I haven't logged in here lately; we've been awfully busy. Our FAQ answers most questions you might want to ask if you aren't conversant with Fourier Transforms. Meanwhile, there's been something of a PR battle raging where the SDMI folks claim our attacks damage the sound quality beyond their subjective quality standards. We're preparing an appropriate response that may be succintly summarized as "put up or shut up".

Watermarking is actually a really nifty technology, but (as far as we can tell) they're using it in a relatively unintelligent manner. They appear to be embedding a single bit of information in the music ("SDMI was here"), where the detector for this bit will be replicated in every single CD player, MP3 player, and heaven knows what else. Since the detector is replicated, that means a single attack can defeat the watermark for every single player. You'd think they wouldn't do it that way, but they appear to be focusing not so much on MP3 music but on traditional CD players. They want a vaguely backward compatible standard that will allow SDMI CDs to play on old CD players, old CDs to play on new SDMI players, but to make it "hard" for a user to burn a new CD with SDMI content that will play in an SDMI CD player. It's all quite strange.

Anyway, Goode Co. Barbeque is always a good thing. I'll be travelling all next week, but maybe afterward. E-mail me privately (dwallach@cs.rice.edu) and we'll figure something out.