“The three remaining watermarks in the Hack SDMI contest
weren’t all “successfully” broken after all — or so goes the news
that is coming out of the SDMI meetings Wednesday in
Washington. Although all three watermarks had hacks that
passed the “oracle” test (which examined whether or not the
watermark had been removed), according to the official testing
committee report sent out today, two of the security systems
managed to pass through the listening and repeatability tests
unscathed.”
“In an official statement, SDMI executive director Leonardo
Chiariglione offered his thanks to the 447 participants and said,
“Each submission — whether successful or not — taught us
important lessons about what can and cannot work in the
marketplace.” His release also noted that one of the two
non-watermark systems included in the hack SDMI test also passed
the challenge….”
“The latest results are hardly cut-and-dried. According to SDMI
documents, the attempt to break the watermark from Verance, one of
the participating companies, failed the listening tests — but only
by a 2-to-1 vote (which suggests that one set of “golden ears”
found the sound quality of the hacked files to be perfectly
adequate). Another watermark, from Blue Spike, did not pass the
repeatability tests, which required that the attack be repeated on
three different songs; but only because they failed on one or two
of three possible tracks, which suggests that the hacks were
successfully repeated on at least one song.”