate has proceeded to another, related question:
QUESTION #4: Are these new Sony discs really CDs or not? Should Apple support them even if they're not CDs?
Here's where the Curmudgeon throws you a curve ball, because contrary to what you've read, it's entirely possible, even likely, that these copy protected discs are in fact CDs.
Of course, Apple's position, as stated in a now-infamous Knowledgebase article [apple.com] is that Key2Audio discs "are technically and legally not Compact Discs (CD format)" because they do not conform to the CD audio format, and so Apple is under no obligation to make Macs work with them.
Sony agrees, having removed the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" badge and logo from discs that use the Key2Audio system.
But I don't think that really settles the matter. Attentive readers of the Mac Web might recall that the first draft of Apple's knowledgebase article stated that inserting such a disc into a Mac constituted misapplication of the product (the Mac, not the disc) and therefore any resulting problems were not covered under warranty. Apple has since removed that portion of the article, no doubt on the advice of legal counsel.
I don't know why that paragraph got removed from the article, but I have a hunch it's because the question of whether or not a Key2Audio disc is a CD has not come close to being settled.
Consider this: while the Sony discs don't conform to the Red Book CD standard, they appear to conform to the Blue Book standard--the one that governs Enhanced CDs. It's not possible to look at the full specs for CD standards without paying Philips (co-creator of the CD format along with, ironically, Sony) quite a bit of money. But available summaries of the Blue Book standard indicate that the standard does not say what has to be on that data track. Philips presumes that data tracks on Enhanced CDs "will in general contain items like disc and track titles, lyrics, and background information on the music," (quoted from here [philips.com]), but the Blue Book spec doesn't actually prescribe specific uses for the data track. The only requirement, as far as I can see, is that the data track be formatted with a known filesystem, typically ISO-9660 (DOS), and/or HFS. Since the Key2Audio system works precisely by getting the computer to "take the bait" by first recognizing the data track, and then confuses it by messing up the actual structure or nature of the data, it's reasonable to assume that the Key2Audio system does in fact conform to the Blue Book standard. (In other words, if the data track was not formatted with a valid filesystem, the computer would ignore it or spit the disc out.) Aside from the obvious marketing nightmare ("Our Enhanced CDs are unique because they diminish the product!") The only difference between a Key2Audio disc and an Enhanced CD is that the Key2Audio CD's data track is used to implement copy protection rather than to provide song lyrics, videos and other more traditional Enhanced CD data content.
Now, you might think the Curmudgeon is splitting hairs here. Who cares if you call it (A) an out-of-spec disc that's not a real CD, or (B) an Enhanced CD with a screwy data track?
It seems to me that there's a huge difference. It might seem like Sony is shooting itself in the foot by omitting the official "CD Digital Audio" badge from its copy protected discs. But to my eyes it's the opposite: Sony is weaseling out of the truth, which is that its discs are in fact Blue Book-compliant CDs that are not out-of-spec but rather are defective, and have intentionally been made defective, using the Blue Book format as a trojan horse to disable the user's hardware when that hardware is a computer.
Insofar as these discs damage or disable computers, they operate like computer viruses, except that instead of working on the software side, they attack via hardware and firmware. Their method of copyright protection is less like MacroVision and CSS (the copy protection mechanisms used on VHS and DVD), and more like the "zapping" techniques used by cable companies to disable cable boxes in homes where cable service or premium channels are being received illegally. In those cases, however, there's a way of distinguishing between legal and illegal activity. Legal cable setups don't get their boxes zapped. With Key2Audio, the technology behaves as though inserting a CD in your computer makes you a criminal.
Now, if a court were to agree with my argument that Key2Audio discs are in fact really CDs, then Sony (and Key2Audio) could be liable to lawsuits from computer users who lost time, money and perhaps data as a result of damage done to their computers by these discs. Conceivably, Sony could also be liable to suits brought by computer manufacturers for sabotaging their machines or interfering with their business practices. By saying these discs aren't CDs, Sony hopes to extricate itself from such liability. One can only hope that Sony gets its ass handed to it by the European Union courts--which are routinely more consumer-friendly than their U.S. cousins--before this situation gets out of hand.
This brings us to the second part of this question: Should Apple support these discs even if they're not really CDs? To which the Curmudgeon replies: Heck No! Key2Audio discs do not represent a new technology or a new CD spec. They are a malicious corruption of an existing spec. Without manual intervention by the user on a disc-by-disc basis, it's impossible to design drive firmware or CD driver software that can differentiate between an Enhanced CD and a Key2Audio CD.
That said, it would be nice if drives used in Macs had their firmware updated so that insertion of a Key2Audio disc would generate a normal "This disc is unreadable" message from the OS, allowing for a smooth and uneventful eject procedure.
Even better would be a user-selectable option to "ignore data volumes on multisession CDs" via a CD Preference Pane (OS X) or Control Panel (OS 9). You could select that option and use Key2Audio discs to your heart's content. If you needed to use an Enhanced CD, you could uncheck the option. It would be a bit of a kludge, but that's the best that can be done given the insidious nature of the Key2Audio technology.
QUESTION #5: What about Fair Use?
The much-ballyhooed concept of "fair use" is much more complicated than it seems, and much too complicated to cover fully here. Its value in helping us fight the good fight against Sony is significant but limited.
It is of course true that it's not a violation of fair use to rip a CD and load its songs onto your hard drive or mp3 player, or onto a mix CD-R. The essence of the famous, then obscure, now famous again "Betamax" case (in which Sony was the defendant, ironically, and which was decided by the Supreme Court exactly one week before the release of the first Macintosh) is that it is permissible for you to record or copy copyrighted material so long as it does not deprive the copyright holder of revenue it could obtain if your copy did not exist. So in that sense we all do have a legal "right" to rip CDs.
At the same time, fair use does not obligate Sony to make its music CDs technologically compatible with your Mac, particularly if Sony gets away with claiming that these things aren't really CDs. Technological compatibility is a matter for the market, not the courts: if enough people refuse to buy such discs, Sony will stop making them. If folks buy them, then they'll keep on making them.
The tragedy here is that the market doesn't work like a democracy. Consumers will never have the ability to choose between copy protected and non-copy protected versions of the same CD. You won't see Virgin Records marketing their non-copy protected version of the Celine Dion CD against Sony's copy protected version. It's that old problem of copyright.
So if we leave the fantasy world of economics textbooks and travel to the real world, in which demand is not merely met but created, shaped and channeled, we see that relatively few people--especially children and teens--want or "demand" a non-copy protected CD. What they desire is the music that happens to be on the CD (or the persona, or fame, or body, of the person who makes the music). So the kid hears Britney on the radio or sees her in a video on MTV, or sees her in that Pepsi commercial on broadcast TV, and then goes to the store to buy the music. Upon arrival, our young consumer is presented with a CD. The fact that it costs $18.99 even though it cost Sony about 99 cents to manufacture isn't really relevant. The fact that it's copy protected probably isn't relevant either. The $19 copy protected CD is the product, end of story. There's no other legal way to get the music. Thus, there's no way to gauge the consumer's preference for copy protection, because the consumer isn't choosing or rejecting a content-delivery medium; rather, the consumer is choosing (or rejecting) the music.
So fair use gets lost in the muddle of the market. But we can try to find it again if we take a gander at the reason Key2Audio exists in the first place: online music swapping.
The record industry says that CD ripping and music piracy go hand-in-hand; hence the need for digital copy protection. Yet a moment of reflection yields the following observations:
(A) Most noncommercial piracy these days (i.e. mp3 sharing) does indeed involve ripping CDs onto computers.
(B) At the same time, most ripping does not lead to piracy.
(C) Virtually no commercial, for-profit piracy involves ripping CDs onto someone's computer and distributing them via file sharing. Instead, it is likely that commercial, high-volume piracy involves mass copying of audio CDs via standalone CD duplicators that can copy any kind of copy protected disc as easily as they copy Playstation CDs (which use a similar copy protection mechanism). To stop this sort of pirating, the record companies will have to continue to rely on the same law enforcement agencies and tactics as clothing manufacturers and electronics manufacturers do in their efforts to shut down counterfeit designer jeans plants and "Sorny" or "Sonee" Walkman manufacturing operations.
(D) No more than one successful rip of a song from a CD is necessary in order for it to be disseminated all across the internet. In order to accomplish such a successful rip, a person can spend less than $300 for a standalone CD duplicator or less than $3 for a Sharpie felt-tip marker.
These observations all point to one undeniable conclusion: digital copy protection schemes like Key2Audio will not stop illegal music copying. So not only will Key2Audio infringe on fair use, but that's all it will do.
The "casual" illegal copyer, who rips a CD, makes a mix CD for his or her car, puts another copy on an mp3 player, and gives three CD-R copies of the original CD to three friends, may in fact be prevented by Key2Audio technology from using his original CD to engage in this mixture of legal and illegal uses. But as long as someone, somewhere, has managed to rip the CD, this person will still be able to download the album and make that mix CD, copy that file onto an mp3 player, and make those CD-R dubs for friends. The source material, being in mp3 format, will be of slightly inferior quality, but it will hardly be noticeable, let alone objectionable, to most people listening with most audio equipment.
With all this in mind, a new picture emerges. We no longer see a push-pull between fair use and copyright, or between consumer desire and intellectual property. Instead, we see piracy continuing more or less undisturbed, with fair use being seriously disrupted.
It would be paranoid and silly to think that Sony and other record companies would want to destroy fair use just for the heck of it. There has to be a method to their madness, yes?
Let's return to the Betamax case. There was an equally important, but lesser known, second prong to that case. As detailed on this helpful web page [colostate.edu], Sony was sued by two movie studios, not two television networks. One of the studios' major complaints was that Sony's Betamax allowed for the creation of a video rental market, which allowed video stores to buy one copy of a movie on tape and rent it out hundreds, even thousands, of times until the tape wore out, without ever paying an additional dime to the movie studios. The Supreme Court ruled that this kind of video rental business was covered under fair use by what's known as First Sale Doctrine, which in essense means that when you buy something you can do whatever you want with it (as long as it's the original, not a copy). That's right--it's legal for you to rent your music CDs to your friends for fun and profit, as long as you're not renting them CD-R copies or keeping a copy for yourself while you rent the original. First Sale Doctrine, it turns out, is what propelled the Betamax case to the Supreme Court: it was the part of the original District Court Decision that was overturned at the Appelate level, enabling Supreme Court review of the entire case. First Sale Doctrine, by the way, is also why you can "license" as much software as your bank account will allow, but you cannot actually buy any.
It is First Sale Doctrine, rather than the more well-known "personal copy" rule, that is ultimately under attack by the record industry. For what reason could there be to prevent you from ripping your own CDs, except to offer you the "opportunity" to purchase multiple versions of the same music so you can listen to that music in ways that currently are defined as fair use: a CD for your stereo; an mp3 for your hard drive, and a "secure digital" copy for your record-industry approved portable digital music player? With a CD priced at $19, an mp3 at $5 (which would include a royalty to counteract the inevitable hard drive-to-hard drive copying), and a secure digital version priced at $2.50, that'd be $26.50 for one music album. No doubt you'd be able to buy all three togeter in a package deal for "only" $25. Or maybe you could license all three formats for the low, low price of $9.95 a year, for the rest...of...your...life--remember DivX DVDs?
Key2Audio is the first step in a dreadful double perversion of Fair Use. The first perversion is the idea that by making a copy of music for yourself, you are depriving the copyright holder of the ability to obtain revenue from selling you additional copies of the same music. The second, linked, perversion is that by destroying your ability to exercise fair use, the record company extends its copyright power beyond the content (the music) to the delivery medium (the CD).
There's no doubt this will all be fought out in the courts. And a recent New York Times article [nytimes.com] indicates that tech companies might finally be waking up to the threat posed by Hollywood and the RIAA.
But more than that, this requires grassroots action by all of us. As I wrote at the beginning of this column, Key2Audio isn't the worst threat we face by a long shot. But it's ominous as one more little indication of the broad threat to notions of freedom and privacy that are crucial to the quality of life in our country as we know it.
For more information, or to get involved, try The Campaign for Digital Rights at http://uk.eurorights.org/ [eurorights.org], the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://www.eff.org/ [eff.org], or the ACLU at http://www.aclu.org/ [aclu.org].
We have nothing to lose but most of our rights.
Key2Audio == TERRORISM (Score:1, Funny)
So, what does it take to get Sony executives hauled in front of a secret military tribunal?
Re:Key2Audio == TERRORISM (Score:2)
Re:Key2Audio == TERRORISM (Score:1)
Watch out.
Re:Key2Audio == TERRORISM (Score:2)
B)
Re:Key2Audio == TERRORISM (Score:2)
Re:Key2Audio == TERRORISM (Score:2)
Machine AI (Score:5, Funny)
PlayStaton discs (Score:1, Insightful)
You have to wonder if the entertainment industry gets its way, whether mod chips for desktops and laptops are coming soon. For now, though, the "mod marker" appears to be a cheap and effective solution. =)
Would this stand? (Score:1)
What's being executed? (Score:1)
My question in all this mess is WHY is the Mac executing this code? I am a Mac owner (well, my wife is), but I know next to nothing about it, internally.
Under Windows and Linux, binary files have a header that contains signature bytes indicating it's an executable file. In Windows, if it's a .COM file, nothing is checked. .EXEs have the 'MZ' bytes indicating it's executable. Linux has the elf32 header, among others. Surely MAC OS9 has something similiar, as that's what allows the OS to know what kind of file it is (since MAC OS9 doesn't require file extensions, as I understand it).
So either machines aren't checking the headers of these files before executing them, or Key2Audio has deliberately placed executable code there. If this is the case, could this not be considered a virus? And if it's a virus, could they be nailed under any of our wonderful DMCA or terrorist act laws?
--jcwren
Re:What's being executed? (Score:5, Informative)
Redbook CD standards are for non "enhanced" cd's. They dont cover cd audio (no fat) followed by data (fat), apparently.
Bluebook standards are, however, for "enhanced" cd's.
cd's like this one, are "enhanced" with a data track. However said track apprears to read, then fails, miserably.
3 things then occur:
2 is annoying. 1 & 3 are "fatal".
Sony are disributing deliberatly cripple bluebook standard cd's. They arent cd digital audio (hence no logo on them), however they are deliberatly crippled with the intent to destroy equipment. I sense a class action court case.
They dont care about piracy (which this doesnt protect against), and arent interested in destroying fair use (which is unprofitable on its own). They are interested in destroying first sale rights, the same rights that allow a video store to buy 1 video and rent it out 50 times without paying any royalties.
they are attempting to corner the market by eliminating competiters, because they know they are too late to enter on a level playing field.
Instead of Whining about it here... (Score:1, Interesting)
Maybe one of us would give her a clue(tm)...
Re:Instead of Whining about it here... (Score:2)
Re:Instead of Whining about it here... (Score:5, Informative)
solution (Score:3, Funny)
*work with me here, people.
Good Read (Score:1)
Excellent Article (Score:4, Informative)
I think the biggest thing mentioned that I have not heard expressed before is that these cds really _do_ conform to the standards of multisession cds. This is because they have to in order to trick the computer into reading what it thinks is going to be an invalid data track, which in turn is not formatted properly at all. This still conforms to the standard, however, since there is no specification as to what the data track must contain, simply that it identifies itself as one, which this one does. So, the data track can store anything, and in this case stores garbage. I think this definitely opens up Sony and anyone else using Key2Audio to lawsuits. Overall, I think it's at least somewhat funny that these really are "Enhanced CDs", just that they're enhanced to hurt your computer.
He also defends Apple's role in this very convincingly. Apple has gotten a lot of flack over this, but as he points out, this has happened many times in the past with various cd drives and formats. There are still cdroms out there that cannot handle multisession cds at all, or those that cannot read CDRWs. Now of course Apple could've had the OS handle the whole thing a little bit more gracefully, but could they have counted on every possible thing that a cd-type media is going to contain ever in the future? Certainly no, and certainly not having a garbage data track that is specifically meant to not fit with what a pc maker would count on. So I think as long as they issue a patch for this, they're not the bad guy at all here.
My thoughts are that consumers should continue to vote with their wallets. Realistically, sales for popular albums will not be hurt by this, but, if enough of us complain to stores, perhaps they'll do something. I listen to cds at work on my computer as I work (doing so now) and the first time I get one of these, I'm complaining my head off to Best Buy or whoever. If enough of us do so, perhaps they'll start putting them in a separate section or ask the labels to start identifying them more clearly, and then more people will be weary of getting them.
Re:Excellent Article (Score:2)
That being said, I've tended to notice the opposite phenomenon. I've put in scratched data CDs that really annoyed the crap out of Windows 2000 (system slowing down, taking a long time to bring up an explorer window if it does at all) that my OS X iBook would read just fine.
Re:Excellent Article (Score:2, Interesting)
So, the PC should check that the track is corrupt, and recover gracefully.
The problem however, is that the malware CDs, don't just contain random cruft, as would result from a scratch. They contain information that intentionally attempts to deceive.
We can argue that the PC should not react inappropriately to this, but we can also argue that a PC should not react inappropriately to a virus, trojan or other attack: this still in no way exonerates the perpetrator of the virus, trojan or Celine Dion.
As a further complication, it is not even software in the PC that is being attacked, it is firmware in the CD drive itself. Firmware that in many cases is in drives manufactured by Sony. Firmware written by Sony. The PC doesn't even get a chance to react. It asks the drive to read the CD and that's the last the PC hears from the drive.
Assuming the drive doesn't go completely catatonic when it sees such a CD, it should be possible to get the PC to send a "reset and eject" sequence of commands, and Apple should provide a way to do this.
But, maybe it isn't possible. Maybe some drives won't accept commands while they are confused by a malware CD. I don't know, any ./s who do?
Certainly, Apple should provide firmware updates for the drives to prevent the problem, but as I just pointed out, there could be some issues there given where the firmware has to come from.
In summary, while some of it may be Apple's fault, there may be extenuating circumstances---for Apple. I can't think of any for Sony. (And indeed, you won't find the malware CDs for sale in a number of jurisdictions where they are plainly illegal under local consumer protection laws.)
Re:Excellent Article (Score:2)
Computers that do not crash and require expensive repairs in response to bad CDs were better programmed (for this particular crisis).
Computers that do not crash and require expensive repairs in response to bad CDs chose better manufactuers for their CD-ROM drives.
Re:Excellent Article (Score:1)
In the Apple Knowledge Base article [apple.com] it describes the symptoms as:
So, some Apple computers won't recognise the CD---which is the effect the malware is trying to achieve. These also won't let you eject the CD---which I agree should most certainly be fixed, if possible (as I said, it may be that the drive goes all catatonic and won't respond).Additionally, when you reboot, some computers may also get confused by the bad CD. Basically, during the boot process they scan all available disks---and the CD never responds, and the computer never times out. Again, a bug (in the computer boot firmware) which needs to be fixed. But it's not caused by the computer executing untrusted code.
Apple tends to cover up the manual eject button and the 'paperclip' emergency eject button---but they are there, and that trip to the shop involves some tech finding for you. (Shouldn't be a challenge to any /.r I'd have hoped).
As for the manufacturers---I rather hope that this little debacle does indeed prompt the PC manufacturers to re-evaluate who they get their drives off. I'm sure that Sony Electronics will be even more pleased with Sony Music than they now are.
Re:Excellent Article (Score:1)
Re:Excellent Article (Score:2)
Re:Excellent Article (Score:2)
Nah, cant be that - most people dont read the articles
Not Redbook, but corrupted BlueBook. (Score:1)
Myself, I've been too broke to buy CDs so far this year, but I'm getting leery of buying CD's anywhere without an easy to use return policy. I've considered submitting a suggestion to Amazon.com that they should check every CD for these "protections" so that I'd feel safe buying from them.
Apple should take his suggestion (Score:4, Interesting)
Or perhaps this is something someone could provide a hack for.
Not providing such a solution, were it possible, I can understand as a boycotting-type action; lots more publicity this way; but users should come first.
Re:Still a design flaw (Score:1)
Re:Still a design flaw (Score:1)
You send a bad http packet. IIS sees it, determines it is faulty and requests you resend the packet. You do, but send back the same packet again and again.
Sort of a denial of service attack on your CD drive.
Not Enhanced CDs (Score:1)
Hmmm... (Score:1)
Holding down the mouse button... (Score:2, Informative)
Is there some reason that this isn't working on these "stuck" CDs?
Excellent article, misplaced section. (Score:1)
Did the editor read the article at all?
How to listen to Celine on OS 9 (Score:1, Informative)
The trick is to disable all extensions except "CD audio", of course. Restart, and you can listen to any copyrighted CD. Enjoy!