Massively-Distributed Real-time Video Broadcasting

like this Director at the bottom of US DHS directorship. Here is his resignation letter.

Is his reason good enough for you and me? It is hard for us to find motivations to do what we believe is right and to burden ourselves with powers unassigned.

I wonder if Rob is the starfish or the spiderman himself. which one would you bet?

... if nothing else, you simply distribute the content in all format sizes simultaneously, and, without attempting anything "clever" such as performing diffs on video frames, allow the devices to automatically switch the selection of the appropriate format size, depending on detected available bandwidth. so, for the first 25 frames, an individual device downloads the first "full" picture followed by the 24 updates in 760x520 but, on discovering that that format takes more than one second of real-time to download, drops down to reading the next second of data - the next 25 frames - at the 640x480 picture size, from a different set of peers.

apparently, it turns out that MPEG is capable of encapsulating "graded" signals, such that you can just .... not add increasingly high quality components.

wow.

the trouble is that at the time MPEG was designed, the cost in hardware and software of cutting up a stream in this way was prohibitive.

it's time for that to be revisited.

Re: 2) DRM is mutually exclusively incompatible with broadcasting. This is a simple mathematical fact, and content providers are just going to have to accept it. If people cannot get content easily and at a fair price, they simply find other ways.

Unless I missed a meeting, it's dead simple using vanilla PKI:

encr BBCPrK DC | CloudDS | decr BBCPuK | Display

where

* DC = whatever digial content, say a TV show.

* BBC = British Broadcasting Corporations

* BBCPrK = BBC Private Key

* BBCPuK = BBC Public Key

* encr = PKI Encryption program

* decr = PKI Decryption program

* | = pipe symbol -- left side stream in, right side stream out

* CloudDS = Cloud Distributor -- something that sends and receives stuff across the network cloud from one to n.

* Display = some 'sink' for the digital content -- TV, monitor, disk, etc.

encr BBCPrK DC | CloudDS | decr BBCPuK | Display

Below is an actual pipeline that mimics the above:

env | b64 -e | more | b64 -d

The above uses 'env' which has meaning under a number of Operating Systems and dumps a bunch of strings to stdout. It also uses a base64 utility (with the encode and decode switches faking the asymmetric keys). It takes the 'env' stream, encodes it, sends it through something and then decodes it and displays the console.

You need to have a base64 program with that syntax, but fortunately I wrote one about eight years ago when I realized I would be making this post.

Sorry about that -- the above, of course, requires that the 'public key' is only known at the receiving end. It also presumes, obviously, that some sort of optimization allows caches along the way to have access to the unencrypted stream or a suitable intermediate form. It's not quite 'dead' simple, but it is doable.

I have to note here that I find the whole concept of DRM and treacherous computing scary. The fact that infrastructures are being built to create digital masters and digital slaves is entirely contrary to any 'enlightened wishes' of the sovereign population. If people understood what genie was being let out of the bottle, they would not stand idly by while this happens. Many years ago, Richard Stallman wrote a story:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Here is a quote from the above short story:

"you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books"

I am an advocate of freely available maximum strength encryption. I think that, going forward, public access to strong encryption and other privacy measures will be necessary to keep the freedom we have left.

As soon as I started to put in bits above to make a practical method of DRM for broadcast, I thought 'wait a minute' ... let them think that it *is* hard to do if that is what the weasels will try do to with it.

Strangely enough, as can sometimes happen, I thought of a really interesting notion whilst designing that pipeline. I am going to see if there is a way to make quick hack as a 'proof of concept'. If I do, I will describe it here.

Sorry about that -- the above, of course, requires that the 'public key' is only known at the receiving end. I

precisely. and everyone involved has to know the "public key", which means that you are doing "verification" - not "encryption".

in other words, content from the "BBC" can be verified as coming from the BBC.

to encrypt, you have to .. well... encrypt! and that means that you must distribute the decrypt secret key.

and _that_ means that the more people that you distribute to, the higher the probability that someone will distribute the key _without_ permission. or, if that's difficult (note: obscurity != difficult), they will simply write a system which decrypts, stores and re-forwards as either real-time or offline content.

simple mathematics. no matter what measures are in place, the fact that content is being distributed mean that the probability of a crack is increased to the point where it is inevitable.

water always flows downhill....

the other way is this: you transmit using a single encryption key per person. well _that_ really works.

1) broadcast distribution per person requires MILLIONS of customised encrypts. that's insanely expensive.

2) the numbers game makes it pointless. one person decides to anonymously decrypt and republish, everyone else gets the re-published content instead of the encrypted content.

no matter _what_ you consider, DRM loses, loses, loses, every single which way it is considered.

mathematically, DRM loses.

algorithmically, DRM loses.

psychologically, DRM loses.

sociologically, DRM loses.

politically, DRM loses.

practically-speaking, DRM loses.

the only way in which DRM isn't yet dead is from the perspective of its status in law. having been bought into existence by the cartels, DRM is slowly being eroded, and will eventually lose there, too.

Re: 1) broadcast distribution per person requires MILLIONS of customised encrypts. that's insanely expensive.

There are ways around this. However, it is not quite 'dead simple' and you are correct that it can get 'leaky'. As I said above, I am reluctant to make too much about this or go into it because it *can* be done and I sure would not want to be the one providing the method. I wonder -- is there any way we could figure out *all* the ways of doing it, patent them and find some legal mechanism to make it impossible for anyone to use them? By rights, you are supposed to make patents available for licensing on some reasonable basis. However, is it possible to break the pathways to doing this into plausible separate patents, sell them off to different entities and then have the individual licenses punitive PLUS keep some essential and difficult step(s) as trade secrets? Oh my. I truly do hate those guys.

Re: 2) the numbers game makes it pointless. one person decides to anonymously decrypt and republish, everyone else gets the re-published content instead of the encrypted content.

This will always be some kind of weakness, but do not underestimate the nefarious nature of Windows Vista, Treacherous Computing and the willingness of these guys to use the inverse of Rubber-hose cryptanalysis - Rubber-hose cryptography.

I looked about for a discussion of this and did not find one easily. Cryptanalysis, yes, but not cryptography. Rubber host cryptanalysis, or a 'rubber hose attack' is to use a weakness of the key holder to get the key from them. The traditional image is to beat the secret out of them with a rubber hose, hence the name. It is coercive. Its counterpart would be a coercive method of enforcing individuals to *not* reveal things. The DMCA is, in my opinion, a variant of this. We have the technology to do certain attacks, but the police will jail you if you are even involved in making them available.

It is getting increasingly more difficult to beat these things.

In the case, for instance, of broadcast content (I am not revealing anything here because it is already in place), each computer is a sealed environment and although it will decrypt for play to the screen, it will not do anything else with that stream. This is the essence of treacherous computing. YOU do not have ultimate admin rights to the computer and so you just get 'access denied' errors or can not even see the files you wish to hack into. The manufacturer (Microsoft and cronies) owns the 'root' keys for the system. The system negotiates an SSL-like session with the broadcaster using a key you can't get to and moves the stream into the treacherous platform. It can't be eavesdropped in transit and only the treacherous computer is able to access the file and even then will only access it with the permissions allowed. So, for instance (I don't know if they have gone this far yet, but it is a no-brainer to implement), the file you have on your machine is 'play by reference only'. You have a reference on the machine which you can not even read. You use the reference to play the content (wherever or however it is stored on the file system) as long as the broadcaster allows. It could, for instance come with a play once and die restriction or even a play a sample and then ask for money restriction. Except that you take a film of the output, there is no way you can access the stream. Remember, this is treacherous computing -- the display device itself uses SSL type encryption to get its signal from the computer. There is no way to intercept and no way to get into these devices to gain access to a decrypted signal.

Now, in the fullness of time, just as high-quality photocopiers are already not allowed to print money, video cameras will be made so that they simply will not film a DRM image from a treacherous device. The whole image will be watermarked so you can't distort it out and the camera will inspect the watermark and honor the instructions of the other treacherous device.

As I say, the above is already in place or I wouldn't describe it.

Up until now, in the DRM arms race, we have had two advantages that have allowed all the security schemes to fall:

1) We have unrestricted access to the same tools.

2) Attack is cheaper than defense.

Item one is being closed down as we speak via treacherous computing. Since we will *no longer* have access to the tools, attack, though cheaper than defense will be prohibitively expensive. The forces of evil are lining this up so that NOBODY will be able to mount any kind of attack at all.

Although there are always going to be exploitable weaknesses in encrypted systems, these weaknesses can not be (effectively) exploited using a pair of tweezers and a crystal radio set.

I chose the crystal radio because there is arguably always going to be some kind of side-channel attack. However, even the cleverest of us, even if they could cobble together a device to actually capture the usable stream, would have no effective way to defeat the entire system. I am a resourceful guy with a lot of time in as a programmer and all-round tinkerer, but I would be left behind before I could even capture the stream. You still have to take that stream and convince something to store it somewhere and then you have to convince the system that the thing you have is playable and then you have to convince the system you have the right to play it. As your weapons of choice go from canons to guns to arrows to wooden clubs and the defensive walls go from nothing to sticks to brick and then reinforced concrete plated with armor your probability of successful attack goes down.

Is it really sensible to think that a watermarked stream with digitally signed segments is going to come across perfectly intact and that you are somehow going to be able to sign it appropriately. I really don't think so. I think that if we were on an equal footing with our systems (we had full admin access to similar hardware), we would have a chance. However, Treacherous computing and rubber-hose defenses such as DRM and the ominously rising police state increasingly makes digital weapons development and deployment impossible.

I am going to make another post to briefly speak about what I believe is a possible solution.

The solution to the problems created by current DRM mechanisms is something akin to 'n' laws of robotics PLUS. I will leave the PLUS for another day.

What we need is to incorporate into the very DNA of our legal system the notion that at some level devices must NEVER be able to work against their masters and that all individual humans may be masters and no device or entity (including evil corporations) that is non-human can trump a human. This is a very difficult balancing act (hence 'n', three or four provably do not cut it). Although I say 'device', I am thinking along the lines of clever devices akin to 'robots'.

The fact is, DRM and the Treacherous Computing environment that makes it practical is DANGEROUS to public health and safety, individual human liberty (including privacy and the pursuit of happiness) and the entire fabric of society.

There needs to be multiple custody of keys (m of n required to do something where m increases with the severity of the consequences of key discovery).

There needs to be a compelling reason for a robot to disobey a human being. Protecting somebody's copyright is so far below a compelling reason, it should be removed from consideration and to the extent that copyright interferes with anything at all it should be abolished.

A human being should not be able to stop the cooling of a nuclear reactor without some checks in place. I made that up, but I honestly feel it is a bad idea to allow a 'fire alarm' type mechanism to trip the meltdown of a nuclear reactor. It should have locks and those locks should require some rather unique authority to defeat.

Strong encryption, available to all is a necessity. I *need* to able to say that such and such a document can not be opened except with chosen trusted custodians supplying keys. I need to, in an emergency (when the state has gone mad, as it has now), apply digitally administered rules to my programs and data.

What we need to do is to outlaw, in the harshest possible way, any attempt for other parties to injure the public good. Copyright was intended to provide an incentive to creators to create things for the ultimate good of the public. That is, its only reason for existence and it is a weak reason at that. Its current level of abuse seems to me to argue strongly for its abolition altogether. However, even if one grants that there is some merit in the old common-law regime of a 14 year copyright (I don't, BTW), the whole purpose of the grant is to allow the property to fall into the public domain. Any digital control mechanism places this in danger and in fact we already have a TON of public domain material removed from the public domain using these mechanisms. A high-resolution image of any classical painting, for instance, should be freely available to everyone. There is no incentive required to get the world's art digitized like this. Allowing any copyrights, watermarks or other obstructive mechanisms to be applied or even attempted on these things robs the public (you and I) of what belongs to them, for there is surely a demonstrable incentive to controlling the best images of the Mona Lisa. If you allow them to (and we have), they will steal this from us and charge us a toll on our own common heritage.

I think the framers of the U.S. Constitution slipped up when they allowed Congress the right to grant copyrights and patents. They anticipated many evils, but they just were not paranoid enough when they drafted that little bit. Had they seen what became of it, there is no way at all that they would have put that in there. On the contrary, it barely made it anyway and if they knew what we know now they would have specifically and forcefully forbade it from even being attempted.

We need to put into our laws mechanisms that make it impossible for the greedy or power-mad to injure the public good. The only way to do that is to make it disadvantageous in the extreme to make the attempt. It should, for instance, not be legally possible to profit from breaching the public trust. The way things are set up now, perpetrators of financial crimes, especially corporate entities have a strong incentive to cheat. In the worst-case scenario, they have to pay back what they steal. Over time, that provides a financial incentive to cheat -- and guess what? They cheat!

The solutions to most of these dreadful things (WIPO, DRM abuses, DMCA) is to remove the ability of the 'forces of evil' to perpetrate them. We need the political will to 'cut them off at that pass' by fixing our constitutions (I am Canadian, most here are probably Americans) to prevent the abuses in the first place. One of the best ways to prevent this stuff is to abolish copyrights and patents and mechanisms used to enforce them. Even though it would cause problems in the short term, I support the notion of Canada simply opting out of all the supra-national treaties that pertain to copyrights and patents. On balance, we would be better off in the long run and we would help make the world a better place.

As a somewhat tangential parting shot, let me just say that I find it irksome in the extreme that every time I watch a video or DVD I am confronted with an FBI warning. What on earth does the FBI have to do with a civil matter like copyright infringement? It is downright creepy how much power copyright brokers hold. They have managed to effectively criminalize the civil matter of copyright infringement and to pervert the world's technology to the point that it now presents genuine political and physical danger for the world's populations. With their patent cronies, they impoverish the Third World unnecessarily and they are coming for us.

It is getting increasingly more difficult to beat these things.

you are underestimating the effect on OEMs of the mass-market cost of production and development.

OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), especially those in the far east, are not the *slightest* bit interested in factoring in DRM into their hardware, when the cost of doing so shaves their margins from e.g. 2% to 0.5%.

if you think that's ridiculous, then you need to be aware that the margins on the mass-production e.g. of desktop PCs is ten to twelve percent FOR EVERYBODY. no, not 10-12% for the OEM, plus 10-12% for the middle-man, plus 10-12% for the sales distributor - i repeat: 10-12% for EVERYBODY.

one broken PC out of a hundred can destroy a sales distributor's profits, which is why they offer those 2-year / 3-year warranties that add 30% to 50% on top - it's the only way they make any money.

why do you think netbooks have linux in them?

do you think that the netbooks are going to have DRM software or DRM hardware built in to them - ever?

now think about the mass-market of digital TV.

do you _really_ think that distributors are going to be happy to be forced to shove in DRM?

lckl:

Let me just say that I feel a little sheepish about disagreeing. Nobody wishes more than I do that the problems with DRM would go away. Unfortunately, they are here and they are here to stay. Nothing can stop DRM implementation. What we need to do is lobby for safeguards that no single entity or cabal can control DRM.

Does crazy, unacceptable, unthinkable stuff happen in our industry? Why, yes it does.

I remember back when we sold PCs for more than $5,000.00 and the operating system cost $50.00. Microsoft grossed about 1% of the cost of a PC and about 5% or less of the total gross margin. Today, you can buy a more or less equivalent PC for about one tenth the cost -- $500 or so. A copy of Windows Vista business plus Office Pro costs more than $600. For MS, the gross margin on that has got to be more than $200. Meantime, according to your notion (with which I don't really disagree), everyone else in the chain makes about $50. That extra $400 on the MS side is rapidly being scooped in its entirety by MS, BTW.

Basically, the cost of a PC has dropped by a factor of ten and the take by Microsoft has risen by a factor of ten. Their share has increased one hundred fold or more. For most people, when they buy a PC, most of the money goes to Microsoft.

Here's my question:

If, back then, you were asked to choose between the following scenarios:

a) Microsoft's share would increase by 100 times.

b) Manufacturer's would absorb a 2 percent additional cost.

What would be more likely? I would pick (b), as I think most people would. In fact, though, both happened. It seems impossible to me that MS could take even more starting today, but they have proven unusually tenacious in their pursuit of a greater share. As for manufacturers taking a hit on commodity items, well, that's the commodity game.

As the marginal cost of the devices relative to the total cost tends toward zero (which it is doing), DRM becomes increasingly necessary to protect the profits in the system. Likely, the manufacturer of a device in Taiwan is building for $400 and selling for $440. Later, they will build two boxes at $300 and sell for $645. Their margin goes down, but their total take still goes up.

Manufacturers of these devices will continue, generally, to do what they are able. It has ever been thus. When you can't buy parts without DRM EvilInside (TM), the decision as to whether or not to include them is moot. The DRM machinery is ALREADY in place. That battle is finished and we lost.

I could write a treatise on the costs of DRM. They are unacceptable. However, the hardware, legislative and most of the software battle has already been lost. We are currently on the road to being at the mercy of a couple of companies holding the 'master keys' to control most of the world's new computers.

Re: do you think that the netbooks are going to have DRM software or DRM hardware built in to them - ever?

Uh. I agree with you that it is unthinkable. However, it has already happened. So ... yes, I *do* think netbooks are going to have DRM in them. In fact, I will go one further than that, I expect within less than two decades that every non-trivial device will have DRM capabilities. In fact, you will be unable to buy one without them because they will not be manufactured. DRM in MS Vista is not optional. When you by Vista, you buy DRM. There is no non-DRM version of Vista. The same is true for more things than you realize and we are at the heel of the curve.

From:

http://blogs.sun.com/oslab/entry/intel_drm_bug_hangs_resume

"Friday Mar 27, 2009 Intel DRM bug hangs resume on B110

Hi All,

If you run the compiz desktop on any of the Intel Atom netbooks, B110 has a bug in the DRM code, that hangs the system on resume.

The Beijing Engineering team just asked me to test a patch fo this today.

I tested on the AA1, AA1-10 and MSI netbook and it works fine.

Dave"

Note that for the above to be in physical existence the plan to do it must have been in place for many years.

Note also that they are *more* than willing to risk the failure of the entire system to put it in there.

AFAIK, all of VIA, ARM, GEODE and ATOM devices in production have DRM support.

As an aside, "Mar 27" was my birthday. Quite the birthday present, n'est pas?

The situation with DRM is very, very dire. This transcends just the notion of DRM per se. DRM is actually necessary and inevitable. The problem is one of political will to stop the forces of evil before it is too late. Companies already can (and do) shut things down remotely. That is already wrong. We need to ensure that our laws stop any abuse of the system. As it currently stands, legislation (not just about DRM), technology, social structures and customs all conspire to make abuse not only possible, but certain. It's kinda creepy when you know what is happening.

The DRM in that post on the Atom refers to the Direct Rendering Manager video accelerator, used by X, not Digital Rights Management. Also note that netbooks that ship with Windows mostly have XP, not Vista, because XP costs $15 due to competition from Linux. As for that DRM being inevitable, I disagree - there is a clear market for open hardware, as evidenced by the WRT54GL, OLPC, OpenMoko.

I do agree with you there should be laws that ownership of a computer = absolute control of that computer, but it's a complex subject worthy of an entire article.

recent research into this topic shows that code and projects already exist

SVC stands for "Scalable Video Coding", and there exists an extension to H264 which does exactly that.

The Trilogy Project is a project that is drawing to completion which combines JXTA, p2psip, SVC, MPEG-21, MPEG-7 and MDC (presumed to be mozilla development centre) into... get this: exactly what i described in this article.

i'm a bit unimpressed by the use and deployment of MPEG-21 (in the trilogy project), simply because it will be a failure to "protect" - not for technological reasons, but for psychological ones. but the rest of the project? i'm absolutely astounded. can't wait to see the source code: they use a number of free software applications and libraries.