Music and Silicon

Chuck Moore CPU, Photo courtesy of NASA.

John Sokol, Inventor 5/11/03
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In the future all music will be sorted on Chips no larger then the tip of a pencil eraser and as thin as a piece of paper. These chips will need to be place in some cartridge to allow people to hold them without dropping then and loosing them. There are already examples of music on chips that are in practical used. Compact flash and MP3 Players already do this. The Multi Media Card (MMC) is very attractive since it’s the size of a postage stamp and can be places on a key chain. A 50-album music changer using the MMC cards could fit all the music chips into the faceplate of a card stereo on the dashboard.

SanDisk MMC Card.

Music on silicon has many advantages, damage resistant, much smaller, and vibration resistant, the players are extremely simple, the manufacturing cost and shipping costs can be much lower then CD’s. In addition copy protection can be incredible secure if done correctly. Currently you cannot by a flash card with prerecorded music titles.

Currently the music industry is plagued with piracy, file sharing and a copyright enforcement nightmare. Much of these stems from several poor decision the past.

1.) Choosing format (CD/DVD) that is compatible with computer storage. This allows anyone with a computer to read the raw binary data conveniently.
I can only guess they thought they were saving money.

2.) Choosing to store this data is the simplest raw binary data format, no compression and no encryption.

3.) When encryption using a static encryption method that can not be upgraded or changed.

4.) Publishing full specification openly for all to read.

5.) Relying on the government and legal system to attempt to prevent this.

We are in a technological arms race, with Moore’s law the computing power doubles every 1.5 years. With the Internet the ability to exchange music and video as well as collaborate and form cryptography code breaking teams and super computers is now easier then ever, Most new Copy protection is viewed not as a hurdle but as a new technological puzzle that is fun and exciting to try to solve.

The survivors in this new environment are not only the ones who can evolve new solutions but also the ones who develop new methods to allow them to change solutions faster then their opposition.

Current media such as CD are essentially sitting ducks. There data is there in plain readable format. Even the new formats proposed so far are like CD’s, they cannot change or alter their format to work around vulnerabilities and make the hackers have to work to gain access to their contents.

The proposed solutions involve a system that can allow Music format encryption to evolve and change for each title released. Code breakers may crack song but it will take them several months. By this time it will no longer be as popular. Also Cracking on CD will not get them the rest of the music on the Disk or other disks! Pirates will have to go back to making analog recording to steal their music and before creating an MP3, this will degrade the quality of copies.

The New proposed technologies could do the following:

1.) By using a closed and very exotic CPU technology that hackers/hobbyist will not be able to get access to, not it’s documentation.

2.) A CPU that is specifically designed to be extremely slows to emulate on a regular CPU such as a Pentium.

3.) The music itself would be “SMART” meaning it would be able to vary its format, encryption and compression with each title released.

4.) Would allow the music companies a way to respond to threats and defend against pirates on a technological level.

5.) In chip format the music storage device itself would in intelligent and would be able to play music without ever allowing access to it’s stored digital content.

6.) A new theory of information based on how the Brain itself stores information will increase Silicon memory storage by 10x.

This technology can go into 3 configurations.

1.) Dumb recordings such as CD, DVD, flash Memory, Chips and hard drives that are just a stream of Bit’s with no on board intelligence.

2.) Broadcast that is very similar to #1 in that there is no intelligence just a stream of digital data.

3.) Smart recordings. This is where the music is on a chip that can prevent the data from ever being exposed, it could defend itself in a sense.

Background:

John Sokol has been working with digital audio and compression since 1978 and is currently employed as a video compression expert. He started the Enumera project in early 1996 to do basic research of computing technologies and has been in the process of filing a number of patents based on this research. The research has been in the area of high performance, low power and cost computing, encryption, compression of audio and video, and fundamental information theory.

In this course of the Enumera project, there have been a number of collaborations, and some of the technologies have been spun out into different startups. Most notably www.nisvara.com a completely silent computer technology based on a new heat removal design.

Some of this work was collaboration with Chuck Moore the author the Forth Programming Language and inventor of a stack based architecture CPU chip. This is a powerful chip that is exceptionally small using 3000x less transistor then a comparable Intel CPU, uses almost no power, and because of this is inexpensive to manufacture. Chuck research and development on this goes back 20 years, it represents a generational leap in chip design that seemingly defies the laws of semiconductor physics. Earlier versions of the Moore chip have been purchased by NASA and certified for use in space, and several earlier chips have become commercial products produced my Hughes for the Aerospace industry.

A number of interesting commercial applications have been investigated, and we are now seeking to address these commercial opportunities.

We now seek to enter into joint venture arrangements with entities that have significant experience and capabilities in the market relevant to the intended applications.

CPU:

The Moore CPU uses only 16,000 Transistor 1/3000 the number of transistor used in the latest Intel CPU's,

This chip draws little power and gives low heat and runs at 500 Mhz Asynchronous. This chip had one major limitation different from current chips design and software programming technology. For this application this is desirable for a device that is designed to not be emulated or hacked. All these features combined with Low manufacturing costs makes this chip well suited for use in copy-protection systems.

There are currently working prototype versions of the CPU designed for other applications. Initial development costs of a CPU for this application is estimated at $4 Million. But once in production the cost is expected to be as low as 20 cents each for the Copy protection CPU for CD/DVD players and 10 Cents each for music storage on Silicon with the players costing only a few cents.

Application of interest for media companies:

Several technologies have been developed that can make a secure copy protection based on the physics of silicon and limitations of commercial off the shelf (COTS) computing technology.

Our solution has a significant advantage over public key, prime number and secret number based systems such as in DVD’s where once the number is discovered all of the disks are cracked. This much more secure then altering the formatting slightly as to allow some CD player to work while hoping to stop home computer users from ripping CD to MP3’s like Macrovision’s solution.

Analysis of Copy Protection problem:

If you can see it or hear it you can record it, the real goal it to prevent exact byte for byte copies that are as good as the original (or better).

Anti-piracy technology on CDs - Universal was the first major label to openly distribute a copy-protected CD in the United States, with the release of a soundtrack to the "Fast and the Furious" film in December.

One problem is the 1992 AHRA law allows music listeners to make some personal digital copies of their music. In return, recording companies collect royalties on the blank media used for this purpose. For every digital audio tape (DAT), blank audio CD, or minidisc sold, a few cents go to record labels.

A quote from congressman Rick Boucher: "I am particularly concerned that some of these technologies may prevent or inhibit consumer home-recording using recorders and media covered by the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), Any deliberate change to a CD by a content owner that makes (the allowed personal copies) no longer possible, would appear to violate the content owner's obligations."

This law seems most applicable because the Standard CD Audio format calls for uncompressed, unencrypted audio and modifying a standard CD to cause it to fail reading on a computer such as Midbar Technology's Cactus Data Shield and Macrovision's SafeAudio.

Worse yet according the techtv.com these methods don’t even work on many computers. As long as a few people can read the raw digital data they can encode it to DIVX or MP3 and share it on napster like file sharing services making the copy protection almost useless and only creates an inconvenience for legitimate customers.

Anti-piracy technology on DVD - didn’t suffer as much from the AHRA Law because its format was encrypted and compress from the start and the argument was made that analog copies were still possible. But that too didn’t last and at this point the DVD is easily read using open source software on Linux.

The November 25, 1997 edition of Off The Hook (relevant portion 21 minutes into show), reported that DVD copy protection had been defeated. The method involved a C program that hooks into the device drivers from Zoran's SoftDVD player to intercept decoded DVD data. Three years later, the encryption itself has been cracked. (From http://www.asleep.net/dvd/)

As in the DVD cracking there were several flaws. 1.) Raw digital data was exposed in software or hardware that could be intercepted. 2.) Software decoders could be reverse engineered or expose the encryption keys 3.) Encryption keys could be broken with enough computing power or intercepted from running software using a debugger or logic analyzer..

Another problem is that most CD and DVD players as well as car stereos and set top boxes are built using off the shelf CPU’s and decoder chips. Hackers have access to off-the-shelf tools, manuals and full specifications for these parts and are even better prepared to reverse engineer a product then the original designers were that developed the product.

Proposed solution.

To produce a very non-standard decoder chip for use in copy-protection systems that never allows raw digital data to be exposed and accessible. Our media chips don’t rely on current fixed compression decoders and encryption methods but would allow these to be changes out on a regular bases frustrating would be crackers.

Proposed methods:

USING EXISTING MEDIA FORMAT

Existing CD and DVD formats can be modified to work with Sokol enabled players. These players will also play old CDs and DVDs but newly released Sokol protected CDs and DVDs will only play on the Sokol technology based players. This method is a major improvement from current protection schemes but is still not 100% foolproof.

CD à Chuck Moore CPU chip à Analog Audio at a non-standard impedance level degrade direct analog recording.

DVD à (Chuck Moore CPU chip and MPEG decode) à RGB or YUV digital bit stream out and analog audio or lightly scramble digital audio.

CD’s and DVD could still be copied but would only play on a device using the Chuck Moore CPU chip and MP3’s and DIVX could not be created without some loss of quality from an analog copy.

NEW MEDIA FORMAT

Sokol’s music ROM (read only memory) modules work with special players. The new music module format combined with the Sokol-enabled player is the ultimate copy-protection solution the music industry has long sought. Our proposed new format also provides more than double the sampling rate of current CDs and can store far more music while players can be produced for much less than current CD players.

Digital music source burned onto Sokol music ROM module / chip (CDs replacement) à Analog Audio at a non-standard impedance level degrade direct analog recording.

HDTV OR SATELLITE DIGITAL VIDEO BROADCASTING

Sokol also has a copy-protection solution for HDTV and satellite broadcasts. HDTV has been held back due partly to copy protection issues broadcasters face. The new technology can allow the industry to now move forward without the fear of perfect copies being made of the broadcasts. Only degraded versions can be copied.

HDTV Tuner à PVR storage à Chuck Moore CPU chip à out to TV Display.