Funny you mention this. I remember a senior staffer at a large games publisher talking about this back in the late 00's.
He said, quite candidly, that all of the execs at EA, Activision etc. all knew that technology like SecuROM was incredibly ineffective at reducing piracy.
They all paid millions of dollars in licence fees to use it, though, so that they when an investor asked them what they were doing to protect their IP, they had a "good" answer.
AACS was supposed to last years. HDCP, indefinitely. BD+, the creators thought it would last a decade at least. Cinavia? They thought it would never be removable. Drive Bus Encryption? Almost impossible they thought.
All of these technologies were defeated about ~2 years after their introduction. Some had minor updates breaking things for a little bit, but were broken again shortly later. And some are only partially broken (not enough to make your own player), but in practice broken enough where you can rip the disc which is all most people want.
Similarly afaict there are some sketchy closed source programs to remove cinavia,but given we are a decade in, and there is no open source implementation/public description, i would say it lasted better than i would expect.
Definitely not a total success for DRM, but better than many people predicted.
As for Cinavia, if you shift the pitch of the music, you can cause the player to stop recognizing the track. Or, as some people have experimented with, you can compare the audio to a version of the film from alternative sources (i.e. streaming) to detect and patch over potential watermark signals. Or, well, burn a streaming rip to the disc instead of the disc encode.
Including disks with the latest MKB?
> As for Cinavia, if you shift the pitch of the music, you can cause the player to stop recognizing the track
Sure, but that distorts sound, which people dont like.
Like its definitely not totally blocking piracy by any means, but its certainly not totally defeated the way DVDs DRM was. Its still present enough to be a little annoying, which is much better than early predictions thought would happen.
AFAIK, it appears so. Also AACS LA appears to have given up and stayed on v68 for a few years now. Maybe there is a new one at last... maybe. AACS 2.0 it sounds like started from v72 and counting up.
> Sure, but that distorts sound, which people dont like.
True... but if I just burn a stream rip instead to the disc, problem solved. Plus most discs do not have Cinavia.
> Its still present enough to be a little annoying, which is much better than early predictions thought would happen.
From what I can gather... you can just download MakeMKV and rip Blu-rays on any PC Blu-ray drive, no problem, no internet connection required, latest MKB, BD+ completely defeated. It's only annoying if you are trying to actually copy the disc.
But they heaped on BD+ VMs, Cinavia watermarking, BD-ROM Mark, basically threw everything they had at the problem and hoped that something would stick. Movie studios actually say that Blu-ray supporting more DRM methods was actually a major reason they chose Blu-ray over HD DVD (which didn't support BD+, which supposedly was DRM designed to last a decade).
And again, if that perspective were true, the movie studios wouldn't have done the whole dance again with HDCP 2.2, BD+2, and AACSv2 when 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray came out (only for all of them to get broken again not long after release despite being completely-fresh implementations). You already needed the older versions, right? So, I would argue, it's actually a mixture of both.
It's funny, songs are much easier to share than movies, the files are a hundredth the size, yet the movie industry thinks DRM is very important while the music industry survives just fine without it.
OTOH, video is just pixels and waveforms. If you can get that raw content out somehow, copy protection cannot prevent someone from enjoying that copy (which can then be re-encoded to not have protection). So making video copy protection is much harder because you actually need to prevent copies rather than just make sure the authentication is hard to break.
There are actually a handful of technologies meant to survive the transcription process only to reappear in the new medium. Probably the most effective schemes are used in money, in paper bills. There are little things there (ie the eurion constellation) that are purposely designed to be scanned. They can be copied. But then they are detected by software (Adobe Photoshop) and hardware (high-end printers) which then refuse to edit or reprint them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Other tech is meant to leave a trail leading back to forgers, a bit like a DVD ripping software embedding your MAC/IP information in any Mp3 it generates.
As for fingerprinting, that's a whole 'nother can of worms. I've never seen it be used for DRM specifically but it has been successfully used many times to track down who was leaking trade secrets etc. In fact it might be more widely deployed than most people realize.
The problem with fingerprinting for DRM would be the plausible deniability of an unsuspecting user "getting hacked" and then their fingerprinted copy ending up as the illegally distributed one without their knowledge or control.
>Other tech is meant to leave a trail leading back to forgers, a bit like a DVD ripping software embedding your MAC/IP information in any Mp3 it generates.
It is simple: rip the media multiple times with different identifying information, and then analyze the diffs (or just take the average). You cannot hide the existence of steganographic data if there are multiple copies with different steganographic data. It is not like analog where a loss of precision is justifiable
However... even the best intentions went awry after the first Blu-ray player software for PC was released with the flaw of allowing Print Screen to capture frames. Which caused people to quickly figure out they could run a script using Print Screen to capture all the frames, while having their audio-out headphone jack connected with a male-male 3.5mm cable straight into Line In. No real hacks necessary!
This was, of course, patched by blacklisting the player key and rolling out new keys in updated player software (to render new discs unplayable without an update) but it was a major oversight. ;)
Maybe we can reframe the issue. Why is it the administration's problem? When I went to college, I went there to learn engineering. I didn't really care about the degree. I was paying to have the prof teach me, not check me for cheating.
Me, I'd make no effort to detect cheaters. If they want to pay $$$$$ to attend university, not bother doing any work, and cheat, I'll take their money.
Make it like guitar lessons. People pay to learn how to play. There's just no percentage in cheating, because you can't play.
The cheaters will see their jobs outsourced, and my salary will be higher.
P.S. In college, lots of students were always doing engineering projects on their own and with their own money. For example, a couple of EEs designed and built a pirate radio station. I wanted to learn how to do that stuff. Cheating is just no fun. And if you don't learn anything, the other students will notice that, and will have nothing but contempt for you.
For example, a doctor doesn’t need to know history very well to be a good doctor. Yet it’s probably part of the undergrad curriculum. So cheating on the test has no consequences if they don’t get caught.
Additionally a lot of jobs are really taught via OJT, and whatever was learned from a degree is mostly unused.
> whatever was learned from a degree is mostly unused.
What a good engineering curriculum does is teach you how to think, which transcends specific skills. It reshapes your brain.
Suppressing cheating is work on behalf of the good faith students. Miserable work it is.
For example, in universities that aggressively go after cheaters, an adversarial relationship develops between the students and the faculty. The students collaborate on cheating, and get social credibility for cheating. Students will brag about successfully cheating to their peers.
On the other hand, at Caltech, we had an Honor System. Exams were not proctored, and students could take the exams whenever and wherever they wanted. The students were on their honor not to cheat. And an interesting thing happened. The students developed a collaborative relationship with the professors. Cheaters were despised and ostracized. If you were cheating, you'd better keep it to yourself - the other students would turn you in, and at that point you might as well leave the university.
"The student-faculty ratio at California Institute of Technology is 3:1, and the school has 66.7% of its classes with fewer than 20 students."
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/california-institute-of...
I paticuarly like the framing of responsibility.
In modern societies we have pretty fine grained tools for chopping up risk, selling it, trading it, via financial instruments or insurance. In fact when you use these tools sometimes the goal is to vanish the risk all together (which as a result sometimes creates counter-party risk).
Likewise we have a whole cottage industry of chopping up and trading responsibility with very similar mappings to risk. In fact in many ways responsibility is treated more or less like risk itself.
How many problems today though could you follow the thread back to people creating the responsibility equivalent of CDOs.
That is total projection. The consequences of such things cannot even be estimated in such a short span of time. In any case, there is no shortage of studies showing recent massive shifts in quality of education in certain major western societies. Even if you were making the fallacious presumption that what has been will be, you should then presume change over stability.
Can you share 1 study and name 1 major western society you’re referring to?
>For 13-year-olds, the average score was lower in 2020 than in 2012 (260 vs. 263), marking the first time reading scores for this age group declined between assessments.
>Meanwhile, the average mathematics score for 13-year-olds was lower in 2020 than in 2012 (280 vs. 285), marking the first time mathematics scores for this age group declined between assessments.
Not huge, but noticeable.
Any large organization, private or public, is full of checkboxes and CYA. Test proctor software is just another example.
It’s a false equivalency.
If anything, I suspect that on net a noisily invasive anti-cheating system would actually increase cheating, as more students would be tempted to see if they could game the cheating system than would be dissuaded from cheating from hearing about a cheat-proof system.
I can tell you with certainty that some cheaters are skittish. I am certain of that because I once wrote a bunch of trig identities on the side of my leg. I was very nervous about it, and only did it because I knew from previous tests in that course that I could get away with it. If the teacher had been walking around during that test, my pant leg would have stayed down.
The students being treated like crap isn't just a rounding error here.
Whether the integrity of the exams is actually guaranteed is immaterial, because the company that made the nanny software went on the record and took responsibility, and/or by splitting the responsibility, the school admin and the nanny software vendor can point fingers at each other and the responsibility essentially disappears like it usually does.
You can see this with most other security theater type things. As long the "general public" is unaware that they have been lied to, they will accept this kind of positioning as gospel, and not look into it further. For the most part, as expected, the world turns around just fine without real security because systems tend to be robust to a certain level of bad actors doing selfish and small scale bad things like exam cheating, and as long as nobody's feelings are hurt, it's all fine.