The record companies have unbelievably put up a site at HackSDMI.Org that offers a $10,000 reward to anyone who can hack the latest SDMI scheme — the contest runs from Sept. 15 to October 7. For those who do not know what SDMI is, it stands for Secure Digital Music Initiative and it is the anti-piracy, anti-user encryption scheme that the recording industry wants to use to stop the MP3 juggernaut. The problem being that say you have an electronic music player in your computer, your home stereo, your car and say a portable player for jogging, SDMI effectively means that you are going to have to pay a per device fee for songs (so, basically, if you have four devices and it costs $1 per song, you will wind up paying $4 per song to play it in all devices without enduring mind numbing secure transfer processes).
It will be interesting if anyone takes them up on the challenge since most hackers hate the whole SDMI proposal. The folks at ArsTechnica suggested a better plan would be to hack SDMI in as many ways as possible, but wait until after the standard is finalized before publishing the results. Personally, I think it is more likely the web site will get hacked and changed to some pro-Napster message than that a lot of folks will take their time hacking SDMI and then reveal the holes in the process to record company lackeys.
Besides, any encryption scheme which requires the encrypted text to be decrypted on literally millions of machines is inherently defective. Especially given the power of current computers, as soon as a song is decrypted into a digital stream of CD or better sound within my computer, which it has to be to be played back, the encryption is pointless since all I have to do is find a way to capture that stream and write it to a file (and there are plenty of those sorts of utilities floating around).
It looks like they gave up quick…