Is Apple TV simple?

Apple is famous for making things that look beautiful and are simple to use. However, what happens when Hollywood gets involved? Not even Apple can make their requirements simple. Thanks to Engadget for making that list of what you can and can't do. Be sure to check all the limitations before you rush out to buy it...

Nokia - Confusing People

Nokia to W3C: Ogg is proprietary, we need DRM on the Web.

Read that and check this part of Nokia's submission (pdf):

Anything beyond that, including a W3C-lead standardization of a “free” codec, or the active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg, …, by W3C, is, in our opinion, not helpful for the co-existence of the two ecosystems (web and video), and therefore not our choice.

This is either written by some amazingly clueless people or it is money talking. My money is on the last.

DRM - more choices for the consumers!

The content industry keeps saying that DRM (also known as CRAP or C.R.A.P.) is good for consumers because it creates more choice for us consumers. here is the latest "choice": To be able to play that new BD movie you just bought, you might need to upgrade your players firmware - if you are so lucky that the manufaturer has made an updated firmware available, otherwise you just out of luck!

How do you do a firmware update? Here is a bit of info:

Many of these players don't have Ethernet ports, as the Blu-ray spec doesn't require them. Updating the firmware on these units involves downloading an .ISO from the web site, unpacking it, burning it onto a CD-R or CD-RW, putting the disc in the player, rebooting, following the prompts, and hoping that all goes well.

I'm pretty sure my mom and dad wouldn't have a clue and would be out of luck until I made a visit and did it for them.

It is a fantastic business decision they've made: Let us annoy our honest customers the most.

Will they ever learn?

Somehow I doubt it! It seems sony has created a new form of copy protection on at least some of their DVD's which means they don't play in some DVD players, including some of Sony's own players. I hoped they learned a lesson after the big rootkit scandal last year, but apparently they intend to repeat it...

What Steve Jobs really said

Cory Doctorow has written this excellent comment about Steve Jobs Open Letter from not too long ago. Basically, Steve Jobs said that Apple would stop using DRM if the music industry would let him. However, as Cory Doctorow nicely displays it in his comment, Apple's actions tells a different story:

Actions speak louder than words. Artists have asked -- begged -- Apple to sell their music without DRM for years. From individual bestselling acts like Barenaked Ladies to entire labels of copy-friendly music like Magnatune, innumerable copyright holders have asked Apple to sell their work as open MP3s instead of DRM-locked AACs. Apple has always maintained that it's DRM or nothing. These artists believe that the answer to selling more music is cooperating with fans, not treating them as presumptive pirates and locking down their music.

Of course, you're entitled to change your mind so Steve, will we see DRM free music on iTunes soon?

Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD broken

Some time ago a guy posted the first crack to these new formats and now another improved crack have been made:

AACS took years to develop, and it has been broken in weeks. The developers spent billions, the hackers spent pennies.

For DRM to work, it has to be airtight. There can't be a single mistake. It's like a balloon that pops with the first prick. That means that every single product from every single vendor has to perfectly hide their keys, perfectly implement their code. There can't be a single way to get into the guts of the code to retrieve the cleartext or the keys while it's playing back. All attackers need is a single mistake that they can use to compromise the system.

There is a good quote (taken from schneier.com that I think fits quite well:

But there's an old saying inside the NSA: "Attacks always get better; they never get worse."

That quote is about breaking cryptography, but that is a big part of any DRM system too.

Arstechnica have written about this crack as well.

Sad news from BBC

Read and weep:

The podcast is both heartening and frustrating. The BBC had so much promise a few years ago, back when it was talking about delivering real, world-class public value to license payers by doing the hard work of clearing the footage in the archive and letting the public remix it. Now that vision has been reduced to a sham -- the BBC iPlayer, a steaming pile of DRM that restricts you to being a mere consumer of BBC programming, downloading it to your PC for a mere seven days.

Schneier.com: DRM in Windows Vista

Here is a great article by Bruce Schneier about DRM in Vista.

Windows Vista includes an array of "features" that you don't want. These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure. They'll make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features won't do anything useful. In fact, they're working against you. They're digital rights management (DRM) features built into Vista at the behest of the entertainment industry.

And you don't get to refuse them.

Doesn't sound too nice does it? And why would MS add all this DRM to Vista? Well, here is a nice theory:

We saw this trick before; Apple pulled it on the recording industry. First iTunes worked in partnership with the major record labels to distribute content, but soon Warner Music's CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. found that he wasn't able to dictate a pricing model to Steve Jobs. The same thing will happen here; after Vista is firmly entrenched in the marketplace, Sony's Howard Stringer won't be able to dictate pricing or terms to Bill Gates. This is a war for 21st-century movie distribution and, when the dust settles, Hollywood won't know what hit them.

Of course, that is just a theory but I doubt it is far from the truth.

Interesting comment from Apple/Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs just posted a comment on the Apple website called "Thoughts on Music. He starts by mentioning that

To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC.

What he doesn't mention is that AAC and MP3 isn't exactly open formats - they are quite infected with software patents which means that everyone that wants to play those files have to pay royalties (if you bought an iPod, part of the price is royalties to be able to play MP3 files). Free, open formats do exist - just have a look at the Xiph.org formats like Ogg Vorbis and Flac. There is nobody that prevents Apple from adding support for those formats to their players and no one will demand royalties if they did! They would probably sell even more iPods if they added support for those formats.

He ends by stating the obvious and what everyone else have been saying for years:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

He also says that if the music companies would let them sell music without DRM,

Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.

That is positive news from Apple! It is now up to the music companies to do the right thing. The big question is whether they will go for it? I'll believe it when I see it. Why? Because they don't use DRM to stop piracy, they use it so they can sell us the same product again and again.

I got another question: If Apple starts selling DRM free music, will all those unfortunate people that already bought music with DRM be able to download DRM free versions of the music they already bought?