HDCP Break Proven

zavyman writes: "I just noticed at Cryptome that the flaws in HDCP posted to Slashdot earlier this year, which one person refused to disclose due to possible threats from the DMCA, have been made public by different authors. Scott Crosby of Carnegie Mellon University, Ian Goldberg of Zero Knowledge Systems, and Robert Johnson, Dawn Song, and David Wagner of UC Berkeley have published a formal cryptanalysis of the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection System that proves its fatal flaws. Interesting reading for those with some background with cryptanalysis."

Comments

Re:Bail money

[trilucid]

One more note: it's sad how this nation (the U.S.) finds locking up scientists for publishing their research acceptable.

If seems awfully close to the practices of the old U.S.S.R. People can call me an extremist all they want for having this view, but many of the Iron Curtain policies don't seem so alien anymore. We lock up scientists, have mass media monopolies that manipulate the masses, and recently massively expanded "police powers" in government. Seems pretty nasty to me. For all those who think the recent intrusions upon civil liberties are "only temporary during our nation's hour of crisis", history shows us differently.

BTW, if you're gonna reply, please be polite. If you're gonna email, use my public key. Thanks.

Re:Bail money

[TGK]

The German philosopher and author, Adorno, had some sage words on this topic. He argued that Facism was the outgrowth of a people with so fragile an ego that they lost the ability to belive in their capability of judging for themselves what was right and wrong. Adorno argues that when this happens we allow demagauges (sp?) to make those judgements for us, and the result is the concentration of an enourmous amount of power in the hands of a very very very few.

His argument can be expanded to deal with almost all forms of oppresive government. Bolshivism, Nazism, Maoism, to say nothing of the numerous military dictatorships the world over (yes, these count too. If the entire country decides that a ruler is just an asshole and that opposition is the only option, he will fall), all of these rely on their implicit ability to define right and wrong.

Are we letting big buisness and other corrupt hyper-capitalist interests define that for us? It's a question left up to history to decide, but I'm not above saying that it scares me sometimes.