Day: April 26, 2001

When the Secure Digital Music Initiative conducted its much-publicized SDMI Challenge — which offered a cash reward for anyone who could crack its protection — a group of Princeton researchers claimed they had found away around SDMI copy protection but refused to enter their solutions in the challenge because they preferred to publish them academically instead.

Now the SDMI is suing, and for now the researchers are backing down, to prevent the researchers from presenting their findings. Of course it’s a bit late since the paper that SDMI doesn’t want presented was already published on numerous web sites.

The interesting thing about SDMI is that, based on what the Princeton researchers found, the SDMI system was even less sophisticated than even its biggest critics had thought. SDMI utilize a watermarking scheme and the researchers used relatively straightforward methods to remove the watermarks without seriously degrading the quality of the sound (as they put it, the sound does degrade, but no worse than the degradation caused by the presence of the watermark itself).

In fact the methods the Princeton researchers are so obvious that quite a few Slashdot posters on the topic seem to think that the SDMI intentionally included techniques that it doesn’t plan to use and knows would be broken (though it is difficult to fathom why they would do this given that music companies were already a bit nervous about whether or not SDMI would actually provide copy protection that was reasonably difficult to circumvent).

As the Princeton researchers sum it up, all such copy protection schemes are likely doomed,

Do we believe we can defeat any audio protection scheme? Certainly, the technical details of any scheme will become known publicly through reverse engineering. Using the techniques we have presented here, we believe no public watermark-based scheme intended to thwart copying will succeed. Other techniques may or may not be strong against attacks. For example, the encryption used to protect consumer DVDs was easily defeated. Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.

Games Domain reports that the DVD version of the Dungeons and Dragons movie will ship with a demo of Baldurs Gate II. Big deal. The real challenge would be to release a version of the D&D movie that was actually watchable.

A worldwide effort to eradicate polio by 2005 appears to be making great strides — since 1998 reported polio cases have dropped by 99 percent.

In 1988, 350,000 cases of polio were reported, but worldwide only 3,500 cases of the disease were reported, with all of those cases occurring in only 20 countries in Africa and Asia.

“Victory over the polio virus is within sight,” World Health Organization director-general Gro Harlem Bruntland told the Associated Press. Last year WHO managed to immunize 550 million children under the age of 5 against polio, but reaching that last 1 percent of cases may be difficult since they tend to occur in remote areas plagued by civil strife or in areas that will require massive vaccination efforts, such as in India, to ensure the disease is truly eradicated.

Still even with those obstacles to overcome, the WHO and other organizations are confident they can meet their goal of ridding the world of the disease by 2005.

Sources:

Polio eradication draws closer. The BBC, April 3, 2001.

U.N.: Worldwide polio eradication at 99 percent. The Associated Press, April 3, 2001.

With great fanfare pharmaceutical companies and the South African government announced earlier this month that the drug companies were dropping a lawsuit against South Africa’s proposal for cheap AIDS drugs. This was celebrated as a great victory, though it is highly questionable whether the agreement will have any effect on the AIDS epidemic in South Africa.

In 1997 South Africa enacted a law that would have given the government the ability to authorize generic versions of patented AIDS drugs to be sold in South Africa. Numerous pharamceutical companies joined together to sue the government, arguing that it lacked the authority to do so under the South African Constitution as well as various international treaties on intellectual property.

For thtree years the drug companies manged to keep the law suspended while they fought it in court, but the move turned out to be a public relations nightmare. People accused the pharmaceutical companies of putting their own profits before people’s lives (forgetting, of course, the immense amoun tof money needed to research and produce anti-AIDS drugs).

But the upshot of the whole fiasco and the recent settlement is that it was largely a pointless exercise in public relations by both sides. After all, the government of South Africa has yet to decide if it will actually invoke the law. Even without the associated patent costs, anti-AIDS drugs are probably still too expensive simply to manufacture and distribute, especially given South Africa’s poorly developed medical infrasturcture.

There is ample precednet for this. As Dr. Harvey Bail, director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Assocation, notes, India doesn’t recognize patents for drug compounds at all — there is nothing stopping manufacture of any medicine patented anywhere else in the world. And yet even with diseases that are serious problems in India, such as tuberculosis, only enough drugs are produced to treat about 15 percent of people infected with the disease.

Systemic poverty is still the single biggest health care obstacle in the developing world, and looks to remain so for the forseeable future.

Sources:

Head-to-head: Aids drugs. The BBC, April 19, 2001.

Cheaper drugs a long way off. The BBC, April 19, 2001.

Joy at SA Aids drugs victory. The BBC, April 19, 2001.

Aids court battle: Joint statement. The BBC, April 19, 2001.