News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms. Parent comment

Re:Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algor... by segfaultbuserr on Friday May 17, 2019 @05:51AM (#19937934)
A standard Red Book audio CD cannot install malware to your system. It was the data CD with music that Sony shipped made it possible.

This is why, I, sometimes a CD buyer, believe all listeners of Audio CD should try maintaining the status quo of CD, as defined by the Red Book, and resist/boycott any attempt by the industry to "make a better CD" (e.g. SACD, Audio DVD, Audio Bluray), or "add more functionalities" to the existing CD standards.

Technologically, I would be happy to see a Doubly 5.1 Bluray Audio CD playing at living room from my surrounding speakers (better channel separation allows improvements of sound reproduction even on speakers of moderate quality), or CDs with real filesystem and error correction (an Audio CD by its original design, only streams music in real time, as if it's a digital LP track. There is no way to even know if the data you've just read from the disc is correct or not [0]), or a FLAC-encoded stereo CD (it would allow 30% more songs to be recorded on a single CD).

However, I'd better to live without them, as history has shown: all the newer standards would definitely be more "consumer-unfriendly" at best (go to any AV forum, and see the compatibility issues caused by HDCP [1] for example...), and malware at worst. The Audio CD, even with its historical limitations, is good enough, it plays lossless music with 44100 kHz sampling rate, and it did/does this job well.

Also, you may have noticed the recent renaissance of LP discs, and some LP lovers' arguments of how analog has better sound quality. While I don't believe those arguments are persuasive, I'm highly supportive of the LP industry for the same reason - you cannot install malware on a LP disc.

[0] Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649374

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1689823

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algor... by pbhjpbhj on Friday May 17, 2019 @06:14AM (#19938056)
>A standard Red Book audio CD cannot install malware to your system. //

I don't think I'd ever be so confident as to say that given some of the incredible hacks I've seen ;o)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algor... by segfaultbuserr on Friday May 17, 2019 @06:21AM (#19938089)
Well, theoretically, "an Audio CD that exploits a buffer overflow of your music player on your computer and installs malware" is always a possibility, and a good intellectual challenge.

But doing it at an industrial scale and including an 0day exploit in all albums is a separate thing, I don't believe it would ever happen. On the other hand, creating an extension of the standard to "make a better CD" is a real threat, for example, a plausible example would be:

"a CD-based service that connects to a server to obtain metadata and lyrics of your music, like a proprietary version of MusicBrainz, but with ads and tracking added."

[ Parent | on HN ]