[Wylug-announce] Leafletting date now set

[Martyn Ranyard]

from the UK-Free-Skylarov Announce list :

Subject: [Free-sklyarov-uk] CD leafletting day, Saturday October 7th

Okay, we've agreed a new date for the CD leafletting - Saturday
October 7th.  This gives us two weeks to get organized and bring
groups together.

In naming this date, we have had to bear in mind the current
international situation, so if any disaster does occur that would once
again make our leafletting meaningless, we might have to call it off,
although I sincerely hope this does not occur.

That said, it's time to start getting things together.  If you are
planning to do some leafletting, let me have your contact details for
the web-site.  Last time, we managed to get six towns and cities
represented in just 2-3 days - so this time, with a little more
warning, hopefully more people will be able to join in.

Regarding news, there have been more reports of additional
copy-protection formats coming onto the scene.  We'd already discussed
SafeAudio (the one that corrupts the data), but another one has come
to light called Cactus, which was originally being secretly tested on
the innocent CD-buying public of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Since then 1,000,000 Cactus-encoded CDs have been released all over
Europe, but where exactly is not being revealed.  This information
comes from Midbar, the creators of Cactus, so unless they are
boasting, it should be reliable.

Cactus also works by corrupting the data, but by replacing entire
audio blocks with control-data blocks, forcing the CD player to
completely fabricate the sound for those blocks.  If digitally copied,
the control data is interpreted as audio data and makes the recording
sound terrible.  Once again this technique is going to have
consequences on the reliablity of these CDs.  There was also the
possibility taken up by several articles that the `hidden' audio could
be designed to damage speakers if a copied CD was played.  Midbar
quickly denied that this was the case and forced the New Scientist to
withdraw their article on the subject [*].  This is all very very
suspicious.

  http://uazu.net/cd/links.html
  http://uazu.net/cd/

So far we only have one confirmed report of a copy-protected CD in the
UK - the Michael Jackson one I mentioned in another post.  If anyone
has any CDs close by that have been bought relatively recently, please
consider trying to extract a track or two from each to see if we can
enlarge this list with some more positively identified `bad' CDs.

I know for certain that I'm going to check every new CD that *I* buy,
whether I want to use it in MP3 format immediately or not.  I don't
want to discover the problem three months down the line when I might
have lost the receipt.

Any other snippets of related news that anyone comes across, please
post them either to me or to the list.

Many thanks -

Jim

[* My guess is that damage is of course possible - for the same reason
that there used to be warnings on CDs telling you not to play the data
track on an mixed data/audio CD because it might damage your speakers.
Most probably the New Scientist was reacting to a stiff letter from
Midbar's legal department. ]

--
Jim Peters                  (_)/=\~/_(_)                        Uazú
                          (_)  /=\  ~/_  (_)
jim@                  (_)    /=\    ~/_    (_)                  www.
uazu.net           (_) ____ /=\ ____ ~/_ ____ (_)           uazu.net



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