Category Archives: Technology

Some notes about Broadband World Forum Asia 2008

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I chaired the Hot Session at this conference. The topic was “Peer To Peer: opportunity or threat?” The two panelists were rather in favor of P2P although they highlighted some threats. The best quote from Shashi: “P2P means also People To People” I love this one.

Two sessions were interesting from the security point of view. The first one was “VoIP security: Myths and Realities”. The papers were not technically detailed. The most interesting part was the discussions and Q&A. Final conclusion: “Encryption for VoIP is probably useless from the security point of view, nevertheless it makes people feel more comfortable.”
The risk of eavesdropping in a cafe the unsecure wireless transmission is probably not serious. There are easiest ways to listen the speakers such as being near or high quality microphones. The risk of a eavesdropping by government wiretapping is balanced by the legal requirement asking for such feature. In other words, if you want it to be secure, either use an independent scrambling codec, or use a VPN.

The second session was “Monetizing Content: 360 degree view of the customer”. Two speakers were extremely interesting. Daniel Brody VP of Tudou (The Chinese YouTube), and Ringo Chan VP of Tuner International. Some interesting comments/facts. According to Mr CHAN, the release window of VOD will soon coincide with the release window of home rental, i.e., the DVD sales. Currently, VOD occurs one to 3 months after DVD release. The future of VOD will be difficult in China when you find high quality DVD for 1$ at each corner street months before the official DVD release. Tudou succeeded to have a commercial agreements with Chinese content providers. It was far easier than with Western content providers. Chinese content providers do not have complex business models such as windows release. An interesting revelation from Dan. User Generated Content (UGC) is about buzz. And it is extremely easy for UGC sites to create the buzz on the clips they want to promote. He revealed that they are very good at this game.

Watermark and privacy

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The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) issued an interesting paper titled “Privacy principles for digital watermarking“. CDT published similar principles of other technologies such as RFID or DRM.

The document proposes eight principles:
1. Privacy by design; Interestingly in this principle, CDT recommends that the digital watermark technology providers imposes, by contract binding, to the application designer to respect privacy issues. This is highly ethical but is it realistic in business environment?
2. Avoid embedding independently useful identifying information directly in watermark; in other words the payload should look random without access to relevant information
3. Provide notice to end-users; CDT provides an interesting rationale to inform end users if the watermark is used against copyright infringement. End user should secure his/her content to avoid theft by third parties; else they may suffer from legal actions.
4. Control access to reading capability
5. Respond appropriately when algorithms are compromised; Their recommendations is not to renew the algorithms as technologists would recommend. Rather, CDT recommends to publish a notice if the hack allows watermark forging. I am not sure that this will be loved by technology provider
6. Provide security and access control for back-end databases
7. Limit uses for secondary purposes
8. Provide reasonable access and correction procedures for personally identifiable information

The principles are sound and many of them apply to other security related techniques. Of course, in view of the goal of its editor, some recommendations are Utopian. This document is worth reading.

DRM and Individualized Pricing

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Michael Lesk, from Rutgers University, attempted to answer why online music stores sell to each customer at the same price. Interestingly, every song is sold at the same price, regardless of its performer. The price of the corresponding CD varies depending on the artist’s fame. Online stores have good profiling of Alice. Thus, they could easily propose a personalized price slightly lower than the price she would be ready to pay. According to Lesk, it is not a privacy issue but a feeling of resentment that frightens the sellers.

One alternative that make price differentiation acceptable is versioning. People accept that a hard-bounded book is more expensive then a paper back. People may accept to pay more for a content they will be able to view several times, than for a content that they will view only once. This is the role of DRM. DRM may allow to decrease the average price by offering different versions. Unfortunately, today DRM is not used for that, probably because it is simpler and safer for merchants to offer one unique price.

Reference of the paper
LESK Michael, Digital Rights Management and Individualized Pricing, in IEEE Security & Privacy, May/June 2008

Is DRM bad for the Earth?

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:Happy:
In my life, I heard many arguments against DRM. I must confess that this one is the most surprising one. It seems that some professors of US campuses promote the use of eBooks as alternative to traditional paper book or photocopies. One of the arguments is that it is more environmentally sound. To that, we can only applaude.
Unfortunately, there is no universally adopted format for eBooks. Furthermore, they are protected with DRM that are not interoperable. Thus, ebooks are an ecologic but less convenient alternative to paper book.

Conclusion of the paper: DRM is not environmental sound. :Sad:

My personal conclusions are that we urgently need interoperability of DRM. It is the unique feature that will make DRM acceptable to users. Furthermore, for ebooks, DRM must support the possibility of free excerpting. This mandatory for any serious scholastic work.

Mininova will reach the 5 billions downloads

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Many torrent tracker sites compete. Thus, they publish data such as number of available torrents, of registered users, of seeders and leeches. One of the most important sites, mininova publishes the number of downloaded torrents: 4.918.964.636. At their current pace, mininova will reach the threshold of 5.000.000.000 downloaded torrents in a few days.

I find this figure more interesting than the other ones. For instance, the number of available torrents is not really meaningful. Many torrents are not active (thus the health bar on any site). Mininova publishes other data. The distribution of the type of downloaded contents is interesting. 39% are on TV series, 22% on movies, and 20% for music. The most downloaded torrent is episode 17 of Heroes’s first season. This craze torrents of TV series is extremely interesting and should be carefully analyzed by broadcasters.

In any case, BitTorrent is really the protocol of choice. Many progresses have been done both by the software themselves and by tools allowing search (BitCHe, TorrentFinder toolbar, …), making them easier to use.

TorrentSpy: second round for studios

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 End of March, under the pressure of studios TorrentSpy ceased to work (see TorrentSpy: first round for studios. A Californian federal judge knocked down for a second time TorrentSpy. The judge ordered TorrentSpy to pay 111M$ (72M€) to MPAA. This high penalty is mostly due the accusation that TorrentSpy destroyed evidences. TorrentSPy refused to gave information about its “customers” and destroyed the corresponding data.

Having ceased any activity, TorrentSpy will not be able to pay MPAA. But the message is a strong warning for tracker sites based in the United States. Will it have any impact on the other tracker sites (for instance The Pirate Bay, or Mininova)?

RIAA forecasts the return of DRM

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At last conference Digital Hollywood, David HUGHES, head of RIAA’s technology division, forecast that DRM will return to protect music. His rationales are simple. He listed 22 ways (or should we say business models) to sell music. Twenty methods require some way to enforce some limitations in consumption, i.e. DRM.

In fact, HUGHES highlighted one characteristics of DRM that is often forgotten. DRM facilitates versioning, i.e., different types of commercialization of the same song. Currently, DRM free songs are sold either as a song, or as a full album. Other ways , for instance as part of a subscription, or pay per listen, may sell this same song at a lower price (but with less freedom of consumption). But, these methods require to limit the consumption to the defined limitations (for instance only once in case of pay per listen). Here comes back DRM.

HUGHES highlighted that DRM should become transparent for consumers. Then, they would not care any more.

Currently, DRM free is the trend in music industry. Four majors sell some songs DRM free. Nevertheless, if they will find new ways to sell songs, HUGHES may be right.