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Movies Sony

Alamo Drafthouse Blames 'Nationwide' Theater Outage on Sony Projector Fail (theverge.com) 52

Posted by BeauHD from the what's-going-on dept.
An issue with Sony's projectors caused theater chain Alamo Drafthouse to close theaters entirely on New Year's Eve. "As of New Year's Day, however, most theaters and most showtimes now appear to be available, with a few exceptions," reports The Verge. From the report: It's not clear what happened. As New Year's Day is a holiday, we somewhat understandably haven't yet been able to reach Alamo or Sony spokespeople, and not every theater or every screening was affected. That didn't stop Alamo from blaming its Sony projectors for what at least one theater called a "nationwide" outage, however.

"Due to nation-wide technical difficulties with Sony, we aren't able to play any titles today," read part of a taped paper sign hanging inside a Woodbury, Minnesota location. That apparently didn't keep the customer who took a picture of that sign from watching The Apartment at that very same location, though: "When we went to our seats, the wait staff let us know that despite the fact that the previews were playing, we wouldn't know until the movie actually started whether we could see the film or not. If it didn't work, the screen would just turn black. Luckily, the film went through without a hitch."

What might have only affected some screenings at some theaters? I've seen speculation on Reddit that it may have something to do with expired digital certificates used to unlock encrypted films, but we haven't heard that from Alamo or Sony. We're looking forward to finding out. Longtime Slashdot reader innocent_white_lamb suggests that "[a] cryptographic key used to master all movies distributed by Deluxe" was the culprit after it expired on December 30. "This means that almost all Hollywood movies will no longer play on many commercial cinema servers. In particular, many showings of Wonka and Aquaman had to be cancelled due to the expired encryption key." From their submitted story: Deluxe and the movie companies have been frantically trying to remaster and send out revised versions of current movies over the past few days. Nobody knows what will happen to older movie titles since everything mastered by Deluxe since 2011 may be affected and may need to be remastered if it is to be shown in movie theaters again. There are at least four separate threads discussing this matter on Film-Tech.com, notes innocent_white_lamb.
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Alamo Drafthouse Blames 'Nationwide' Theater Outage on Sony Projector Fail More

Alamo Drafthouse Blames 'Nationwide' Theater Outage on Sony Projector Fail

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  • DRM? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by devslash0 ( 4203435 )

    I'd bet my kidney that it had something to do with DRM and/or licence checks.

    • So exactly what the snippet says is the likely culprit.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )

      I mean, that was literally stated in TFS. Got anything else to contribute?

      • The fact that people's immediate reaction to the outage was "they were screwed by their own DRM" is in itself an interesting contribution. In my case as soon as I read the headline I thought "certificate used for DRM expired".

      • Re:DRM? (Score:5, Funny)

        by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:56PM (#64126471)

        I'd bet my kidney that it had something to do with DRM and/or licence checks.

        I mean, that was literally stated in TFS. Got anything else to contribute?

        You're forgetting the kidney. :-)

    • You can keep your kidney.

      There is nothing dark happening here, just another SNAFU. It's just the general clusterfuck that is digital certificate management and yet another example how something as stupid as a "licensing issue" creates global outages. This isn't the first expired certificate that will do that it and it won't be the last...

      The problem isn't so much the Sony projection system though, but rather a stupid oversight of Deluxe: The fact that the signer certificate of the keys that unlock the conte

      • Reading the summary it also seems like the DRM system had hardcoded values. Somewhere someone used December 31, 2023 as the default for all movie keys and no one noticed until hundreds of movies later.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I'd bet my kidney that it had something to do with DRM and/or licence checks.

      Of course it is.

      I mean, the way digital projection works is that the movies are stored encrypted on hard drives that are loaded into the server for the projectors. When it's time to play the movie, the projectors obtain the key to decrypt the movie and that act charges the theatre for the showing - after all, every showing needs to be audited and paid for.

      Chances are, a certificate expires and now the projector can't talk to the ke

  • Seems like a crappy workaround would be a better solution than remastering every movie since 2011.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Xenx ( 2211586 )
      That would depend on how the projectors operate. It's possible(probable?) the projectors need the time to be correct to validate themselves, then also need to have the crypto key validated for the movie.

      • Re:Just roll back the clocks on the projectors (Score:4, Informative)

        by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @11:14PM (#64126723)

        Correct - the KDM file contains the decryption key for the movie file, it also contains the "opening" date & time, and the "closing" date & time, meaning the period of time that the cinema is licenced to screen the film. If a film turns out to be more successful than anticipated, and the cinema wants to keep screening it, they send a request to Deluxe for a new key. Ingest the key and life goes on.

    • Re:Just roll back the clocks on the projectors (Score:5, Informative)

      by griebels2 ( 998954 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @09:00PM (#64126481)

      You cannot roll-back the secure clock on those projection systems. You're only allowed to change the clock for a few minutes a year, manually or automatically. You're supposed to sync your playback machines to a stratum 2 or better time source and keep them synced, to avoid any significant clock drift of the secure clock. Only the secure clock matters for content access validation, the system clock is irrelevant in this case.

      • That was a bit tongue in cheek but an example of the type of shitty workaround they may try instead of remastering over a decade of films. Although perhaps their use of the word remaster is far less work than what I'm thinking of like when a movie is remastered for bluray from the original source.

  • Haha!

    Sony, reap what you sow with your evil DRM.

  • Just set the clocks on all the projectors back.

    Projectors must be network connected to work? Someone smart with an RPi and a bit of code can intercept NNTP queries.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )

      Someone smart with an RPi and a bit of code can intercept NNTP queries.

      "Um, Actually..."

      You meant NTP, the Network Time Protocol. NNTP is Network News Transfer Protocol, used to pass around USENET posts.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )

      Someone smart

      How big of an overlap in the Venn diagram of "theater workers" and "someone smart" do you think there might be?

      • How big of an overlap in the Venn diagram of "theater workers" and "someone smart" do you think there might be?

        Are you mistaking the person who cleans up your popcorn for the projector operator? That's quite ignorant of you, this isn't a low skilled minimum wage job, and even if it were there are plenty of very smart people doing meaningless low paid part time jobs to work their way through college.

        Be less of a judgemental arsehole.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pascoea ( 968200 )
          That's a fair criticism. I don't mean to imply that all theater workers are dumb as a stump. I don't, however, have a ton of confidence that there are a large number of them that possess the skill to kludge together something that would override Sony's security protocols. Especially someone being able to do it in any meaningful timeframe. Expand my comment to "How big of an overlap in the Venn diagram of "theater workers" and "someone smart enough to pull off what your suggesting" do you think there might

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      Projectionists at cinemas don't get that kind of user privilege, i.e. you get access to the application software on the server (which is frequently embedded within the projector itself). You can ingest films from eternal HDD/SSD, or from internet, and you can also ingest the KDM file containing the decryption key, and you can program shows including ads, PSAs, trailers, and the feature, but you do NOT get access to anything like the date&time, OS or package updates.

      It's part of the licencing arrangement

    • Someone smart with an RPi and a bit of code can intercept NNTP queries.

      Leaving aside the typo, NTP doesn't work like that. NTP slews the clock and has a maximum slew rate and a maximum clock deviation. The NTP daemon by default will reject a correction if it is more than 1000 seconds off, and even if it accepted 1001 seconds it would take 23 days to correct that 1001 second deviation given the default max slew rate (500 parts per million).

      You can't just intercept an NTP query to change a system time.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        The NTP daemon by default will reject a correction if it is more than 1000 seconds off

        Great! Since the projector will have to be bumped back by weeks or even months, there will be no need to spoof network time servers.

  • Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @10:04PM (#64126595)
    I'm pretty sure everyone's pirated copies of those movies worked just fine.

  • Why no warning (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @11:43PM (#64126765)

    ... expired digital certificates ...

    Art and culture with built-in obsolescence: I suppose the good side being, paintings about Greek myths can't be replaced by (corporate-owned) digital art.

    It seems to be a small percentage of theatres but the wonder is it happened at all: The master-making service and the film distributors with a license should be prepared for this. My ISP applet alerts me every time, there is an update available. Failures like this reveal "for your safety" excuses are total bull.

  • No one can watch the fucking encrypted movies. It appears Hollywood studios give movies to the projector makers to distribute to theaters, but requires commercial-grade "CSS" DRM all the way to the projector to prevent us dirty pirates from getting raw, IMAX-quality streams.
  • In before some theater gets caught "fixing" the problem by downloading and showing pirated copies of movies.

  • Mastering a film/video means one thing.

    I sounds like they need to reencrypt the video files?

    Or ideally they have a chain system so they don't need to and they just need to reencrypt a detached master key and push those out?

    Some hybrid of a PKI and a LUKS-like container would suffice.

    • Mastering a film/video means one thing.

      Creating a new master copy for duplication, yes. Which is what they are doing. So...

  • Hey we're all smart folks. Turn away from this shit and let's make our own. I'll leave space for all the loser talk below because you love it, losers. You love other people's stuff and are mad when it's not there and you can see it or be in the cool kids' tent o' wonders, for a price, when it works, when they want. And they have just as much fun keeping it on a string while you chase it like a kitten turning out your pockets for what amounts to change that falls behind their couch cushions. Enjoy your dutch
  • It's always expired certs. Or neteng doing firewall migrations. Why neteng? Why do you migrate infrastructure without telling anyone??

  • Scores of large firms get caught with their keys down, suffering substantial outages because they forgot to track an expiring certificate.

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