Tag: Analog Hole

  • Analog Hole Bill Requires "Open and Public" Discussion of Secret Technology

    Today I want to return to the Sensenbrenner-Conyers analog hole bill, which would impose a secret law – a requirement that all devices that accept analog video inputs must implement a secret technical specification for something called a VEIL detector. If you want to see this specification, you have to pay a $10,000 fee to…

  • What's in the Secret VEIL Test Results?

    I wrote last week about how the analog hole bill would mandate use of the secret VEIL technology. Because the law would require compliance with the VEIL specification, that spec would effectively be part of the law. Call me old-fashioned, but I think there’s something wrong when Congress is considering a secret bill that would…

  • Analog Hole Bill Would Impose a Secret Law

    If you’ve been reading here lately, you know that I’m no fan of the Sensenbrenner/Conyers analog hole bill. The bill would require almost all analog video devices to implement two technologies called CGMS-A and VEIL. CGMS-A is reasonably well known, but the VEIL content protection technology is relatively new. I wanted to learn more about…

  • CGMS-A + VEIL = SDMI ?

    I wrote last week about the Analog Hole Bill, which would require almost all devices that handle analog video signals to implement a particular anti-copying scheme called CGMS-A + VEIL. Today I want to talk about how that scheme works, and what we can learn from its design. CGMS-A + VEIL is, not surprisingly, a…

  • The Professional Device Hole

    Any American parent with kids of a certain age knows Louis Sachar’s novel Holes, and the movie made from it. It’s set somewhere in the Texas desert, at a boot camp for troublemaking kids. The kids are forced to work all day in the scorching sun, digging holes in the rock-hard ground then re-filling them.…