 How it affects you and what you can do about it. So what's a broadcast flag? Well, a few different definitions. Legally, it's a rule that forces DRM on to free over the air digital television broadcasts. Does that by a technology mandate on DTV tuners, anyone who manufactures a device capable of demodulating the HDTV signal must bake in DRM as of July 1st, 2005. Specifically, broadcast flag is metadata that goes along with the ATSC signal, telling you what you can or more likely can't do with that signal. Every tuner device, again, has to watch for and recognize that flag and implement it in a temper resistant non-user modifiable way so that if the signal is flagged, do not copy. It can't let you copy it. We have here a PC with an HDTV tuner card. The display there is displaying HDTV that we captured over the air in our San Francisco office just last week. I think it's showing CSI, one of the few, but growing, number of shows that's being broadcast in HDTV. We captured that to a couple of big disks that we've got in this machine. And once we've got that file, it's unencrypted MPEG 2. We can do what we want with it. We can pause live TV. We can play it back. We can store it for later viewing. We can take excerpts from it to use in our critical reviews. In other words, we've got complete flexibility to make fair uses of this content. Motion Picture Studios don't like that. And that's why we got to the broadcast flag. It affects digital over the air television. It doesn't affect premium cable or satellite television or analog television. So this is one very specific class of the kinds of things you can receive on your television. But it is the class of signals that Congress has said in the Telecommunications Act the kinds of signals broadcasters should be transitioning to from the current analog broadcasts and in order to encourage their transition, they've helped the Motion Picture Studios along with these restrictions on what we as individuals can do with those signals. Why should you care now? Well, the broadcast flag takes effect July 1st, 2005. As of that point, it becomes unlawful to manufacture or import tuners that give access to the unencrypted digital signal. So you have 334 days left for unencumbered digital television, but any tuner device you buy now will continue to work. If it ignores the broadcast flag now, it'll ignore the broadcast flag 335 days later. Buy tuner cards now. 334 shopping days. Not all of those are shopping days. How did we get here? Well, this is a cartoon from the time of the Sony Betamax case when the Motion Picture Studios sued Sony for manufacturing the Betamax, this old-style VCR that could record over-the-air television, not digital, that time. And the lower court ruled that the VCR was illegal because it could be used for copying without authorization of the copyright holder. Cartoonists here asked, which one of these is illegal? And the Supreme Court, of course, later reversed that decision, telling us that because time-shifting was non-infringing fair use, the VCR was capable of substantial non-infringing uses, even if some people who used it would rank pirates, other people who used it were making non-infringing fair uses, we wouldn't outlaw the technology. And that's been the spore that's allowed technologists to continue making not only VCRs, but Teavos and MP3 players, all sorts of devices confident that because they had substantial non-infringing uses, they could make their technologies without asking permission from the movie studios first. You have a question in the back? We are challenging the line, we're getting told that. So Seth is gonna explain a little bit of the history of how we got to the broadcast flag from that case 20 years ago when the Supreme Court said VCRs are good. Yeah, I wanted to talk about the history, particularly because I've been working on the broadcast flag issue for about three years. So it's really been, I've been with it for a while and I would be glad to talk about the history for much longer if anyone is interested, but I'm going to try to cram it down and give some of the highlights. So in the good old days, in the heyday of user rights under copyright law, there were very few legal restrictions inspired by copyright on what kind of technology people could make and distribute. There were a series of excellent user rights cases that protected people's right to make and to sell copying technology, even protected their right to break encryption imposed by copyright holders and protected their right to reverse engineer and interoperate with devices and media formats without prior permission. All of these things were in the past upheld by the courts. That doesn't mean that Congress, for example, can't change the law to add and create new restrictions. That is exactly what Congress did most famously with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act changed the outcome of a number of those pro-user rights cases. There was a deal between the industries that were interested in the DMCA. The deal was called no mandate. The theory was if you have encryption or another technical measure that restricts how people can use something or how they can interoperate with something, it will be unlawful to defeat that encryption, but there will not be any new additional regulation on how people can use open formats, even if they know or if they have reason to know that a copyright holder disapproves of how the open formats are being used. So the DMCA doesn't provide absolute control over technology in every situation. It provides a very broad and powerful control over technology in the case where encryption is present and where technology is proprietary. So in that sense, you could say that the DMCA had the effect of dividing the world into the proprietary world where you can't touch things without permission and the open standards world where you can still do what you like. In the proprietary world, the theory is get a license if you want to interoperate, go negotiate, go get prior permission. In the open world, the protections of the prior court cases protecting technology are still effective, and even if copyright holders are unhappy with the scope of technology, with the scope of what it allows you to do, they don't get a veto over your design decisions within the open technology world. That's the world of open standards like HTML, like text files, like MPEG2 files, like AUG files, like MP3 files. So the industry has this private licensing ideal. I have a lot of regret about this ideal because it's become so pervasive that it's hard to get people even to remember that there was a time when this was not the case. The current theory under the DMCA is you can't get our content without agreeing to our rules about how it can be used. This is enforced with encryption. When the works are published, they're encrypted, triggering DMCA protection, and thus, if you choose to interoperate with the content, to interoperate with the medium, to interoperate with the technology without permission, you'll be a DMCA violator, as the courts have interpreted it. The industry feels that DVD is the fundamental vindication of this approach, because DVD is a proprietary licensed technology, and people agreed contractually to various restrictions on the feature set that they could implement when they implemented DVD. A lot of people feel there's a question. A legal term called effective, whether something in the ordinary course of its operation, a vague term, effectively controls access, or effectively protects the right of a copyright holder. There are lots of court cases trying to define effective, and that's a complicated legal question. But it basically, it's very important, they have to actually do something in order to prevent you from interoperating, and what they do has to be at least powerful enough that you would have to do something to get around it, and that's very important, because what we're going to see with the broadcast flag is an erosion of that standard into even if you don't have to do anything to get around it, people will try to impose additional regulations on you. But the DMCA did not go that far. So a lot of people in industry feel that DMCA was, I'm sorry, that DVD was this great vindication because DVD was this industry licensed thing. It uses encryption, as we discovered in the Corley case, it triggers DMCA protection, and it's popular with consumers. And so they say, but if we didn't have the DMCA, we never could have done this. And so this is in the view of a lot of industry people, the new norm. You want to interoperate, you go, you negotiate, you get a license, you get permission. That's the way things are going to be in the future. We don't really like that, but that's the industry view. The Motion Picture Association feels that even this legal regime does not go far enough to protect its interests, because sometimes for various reasons, primarily what they refer to as legacy reasons, movies might still be available to people in unregulated open technologies. The recording industry is kind of conflicted over whether it wants more restrictions or not. The Recording Industry Association signed a pledge not to seek any regulations of open technologies. And then it went back on that pledge and started advocating such restrictions. So we're not sure exactly how they think about this. The Motion Picture Industry has never claimed that the DMCA went far enough and has always claimed that additional regulations on top of the DMCA would be necessary from their point of view. So I had a few examples of things that the DMCA does not control the feature set of implementations of. Audio CDs, things like MP3 streams, analog recordings like VHS, television broadcasts, that's what we're going to be talking about today, analog outputs from DVD or satellite, and analog outputs from cable, even premium cable. So all of these things are uncontrolled, meaning that regardless of what copyright works may be present, regardless of what indication people may have about what policies copyright holders prefer, the DMCA does not reach far enough to allow copyright holders to dictate to technology implementers what they may do with these sources. So MPIA said there are three technologies that particularly worry them. They want these technologies to be regulated because these technologies are particularly threatening. The first is unencrypted digital television, broadcast over the air. The second is analog captures, the so-called analog hole. We started to make fun of them over the term analog hole, so they renamed it the analog reconversion problem, or analog reconversion issue. The analog issue is a very fundamental issue. In order for something to be perceived by a person, it needs to be converted back into an analog form. At that point it can be digitized by any device that can digitize an analog signal. So for example, you might have a DVD. The DVD has to be converted into an analog format for you to perceive it. If it's converted into an electrical analog format, like NTSC, like S-Video, you can plug that into the input of an analog to digital converter, a video digitizer, and you can digitize it. And regardless of the encryption that may have existed in the first place, the encryption will not serve to prevent it from being re-digitized, as the industry says. And that can be done with very high quality. There's no theoretical amount of noise that will necessarily be there. You know that noise is added, but there's no law of physics that says that it has to be very much noise. And if you get good equipment, it may be very little. So they say there's this analog hole, and it's a big problem, and they want to regulate analog to digital converters. And they are trying to do that, and they haven't done it yet. And that's an interesting issue that's still alive. And finally, if people do decrypt or do use the analog hole to re-digitize something, they may use file sharing or other uncontrolled channels. And the motion picture industries say that they would like to be able to detect when that has occurred, and after the fact, apply some control upon detecting that this has occurred. And that means some kind of watermark detector inside PC is somewhere, or inside PC display is somewhere. So when you decrypt the thing and you circulated or you recorded on some medium, they're going to notice, oh, this is actually some commercial audio visual work that has been decrypted. So now that we know that, we're going to reimpose restrictions on how it can be used. And MPAA has said very publicly and repeatedly, especially during the tenure of former MPAA president, Jack Valenti, who recently retired in favor of Mr. Glickman, former Secretary of Agriculture. They've said they're going to seek these three additional regulations on top of the DMCA, because all of those three technologies are essentially open standards or open formats that the DMCA regulation does not reach. So Fox News Corporation in 2001 invented something that they called the broadcast flag. Because US digital television broadcast over the air is digital and unencrypted, there are no DMCA restrictions on what you can do with it when you receive it. So Fox said, well, there ought to be something in the headers, something in the metadata that would indicate that a copyright holder doesn't want something to be redistributed to the public. Once we've defined that metadata, we can seek legislation based on it. We can seek regulations based on it. So they invented this. They can indicate when they want a device to obey some kind of redistribution control rule, and then in their ideal world, devices will recognize it and comply. I asked one of the people who invented the broadcast flag back in 2001, why would a device maker comply with these restrictions? And his first answer was, well, they recognized that it's the right thing to do. His second answer was, they recognized that they have a shared interest in the continuing viability of commercial audio-visual content distribution. And his third answer was, we might need to seek a little regulation of some sort. The third answer turned out to be the most powerful answer of those three. So the standards committee allocated them some space in the headers in a thing called the PSIP table, which contains things that describe what's on, like a program title or a program rating, similar to where they have closed caption data. So the standards committee said, and you can have this flag indicating whether you want to claim redistribution control or not. But they didn't say that it meant anything or that anyone had to do anything about it. They just said you can have this header. So then people went to the Copy Protection Technical Working Group where we frequently participate and said, let's have a discussion about what this flag should mean, what devices ought to do when they see the flag in this unencrypted stream? How should they react? So essentially it was a big negotiation where a bunch of people wrote some legislation, but they didn't call it that. They called it a technical discussion about what the right way for a device to respond would be. And it happened to include things like, well, the device should be hard for users to modify because they might remove this protection. So it actually read like legislation. It even had legislation section numbers. They called it like x.2, code section x subsection one, code section x subsection two, but they didn't call it legislation. And then they had a big political argument for the better part of the year about whether they had reached a consensus or not. And at the same time, a lot of people were lobby in Congress and saying, look, this industry group is coming up with this thing. You ought to make it the law that devices that receive TV should follow these rules that we in industry have written. The Congress flirted with this a bit and then kicked it over to the Federal Communications Commission, which opened up a docket, which went on for a long time, lots of comments, lots of arguments about whether the FCC should impose these rules or some other rules on device manufacturers who make digital television devices. If they didn't do that, the devices would keep on ignoring the flag because this is a standard that's been standardized. People are broadcasting in this format. There are devices out there that receive this. So in the absence of a law, as we found, devices would not obey this. They would not react to it. It would just be, oh, that's some interesting metadata. Okay, we don't care. My analogy is, imagine if your email could have an ex-no-forward header, indicating that you didn't want a message to be forwarded to anybody. And then you say, user agents ought to detect the presence of the no-forward header in email and obey it. They ought to refuse to forward an email message that has the no-forward header. So of course the only way you can do that is make it illegal to write a mail user agent that fails to respect the no-forward header. There is the slight inconvenience that the email standards, RFC 822 and so on, are public standards with no encryption. So you have to rely on finding or imprisoning those people who choose to continue to implement the public email standards without respecting your no-forward header. That is exactly what the Motion Picture Association has asked the Federal Communications Commission to do. Their main arguments were, it's not safe to have unencrypted HDTV programming because file sharing will destroy our markets and various things like this. They also said the industry is converging on DRM. Everyone in industry has agreed that DRM is the norm. So now it's kind of weird and retro and legacy to have an unencrypted media format. And at the very least, you can steer the content out of the unencrypted media format in a modern DRM proprietary format because that's where industry is growing. They said this is just the beginning of a larger framework to control infringement. So if it's not complete in itself, you at least have to make your journey of a thousand miles begin with a single regulation. And finally, the most powerful argument was, we will not provide our content for digital television broadcast unless you adopt a rule. That was the key argument. The argument was we're going to boycott the digital television transition if you don't do this. And the digital television transition is very important to the FCC. From the point of view of Congress, it's perhaps the most important thing that the FCC is now undertaking. And so when essentially all of the major movie studios and some of the networks that they owned and were friends with said we're going to start boycotting this transition. We're going to have to withhold our high quality content. Because hey, nice television format you've got here. It would be a real shame if something happened to it. So that was a fairly persuasive argument. We and some technology companies said this is a bad idea. First of all, these files are huge. On here, they're about six gigabytes per hour. So it's kind of hard to imagine that people are actually going to send them over file sharing networks. It's not like an MP3 track where you've got like two megabytes. If you record an hour show, it's going to be six gigabytes. That's kind of difficult to download for most people. So maybe that's not going to be such a big threat. We also said as a policy matter, this is a really bad idea. It's going to make digital television technology cost more and do less. It's going to be bad for innovation because there will be these gatekeepers. You need to ask them permission. That hasn't been the case before. It will be bad for fair use because it will inevitably prevent people from doing such as sending clips to family members or a lot of other things. It will be bad for open source because you won't be able to implement it in open source because of these tamper resistance requirements, these robustness requirements euphemistically. And it's a bad regulatory precedent because it suggests that anytime an open standard scares entertainment copyright holders, they can just come in and set rules for how people can use that open standard, which goes far beyond the DMCA. And if you let them do it this time, they'll go back and saying, this technology is too big a risk, that technology is too big a risk, you've got to regulate this and that and the other thing. Finally, it won't work well because there are lots of holes. One of our filings said this isn't a solution, it's a sieve. One of the holes we're advocating here today, which is the fact that devices manufactured before the regulation takes effect will continue to work because there's no change in the format. That's the so-called legacy hole. There's also the analog hole, the DVI grandfathering in because a bunch of people had DVI monitors that don't do DRM, so they said if you give a slightly resolution-reduced DVI output, that doesn't need to be encrypted for legacy reasons forever. So there are a lot of holes. Also, it's a public standard with no crypto, so anybody can implement it. Small numbers of people have gotten together and implemented this from scratch. So it's not necessary, it's a harmful thing, and it's not going to work well. We adopted the rule. The pressure of the we're going to boycott the digital television transition was too politically difficult for them to resist, and they said as of July 1st, 2005, less than one year from the date of our current presentation, devices that are manufactured that receive terrestrial digital television broadcasts, as well as certain cable TV things that are still being argued about, and so we're not going to address that may only output or record digital television programs that have this flag to analog outputs, to government-approved DRM technologies, or to certain weird exceptions like this legacy DVI thing, and they must not be modifiable the term is robustness by a user to do otherwise. So all of your GTV receivers have to be tamper resistant. There is a court challenge led by public knowledge We're a party to the court challenge A bunch of non-profit groups are saying that the FCC lacked authority to impose the broadcast flag rule We heard yesterday that people in the movie industry are not giving us very good odds with this challenge We're optimistic because we think that there's no precedent for the FCC doing something like this without express congressional authority Congress didn't specifically say that they could do this and the court challenge is just getting started we'll see where it goes The broadcast flag is very strange because there's no encryption there's just this legal regulation it sends a really weird message as we parse the message it is if your open standard is too threatening to copyright holders it can be made proprietary retroactively through legislation or regulation that's a scary message to us and as we've seen copyright industries are also targeting other technologies such as analog to digital converters potentially digital to analog converters file sharing software with legislation like the induce act and recently digital radio which like digital television is also unencrypted and they've argued that that's an unreasonable risk so that the receivers should be regulated and forced to apply DRM so I'm going to go back to Wendy for a continuing discussion leading into our cool personal video recorder project Thanks Seth Seth was saying the broadcast flag is weird broadcast flag is weird technologically because of all of the problems with implementation and the technical realities that it doesn't take account of it's also weird from a copyright law perspective traditionally US copyright law is to promote the progress of science and useful arts copyright law gives a basket of exclusive rights to the copyright holder in order to promote public benefit public access to those works to the copyright their entry into the public domain the copyright law started out at the founding a fairly narrow bundle of rights a narrow set of rights and a narrow restriction on what the public could do you couldn't copy bend or distribute charts maps and books and the founders copyright now you can't reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of publicly perform, publicly display or publicly digitally perform anything that a copyright holder has fixed in a tangible medium of expression and anything and everything can be subject to copyright as soon as it is fixed as long as it's original but at the same time copyright is still fairly narrow copyright has been expanding though through anti-circumvention anti-circumvention law says that if a copyright holder applies digital locks to a work then it's a violation of the law to circumvent those copy controls to break those digital locks even if what you were doing would not be a violation of copyright so copyright law has the fair use exception it's a fair use and not an infringement of copyright to take an excerpt from a movie to use in your critical review or to take a quotation from a book and use it in your news report not a violation of copyright but if the copyright holder has put a digital lock on the work and you need to break that digital lock in order to get the clip to make your fair use you might be circumventing so anti-circumvention covers much more than copyright and puts a layer of additional restrictions on to the public what we can do with copyrighted works well take that expansion and go one greater technology mandates like the broadcast flag say it shall be unlawful to make a technology that can, that doesn't have DRM to protect the digital locks to protect the copyrights so for this negative copyrighted expression you've now got digital locks and technologies anyone who makes a technology to deal with copyrighted works now is the government's finger in that design process and the broadcast flag says anyone who makes a digital TV tuner has got to go through the FCC licensing process or use approved technologies can't just go to your garage and build what you think would work best for the public your, and you can't rely on the Sony Betamax standard of substantial non-infringing use to say that because most of what people can do with this technology is non-infringing and fair, our technology is good, instead you're stuck with get approval first and promising technologies are unlikely to see the light of day because of that kind of restriction and the way in which that process becomes political very significant negotiating leverage to copyright holders because now that there's a political approval or disapproval process there's an opportunity for copyright holders to say we don't trust that technology we don't like that technology and their reason for doing that may be some kind of marketplace reason that's unrelated to their stated reason so that's an additional risk from this so what does this mean for the public general public joke you average our digital video recorder you buy will have DRM baked in and can you record to a plain old DVD can you send a clip to your mother can you watch TV recorded in one place on the plane or at another house or lend a disc to your friend to watch those are questions that we don't know the answers to but if the motion picture industry has its way in the various technologies that are approved the answer to all of those will probably be legitimate not infringing uses of television will be blocked because you won't be able to buy the technological device you need to make those uses the average consumer who can't hack his machine will just be stuck and so what does this mean for the geeks you can hack your machine why should you be concerned some may ask well it still means that any tuner digital video recorder you can buy will have the DRM baked in and maybe you can hack the hardware to build your own DVR but no compliant device will work with open source drivers because open source is by definition not tempo resistant and it is designed to be user modifiable well if you can comment out the if broadcast flag don't save then broadcast flag doesn't do much good well the NPA may be politically stupid but then they may be opposed to us but they're not stupid they recognize that and they would clearly oppose anything that was implementable in open source and will would likely be able to convince the FCC that that was not tempo resistant and that the that would not give them the protection that the FCC has already said it will give them so Brad Hunt we recently had an article in Wired News talking about our digital television liberation front and Brad Hunt CTO of the MPAA said there are a lot of things that are still going to be allowed under the broadcast flag as though that was a retort to all of the things that we said were problems with this technology well a lot of things doesn't mean everything it doesn't mean everything that copyright law permits will still be possible it means a lot of things that the motion picture association doesn't deem to threatening and it's precisely that fringe class of uses that the motion picture industry deems threatening but are not infringements of copyright that it's most important to protect because it's in that fringe that the technological innovation happens it's there that we got the VCR it's there that we got Tivo because they didn't have to ask permission before they developed because they were allowed to develop the fair uses and then let the court rule on them that we got rulings that permitted time shifting that we got concessions from the movie industry that well they may not like Tivo they can't sue it out of existence they did sue replay TV out of existence however for making technology that was slightly less friendly to them like having the commercial skip feature instead of just go in through the back door to enable a 30 second advance but some good news as we stated at the beginning mandate doesn't take effect until July 1st 2005 and for the backwards compatibility and because this is an open standard tuners built now continue to work unrestricted and HDTV tuners are available for PCs running Linux and Windows with drivers for both under both of those operating systems there is a tuner device that's either just became available or will shortly become available for macOS and again buy it now it will continue to work it will continue to give you the unencrypted full digital output come July 2nd 2005 so this box that we've got sitting up here is a Pentium 4 3 GHz machine with the PCHDTV HD2000 card that is a PC card that receives the digital signal running on any flavor of Linux this one happens to be running Debian with the software package MythTV MythTV is a free open source software package that's been developed collaboratively by a team of developers it was started by Isaac Richards you can find it online at mythtv.org and there's continuing development to integrate HDTV drivers and improvements to use HDTV even better than it already is but stock works well with HDTV projects like Knopp Myth making live CDs that you can boot off the CD and make a little front end machine or install from the CD to make the DTV recorder machine is a Tivo on steroids this machine can record live over the air HDTV or standard definition television it can pause live TV it can schedule updates it has a programming guide so MythTV opening screen watch television get a lineup select from that lineup that you want to record a program come into the program guide watch the program choose from other programs up there a few screenshots from some HDTV content and MythTV isn't limited to I'm just excellent MythTV isn't limited to television you could make this box your home entertainment center by adding in music by adding in weather modules by changing the themes to match your preferences and if you want to see more of what you can do with MythTV EFF has a live demo going in our booth although we don't seem to get enough reception inside to record the live TV you can see from any of our collection of stored programming all of this stuff is stuff that we recorded off the air in our San Francisco offices with either this antenna or an aerial on our roof no cable subscriptions no monthly fees to a provider all of the the data is available for you over the lab and the beauty of this technology is that it is expandable by its users as an open source project MythTV is developed by the people who use it if you want a capability that's not in there you can program it yourself you can work with friends or developers to to add it in there so you don't have to ask permission from the motion picture industry you don't need to get a big consumer electronics company on your side you want to record to DVD you can do it, that's in there now you want to compress the program on your board disk or store your backups more easily you can do it you want to combine the management of your television with the management of your music you can do it and if you want to take that clip when you were on television and send it to your mother and father you can do that and if you want to show to CD or DVD, share it with a friend you can do that it does not have DRM built in doesn't have DRM baked in and will continue to operate broadcast flag free good folks at PCHDTV.com have offered EFF and EFF listeners a discount on the PCHDTV card although we're not endorsing any products this one works under Linux and it works quite well and we thank them for their generous donations to EFF in conjunction with purchase of the card we have flyers describing that at our booth EFF is working to to build public awareness of this we're working to build these machines as contrasts to what's likely to be coming out of the consumer electronics Hollywood approved and we're working to get these out into the marketplace so that people like you who understand the technology can can get broadcast flag unencumbered HDTV we're building up a cookbook to explain the installation process further and to help other people get their very own HDTV boxes running but this isn't the only issue it would be great from the point of view of something like consumer reports perhaps not consumer reports itself if you had the contrast of what the state of the art is with what the state of the licensed or authorized art is because it can be a wide gap and that's one of the upsetting things about DVD that paradigmatic example of industry cooperation and negotiation it's so far behind the state of the art and anyone who wants to do something that might improve it unilaterally gets sued so it's great to build up these contrasts between this thing and the functionality that the studios might approve the other thing is GNU Radio GNU Radio has been the subject of an entire talk by its lead developer or by another developer probably both at previous DEF CONS I hope that all of you were here then and heard the GNU Radio talk to keep the entire GNU Radio talk in our remaining six or eight minutes I'll tell you briefly how GNU Radio works you have a frequency converter like that in a cable modem tuner that allows you to select input frequencies from a wide range of input frequencies you select a particular range and it will down convert that into an intermediate frequency range you then have a really fast analog to digital converter the one that GNU Radio people have been using has 20 million samples per second and you just digitize part of the radio frequency spectrum because if you have a 10 megahertz radio wave you can just use the analog to digital converter take samples of the radio wave and get a digital representation of the radio wave and then you can save it without even interpreting it GNU Radio is then open source software that can be used to interpret the spectrum sample after the fact you can essentially develop plugins to modulate and interpret particular kinds of signals and new plugins can be added all the time you can add one, it's an open source project so it can be extended over time and come to understand more kinds of signals the question of how the FCC feels about GNU Radio is very interesting the GNU Radio is an example of a science called software defined radio in which software rather than hardware circuits define how a radio receiver or transmitter will behave the FCC in its broadcast flag order recognized in response to our comments that software defined radios are an interesting issue I'm not sure if that was their term but that's the spirit of it for the broadcast flag GNU Radio is intended to be modified by end users it's published as source code to facilitate people's understanding and to facilitate modification so we believe it's protected by the First Amendment Incidentally, GNU Radio much like that card is capable of receiving ATSC that's the digital television standard used here in the US it can demodulate it and save it as MPEG-2 much like that card except a lot more expensive and a lot slower but more scientifically interesting GNU Radio is about 40 times below real time in other words, if you're using this card you can watch live HDTV if you're using GNU Radio you save it, then you wait 40 hours while it does a lot of math and it calculates your digital television program out of the radio frequency sample it does the math to calculate which television program is it that would have given rise to this weird radio object this television program of course this is a famous slide similar to what you've seen up here this was from a full-motion MPEG stream that was calculated by GNU Radio from an off-air broadcast on NBC this is from law and order so the way that SDR will be treated by regulators is still quite unclear there are other kinds of regulations on certain receivers and transmitters that may be harder to enforce in a software-defined radio environment GNU Radio has so far only been used to receive signals not to transmit them but it could be used to transmit as well the commercial software-defined radio industry says that the right way forward is to have tight control of the code that's used to form the waveforms that get transmitted by software-defined radio transmitters that wouldn't bode well for GNU Radio's use because GNU Radio is designed to be modified by end users but this technology is not some magical thing or some obscure thing that only a few people know how to do or that only a few people have implemented any signal processing software even MATLAB for example MATLAB happens to come with code, sample code that can demodulate probably 100 times below real-time but it has the technology to demodulate radio signals like digital cable but even sound cards for a sufficiently narrow band signal can be used for the analog to digital conversion so this is not some esoteric thing this is like MATLAB and a sound card only a little faster really software-defined radio is just math mathematics has been widely implemented so it might be kind of difficult to regain proprietary control over it now one approach to regulating it as a result would be to target the hardware to your computer if you can't regulate the math you can regulate how the math talks to things perhaps so there are proposals to regulate both fast digital to analog converters and fast analog to digital converters because of the flexibility that people can get with software-defined radio and anxieties about that there have not been any FCC rulings that I would call definitive in this area but there are so many pieces of software and so many pieces of hardware that perform the parts that make up a modern digital communication system it's quite difficult to regulate it I want to say FFT is not a crime so that we can add to the stickers the fast Fourier transform which radio uses so we've come to the end we have a page about the broadcast flag devices that don't react to it if you get those devices before July 1st 2005 and I think it bears repeating and it bears repeating to people beyond DEF CON for over the air US digital television those devices will continue to work and they will give you an unencrypted MPEG stream that you will not get from the devices lawfully manufactured within the US for sale in the US after that date so we encourage people to visit these URLs to visit our booth for a demo and I suppose we have two minutes for questions three minutes for questions and I saw one early over here the width are the manufacturers not supposed to build anymore you're saying they can't sell on no that's actually a manufacture date any device lawfully manufactured under the rule can be resold that's actually a manufacturing cutoff date July 1st 2005 so therefore after July 2nd whatever is an inventory that's correct now major manufacturers have a long design time and a long product cycle so they may well start implementing the restricted devices earlier in order not to have to make the change over abruptly you want to pick some I seem to remember that the open source code will not be avaliable devices presumably if you could get the technical information necessary to write the open source drivers the manufacturer would be in violation of the regulation for having allowed that technical information to be released it's entirely possible that there will be no cards produced because they can't be robust against precisely the kind of attack it's it's also certainly likely that people will successfully attempt to defeat the regulation in that way but their efforts and the products of their efforts may be unlawful and the future generations of the cards will be required to take more counter measures okay we're being told it's time I'm sorry we couldn't take more questions but we are continuing to demonstrate this at our booth today and tomorrow please join the FF help us continue this fight and please buy your tuner cards while you can thanks