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Sun DReaM Finds Home In IPTV 68

Posted by Zonk from the someone-likes-the-idea dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Register has a story reporting that Sun's DRM will find a home in a Korean IPTV system. From the article: "This week Sun released the source code for two components of DReaM, its DReaM-CAS (Conditional Access System) and DReaMMMI (Mother May I) the underlying mechanism for always asking a central resource for permission to access content. In papers that Sun put out this week it has described both of these processes. DReaMCAS or D-CAS currently only manages access to content in the MPEG-2 format."
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Sun DReaM Finds Home In IPTV More

Sun DReaM Finds Home In IPTV

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  • Catch-phrase (Score:4, Funny)

    by Joebert ( 946227 ) on Friday April 14, 2006 @05:59PM (#15132979) Homepage
    I hope their catch-phrase isn't going to be Keep Dreaming.

  • Good (Score:1)

    by thePig ( 964303 )
    Hopefully, this kick starts the IP TV network.
    This is good for the whole bubble in general, in that more bandwidth needs will sustain it for longer periods.
    • Does IPTV stand for the "Intellectual Property" TV network? If so how appropriate.

      Or else it could, during the mass subscriber exodus, become the IP (Freeley) Network

  • IPTV canonical error message... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Friday April 14, 2006 @06:01PM (#15132995)
    > Error. Nothing for you to see here.

    Please purchase a subscription to access the content.

  • DRM and GNOME (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14, 2006 @06:05PM (#15133010)

    Sun also has a "customer" in Fluendo... the company set up to develop GStreamer... the media framework in GNOME. Fluendo have committed to the whole DRM shebang. Locked down kernels, trusted computing, and DRM built in to Gstreamer (and hence, GNOME). And Sun, a full-blown member and devotee of The Trusted Computing Group with it's DRM hardware.

    Lovely thought isn't it.

    All that corporate involvement in GNOME was worth it, wasn't it? I mean... now that we've a got DRMed desktop that is completely controlled and developed by three corporations and a few small businesses around edges.

    • You Don't Get It (Score:5, Interesting)

      by turgid ( 580780 ) on Friday April 14, 2006 @06:12PM (#15133038) Journal

      Do you?

      No one in Sun "believes" in this DRM stuff. They just do it because theu have to to play in the pointy-haired Western markets. They make it Open Source to make a point.

      When Digial Restrictions Management puffs and wheezes its last breath in a few months, Sun will calmly pick up from where it left off, as it has always done, as if it hadn't happened.

      The enigineers in Sun know what they are doing, and they keep the PHBs beaten into shape. Mark my words.

      This is just Sun playing ball with the suits in the short term.

      In the mean time, I urge you Slashbots to learn how to use a compiler.

      • Re:You Don't Get It (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        When Digial Restrictions Management puffs and wheezes its last breath in a few months, Sun will calmly pick up from where it left off, as it has always done, as if it hadn't happened.

        No, *you* don't get it. DRM isn't going anywhere... you want to know why? It's because it has fuck all to do with music and video copying now. It did once, but not anymore.

        DRM/Trusted Computing is about controlling what applications can run... and using the hardware to lock data to a particular piece (or pieces of code, "T

      • They just do it because theu have to to play in the pointy-haired Western markets

        Meaning that Asian markets are different? You may be right about that.

        A workmate bought a bunch of DVD's back from china recently. He gave two of them to me because the dialog and subtitles turned out to be both in Mandarin, which my wife speaks.

        One of the movies is a really cheap action movie with lots of planes being blown up and nukes being defused. At one point the protagonist confronts a stream of "encrypted data", we k

      • No one in Sun "believes" in this DRM stuff.

        Its nice to assume they're on our side, but I disagree.

        I think Sun does believe in DRM. They believe in patents and copyrights, why wouldn't they believe in protecting them?

        I want a list of all DRM-friendly companies, so I can avoid their products:

        Sun
        Microsoft
        Apple
        HP?
        IBM?
        Novell?
        RIAA and members..
        MPAA and members..
        Creative Labs

        anyone else?

        I'm just going to pretend they don't exist. Maybe if I'm lucky, one day, they won't.

        Any anti-DRM businesses want my money? Its

      • Re:You Don't Get It (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Tim C ( 15259 )
        When Digial Restrictions Management puffs and wheezes its last breath in a few months

        Well now, that's a nice thought, but I can't see it happening. Truth is that we've had DRM in one form or another on computers for at least 20 years, and it's not just going to disappear no matter how much you may wish it.

        (For the purposes of this discussion, I am including copy prevention measures such as having to type in a given word on a given page of the manual, or using a hardware dongle, Elite's Lens-lok, etc - they'

    • Re:DRM and GNOME (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dolda2000 ( 759023 )

      DRM built in to Gstreamer (and hence, GNOME).

      Somehow, I'm just having a very hard time believing this to its full extent. DRM needs a full chain of trust, complete down to the BIOS, to even stand a chance of being effective, and since GStreamer (and GNOME) are seldomly, if ever, run on "trusted" kernels, it just seems completely and utterly pointless to implement DRM in GStreamer.

      That being said, I can't deny that the work is being done. If anyone's interested, here's a link to the announcement [gnome.org]. The sh

      • Re:DRM and GNOME (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        and since GStreamer (and GNOME) are seldomly, if ever, run on "trusted" kernels, it just seems completely and utterly pointless to implement DRM in GStreamer.

        1. I've asked Fluendo this, and they will not talk about it. 2. This DRM is mostly aimed at stuff like Nokia Maemo, or other newer mobile phone systems (for the moment), which also run GNOME. 3. Fluendo are taking Free software (and others' work) and using digital signatures to lock it down and ensure that only their signed versions run, and impleme

      • They want to make unauthorized copying just hard enough and socially unacceptable that few will do it. Ex. bittorrent is "bad." Buying itunes music "good."
    • Although a lot of the online chatter about DRM has focused on locked-down platforms, this is really not a key feature of DRM. The purpose of DRM is to protect contect, which it does through condition access to obtain a host-specific key, which is used in a secure decoder chip to play back encrypted content. In a nutshell.

      The platform part is merely a marketing tool, if you're Tivo, or IPTV, or someone else and you sell subsidized hardware with the expectation of recouping it on service, with a liberal min
    • Good thing I switched to mplayer.

  • Open Source DRM is like... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dr. Zowie ( 109983 ) <slashdot@defores t . org> on Friday April 14, 2006 @06:08PM (#15133021)
    ... a car with a Plexiglass hood that's glued shut. You can see, but you can't fix.
    • Not a bad analogy. You'll be able to modify the DReaM code all you want, but you won't be able to load the modified code on your "certified robust" set top box. So it's open source, but not as we know it.

  • WHHYHHYHY! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Friday April 14, 2006 @06:08PM (#15133023) Homepage
    Why are customers paying for the extra costs of DRM?

    How many times do these people have to be told, DRM can't work, at least not the way they want.

    (shudder) to quote Bruce Schneier, you can't make water unwet, you can't make bits uncopyable.

    STOP STOP STOP.

    The only crypto should be authentication, as in, I the user want to be protected from fraud.

    That and I don't really see the worth. Not a lot of TV is worth seeing once let alone twice.

    Tom
    • I've got a machine in my kitchen that can make water into a unwet state

    • Re:WHHYHHYHY! (Score:2, Informative)

      by ChrisGilliard ( 913445 )
      (shudder) to quote Bruce Schneier, you can't make water unwet, you can't make bits uncopyable.

      Sure you can't make bits uncopyable, BUT you can make it very difficult for people to copy the bits. This is all that DRM attempts to do. Microsoft actually came out with an interesting paper on this several years ago. They called it the dark networks I think. It referred to the perpetual group of people that will copy software/movies/mp3s/etc without permission. This group of people is less than 5% of the popul

      • Re:WHHYHHYHY! (Score:3, Informative)

        by discordja ( 612393 )
        it was called the Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution [stanford.edu]
      • It referred to the perpetual group of people that will copy software/movies/mp3s/etc without permission. This group of people is less than 5% of the population. The goal of companies that produce content that they would like to control the rights to, is to keep this group as small as possible.

        I think it is understandable to want to restrict non-paying people from getting the media. If a person doesn't think it is worth money, then it shouldn't be worth the bandwidth either, IMO. Because I understand there

  • MPEG-4 content, MPEG-2 transport (Score:3, Informative)

    by bunkport ( 968528 ) on Friday April 14, 2006 @06:19PM (#15133065)
    It will only work for MPEG-2 transport, not MPEG-2 content. The content will be MPEG-4 since bandwidth's scarce.
  • back in that fairytale land where nobody watches content without explicit permission and possibly the miracle of micropayments, i suppose Businesses wouldn't care about DRM-- but it seems like everyone is so terribly territorial over everything they might possibly be able to claim the credit for (or the IP of), so in light of *THAT* i think that non-device-dependent DRM is comparatively a good thing. Although this one does sound like it wouldn't be even remotely close to trivial to break, constant stream of

  • Avoid te knee-jerk reaction... (Score:3)

    by caudron ( 466327 ) on Friday April 14, 2006 @07:19PM (#15133341) Homepage
    I know there will be the inevitable "DRM is teh suX0rs" and "Sun is teh eVi1 for making it", but the Sun model is different enough to warrant a second look:

    http://www.sun.com/2005-1025/feature/ [sun.com]

    I'm NOT a fan of DRM---including Sun's---but as DRM goes, Sun's is less honerous than most. Read the details before commenting, as they may surprise you. They address some of the more common complaints about DRM. Again, I'm still against it, but there's somethig to be said about being against it for the right reasons.

    Tom Caudron
    http://tom.digitalelite.com/technology.html [digitalelite.com]

    • Re:Avoid te knee-jerk reaction... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Friday April 14, 2006 @08:36PM (#15133657)
      The important questions are these:

      (a) Does the DRM system prevent users from making fair use of protected content? (Shifting content in time, space, format)
      (b) Does the DRM system enforce additional non-piracy-related restrictions on the end user at the behest of the content industry? (Region codes, preventing use of things like track skip/fast forward/other remote control buttons)
      (c) Does the DRM system continually depend on an external authority which, if it were ever to become defunct, would effectively revoke the rights of the user to access the content? (And, can that external authority track the usage habits of the end user?)

      While (c) here is an implementation detail that has implications concerning things the content industry would like to be able to do, (a) and (b) are make-or-break issues which apply to all DRM. That is, if (a) and (b) are true, then the DRM system is just as oppressive (perhaps even more so) than the DRM we're already afflicted with, regardless of the platforms that the DRM is available on or the open-source-ness of the scheme. But if (a) and (b) are false, then the content industry won't use them.

      From the article you linked:

      We believe in content owners' rights to control their creations as they see fit. And consumers have the right that if those systems are onerous, they just don't have to buy them. So the fair usage issue gets sorted out by the market. - Glenn Edens, Director, Sun Labs

      This is a foolhardy assumption. The entire reason that the content industry plays the way they do is to ensure that there is no consumer choice when it comes to DRM. They use the legislature to enforce particular DRM schemes on the public. They collude in I-can't-see-how-this-is-legal associations to ensure that whatever DRM scheme is used is burdened with licensing terms to prevent electronics manufacturers from making playback devices that permit the full scope of fair use or that don't impose non-piracy restrictions on the end user, and those licensing restrictions are given teeth by the even-more-broken patent system. Even the biggest duel of the new millennium - Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD - laid to rest the question of DRM fairly early when both format consortia announced they were using AACS. And none of this is motivated solely (or even primarily) by piracy - the real goals here are to be able to track the end user, to manipulate the international content market, and to force the end user to watch advertising.

  • "DReaM-CAS"? Where did I hear that before... *ahem* [wikipedia.org]
  • Both Microsoft, Apple and others have their more or less closed source DRM implementations in place. Microsoft provides their WMRM SDK's to developers so anyone can roll their own DRM system based on MSDRM. Apple's DRM system is exclusive for Apple only (correct me if I am wrong).

    All of the current implementations are closed source - if it was possible for anyone to write players that could play/strip the DRM from the files then the whole DRM idea would fail. That is why I have a lot of problems seeing how
    • You're missing one important part - how things are DRMed can be open source, but that doesn't mean you have the crypto keys to reverse it.

    • Re:How "open source" can DRM be? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      yeah and do we all have a 'lot of problems' seeing how any good crypto system could be open source?
      the interesting tidbid is, that the open sourced drm will be harder to break as it cannot rely on simple security by obscurity.
      • Cryptography is slightly different than DRM though - a crypto system is just going to prevent users from reading a file unless they have the key, but a DRM system usually has different rules depending upon the license - can the user burn the item to CD, can it be played on X device etc, all of which need to (currently) be implemented in software.

        If the DRM software is all open source (ie it doesnt need to be linked against closed source libraries to compile which actually contains the DRM parts), how can
        • If the DRM software is all open source (ie it doesnt need to be linked against closed source libraries to compile which actually contains the DRM parts), how can it prevent me from disabling the license checks for burning the media to disk,

          The software never sees content in plaintext, that would be utterly pointless.

          A conditional access system needs to do all the backend work: interact with the subscriber and device databases, handle purchase requests, produce billing and audit data, look for fraud, rev

  • No sir I dont like it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bruha ( 412869 ) on Friday April 14, 2006 @08:38PM (#15133661) Homepage Journal
    I dont want my content phoning home every time I play it. If I want to watch debbie does dallas 100 times a day that's my business and not theirs.

    Next thing you'll know if you watch CNN too much you'll get republican are great email and snail mail and if you watch Fox News the democrats will be trying to swing you back.

    Or if you watch only shows showing violence you'll be flagged for special security at travel terminals.

    This can be abused way too much. Corporations do not protect our security if there's a dime to be made off selling your information.
    • The "ownership society!"

      It's very disheartening to see righteous indignation like this consistently modded up. No mention of action, ever. It's okay to complain. But for dog's sake don't ever do anything that would label you a nut case.

      go here: www.eff.org and give them some money, or figure out a way to volunteer some time.
  • I find it interesting that every single reply in this thread is a knee-jerk reaction lamenting about the evils of DRM and content protection simply due to the fact that the product name of this system is misleading.

    "The system uses AES encryption, requires a constantly open two way IP connection and it sends encrypted keys to the content along with the content, and these have to be decrypted by an existing public key. Entitlement messages are delivered out of band in a separate communication using the Mo
  • Thats a bogus concept, forcing one to have a connecton of some sort to even watch a damned movie, o listen to a song.

    Will my car have to have wifi ( and a subscription to a mobile internet service ) just to lisetn to the traffic report at some point? What about trying to read a book in the park on a nice day, once they outlaw paper books since they 'cant be controlled and monitored'?

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