Newsgroup: it.hobby.home-cinema
Titolo: LEGGETE forse [OT] Ora se ne stanno passando: nuovo antipiracy cactus data shield

Un conto e' fare la guerra ai pirati, OK mi sta bene, ma di
danneggiare gli impianti mi pare che sia ledere i diritti del singolo.
Mi sembra un po' come dire, fa qualcosa di sbagliato ed allora noi gli
rompiamo le gambe alla nonna.
Commentate gente, commentate.
BYEZ:
ALBY
Anti-piracy system could damage loudspeakers - Hilbert Hagedoorn @
21:01 
Okay, this is somewhat weird .. CD pirates beware - the music industry
has
a new weapon up its sleeve. It is called the Cactus Data Shield, and
it is
designed to add noisy garbage to all copied CDs. The trouble is, it
could
also damage the hi-fi and loudspeakers of people who play pirated CDs.
Sony is already evaluating the Cactus system through its music
division,
which has been secretly testing it in Eastern Europe. The system was
developed by Midbar Tech, a company based in Tel Aviv. Midbar Tech
refuses
to comment on how its system works, but New Scientist has dug out its
American patent (US 6208598) - which reveals all. 
Midbar's anti-piracy technology follows on the heels of a similar
system
from Macrovision of California, which recently launched its SafeAudio
system (New Scientist, 14 July, p 22). This adds uncorrectable errors
to
the digital music on a CD, so CD writers on PCs can't copy it. But
Macrovision admits SafeAudio doesn't work with consumer disc-to-disc
CD
copiers. 
However, Eyal Shavit of Midbar Tech claims, "We can stop all kinds of
copying, even on domestic CD recorders."
Square wave 
It is well known in the audio industry that feeding large "square
wave"
pulses to sensitive circuitry - particularly loudspeakers - can cause
damage because high-frequency harmonics in the steeply rising and
trailing
edges cause rapidly repeating high-energy peaks in the speaker output.
Sony has secretly tested Cactus by treating several thousand CDs sold
recently in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but the system was not
set to
cause damage on this occasion. 
"We have had no problems with loudspeakers," Shavit says. While
acknowledging that it may seem "unacceptable" to harm consumers'
equipment
deliberately, he adds, "It's 'sweat engineering'. We can add extra
lines of
defence as people use new attacks." 
Midbar will not identify the affected CD titles sold in Eastern
Europe, so
no independent listening tests are possible.
Source: newscientist
 

...cut...
A parte il potenziale danneggiamento che mi sembra una bufala enorme,
leggiti questo:
Does it work in real life?
Nope with Plextor drives! You can read such CDs and with CloneCD you can
additional remove the Cactus protection from the protected AudioCD. For the
rest CD-Roms the Cactus protection will work just fine...
Come per ogni protezione, è solo questine di tempo...:-)))
Saluti
Franci



Touche'
Visto che poi avevate cominciato a litigare avevo postato anche
questo, cosi' siamo pari:-))))))
Baci & BYEZ:
ALBY
Mi scuso per la risposta sulle BMW oops B&W :-))
Spero che con questa mi sdebitero':
Anti-rip CD system bypassed
By Tony Smith
Posted: 01/08/2001 at 12:40 GMT
Macrovision's SafeAudio technology, designed to prevent PC-owning
music
fans from ripping CD tracks onto their hard drives, has been bypassed.
Commercial CDs protected by Macrovision's technology went on sale to
the
public in the US and elsewhere last month, part of a test programme to
ensure listeners aren't upset by the company's system. 
SafeAudio essentially corrupts the data on the CD. Hi-fi CD players'
error
correction systems can cope with the bursts of noise added to the
music, so
the listener remains - allegedly* - unaware there's anything they're
hearing anything but a perfect sound reproduction. The error
correction
system treats the noise as just one more result of the inherently
noisy
environment, thanks to high disk speeds, grubby disk surfaces and
frequent
laser mis-reads, that all CD players are. Listen to an audio CD with
error
correction switched off and you'll hear little more than hiss. 
PC CD drives, on the other hand, require the mediation of a controller
application, which treats all this extra noise as corrupt data and
trigger
a read failure. That, reckons Macrovision, renders SafeAudio discs
unrippable. Every time you try to do so, you're told that the data has
been
damaged and the copy has been aborted. 
The bypass, highlighted by European Web site CD Freaks, converts the
disc
tracks to .wav files in RAM and mounts them as readable volumes. At
that
point any .wav app can handle the rip. The bypass uses a custom VXD
virtual
device driver file. ® 
*Macrovision claims that return rates on SafeAudio-encoded CDs are no
higher than unprotected discs, but we're still not too happy about a
technology that explicitly messes with a recording's fidelity. Doubly
so,
since it appears record companies don't seem too keen on actually
telling
consumers they're buying a SafeAudio CD.

 wrote:
Non sono sorpreso. Io ho due o tre CD con errori che non riesco a
duplicare in alcun modo, su alcun PC o Mac; mentre i lettori audio
"saltano" l'errore e leggono tranquillamente il disco.
Non mi sembra inverosimile che errori di questo tipo possano essere
introdotti volutamente nei Cd audio per impedirne la copia.
Quanto a danneggiare l'impianto, non credo lo farnno. Se il sistema
funziona, non ne avranno bisogno.
Cesare