Just saw MIA’s Born Free video for the first time.  It contains life-like violence and is difficult to watch.  But it yields a striking combination of sound and imagery with a purpose. Boing Boing has info on the tune.  Amazing how this artist can flex from a $100 music video of her dancing in lasers to a complex short film with plenty of cash behind it.  [watch on vimeo]

Something I liked about the article was that it gave context to a technical social mashup idea I’ve been exploring, which is the increased use of near field communication (NFC) to increase one’s visibility in a meaningful way.  More specifically, people will use RFID tag readers in a mobile device like the iPhone to alert the world of their participation in entertainment experiences.

In The End of Solitude, Deresiewicz suggests the culture of celebrity is connected to the video camera, which I connect to broadcast television.  Regretfully, in the year when we could least afford it, reality TV gave rise to pointless distractions like the Balloon Boy and the White House Party Crashers.  But the article also describes the culture of connectivity as a product of the evolving use of computers and mobile communications in society.  As something of an evangelist for new media and a critique of old media, it is somewhat humbling for me to read Deresiewicz’s grouping of celebrity with connectivity in the contemporary self:

“Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.  It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.”

The value of different participatory entertainment activities runs the gamut.  A film at your local movie theater requires you to only buy a ticket before the film is sold out and ensure you show up at the scheduled time.  Getting yourself twenty feet from the stage at The Dead on July 4th at Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan requires a significantly greater level of planning.  But the relative interest in the social grid in any given activity is less important than the simple declaration to the post modern self that you “did it.”  People want to shout from the top of their literal or figurative mountains, “I am about to (or have just)  ____ at _____.”

Given that a lot of people love to share their experiences, many are simply limited by the inconvenience.  I’ve given some detail to my sense that there is a big splash still yet to be made by Apple’s touch platform.  And that the Touch lineup of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and the iSlate we will see a revolution in mobile computing.  They will allow us to enjoy the impulses of the modern self which are to take part in connectivity and some element of celebrity.

A topic that hasn’t been explored enough is the effect of including an RFID reader in a breakthrough device like the iPhone.  There is reason to believe that an RFID reader will be incorporated in the near future.   I believe that the inclusion of such hardware will open up opportunities to more quickly identify and disseminate interesting information about the entertainment spaces we’re inhabiting.

To illustrate a point, when I was writing the above paragraph I searched twitter for “Sherlock Holmes” which premiered this past weekend.  The third tweet from the top was from a student I’ve never heard of or met named Nicholas King.  From his Twitter bio, we know Nicholas is a student at Eastern Michigan and studies business.  Quite simply, Nicholas tweeted:

A quick search reveals that Trillium is a cinemas in Grand Blanc, Michigan and Nick was keeping his followers up to date with a text message from his phone.  While a text message accomplishes the goal of updating his thirty or so followers, it falls down for a few reasons:

1. Part of being fully connected is also having your information quickly sorted and grouped with similar data.  Twitter provides a reverse method for grouping information through its search.twitter.com functionality.  Users are capable of directly grouping their tweets with hashtags.  Both of those methods suffer the potential for data entry error.  I wouldn’t have known about Nick’s experience achievement if he had spelled it “Shelock Holmes.”
2. Manually updating your followers with the activity you’re participating in requires extended effort.  If you’re walking in the door of an RJD2 show you might have a drink in one hand and a gaggle of pals pulling you forward with the other. It isn’t always possible or at least socially acceptable to whip out your phone and type out an update.

The concept is this.  Sherlock Holmes is being distributed to theaters by Warner Bros Pictures.  In addition to sending out reels of film, Warner Bros would also send a small stand up display that is to be placed near the entrance to the theatre showing the movie.  If Nick carried an iPhone with an RFID reader, he would need only to wave his phone at the entrance and it would automatically pick up his preferences for sharing his location and the movie title he’s seeing via Twitter or Facebook.  More interesting things would be to automatically enter you in a contest for people who attended an Sherlock Holmes on opening weekend.

Another illustration to the benefits of adding an RFID reader to the iPhone in the realm of participatory entertainment is in live music or very large public entertainment events.  For instance, scanning the RFID tag in your section at a football game will identify the mobile capability to an application that could cue everyone to hold up their phones at a given time, display a particular set of images on the screen and turn the entire stadium into a megatron.  At a music festival like Rothbury, it might allow people to collect virtual zoo keys which turn an already amazing Sherwood Forest into something that is digitally enchanted.

The total extent to what could be done with connected devices incorporating RFID tags in combination with the impulse to reinforce personal visibility is impossible to see right now.  What is clear is that culture, technology and the increasing value of participatory entertainment rapidly is converging with all-in-one devices like the iPhone and iSlate.

Update 12/30/09:  A few additional things: 1. There is a strong sense that RFID will be most valuable for payment and wireless financial transactions.  The basis of my interest in RFID has been from seeing the NFC-enabled registers at places like McDonalds and Regal Cinemas.   When I first started seeing them, I would ask how often they took payment using the NFC at POS and I’d get blank stares from the employees.  MasterCard’s PayPass and American Express’s ExpressPay have been around for a while but have mostly only survived market tests as far as I can tell.

To look at how NFC/RFID payments and entertainment overlap, I love what it could do to damage the secondary ticket market.  I’ve long felt that secondary ticketing and scalping does more harm than good on the average would-be live entertainment participant.  Locking tickets to phones is a great way to help track and possibly reduce scalping while still allowing some flexibility in transferability.

There are some articles about how an RFID, NFC enabled phone are useful outside of entertainment which are worth linking to.  Here’s one that simply gooses the idea.  Here’s a second article that talks explicitly in terms of marketing opportunities.

I didn’t notice any smokers in Ratatouille, and I couldn’t see them in a new traditional film from Disney either. But the FT article goes on to state that Bob Iger’s position is that “the company would also ‘discourage’ depictions of smoking in films made by its other studio labels.”

Disney’s owns Bob Weinstein’s Miramax Films which has released a ton of adult-oriented features including Tarantino’s, Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs. Quentin Tarantino makes including cigarettes in his movies a recurrent presence. Iger goes on to say that argueing with filmmakers working under his roof about excluding cigarette smoking is a “confrontation we are certainly willing to have.”

The timing of the move is certainly not coincidental, as the MPAA recently began making smoking a factor in rating films. This change comes only two years after a suggestion by the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. So while Disney is doing the right thing being the first to take a hard line on tobacco use, it is also protecting a kid-friendly film ratings.

Keeping cigarettes out of the movies is one thing, but Disney aims to make a difference in the nutrition level of its customers as well. In October of 2006 Disney published new guidelines for both food available on theme park menus along with its promotional and licensed foods available in stores. This is most likely a move to help slow down the increase in obesity among children, but you have to question, why is Disney in the food business in the first place?

If Disney is going to get serious about kid’s health they’re going to have to take a hard look at the ethics of marketing to children in the first place.

Cloverfield AKA The Parasite AKA 1-18-08 had its teaser trailer break on the web today. You need to check this out, it looks awesome. The movie comes from Paramount pictures and Lost director JJ Abrams “shrouded in secrecy” hoping for free hype no-doubt. It is a disaster film of some kind supposedly shot through home video cameras. (via Quicktime)

Research In Motion’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie has been clowning on AT&T for giving away the farm with the iPhone. He says that AT&T is helping turn carriers into a commodity rather than a brand. Right now carriers create exclusive deals with phone companies to pull customers for the most popular types. There is some irony in Balsillie’s comments coming now–RIM just released its newest greatest phone, the Blackberry Curve 8300 under an exclusive contract with AT&T. (via BlackBerry Cool)

AACS is the standard system used to protect both HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs. It was developed by a variety of entertainment and technology giants including Intel, Microsoft, Warner Brothers, and Sony.

The most effective attack on the system prior to the retrieval of the AACS Processing Key was performed by a hacker named Muslix64 who created a software utility that allowed anyone to decrypt AACS content and thereby copy select movies where the Title Key was known. A large number of Title Keys are known and are available on the website AACSKeys.com.

This past weekend’s new attack by Arnezami published the Processing Key for AACS on February 11th, 2007. The key can be used to decrypt any HD-DVD or BluRay disc that has been published through today. The hack requires the Volume ID for each release to be known. Interestingly, Volume Keys can be easily guessed at this point. The publishing companies have been using simple information such as the date and time of the release or text from the title of the film.

If publishing companies begin to randomize the Volume IDs for new HD-DVD and BluRay movies, it is believed that a brute-force attack against the memory of HD media playback software like WinDVD will allow all future HD media releases to be decrypted and copied with little effort.

This represents a striking blow against HD DRM, and has not been publicly commented on by the AACS Asssociation Management. The last public statement from the group was on January 24th, 2007 in response to Musilix64′s hack which stated:

AACS LA has confirmed that AACS Title Keys have appeared on public web sites without authorization. Such unauthorized disclosures indicate an attack on one or more players sold by AACS licensees. This development is limited to the compromise of specific implementations, and does not represent an attack on the AACS system itself, nor is it exclusive to any particular format. Instead it illustrates the need for all AACS licensees to follow the Compliance and Robustness Rules set forth in the AACS license agreements to help ensure that product implementations are not compromised. AACS LA employs both technical and legal measures to deal with attacks such as this one, and AACS LA is using all appropriate remedies at its disposal to address the attack.

It is important to point out that the AACS system has not been cracked, only bypassed because the keys were found. In my co-authored 2003 paper “An Analysis of DVD Encryption” I stated:

Hackers did not break the encryption scheme through conventional attacks–the player decryption keys were mishandled. If one were to lose their house keys with the address on the key chain, they could reasonably expect a rogue try and gain entry.

I suppose that history was doomed to repeat itself.

For some follow-up on this I’ve contacted the AACS press representative for comment on this most recent attack but have not heard back yet. In addition I’ve contacted Dan Wallach of Rice University, who wrote a paper I referenced in college. Dan’s paper was published in IEEE Computer in 2001 and is titled: “Copy Protection Technology is Doomed” and is worth a read for anyone interested in the protection of consumer media. I asked Dan’s thoughts on the retrieval of the AACS protection key, if I get some good commentary back I’ll post it up.

Update 2/15/07:

I heard back from Dan, he suggests that AACS is not exactly defeated yet, and that it should be looked into an additional content protection scheme known as SPDC. Here’s one of the questions I posed to him:

I wanted to see what your evaluation is of what appears to be the defeat of this protection system and also whether you think the implications of the protection defeat of another major media type means that media will be going DRM free in the future.

Dan’s response:

It’s a little early to declare it “defeated”. In particular, the AACS system has mechanisms to “revoke” specific players, which they may start using in an attempt to defeat these guys. Furthermore, if that fails, there’s a whole other mechanism called SPDC. You can read more about how SPDC and AACS work here:
http://securityevaluators.com/eval/spdc_aacs_2005.pdf

Long term, I still stand by my original “doomed” paper. The question is how long it’s going to take to get there from here.

(On a side note, it’s not at all clear that the market cares. There are almost no titles available in either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Remember DVD-Audio and SACD? Both of those standards went nowhere and are now relegated to obscure things. It’s just not clear that people are willing to pay the premium cost of HD relative to the already quite good quality of regular DVDs.)

Dan

It is great that he stands by his doomed paper and his additional commentary about the state of HD media. Will consumers care about this new format? I’ll leave discussion of the infiltration of HD capable devices into consumer homes via XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 console’s to other blogs for now.

I looked at the SPDC paper and wonder myself whether once an existing ripped copy of HD video such as the infamous “serenity” has been re-burned to a blu-ray or hd-dvd disc without any provisions for copyright, how a player could refuse to play it. It seems that these devices must be made to comply with playing unprotected HD media, otherwise how will consumers store and playback video taken with HD camcorders in the future?

If the playback device can’t tell the difference between a HD video of a toddler’s birthday party and a ripped and stripped copy of King Kong, what can be done to stop it? It appears to me that at best media companies will be able to trace pirated content back to the device that actually ripped the media. This is a far cry from preventing illegal playback once the conent has found wide distribution on the internet.
Finally, It is worth noting that the CSS protection for DVDs was released around 1996 and not broken until October 1999–well after DVDs were prolific in the marketplace.

AACS protection for HD media began appearing in 2006 and has already had a severe attack in the first quarter of 2007. To me, this suggests that as consumers adopt the new format they will be walking into a situation where there are already