On Wednesday April 7th 2010 a process that would normally involve several weeks or even months of legislative scrutiny was shoe-horned into a two hour House of Commons debate. A debate largely unattended by the vast majority of MPs. What was the debate about? It was about the proposed new Digital Economy Bill which among other things holds the account holder of an internet connection legally liable for any copyright infringement / piracy carried out using said connection.

Out of a total of 642 MPs, 412 didn’t turn up to the debate. At all. This was despite over 20,000 letters that were sent to MPs by members of the public in the run up to the debate. The bill was rather unsurprisingly voted in with a majority of 189 to 47. I should also point of that the vast majority of those MPs who did turn up to vote, strolled in at the very end and did not actively take part in any form of debate. This was also televised. Today the bill is being considered for a final time in the Lords, where the unelected peers are expected to rubber stamp the legislation.

Apparently this is what’s known as democracy.

The Digital Economy Bill will become law. That much is clear. What does it mean for the average person though. You’d be forgiven for thinking that if you have nothing to hide, and you’re not involved in any illegal activities, then this won’t affect you. But looking closer at the bill there are some alarming similarities with the vague new anti-terror laws which as we’ve seen are being abused time and time again by the authorities.

Disconnection Without Trial

The secretary of state for business can order the blocking of “a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright”

This is intentionally vague. Essentially translating as “We can, via the secretary of state for business, take down any website we don’t like simply by citing a connection to some form of copyright infringement”. The issue of copyright infringement is such a contentious one that it is not difficult to imagine how this might be abused. You could theoretically shut down Google with wording like that.

The bill also requires that ISPs issue warnings to their clients should they be ’suspected’ of downloading copyrighted material. They are also required to suspend and subsequently disconnect repeat offenders. You will have the right of appeal, but you will not be entitled to legal aid. The onus would not be on rights holders to prove your guilt: you would be responsible for proving your innocence.

Wireless Security

It is very clear that no one involved in the formation of this new bill has any idea how easy it is to crack the security key on a wifi network. As i write this on my laptop I have the choice of 7 different networks I could possibly connect to for Internet access. Only one of them belongs to me, 5 of them are secured by weak WEP/WPA keys that I could crack using nothing more than this laptop, some free open source software and a shitload of patience, and one of them is an open BT-FON router (probably a BT HomeHub, which i believe are all now automtically opted in to BT-FON sharing by default?).

What I’m saying is if I wanted to do something nefarious online, like downloading copyrighted material, I could quite easily use one of my neighbours’ home ADSL connections via their ’secure’ wifi router. It would then be them who had their internet connection terminated rather than me. They haven’t thought this through. If someone were to sit outside my house in their car, crack my WEP key and download series 4 of Desperate Housewives using my ADSL connection, it could be terminated. As I work from home I would lose my job and there would be nothing I could do about this. I don’t even like Desperate Housewives.

There is no such thing as a secure wifi network, and even if there were, holding regular people legally accountable for setting up their wifi routers correctly is frankly ridiculous. Most people never learned how to program their VCR, and I don’t think I’d be wrong in counting the vast majority of MPs in that category.

An end to public wifi

As far as I can see, this may well also spell the end of free adhoc public wifi in places such as small independently owned coffee shops. What business in their right mind would want to be legally liable for the actions of it’s customers? I certainly wouldn’t.

In short the Digital Economy Bill benefits no one but the BPI (who shockingly, actually drafted large parts of the bill), and has much less to do with the Digital Economy than it does with restricting our ever increasing powers of free-speech and self-organisation.

The one thing the Digital Ecomony Bill will not do is put an end to piracy. In April last year Sweden’s Internet traffic dropped by around 30% as their own anti-file sharing law came into force. But several months later traffic levels were higher than ever and independent reports showed that the accessing of illegally shared movies, TV shows and music was at an all time high, only now a large chunk of Sweden’s Internet traffic was heavily encrypted, and thus virtually untraceable.

What can you do about all this? Sadly, probably nothing. There is too much at stake here for the government not to step in to quell the rising trend in free speech and free-thinking. It does beg the question though of who to vote for in the upcoming general election. Labour and the Conservatives conspired together to bring these new laws in via the back door, and the Liberal Democrats didn’t even show up to the party.

ISPs are required by law to hand over any and all of this information to the security services, police and most worryingly to your local council upon request. Quite apart for putting an intolerable strain on smaller independent ISPs this is a direct breach of our civil liberties.

This, along with other laws which restrict photography in public places are being pushed through under the imaginary umbrella of “The War on Terror”, but what it’s really about is protecting the stranglehold of and handful of media giants. How long will we continue to allow governments to strip us of our basic civil liberties in order to protect us from this imagined threat?

Wonder why you haven’t heard about this on the news? You’d think this would be front page stuff right? It’s funny how some stories seem to get buried isn’t it.

European Parliament members have already voted in favour of outlawing this kind of ISP disconnection policy. French MEP Guy Bono’s proposed bill on safeguarding cultural products, drafted in September, had made clear: “Criminalising consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution”

“The repressive measures are measures dictated by industries that have been unable to change their business models to meet the needs imposed by the information society. Switching off internet access is a powerful sanction which could have profound repercussions in a society where access to the internet is a mandatory law for social inclusion.”

So here’s how the new laws work:

First strike: Suspect is issued an email warning.
Second strike: Internet access contract is suspended.
Third Strike: Internet access contract is terminated and access is cut off.

Sounds fair right? Not really. So what is this really about? Is it about protecting us? Is it about protecting the profits of some very, very rich people? Or is it just another step towards a full police state? Let’s face it, we’re halfway there already.

And there was me using BitTorrent and Rapidshare to download installerz, keygenz and serialz. If only i’d known that I could just drag desktop shortcuts to a massively oversized USB mass storage device.

Update

Having discussed the episode in question with this Marc Rogers guy (He’s Technical Threat Intelligence Manager for Vodafone) I can assure you that it was deliberately dummed-down, and he’s well aware that this isn’t how software is really stolen… He’s also quite a nice guy.

It’s not really encryption, is it

Long story short, the streams are XOR’d with a two-byte repeating pattern. It’s not yet clear how the iPhone picks up the two-byte key for this XOR scheme, or what kind of inside knowledge was needed to discover the capability (collusion?), but it’s rumoured that the XOR scheme has actually broken the iPod Touch functionality. If this is true it’s a massive WTF and probably rules out any idea of the BBC colluding with Apple over this.

Putting the moral arguments for the BBC’s latest move aside for a second. It’s fairly simple to deXOR the files and there are already a handful of pre-written scripts for doing just that.

So, What Are The Options?

Paul Battley has patched his iplayer-dl script so that it will continue to function in light of the XOR encryption. He’s also planning on patching the Windows GUI version for n00bs.

There’s a nice little perl script which should prove pretty useful for those of use already using one of the perl based solutions to access the TV shows we’re forced to pay for.

Most interestingly i’ve found some C++ code for decrypting the streams which is available at beebhack along with simple instructions for how to compile it for use.

The cat and mouse game continues. Yawn.

Update: June 12th 2008 Paul Battley has released updated versions of both his ruby command line tool and the Windows GUI download client. Not only that but this morning, new releases of both have appeared which utilise faster XOR decryption. His blog post details the changes.

The new project page for iPlayer Downloader is at http://po-ru.com/projects/iplayer-downloader/

I’m sure the BBC won’t approve of this but within the last few days an XBMC plugin for the BBC iPlayer has been released for general consumption. Though it’s far from a finished product, it neatly lists and plays the H.264 encoded iPlayer streams designed for the Apple iPhone.

The BBC’s provision of non-DRM MPEG streams only for iPhone users has sparked widespread controversy not least because they have previously stated and continue to take the line that non-DRM versions can not be made available for legal reasons, meaning those wanting to download and watch iPlayer content are forced to use Microsoft Windows.

BBC iPlayer programmes specify the dates for which they are valid and
whether the programme is available for download at all.

In the interest of common decency, the [XBMC iPlayer plugin] should store and honour these
values – deleting programmes once they expire. – Developer of the XBMC iPlayer Plugin

So, just what argument can the BBC come up with to justify referring to projects such as this as ‘hacking’?

The XBMC iPlayer plugin looks like the first step on a promising path toward the British public being permitted to use an actual TV to watch the programming that they’re forced to pay for. Here’s hoping that this trend continues, and sets a precedent for the abandonment of pointless applications of badly executed DRM.

There looks to be roughly enough stock to last until 2009, but after that the film could go the way of the dinosaur! – Rick Nunn

So what can we do about it?

savepolaroid.com have been assembling articles, links, stories and planning out the best way to create a joint effort to save instant film.

Let the big boys know we’re serious about keeping instant film alive. Write to them using the addresses listed on savepolaroid.com or download their Action Pack, which has pre-written and addressed postcards you can post to Polaroid, Fuji and Ilford, telling them why instant film should be saved.

Don’t allow corporate america to stifle your creativity. Download your action pack now. Do it. Do it now.

http://www.savepolaroid.com/download-the-action-pack/

Credit for the photo goes to Jürgen Kreileder

Update 19/03/2008: Today, Liad Cohen pointed me in the direction of the BOYCOTT POLAROID! flickr group.

When Petters Group Worldwide purchased the remnants of the once great Polaroid company in 2005, the decision was made immediately to kill the production of instant cameras and all films.

Last month, the announcement finally came that all Polaroid film production has ceased.

Now, Petters/Polaroid is trying to sell us on their new ZINK cameras, crappy digital cameras with a paper output option. Further, we are being urged to consume Polaroid-branded televisions, DVD players, etc..

You’ve killed our photo love Petters, YOU BASTARDS!!! We are thousands strong and we will boycott your greedy asses til the day we die.

Think about it, Mr. Petters. You bought Polaroid solely because you covet the name/logo recognition. Now that you’ve divorced the company from it’s key product line, you’re left with nothing of value. As well, you’ve angered a swarm of artists, designers, creatives and professionals – the very people who create the ads and propaganda you depend upon. Bad, bad move.

Most people (normal people) would be surprised however to learn of the ongoing controversy which surrounds the beeb’s most recent squandering of our money.

The (Microsoft Windows Only) Desktop Client

Which allows you to download DRM encumbered BBC programming from the last 7 days and store and view it for the following 30 days, after which time the DRM technology built into the files renders them unplayable. This DRM protection however has roughly the strength of ten paper bags. But that’s beside the point.

The Windows iPlayer application uses the same Kontiki Peer to Peer client as does Channel 4’s 4OD. For the unitiated, this piece of software, once installed, will run constantly in the background as a “seed” hosting chunks of content oh behalf of the BBC for others to download from you rather than them. This is in essence the SAME technology as the BitTorrent which is touted by digital rights enthusiasts, such as the BBC as the root of all evil.

Aside from this. Kontiki is well known to randomly cuase high CPU load, systm freezes and lockups. Certainly not something i’d wnt to install on my Windows PC. If I had one.

Of course the other problem with the Windows based client software is just that. It is Microsoft Windows only. It is certainly not platform agnostic, and that is something to BBC is supposed to be duty bound to provide to license fee payers. By deciding to create a platform specific solution, in partnership with the supplier of that platform (Yes, Micorsoft were involved in the development of iPlayer) they are offering an unfair advantage to a private enterprise, and doing so using public funds.

The Online Streaming Service

Released around Christmas 2007, This promised to be an excellent opportunity for the BBC to finally offer up it’s programming to ALL license fee payer, regardless of whether or not they were also Microsoft license fee payers. They failed.

The choice of flash video streaming over RTMP offers yet again another unfair advantage to yet another private enterprise. Adobe. Rather than chose an open non-proprietary codec, they opted for yet another proprietary system of content delivery. So who do you think advised the BBC on their online streaming iPlayer service? Yes. Adobe Inc.

The “Salt In The Wounds” iPhone Service

So, last week some people started noticing that if visited using an iPhone, the iPlayer site was now serving up nice Non-DRM’d h.264 encoded MPEG4 files. A quick glance at a BBC pres release confirmed that yes, they had released a “streaming” service targetted specifically at the iPhone. Only it doesn’t stream. It’s just that the iPhone is able to buffer and begin playing the file as it downloads.

Most people with half a braincell realised that by simply changing the User Agent string in their browser they too could download an unencumbered lovely little h.264 of any program they wanted by simply looking at the html source and copying and pasting a URL.

The mainstream media reported these “hackers” and the BBC closed the security hole mumbling something about “oh, it was only supposed to be a beta, come on guys, ree-lax”. To suggest that switching user agents is hacking is tantamount to describing wolf-whistling builders as crazed rapists.

This then opens the debate, if the BBC do not have the rights to distribute their programming in an open format as they say they do, how is it they can offer this very service to users of one device, which is only offered by one mobile carrier (O2), only produced by one company (Apple) and has a relatively tiny user base.

From a simple marketing perspective this act gives Apple a HUGE extra selling point for their iPhone product in the UK. It’s almost beyond belief that this could be allowed.

Either they openly distribute their content to ALL those who are forced to fund it, or they don’t. It seems clear to me that the decision makes in all this are uneducated in the technologies involved. With a Personal Video Recorder under my telly, and a large enough hard disk, i can digitally record anything i want on any free-to-air channel, whenever i want – and keep it forever. Why go to such lengths to try and secure something which is so freely available.

Consider this scenario. I miss an episode of my favourite BBC TV show. It’s ok cause i had my Freeview digital video recorder i bought from ASDA to record it in full digital quality using nothing but the aerial on my roof. In fact i’ve recorded the entire series, as well as the previous series all in full SD broadcast quality… maybe even HD if i had freesat. It’s good enough to keep and watch again. Or share with others if I wanted.

Then consider another scenario. I miss an episode of my favourite BBC TV show. It’s ok cause i can head over to the iPlayer site and download a small but unrestricted h.264 encoded MPEG4. It’s pretty shitty quality, but good enough to watch at a push. I’ve done this every week since the show started, and i now have two series of it burnt to a CD at a fairly low resolution and bitrate, that i’ll probably dispose of once i’ve watched them all.

In which one of these sitations am i more likely NOT to go out and buy some BBC DVDs. And let’s face it, this whole debate boils down to potential loss of residual income.

The current state of play benefits no one but three giant multinational organisations and a UK mobile phone carrier, who pretend not to be BT Cellnet. All at the expense of the UK public.

I wonder if the EU Antitrust Commission are busy at the moment?

Update: The fix issued by the BBC seems to be more of a publicity stunt than an actual fix. The MP4 streams are still pretty much completely unsecured. Beebhack is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to watch the content they’ve paid for on their own terms. There’s also a really nice looking XBMC plugin, which if it works as good as it looks is gonna be amazing.