Ah, greetings my friend.
We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the
rest of our lives.
All of the prophets of the world have predicted through trend precedent, pattern of habit,
human behavior, that the 20th century would be our last.
No prophet predicted beyond the date of 1999.
Does this mean we will suddenly run out of time?
Will there be a tomorrow after December 31st, 1999?
Tune in for a shortcut through the 20th century.
This is WBAI-FM's Last Days Broadcast, the last days before that glorious day.
Part one.
Monday through Friday from 9 till 11 p.m., right here on WBAI-FM.
This is really it.
A shortcut through the 20th century.
So let us remember the past, honor the present, and be amused at the future.
Over listener-supported WBAI-FM, non-commercial radio in New York.
The future is in your hands.
Come to a Night Drum Fundraiser on Thursday, December 30th, 1999 at The Lab at 1428 Fulton
Street between Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues in the People's Republic of Brooklyn from
5.30 p.m. until you say when.
Featuring live music by the Afro-Cuban jazz band Afrodesia.
Plus special music mixed by WBAI's own Nancy Rodriguez, Chet Jackson, Dred Scott Keyes,
Happy Selassie, Tony Short, and Chico Alvarez.
For tickets call 212-340-1196.
That's 212-340-1196.
This is a fundraiser for Night Drum and Adam to help feed the homeless.
Brought to you by WBAI.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI in New York.
We're actually early tonight.
We're 30 seconds early.
So we're going to start the show.
Off the Hook is on the air.
Okay, well we don't have time for that because it's a very busy show tonight.
We have all kinds of things to pack into the special end of year celebration that we're
doing here.
End of century, end of life, end of world, whatever it is.
It's the end of everything.
The end of the world as we know it.
This is the last show before all four digits change in the year.
And you know what that's going to cause?
It's going to cause mayhem, havoc, catastrophe, confusion, and a darn good time for one and
all.
And you know we have so much to talk about tonight that we don't even have time to play
this all the way through like we usually do.
Isn't that a shame, Isaac?
It's saddening.
It's the last time in 1999.
I don't want to say in this century because that's not true, but it's the last time this
year that we'll be able to play this.
Have we ever disclosed what that song is, by the way?
We have, but sometimes people don't pay attention or they don't listen to the show where we
disclose it.
But I can disclose it, that it is the band called Klaatu, K-L-A-A-T-U.
Good luck finding their records.
It came out back in 1976, I believe.
And this is a song entitled Little Neutrino, which has absolutely nothing to do with Y2K.
But it sounds good.
It sounds really cool.
And in fact, when this band came out in the late 70s, people thought they were The Beatles.
I know this song sounds nothing like The Beatles, but other songs on the album do.
And they didn't have any names on the CD, so people thought, you know, hey, it's got
to be The Beatles.
Who else could it be?
Of course, it was a band from Canada.
Oh, well, you know.
Canada's got a lot of good music, but we'll get into that some other time.
This is it.
We have a special show that's non-Y2K related, which we'll be getting to in just about 10
minutes, because, well, I don't know.
If you've been around, if you've been paying attention over the past 24 hours, it's really
hit the fan in ways that you never thought possible.
Just when you think that you know what the crisis is, you know that we're focusing on
disaster on New Year's Eve, and that's really what everybody's focused on.
We're convinced there's going to be some kind of a disaster.
I don't know.
Who was it from on high that said, yeah, terrorists are going to strike on New Year's Eve?
You know, someone said that somewhere, and we believed it.
So naturally, we're fighting these terrorists that nobody can see.
They're, like, in another dimension someplace.
So Times Square is being riveted down to the ground.
They're sealing up all, no, they're taking away the garbage cans.
They're sealing the manhole covers, which I think is going to be a phenomenally bad
idea if one of them has to, like, you know, vent some steam or something.
And they're doing all kinds of other things, too.
Dogs are sniffing every single car in every garage for a 75-block area.
That's a lot of overtime for dogs, which can really get expensive.
So it's Seattle today canceled their New Year celebration because they're just so nervous,
and they remember the WTO thing, so they just don't want any part of it, so they canceled it.
New York's going to go on, and, of course, that's where I'll be.
And Isaac, I believe you'll be there, too, right?
No, no, no.
Well, I've originally planned on, I had this vacation planned out in November.
Right, you shouldn't still be here.
Yeah, well, I was...
There's going to be a mad rush for the airports.
Well, I was going to be heading down to Penn Station and departing on my Amtrak train,
in fact, tomorrow morning.
I can give you a ride there.
Well, that won't be necessary.
It won't be necessary, will it?
Because my mother notified me of something I happened to overlook.
Uh-huh.
Your tickets are for 1900.
No, no, no.
Actually, Amtrak was very good about that.
Eight months ago, managed to figure out my reservation properly.
Uh-huh.
However, I recognized, or rather it was brought to my attention,
that upon arriving in New Mexico, when I would attempt to rent a car,
I would be unable to do so, because in my wonderful fit of paranoia,
I do not possess a credit card.
Ah-ha.
Well, can't you just sort of run around...
Leave a deposit?
...flailing in the desert someplace?
Well, I...
Do you really need a car?
I mean, there's not going to be any gas.
The gas riots are going to start right after New Year's.
I'm hoping that wouldn't have been necessary,
but I actually wanted to go to New Mexico and, like, tour around,
you know, visit Socorro and Roswell and some of the nice towns.
Well, yeah, I got news for you.
Back in the old days, there weren't cars,
and people went to New Mexico where they got off the Amtrak train
and they just walked around.
These towns aren't exactly very close to Albuquerque.
So, basically, you're going to risk your life staying here in New York
because of convenience.
Oh, I'm not going to be in New York.
Uh-huh.
But I'm not going to be in the great American Southwest
like I'd originally planned.
Well, if you're a mile below ground,
you are technically still in New York.
True, true.
Oh, wait, people don't know about that, do they?
No.
I'm sorry.
They do now, though.
Thanks a lot, you know?
Well, they don't know where you found the bomb shelters.
These remnants of the 50s are always around.
Uh-huh.
Well, okay, so it sounds like you're going to have a dandy time.
Oh, yeah.
I'm going to be right there in Times Square just watching.
Just watching what's going on.
Well, enjoy.
It'll be fun.
It'll be a hilarious experience, I'm sure, for one and all.
But did you see the post on one of the lists that were on?
Someone said that New York City Police Department bought 200,000 body bags.
Yeah.
You don't find that just a tad odd?
I think it's very odd.
Okay, well, you don't have any expression on your face
as if it's, like, you know, something totally normal to buy 200,000 body bags.
In a response for a potentially dangerous situation
as may occur in the year 2000.
So you think that they actually went out and bought 200,000 body bags?
It would be a reasonable purchase.
Okay, but they're expecting 2 million people.
Yeah.
That's about a tenth of the actual...
That only accounts for a tenth of the people that could be killed.
So, I mean, first of all, they would need to get 800,000 more.
No, more than that.
18,000.
I don't even know how to...
If it was a nuclear weapon, you don't have to worry about the core, you know,
100,000 or something because they're instantly vaporized.
Uh-huh.
And so would the body bags.
Right.
Yeah, wherever they're keeping them.
Assuming the body bags are far enough away that they would be unaffected
and yet close enough to make them easily accessible.
That's right. That's right.
And plus, there are all kinds of jobs that could be opened as a result of this.
That's true.
People have to carry the body bags over to where the bodies are.
They have to load the bodies.
They have to take the bodies someplace.
The unemployment problem will be solved.
So, yeah, let's leave it to NYPD.
We're doing pretty good already.
Definitely.
But I would like some independent verification of this
because people like to spread rumors like this
and I don't know if it's really...
I would say it wouldn't surprise me.
Nothing would surprise me.
200,000 body bags.
And what are they going to do with them if nothing happens, huh?
That's enough body bags to last.
You don't have to load any more body bags for a few decades.
Or maybe not a few decades, maybe a decade or so.
Okay.
Any other Y2K things happening this week?
This is really the last week Y2K things can happen.
Yeah.
Well, you're going to see Y2K things happening most of next year
with February 29th and all that rollover.
So, you mean it's not over yet?
It's not over.
We still have more dates to worry about?
This is going to be a very long and prolonged process.
Yeah, but the thing is, Isaac, nothing's happening.
That's the thing.
It's not happening.
And I've been saying this now for a year,
that everyone's panicking, saying,
oh, 9-9-99, that's going to be the first thing,
and January 1st, 1999, because that's a year from the date.
And there were some minor failures there.
And now January 1st, 2000.
Nothing's happening.
There were some failures.
There was nothing to think of.
Well, you will feel this one.
Okay, tell me what's going to happen.
Please, tell me.
What's going to happen?
I don't know what's going to happen.
If I could tell you what's going to happen, I'd...
Hazard a guess.
Hazard a guess?
Okay.
As close to being...
As realistic as...
As realistically as possible,
you're probably going to see some minor failures
in some convenience things.
Like convenience stores?
Perhaps.
Basically, you walk into a store,
and they'll be telling you,
well, the cash register's down,
we don't know what happened.
And we don't know how to count,
so we can't take your money.
Well, very likely,
you just have to go back to paper.
Which, unfortunately,
some of their clerks may or may not know how to do,
but it will take a little more time,
and you'll notice some very definite defects from it.
This is just for January 1st,
and the immediate days after.
Now, this assumes that power is still on,
and all of the particularly bad things don't happen.
I think everyone's going to get a false sense of security
once everything is over.
They're going to say, oh, everything's cool now,
and then the computers are going to crash
for a different reason,
because that's what you have to realize,
is that technology is always vulnerable to something.
And knowing when the data's going to change
is probably the easiest thing in the world to avoid.
But how are you going to know
when some vital component fails,
or a piece of software just suddenly runs into a bug?
Well, that always happens.
Always happens, but on a massive scale.
The thing with Y2K is that it would...
The whole point with Y2K is that it is a single date
where there is a potential for a very broad range of failures
to occur simultaneously,
or within enough of a time frame
to make them nearly catastrophic
as different minor effects add up.
But we'll see what happens.
It could very well be a very slow progression,
where systems are failing,
and the contingencies are in place,
but as the contingencies begin to lose their effectiveness,
all of a sudden you see some major failures in April,
or something like that.
Who knows?
Who knows?
I think that's what it boils down to, is who knows.
But I still got my water bottled,
and my food stuff's at the ready.
Yeah, well, we'll just see if who knows turns into who cares.
And this, of course, ignores all the terrorist possibilities.
Right.
We have some little bit of entertainment here
that someone sent us.
First of all, speaking of entertainment,
this has nothing to do with Y2K,
except that it takes place right in the middle of it.
I was notified that there's a cartoon up in Canada,
speaking of Canada, called Kevin Spencer.
I don't know if you've ever heard of that.
Kevin Spencer.
Well, it's supposed to be a very funny cartoon.
It's a Canadian cartoon.
It appears on their comedy network up there.
So I don't think we get it here, but...
Well, you have DSS.
Don't you get silly things like that?
Yeah, but I don't get that.
It appears on CTV.
I don't get CTV.
But in any event, if I get that other dish,
which I'm trying to get, then I can get CTV,
but that's another discussion right there.
There's an episode where one of the characters
in the cartoon attends a 2600 meeting
and learns how to rig an old Motorola cell phone
to scan cells.
Woo-hoo!
Yeah.
You know, not knowing anything about this,
right away I feel better about it
than I do about the whole MTV and 2020 thing.
I just have a feeling these guys are going to get it.
It's going to be funny.
Well, even if they don't get it,
it's still going to be funny.
Well, I've just never had a problem with people
in other countries, particularly Canada,
doing things like this.
They tend to sort of figure out what's going on.
Anyway, if you're in Canada, it airs Monday,
not Monday, Saturday, January 1st at midnight.
Saturday night, January 1st at midnight.
Yeah.
So it's right after the ball drops here.
You have this show about a cartoon character.
Yeah, 12.05 a.m. on Saturday night
or is it Saturday morning?
I guess it would be Saturday morning.
I'm not even sure.
January 1st, midnight, or 12.05 on CTV.
That's kind of neat.
If somebody sees that, let us know how it is.
Here's an idea.
Why don't somebody tape it?
Actually, I've made arrangements with somebody
to send me a tape, so we'll see if that works out.
Well, send that on to me because I'd like to see it.
Speaking of entertainment, someone sent us a song,
and we're going to play this before we go
into our next segment where things have hit the fan.
This is the official song of the Millennium, Y2K,
and it comes with an official dance of the Millennium,
which we can't show you.
It's written by someone named Darryl Shurney,
and they sent us a copy of the CD here.
So we're going to play the CD,
and then we'll be back with the rest of Off The Hook.
Stay tuned.
♪♪
♪ Now the guys at the computers are really smart ♪
♪ They could make an IBM out of old spare parts ♪
♪ They could forecast the weather, do incredible math ♪
♪ They could track the cosmos on a million-year path ♪
♪ Now do you think computer geeks were so dumb ♪
♪ That they could not foresee the Millennium? ♪
♪ Y2K, Y2K ♪
♪ Where will you be on that big old day? ♪
♪ Y2K ♪
♪ Now the moment that the year 2000 strikes ♪
♪ Computers gonna do anything they like ♪
♪ They can back up the sewer, shut the power down ♪
♪ Send a nuclear warhead to your hometown ♪
♪ And you won't get your food at the Safeway no more ♪
♪ Cause the hoarders and the looters have emptied the stores ♪
♪ Y2K, Y2K ♪
♪ Where will you be on that big old day? ♪
♪ Y2K ♪
♪ Now will you be on the farm just a-killin' the sod? ♪
♪ Or will you join a street gang where you're killin' your rod? ♪
♪ Will you hide in your condo with your kids and wife? ♪
♪ Or be stuck in a prison for the rest of your life? ♪
♪ All this year is 1999 ♪
♪ It's the last year that things are gonna be fine! ♪
♪ Y2K, Y2K ♪
♪ Where will you be on that big old day? ♪
♪ Y2K ♪
♪ Now will you be in New York City eatin' pigeons and rats? ♪
♪ Or holed up in a cave eatin' bugs and bats? ♪
♪ Will you be meditating at the pyramids? ♪
♪ Or in your Idaho bunker just flippin' your lady parts? ♪
♪ I wanna know what you're gonna do ♪
♪ Cause I might just wanna follow you! ♪
♪ Y2K, Y2K ♪
♪ Where will you be on that big old day? ♪
♪ Y2K! ♪
♪♪
♪ Now the wizards who created this computer crash ♪
♪ Are sellin' the solutions for piles of cash ♪
♪ Did you think the corporations were givin' an inch? ♪
♪ What do you think the army will do in a pinch? Oh! ♪
♪ It might be a little computer fall ♪
♪ Is there an excuse for instituting martial law? ♪
♪ Y2K, Y2K ♪
♪ Where will you be on that big old day? ♪
♪ Y2K! ♪
♪ Now will you be in Jerusalem waitin' for Christ? ♪
♪ But his website is down, so forget it, no dice! ♪
♪ Will you be on 42nd Street at Old Times Square? ♪
♪ Where the ball that falls is stuck in the air? ♪
♪ Will you be on the space shuttle afraid to land? ♪
♪ Cause even all of its computers are jammed! ♪
♪ Y2K, Y2K ♪
♪ Where will you be on that big old day? ♪
♪ Y2K! ♪
♪ Y2K, Y2K ♪
♪ Where will you be on that big old day? ♪
♪ Y2K! ♪
Okay, as the beepers go off...
That's kind of fun.
Yeah, that's Y2K by Daryl Sherney,
and you can find out more about him
by going to www.DarylSherney.com
and that's the official song of the millennium.
Pretty right on the money there.
That's pretty fun, I like that.
Alright, well we're finished with the Y2K feature
for this year anyway.
Now it's on to the next crisis,
which really hit us.
It's kind of funny how this happened.
I was sitting around yesterday minding my own business,
just doing the things that I do,
and all of a sudden I got a message from somebody
wanting to know my reaction to the lawsuit.
And I'm like, what lawsuit?
What's going on here?
It turns out that a court motion
has been filed against 2600
in a courtroom in California.
That's not entirely true,
and we'll get to the technicalities in a few minutes.
But yeah, there was this motion filed
and it was sent to us by email.
I missed it.
I totally missed the email because it went to Webmaster
and I didn't read the mail in time.
So yes, apparently,
now you recall we might have talked about this
a couple of months ago,
and it's been on the webpage for that amount of time too,
that encryption for DVD technology was cracked.
And people have been spreading the news of this around.
The encryption was not very difficult to crack,
from what I understand.
But the industry's response has been,
instead of trying to fix it
or figure out what went wrong
or what they did wrong
or how they could maybe repair the damage,
their reaction in typical big business way
is to simply intimidate people
and get them to remove any mention of this
from their websites,
and maybe it'll go away.
So what they did was they sent out a piece of email,
and this is the really funny thing,
they sent out a piece of email to everybody
who was listed as someone
who had the information on their website.
And of course, 2600 is one of those entities.
But the funny thing is,
when they sent out the email,
they sent a carbon copy of the mail to everybody.
Now, those of you familiar with sending email,
there's two ways to send copies to lots of people.
One is the CC command, or CC flag,
and the other is BCC,
which means blind carbon copy,
which means you don't see the other people.
But they didn't do that.
Apparently, they didn't know about that feature.
They sent CC, so we got to see the names of everybody.
And I'd imagine you all talked to each other.
We all started talking to each other,
because, hey, what better way to talk about
what's happened to all of us
than to simply send mail back and forth.
And thanks to these nice legal people,
they gave us the information that we needed
to contact everybody who was served,
sort of served, with these papers.
And that's how we got our guest tonight, in fact,
for the radio show.
We have two guests with us right now.
We have Tom joining us from Germany.
Tom, are you there?
Yes, I'm here.
And we have Matthew joining us from the United States.
Perhaps we could each go over your background.
Tom, we'll start with you,
your background in the whole DVD escapade,
starting from whenever it began.
Well, it actually began a few months ago
when the DVD disencryption first went on the Web,
and there were a couple of sites
that started to immediately copy this information
and spread it around.
And one of the sites was Rhythm CX,
and I found that site
and started to put up a copy of it myself.
And it didn't take very long,
about a week after I started copying Rhythm CX,
that that site received some kind of legal letter.
I have never read it,
or I don't know what exactly went on there,
but the site went down.
And so I took it up to myself
to keep my list of mirrors updated,
to put new information on the site,
new versions of the software.
And due to some media attention,
my site quickly became one of the primary sites
mirroring this information,
providing links to other sites
that contained the software and information
and stuff like that.
Now, you're over there in Germany,
and you're being served with a notice
from a California court.
How does that make you feel?
A bit weird, actually.
One is that I don't think that anything
a California county court does decide
will apply to me,
but I'm not sure on that.
I'm not a lawyer,
so I'm a bit confused.
And the other thing is that
I have received about 36 hours prior notice of this,
so I have zero chance of coming to California
or finding a lawyer to represent me
or anything like that.
So I feel like there's absolutely nothing
I can do about this.
But the hearing is scheduled for tomorrow,
Wednesday, I believe, right?
Yeah.
In California.
All right, Matthew,
you were involved in the whole Linux aspect of this.
You want to tell us something about that?
Sure.
I started what we call the LIVID project,
which is what we abbreviated for Linux Video and DVD.
And one of the aspects of the project
we wanted to develop
was DVD playback support for Linux.
For those of you who don't know,
you can play DVD movies on your PC,
which typically runs Windows,
but there's no software available
to play DVDs for those running Linux,
and there's approximately 10 to 15 million
Linux users nationwide or worldwide.
I'm not sure what the numbers are.
And one of the things we really wanted to do
was to be able to play and watch the DVDs
under the operating system we developed for them.
The code in question,
which people are really getting hit on about this,
is called the DECSS code.
And this code was actually written
to exploit the DVD encryption scheme under Windows.
And they used part of the code
that was developed under Linux through our project
in the DECSS, which completed...
There's two aspects to the CSS decryption,
and one of them was developed through the Linux project,
and then the DECSS picked it up
and were able to finish it off.
And from there, we started the project.
I run and maintain the website,
the mailing list, and the code repository.
So they felt that they'd send a notice out to me
as kind of a way of recognizing the project.
I see.
So basically this whole thing started
because you couldn't play DVDs under Linux.
Correct.
So it wasn't a massive scheme
to defraud the DVD industry
and bring it down to its knees.
No.
Contrary to what some of the lawyers
are putting in their press briefs,
we were not trying to...
We weren't out to just break the scheme
for kicks and giggles.
We were trying to watch the movies under Linux.
And in fact, they claim that with the code
you can do disk copying,
but I have yet to see any application under Linux
that can write DVDs from the movie DVDs.
So disk copying is not possible right now
and won't be for, I can imagine, quite a while.
Interesting.
Now, how could the DVD industry
have done things differently from the beginning
so that this wouldn't have been such a problem for them?
Well, they were kind of bound up front.
The encryption scheme is flawed
because of the U.S. government export restrictions at the time,
which restricted them to using 40-bit keys.
And what they're actually doing is they're using two 40-bit keys,
one on the drive side and then one on the decoder,
which is the part that you pull the data off using the drive
and then you de-scramble the data to get the picture
with either a decoder card or a software decoder.
And in order for them to increase their chances
of this not being broken,
they could have used a higher bit,
what do they call it?
I'm trying to think of the right term here.
Using more bits of encryption.
The other thing that's kind of interesting about this is
although they have a 40-bit key set,
they're only using approximately 10 to 12% of the key range.
Anytime you've got a set of bits set for encryption,
you've got this range of available different values
you could use.
They're not even using the full key set.
And to determine all possible keys within the key range
they're using would only take about three minutes
to decode on any modern PC.
So it's really a weak encryption scheme.
I've talked to several people in the DVD forum,
and they've said that the CSS really ended up being
not to stop copying protection,
but to prevent what they call otherwise fair use of the movie.
For example, if you were to give a presentation
and you wanted to cite a scene in Star Wars,
you know, like a VHS tape,
you could just fast forward it to the point
and hit play during your presentation.
Right.
Well, with the DVD encryption
and the way the software players are set up,
this helps prevent people from using little movie clips
or taking a screenshot,
using it like a background on the computer,
which have all been determined as legal uses
if you own the movie.
So that's just a bit of information about that.
Tom, what has been your immediate reaction to getting this?
I know you've set up a mailing list for everybody.
Yeah, that's right.
The first thing I did after receiving this letter
was to send a reply, of course,
because they sent the actual content of the letter
in Microsoft Word format,
which I can read because I'm a Linux or Linux,
depending on how you pronounce it, user as well.
But the second thing I did was setting up a mailing list
for everyone involved
so that we could not only get in touch,
but also keep in touch
and talk about how we can defend ourselves
against this what I've called harassment
and threatening on various occasions.
What's been the general feeling so far
from the people you've talked to,
especially the other co-defendants?
Very, very positive.
I've received a lot of support from various people,
including a lot of lawyers, legal expert attorneys,
and people like that.
And, well, one thing, for example, I can say
is that there will be someone tomorrow at the court
to represent at least some of us.
That's good.
Someone who is an attorney working in the area,
so we have legal representation on the case,
which is a very good thing, I think,
because various legal experts that I've talked to via email
have all said that this whole case
has little or no merit whatsoever
and should probably be thrown out of the court
without even hearing all of it.
It seems pretty clear that it's an intimidation tactic.
It's meant to make people think twice
before they reverse-engineer any kind of technology
and send kind of a chilling effect
to the whole community.
I don't think they are counting on this kind of a reaction
from the various people involved.
For instance, we put something up on our website
inviting people to join us,
to put their own mirrors up on their websites as well.
And we were thinking, you know, in the course of today,
we put this up earlier today,
we were thinking in the course of the day
maybe we'd make up for the people that dropped off
because initially when these papers were emailed
or served or however you want to say it,
some people kind of got spooked by that
and that's the intent, to get people spooked,
to think, hey, I could actually go to jail
or pay a huge amount of money for this.
It's not worth it.
So we lost a handful of sites.
We wanted to replace those sites.
We figured if we got 10, you know, throughout the day,
that would make up for it.
As of a few hours ago, before I left for the show,
we were over 30 and they just keep coming in.
And I think the same thing is being repeated
on other sites that also mirror the files.
People are lining up to support us
and to offer all kinds of defenses
as to why it's important to allow this kind of thing
and not to threaten people who figure things out.
Yeah, definitely.
I've had about six of the mirrors on my list
drop out only a few hours after receiving the letters.
And when I talked to you earlier,
I said that five new have appeared
that have changed in the past 45 minutes or what it's been
to a total of seven new.
So my list is plus one due to this legal harassment.
Uh-huh.
So I think that's the kind of reaction that we can expect
is for people to not want to stand for this kind of thing.
It's really frightening.
But let's talk to the people
that might not really appreciate the nuances of DVD technology.
Why should the average person care about this?
There are a lot of answers to this,
basically depending on what you're interested in.
For example, if you're interested in DVD technology,
then I think that you should be interested
in the people who implement the technology
and develop the technology and the protocols
to actually know what they're doing.
And the weakness of the CSS encryption
shows that at least in parts of the field they are not.
I wonder how many other weaknesses there are in the DVD,
in the whole DVD technology, for example.
The same thing is if you're interested in culture
or technology and science,
then you know that peer review
or other kinds of review by people who know the field
is very, very important to our science and to our technology
and especially in complex fields like cryptography.
And any try to keep such a complex issue completely hidden
from those who know what they're doing
is doomed to fail as CSS has proven once again.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I'd like to make a point here on that topic.
The CSS algorithm does not prevent copy protection or copying.
You can still do what they call a bitwise copy of the disk.
That's what I was talking about
where they're trying to prevent the otherwise fair use.
And so the whole argument that by distributing the source code
you're violating the copyright is kind of a mute point
because the CSS doesn't prevent copying anyway.
The other thing that's interesting about DVD technology
that most people don't realize
is they build in region locking into these disks.
For example, if you live in the United States,
you buy a player or buy movies and then move to, say, Germany,
they have a different region for their movies
and a different region lock for their players.
So you would not be able to play, say, a movie bought in Wisconsin,
in Germany or in England or any of the other areas
where they cross region lines.
What's the rationale behind that?
What they're trying to do there is, again,
it's part of the copy protection.
If someone, for example, in Germany were to do some reverse engineering
and start making copies,
that if those disks were ever sent to the United States,
that they wouldn't be able to play in the United States players.
You've heard on the news about all the copy violations going on
in countries such as China or Indonesia
where people are mass copying audio CDs.
And so this would be a way for them to try to prevent this,
whereas if they were to get a disk,
if they were to buy a movie in Indonesia and make a copy,
it could not be sold to people in the United States.
Actually, on that very point,
I do have a DVD drive, of course,
and I do watch DVD movies,
and I'm a big fan of director Kahrt's original version,
stuff like that.
So if I want to view original versions and German versions,
I have a big problem here
because I can only set my player to one region,
either the United States or Germany,
and I'm allowed to switch between them only a limited time,
five times, I think.
And after that, it would be impossible for me to switch again.
I'm just trying to imagine the same kind of restriction
taking place for audio CDs. It would be absurd.
Yeah, it really is something to really question
what they were thinking.
On a smaller scale, you could kind of make the analogy,
if you're in Illinois, bought a player and then moved to Indiana
and tried to buy a movie, you couldn't play it there.
Or you'd only be able to buy movies and players in Illinois alone.
It seems almost like the DivX mentality,
where you can only play a movie a certain amount of times
and then it would expire.
Yeah, I agree.
And there has not yet been a media
that has proven itself to be indestructible to copying.
And that really wasn't the motivation behind, I know, our project
and most of the people behind the source code
that has gotten them in such a frail.
It was just to understand the technology
and to play movies in operating systems
that the industry did not see a need for.
There are a lot of users that are very interested
in getting this technology and being able to play these movies
in other environments.
Now, when you first started with the project,
the DVD industry, I guess, pretty much thought they were impenetrable.
Was that the feeling you got from them?
I didn't ever...
See, that's the funny thing. This is the first I've ever heard.
I never got a cease and desist letter like several of the other sites did.
I actually got a lot of support from people in the DVD industry.
I got documentations and specifications for several...
Excuse me, DVD decoder cards.
They minused out some of the parts for the CSS encryption,
but we'll still be able to use the documentation
to get the blunt work done for decoding and hardware.
And so, from the manufacturer's point of view,
the people that make the cards and the video cards
and the decoder cards for the computers
we're very happy to see that people are going to write the drivers
and the support so they can have their products work under Linux,
which is, as a lot of people are figuring, a growing operating system.
So it's...
The resistance we're seeing is really from the top,
from the very top of the DVD.
With the people involved with DVD,
it's really not all the way through the industry.
Well, it seems to me that, and I've heard this from a number of people,
that they don't really expect that they can simply call back
all the files that are out there
that have been spread around the whole Internet.
But what they do want to do is make it a precedent
so that people won't be able to do things like this in the future,
so that even trying to do something like this
will result in bankruptcy or just legal harassment of all sorts.
And I think that's basically what they're attempting to do here,
is intimidate us.
I agree.
The intimidation attack.
And again, if you were to see some of the e-mail addresses
that they were sending to the people that were having the sites...
Yeah, there are some we can't say on the air, but...
It's funny, because you know a lot of those are aliases.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of those addresses went to the same person.
So three people were getting the mail multiple times
because they have different aliases.
And we're at the point now with technology and the Internet
where trying to stop something like this...
It's like what you guys have been talking about,
where one site goes down and three more pop up.
That's right.
And that's the nature of the Net.
It's not an evil thing.
It's basically keeping information out there.
And you can't legislate information.
You can't restrict it so that people aren't allowed to talk about certain things.
We've seen the authorities try this countless times
to make things illegal that just don't make any sense,
such as being able to tune your radio dial to 800 megahertz
and listen to something that's in the clear.
Rather than fix it, rather than encrypt it,
they make it illegal and send people to prison for just tuning a radio dial.
If we accept things like this, they become the norm.
And people accept it into the future, and that's the way laws are written.
And if we stand up...
It might be painful if we stand up against this kind of thing,
but I think it's worth the battle.
I sure hope so.
I'd like to read something that someone sent us
right before we went on the air.
This basically is...
A lot of people have been sending us all kinds of email.
Pretty much a deluge.
As if things weren't busy enough,
this has really made things extremely challenging.
Has anyone even bothered to mention the fact
that the idea of copy protection is fundamentally broken
from an information theoretical point of view?
It isn't possible to copy protect a DVD movie
because you must transmit the information from the DVD
to your AV system in unencrypted form.
The same problem exists with macro vision,
but here the problem is twofold.
Not only can you easily get a copy of the decrypted information
with or without the CSS decryption software,
but you don't even need to decrypt it.
You can simply blindly copy the encrypted data onto another DVD ROM,
and that pirated copy will play just as well as the original.
This technology isn't yet available on the commercial market,
and may never be,
but it is certainly not beyond someone with a good bit of technical know-how.
Don't get me wrong,
I think it would be a bad thing for people to shamelessly copy DVD movies,
as the resulting inflation of prices would hurt the paying consumers
who legitimately acquire movies.
DVD is still a new technology
and hasn't yet fully entered the mass market.
The distribution of pirated movies would seriously injure this new market.
But the whole point of the CSS code
is not to provide a way to pirate movies,
it is to allow the media to be viewed on systems
lacking the commercial force behind them.
There isn't any other way for many to play DVD movies
on a non-Intel or non-Microsoft computer.
If the commercial industry was so concerned about the threat of piracy,
they should have worked with these parties
rather than tossing them aside
and forcing them to reverse-engineer their own systems
and write their own software support.
On copy protection in general,
we have seen software copy protection broken,
PlayStation games duplicated,
MP3 songs spread rampantly across the Internet.
For now, the DVD format has an advantage,
because the volume of data makes it impractical
for free, limitless distribution,
and it is the MP3s that continue to steal artist profits.
But that advantage will not last.
Already, portable storage on the order of 4 GB is available.
Whether that will fall into a price range
to make piracy worthwhile remains to be seen.
However, I think that the pirating of any type of media
is a necessary evil.
In most cases, it provides a price control
which regulates the cost of a medium
and hopefully falls into a reasonable range.
In the PlayStation game market,
it keeps vendors from raising the prices
based on what the average consumer is willing to spend.
This eventually will benefit both the consumer and the retailer.
An equilibrium price will be reached
that most consumers will be willing to purchase at,
maximizing the number of people acquiring the game
through legal means.
Hopefully, this translates directly to more profit for the company.
All said, any new technology will eventually fall
to the level of the streets,
to borrow a famous quote,
and we see this more as we become a more techno-savvy society.
There isn't anything the media vendors can do about this,
and I think that by now, they should recognize that.
In this case, I think that the DVD industry
is doing more to hurt themselves
than any threat the CSS code ever presented.
By shutting off the important and growing consumer base
who is fed up with buggy and cumbersome mainstream software,
they are generating adversity in this community
that would otherwise be happy to consume DVDs
and play them on their Linux PCs or Unix workstations.
The more obstacles thrown in the way of this community,
the more they will reach out to overcome them,
even if it has to be done far outside of the US,
where their legal trappings won't reach.
And that comes from someone who wishes to be identified
as a Silicon Valley engineer.
Isaac, what's your take on all this?
Well, I could disagree with a lot of the points in that,
but some of them are valid.
I honestly don't know that much about the issue
to make an intelligent commentary on it.
Okay.
Callers, our guests, do you have anything to add to that?
Oh, I picked up one little bit of information
out of that letter that I thought was a good point.
It was the buggy players under Windows.
I would say over half the DVD software programs for Windows
are, I wouldn't put them past the beta stage
as far as their reliability and their playback quality
and their resource utilizations.
I've got one of my roommates that has a PC
and he runs primarily Windows,
and he's tried three or four different players
and he's only been able to get one to work.
And the software player, you know, he's got a 500-mega CPU
and he's got some hardware decoding going on there
and he still gets frames skipping,
and the quality of the players is just really not there.
And I think that's a good point to be made,
that the player that's going to be,
the player that we're developing under Linux
is going to be highly reliable and high playback quality
and all these things that the DVD industry
was saying they were going to deliver, but they have not yet.
We're going to be taking some phone calls, 212-209-2900,
but I'd like to ask each of you what your plans are.
Do you have any doubts here
as to whether it's worth the effort to continue this
or are you prepared for a long fight?
What do your instincts tell you?
Go ahead, Tom.
Yeah, OK.
I think that what I'm doing is first trying to find out
what the hell is happening over there.
I'm very much removed from everything in the United States
and I don't know much about your precise laws
and legal situation and stuff like that.
Basically, we've all gone mad over here.
Yeah, I think so too sometimes,
but I'm trying to figure out what is happening
and what it means to me.
I still think that when they actually want to try
to do anything to me, they have to come to Germany,
so I'm waiting for that.
Basically, I'm preparing to gather any information
that might be useful to me
and support the movement with mailing lists and web space
and whatever I can afford.
Basically, I'm preparing for a long fight
because this is just the first stage.
This is, I think, the intimidation phase
and if that doesn't work, they get out the real guns.
I think it will take a long time until this is resolved
and I want to do a lot and putting a lot of efforts into this.
Of course, my resources are limited,
especially in the financial area,
so I probably can't do everything I want to do,
but I will do everything I can do
because I think this is at least morally highly questionable
whatever they're doing, no matter how much legal ground it has.
Well, that's the real danger right there.
They have virtually bottomless pocketbooks here.
They can spend as much as they want intimidating us
and we have limited funds,
so we're going to have to have some kind of moral backing behind us
if we have any hope of surviving this.
Yeah, if nothing else, they can just drag this thing out in court
until we're all broke and have to give up.
You guys think that's a possibility?
Yeah, I think it is.
Well, several large corporations have done this to private individuals
and of the 70 or so people who received this letter,
I think about 68 or 69 are private persons.
Matthew, how do you feel about this?
I agree. They do have the resources.
I also want to touch the point on how this is just the first stage.
They just filed for an injunction order,
which basically they just want the data to come down.
From there, they could then move on to actually filing other lawsuits
to actually try to get compensation for what they would call damages.
Their abilities at tracking people down don't seem exactly well-defined.
I mean, Tom, they even got your country wrong.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, that's right.
The letter says, I live in Denmark,
while exactly I live in Germany,
which is like the northern part where I live is 200 miles away,
but I don't speak a word of Danish,
so I'm happy they sent the letter in English.
There are a lot of other mistakes in there as well.
For example, you mentioned the indestructibility of the net,
which, by the way, was intentionally constructed by the U.S. government
when the internet or ARPANET was originally conceived.
Several of the sites that are mentioned in this letter
are not websites hosting the DCSS information,
but stuff like DGACOM, which is just an archive of Usenet news.
So they are trying to sue archives.
Yeah, someone else brought up the point
that it actually points to a specific file in a particular directory
on a particular website.
If you simply rotate that name a few times a day,
they're going to have to issue all kinds of notices
to that particular address as it changes.
So it's really kind of weird the way they did it.
Well, this entire motion that they filed is somewhat laughable.
Yeah, I laughed.
It was improperly executed.
I imagine that more than half of the people who are cited there
don't fall under the jurisdiction of the Superior Court
of the State of California, County of Santa Barbara.
So it's a joke.
I hope it gets laughed out by the judge and whoever else is present in the courtroom.
But what happens if it doesn't?
What happens if they actually succeed in getting an injunction?
What does that mean?
Well, I think it means I'm becoming an expatriate
because this is a joke.
I don't agree.
Yeah, I think it's also a bit more subtle than this
because I've quite recently learned that the law company
that is filing this injunction is known to be one of the best in the business.
So I don't think they're stupid.
I think what they're trying to do is establish a couple of facts and precedents.
For example, that if they get this injunction through,
there are several things in this that would not be easily questioned afterwards.
For example, the fact that the DCSS encryption algorithm is a trade secret
or the fact that we, who are providing the information,
how weak it actually is,
are willingly and with malicious intent trying to damage the DVD industry.
I think if this injunction goes through,
facts like this will not be easily questioned afterwards.
Absolutely.
That's the point of this.
From the way it looks, it doesn't look like they spent a lot of time on it.
Well, we'll have to see.
It's interesting, too, that they filed the—
well, they didn't file the injunction yet,
but they issued the complaint against me personally, not the 2600 website.
Apparently what they did was they did a who is of the actual site,
and then they simply tried to serve those people based on their email addresses.
It's not exactly the best way to find somebody,
and as I mentioned before, I even missed it.
It didn't get to me at all.
So who knows if the injunction time comes by,
how they're going to try and serve these things.
It could take a very long time.
Well, from the document you just showed me, they named 500 John Doe's.
Yeah.
I don't know how they're going to do it.
In fact, we got an email.
I'm John Doe number 78, and this is my comment.
It's really something.
But if they want to serve me an injunction,
I can tell you where I'm going to be on Friday night.
I'm 42nd Street and Broadway watching the ball come down,
so they're welcome to—
Be careful.
Yeah.
Well, I know how to avoid process servers, if that's what you mean.
Well, people laugh at Y2K, but I'm telling you, you're going to feel it this time.
Okay.
I'm looking forward to it.
212-209-2900.
Let's take some phone calls in the brief time we have left.
Let's see.
Shall we go over here?
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Speak up, please.
Yeah, this is off the hooks.
Rich DeRebel, wishing you and yours a happy New Year.
Thank you very much, Rich DeRebel, for calling up.
Sounded like a prerecorded announcement.
That's the best way to hear from you.
Well, that's the best way to hear from you.
Okay.
How about this one?
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah.
You still got those guys on the phone?
Yes, I do.
For the guy in Germany, does American law extend that far in terms of process serving?
Does it have any effect on him if he doesn't obey it?
Well, to be correct, I don't know.
I'm not a lawyer.
As far as I do know, there is nothing that they can immediately do, but there is some
legal cooperation between Germany and the United States, so there might be something
that they could do.
I have also been informed by a lawyer that appearing before the court, either by telephone
or in person or by representative, might put me under the jurisdiction of the court.
That's exactly what it will do.
Let's not forget the case of eToys, which we talked about a couple of weeks on this
show.
Someone over in Switzerland was able to have their website shut down by a court in the
United States.
It can happen.
Yeah.
This can happen, but I don't know how exactly they want to make it happen, but I'm pretty
sure that they're professionals and they know a way to make it happen.
That's what I'm afraid of, that they know much more than I do.
Okay.
Thanks for the call.
Let's move on over here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi.
I just wanted to ask what anyone thinks about the fact that it probably seems, on a mass
market level, more like standalone DVD players for television and such will be the norm.
I don't really see that there's a threat to any of the DVD industry from those, which
are probably going to be the majority.
Okay.
What is your question?
I'm just wondering what anybody thinks about the fact that the threat is just minimal because
most people are going to be using standalone DVD players in the future, I would assume,
that hook up to television and whatever.
I just don't see what their real threat is, what the threat is to the DVD industry because
most people aren't going to be doing that anyway.
Guys, what do you think of that?
I think they're seeing the threat just as you could take an audio CD, make a copy of
it in a computer, and then play it in your home audio player.
Right.
I'm sure you've got a friend that's got a CD burner.
I think they're worried that the same thing will happen to movies where there'll be the
guy down the street with the DVD writer, and people are just going to go over there and
have DVD burning parties or something like that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's possible to do this with CDs right now, and I don't
see the music industry collapsing.
Well, I may be way off the wall here, but I recall a device that I keep under my television
right now called a VCR, which plays VHS tapes.
If I hook another VCR up underneath it, I can make many copies, but I don't see Blockbuster
going out of business.
You're such an anarchist.
Well, hey, not that I've done that.
The thing is, I think the difference here, though, is that making a copy of a DVD, making
a copy of a CD, it's perfect.
It's the exact duplicate.
There's no generational loss.
Whereas with VHS tapes, there is some loss.
From a legal standing, it should make a difference.
Okay, let's take one more phone call.
212-209-2900.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Yes.
Oops, I'm sorry.
My finger slipped.
Oh, boy.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Speak up, please.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Hello?
Yeah.
You want to say something on the air?
Oh, here.
Okay.
We have a secretary, I guess.
Hello?
Yes.
Yes, is this Emanuel?
This is off the hook.
You want something said on the air?
Yes.
I sent Emanuel an email.
It's sort of maybe a little bit estranged of an email, but it's regarding hackers and
the government using them to solve some of their problems.
Having something like the Secret Service start a hackers club with an award and maybe even
scholarships for kids who can hack into certain systems, give them symbols so that they know
that they've hacked into the system, and give them rewards for it.
Is this your idea?
It's my idea.
It sounds...
My son thinks I'm crazy, but I don't think so.
I think most people who hack do it for fun and for the challenge.
Well, that's true, and that's what they'll continue to do it for, not for a government
agency and not for some kind of a merit badge.
But don't you think that the talent that's involved in hacking could be used to help
our country?
Well, yeah, and I think it already is used in that way, and I think the problem we're
seeing these days is that people are simply taking anything that hackers do as something
evil and not listening to the real message behind it.
Hackers, for the vast majority of cases, don't go out destroying systems, don't cause problems,
don't erase things or sell data on the open market, but yet we still want to classify
them as terrorists because we don't understand what it is that they're doing.
I'd like to discuss this more.
Unfortunately, we're out of time, and we do have important guests on the line that need
to give out some information so that we can continue this fight in the weeks ahead.
Tom, let's start with you.
How can people get a hold of you and voice their support?
First of all, I'd invite people to visit my website, which is at www.lemuria.org, and
then at slash DCSS with the E, everything except the E capital, and you will find the
DCSS defendant's page there.
I try to collect some information.
I will put all the conversation with the law firm that is trying to get at me from California
somewhere on that page, so everything they send me will be put on that webpage immediately.
I hope they don't make too many grammar mistakes.
You can also reach me by e-mail, which is Tom at www.lemuria.org.
I think I'll try to answer any e-mails I receive as long as they're not too stupid.
I'm really trying to put some punch into this because I think they're trying to just intimidate
us and hope that we all fall over without any fight.
My personal goal is to make sure that that doesn't happen, that even if we lose, we put
up a fight.
Okay, and I think we can count on a lot of people to also back us up on that.
Matthew, how do people get a hold of you?
Well, a while ago when the first cease and desist orders came out to those few websites,
I started a campaign and we just kind of let it sit for a while, and now I think we're
really interested in getting it kicked off, and we're still a few pieces short of what
we need for it, but we're calling it the OpenDVD campaign.
It's found at OpenDVD.org, and what we're trying to do is give out information like
we've been doing on this radio station about CSS, how it's flawed, what we're trying to
do.
We're not trying to bring down the movie industry, and also raise awareness to what's going on.
We've got a lot of behind-the-scenes support so far.
A lot of the big names in the open source community have said they're going to pledge
support for this campaign.
Okay, how can people get a hold of you, because we're down to our last 15 seconds here?
Just go to the OpenDVD.org website.
There'll be information on there.
If you don't see it tonight, I'll be updating it in the next couple days.
Okay, great.
I want to thank you guys for joining us, and we'll be standing alongside you in the trenches
there.
Thank you.
Okay.
And, of course, if anybody wants to support us in this, please go to the website, www.2670.com,
read the articles there, mirror your site to contain the files, too.
We can do that as much as we want.
Become John Doe number 1,142.
That's right, because we haven't been issued an injunction yet, and we intend to continue
as long as we can.
Well, that's it for 1999.
Isaac, do you want to say goodbye since the world's going to end?
Folks, keep awake, keep your eyes open, and think about what's going on for Y2K, and you'll
be fine.
Okay, I'm just going to run down to Times Square with Reckless Abandon and see what
happens.
Yeah, we'll talk about it next week.
Till then.
Yeah, if there is a next week.
Till then, have a happy new year, and we'll see you in 2000.
Good night.
Good night.
Bye.