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  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 15:18:28 +1030

disk copy-protection enforcement - Yet Another Nightmare

This article is one of the most scary I have seen for
a long time:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15620.html

This hasn't hit slashdot yet, though I don't know why.
Maybe they're at a party.

Here's an excerpt:

=======================================================
Hastening a rapid demise for the free copying of digital media,
the next generation of hard disks is likely to come with
copyright protection countermeasures built in. 

Technical committees of NCTIS, the ANSI-blessed standards
body, have been discussing the incorporation of content
protection currently used for removable media into
industry-standard ATA drives, using proprietary technology
originating from the 4C Entity. They're the people who brought
you CSS2: IBM, Toshiba Intel and Matsushita. 

The scheme envisaged brands each drive with a unique
identifier at manufacturing time. 

The proposals are already at an advanced stage: three drafts
have already been discussed for incorporating CPRM (Content
Protection for Recordable Media) into the ATA specification
by the NCTIS T.13 committee. The committee next meets in
February. If, as expected, the CPRM extensions become part of
the ATA specification, copyright protection will be in every
industry-standard hard disk by next summer, according to IBM
=======================================================

Could somebody more clued up than me please say what's going
on here? 
I get the impression you won't be able to read the contents 
of your own disk drive without getting some keys off the net
or something like that.
All current disk backup software will fail, and so forth.

It's like all the worst things about DVD encryption
transposed onto the standard hard disk.

Has anyone been following this development?

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
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