CD anti-piracy system can nuke hi-fi kit

The Register: “Sony’s Music Entertainment division has been testing an anti-piracy technology
that at best renders illegally copied CDs unlistenable and at worse blows listeners’
speakers.

The anti-piracy system, called Cactus Data Shield, was developed by Israeli
technology company Midbar Tech. Research conducted by New Scientist magazine
and reported in this week’s issue shows how Cactus works. Like Macrovision’s
SafeAudio, Cactus adds noise to the music data stored on the CD. Unlike
SafeAudio, Cactus flags the noise as control information. On playback, this is
ignored, but on duplication – even with consumer CD-to-CD systems, which are
not disabled by SafeAudio – the noise disrupts the copier’s error correction system.”