[ILUG] SDMI initiative

[John N S Gill]

> BTW, just to drift a little:
> 
> The content moguls have considered this problem in the past; last I heard,
> they were seriously considering encrypting the connection all the way to
> the speakers.  

I'm not sure how much this would really buy them. I guese the idea here 
is that there would be a chip in the speakers + reverse engineering 
the algorithm would be tricky, if not impossible, if they made the 
chips tamper-proof.

I guess if this chip also included the D/A conversion (as opposed to
pushing out the digital signal to a separate D/A converter) and spat 
out an anlalogue stream only as good as the speakers need then 
they might be on to something.  

> I think they may have given up on that one (thankfully) and instead
> they'll be going the RealAudio route -- sue the shit out of anyone who
> reverse-engineers their intellectual property and works out how to save a
> stream (viz. StreamBox).

As I see it this sort of thing is ntothing but bad news for 
open source systems.

Since it is open source people can get hold of the sound drivers and 
put in hooks to dump out streams.

With windoze, source isn't usually available for the sound drivers,
so the risk of people hacking these and putting in hooks is much 
lower. 

So, I suspect folks like SMDI won't exactly be rushing to produce 
apps to play their products on Linux :(  -- but this just invites
linux users to reverse engineer their "property", if they won't 
provide the apps then maybe they deserve what they get.

As I write this I'm beginning to think that the chip in the speakers 
might actually be better for linux.  SMDI et al, could release the 
specs for driving the speakers without worrying about losing their 
security.  Linux would then be on a much more level playing field.

John