Alamo Drafthouse Blames 'Nationwide' Theater Outage on Sony Projector Fail (theverge.com) 52
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.
"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.
DRM? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd bet my kidney that it had something to do with DRM and/or licence checks.
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I mean, that was literally stated in TFS. Got anything else to contribute?
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Re:DRM? (Score:5, Funny)
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. :-)
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Bah gimme the liver instead, you can clone it and make more money.
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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
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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
Just roll back the clocks on the projectors (Score:2)
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Re:Just roll back the clocks on the projectors (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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.
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In my best Nelson voice... (Score:2)
Haha!
Sony, reap what you sow with your evil DRM.
Re:In my best Nelson voice... (Score:4, Insightful)
The theatre didn't sow it. Sony did.
Sony didn't reap it. The theatre did.
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Sony reaps profit from every showing. If the movie doesn't show, Sony doesn't get profit from that scheduled showing.
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And the movie goers will catch another showing, when the theater will be slightly more occupied.
No profit lost.
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Or decide to just watch it at home, whenever.
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It's amazing that they still exist after the Covid-19 pandemic.
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The theatre purchased equipment from Sony, they could decide not to purchase.
Key expired? (Score:1)
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.
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"Um, Actually..."
You meant NTP, the Network Time Protocol. NNTP is Network News Transfer Protocol, used to pass around USENET posts.
Re: Key expired? (Score:2)
In this case, usenet posts might be a better solution.
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Usenet is how I used to get my movies back in the day.
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You meant NTP
Yeah. My fingers refuse to cooperate with my brain.
Re:Key expired? (Score:4, Funny)
What, you didn't know these are distributed via alt.film.sony.releasekeys?
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Someone smart
How big of an overlap in the Venn diagram of "theater workers" and "someone smart" do you think there might be?
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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.
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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
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Given the critcal nature of the projection systems in the cinema, as well as their power consumption, I'd be very surprised if these weren't hard wired to dedicated power outlets rather than a standard 110v/220v wall socket.
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I was a projectionist in the late 90s and early 2000s. This was back when we had to "build" the movie (slice all the rolls into one along with the trailers.)
We did not routinely unplug the projectors. Cleaning up there was with a broom and dustpan. The projectors were not on the movie theater floor with all the "sticky goo."
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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.
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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)
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Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
It's been known to happen. We had a key mismatch once. The manager drove to a shopping centre and bought the Blu-ray.
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Any time this has happened to me I just email Deluxe and they send me a new key within about fifteen minutes.
Why no warning (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
When some corporate asshole forgets to roll keys (Score:2)
In b4 (Score:2)
Remaster? (Score:2)
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.
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Mastering a film/video means one thing.
Creating a new master copy for duplication, yes. Which is what they are doing. So...
We all love it (Score:2)
Expired certs?? (Score:2)
Business as Usual (Score:1)
Scores of large firms get caught with their keys down, suffering substantial outages because they forgot to track an expiring certificate.