Decryption Keys For HD-DVD Found, Confirmed

kad77 writes "It appears that, despite skepticism, 'muslix64' was the real deal. Starting from a riddle posted on pastebin.com, members on the doom9 forum identified the Title key for the HD-DVD release 'Serenity.' Volume Unique Keys and Title keys for other discs followed within hours, confirming that software HD-DVD players, like any common program, store important run-time data in memory. Here's a link to decryption utility and sleuthing info in the original doom9 forum thread. The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?"

Comments

Blu-Ray?

[Midnight Thunder]

Has the same thing been done for Blu-Ray yet? I would like to see DRM on both systems being shown as being useless.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs Blu-Ray anyway?

That format has killed itself by Sony's arrogant attitude. History has shown that locked-in, porn-shy formats always loose.

HDCP is the biggest crime in consumer history yet, let's hope this development kills it before it really takes of. For me there are two choices:

1) HD content works with my current and future hardware setup
2) No HD content for me

It's about time those media companies learn what they are producing their precious content for.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[HappySqurriel]

I really doubt that Blu-Ray is dead or has been killed, but I do think a lot of Sony's recent decisions (Root-Kit, Laptop Battery Fire, Lik-Sang Lawsuit, and PS3 Price) have made many potential consumers very angry.

Ultimately, in 24 months every HD-DVD player will play Blu-Ray movies and the 'format war' will have been a massive waste.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[gnasher719]

'' HDCP is the biggest crime in consumer history yet, let's hope this development kills it before it really takes of. ''

Every time I read a rant about HDCP, I conclude that customers (and content providers as well) have not the slightest clue what HDCP does.

At some point, after all the decryption, decoding, filtering and whatever else is done, your computer must send a signal to the monitor, which the monitor then translates into an image that you can see. This signal usually comes out of the DVI connector in your computer, goes into a cable, which feeds into the monitor or TV. Our paranoid friends at the MPAA or whatever abbreviation it is are afraid that you could catch the signal coming out of the video card, and record it.

Truth is, you can't. You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk. Well, I can't and no normal consumer can. There are people who could build stuff that could do it, but those people are probably happily building graphics cards for NVidia and ATI, or building DVD players.

Still, that signal had to be encrypted. So you have a chip just before the DVI chip (or integrated into it), and another chip in your TV, and they can negotiate to decide on a key for a cipher stream, and use that cipher stream to encrypt the signal on one end and decrypt it on the other end. Which means you can't record the signal coming out of your computer and turn it into a DVD. However, this has nothing to do with DRM whatsoever. Once this encryption is turned on, it stays turned on until the computer or the monitor are turned off. So if you read slashdot after watching a DVD, everything you see on the screen has gone through encryption and decryption. Doesn't matter, because you couldn't read the signal from the cable anyway.

Where the real effort is: First, the graphics driver has to check constantly that encryption works properly. That is not to make sure you don't steal the video signal (as long as encryption is turned on, you can't, and encryption doesn't turn itself off), it is because if the video card and monitor run out of sync then you will see nothing but snow on the monitor, and that makes for a very very unhappy customer. Second, all the commands from the OS to the driver are encrypted, and status reported by the driver is encrypted as well. Otherwise, a hacker could just pretend to be the OS and tell the graphics card to turn encryption off - and that's it! No, most of the work is not the encryption, but to make sure that the OS always knows whether encryption is turned on or off. And third, a DVD can request that high resolution is only used with encryption, so if the HDCP chip isn't there, the image is scaled down to lower resolution.

All in all, the whole HDCP stuff is complete nonsense. It prevents an attack from thieves in a place where you wouldn't attack. It costs money to add and implement. It doesn't hurt you as a consumer, except that you have to pay for the damned chips. It creates work for device driver writers. It doesn't protect contents. Anyone who can record 200 MB per second from a DVI output has invested some serious money, and a little bit more money will allow you to break into a monitor and get the signal from there.

Executive summary: If you can't record a signal coming from the DVI cable, HDCP doesn't matter. If you can record a signal coming from the DVI cable, HDCP doesn't matter much either.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Salsaman]

You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk. Well, I can't and no normal consumer can.

Sure you can: take output from computer a), feed into hdtv card on computer b), compress to mpeg2, store on disk. And btw, it is 24bit per pixel, 30 fps (non-interlaced), but the figures come out the same.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[ajpr]

Perhaps you could somehow split the data to a network of computers. If you had 10 computers, could they write the signal to disk in pieces and then recombine them later?

Re:Blu-Ray?

[baadger]

Truth is, you can't. You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk

Yes, surely you can. For a start it's approximately 30 frames a second (it's 60 fields a second). That gives you a stream of:

(1920 * 1080 * 12 * 30) / (1024*1024) = ~ 712 Mib/s (megabits per second) or
about 89 MiB/s.

I would have though an array of high speed reasonably standard disk drives could handle that quite easily, after all consumer SATA drives have a theoretical 1.5 Gib/s interface.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[LocalH]

No, you can't. Pretty much all "HDTV cards" are taking already-encoded streams from off-air HD stations and basically extracting it into a file on your hard drive. However, if you know of a low-cost capture card that can handle HD-res DVI/HDMI, then by all means feel free to enlighten us.

The GP is correct. If you can actually capture DVI in realtime, then you're probably inside the industry already, where no form of copy protection can prevent leaks.

Also, especially referring to 1080p TVs, regardless of the signal stored on the disk, the output is pretty much 1920x1080x60fps. And, if anything, it's probably 32bpp between device and monitor.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[tjansen]

Actually you can already buy DVI capturing cards capable of recoding 1600x1200x60:
http://www.fi-llc.com/boards/Products/AccuStream17 0.php
Real-time recoding of HDTV videos is not that far away on consumer PCs either. I doubt that it would be a problem in 5 years.

So if there was no HDCP, and there was no way to get the compressed signal, capturing the data would become a viable option.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Jugalator]

Has the same thing been done for Blu-Ray yet? I would like to see DRM on both systems being shown as being useless.

I agree, although it would be more amusing to me if Blu-ray DRM was broken with various key extraction algorithms in about 6 months or so, for it to reach the market better and give them less hope to just change details in the standard as a worst case scenario. :-) Makes me wonder if it's possible they'll do this with HD-DVD, or if it has reached critical mass alraedy, so to speak.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[zlogic]

Well, you could place a hardware MPEG-2 or WMV or whatever codec the video is encoded in so that you'll have a 10 MB/s instead of a 200 MB/s stream. Quality will drop, but the system will work pretty much the way FairPlay can be broken.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[enosys]

It is true that the data rate is too high for recording it right now but they have to think of the future. I'm sure that 200 MB per second won't seem so high in a few years. It is also possible that dedicated hardware could compress it and make the data rate more manageable. What I find outrageous about HDCP is that they went through all that effort to plug certain security holes they imagined while other obvious holes, such as the current attack on HD-DVD are wide open. This makes it a total waste of money and effort which inconveniences customers and makes pirated video better than purchased video. What were they thinking?

Re:Blu-Ray?

[baadger]

According to the Wikipedia article the DVI specification does indeed have a colour depth of 24 bits per pixel.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Original Replica]

So I have to take a HDCP chip out of some TV that got a Wii hole in the screen, not a big problem if I was going to go through the trouble to make some dedicated copying rig. But I think that's the real value here, to discourage the casual copies, and add another layer of "criminal activity" to anyone that does make a copy.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[aachrisg]

It hurts the consumer a lot. The encryption handshaking makes switching between video sources cause long pauses/ glitches, and is unreliable. Things like unplugging a cable can cause your device to think that it is being subverted, forcing it (for instance) to stop outputting hd (comcast cable boxes are prone to this).

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Overly Critical Guy]

That format has killed itself by Sony's arrogant attitude. History has shown that locked-in, porn-shy formats always loose.

Disney will be Blu-ray only which pretty much guarantees its success, Betamax didn't lose because of porn (it lost because of short running time), and porn these days is already free on the Internet.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

"What were they thinking?"

**AA & Co's brain-licenses were revoked some versions ago.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

your premise about needing to record 200MB/s is incorrect because it doesn't need to be played back at 60fps in order to make a copy! set your player to play at, say, 1/10th speed and suddenly you only have to record 20MB/s. sure, the RIP process takes 10x as long but, really, big deal.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[TheGratefulNet]

RE: sony problems.

add to that a MASSIVE camera sensor failure PR mess.

canon cams, 1 or 2 pany cams and a whole bunch of other cams that use sony sensors are on the recall list due to, well, sensor failures. even as far back as a few yrs old models.

sony has not been doing well the last few years...

Re:Blu-Ray?

[WhodoVoodoo]

But their TVs are fine, and also use linux!

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Mad Merlin]

I would have though an array of high speed reasonably standard disk drives could handle that quite easily, after all consumer SATA drives have a theoretical 1.5 Gib/s interface.

More like 3.0 Gib/s (SATA2), but either way, it doesn't matter, modern consumer hard drives can't write faster than ~40M/sec. But if you put 2 or 3 of those consumer drives in RAID 0, you shouldn't have much trouble at all writing 89M/s, especially if you compress the signal before dumping it to disk. In a couple years it'll be even easier.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Ucklak]

It lost because it confused consumers.
No one understood what L-250, L-500, L-750 meant except that L-750 should be better than L-500.
Add to the fact that Beta 3 material wasn't compatible 100% with Beta 2 machines and vice versa.

6 hour tapes made sense.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Ucklak]

$3,000 and Windows only. Wow.
This card probably won't be Vista compatible due to it's nature.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Fordiman]

Unfortunately, dismissing the porn industry is what killed the technically superior Betamax. Without it, all they have is the rabid PS3 fans to bolster their film sales - and that's only if the gamers want to take a minute to watch a movie.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Fordiman]

I would like to see DVDs, en masse, released in a dual layer setup, where layer 1 is standard DVD (for backward compatibility), and layer 2 is the HD-DVD version. That would let the movie companies sneak the new format in utilizing the existing install base.

That this isn't being done just shows how flipping stupid the content industry can be.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anaerin]

Sure you can. And if you're going to say that you can't pipe HDMI into a computer, you'd be wrong there, too

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensit y/

Voila! One PCI-Express HDMI capture card. And no, it doesn't do HDCP (Yet), but considering how fast AACS has been bypassed, how long will it be before someone makes a Linux driver for this that decodes/bypasses the HDCP encryption?

Oh, and if you're worried about processing time, now you know what those AMD 4x4 boards (With dual quad processors when they come out, and stacks of RAM) are for. Capture to a high-speed RAID0 buffer (At a guess - SATA for 1080i, U320 SCSI for 720p, or fibre channel for 1080p), then have your 8 CPU cores using a multi-threaded codec to compress into MPEG/XviD/H.264/Your-choice-of-codec-here and store the completed file on a big RAID5 (750Gb drives, anyone?)

How long before MythTV has been upgraded for this kind of thing? It's exactly Myth's remit, after all.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, capturing uncompressed HDTV is beyond consumers now. Capturing RAW CD-quality digital audio was beyond the computers we had a while ago too. In 10 years RAW HDTV capture should be quite doable.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[ADRA]

Although it definitely is possible to capture this amount of data, the -average- consumer won't be able to utilize it. And don't forget that the best way to crunch the data down for disk access is to encode it in runtime. So the real requirement for hi-def capture is probably along the lines of a 4 x striped array with hardware codec encoder that supports 1920x1080.

This is all feasible, but its a solution for the commercial pirates, not ordinary people. Plus, there have already been 'HDMI decoder' breakouts that were available a while back. As long as HDMI is performed by 'a chip', some enterprising hacker is going to start ripping those chips out of of cheap HDMI receivers to make pass through adapters which are sold to pirates that could afford this costly endeavor.

Oh and when you're capturing, unless you have a DVI capture card (do these exist?), you'll need to convert the signal to analog. In which case, you'd probably want to consider oversampling by 2x just to make sure you got the right frame timing which would double the bit rate requirements.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[AJWM]

You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk.

30 frames/second, not 60. Anyway, that's 1920x1080x1.5 bytes/frame, just over 3 megabytes/frame. About 93 megabytes per second with zero compression. Reasonably modern hardware on a RAID 0 or RAID 5 setup should do that easily, or any modern SCSI drive system. Heck, you can buy off-the-shelf Firewire-B external drive systems capable of that. And disk subsystems aren't getting any slower (unless you're saddled with crappy drivers and filesystems at the software level.)

That said, I pretty much agree with your conclusion.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[grimwell]

Aye, my MythTV backend with the disk dump has two 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives in a RAID 0 array. The frontend has three HDTV capture cards(two HD-5500 & one HD-3000). A Lowly 100mbps full-duplex network link between the two boxes.

I'm able to record three HD streams at once via nfs(nfs ver3, ver4 cause kernel panic under that load). Playback of one of the three streams while it is being recorded isn't do-able but recording two and watching an earlier(yet to be transcoded) one all at the same time works.

An hour of 1080i is a little shy of 8.5GB. The network link is the bottleneck in my setup, the disk array handles the task without a problem.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Emetophobe]

modern consumer hard drives can't write faster than ~40M/sec

It's now closer to 60MB/sec. I have three 250gig western digital sata drives, each drive can do 60MB/sec, or roughly 180MB/sec in a RAID0 array.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk.

Erm. Excuse me? There's even consumer-level hardware to do exactly that: Blackmagic Design's HDMI capture card - $249

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Hes Nikke]

i fixed it for you:

so we know that 1 second of a 1080i stream is 1920 * 1080 * 24 * 30 bits. that comes out to 1,492,992,000 b/s.

for the raw uncompressed stream that comes to the following:
1,492,992 kb/s (kilobit - bits/1000)
~1,493 mb/s (megabit - kb/1000)
~1.5 gb/s (gigabit - mb/1000)
186,624,000 B/s (Byte - bits/8)
182,250 KiB/s (KibiByte - B/1024)
~178 MiB/s (MebiByte - KiB/1024)

this doesn't even take into account audio (are they still using 16 bit samples 44,440 times a second?)

get your terms right, and the math will follow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure you got your terms right because mb = millibit and gb = gram*bit.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[h4x0r-3l337]

are they still using 16 bit samples 44,440 times a second?

I don't think anyone has ever used a sampling rate of 44440 Hz unless their audio clock was way off. 44100 is a standard audio rate, although high-def TV (and presumably DVD) uses 48000.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[deathy_epl ccs]

Without it, all they have is the rabid PS3 fans to bolster their film sales

But... but... it helped so much with UMD sales!

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Kjella]

Well, first off you're assuming there's no such thing like a HDTV hardware encoder (after which you can store it on a plain non-raid HDD as far as bandwidth is concerned). Those chips are in sub-1000$ cameras, and you don't need lens, ccd, tape mechanism or any other fancy electronics, just the encoder chip. Probably a few hundred dollars at most, really.

Secondly, raw capture is certainly possible. Full HDTV is about 1.5Gbps (HD-SDI used for uncompressed HDTV interlinks for example). Then you can throw in some very light lossless capture codec like huffyuv who'll covert to YUV2 (half the bits) and compress it 2:1 again on any normal CPU, and you're down to ~360Mbps, or 45MB/s. Hell, I capture 25MB/s from my DV camera on a regular basis. 45MB/s would take a fancier disk like a Raptor X or a RAID 0, but then again RAID 0 is standard on pretty much every mobo I've seen.

No, it's not that pretty... but if you were a slightly dedicated pirate (remember, they think they're going to stop everyone) then setting up this is hardly excessive. The only thing that's not in common circulation is in fact a DVI *in* port.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't all this encryption and decryption consumer quite a bit of power?

How can a video card/monitor have all this additional computing horsepower and still be called "Energy Star" compliant?

Seems like a waste of power to me.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[HTH NE1]

Except you're recording the original compressed stream, not the HDMI or DVI uncompressed output.

And really, you want to copy the compressed stream. If you copied the uncompressed data, you'd have to recompress it to make it useful and make it lossy to reduce the size.

Unless you are able to get that data to an analog recordable medium with sufficient fidelity.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[HTH NE1]

Disney will be Blu-ray only which pretty much guarantees its success

Yeah, because that worked sooo well with the DIgital Video eXpress (DIVX) format.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[s4m7]

When speaking of stand alone video signals, there's no difference between 24bpp and 32bpp, since the extra 8bpp is an alpha channel, and in almost all instances can be dropped, unless for some reason you were layering two or more signals on one device.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[ditoa]

The point of HDCP is that they need to stop anybody from doing it. There are enough people with lots of movie and time to burn buying and setting up kit to do realtime DVI/HDMI stream capturing. It only takes one person to do this for a movie, stick it on the net and everyone can get it. HDCP is to try and stop EVERYONE, not just consumers but everyone from copying it. HDCP sucks for consumers because it means your 3 month old £3000 50" LCD TV might not be able to play movies in 2-3 years time because some monkey for a media company and some monkey from the TV companies have had a meeting and decided they want people to buy new TVs again. Similar to Microsoft giving the finger to all PlaysForSure customers with the Zune.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[p0tat03]

I know other posters have already pointed out that you can in fact record the bitrate of a DVI port quite easily, even at 1080p, I would like to add that it only takes one to break the system. One lone guy with the means and willingness to build the hardware and rip movies, and the nature of the internet will take care of the rest.

Piracy prevention in this day and age is like a balloon, as soon as there is a single hole, no matter how small, the system on the whole is screwed.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[kazad]

FYI, I put your numbers into a calculator here:

http://tinyurl.com/ydzspv

You can play around with different refresh rates, color depth, etc.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Jerry Coffin]

I would like to see DVDs, en masse, released in a dual layer setup, where layer 1 is standard DVD (for backward compatibility), and layer 2 is the HD-DVD version.

It'd be more than dual layer -- a typical DVD is already dual layer. There are both single and dual layer versions of HD-DVD, but it memory serves, the "second layer" is accessed by flipping the disc rather than changing laser focus.

OTOH, that's mostly details -- from a technical viewpoint, been demonstrated and could be produced -- and at some point, probably will be. The real reason it's not being done is almost certainly financial. To sell, this combined format would need to be competitive with normal DVDs, but the disc is undoubtedly more expensive to manufacture. They want the opposite: instead of selling you a single disc at a reduced profit margin, they'd rather sell you a DVD and then later sell you an HD-DVD of the same content -- both with inflated profit margins.

Given that it's technically feasible, chances are it'll happen eventually -- but I'd bet it happens only when the market for SD DVDs starts to shrink to the point that it no longer justifies producing them separately anymore.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[LuckyStarr]

It just struck me:

1. Capturing full HD content is very hard.
2. Unencrypted HD content gets scaled down.
3. Capturing downscaled content is not so hard.
4. ?

Did they really intend this? :)

Re:Blu-Ray?

[TACNailed]

You don't need to record at 200 MB/sec. All you need to do is advance your player one frame at a time and dump a SINGLE frame at a time onto your harddrive. No serious money needed. Write a macro to advance frames and boom, you have an uncompressed video on your $80 hard drive ready to be compressed.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Darth Android]

and that's only if the gamers want to take a minute to watch a movie.

I thought all those spare minutes were spent trying to pay off the loan they took out to buy the thing in the first place...

Re:Blu-Ray?

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

Many people have gotten used to being able to casually record what they wish. If new DRM measures frustrate them enough, then the market for the dedicated pirates will expand.

I have HDTV cable service, but cannot get HD from my cable box to my Media Center PC. If some cable channel runs a High Def program that I'd like to *timeshift* in HD, well, tough.

Due to Media Center DRM, I also cannot play CSS encrypted DVDs to my HDTV unless I (a) set the resolution down to 480i, (b) decrypt the DVD to an .iso & play that, or (c) use on-the-fly CSS removal software.

So here, without even wanting access to any content I haven't paid for, I'm part of the market for DRM-defeating devices & software. With the direction the MAFIAA is making things go, I'm not far from being part of the market for pirated Dual Layer DVDs with high-def XviDs or MP4s of my favorite content. I pay my cable bill, my premium channel fees, my HD service fees, and my Netflix subscription. Basically, I've payed for just about every version of any media content that's available, so these draconian DRM measures are accomplishing little more than making me lose respect for content providers.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it's not killed yet, but it's only a matter of time. Not only it's coming from a company with very poor business ethics (like you've pointed out), but there's also countless other issues with Blu-Ray:

-overpriced players (including the PS3), and those players had bad reviews when they came out (hardware problems) - there were /. articles about this too
-expensive for DVD media producers to retool, and very expensive blank media
-uses Java for menus and stuff, which I fear will cause compatibility problems down the road (just like for mobile phones), and requires programmers, or a TOTAL change in DVD authoring apps (must generate Java code and compile it, or come with some slow interpreter written in Java, or hire highly paid Java programmers to make your menus or such)
-had problems with supporting some codecs at first (none of the initial released movies were using VC1, and had worse image quality than HD DVDs which were using it)
-no pr0n
-yet another Sony proprietary format nobody wants, and that always fail
-did I mention overpriced like other Sony stuff again?
-Won't allow dual format players (their only chance not to fail completely)

In comparison, HD DVD:
-has very cheap players (like the xbox 360 external drive that was like 150$ on special during the holidays, and can be hooked up to a normal PC)
-is cheaper for DVD making plants to retool, and the media is far cheaper
-uses very simple markup (very much like html and css) to create menus (and is even documented on MSDN, has examples, free tools and all). Easy to do even with notepad, and doesn't require such drastic changes in authoring tools
-supported VC1 right from the start (and used it, and resulted in better looking movies) - even MS has a free encoder for download!
-pr0n!
-can be decrypted using existing tools, i.e. no more DRM, and you can make backups and exercise your fair use rights, which is a HUGE bonus for lots of people (no need to upgrade your old component or DVI-only HDTV, video card, Windows OS, and computer hardware to support whatever monster required specs PowerDVD asks for and such, like a Dual Core CPU, high end video card and all that) -- with Blu-Ray you just gotta ditch your old 2500$ TV away and spend as much on a new one plus HDMI cables, you essentially have buy a new 2000$ PC and a 1000$ Blu-Ray drive (enjoy your DRM!), whereas with HD DVD you buy a 150$ xbox drive and you're done! And no DRM crap!
-HD DVD's encryption being broken, it will likely be supported under Linux (or VLC and such) pretty soon (unlike Blu-Ray)
-etc

It doesn't matter which way you look at it, HD DVD is better all around! Except perhaps for storage space, but it's largely irrelevant for movies, we can already store HD movies (@ 720p at least) in mpeg4 on plain old single layer DVDs. HD DVD provides more than enough for 1080i/p (and at moderate prices), so it's mostly pointless for Blu-Ray to have more (unless you want it as a PC backup/storage thing, but that's NOT what they want to use it for primarily).

Blu-Ray is dead. So very, very dead. In 2 years, nobody will even remember Blu-Ray, except as "yet another Sony format that failed" The battle is already over, and I'm buying a HD DVD player next month for my birthday.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but you can record a 1920x1080p stream in real time using a RAID array. 1920x1080x24x30/8=187MB/s. 10 (8 data 2 parity) HDs can easily record this fast. You can encode using JPEG to drop this to between 19 and 38MB/s. Use a real time MPEG-2 encoder using a few PCs could knock that down to 6-10MB/s and any single HD would do. With more processing power, you could real time encode into a HDTV stream (.ts) at 2.4MB/s. You could also record it using 50 of those new 32GB flash HD drives. They could hold over a 2 hour movie. Then any PC could convert the raw stream into any desired format.

My brother's employer builds such high end hardware. It can capture and backup 4 raw streams of the above quality for under $100K. The government buys that HW among others. Pirates are more likely to emulate a popular HW player like Xbox 360 for HD-DVD and PS3 for Blu-ray. They strip out the re-encryption routines and walla, unencumbered content at full quality. That is likely to cost much less than $100K. Msft or Sony will not alienate their owners by revoking those keys. And if they update them using new software or firmware, the pirate simply uses that in the emulator and breaks it again, likely much faster than they could update all of the players they made. No win scenario either way except for their customers when the pirate uploads formware with the encryption removed. How much would the public pay to remove the DRM from their HW player? Likely enough to raise the eyebrows of the management at either company.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[alienw]

Uh, we aren't talking about off-the-shelf hardware here I would assume. And it's not like realtime hardware MPEG2 or MPEG4 encoders don't exist or can't handle HDTV resolutions. Any TV studio probably has boxes that can handle that, and it only takes one person to pirate a movie before everyone has it. So yeah, HDCP serves a useful purpose.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Rich0]

Just to add a little to the other reply - your mythtv stream is only a few megabits/sec. Certainly not 700Mb/s! You might be able to record at that rate with the right drive setup, but you'd fill your hard drive mighty fast (80 megabytes per second eats through space pretty quick).

Go ahead and check the mythtv-users list - this is a common topic. The hardware capable of compressing live HD is very expensive - studio gear. We're not talking Apollo-mission cutting edge, but even the TV studios have difficulty with live HD streams (I know somebody who works in the industry).

Anybody recording HD using myth is recording compressed MPEG2 - not DVI. In fact, there is a company that will mod your cable box with DVI/HDMI-only output to add a firewire port so that you can record the HD stream at a decent rate.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Rich0]

Yeah, if you have a few TB of disk space. That card doesn't compress the signal - so you're drinking from a firehose. A 1 hour HD program would consume about 300GB of disk space if you used that card. Sure, you could then compress it down to a few GB, but not in realtime (figure 2 hours processing time for each 1 hour of recording time).

Want dual-tuners? Better have a bank of 6+ drives! Not only do you have to buffer all that video until it gets compressed, but you also have to stream it all at an insane rate of about 1.5Gbps - your SouthBridge won't even handle that, so you'd need a fancy motherboard design or several computers.

Consumer HD recording from DVI will only be practical when hardware mpeg2/4 compression becomes affordable. Right now the equipment for that is rack-mounted and costs a very pretty penny (computers, DSPs, signal-processors, probably lots of fiber, etc). TV studios use it, and they have trouble getting it all right...

Re:Blu-Ray?

[vision864]

89MB/Sec

1 Used perc 4 U320 = 200$
4 Ebayed St373454LWs = $400

HDCPs ass on a platter = Priceless.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Trogre]

Sony's attitude? You do realise that Blu-Ray is controlled by an association of nearly twenty companies, right?

        * Apple Computer
        * Dell
        * Hewlett Packard
        * Hitachi
        * LG Electronics
        * Mitsubishi Electric
        * Panasonic (Matsushita Electric)
        * Pioneer Corporation
        * Royal Philips Electronics
        * Samsung Electronics
        * Sharp Corporation
        * Sony Corporation
        * TDK Corporation
        * Thomson
        * Twentieth Century Fox
        * Walt Disney Pictures
        * Warner Home Video Inc.

As opposed to HD-DVD in which the only major controllers are Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, Intel, and that axis of evil, Microsoft.

Also, I seem to recall people here circa 2000 had posts similar to yours:

For me there are two choices:

1) DVD content works with no Region locks, CSS or UOPs
2) No DVD content for me


Do you still think this is the case? Do you think you'll still be able to buy new DVDs in 5 years?

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could always set up something to pretend it's a monitor or television with HDCP. Something that responds to EKE and decompresses on the fly, and saves the result. As long as data needs to be somehow shown to a user, there will always be a way around any scheme like this. There's no data manipulation you can't do with modern software.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[harryk]

Additionally, all you're taking is the compressed mpeg2 stream direct from the digital feed and back to the harddrive, you'll notice that the bandwidth to record that level of video is significantly slower than attempting the same thing with 1080p.

BTW, gigabit cards are relatively cheap, and assuming your frontend and backend are the only two myth boxes in the house (Today anywAY) you could forgo the gig switch, and use a cross over cable between the two, thats actually what I'm doing right now, and it works great.

harryk

Re:Blu-Ray?

[daBass]

Don't you mean 1920 * 1080 * 36?

AFAIK, there are 12 bits per color, per pixel.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[grimwell]

Just to add a little to the other reply - your mythtv stream is only a few megabits/sec. Certainly not 700Mb/s!

True, enough... I did state that the network link is only 100mbps. Recording three HD streams uses about 6.5 megabytes per second of disk & network. Three streams is about 24GB of disk space an hour.

For a better point of reference the Colts vs Raven game yesterday was broadcast in 1080i. The recording schedule is configured to run late 45 minutes, I ended up with 4 hours 15 minutes worth of video. That file is 38GB in size.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[grimwell]

Yeah, I've used the cross-over cable solution before... it does work well.

My main frontend only has the three pci slots and they're filled with capture cards. So I'm stuck with the on-board 100mbps nic. Backend has a gigabit nic on-board and there is one other dedicated mythbox as well as a few more workstations with myth installed. The cheap-o gigabit switch works well enough.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Kjella]

I read my post again and realized something had to be very very wrong:
(...)and you're down to ~360Mbps, or 45MB/s. Hell, I capture 25MB/s from my DV camera on a regular basis.
That should be 25Mbit, or ~3MB/s. Then again, everythine else I wrote was correct

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Rich0]

But if you captured it using a framegrabber it would be:
1920*1080*30fps*12bpp*255min*60s/min/8bytes/bit = 1.4E12 bytes - and that isn't including the audio.

Even compressed HD uses quite a bit of space, but my point was that capturing DVI wasn't practical at all, even if you could afford the hardware (unless you buy realtime compression hardware).

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Mad Merlin]

It's now closer to 60MB/sec. I have three 250gig western digital sata drives, each drive can do 60MB/sec, or roughly 180MB/sec in a RAID0 array.

Read or write speed? I agree that read speed is over 60M/sec now, but write speed is still slower than read IME.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Emetophobe]

Oops, good point, I was only thinking about read speeds. Write speeds would be lower.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Fordiman]

Which would be null if it weren't for the fanboys wanting to buy a movie and show it off - that is, before they relaized they could put films on their memory sticks - that is, before they realized it's a fun novelty, but really not worth the effort unless you're going on a long plane trip.

A simple answer

[DiamondGeezer]

The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?"

Lawyers. Lots of them.

Re:A simple answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Lawyers. Lots of them.

Is that a new scene of the loading program in Matrix 4 the Retaliation?

CAPTCHA: sequeal ;)

Re:A simple answer

[Anonymous Coward]

The response is already in place... the TPM that the industry is trying to force down everyone's throats will provide the hardware to hide the key (you Apple owners opened up and swallowed willingly, there's one in every Intel Apple Mac).

These breaks are temporary...

Re:A simple answer

[jesboat]

Troll: there aren't TPM modules in many Intel Macs, and the ones which were shipped in Macs before are for use only by the user. The firmware and operating system don't initialize it, and you need to compile/install your own drivers to get it to do anything. It's not useful as a DRM device because you'd need firmware and OS updates to use it to protect the content properly.

Re:A simple answer

[jvillain]

That or else The Empire Strikes Back.

Re:A simple answer

[KUHurdler]

I was hoping the answer would be better movies...
Man, I was WAY off.

Re:A simple answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is designing their HiDef video/audio system around the TPM.

It's not useful as a DRM device because you'd need firmware and OS updates to use it to protect the content properly.

You idiot... SOFTWARE UPDATES. What the fuck do you think the latest OSX does? It supports "TRUSTED APPS", and the TPM is used all over the place.

Even simpler

[Overzeetop]

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

I predict that any backlash against key revokation will be addressed by very polished newsvertisements which state that the key revocation is the result of "hacking" by the "pirates" and despite the sincere regret of the problems caused, there is nothing they can do at this point.

Re:Even simpler

[Wonko the Sane]

If I remember correctly they can only revoke keys for future movies. All movies released when the compromised player was cracked can still be decrypted.

Re:Even simpler

[Philip K Dickhead]

Yeah. Then you can DoS the industry, by generating a significant portion of the possible key-space, and releasing it in a crack.

Nice going!

Re:Even simpler

[Constantine XVI]

To my knowledge, once the key for a disc has been let out, the only thing you can do is make a new key for the next run of the movie. I don't think you can have the players reject disc keys. Anyways, they would have to do a recall for everyone who had bought the movie.

Including the people that pried the key from the original

Re:Even simpler

[spisska]

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

Ahhh. But only the player key can be revoked, not the title key for discs already in the wild. They could use different keys on all subsequently pressed discs of the same title, but that doesn't affect the titles already cracked. And they can't expect to do a recall of cracked titles.

Or they could revoke the device key for the software player, which would mean the software player gets upgraded with a new key, and newer discs can be cracked using the exact same technique. Otherwise anyone selling software players would be faced with the massive liability of having sold something that doesn't work as advertised.

Since this technique relies on using the title and/or volume key and not the player key, it will not be so easy to fix through the device key revokation system that's a part of AACS.

Round one definitely goes to the good guys. And I don't see how it's anything but a matter of time before AACS is as completely broken as CSS is. Even with device key revokation, it's just a cat and mouse game with newer titles and newer devices. And how will the MPAA and the device manufacturers react when people who pay out the nose for players and films are no longer able to use them?

Re:Even simpler

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't revoke the title key. They can't revoke the player key because they don't know what player was used.
They can change keys for future discs, but any discs still in the wild will decrypt just fine, and the hackers can just rinse and repeat without revealing the player key.

Re:Even simpler

[Dachannien]

and despite the sincere regret of the problems caused, there is nothing they can do at this point.

Except settle in a class-action lawsuit.

Re:Even simpler

[iamdrscience]

I think the possibility of key revocation is extremely unlikely. If the companies behind HD-DVD begin to revoke keys it will only serve to hamper the format's adoption, consumers will not stand for that. Furthermore, I would imagine that such proactive defenses against pirating might result in a class action lawsuit -- if they revoke the keys for a hardware player consumers will be pissed and they'll likely win such a case.

Re:Even simpler

[shaneh0]

Arrrhhh... Ye can revoke my device key, but ye can never revoke my FREEEEEEEDOOOMMMM

Re:Even simpler

[Jugalator]

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

But it's volume keys leaking? Sure, they could re-encode the content and release new copies (hmm, to what estimated extra costs??) for a volume key revocation, but what use would that be when the previous version of the disc has already been decrypted and released as torrents?

Re:Even simpler

[DamnStupidElf]

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

Like I posted last time this crack was on slashdot, it's futile to revoke a key. Every movie released to HD-DVD before the key is revoked will still be readable with the known key, and within a few days or weeks another software key will be found to read all the newer movies. Additionally, true pirates who recover the key of a particular player are able to keep their discovery secret by not publishing the key, and they will always be able to rip new HD-DVD movies. There's no way to watermark movies based on the player key, because the entire stream must be encrypted with a single master key that the player key decrypts. There's no way for the media companies to discover which keys have been secretly compromised, even when movies are being released on the Internet.

In the best case, AACS will be fundamentally broken because of some oversight and all the player keys will be compromised, making key revocation laughable.

Re:Even simpler

[retro128]

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

It won't work. Right now, they're just figuring out how to get the title keys. It's kind of inconvenient because the only way you can decrypt a movie is to have the code for a particular title, and maintaining such a database will be a pain. Title keys can be revoked, but obviously it will not affect movies which have already been pressed. The whole thing may be moot, however, if someone writes a utility that can grab the title key on the fly. We already know that software players hold the key in memory - I would imagine it's just a matter of time before the process of getting it is automated.

It's also likely a matter of time before someone figures out what the player keys are. That's the Holy Grail. Player keys can be revoked, too, but it isn't practical to do so. If someone was able to get a list of player keys (ala DeCSS), the HDDVD consortium can revoke them all they want. They'll just have to explain to Joe Sixpack why his $500 HDDVD player won't run any new movies.

Re:Even simpler

[Anonymous Coward]

"There's no way for the media companies to discover which keys have been secretly compromised, even when movies are being released on the Internet"

It may not be worth it, but there is a way:

• release a few thousand different players
• for x titles, release a disc that does not play on a small fraction of these players
• check which of these titles do not get pirated

The search for the compromised player can be done using a variant of binary search, so it needs only 2log(n) titles. In the end, you will need to revoke a player key, and, if you want to play nicely, release a 'fixed' version of all probe DVDs, and give the owners of the revoked player some incentive. That is where the 'few thousand' different players come into the picture: it limits the number of customers affected by the revoking of the key

Re:Even simpler

[Dever]

too bad they revoked our freedom first in this reality...

Re:Even simpler

[KDR_11k]

That assumes there's only one device being used for this.

Re:Even simpler

[julesh]

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

If a movie distributor revokes the key of my HD-DVD compliant player that I paid money for, thus making it useless, they can expect to find themselves receiving a county court claim form through the post a few days after I find out about it. Sure, they could afford to pay what I demanded (a refund of the cost of the player). But could they afford it if everyone who owned one did the same?

Re:Even simpler

[rsmith-mac]

And how will the MPAA and the device manufacturers react when people who pay out the nose for players and films are no longer able to use them?

If the keys are being extracted out of software players, then that's not going to be a problem. Cyberlink/Intervideo will just release a point-upgrade with a new obfuscation scheme and new keys. Owners will just need to update their player(or better yet, it'll update itself), and things will continue on as normal. If you want to "break" AACS, the key from a popular hardware player needs to be extracted. Software players will only get you so far as the developers will get better and better at hiding the keys.

Re:Even simpler

[Tony Hoyle]

You can - all the HDDVD and BluRay players have internet connectivity. They can and do download blacklists in 'firmware updates'. Such updates are also pressed into future disks - so you can't even get away with never connecting the player. These can revoke both disk and hardware keys, so you'd have to replace your copy of serenity, or even potentially your TV if the keys for that got revoked.

The only question is whether they have the guts to do it.

Re:Even simpler

[Anonymous Coward]

Revoke the key. It will happen each time. This assumes that they know which player has been cracked. Anyone serious in commercial piracy of HD-DVD's would have at least one device which they use to retrieve master disc keys from, and this would allow them to crack any HD-DVD *without* anyone knowing which device needs to have its keys revoked. Of course, they wouldn't tell anyone which device/software they use to get master disc keys.

The real change HD-DVD is making is one to do with who is licensed/authorized to make hardware/software to play the movies. The DMCA and patent laws make it illegal to create your own HD-DVD player without following the guidelines that are set... and more importantly, without paying royalties on each device sold!

If they can control the availability of hardware/software for playback of HD-DVDs, they can also easily demand $50 from the sale of each player to "compensate for piracy".

Re:Even simpler

[Tony Hoyle]

Or they could revoke the device key for the software player, which would mean the software player gets upgraded with a new key, and newer discs can be cracked using the exact same technique. Otherwise anyone selling software players would be faced with the massive liability of having sold something that doesn't work as advertised.

Tough titties.

They wrote a player that was broken because it was badly coded. Their choice to cut corners.

The HDDVD licensing people will just revoke their license & those that have bought the software will get their money back. Expensive mistake but you can bet their contracts allow for exactly this scenario.

Re:Even simpler

[Webmonger]

That edition of that movie, yes. They can always create a new edition of the movie to revoke the keys.

Re:Even simpler

[ConceptJunkie]

Serious question:

Has a class-action lawsuit ever accomplished anything but be a minor annoyance to the defendants and enrich the lawyers? They certainly never do anything useful for the class.

Re:Even simpler

[Spikeles]

Software players will only get you so far as the developers will get better and better at hiding the keys.

WOW! You are naive! If it is in Software, it can and WILL be cracked. The new software obfuscation scheme will be broken in 20mins by some Russian crack group. It happens with the copy protection on games, what makes you think Cyberlink/Intervideo will have any more success?

Re:Even simpler

[Overzeetop]

It is my understanding, incorrect as it may be, that this was cracked using a software reader, not sniffing a hardware (stand-alone) player. You can just download the update. It will be a cat and mouse game, but an irrelevant one. You see, there are far more people who will have to buy a second copy - for whatever reason - than there will be pirates that lose them money. Slashdotters are so myopic on this point - most of the worlds computer users couldn't rip a DVD in a day if their life depended on it. Seriously. And it would take more than a casual hacker to get the information from a hardware player.

Besides, I'm certian the consortium would tell any hardware player mfr who has had their box cracked that they better pony up the fixes for free and do a better job of protecting the IP the next time.

For the record - I don't have either HD format player, and don't intend to get one for some time. I'd love to have HD, and I have an HD set to view it on (albeit fairly small at 51"). I do not support what they are doing, and I hope they fail miserably, but don't be suprised when it's "our" fault things get screwed up.

Re:Even simpler

[Dare nMc]

Owners will just need to update their player...the key from a popular hardware player needs to be extracted.

Both just got alot more difficult to protect. The title key cannot be changed for these cracked disks (unless they break backward compitibilty for all new players) So you take the newley released software/player, put in the old disk. watch for the presence of the known key to appear, put in the new disk, look at what shows up their now.

Re:Even simpler

[Dare nMc]

It's also likely a matter of time before someone figures out what the player keys are.

Actually muslix64 wrote: December 21:

I want to go further in the decryption, so I decide to track down the "Volume unique key" instead of title key.
I found it also! I'm preparing BackupHDDVD V1.00, that will support volume key and title keys.


Sounds like he/she posted the title keys as proof it works, but is keeping his/her volume key secret for now.

besides the title key is enough to give the hackers, if they know the key for Serenity, if they own Serenity, then it should be easy with a decent debugger to wait for that key to come across in the memory dump, and build your own scapper from their.

Re:Even simpler

[Workaphobia]

I don't understand why the player would have to take any active action on its part to revoke a key. My understanding is that once a disc like Serenity is cracked, there is no reason to recall existing copies, as the digital data is already out there on the P2P nets. If you're trying to prevent the same discs from being ripped again by the same player, that's futile because the player is presumably not connected to the Internet (what kind of hacker would allow his success to be overwritten by firmware updates?) and it's not like you can plant homing devices on commercial media and arrest people who refuse to comply with a mandatory recall. All you can do is not allow that player key to decrypt all future title keys on all future discs, and thanks to the broadcast encryption system that AACS uses, they shouldn't even have to update anyone else's player key to allow them continued legitimate access.

Re:Even simpler

[cayenne8]

"You can - all the HDDVD and BluRay players have internet connectivity."

Well, I can't imagine that many if any dedicated players will be hooked up to the internet. Why would they? They would shoot themselves seriously in the foot if they require someone to have internet connectivity to the living room just so someone can watch a HD dvd....

Hell, you hear 'geek' people even complaining they don't want a media computer in the living room...so I can't imagine that Joe Normal, that probably still has dial up...is going to want to run a phone line across the floor just to enable his dvd player. I'm talking in the future of course...where HD is the 'norm' like regular dvd's are today...............if that day ever comes.

Re:Even simpler

[ArsonSmith]

They make lawyers rich and businesses Leary of trying new things.

Re:Even simpler

[marcosdumay]

DoSing it is hard, there is plenty of space for keys.

But the good part is that every old player will have its key revoked too. So, we can DoS a big part of the HD devices after they are sold... I forsee big troubles with key revocation.

Re:Even simpler

[EllisDees]

>You see, there are far more people who will have to buy a second copy - for whatever reason - than there will be pirates that lose them money. Slashdotters are so myopic on this point - most of the worlds computer users couldn't rip a DVD in a day if their life depended on it.

If the choice becomes either buying a second (or third) version of a disc or just start downloading it off the internet from someone who has ripped it, how many people do you think will catch on that they don't have to waste their money?

Re:Even simpler

[Nasheer]

Call me naive, but I can't see the point of the movie industry.

A DVD is released, its key unleashed and exposed. Within 24h the movie will be available for download, key-free. New releases are sold, blacklisting the "faulty" hardware.

But at this point the movie is found in every torrent site in the planet. The so called "pirates" will have limitless access to it, because they won't buy, they'd download.

What is the industry trying to do? Reduce or even eliminate its claimed worst plague or just be a pain in the ass of the regular customer? I can't see how bad behaving users will have a hard time. The only ones who'll suffer are the ones who don't have a clue of what's going on.

Re:Even simpler

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

These can revoke both disk and hardware keys, so you'd have to replace your copy of serenity

I call bullshit. What possible value could there be in revoking a "disk key?" The consequences are that all legitimate owners could not play it, while all pirate copies would continue to play just fine.

Truth is, you are just making things up. Not only is there no mechanism for revoking "disk keys" - the only way player keys are revoked is by simply not including that player's key in the list on new titles, there is no "blacklisting" and no disabling of ability to play previously purchased titles.

Re:Even simpler

[iainl]

Fortunately for the HD-DVD group, unlike with Blu-Ray it's part of the mandatory spec for the player to have a network connection and upgradeable firmware, partly for this reason.

Re:Even simpler

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish this was true. But look at cable and satellite boxes. All the ones I've run across require a phone line so they can "phone home" every so often. Usually once a night. If people put up with this kind of crap (and I for one do NOT) then why should they balk at the HD-DVD box wanting a phone line? I'm a geek on dial-up and over-the-air television. And it sucks. :( But I refuse to pay out my yin-yang for cable/satellite and DSL isn't available in my area.

Fantasy Land

[gravesb]

By admitting DRM is useless and treating customers like clients instead of criminals? Only in my mind, only in my mind....

Re:Fantasy Land

[SuperDre]

It's the customer that is responsible for the reason of DRM, not the industry.. If the customer just bought it's stuff instead of copying it, then there would be no need for DRM... The industry is just trying to protect it's income like any normal thinking person would... Most people who are complaining about DRM are people who don't even buy stuff... But here we aren't talking about DRM, we are talking about a copyprotection.. You can play any HD-DVD/BR disk in any HD-DVD/BR player, so if you buy your stuff you won't have any problems..

Re:Fantasy Land

[Takumi2501]

It's the customer that is responsible for the reason of DRM, not the industry.. If the customer just bought it's stuff instead of copying it, then there would be no need for DRM... The industry is just trying to protect it's income like any normal thinking person would... Most people who are complaining about DRM are people who don't even buy stuff... But here we aren't talking about DRM, we are talking about a copyprotection.. You can play any HD-DVD/BR disk in any HD-DVD/BR player, so if you buy your stuff you won't have any problems..

Your objection sounds perfectly logical at first, but what if you want to make a backup copy for yourself or convert it to another format to play on something else? These are both perfectly legal and ethical, unless of course you have to deal with breaking a copy-protection scheme to do it.

Re:Fantasy Land

[shaneh0]

I, too, LOATHE the people that steal content and then complain about DRM.

But, the people that don't actually buy things don't give a shit about this. They'll just wait for someone else to do the hard work, and they'll download the torrents. This harms the people that DO BUY and want to make a backup copy, or want to transfer it to their VOD library, like yours truly.

I mean, the people that download movies are more or less used to the fact that the downloads are of lower quality than the DVD. This is almost universally true. So the fact that they can't get HD content thru Pirate Bay is probably not making them cry in their cornflakes.

No, this doesn't hurt the freeloaders. It hurts the guy that spent $2200 on a TV, $600 on an HD-DVD player, and $25 per movie.

Re:Fantasy Land

[Anonymous Coward]

I find with piracy I'm not forced to watch non-skippable "Don't pirate!" clips on DVDs. Each time I watch a DVD at some friends', I laugh at how they pay for that stuff, only to be told not to pirate.

Oh the irony.

Re:Fantasy Land

[WNight]

You piss me off. There's an industry lobbying for ruinous copyright laws and suing security researchers, children, etc. You're funding this industry by re-buying their overpriced schlock *yet again* in a new format. Stop being such a fucking dick and funding the enemy. Try sending money to an industry that doesn't want to destroy the internet to protect their shows.

I now pirate movies and support the cracking of HD-DVD, etc, specifically because I hope to ruin the industry. I can't possibly hope to sue every exec who think the MPAA and RIAA are good ideas, as their organizations have sued others. There are too many of them and they have too many lawyers. But, if we can drive them out of business it's just as good.

I'd imagine DVD John feels much the same, as do thousands of people who are pissed off at mandatory copy "protection" and other forms of their media and computers being set against them in the endless quest to squeeze out a bit more graft for the entertainment industry.

There is no copyright on DRMed goods. You can either have unrestricted copyright and let the law (we the people protect your monopoly in trade for its future release) take over, or you can DRM it and because there's absolutely no hope of a future release, we won't protect it for you. You can try to convince yourself there is, but I pay for copyrights and I'm fucking sick of being tricked into paying for something that's hostile to me (Sony's DRM for one) and paying to fund a massive government crackdown on free computing just because it might be able to break someone's restrictions. I will do my utmost to ruin the value of any DRMed copyrighted works, in proportion to the DRM. Just as that little Thank-You to an industry that loves us so much.

Re:Fantasy Land

[shaneh0]

You're a joke. I mean, you're a walking punchline. People should fall to the grown rolling around inflicted with uncontrollable laughter at your mere presence in their field of vision.

You've spun being too cheap to pay for the things that you desire into some sort of pseudo-populist freedom fighter welfare case.

"Funding the Enemy?"

I'm serious. The Farrelly brothers have a hard time writing comedy like that. Seriously. This line makes you sound so retarded that I imagine you catatonic drooling into your "Big Breakfasts for Big Boys" bib hoping for mom to "fly" another "airplane" of strained peas into your cleft pallet.

"Try sending money to an industry that doesn't want to destroy the internet to protect their shows."

It's like you've majored in Cheaponomics with a minor in Melodrama.

"There is no copyright on DRMed goods. You can either have unrestricted copyright and let the law (we the people protect your monopoly in trade for its future release) take over, or you can DRM it and because there's absolutely no hope of a future release, we won't protect it for you."

OK, I understand that you're reading at a fifth grade level now, but this makes no sense. I mean, says who? You? Puh-leese.

"I will do my utmost to ruin the value of any DRMed copyrighted works"

Every indication is that your "utmost" is about as scary as your average Brownie troop trying to get their "No DRM" merit badge. I'm sure the "enemy" entertainment industry is scared senseless at the prospect of your ankle-biting.

"I'd imagine DVD John feels much the same"

Awwww. How cute. Da liddle boy has sucha 'magination. Always dreaming, arent't ya buddy? Seriously, DVD Jon in 2001 when DeCSS came out said he did it for FAIR USE RIGHTS. _NOT_ so cheap welfare case free-loaders like you don't have to pay for the things that you desire.

In summary, you seem to feel you're entitled to the artistic works that you desire. You are every bit the consumer-whore as any other American, but you've used some braindead logic to try to justify STEALING the things you want. In reality, you're just another welfare case that wants what he wants but would rather let somebody else pickup the tab. There's a word for people like you: losers.

Like it or not, the "enemy" you speak of apparently still produces things that are valuable to you. So valuable, in fact, that you've invented this fake "crusade" wherein your "utmost" will be done to avoid paying a dime for your actions. So valuable that you've imagined yourself as some anti-drm super hero that's left trying to "save the internet" from the evil corporations that, apparently--according to you--are trying to destory it.

Seriously: Grow up, dude. Step away from the hyperbole and put both hands in the air.

But if you ever decide to expand your crusade to "liberate" BMWs from their Nazi Death Camps and are looking for a place to stash them before the auto industry destroys the internet, let me know.

Re:Fantasy Land

[WNight]

Wah, wah, wah. I don't buy your political arguments so I'm cheap.

For what it's worth, I have helped everyone I know install p2p software and discouraged the purchase of media from companies that encourage DRM. My own lack of purchases (I spent little before mp3 piracy became the rage) is far from stunning and my efforts will be totally felt through my encouragement of others.

As for who decides that DRMed works don't have Copyright, yes, me. Can you think of anyone else? I don't respect them and to the limits of getting sued, I will continue to not do so. Further I'll work to weaken their DRM, cause others to disrespect the people who DRM the works, and to finally copy the work once DRM is broken. If I had millions, I'd bribe a politician. Instead, I'll convince everyone that DRM is wrong and that it violates the spirit of copyright law. Once nobody follows the law, we'll have an easier time getting a less restrictive one in place.

I see my industry, and one that thanks to things like Wikipedia, is one of the best things to ever happen. And I see companies looking to install mandatory DRM on computers, refuse to play high-res content unless it's signed from a *valid* copyright holder, etc, all in order to shut off the post-sale market on copyrighted works, etc. I see OSes refusing to run on changed hardware, files refusing to open without license servers that no-longer exist. Your data, your hardware, controlled by someone else.

So yes, I see those who are doing the DRM lobbying as the enemy. They'd gladly put me and my friends out of work to preserve their antiquated business model. So I'd gladly bring the world into a new sharing model and put them out of work, rather than being thrust into a 1984 world of locked files and access restrictions.

If you spend money on DRMed products, you're directly funding people who want to hurt us. Go donate a dollar to SCO or some patent camper, if you want to fund people who'd take your rights away. You're just a loser who doesn't want to assume responsibility for what you invest in.

Re:Fantasy Land

[shaneh0]

I swear to god, your post should be hung up in the FUD museum.

You are far, far beyond the bend, my friend.

Let's do a little exercise.

Draw a Zero. Now draw a decimal point after the zero. Now draw another zero. So far you should have "0.0" Now, draw a zero, and another, and another. Keep drawing zeros until your hand is NUMB. By this point you should have something like this, only 4 or 5 times longer: 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000

Good. Now, draw a "1"

Now, draw a percent sign. That's two more zeros with a diagnol between them.

That number, the tiniest fraction of a fraction of a percent is the effect that you will have on the entertainment industry, even if you install P2P on every PC you touch from now until you choke on your last worthless breath.

The best part is, your entire premise is just as stupid as your master plan itself. You think it's easier to get a lesser law passed if nobody follows the law? Seriously? When has this _ever_ worked before? (and no, prohibition wasn't repealed because everyone ignored it. go crack open a book loser). See Also: Jane, Mary.

You, my dear friend, are a textbook example of a fanatic. You are fanatical. You are not only fanatical, but so cheap that you channel your fanatic personality into trying to get things that you want without paying for them. I mean, you would _bribe a politician._ Your parents should be so proud. Their progeny is sitting on a fricken website _complaining_ about something he can do _nothing_ about, waxing poetic about "if only I were rich" so that way you could subvert democracy and commit multiple felonies.

You say that DRM violates the spirit of the copyright law. Really? What spirit was that? The spirit where you should actually be able to blow-off copyright law if you want to without any consequence?

The truth is, DRM is the maximum and logical extension of copyright law. You don't like to hear it because it ruins your moronic plan where everything is free, but the purpose of copyright is to say that YOU HAVE NO CONTROL. It's the CONTENT OWNERS that have control. DRM took away what you never legally had to begin with. And that makes you cry like a little bitch because your cheap ass can't break out the mastercard to the tune of ONE WHOLE DOLLAR to pay for what you want.

Your little plan to subvert DRM is--no shit--like Brain trying to take over the world. Your a tiny little person who dreams of taking democracy away from Americans for the advancement of your own twisted welfare-state agenda.

DRM is going _nowhere_ my friend. It has a long and rich history and it's here to stay. There will be childish fringe elements like yourself working long hours in your parents basement downloading torrent files, meanwhile the entertainment industry will continue to roll in BILLIONS of dollars from hard-working honest people like myself, and they'll use that money to combat, sue, and jail fanatics like YOU who would just as soon take away my representation in congress.

You're a petulant child who thinks that if only you cry loud enough the world will change just for you.

Wake up asshat: your "plans" are totally fruitless and serve only as comedic fodder to _real_ Americans like me.

And one more thing: Did you actually equate 1984 with "locked files." ???? Seriously? I'm not at all surprised, but just saying that shows you didn't bother to actually read that book. There is _nothing_ in the book even remotely close to what you're attributing to it, and the things in that book are far, far worse--and worlds removed--from being able to download the newest kiddy pop song that you and your plebe friends are totally keen to download.

I'm glad th

Re:Fantasy Land

[WNight]

Ahhh, you think prohibition ended because everybody happily gave up alcohol and didn't protest. That makes total sense.

And your point about me damaging the movie industry, my total efforts will amount to little therefore I should not try. You sure are inspirational. Luckily, my energy outlay in pointing people to p2p programs is minimal. Therefore, my results/effort is actually fairly high. Thanks though, for your concern about the productivity of my free time.

As for the maximum and logical extension of copyright, this DRM you trumpet, it obviously totally fails to prevent any use of mine, I crack it. Anyone unable to google for 'crack windows' though, like a legitimate user with a problem booting, is more than a little inconvenienced. Not quite the 100% effectiveness you claim...

And as for locked files, I don't know what part of redactable email, or news sites you can't quote or screenshot, etc, you can't reconcile with 1984 (and such). Perhaps if you already share your encryption keys with everyone from Microsoft to the MPAA and the obviously trustworthy government, then you might not mind having this kind of crap built into your software. Maybe a tazer will personally demonstrate your patriot act some day.

Re:Fantasy Land

[cultrhetor]

Two fact checks: Prohibition ended for a number of reasons, one of the greatest of which was the "lobbyists" (who were, back then, just "concerned" citizens with a bundle of $$$ from certain manufacturers to share with concerned congressmen) from St. Louis and Milwaukee. Kind of like the lobbyists from Hollywood and NY pushing for DRM... Second, you really need to read 1984. The novel talks about a totalitarian government that watched its citizens' every act and had absolute control over the media and language, and by extension, thought. All broadcasts were not only accessible to citizens, but they were required viewing: "news sites you can't quote or screenshot" wouldn't make an appearance because the populace was encouraged to accept whatever they saw on the broadcast as truth, and quoting it as such would benefit, not harm, Big Brother. Even now, you can "quote" from news sites, you just have to attribute your quote - something that someone like you, who plagiarized his thoughts from a bad cyberpunk novel, might not understand.

Re:Fantasy Land

[WNight]

Did you totally miss Winston's job, redactor of the old inaccurate newspapers, etc.

My point is that you can't very well reliably quote something you don't have in hardcopy, and a DRMed video that refuses to let you take a screenshot or display it to others isn't a hard copy. This is quite literally from the book - if people were allowed to have books or newspapers they could compare them to discover the government lies. The government restricted access, an actually went so far as to force library copies, to hide the truth.

1984 predicts the totalitarian outcome as being through government, but in reality most of the chilling effects are just as likely in a capitalist society where the means to communicate (tv, net and phone companies), utilities, etc, are private property. Ted Turner is as plausible a Big Brother as Joseph Stalin.

News agencies have been caught silently changing articles on their website (no notice of the edit) when this substantially changed the meaning of the article. If screenshots, saved copies, digital photos, etc, were all blocked with DRM, how would anyone prove this sort of thing to anyone else? Would you sign a contract and trust me to keep the only copy?

No less scary for the fact that we're buying into it in trade for glitzy movies and pop music. When everyone is using a console instead of a computer and can't run unsigned programs without a mod chip (illegal in many areas) the freedom to break the law (illicitly photograph a copyrighted document) and let a judge sort it out (in a whistle-blowing case) will be gone.

But yes, we have yet to be crushed so I shouldn't mention the sky falling.

That seals it for me...

[chill]

Between the porn industry choosing HD-DVD and now this, I know what I'm opting for when upgrading to HD movies! Sorry, Sony. I was so looking forward to having spyware installed on my PC with every BluRay disc purchased just like your music discs.

Re:That seals it for me...

[pdaoust007]

These rootkit allusions are getting really old...
 
    the fact of the matter is that HD-DVD being cracked means studios will shy away from it, even more than today (BD has waaay more sudio support as it is). As far as I'm concerned this seals HD-DVD's fate. Blu-Ray will win, will be eventually cracked and we'll all be happy.

Re:That seals it for me...

[Overly Critical Guy]

The porn industry didn't "choose HD-DVD." See, this is why I don't like Slashdot and its exaggerated headlines. People read just the summaries and form their whole worldview off of them.

Re:That seals it for me...

[Trogre]

Yep, that about seals it for me too:

Porn destined for HD-DVD - check
HD-DVD encryption cracked while studios are watching carefully, deciding which format to go for - check

Blu-Ray, here I come.

Re:That seals it for me...

[Dion]

You (and most people it seems) overrate how important this crack is.

Bluray and HDDVD use the 100% same DRM, what works for one will work for the other.

The only difference between Bluray and HDDVD is the additional B+ spyware/rootkit code which needs to be run in a virtual machine (I think it's Java) the only thing the B+ crap can do is to do further work before decrypting the title key, once that has happened the keys will still be in RAM, ripe for the picking, just like this hack.

What is needed before we can declare either format non-worthless is to get a player key and have a reliable method of finding other player keys.

The best outcome would be for both HDDVD and Bluray to fail miserably the same way as DVDA (snicker) and SACD failed clearing the path for a much cheaper and less restricted medium, like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Versatile_Di sc

If the EVD can become popular enough in China that all chinese made players support it by default (like VCD) and bluray/hddvd keep dragging their feet then at some point studios will serve customers with those players.

great news hd-dvd rips w/Xvid around the corner

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a great day to be a pirate, arr...

"now how will the industry respond?"

[gerf]

"Hello, Doom9.com's ISP? Yes, this is Microsoft. We're auditing your sofware licenses."

"Hello, Doom9.com's registrar? You're being charged with violating the DMCA. Pretty much all of it."

"Hello, little tiny country? This is the MPAA, and as official representitives of the US government, we're asking you to hand over all people involved in this post on Doom9.com's forum. If you fail to respond, we'll enact sanctions on your country and drive you into the dark ages. Just look at North Korea for an example.

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wait, so if I don't turn these guys over, I get a one-million man army and nuclear weapons?" ...

"Sweet!"

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[MostAwesomeDude]

Um, as The Pirate Bay has demonstrated already, there are three wrong with your supposition. First off, ICANN does not and will not revoke domain names at the behest of the government. As long as Doom9 has backbone (and this hasn't been their first time in this type of situation), they're not gonna crumple.

The second thing is that they might not be located in the USA. The whois dossier shows that the domain was registered by (anonymous) proxy, and it's entirely possible that he's not American. If his servers are physically located outside of the USA, then he can't be legally threatened by civil suits, and he's not subject to DMCA. (However, this is a hypothetical, and since he refuses to host DeCSS, it is my guess that he is somewhere in the USA.)

The third thing is that the website is http://www.doom9.org/ , not doom9.com.

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hello USA, this is Europe. Here is a list of more tarrifs that we shall impose upon your trade" :)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Europe-Will-21st-Centu ry/dp/0007195311/sr=1-1/qid=1168715726/ref=sr_1_1/ 026-9520916-4570038?ie=UTF8&s=books

I recommend this book for the differences in approaches between USA and the EU with regard to the approaches to solving disputes :)

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[cdrudge]

Doom9.com: "Hello Microsoft. We are a domain squatter. We have no idea what you are talking about. Besides. We run Linux."

Microsoft: "Crap. We sued the wrong company. Refile for doom9.NET"

Doom9.net: "Go fly a kite. We run Linux as well so you have no authorization to do an 'audit'. And go fuck yourself with the DMCA. US laws don't apply in England."

Microsoft: "Shit. Wait. Why the hell do we care if HD DVD are cracked. That's the MPAA's problem."

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[interval1066]

gerf said:
"Hello, little tiny country? This is the MPAA, and as official representitives of the US government, we're asking you to hand over all people involved in this post on Doom9.com's forum. If you fail to respond, we'll enact sanctions on your country and drive you into the dark ages. Just look at North Korea for an example."

The United States and the MPAA are responsible for N. Korea being in the dark ages?

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[Anonymous Coward]

To an extent, the US (and UN) is. The MPAA then, by controlling the US, can leverage that power.

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[danbeck]

Congratulations, even in an article that has little to do with the US government, you succeeded in somehow making it the focus of evil in this world. DRKP is a 5th world country because it's run by a little tin-horned dictator who rules with such an iron fist, that you could never even imagine living under it. Do you know that the DRKP still, to this day, tell it's citizens that food given as humanitarian relief are war reparations?

Boy, yeah... if it weren't for those sanctions, the DRKP would be a utopia of the far east!

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Try telling this to Ernst Zundel, or many other holocaust revisionists...
The Jews have their claws in every country...

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft confirms it.

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[Firehed]

As Microsoft is firmly in the HD-DVD camp (see: Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive, Sony backs blu-ray, etc), I think they'd care quite a bit of HD-DVD gets cracked.

That said, it won't matter if blu-ray's copy protection holds up while HD-DVD's doesn't if nobody actually buys into it. In the end, studios will produce for whichever side has a bigger market - they're not stupid enough to think that the winner's copy protection will hold up forever even if it lasted a bit longer.

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[cdrudge]

I'm sure they care as they are a backer of HD-DVD. However I don't think they care in the manner that they are responsible for the success of HD-DVD. If HD-DVD used WMV DRM/encryption for instance, then I can see them caring.

Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[RAMMS EIN]

``The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?''

I think at least the Blu-Ray camp will switch on their intergalactic megaphones and tout how Blu-Ray was superior all along. This whole format war is childish enough for that.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[mcknation]

They use the same encryption spec don't they?
I thought I read somewhere that this would effect blu-ray as well...
?
/McK

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! Blu-ray doesn't belong in my living room, and neither does Al Gore!

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[pyite]

You are correct, sir. The attack vector is the same, keys being exposed in insecure memory in the decoder/player. The encryption of AACS itself is unlikely to be cracked as it's AES, and AES is very nifty and well studied. Even if the key searching approach fails, there *are* possibilities that some sort of attacks could be waged on the AES implementation which might be vulnerable. (For instance, I wrote AES for MATLAB. It's highly likely that my implementation could be exploited for various reasons, such as cache timing attacks.)

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[Overly Critical Guy]

What really strikes me is how much Slashdotters go on and on about how competition is good...but then they turn around and claim HD-DVD versus Blu-ray is bad and "childish." Uh, they are two competing formats, which is good. It means each will try to undercut the other in prices, outdo the other in specs, and try to have a wider library of titles. You know, the whole "competition is good" thing you guys spout every other time.

That makes me wonder, what is it about Blu-ray versus HD-DVD that makes Slashdotters not want any competition in the free market?

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with the Blu-ray camp doing that? Why is competition bad?

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[onemorechip]

I'll say your nom de plume is appropriate. There are two ways to reconcile these positions logically. One is that it is not the same Slashdotters making both claims (we have diversity of opinion here, in case you failed to notice). The other way is that the "competition" the first claim refers to is between corporations, not between formats. The former fuels markets, the latter fragments them. It's true that the latter is a consequence of the former, but it is not an inevitable consequence. For instance, nearly all books published in English today have the binding on the left side, even though there are many publishers competing for your cash.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[RAMMS EIN]

``What really strikes me is how much Slashdotters go on and on about how competition is good...but then they turn around and claim HD-DVD versus Blu-ray is bad and "childish."''

I'm not sure these are the same Slashdotters. Also, I'm not sure there is a contradiction here (as you seem to suggest). Personally, I believe in competition, but I also believe in interoperability. In fact, I believe that interoperability makes competition more effective. Having two incompatible formats pollutes competition with another factor: rather than being about the quality and price of the content, it's suddenly about compatibility.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[Workaphobia]

Yes, but I believe blu-ray has additional measures besides AACS.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[Workaphobia]

Ah, but you're forgetting that fragmenting into different formats reduces competition between manufacturers for each format individually. If half the companies choose HDDVD and half choose Blu-ray, that's less competition and less choice over what device you can play your movie on, if your movie is only offered in one format or the other.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[Lehk228]

TEMPEST type attacks will end up as a last resort way to pull the keys. the same thing will work with Trusted Computing modules. place a series of antenna against the chip an "listen" as it works. then you analyse the results and determine the key. depending on how easy this part is it will either be relegated to release groups with personnelle experienced enough to do it, or it could be deployed as a solderless "mod chip" that anyone willing to take the risk of ordering one from overseas can sell the service of ripping keys for whatever the market will bear. once you get the keys out of a TPM you can emulate the whole trusted computing stack in software no problem.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[Kjella]

What really strikes me is how much Slashdotters go on and on about how competition is good...but then they turn around and claim HD-DVD versus Blu-ray is bad and "childish." Uh, they are two competing formats, which is good. It means each will try to undercut the other in prices, outdo the other in specs, and try to have a wider library of titles. You know, the whole "competition is good" thing you guys spout every other time.

Well, in any industry where you have economics of scale, a monopoly is the most efficient when it comes to production cost. The downside is that the monopoly can set whatever price it wants. Let us take the DVD format, which pretty much has a monopoly depsite there being plenty manufacturers. If the DVD Forum decided that they should take $100/player for the licensing, there wouldn't be much to stop them with the massive player- and disc-base they have. For some reason the licensing costs are very low though, leading to $29 DVD players from asia. Why that is I can't exactly say, but I'm guessing it's because many of the DVD Forum's members have a vested interest in selling DVDs, which means they'd like to sell as many players as possible.

In the same vein, I think many people believe that when we agree on a format, the consumers will find it much simpler, the volume of production goes up, and the prices still drop because it's better business to steal market share from DVDs than to gauge the relatively few HDTV-fans. That'll take care of the prices, as for the specs they usually get maxed out by players/movies differeniating themselves from their competitors and SD counterparts - does a crappy 720p player using a poor MPEG2 compressor sell bad? Well here's a 1080p player and a H.264/VC-1 movie so you really can see the difference. Finally, with a single format the library will almost tend to itself. Want to earn more money, by selling to the HD crowd? Then you *will* release in this format, very simple economics at work there.

In short, as long as the format licensing costs can be kept low it might be good for consumers. The general rule about monopolies still applies, but when there's good reason why a consortium can't/won't extract monopoly profits there can be exceptions.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[WNight]

If the studios drop DRM, and I can move my HD-DVD content to blu-ray when HD-DVD drives stop being made, it'll be acceptable.

Otherwise, those expensive media licenses we buy will be rendered worthless when their DRM locks them to a format you can't buy a drive for anymore.

If the media industry wants DRM they'd better get together and create a guaranteed format, or maybe a guaranteed free upgrade policy. Otherwise it's just a George Lucas cash grab, release the same shit in a different format yet again.

Personally, I simply don't recognize a copyright on DRMed works. Copyright is something that I, the people and government, grant to creators in trade for their giving the work to the public domain, sans some distribution rights for a temporary period. When the work's creator denies me those contractual obligations, I don't grant them copyright. Seeing as how it would be impossible for me to get a tax refund over, say, Adobe's DRMing of Photoshop CS2, or how the XMen 3 movie is DRMed, I choose to simply apply that tax refund towards the purchase price. I don't grant you copyright, as you don't quid the pro quo, so I'm not breaking it when I copy your work.

I fully became a thief in the industry's eyes the day I copied disk images of all of my old Apple 2 images onto my new 486, so that I could keep playing Ultima 5 (which I had purchased from chore money as a kid) on my new PC. The games were engineered to prevent this, thus locking my usage license to a fragile medium which didn't represent the direction that I, the user, was moving my hardware in. So, I figured that this nasty assessment of my character could make me feel bad about myself, or I could simply look and see that absolutely nobody was harmed, greedy people merely did not get richer for no extra work, and that I was served in a fashion which treats fairly the creator of any other product I buy. I can refinish a chair, but not re-disk a game. I can scribble notes in a book, but not in software. Obviously it's not because people in this new medium need new protection that nobody has ever had before, but simply because they found a way to take what they wanted (my post-sale rights) away. Well, fair is fair then, and it's an arms race. Currently I use various fake CD programs to rip my CDs and throw them on my server where I can mount them from any PC in the house.

In general I still own most of the software I use, but where DRMing makes it problematic as with Blizzard games, I don't bother buying them anymore. They proved by telling me to buy a new CD rom (when by burner triggered their DRM in the Diablo days) that my property rights meant nothing to them, and by doing so, announced their intent to opt out of our copyright agreement.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[Anonymous Coward]

...I wrote AES for MATLAB. It's highly likely that my implementation could be exploited for various reasons, such as cache timing attacks.

Awesome. Now I know where to focus my efforts. Thanks for the tip!

Too early to celebrate victory

[rumith]

Does anyone know if it works under Vista? Does anyone have think it's possible to detect this stuff by signature and block execution?

We have a Winner...

[dalmiroy2k]

You have Pr0n, cheaper hardware and blank media than Blu-ray and now you can "backup" movies, HD-DVD will be the winner of the HD format war, at least here in Argentina, Brazil or other developing countrys where piracy reigns...

Re:We have a Winner...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be so glib. There is very little penetration from either format right now, amounting to acceptable loss to anybody involved except the producers of the media themselves.

So what makes you think, if for instance Blu-Ray remains resistant to easy copying, and HD-DVD turns out to be wide open, that content producers are going to flock to it? What is going to suddenly change their mind now, after all this time, that an open media is better than a closed one they have full control over?

Dream on. For those movie studios that were on the fence or hedging their bets, the scenario of "HD-DVD open, Blu-Ray closed" is a disaster for HD-DVD. They will choose Blu-Ray despite other negatives, just for the safe haven of being able to extort every last dollar out of the sale. A secure media trivializes the cost difference in production of disk which is the most often cited decision criteria between the two media.

The best thing that could happen now is somebody cooks up an equivalent system for Blu-Ray. Which may not be possible if they were a little more awake and aware when implementing their protection layer.

Re:We have a Winner...

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is very little penetration from either format right now"

Apparently, that's about to change. In case you missed it:
Adult Film Industry Chooses HD-DVD

now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should start a list of 'safe-to-buy' HD-DVD hardware and content/media.

The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[TechyImmigrant]

I took a look at the spec for the HD-DVD encryption. The data is encrypted with AES-128 in CBC mode. The spec states clearly that the IV is a fixed constant. CBC required the IV to no only be unique, but also random. Not making it unique and random leads to a leak of key material. I assume that this is the weakness through which the keys are being extracted.

So rejoice. The HD-DVD media keys will be free.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[julesh]

So rejoice. The HD-DVD media keys will be free.

Yes, but how much processor time will be required to free them? If this guy used a 20 node overclocked Core2 Extreme cluster with 16GB RAM per node, and it took him 8 months to get the answer, then things aren't looking great for our ability to play HDDVDs on Linux any time soon.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[gweihir]

Not making it unique and random leads to a leak of key material. I assume that this is the weakness through which the keys are being extracted.

Very, very unlikely. Far more likely is the key just being present in plain in the memory occupied by the player, Simply do triel-decryption with any 16 byte sequence in there. Easy, really and will not take long. Even if they do obfuscation, the cipher should be easy to find in memory. THen you can read out the key setup.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[IamScared]

The use of a fixed and constant initialization vector does not leaks key material, but allows a dictionary attack, specially when the first block is somewhat predictable. In this case, a dictionary attack on the AES-128 cipher is still required. A cipher leaks key material when at least one bit of the ciphertext it produces is not completely random.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[Kadin2048]

Isn't this how CSS was cracked eventually? The first hacks intercepted the keys from a player that stored them in a fixed location in memory, as this HD-DVD crack does, but later versions actually broke the encryption scheme without reliance on any existing code or players.

And wasn't the eventual mode of attack something related to weak initialization vectors, too? I might be confusing CSS with WEP here, but I thought that it was some poor implementation of IVs that led to a catastrophic reduction in the keyspace, allowing someone to easily brute-force the key.

Even if it was WEP and not CSS that was broken due to weak IVs, you'd think the AACS people would have learned.

Of course, given the inherent flaws in DRM, I'd have thought they've learned that they were playing Sisyphus by now, but it seems not.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[numbski]

Now wait just a second. I'm no cryptographer here, but I think you're making some presumptions that may be out of whack.

As you get more keys, wouldn't it be feasible to create a table by which to speed up the decryption process? As you get more keys, theoretically speaking you could derive the base equation used to generate the keys, thus being able to arbitrarily generate your own. So yes, it's slow now, but as more keys get cracked, more energies can be put into determining that base equation through brute force rather than into getting more keys. Of course I could be off my rocker there too.

Sounds like a job for distributed computing IMHO. :D Someone want to work up a screen saver for this?

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[Jugalator]

Very, very unlikely. Far more likely is the key just being present in plain in the memory occupied by the player, Simply do triel-decryption with any 16 byte sequence in there. Easy, really and will not take long. Even if they do obfuscation, the cipher should be easy to find in memory. THen you can read out the key setup.


Heh, yeah, and if you read the Doom9 forum in the story about this, you'd see this is how it was done. They found the addresses of where WinDVD stored the plaintext keys.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[DavidTC]

That entire assumption is faulty, because no one cracked any encryption, and that would, in fact, be impossible to do for AES for any time in foreseeable future.

They reverse-engineered a piece of software to find where it stored the player key. With this player key, they, and anyone else, can trivially decode all HD-DVDs produced currently, just like the original software. They can hand this key to anyone, and it will allow anyone to decode all current HD-DVDs.

It didn't take any computing time to 'decode', although it might have taken some time manually pouring through memory dumps and stack traces.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[julesh]

OK, so we're relying on a software flaw that exists now but could be closed at any time in the future due to the implementation of revocation lists. Newer OS designs will presumably make it harder and harder to gain access to a "protected" process's memory to perform this kind of debugging, and in the end we'll all be stuck with no keys again. Sounds useful.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[Terrasque]

A software flaw.. I wouldn't call it that. Design flaw maybe.

The real problem is that the software player need to decode the video at some point, and for that it needs to use the key.
The question is rather, can a program use a set of data (the key) in a way that no other programs can read it? The way it is now, no.

This may change with the trusted computing stuff that is coming, unless someone find a weakness there too..

So, until then, the key will be revoked, and the company have two choices. Update with a new key (that will probably be copied out from the player the same day), or get a lot of angry customers complaining that their program don't work anymore.

Sure, they could add some fancy trickery to make it harder to read the key, but commercial software have tried that for years and years (copy protection) and still aren't even close to the goal.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[HTH NE1]

So, until then, the key will be revoked, and the company have two choices. Update with a new key (that will probably be copied out from the player the same day)

I think you can be assured that company that created the exploited software player won't be given a new key until that company changes the software so that the same exploit will not work.

The people who control who gets keys will see to that.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[sago007]

The real problem is that the software player need to decode the video at some point, and for that it needs to use the key.

That is a design flaw. They could just copy the data directly from the HDDVD to the graphics card, skipping the whole software part.

However this would have caused them some problems:
People would not need to buy expensive software, so they would get less money
DRM is enforced in software, it is not that easy for the graphics card to know if the user have payed extra so he can use surround sound, especially now then the drivers are moving out from the kernel.
High performance hardware does not allow upgrading, so if the key is broken... it is just broken!

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[DavidTC]

Then they'll run the entire OS under a debugger, or under a virtualizer and debugger. Or just decode it off the disk.

Any machine can emulate any other machine, period. It is theoretically impossible to keep decoded data from the hands of someone who has all the secrets. I like how various industries are apparently unaware that computer science is a science and knows that that such concepts are flatly impossible. As long as you can physically read all the data used to decode something, and the thing you want to decode, you can crack it.

Protecting memory won't cut it, the data's on the disk. Protecting the files on the disk won't cut it, because they can be read in Linux. Encrypting the files won't cut it, because the Windows decryption key can be read in Linux. And so on and so on. It's a theoretical impossiblity, which seems to have escaped notice of the people trying to implement it, who, I guess, just keep thinking they're implementing crappy systems.

It's akin to designing a perpetual motion machine...it always looks like there's some fatal flaw you can fix to get it to work, but, sadly, no, there isn't. It cannot work in theory, and thus will always fail in practice.

Now, it might be possible to have complete software protection if some of the secrets are locked into silicon. With such hardware protection, people might be required to do hardware hacking to crack it, although I'm not entirely sure of that. It always can be done with hardware hacking, even if the hardware hack required is to disassemble a decrypting plasma display and pipe the decoded output to another computer.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[fuzz6y]

That's not how that works. Keys are generated randomly. Knowing one doesn't tell you anything about any other, unless someone has made a very serious mistake.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[Alsee]

That's not how that works. Keys are generated randomly. Knowing one doesn't tell you anything about any other, unless someone has made a very serious mistake.

Ah good. Then the MPAA have nothing to fear. Chuckle.

-

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[Kjella]

Short summary of the differences:
The DVD encryption spec (CSS) was a secret
The HD-DVD/Blu-Ray encryption spec (AACS) was published

The DVD encryption spec uses 40 bits, which is brute force crackable (public efforts have done things millions of times more complex)
The HD-DVD/Blu-Ray encryption spec (AACS) uses 128 bits, which is not brute force crackable

The DVD encryption spec used a secret algorithm, which was weak and only had 25 bits of actual keyspace
The HD-DVD/Blu-Ray encryption spec (AACS) uses AES, which is public, heavily analyzed and approved for US Top Secret material

As for the parent, he's wrong. ECB mode (as in no IV at all) doesn't leak key data. It does permit some other attacks, which are hardly relevant to this.

Re:The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[julesh]

This may change with the trusted computing stuff that is coming, unless someone find a weakness there too.

The weakness of TPM (at least for this kind of application) is that you can emulate a computer that has a TPM module, and choose your own private key for it. Then you can do anything you want.

TPM only helps content providers secure their stuff if they know the key of your TPM module when they produce the disk. If they don't, then there's no way they can do something that requires the TPM module to decrypt.

DMCA

[MyNameIsEarl]

Just by figuring this out hasn't the DMCA now been violated and soon the people who made the discovery will be violated as well in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

Re:DMCA

[ceejayoz]

Assuming they're a) in the US and b) not smart enough to cover their tracks, sure.

Re:DMCA

[julesh]

Just by figuring this out hasn't the DMCA now been violated and soon the people who made the discovery will be violated as well in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

No. Only if the method is described to somebody else. And maybe only if the description is in the form of source code that can be compiled to a program that will crack the key on a disc, that one isn't entirely clear.

Re:DMCA

[falconwolf]

Just by figuring this out hasn't the DMCA now been violated and soon the people who made the discovery will be violated as well in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

The DMCA only applies to the US, it doesn't apply to those outside the US.

Falcon

Re:DMCA

[dosboot]

Are you sure? The DMCA outlaws circumventing encryptions and not just distrubting/providing/trafficing in said circumventions.

Re:DMCA

[Dun Malg]

Are you sure? The DMCA outlaws circumventing encryptions and not just distrubting/providing/trafficing in said circumventions. And someone (pseudonymously!) cryptically claiming they figured out how to do something is proof they did it?

Re: Don't like Movies Much?

[DumbSwede]

Ermmm... Good plan except major movie studios will only release on Blu-Ray if it's DMR holds up (at least for the next couple of month). Then again maybe all you want to watch is Porn.

BTW, in yesterday's post about HD Porn and Sony not Allowing Porn on BETA, I assure you there was LOTS of porn on BETA. The adult industry may prefer HD-DVD for cost reasons, but if Blu-Ray wins, there will be Blu-Ray porn -- count on it.

The best thing might be for HD-DVD to fail, have Blu-Ray generally accepted, and THEN break the DMR Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha

Basically the DRM-Mafia has no chance...

[gweihir]

What they would need is to do the decryption the the LCD pixels. Even if they do it in the LCD driver chip, recording is possible and not that hard to do, considering that one un-DRMed copy on P2P will distribute really fast...

However, today software players running on general-purpose hardware are necessary. Without them, the market shrinks too much. And software players cannot be secure against the system administrator. The keys have to be stored somewhere.

What I don't understand is why anybody bothers. The trash comming out of Hollywoos is certainly not worth the effort. Maybe that is why it takes so long to break these systems at the moment....

Re:Basically the DRM-Mafia has no chance...

[Anonymous Coward]

You ain't kidding, brother. The Jews are so busy promoting 'diversity' and the destruction of white America, that they can't bring themselves to bring out any films with all white casts and happy endings.
Just look back at the WHITE films made before 1960. Look at the number of absolute classics, which Hollyweird will NEVER be able to replicate. Modern films are rubbish. And all because of our friends, 'God's chosen people'...

LET YOURSELF IN!

[Philip K Dickhead]

"The key is under the mat..."

The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Not every use of a copyrighted work is fair. BackupHDDVD is just as useful to pirates.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Wonko the Sane]

Not every use of a copyrighted work is fair. BackupHDDVD is just as useful to pirates. or to people who have monitors capable of displaying full resolution HD content, but are not permitted to because of a lack of HDCP

or people who want to watch movies they bought on their mythtv system

or people who like to buy movies and watch them, but don't run windows

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Opportunist]

And guns are just as useful to criminals as they are to law enforcement units and law abiding people protecting their home.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Lord Ender]

You win the ubertroll award.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[pla]

Not every use of a copyrighted work is fair. BackupHDDVD is just as useful to pirates.

While true, irrelevant.

It matters that you can hunt and overthrow the government with the gun, not that you can use the gun to rob a liquor store.

Well, no. Bad analogy, because knowledge of a gun doesn't equal posession. In the case of DRM, knowledge of the keys means "ding, dong, the witch is dead".

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Andy Dodd]

"or to people who have monitors capable of displaying full resolution HD content, but are not permitted to because of a lack of HDCP"

It's interesting to know just how recently HDCP-capable devices became available.

While my new monitor supports HDCP, my (relatively) new Dell E1705 does not (at least for external devices, PowerDVD Advisor seems to think the internal screen is OK for whatever reason), and it's less than a year old.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[dascandy]

Not every use of a woman is fair. Viagra is just as useful for rapists.

Why is viagra not illegal and why is BackupHDDVD illegal? Especially when one affects your morals and your feeling of justice where the other explicitly hinders something you should get according to some part of another law?

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

How long is it going to be before PowerDVD or WinDVD is patched to stop the leaky key? Congratulations, you can play "Serenity" on your Myth Box. Will you be able to play "Return of the King?". Or "Children of Men?" Or "Empire Strikes Back?"

DeCSS was important because the encryption algorithm was unknown. This? All it does is demonstrate that if the keys are known, the disc can be decrypted. Big Deal. That's how every encryption algorithm works. That's how every well designed lock is supposed to work. If you have the key, you can enter. If you don't have the key, you shouldn't be able to open the lock, even with the help of detailed diagrams and specialized tools.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Televisons have had hdcp for a good long time. I suppose it took the computer industry some time to catch up--probably because no one was daft enough to think that encrypting the video link from a computer was terribly useful.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Yeah. Someday I'll write a post simultaneously defending the private possession of military grade weaponry as an insurance policy against tyranny, and proposing the canonization of RMS-- and all of those karma points will come rushing back.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[camperdave]

How long is it going to be before PowerDVD or WinDVD is patched to stop the leaky key?

What are they going to do? Issue new keys through software updates? Some clever people are going to make an OpenSourceDVD player that can read the Microsoft updates and extract the new keys.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

128 bits can be hidden quite well in a 50 Megabyte download.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Wonko the Sane]

Not every use of a woman is fair. Apparently you don't watch enough Japanese porn.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Lord Ender]

You weren't moderated into oblivion because of bias. You were moderated into oblivion because everyone who reads this site has heard that argument (baseball bats are useful to murderers!) and already knows it's bunk.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

I just don't think that the ability to decode a limited number of HD-DVD titles is worth it. Fair use is about freedom-- the ability to use copyrighted works in ways not envisioned by the original copyright holders-- criticism, time shifting, parody, space shifting, news reporting, educational use.

But this? All it really does is allow owners of PowerDVD or WinDVD the ability to play a limited number of works from the hard drive. Big fucking deal. It's not freedom. It's not the first step towards a linux HD-DVD player. It's the first step towards a key revocation, the first step towards a rewrite of whatever player leaked the keys, the first step towards even more onerous DRM requirements, maybe the first step away from HD-DVD towards Bluray.

But, if you want to distribute the movie on the internet, it's useful.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[camperdave]

How long do you think they can remain hidden in a file that has to be read by the Windows update utility for the express purpose of updating winDVD? Windows updates are individually selectable. It wouldn't be especially difficult to single out the winDVD update, and then decompile that to get a good clue as to where the keys are.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

The reason that keys can be revoked is to prevent the use of players which have security holes in them. The affected player will undergo a substantial rewrite, and any any embedded keys will be themselves encrypted. But, hey, they could make the same mistake twice.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Lord Ender]

The fundamental idea that everyone else on this site has already realized (in many cases because it bit them personally) is that when you buy a piece of mass media, it should be yours to do whatever you want with (short of selling copies to others). If I buy "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," I should be able to play it on any device I want for the rest of eternity. I want to be able to load it in to my Mediacenter PC (which plays DVDs directly from the hard disk, so I don't have to fuck with plastic disks). I should be able to play it on my video iPod. I should be able to play it on my OpenBSD laptop. When I'm 90 years old, I should be able to play it on my neuro-optical linkup. Also, I should be able to make offsite backups so that I don't lose my media collection if my house burns down. And I should be able to sell all my rights to this mass media to anyone else I want, in any "region" of the globe.

People familiar with digital technology (most slashdotters) already realize that what I listed about is the moral definition of fair use, even if the legal definition hasn't caught up yet.

Today, the only kind of DRM that allows this fair use is broken DRM. Eventually, a PKI/SmartCard/VideoOnDemand scheme (with legal requirements and restrictions) could allow this to be fixed. But that is a long way off. Today, the people breaking DRM are fighting for MY RIGHTS.

Anyone who can't see the value of being able to play your media on any device of your choosing, even those not yet invented, has either never considered the issue seriously, or is just plain dumb.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Alsee]

a linux HD-DVD player

For less than a meg you can have a file with the key to tens of thousands of movies... i.e. every movie. Assuming you're online at least once every month or two, a background process your system can autoupdate that list with new releases for the bandwith of a single ping packet and a few dozen bytes per month.

-

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Sique]

In recent tests from TV tech magazines, there was virtually no chain of equipment (disc player, sat receiver, digital settop box, hard disk recorder and TV set), that was able to play all HDTV content that was thrown at it. Not even equipment bought from the same brand was stable enough (Yes, a set of disc player, sat receiver, settop box and TV set from Sony was not able to play all Sony content).

Some mixed sets proved to be quite capable, but even using the next revision of the same device broke the chain again. Compatibility virtually does not exist. HDTV logo aside. Two component stuff works quite well (e.g. sat receiver + TV set), but as soon as you use more equipment, it breaks easily.

The executive summary was: HDTV is not ready yet.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

I'm guessing that there are perhaps a hundred HD-DVD titles, perhaps more, perhaps less. Not a whole lot. The keys discovered so far were recovered with the help of an insecure player, which may have its access revoked until it is rewritten. CSS had a fixed keyblock that only allowed for a few hundred different keys. AACS uses a broadcast encryption scheme that allows hundreds of thousands of keys to be revoked.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Fine. I want you to take an HD-DVD, decrypt it, and play it on (pick one)

1) your ipod
2) your bsd laptop

Well?

Have you done it yet?

Quickly now. You don't want to find out that by the time your tool chain is constructed, and you're ready to start buying HD-DVDs with abandon, that keys have been revoked and security flaws patched.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

er, as long as we're talking about logos:

In the United States, a HDTV is not required to have a HDMI port and not required to use HDCP. There's a HDMI logo, which is supposed to guarantee some compatibility, but apparently the technology doesn't work. Maybe HDMI 1.3 will fix this.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Lord Ender]

The DRM on DVD has been broken. Now, I can exercise my fair use rights with my DVD collection. The keys have not been revoked. Why should HDDVD be any different?

And it doesn't matter if all the tools to exercise my fair use rights are available today. It is only possible for me to exercise my rights if bad DRM schemes (like all those existing today) are broken. I prefer difficult but possible freedom to impossible freedom.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Jeremy Erwin]

AACS isn't CSS. It's not based on a ultra-1337 sekrit crypto algorithm. It's based on a published, well documented cryptographic engine (AES). The number of possible device keys is not limited to 400 or so-- millions can be released, and millions can be revoked.

There seems to a widespread belief that no one in hollywood learns from their mistakes.

I would like for HD-DVDs to be accessible for fair use. I really would. But I see no evidence that this breach cannot be repaired by AACS and the DVD forum.

Besides, HDCP is breakable. Not unlockable with a spare key that someone found lying under a doormat. Breakable. Somewhere around 40 displays are required to locate the collision, and if you ask nicely, and promise to bring it back in one piece, I might just donate mine to the cause.

Wait!!!

[sulli]

Don't release the crack until after the standard is settled! Now all the studios will go Blu-Ray only.

Re:Wait!!!

[Cylix]

That's what I was thinking...

Eager beavers are going to ruin the world!

Me, I would have sat on it until things were a little more entrenched. Granted, more then likely someone else would have cracked it and released it eventually anyway.

I wonder if we are going to see HD-DVD2 now?

Re:Wait!!!

[Rew190]

Why would they do that, so that they can be safe for another few months?

Let them all go with Blu-Ray, pray for it. The format war will be settled, all of the crackers will concentrate on it, it'll be cracked, then we'll be where we are today with DVDs and DRM will have lost yet another battle.

Re:Wait!!!

[Threni]

> Now all the studios will go Blu-Ray only.

No they won't. Most people buy content, and the one's who'll copy would have copied it anyway, by capturing the data using slightly less sophisticated means.

Re:Wait!!!

[sakti]

Wrong. HD-DVD has already won. The Porn industry recently decided to standardize on it.
Just search google-news for "hd-dvd porn" for some references. Or here's a few for the lazy.

http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2172459/porn-i ndustry-standardises-hd
http://www.gamepro.com/news.cfm?article_id=93648
http://www.ecanadanow.com/business/2007/01/12/porn -industry-says-screw-your-blu-ray-were-using-hd-dv d/

Re:Wait!!!

[cdrguru]

Most people buy content because it isn't easier (and cheaper) to get it any other way. If it is just as easy to download a perfect copy - not some crappy camcorder recording from a movie theater - they will download it.

Only a fool pays for what is free.

Re:Wait!!!

[Threni]

> If it is just as easy to download a perfect copy - not some crappy camcorder recording from a movie
> theater - they will download it.
>
> Only a fool pays for what is free.

It's been easier - not to say cheaper - to download music, games and films for years now, and yet the market for those products is hundreds of billions of dollars per year. People ripping of software are in the minority - for most people, it IS too hard, because they'd need to get a computer, broadband, learn how to find and download the stuff, burn to a DVD/CD etc.

Also, it would appear that some people don't mind the original musicians/programmers etc getting some money for their work. It might only be a small percentage of a large sum, but it's better than the $0 they'll get if people just help themselves.

Re:Wait!!!

[ivan256]

Unlike in the '80s, porn on physical media is now obsolete. It doesn't matter which format the adult industry chooses, because the porn consumer only uses one medium: the internet.

Re:Wait!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a fool pays for what is free.

That depends on what the non-free costs. These "free" copies definitely have a cost involved - you've got to find them, download them, either burn them or fill up your disk, etc. It's a pain in the ass, and the download takes a long time.

I would gladly pay ten bucks or so for a DVD I wanted rather than go through all that. I just think prices have to get in line with reality.

Re:Wait!!!

[AJWM]

So who do you think was really behind the crack?
</tinfoil-hat>

Re:Wait!!!

[Thagg]

Americans may not know this, but one of the big satellite stations in Europe had a large, well-funded, successful project to build and release hacks for the competing satellite service.

DVD-Jon, you may or may not recall, didn't actually do the DVD reverse-engineering himself, he served as the conduit for the information from (still) anonymous German hackers. Might these have been well-funded professionals, too?

The BluRay/HD-DVD format war will inevitably have people with significant money (we're talking tens of billions of dollars) who strongly want the other sides systems to be cracked. Will some money leak into the hands of the people who can do the work? I think it's inevitable.

Thad Beier

Re:Wait!!!

[Lehk228]

so obsolete that it's still a huge part of the DVD market.

it's easy to get better sales when movies sell, and sell well, for $40-$120

Re:Wait!!!

[Kjella]

DVD-Jon, you may or may not recall, didn't actually do the DVD reverse-engineering himself, he served as the conduit for the information from (still) anonymous German hackers. Might these have been well-funded professionals, too?

And who exactly would that be? The DVD format was a astounding case of cooperation where the whole industry decided on ONE format (DivX and their renting model barely counts) because they feared a format war would slow customer adoption, which was exactly what they had experienced in the VHS vs Betamax war. Well, it worked extremely well. There was only the old format (VHS), and the new format.(DVD) and consumers picked up on it like crazy.

The BluRay/HD-DVD format war will inevitably have people with significant money (we're talking tens of billions of dollars) who strongly want the other sides systems to be cracked. Will some money leak into the hands of the people who can do the work? I think it's inevitable.

Note that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are using the same copy protection scheme (AACS). So again, which is the third side who'd like to release hacks?

Re:Wait!!!

[ivan256]

Wasn't it just last week where there was the article about how adult DVD sales revenues are really less than one tenth what AVN has been reporting all this time?

Re:Wait!!!

[ivan256]

Yup, here it is:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/04/media_overest imates_.html

$200mil a year is chump change in the DVD business. The equivalent of two successful hollywood movies.

Re:Wait!!!

[steve_bryan]

The role played by DVD-Jon in the original exploit for decoding DVDs made for entertaining journalism but it was dependent on one particular carelessly handled player key that was subsequently revoked. What matters was the cryptanalysis performed by Frank Stephenson of CSS which exposed mistakes in the CSS algorithm (see this link: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/FrankStevenson/an alysis.html). It made the already inadequate 40 bit keyspace no more effective than a 25 bit space. Looping through 2^25 possible keys takes almost no time at all with a modern computer. In other words keys are found on the fly and there was no important role played by the mysterious German hackers assosciated with DVD-Jon. Of course the real "heroes" of this story are the poor engineers at Hitachi given the assignment of designing and implementing a secure system just because someone thought it should be possible and creating from scratch was "obviously" the way to proceed.

The moral again is that bumbling and incompetence are often the important explanatory factors rather than significant money or strategic brilliance.

Goodbye Software players

[desenz]

Couldn't the industry, if it were so inclined, just stop licensing software players? I would imagine that compared to set top DVD players, the software must be a pretty small segment.

Re:Goodbye Software players

[flyingfsck]

No software - so how are you going to display the DVD - graph paper and a pencil? That may take a while.

Re:Goodbye Software players

[RobertLTux]

yeah a small problem with that a few players are more or less very tightly locked down copmputers (java support in one of the formats??) so if you lock out "Silver Screen HD Inc" from a software player you would also lock out most of the Black Friday Special players. Ever Gotten a cheapo dvd player and taken a screwdriver (or just glared at it real hard)?? the drive inside is a caseless computer drive!!

Re:Goodbye Software players

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft/Apple wouldn't be too happy with that. (Media Center PC)

Re:Goodbye Software players

[Godji]

No software players? That might actually be a good thing!

In the now famous Windows Vista content protection cost analysis, the author stated something along the lines that if he wanted HD video, he'd buy a standalone player when it's cheap enough. He wouldn't use an expensive computer. Thus, with no software players, Microsoft would not have a reason to cripple hardware (encryption on the bus, driver secrecy, tilt bits, etc.), which would make all our PCs better.

Finally, as long we have drivers that physically read the media, there's the hope that someone would actually write a free software player. Thus we would have non-crippled PCs and we'd play HD video in Linux (as well as Windows) over all outputs. Obtaining title keys will be tougher, yes, but I think it's worth it. Maybe that way the DRM formats will die too, as we stick to practically-DRMless DVDs.

I say, to hell with software players!

Re:Goodbye Software players

[Alsee]

No software - so how are you going to display the DVD - graph paper and a pencil?

Bah!
You spoiled kids these days don't know nothin.

-

Re:Goodbye Software players

[Anonymous Coward]

the SW players are so easy to attack that I would not mind it either if I'm not allowed to view "premium" content on PC.
(hell, I don't care even about original DVDs - have 15 or 20 of them from bargain bin in stores, hardly seen 50% of them, lack of time is the answer. Why should I care about some HD-DVD?? It's just stupid movies after all.)

What's making me worried is the crippled hardware. Please, movie industry, leave the computers to compute, and go, f*ck with disc players...

I will make sure I will not buy anything into computer which is designed for Vista and premium content (basically I bet it would not even work under linux anyway, so it's a no hard brainer for me, hehe).

I reject my reality...

[Mr. BS]

...and substiute it with the real deal. Although there was initial skeptisim on my , original (unbeknownst dupe) post, it looks like muslix64 is about to bring HD-DVD to it's knees. It's just really hard to take youtube vid's as evidence of a successful crack.

WTG muslix64!

pastebin /.'d

[TheSHAD0W]

Could someone please paste the pastebin contents here?

Re:pastebin /.'d

[DaSilva_XiaoPuTao]

this is the pastebin

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2.
3. Mark Twain Intermediate School
4. Restaurant & Lounge
5. Cent
6. Celtic Designs Dover Pictorial
7. Science Online Special Feature
8. Link Building Strategies
9. Starlifter
10. Solar periodicity
11. Dawson's Creek Music Guide Decisions
12. Duncan's F
13. ways to market your small or solo business
14. WBFF
15. Olivia Quinn Food Stamp Leaver
16. Dalmations
17. CITI FM
18. Skippyslist

Re:pastebin /.'d

[Anonymous Coward]

so obviously the key is 42.

amirite?

Re:pastebin /.'d

[DaSilva_XiaoPuTao]

Supposedly you google each line of this, and the first result will have a 3 digit number in the title, which you convert to hex, and the result is the hash key

The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[Opportunist]

Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative. Now it's high time to show that BluRay is just as "consumer friendly" and break it for good, so there is no alternative left, and if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to protect their rights.

The point is to create as much damage as possible, so the industry learns that the only one hurt by DRM are they themselves. Revoked keys mean more work, more expense, more hassle and dissatisfied customers who have to jump the hoops. This will in turn create more awareness for DRM and the problems it creates.

We have to teach the studios that DRM is a failure. That it only generates hassle and problems for their paying customer and is no barriere or even a deterrent for the pirates. For this, the customer has to be the one hurt, too. Learn the easy or the hard way, learn about DRM by investigating or by having your tools stop working.

Yes, that's not the usual gentle way of teaching. But appearantly some people don't learn 'fore it starts to hurt.

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative. Now it's high time to show that BluRay is just as "consumer friendly" and break it for good, so there is no alternative left, and if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to protect their rights.

Except for the fact that HD-DVD is cheaper for the consumer, and also has the backing of the porn industry since Sony is prohibiting porn on Blu-Ray. So consumers will continue to buy HD-DVD players to watch their porn in HD and Blu-Ray usage will continue to flounder. Sales of mainstream titles on Blu-Ray will do poorly and the movie studios won't make any money. They'll either have to offer titles on HD-DVD or give up on HD sales altogether. On top of that, it's only a matter of time before Blu-Ray protection is cracked as well. IIRC, the Blu-Ray encryption is similar to HD-DVE encryption, so it shouldn't be all that difficult.

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as DVD players are available, porn will not be that big a factor. Before videotapes you had to get your porn on 8mm, so that was a big step in many ways - magnetic tape is cheaper, more convenient etc.

Going from DVD to HD-DVD or BluRay means cost goes up everywhere - the discs are more expensive and you need better equipment and better production. You also need better make-up etc. to make the content bearable and if it's one thing porn makers are known for it's being cheap. There will be some releases by the high-end studios (eg. Vivid), but for most producers DVD is pretty much the sweet spot. Reduced piracy may move some towards high definition, but I think most porn producers accept that it serves as free advertising and thus beneficial overall.

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[cdrguru]

Yes, DRM is likely to be a failure. But the result isn't going to be "free entertainment for everyone" - the result will be no digital distribution of entertainment. Period. How is a company supposed to make a profit when they sell one copy in one place on the planet? Answer is, they aren't going to make a profit. Investors are watching this pretty closely and companies aren't going to get started unless an investor says "Go for it!"

New business model based on advertising? Do you want your DVD with 33% commercials? I don't think so.

New business model based on rich people paying and the rest getting a free ride? Possible, but unlikely.

New business model based on government-supported entertainment or rich people-supported entertainment? Again, possible but unlikely to work in the US. Maybe Europe.

I see movie studios giving up on DVDs, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray DVDs and everything else before they will give them away. Maybe there will still be music videos (which are really just ads for the music) but as broadband penetration increases and P2P sharing is uncontrolled, what choice do they have?

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[amigabill]

Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative.

Sony goon #1: How do we win this format war?

Sony goon #2: Well, if ours was more secure than the other, the DRM-obsessed executives at the other studios would have to choose ours.

Sony goon #1: So, what you're saying, is we should hire up some hackers to ruin the competition's technology, post the crack to some public forums, and we win! Brilliant!

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[Opportunist]

I already get DVDs with 33% advertizing. Or did you buy one recently where you could skip those pesky ads before the movie? If you use a standard DVD-player, that is.

I'm not aiming at the free movie. I'm aiming at a business model that does what the copyright should achive: A balance between the maker and the taker, between the producer and the consumer of content. The current situation is that the maker has the law on his side and tries to use it as a lever to pry more and more rights from the consumer. In turn, the consumer does whatever he can to evade and avoid the lock in.

This has to change. Customer and vendor are supposed to be partners in business, not enemies. The completely insane situation is that those who should be competetors are allies, and the ones they should view as their business partners are seen as their business enemies. This is kinda wrong, from a market economy point of view.

You can't force someone to buy something. That's a given. If the commodity does not match the demand, it will not be sold. If there is a way out of this problem, it leads down the road of mutual acceptance as business partners, not forcing either side to comply.

You can't force someone to buy, neither can you force him to sell.

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[Opportunist]

The scary thing 'bout this is that I do not feel compelled to post "Oh c'moooon, get real..."

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[Tim C]

I already get DVDs with 33% advertizing. Or did you buy one recently where you could skip those pesky ads before the movie?

I can generally skip the adverts - all apart from the stupid anti-piracy one (hello? this is on a DVD I BOUGHT!) and the Dolby or THX one, if there is one. However, unless you either buy really, really short films or get about half an hour of unskippable ads, you're not getting 33% advertising.

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[Anonymous Coward]

How can Sony prohibit porn?

AFAIK *I* can make (unencrypted) blu-ray disks on a writable media.

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Sony is prohibiting porn on Blu-Ray

I didn't believe this could be true, but Googling quickly found:

German Heise has interviewed Joone the founder of Digital Playgrounds at the AVN 2007 show in Las Vegas. Joone says actually said last year he is committed to Blu-ray. Now they announced four HD DVD titles in the United States. In the interview Joone says he was forced to use HD DVD, because no Blu-ray disc manufacturer would make his discs, because Sony was against it and they would loose their license.

Is Sony really commmiting media-format seppuku?

This is how they will respond...

[rucs_hack]

The Lawyers
Man them...

Industry response?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?

It will send in a few lawyers. After a while, they will realise that their impact is negligible in the grand scheme of things: the DRM will continue to deter casual copying to some extent, but will continue to be impotent in preventing anyone determined to make a copy and willing to spend a little time on the 'net to find out how (or download a pre-ripped version).

Meanwhile, genuine customers will get seriously annoyed at the fact that DRM in HD-world has now moved beyond a minor inconvenience or ethical question as it was with things like DVDs, and into the realms of seriously impeding their enjoyment of the product they have legally purchased. A consumer backlash will result, with the effect that DRM becomes a "dirty word" 2-3 years from now, and distributors drop heavily-encumbered formats and go back to what works: a mostly hands-off scheme that's enough to deter casual copying by schoolkids but nothing that risks seriously impacting the marketability of their merchandise.

On the same sort of time scales, on-line distribution will reach a critical mass, and the movie distributors will adopt a second, parallel strategy where cheap, legal, unencumbered downloads are the norm. They will make their profit from on-line users through many small incomes, rather than the larger one-offs represented by (HD-)DVD purchases today. This will render illegal distribution channels mostly irrelevant, and the damage due to illegal copying will revert to being low-level noise as it mostly was before they started their current crusade anyway.

Hey, it's a new year and everyone else is making crystal ball predictions. Can't I have mine, too? :-)

Re:Industry response?

[evilviper]

Meanwhile, genuine customers will get seriously annoyed at the fact that DRM in HD-world has now moved beyond a minor inconvenience or ethical question as it was with things like DVDs,

First you have to explain how the AACS DRM on HD-DVDs is any worse than CSS on DVDs...

Hell, it took several years before DVD-CSS was cracked.

Re:Industry response?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so far off about DRM that it isn't even funny. First of all, the decryption keys are being discovered in software DVD players (PowerDVD, etc). While it's basically a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the developres just need to issue a simple patch every so often. This is virtually irrelevant anyway, because the vast majority of people watch DVDs on hardware DVD players. If and only if a name-brand hardware DVD player's key is revoked will there be any kind of backlash, and I really don't think the industry would be willing to take it that far. I think we all agree that DRM doesn't really accomplish much if anything, and unless the MPAA is going to really push key revocation I don't think the vast majority of consumers will run into any problems. As far as your predictions for online distribution, you might be on the right track. However, there are still a number of problems that need to be overcome. Broadband is not ubiquitous, and even when it is available it can take hours to download the whole thing depending on a number of factors. Also, people still prefer traditional televisions to computers for watching movies. iTunes works for music because you can put music on your iPod, take it anywhere, and plug it in to anything with a line-in. I think iTunes could work for movies if the iPod (or whatever other player) had RCA/DVI/HDMI/whatever jacks so you could just hook it right up to your television in a similar manner.

Re:Industry response?

[Anonymous Coward]

...seriously impacting the marketability of...

Ouch, sounds painful. I certainly would not want to know what an impacted marketability feels like. I had an impacted wisdom tooth once...

I wonder if DRM might affect the marketability of their merchandise?

Re:Industry response?

[foamrotreturns]

Crystal Ball Predictions? It's one thing to look into the foreseeable future and try to guess what might happen, but your predictions, especially that last paragraph, are about as likely to happen as Sony giving an open, sincere apology for the rootkits. The industry will never realize what mistakes it is making. It will never wake up. It's quite content to take the blue pill and continue ignoring its customers. It will continually blame slumping sales on piracy, not lack of desirable content or unreasonable pricing. It will continually pay its actors and executives exorbitant salaries that have no relationship whatsoever to the services provided. It will continually pass those high production costs down to its consumers. And finally, the STUPID CONSUMER will NEVER wake up and stop buying the industry's trash! Only one thing will make the industry listen: Money. Changes like what you suggested will never be possible as long as the consumer thinks it's OK for DRM-laden movies to cost $25 and keeps buying them.

Re:Industry response?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heres a prediction.
Nobody cares about your guys arguments about DRM and it doesn't bother the customer.

In fact you guys are in the very small minority on this and usually the only ones who want to open/dissect everything for your own personal gain. You and the minority sometimes just need to accept cold hards facts that DRM is not intrusive and people go on with their lives to play that DVD.

Remember you are a minority on this and although you may be modded up in the paradise of Slashdot; get out in the real world and you will lose that argument in court.

Re:Industry response?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Nobody cares about your guys arguments about DRM and it doesn't bother the customer.

Please read the other posts before ranting, Mr AC. My main point in this discussion is that the stuff they're using DRM for on HD media will bother the average consumer, and that this is why they are likely to suffer a backlash here where they got away with some basic copy protection on VHS, DVD, etc.

Re:Industry response?

[grimJester]

the DRM will continue to deter casual copying to some extent, but will continue to be impotent in preventing anyone determined to make a copy and willing to spend a little time on the 'net to find out how (or download a pre-ripped version).

This is the problem for consumers, and the cash cow for the media companies. Casual copying is fully fucking legal! Consumers have bought the media and have the right to make copies for personal use. That means they can watch their movies on whatever device they choose and store their movies on whatever hardware they wish. Legally protected DRM means that the majority of consumers will be unable to make copies, leading to vendor lock-in (iTunes), lack of free player software (cost of licensing the DRM), having to buy several copies (viewing your media both on your computer and your DVD player and in your car etc.)

Re:Industry response?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This is the problem for consumers, and the cash cow for the media companies. Casual copying is fully fucking legal!

Only in the US, where fair use laws are far more open than they are in most places, and only for personal use in any case. This isn't really the kind of copying that causes Big Media headaches, though, and they don't generally go after people who do it, legally or otherwise.

The big problem for Big Media is the professional fraudsters, but they won't stop them with DRM anyway. The other major concern is people giving casual copies to school friends, office colleagues etc. This is what they want to inhibit, and since most people aren't geeks, I'm guessing that mild DRM is probably quite effective at this.

Re:Industry response?

[WNight]

Hardware is just software running embedded. Software that expects nice factory-made content that isn't designed to trick it. That software is going to meet many hackers who will hit it with malformed everything attempting to trigger a debugging dump, an exploitable bug, a error on decode that could lead to a timing attack... It's also vulnerable to all the standard anti-anti-reverse engineering tricks out there which would let you read the key right out of the operating chip. It's destined to fail.

The industry knows this and thinks that the system of revoking player keys is going to help somehow. Sure, it'll stop that hack from working forever, but it won't prevent an identical hack against some outdated insecure played from working in the future and decrypting all the new title keys.

So the hacker then has a list of title keys for all movies they can get their hands on, which turns into many sources of decrypted video showing up around the world, which is then put on P2P networks, burned onto new disks in Asian marketplaces, etc.

And as soon as the industry finds out which specific hardware or software player was attacked, the legitimate users of it will be denied the ability to play any future movies, but the hacker will simply buy whatever the $49 x-mas special player is next year and crack it. Again, DRM will hurt the honest buyers and totally fail to disadvantage the attackers. Hah.

Re:Industry response?

[jackbird]

People with children:

a) Have a significantly elevated incidence of scratched,unusable discs.
b) Have limited budgets for replacement discs.
c) Are a significant market.
d) Are likely to feel that their inability to make backups is intrusive.

Again, this is NOT a crack!

[KonoWatakushi]

New disks can be pressed with new keys, and the compromised software player will have it's key revoked. As such, this is not a generally useful solution. AACS remains secure, and at best, we may see individual keys available for certain pressings of certain discs. This approach will never provide general playback as DeCSS does.

However, it is my understanding that the decryption process can be done by the TPM; once this is supported, the problem will be much more difficult. Make no mistake, the battle has only just begun. Before long, software based attacks may be rendered impossible.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[ScytheBlade1]

You're forgetting one, key principle here.

Only one person needs to "crack" the encryption once.

It doesn't matter, at all, that they (the "big evil guys") can revoke keys. Get one key, decrypt it, and you now have DRM free audio and video. It only takes one to fire up that BitTorrent client. Who cares if the key is revoked after that? Once you have the data, you have the data, plain and simple. All it takes is once to seed a torrent.

Put it that way, and you can tell it's not about stopping pirates. It is about stopping free usage of a media you have legally purchased through other methods, which it does perfectly.

Pirates just give them a "pubically acceptable" reason to DRM your house, down to the nails that hold it together.


You do have a good point about the TPM, though. However, seeing as nothing that I know of to date uses it, well, I for one am going to wait and see just what happens with it. It has a lot of potential, for good, and for bad...

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[Jugalator]

As such, this is not a generally useful solution.

I hope you mean that the current protection isn't a generally useful solution... right?

Because while new discs can be pressed, which pirate would be stupid enough to buy stuff from a store and trying to decrypt it, when s/he can just download the previously decrypted version from a favorite BitTorrent tracker? You know, how things mostly work today with DVD's? And while compromised players can have their keys revoked, hackers can just use another player. If hackers wish, they can also next time be more secretive about which player they're using to get the volume keys for decryption with, internally to their warez group, to significantly slow down software player bans.

What I wonder most is what will happen to the software HD-DVD player industry now...
I can seriously see the movie industry stopping to support all of them now to protect key extraction.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[CastrTroy]

However, there is one problem, the software that people already bought will have to have an update that updates the key. It's pretty easy to get the key if you know that it's in the update file. Also, if they could get the old player key, they can get the new one. They can't just keep on giving out new player keys every week. Unless they decide to do away with software players altogether, this is effectively a crack.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[Threni]

> Who cares if the key is revoked after that? Once you have the data, you have the data, plain and
> simple. All it takes is once to seed a torrent.

I think he was saying that the keys used to encrypt disks will be changed, and the new ones won't work on the player that's responsible for the leak. I think that's a supported procedure using the content protection provided. So yeah, the current lot of disks will be at risk, but that's about 0.1% of the disks that'll be produced during the lifetime of HD-DVD so it's probably an expected teething trouble.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[KonoWatakushi]

I hope you mean that the current protection isn't a generally useful solution... right? No, I mean that it will never be useful in creating an open source player that is capable of playing all (or even most) discs. Nor for exercising your other fair use rights.

Because while new discs can be pressed, which pirate would be stupid enough to buy stuff from a store and trying to decrypt it, when s/he can just download the previously decrypted version from a favorite BitTorrent tracker? I was only referring to playback of HD discs. Piracy is a completely separate issue, and for it, AACS is completely ineffective. AACS only hurts the legitimate customers; by advertising this "crack," some people will assume that it is now safe to buy HD discs, and this is simply not true.

What I wonder most is what will happen to the software HD-DVD player industry now...
I can seriously see the movie industry stopping to support all of them now to protect key extraction. This is the big question, and it is likely they will stop supporting playback on anything but fully "Trusted" systems. It seems I was wrong about the TPM providing decryption services, but once Trusted Computing arrives, this won't matter.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[modeless]

Well, if the hackers can keep breaking players, key revocation could start to become impractical. There is the possibility of a consumer backlash. Imagine the outcry if one of those $1000 players was cracked and revoked! The PR would be worse than Sony's. Meanwhile, most of the HD releases will be on BitTorrent; after all they only need to be broken once. A *single* crack of *one* player allows *every disk* released before the crack to be decrypted, and probably most disks for a period of at least a few months afterwards. Furthermore, if a clever hacker keeps his hack secret, he can release disk keys forever, and without knowing which player is cracked, the AACS people will be powerless to even fix the vulnerability, much less revoke the player key. They would have to resort to constantly changing the disk keys to make the released keys less universally useful, and it still wouldn't stop the movies from ending up on BitTorrent.

Basically, AACS is screwed.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[DavidTC]

If hackers wish, they can also next time be more secretive about which player they're using to get the volume keys for decryption with, internally to their warez group, to significantly slow down software player bans.

There's the failure of the system, right there. At some point in time, if the HD-DVD actually start revoking all found keys, they are going to find a key and not reveal they've cracked it.

They have, after all, experts at reverse engineering thanks to their copy-protection cracking. Tracking down a key is nothing. Once the studios start revoking all the keys they find, they simply won't tell anyone the keys outside of trusted people.

At that point, their methods will have to change a little, from their current 'Rip, encode, and upload to our distribution hubs' to 'rip a copy of all the disks you have, but instead of trying to encode them, send them to us and we'll decrypt them first and then encode them for distribution.' policy.

Anyone who thinks that's a lot of bandwidth have no idea how much bandwidth and storage space cracking groups have at their disposal.

OTOH, possibly people who have access to their distribution hubs are already trusted enough to hold the key, especially, if they can crack a new key every month or so and so have a fairly high level of acceptable losses. Keep the key as 'need to know', to people who are actually doing the ripping so they'd be unlikely to incriminate themselves by telling anyone, but when it gets out, don't worry about it...release it to the world and hand all the trusted people a new key.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[ScytheBlade1]

Erm, exactly. Once the keys have been compromised, the keys will (in theory) be revoked and new ones will be put in place.

Problem is, there's nothing stopping people from finding additional keys, and then in combo with the "all it takes is one" thought process, it's really kind of pointless. Who cares if a future copy of the same movie has new keys? We already have the straight data!


Of similar interest, it turns out that HDCP, the DRM for these new-fangled HDMI ports, is fundamentally flawed. From the link: "This flaw is fundamental, and cannot be worked around."

The point of the DRM on the discs is to prevent people ripping and burning/torrenting them. Seeing as - somewhere, somehow, the key must be loaded into a computer's memory eventually, this is already broken.
The point of the DRM on the cable is to prevent people from plugging their fancy new HDDVD/Blu Ray player into a computer, and simply recording what comes over the wire. Turns out (reference above link), this can be defeated with basic linear algebra. Oops.

It reminds me of a post I made a while back, on a similar matter. As I posted that, I thought to myself, "the only way they could prevent someone from just plugging in a cable from audio out to line in, is by making brand new jacks for everything, which have DRM built in." Sadly, that's exactly what HDMI/HDCP is. Fortunately, they did an absolute crap job of implimenting it.


There's no secrets here. DRM isn't here to stop pirates, that's just what they tell the public. And, when you look at the facts on the matters, it's pretty blindingly obvious.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[anthony_dipierro]

Once you have the data, you have the data, plain and simple. All it takes is once to seed a torrent.

Put it that way, and you can tell it's not about stopping pirates. It is about stopping free usage of a media you have legally purchased through other methods, which it does perfectly.

It's also about stopping the pirates who don't have all day to spend finding and downloading stuff through bittorrent, which, by the way, is the vast majority of them.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[Vo0k]

But this approach can provide us with movie(HDDVDRIP).avi - don't boast you cracked the key, don't publish it. Just crack it, rip the movie and release the rip. This way they can revoke any keys they want, they can keep guessing which is your player and innocent people hit with their actions will just turn away from them and download your rip, stripped of all DRM and key/device info.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[Threni]

> Who cares if a future copy of the same movie has new keys

Not future copies of the same movie - future movies. Once DVD is cracked, it's cracked for all DVDs for all time. But if this system is cracked, it just cracks current disks, and new disks will be protected. All this stuff about `thought processes` and `what *they* tell the public` just sounds like so much tin-foil hat nonsense, to be honest.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[SigNick]

Every Intel Apple Mac includes, and actively uses, a TPM chip.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[LuckyStarr]

To my knowledge no one knows yet which player was used to extract the keys. PowerDVD was only used to play the ripped content.

At least, this is what the PowerDVD people keep telling. :-)

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[Timmmm]

But they haven't got the player key. The got the title keys for some discs. All that will happen is the software player's device key will be revoked and new discs will be pressed with a different title key. The software will be updated to hide the title keys better and the current 'crack' will be then completely useless.

As far as I can see it the only decent ways to allow reliable playback are:

1) A group of pirates finds a device key and makes releases, but doesn't reveal the device key that they used. Then the MPAA can't revoke it.

or

2) A large number of popular hardware device keys are found. It is unlikely that the MPAA would revoke them all. This can't happen yet as very few hardware players have been sold.

It is unlikely that a cryptographic flaw in AES will be found.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[ScytheBlade1]

You know, I'd agree with you about it sounding like tin foil hat paranoia.

On the flip side, if all of these fancy, complex, DRM protection schemes that "protect the consumer by keeping prices down" and whatnot, actually, gasp, worked, and weren't broken with things such as linear algebra..

It's almost like they wanted it to be broken, you know?

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[zbaron]

No, they do not.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[Anonymous Coward]

To get around TPM, just run it as a client to a Virtual Machine hypervisor. Boom, TPM is cacked wide open.

As for hardware players, they can be emulated and thus, decrypt the contents. You just delete the reencryption routines or make them do nothing and the output is digitally recorded. You don't have to tell anyone what that emulated player is. You can now be a pirate.

BTW, this works for Blu-ray or any other DRM format. The same methods used to debug hardware players can be used to emulate them and thus allow capture of anything, title keys, volume keys, encoded content and decoded content. Without the first, you can't make a HW player for any format. What is really bad is that firmware updates to that HW player would automatically give the pirate the capability of decoding any changed system. And once the offending output encryption routines are made non functional, the new firmware can be uploaded to any single HW player making it do the task of unemcumbering any title of its DRM.

All DRM formats for mass production of media are capable of being broken by this method. And those methods cost far less than making a single movie release of any substantial volume. The marginal costs are quite cheap. Heck you can make available the firmware update to any holders of that HW player so they can watch their discs, copy them, back them up or any other use now done with DVDs. And if the HW player vendor makes firmware changes, the unencumbered version will be distributed a few days later. To make any changes stick longer, they would need to alter the HW. But that would stop all current owners and be very bad PR. They could update all of that HW, but that gets expensive quick. And if the HW player is a major one like Xbox 360 or Sony's PS3, there is no way they would risk alienating those customers, they get too much revenue from other sources by those customers. And there is nothing MPAA could do about it. Well they could try writing a law against it using their undue influence, but if their customers ever got together and told their legislators to make the MPAA and RIAA to go boom, they would go BOOM.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[Kjella]

To get around TPM, just run it as a client to a Virtual Machine hypervisor. Boom, TPM is cacked wide open.

Unless the VM is itself TPM-approved (meaning it won't leak any of the data you want), no TPM-application will function inside a VM. Any TPM-setup loses its "trusted" status when you load untrusted code. That is why Microsoft is pushing their new bootloader.

TPM root -> TPM bios -> TPM bootloader -> TPM OS -> TPM application

flash the BIOS with something unapproved? bye TPM status. non-TPM bootloader? bye TPM status. non-TPM VM between hardware and OS? bye TPM status.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[RegularFry]

It's worth pointing out why you can't virtualise that whole chain. It's because there's a super-secret key at the hardware level, in a tamper-resistant casing, which is used to verify everything. Of course, if you can get *that* key, everything falls apart.

Re:Again, this is NOT a crack!

[wolrahnaes]

It's also about stopping the pirates who don't have all day to spend finding and downloading stuff through bittorrent, which, by the way, is the vast majority of them.

Finding stuff is trivial. There are many torrent search engines, Usenet has the famous Newzbin, and of course the various P2P apps have search functionality which is generally reliable.

Downloading certainly does take time, but consumer-grade connectivity is getting better every day. Many ISPs offer 8-15mbit service and some are offering more than that, up to FiOS's peak of 50mbit. I myself have one 8mbit line, 1-6 10mbit lines depending on the day, and occasionally another 8mbit line via WiFi, all strapped together through a FreeBSD router. Anyone who is experienced with Usenet binary services knows that they've got incredible bandwidth and can flood almost any connection. This means that at any given time I have the capability to download at between 18 and 76 mbit/sec. If you do the math that means a full quality DVD rip (full-res XviD + AC3, 1.5GB) in somewhere between 2.5 and 11 minutes. A worst-case scenario of a full bit-for-bit BRD-DL or triple-layer HD-DVD (50/51GB, respectively) would be between 1.5 and 6.3 hours. Now obviously my situation is unique and most households don't have that kind of bandwidth, but even assuming a single 8mbit cable line (not very hard to find in many metro areas) the numbers are 26 minutes and 14 hours, respectively.

26 minutes is certainly no real investment. It can take longer than that to go to the video store on a busy night PLUS there are no such things as late fees or limited stock on the internet. Even the 14 hour number is completely reasonable if you plan ahead. Look for whatever you want on Tuesday or Wednesday, queue it up in the client of your choice and set a bandwidth limit so it won't affect your daily use. When the weekend comes, your movie is ready to be watched. Again, there's no lines, no late fees, and no shipping delays.

If you make a few assumptions, high definition content becomes even more accessible. I believe these are completely reasonable and will apply in most cases.
1. Most high definition discs will not push the boundaries of their respective format's capacity.
2. Those that do will likely be packed with "special bonus content" filling much of the space, as well as extra audio tracks, angles, etc.
3. The vast majority of viewers only care about the feature film, and within such only the main video track, one single audio track, and possibly one subtitle track.

Based on these assumptions, we could easily strip quite a few gigabytes off of a raw HD-DVD or Blu-Ray rip without affecting the quality or feature content at all in the eyes of most viewers. A 25GB HD-DVD could become 15GB. Supporting this theory, the recently released rip of the Serenity HD-DVD totals 19.6GB, of which 16.5GB is the feature with all extra audio tracks, extra angles, etc. remaining intact. I don't believe it to be too far off that another 3-4GB could be cut from this once HD-DVD EVO processing software is as readily available as the DVD VOB equivalents. Assuming an average of 15GB, this is only a little over 4 hours 15 minutes on an ordinary 8mbit connection. Set it to download when you get home from work and it's ready to watch by sunset (well, unless it's winter and sunset comes before you even leave work). The more you trim it down to what people really want, the more download-friendly it gets. You could even scale the video down to 720p instead of 1080p and dramatically cut the file size. One only has to look at the Xbox 360 HD movie download service to see how well that works. Connections will only keep getting faster and compression techniques will only keep getting better.

You'll note also that when discussing the advantages of these systems I do not mention the lack of cost, because these same concepts can be applied to a legal download service. The problem with current services has been a combination of

Another version of serenity?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Damn! I think there must be at least 3 different "scene releases" of Serenity in various flavors of high-def by now (1080i mpeg2 cropped to 16:9, 1080i mpeg2 OAR, 1080i h264 and 25fps OAR) So now there will yet another version floating around the net soon. These greedy pirates, always double-dipping or worse to try and get people to download the same movie multiple times!

Re:Another version of serenity?

[Kjella]

Well, of the versions available (I'll take your word for, I wouldn't know anything about things like that *cough*) the HD-DVD version should probably be the one with highest bitrate and the one put most work into mastering. In particular, the ATSC MPEG2 stream is just about 20Mbit/s max, twice that of DVDs. The h264 stream, which I presume is from a european DVB broadcast is probably better because of the improved compression, but presumably still only 10-15Mbit average. If they've filled the HD-DVD close to capacity, it'll probably have more like 30Mbit/s. Plus presumably they put a lot more effort into mastering a DVD release than a TV station would.

/. paradise

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Porn goes for HD-DVD
2. HD-DVD encryption is broken
3. The Pirate Bay will buy a country

Put them together and you have pirated porn in HD. Note to self: add KY Jelly and a pack of kleenex to the shopping list.

Re:/. paradise

[jone1941]

Note to self: invest heavily in Johnson & Johnson and Kimberly-Clark

Re:/. paradise

[EvilCowzGoMoo]

1. Porn goes for HD-DVD
2. HD-DVD encryption is broken
3. The Pirate Bay will buy a country

Sealand is for sale!
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21026372-1702 ,00.html

HD-DVD is worth buying

[AnnuitCoeptis]

After all folks, it is stunning 1920x1080 (2Mpix) video with one crazy bitrate and over 20GB of data. I thinks its finally worth buying one, especially when the quality and technology (finally) matches the price tag here.

Re: Don't like Movies Much?

[amazon10x]

Ermmm... Good plan except major movie studios will only release on Blu-Ray if it's DMR holds up (at least for the next couple of month). Then again maybe all you want to watch is Porn. BTW, in yesterday's post about HD Porn and Sony not Allowing Porn on BETA, I assure you there was LOTS of porn on BETA. The adult industry may prefer HD-DVD for cost reasons, but if Blu-Ray wins, there will be Blu-Ray porn -- count on it. The best thing might be for HD-DVD to fail, have Blu-Ray generally accepted, and THEN break the DMR Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha

I would have assumed DMR was a typo but you typed it twice. I think the term you are looking for is DRM. It stands for Digital Right Management.

When will tech people starting getting

[zappepcs]

comedy awards? This is hilarious. Spending all that money on DRM, implementing new media, only to have the encryption cracked before launch day (practically) must be like trying to nail jello to the wall using $100,000 nails. (Has Mythbusters tried nailing jello to a wall yet?)

The real question is not how they will respond, but when will they learn?

Re:When will tech people starting getting

[Blublu]

Best analogy ever.

Re:When will tech people starting getting

[Jugalator]

(Has Mythbusters tried nailing jello to a wall yet?)

I don't think so, but maybe they just don't want to look as stupid as some MPAA studio executives are right now.

I wonder how they'll motive their DRM budgets now?

And now also comes step 2 with DRM, the dark side of it...
That pirates will have a more easy time to deal with HD-DVD's compared to legit users than ever, much moreso than DVD's which only have region coding.

That's my favorite part with DRM protections.

Re:When will tech people starting getting

[DavidTC]

Next on Mythbusters: Is it possible to hand someone content on a computer-readable medium and the software tools to view it, without them being able to copy it?

The conclusion: No way in hell.

Re:When will tech people starting getting

[RobertLTux]

easy way to nail Jello (tm) to the wall Liquid Nitrogen basically you freeze the tray of jello down to just a few degrees K and then use a diamond saw to cut it into cubes and then its bring out your Nail Gun Time.

Re:When will tech people starting getting

[Oktober Sunset]

it's very easy to nail jelly to a wall, I nailed some jelly to a wall in November and it is still there now.

Re: Don't like Movies Much?

[chill]

There was lots of porn on Beta, but that is because anyone could record Beta due to the nature of the tape. Anyone can NOT record BluRay. In order to get a disc mastered, you have to go thru a Sony-authorized mastering service and they've been told NO PORN.

I also feel the studios are more interested in a token attempt. The encryption, even when broken, protects against the vast majority of that type of piracy. The geek market that is capable of doing that is so small it is almost negligible. They just have to go thru the motions to make sure the rest of the public keeps thinking "this is too hard to bother with, unless you are a basement-living uber-geek with no life". The big problem is the counterfeit discs that are mass-produced.

Lawyers

[max909]

They will lawers ... and lots of lawyers :)

You can also find it here

[Anonymous Coward]

BackupHDDVD.zip

Correction

[kopo]

if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to protect their rights. if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to deny consumers their rights.

Re:Correction

[Opportunist]

Well, I tried to word it to match their intention. Denying customer rights is what is called today collateral damage.

This is newspeech for "damage the damage dealer couldn't give a rat's ass about".

Industry response

[xswl0931]

Don't be surprised if the response is to no longer allow PC software decoders for media formats.

Re:Industry response

[TheCoop1984]

The general populace has got so used to being able to play DVDs on their windows machines that that may be the start of the general consumer backlash against DRM (or will force the companies to develop software players anyway), at which point DRM can only become more villified

Re:Industry response

[Phoobarnvaz]

Don't be surprised if the response is to no longer allow PC software decoders for media formats.

This was what the MPAA originally wanted for Windows Vista to be released. Only after Microsoft agreed to the BS in hardware & software was the MPAA going to back off of them.

With the market...or perceived market for media center PC's...the PC manufacturers are going to cry bloody murder for not allowing HD content on their PC's.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

youtube demo removed

[1 a bee]

muslix64's youtube demo linked from the original post has since been removed. Instead the page seems to claim that the content of his video is somehow owned by Warner Bros.:

This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. because its content was used without permission. Sad, but funny...

Re:youtube demo removed

[Jugalator]

I thought short movie clips qualified as fair use without need for a copyright holder permission, and that YouTube video contained no more than that...

Re:youtube demo removed

[Yonder Way]

Maybe so, but it's still available on google.

Re:youtube demo removed

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a blatant abuse of the DMCA takedown provisions. The intent was to stop the distribution of content that actually infringes a copyright. To submit a takedown notice, the copyright owner must provide a statement that it as a "good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the...law.". Warner Brother's lawyers clearly knew the video was presented in a manner that fully complied with copyright laws.

To have the material restored, the person who posted it has to reveal their identity which for obvious reasons is unlikely to happen. This is exactly the kind of thing that ChillingEffects.org was created for.

Re:youtube demo removed

[Silvrmane]

What strikes me about the example is that Full Metal Jacket was not a widescreen movie... Why is the HD DVD version of it presented in that format when the theatrical version of it was not?

the lesson here...

[buhatkj]

is never underestimate a hardcore geek with a little equipment and a decent block of vacation time....

people have been xeroxing books for like 40 years and nobody ever made such a stink as the mpaa and riaa have. their whole thing is so wrongheaded, if they would spend all those legal fees and lawyer salaries on hiring better directors/writers/actors their profits would skyrocket. its not piracy that loses them profits, it's SHITTY PRODUCTS.

Re:the lesson here...

[cdrguru]

Xeroxing a book is HARD. It takes time and considerable manual effort. It also pretty much requires trashing the original book.

What the MPAA and similar folks would like to prevent is it being EASY to copy their stuff. So easy that it is simpler to borrow a disc from a friend, copy it and never, ever buy it. Even better when you can "borrow" a disc from someone half a planet away that you have never met and get a 100% perfect copy.

Mostly because of simple greed, selfishness and stupidity digital entertainment media is going to become obsolete. Nobody can afford to sell one copy - unless it is chock full of advertisements that someone else is paying for. At that point, nobody would want it anyway.

End of game. Sorry, you lose.

Re:the lesson here...

[Kjella]

people have been xeroxing books for like 40 years and nobody ever made such a stink as the mpaa and riaa have.

Because it's a giant pain in the ass, looks like crap, can't be easily repeated and probably costs more if you're the one paying for the copier?

If the future is iPods and HTPCs, what's the difference between a pirated product and the original? None, nada. No cover art, no lyrics, no pressed CD/DVDs with labels except maybe as space wasters and dust collectors. It's just a file of 0s and 1s, a perfect clone of the original. People *always* have other things to spend money on, and if they can avoid spending any getting their music or movies without hassle, many will.

if they would spend all those legal fees and lawyer salaries on hiring better directors/writers/actors their profits would skyrocket

ROFLMAO. Have you checked the salaries of people like Spielberg and Peter Jackson? "Film director Steven Spielberg was the world's highest-earning celebrity last year, according to Forbes magazine. The man behind ET and Jurassic Park had an estimated income of 350$ million in 2005, or 667$ per minute." The top hollywood actors make 30-40 millon dollars per year.

its not piracy that loses them profits, it's SHITTY PRODUCTS.

Yes, it's because their products are so shitty, that people pirate them... uh? If their products were so shitty, people wouldn't *want* them, pirated or not. If you're getting them anyway, it's just another way of saying "I want this product, but I'm too cheap to pay for it".

Simpsons?

[Jugalator]

Heh, somehow tagging this article with "nelson" seems appropriate... :-p

Analog Hole

[alexgieg]

Even if they one day develop a perfect DRM scheme full of unbreakable secure paths, it won't be possible to avoid someone simply removing the actual LCD screen, wiring the signals instructing which pixels should turn on and off to a 3rd party device, and recording the unencrypted content in raw format.

No piracy is being stopped by these means. They're and will always be utterly useless.

Re:Analog Hole

[Ron Bennett]

Easier yet, simply record the content shown on the screen with a HD video camera of similar or higher resolution... ...then remaster (think film to digital conversion; color matching, etc), and presto one has a *digital* copy that's nearly as good as the original, which can then be conveniently copied infinitely with no further degradation.

The biggest flaw with DRM is the ease of which digital content can be copied ... once one has a "good" copy, it's basically game over.

While it's true the entertainment industry could require players to validate all played content (ie. using reference frames) in real-time to a remote server, such an approach is likely to ultimately fail for numerous technical and practical reasons.

Ron

Re:Analog Hole

[mcknation]

Nah, once they get a secure path like that all displays will be loaded with thermite charges so when you try to open your display you get your hands blown off.
Then we can get hooks! Sweet.
/McK

Re:Analog Hole

[Mongoose]

There are commerical devices like this already on the market. You just strap the device to the LCD and have at it. Even the PSP has such a device, albeit not 'HD' in that case.

Re:Analog Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they one day develop a perfect DRM scheme full of unbreakable secure paths, it won't be possible to avoid someone simply removing the actual LCD screen, wiring the signals instructing which pixels should turn on and off to a 3rd party device, and recording the unencrypted content in raw format.

Two words: brain port.

Re:Analog Hole

[alexgieg]

Capturing the LCD bus data directly would provide a better unencrypted rendering of the movie than recording the image displayed by the actual LCD. But, sure, whatever is easier! :)

Re:Analog Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been research into embedding watermarks into video that will be detected by cameras, making them refuse to record. This, of course, replies on every HD camera in the world supporting the watermark recognition...

Re:Analog Hole

[maxwell demon]

But then, how do they prevent recording the signal directly from the visual cortex?

Pastebin /.-ed

[Anonymous Coward]

As the title said. So, here is the page content.

Welcome Slashdot

Pastebin is getting a little overloaded, but here is the "riddle" mentioned in the Slashdot post...

2/Reavers are bad mmmmkay...Google 4TW!

Mark Twain Intermediate School
Restaurant & Lounge
Cent
Celtic Designs Dover Pictorial
Science Online Special Feature
Link Building Strategies
Starlifter
Solar periodicity
Dawson's Creek Music Guide Decisions
Duncan's F
ways to market your small or solo business
WBFF
Olivia Quinn Food Stamp Leaver
Dalmations
CITI FM
Skippyslist

Who cares about existing titles?

[Overzeetop]

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Existing titles are chump change. Just make the next pressing with the new key. The flurry seems to center around release dates anyway, so no future discs will decode on the compromised player. They don't want to make it impossible, they simply want to make it difficult. Having to keep a key database updated is a pain in the ass. I'd go as far as to say that they don't care about an isolated crack - they'll "fix" it and go on, with updates from time to time. This is a s/w player, not a hardware player, correct? Just require an update.

The point is that they will make this about Piracy, and that its the Pirate's fault that you have to go download an update to get your machine to work. Not their fault (Say "Not my fault" in David Spade's voice an you'll get the idea). Most consumers will believe the newsvertisement they see on ther local station that blames those evil pirates for their suffering. If it weren't for the pirates, their stuff would work. Which can easily be spun at truth - pirates cracked the system, system must be safe or poor artists children will starve, so we had to change the system - all pirates fault. Your mother would fall for that, and you know it.

Right and wrong is irrelevant - it's who takes the blame for the mess that matters, and the industry has a lot of PR money to make sure the finger points at someone else.

Re:Who cares about existing titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having to keep a key database updated is a pain in the ass.
So make a CDDB type database for title keys, and have a topsites type contest for whoever cracks a non-revoked program first. All "ordinary users" have to do is insert the disc, have the media player query the database (or file downloaded from P2P) and boom.

Re:Who cares about existing titles?

[Kjella]

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Existing titles are chump change. Just make the next pressing with the new key. The flurry seems to center around release dates anyway, so no future discs will decode on the compromised player.

Yeah, right. Take a look at the prices for DVD seasons of for example Babylon 5 or Star Trek... they're incredibly expensive even though they're many years old. How much does Disney classics go for again? Besides, it's probably not like pirates are going to announce their player keys, they'll likely just release the titles.

The sad thing is that it'll work for release groups having decryption keys and pirates getting decrypted versions, while it probably won't work for average consumers who wants to do fair use like back-ups, format shift, non-HDCP screens and so on, because they don't have a disc from the same batch.

Industry response

[Robber Baron]

now how will the industry respond? Probably by having their politicians table legislation that outlaws mathematics.

that's no news, cos ...

[kirils]

everyone knows, the only key you can't crack is the key that is not.

It does hurt the consumer

[SanityInAnarchy]

What about the early adopters, who bought high-end video cards without HDCP, or very nice HDTVs, also witohut HDCP? They now have to pray that somebody (Sony?) sees the light and doesn't trip the "artificially cripple old HDTVs" flag.

So, because the MPAA is afraid of an attack that isn't feasable, and may never be, they are forcing early to buy new hardware (for no good reason). I can't help but wonder if this wasn't a simple money grab -- force everyone to upgrade so they pay you twice for the same hardware.

Recording DVI out

[Anonymous Coward]

Firewire deck + Firewire hard drive + Mac = instant recordability for less than $1000. I'm sure it can be done for cheaper.

Re:Recording DVI out

[dfghjk]

What does firewire have to do with HDMI?

BTW, macs don't come with software or codecs to record, transcode or play back the HD MPEG streams available on firewire. Firewire hard drives aren't required either. You could have just as easily said firewire deck + PC + magic software. Nice try.

Nope, sorry, the TPM can't do it...

[nweaver]

The TPM does slow public key authentication. It doesn't have the throughput to do high data rate AES which is what's necessary to decrypt the video stream.

Re:Nope, sorry, the TPM can't do it...

[jrumney]

Thank you for confirming that. I thought it was only the crappy implementation my Dell laptop came with. I discovered this when I tried to use the Disk Encryption utility that came with it, and after about 10 minutes churning it gave an estimate of 200 hours remaining just to encrypt a few megs of source code. Luckily there was a Cancel button, which after half an hour had managed to decrypt what got encrypted in the first 10 minutes. It would probably be quicker to brute force the key than use TPM if that experience is anything to go by.

Re:Nope, sorry, the TPM can't do it...

[Alsee]

it gave an estimate of 200 hours remaining just to encrypt a few megs of source code

I'm pretty sure the TPM based disk encryption you had was encrypting the entire disk - including all of the empty sectors. Read-encrypt-write-reread-verify for each sector, multiplied by some huge number of gigabytes.

The TPM doesn't handle data encryption at all, it only handles the encryption of keys. It's a very cheap low power chip. No horsepower, no throughput, just enough to spy on your system and to manage crypto on keys. In fact it can take half a second or so just to decrypt a key (asymmetric crypto is slow even on decent silicon). After watching your system startup it just decrypts the key for the disk which it passes to the CPU to do everything. So the speed issue you ran into had no real connection to the TPM.

BTW, I'm a programmer and I have spent many hours reading the TPM technical specs. It is first and foremost designed to secure the computer against its owner. You could get *all* of the same security benefits for the owner and eliminate *all* of the anti-owner abuses simply by permitting the owner to know his own master key if he wants it (the option to get a printed copy of your master key when you buy the computer for example). Absolutely identical hardware with absolutely identical security capabilites for you, with the sole difference that you know your own master key. Knowing your own key gives you full control of your computer - you can modify your security settings as you wish, you can unlock your own files if you choose to do so, you your key you can escape lock-ins and overrule lock-outs on your own computer. However the specification goes to extraordinary lengths to forbid you to know your own key. The TPM is designed to lock that master key inside the silicon and to prevent anyone from getting it - explcitly including the owner. The specification explicitly refers to the owner as an attacker. The specification has endless requirements on what the owner is forbidden to know and forbidden to be able to do.

-

Re:Nope, sorry, the TPM can't do it...

[cronius]

That's pretty informative, too bad I don't have mod points.

Hash information

[Ougarou]

For when any of these services get killed, let the record state that:
MD5(BackupHDDVD.zip)= 484a73b61fb795d84e11d72614f77db0
SHA1(BackupHDDVD .zip)= c9f28f76ff4f1a8bfe74fa963466e8483da95eff
SHA512(B ackupHDDVD.zip)= 661a12808e64ec516b1eb9e493bf5de4a08223f2ee4258735d aa6a382a1d2e1fbe4b732bebd4133e5af0d968c0904d310f73 40e63edab7b69e1948b08
3dd2617
ED2K(BackupHDDVD.z ip)= 4860e9248663d52dc47bfc98d61ec6d7
GNUNET(BackupHDD VD.zip)= COD1504ECJM52QOUN7I97FQTSIG848VITP15GSQTL9L3GAGT5O FRSIRJ5FLT84PUBBODIQ60I16J23RJ83J3TMLNMQF1II5GGFEI C5O.COTARKV5PLT8MFC6E
BDF83IMEJI74A3H0QNTGMEGDS6P PO6AEFF75S439R2T731ODI37MP0HM3TQ27266N6FMK4PS8SDLC KNE3UIPD8

Re:Hash information

[r3m0t]

You insensitive clod! I use CRCs! :)

Re:Hash information

[Anonymous Coward]

UUencoded .torrent file? =)

Serenity tag lines

[Al Al Cool J]

Can't stop the signal.

I aim to misbehave.

Let's be bad guys.

Re: Don't like Movies Much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I've more commonly seen it referred to Digital Restrictions Management. I think the term Digital Rights Management is just the publishers attempt to put a positive spin on something that is fundamentally designed to impose restrictions on your use of the content. The accepted and common meaning of the abbreviation of course will be determined in due time.

Re: Don't like Movies Much?

[michrech]

I also feel the studios are more interested in a token attempt. The encryption, even when broken, protects against the vast majority of that type of piracy. The geek market that is capable of doing that is so small it is almost negligible.

It only takes one individual to break the encryption and post the results to the wild to throw your entire argument into the trash.

Um, no

[deblau]

Actually, the reverse engineering crowd won round 1. Round 2 is people violating copyright claiming fair use. What happens next is pretty predictable -- the MPAA's lawyers get involved, most of the violators were wrong and get hit up for a few grand (surprise surprise), everyone on /. bitches and moans about The Man putting them down while not rising off their pasty asses to actually do anything about it, and the reverse engineers pray to $DEITY that rest of the world gets on with more important things and doesn't sue them too.

Re:Um, no

[julesh]

Round 2 is people violating copyright claiming fair use

In this case, fair use is a pretty damned good argument. The fact that the videos will refuse to play because the player software has decided that it simply doesn't like your hardware is a good enough reason to circumvent the restrictions, IMO.

And if I owned the necessary hardware and such a disc, I'd be making that argument to the secretary of state that I should be allowed access to an unprotected copy, in order to be able to access the data as is my right as a valid licensee.

Re:Um, no

[deblau]

You make an interesting point. Now write your Representative and Senators and convince them. In the mean time, it's not fair use. Read 17 U.S.C. 107. Not to mention that circumventing the protection in the first place is a separate violation under the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. 1201.

The DRM Programmers

[xant]

What I want to know is, who are the people selling DRM technology to the MPAA? Somebody has to be *developing* this stuff, somebody with a fairly decent understanding of crypto to know about revocation, n-way decryption keys, and so on. This tech isn't being developed by the lawyers and the other suits. Are these programmers a bunch of idiots?

Or are they in fact geniuses?

Re:The DRM Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

There are programmers also behind missile guidance systems or the Gitmo jail security infrastructure; unfortunately being a programmer/geek doesn't always mean being a good person.

Re:The DRM Programmers

[hypocrat]

They are perhaps geniuses because they sell a product that is obsolete/worn out very rapidly to a customer who simply must have a constant supply. DRM programmers are the pushers of the 21st century.

No problem

[RKBA]

If you can actually capture DVI in realtime, then you're probably inside the industry already, where no form of copy protection can prevent leaks.

Not true. This is SlashDot, remember? ;-) I have a brand new Actel ProAsic3E-A3PE600 FPGA development board and a couple of older FPGA development boards sitting around gathering dust just begging for a new project, and this sounds like it might be just the ticket. The boards have a prototyping area, high speed ADC and DAC converters, lots of high speed I/O ports of various sorts, and I have a few gigabytes of some old RAM lying around that I could use as a buffer. I also use to write software for embedded systems and operating system device drivers to communicate with those embedded systems (which in this case would be an FPGA development board), so it shouldn't take me more than a couple of weeks to put together a system that can capture such a bitstream as you describe, and another couple of weeks to be able to DMA it to a computer's hard disk (or even a hard drive attached locally to the FPGA development board for that matter!), but it wouldn't do me much good unless I were able to decode the data stream.

Re:No problem

[Anpheus]

You'd have to slow down the content eventually though, wouldn't you? I mean, 1920x1080 at 60fps with 24 bits per pixel is 2,847MiB per second. That's 1920*1080 = 2,073,600 pixels^2 per frame, and that multiplied by sixty seconds equals 124,416,000 pixels^2 per second, and using n pixels^2 = 24n bits we get 2,985,984,000 bits per second. Divide by eight to get bytes, and we have 373,248,000 bytes. That equals 364500 KiB, or ~355.95MiB/second.

That means you'd fill up your multiple GiB buffer in a matter of seconds. Are you using a fast enough hard drive to write it to disc? Even over SATA 3.0Gb/s your actual throughput is right around 300MiB/s. So you're losing 60MiB to the buffer every second, which means for every gigabyte of RAM you have, you can encode raw HD content for another seventeen to eighteen seconds, assuming everything works really well.

Simply put: without realtime compression and probably signal loss, you can't encode that signal on common hardware. Far easier to simply decrypt the HD content on whatever media it's stored on and reencode it at your leisure.

Re:No problem

[Anpheus]

Should have previewed! First MiB figure is wrong (copied the wrong value) but the remaining math should be correct.

Re:No problem

[FromellaSlob]

Actually, these figures are just about achievable with contemporary hardware. Something like one of the latest Nforce motherboards with 6 SATA2 ports loaded with the latest fast, high capacity hard drives (like the Seagate 750GB 7200.10 drives) in a RAID0 stripe. I have an Nforce4 system with 4 500GB 7200.10 drives sitting under my desk right now. It nearly hits that transfer rate, but only on the faster part of the disk. Of course, with a typical length movie you'll then have about 3TiB of uncompressed video that you'll need to run through a suitable codec (like X264), and that will take a while... but it's the sort of challenge that some people would relish.

Re:No problem

[HTH NE1]

You could use a striped RAID to increase write speed. Then it becomes a matter of whether there's enough bandwidth available to send the data to the RAID controller.

Re:No problem

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

If you can actually pull this off, you could have a sizable customer base in very short order.

I've been actively looking for a solution like this for some time. Actually, it'd need a bit of tweaking for my purposes -- component video + analog stereo inputs into the ADC (instead of DVI or HDMI), and ideally, on-the-fly downscaling from 1080i to 720p & then compressing to MP4 / XviD or the like. MEncoder's latest mp4 compressors are damn fast, and that could probably actually keep up if someone implemented it in hardware. Then it's just a matter of interfacing to USB out or something, much like a Dvico Fusion USB would.

With as many people as are putting as much effort as they are into finding such a device, I'm really surprised that it's not cheaply available already if manufacturing it is really feasible. Videohelp & AVS's forums constantly have running threads full of people willing to pay $2000-ish for something that works, even if it's just a MacGyvered bunch of boards with the right I/O somewhere on 'em.

So basically, a big unmet demand is there. Economics would suggest that if economical manufacture was feasible, supply would already exist. I wish your project luck though, and be sure to hit me up for a couple grand if you can build it.

Re:No problem

[drsmithy]

That equals 364500 KiB, or ~355.95MiB/second.

You could easily build a computer with disk I/O system capable of that sort of performance today, even with cheap consumer level components. Splash out on 10 gig ethernet and it wouldn't even need to be the same box as the one decoding the signal.

Re:No problem

[Anpheus]

See, that's not "common," and certainly costs a bit. And even then, it's somewhat a "cross your fingers and hope" with all the different parts. And still, for all the protection HDCP provides, it is negated by the fact that the media on one end will have to be decrypted eventually, so why not just figure out how to crack that and much more leisurely and simply decrypt the media itself? Performing transcoding in real time is possible, no doubt. Probably not with any common hardware, I am all but certain that no video card will accept an HDCP signal and transcode it, or provide anywhere near the bandwidth. And even if you did get the bandwidth, unless you can compress it you will need a server somewhere. And as you mentioned, you would end up with a huge amount of raw data in the meantime, at 355MiB/s, a full length movie may be in excess of 3 TiB. Your RAID stripe would have to comprise at least 6TiB in storage, which would require, if you used the largest drives available, 10 750GB drives.

Common hardware? If those rigs are so damn common, <em>buy me one</em>. I'll pay the 'common' price of between $500 and $2000 for that machine.

Re:No problem

[Mantrid42]

I don't know why everyone thinks that you need to dump the thing at HD-DVD quality. Think about it. DVDs are prevalent these days, and yet the vast majority of pirated movies are 700 MB in size. Why? Because thats near the size of a CD.

Re:No problem

[RKBA]

Three questions if I may:

1. Are you telling me that there are people who would pay as much as $2,000 for a board that digitizes the three YPbPr component video signals and two analog stereo outputs of an HDTV device and sends the data to a PC for recording (or plugs into the PCI bus and is accessed via device drivers), or would that price also require downscaling of the image and MP4/XviD compression? I believe that fast enough FPGA boards with high speed ADC's and builtin PCI interface plus DMA can be had for around two or three hundred dollars.

2. How much would the MP4 and/or XviD compression portion of the operation be worth (perhaps as an optional extra-cost feature)? At the moment I have no idea how feasible MP4 compression would be for an FPGA. If it's very complicated it may require a very expensive FPGA or even a custom VLSI chip in order to have enough logic circuitry available.

3. Is http://forum.videohelp.com/ representative of the type of "Videohelp & AVS's forums" you referred to, or do you have some better suggestions as to where I could go to sell my YPbPr/MP4 converters after I've built a couple of them? :-)

P.S.
This kind of thing is made considerably easier thanks to the Open Source sharing of Verilog and VHDL designs at places like http://www.opencores.org/ where you can find pre-existing tested and free (as in freedom) designs for things like USB and Ethernet interfaces (not sure about MP4 compression though), so I wouldn't be doing the whole thing from scratch and that's why I gave such an optimistic schedule estimate.

Re:No problem

[Salsaman]

First of all, 60 fps would be interlaced. So an de-interlaced signal would be 30 fps, half the bandwidth, i.e. 170MB/sec. Then you do on-the-fly compression, you can probably reduce that by 2/3. So your final bandwidth is around 50MB/sec. You could easily achieve this with a simple raid setup.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Would the DeckLink HD Extreme suit your needs? It's priced at $995 which is expensive, but still a lot better than $2000. They also have a HDMI capture card for $249.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

NO, your fucking problem is using 'MiB.' MiB, KiB, GiB, TiB are all fucktarded terms only fucktards use to sound '1337'

Re:No problem

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

1: Yes, without a doubt. If you build it, they will come. ;-) There are already some PRO level component-in cards in the $1000 - $3000 price range (Blackmagic Decklink, Aja Xena LHe), but for the purposes of recording full-length HD content, they'd be prone to all the data rate problems already discussed here. To close the sale, the device would need *some* kind of simple data-dump interface that would work on an average PC with an average SATA drive. Since you seem to know low-level DMA programming, maybe the best strategy would be a self-contained recording device, where you just add your own HDD & go? Here's a player version of what I'm talking about: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16855182001. If something like that had a "record" button, I really think it would start a feeding frenzy, even at $2000-ish.

2: In today's market, I could see it being worth another ~$500 if you had a PCI and/or USB version of the device that did for HD component + analog audio input what a Hauppauge or ADS or Pinnacle device does for S-Video input. The price would have to fall eventually, of course, but I think $2,500 would be about right for the early-adopter market (i.e., before you could figure out how to get any economies of scale in the production process). For example, my Hauppauge PVR-150 will (a) tune my cable box via an IR blaster, (b) compress the captured S-Video stream to MPEG2, and (c) provide the muxed stream to a video input device channel that Windows recognizes. It's also compatible for use as a tuner card with Media Center, so some kind of drivers "know" that the IR-blaster & S-Video input "go together." If you are competent at writing Windows video capture source device drivers, then that might be the way to go (though I'd imagine that would add some serious levels of complexity.)

3: VideoHelp is one spot, yes; I'd also recommend checking out the HTPC area at AVS Forums: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f= 26/. If the word got out between those places and Doom9, maybe TheGreenButton.com and a few MythTv forums too, I think the sales momentum would take care of itself from there.

For starters, I'd say figure out if the boards you can program can indeed handle the input & scaling end of the deal. Then try finding out what it would take to get your board's output into MEncoder. On a Windows machine, I convert OTA HDTV streams from 1920*1080i MPEG-2 to 720*405 29.97fps MP4 w/AC3 audio (FFMPEG does the audio), and I can usually damn near run at realtime speeds (above 30fps) on an AMD 3800 X2. That's what makes me optimistic that a dedicated encoder based on MEncoder's code could do the job. Could one get 1080i/30 scaled to 720p/29.97 in hardware, perhaps using a GPU along with libavcodec's support for bicubic hardware scaling?

If you're really thinking about productizing this, I think the big decisions amount to deciding if your skill set is more suited to making a standalone device, or to going the extra mile to write device drivers for Linux and/or Windows. The icing on the latter option woudl be to add some sort of ability to bind to a tuner control / IR emitter, but that's probably not *strictly* necessary as it could be done with separate hardware & simpler, more platform specific software, I suppose.

I'm just a lowly C# programmer myself, but if there's anything I can do to help, or any alpha-testing I could do, please don't hesistate to hit me up.

Re:No problem

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

For the HD Extreme, you'd have to adapt the YPrPb component outs to the card's YUV BNC inputs. I'm not sure how compatible all the signal processing is from there between the formats the Decklink expects and your average consumer analog component AV signal. Might be worth some investigation, though.

The HDMI, unfortunately, would run into HDCP issues, which is what the whole Component Capture subject is about trying to avoid. I don't think that card is HDCP compliant, but even if it is, I don't think a HDCP licensee would be allowed to make a card that would capture into an unencumbered format, so you'd still be stuck with DRMd content, not quite the plain old MP4 we're looking for.

Re:No problem

[RKBA]

Now that I think about it, it might be possible to do the whole thing by just adding a three input ADC PCI card to a reasonably fast desktop computer. As you say, I first need to get a copy of the specs on the YPbPr video to find out how fast it needs to be sampled and what the waveform looks like so I know where to sample it, etc. If the numbers look promising, I would like to get back to you for guidance on what the typical "customer base" would accept, but I just realized that SlashDot apparently has no mechanism for sending private messages from one member to another, so if you (RareButSeriousSideEffect) would please send an email to me at gmail (my username is rsdotson) I will keep you informed of my progress (if any). Thanks for the suggestion, even though surely the "big guys" will be coming out with a device like you describe very soon. ARCHOS already makes video playback/recorders just like you describe that record as well as plays back, but only for NTSC.

Fortunately the Xvid codec is open source, so I've already downloaded it to see how complicated it is. I'm hoping it will be small enough to run on an embedded CPU core in an FPGA. By the way, don't ever think of yourself as a "lowly" programmer. I was primarily a C programmer before my retirement and only taught myself Verilog afterwards. If you can learn C# then you can certainly learn Verilog if you wish to. It's a myth that Verilog and VHDL are difficult to learn. They are both programming languages like any other, except that the rules are different than on standard sequential CPU's. Verilog essentially allows the programmer to implement NON-deterministic finite state machines, as well as the standard classical deterministic finite state machine model that most CPU's implement. If you like low level programming, you'll LOVE Verilog! :-)

Re:No problem

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

In my limited experience, libavcodec's MP4 compressor (also GPL, if I'm not mistaken) is between 50% and 100% faster than XviD's. Is PCIe the kind of animal where, if you had a machine with multiple slots, you could use one slot for input, sampling and ADC chores, and direct blast the bits to the other board (to handle encoding & muxing) straight across the PCIe bus without having to hit the other mobo bottlenecks?

All the Archos units I could find seemed to lack YPbPr *in*, though provided it as output.

Thanks for the kind words re: programming, though keep in mind that I hail from a VB background. ;-) I'd love to learn the low-level stuff someday, time permitting, though binary arithmetic gives me fits.

At any rate, this is an exciting project if you take it up. I'll drop you a line shortly so we can collude outside of /.

Cheers!

Re:No problem

[RKBA]

Is PCIe the kind of animal where, if you had a machine with multiple slots, you could use one slot for input, sampling and ADC chores, and direct blast the bits to the other board (to handle encoding & muxing) straight across the PCIe bus without having to hit the other mobo bottlenecks?

No, I don't think so. As I recall, in the PCI bus I'm familiar with (ie; I don't know what the "e" in PCIe means), a device can operate in either bus master or slave mode but in both cases data transfer occurs between the device and the main CPU RAM rather than from one device to another on the PCI bus. There is nothing to stop you from connecting a ribbon cable directly from one board to another and bypassing the PCI bus altogether however.

Re:No problem

[Wizarth]

Actually MiB is the correct term for 1048,576 Bytes. It has not always been, but it is now and has technically been so for 7 years now. The computer industry took kilo (meaning 1000) and tweaked it to mean 1024, but everywhere else kilo is 1000 and should not have been bastardized like this. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiB

Latest Volume Keys

[Anonymous Coward]

0E75082678AAD5CD4410A28A662D6832D21EB325=King Kong |V|09/18/06|802F78B1B20D1183638D84E1A96D6EDD
C8A 57242AF4CB5C0D7848BDA10821F984DC656E0=Serenity |V|MM/DD/YY|D075568AE6BB0B3F85446927B3794C28
4ACA BE525F5CBF77DAA43EA2B83E04918D5FA6D4=Apollo 13 |V|MM/DD/YY|8BA9C422F93C9B4B4247814530B29C48
17C 8312A7BEA25A08606F118AD265FD657161D0D=SuperMan Returns |V|MM/DD/YY|EC2EC7F847F6D304B3C26F121CA578DA
1828 B68D292D2EA1E9EEA1C7044DC864FDBC3EB6=12 Monkeys |V|MM/DD/YY|2662C05B5238B0C50BD1BDF693223712

I wouldn't watch these movies if they were free. Please find the keys to some decent movies, thx.

The 'Fair Use' crowd? You mean the 'pirates' won

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this have anything to do with "fair use"? You already had the ability to play these discs in any HD-DVD player. And you had the ability to copy the videos to other forms (iPod, DivX, WMV, whatever) through the analog hole. So having the keys gives you no extra "fair use" ability. The only thing it gives you is the ability to make "backups", which we all know is 99.999999% used to pirate.

So call it like it is.
What would happen if the "industry" responded by saying, "Fuck it. We'll just release DVDs. We make plenty of money with those. No more high-def disc releases, since you guys pirate them anyway". Would that make you happy?

As long as the data is processed...

[Z00L00K]

...by any means it can be circumvented at any point in the flow. All the security schemes assumes that software and hardware is "unhackable". Reality has shown that it isn't the case.

What the MPAA et al. fails to recognize is that the movie pirates that does it for money will get around any encoding technology as they like. It can be bribery, threats or industrial espionage. No holes barred, and the only persons that will suffer are the end users. Large-scale movie piracy gangs will be the Al Capone's of the 21:st century because they have the means and manners to get around anything. So the best idea is to actually find another way around how to resolve the copyright and fair use problem.

The modern problem is that copies of data doesn't degrade at each copy. If that was the problem (as old analog magnetic tapes like VHS and music cassettes) the copyright problem wouldn't be as big. Those who wanted the best quality bought the best thing and those who couldn't afford either used a copy or went to a friend. Today each copy is as good as the original. No degradation whatsoever. Only thing missing is the CD cover and inlays. This brings up the point that those who do movie piracy by filming in the movie theater will by default create a copy that is of a lower quality than the original thing, so calling for imprisonment there seems to be a great overkill. Just confiscate the equipment and let them go. Repeated felonies may be prosecuted, but overdoing that part seems to be a waste of money and resources - the big leaks are on digital media.

Re:As long as the data is processed...

[Dun Malg]

No holes barred The phrase is "no holds barred". It's an old "professional wrestling" term used in promotional materials. Your version sounds downright pornographic.

No more software players?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

They could take a more drastic approach, and simply revoke the keys to all software players, since software players are too easy to extract keys from. The already cracked discs would still be available for piracy, but further discs wouldn't be playable on anything but hardware. That would definitely suck, and would render the "victory" as Pyrrhic.

Re:No more software players?

[Tony Hoyle]

They probably will. I could bet money that part of their license to the decryption technology is that they protect the keys so they can't be broken. The player manufacturers are the ones that get shafted in this - they'll have no product any more.

Re:No more software players?

[toejam316]

How would this function exactly? They'd need it to be encrypted the whole way for it to be safe from the "fair use" squad, and, lets face facts here, there has to be a point of software de-encryption, or else you would need to have a extremely elaborate setup which could easily be cracked, or failing that, a built in Movie Player Firmware in all devices (rendering blu-ray/HD-DVD drives released before X rendered useless unless the firmware (if released) has been upgraded to x) and even then, it would have to be a bootos, because otherwise they're still putting the movie at risk. More or less, the only way that could work is if they totaly severed the format from being PC compatible for any sort of playback, and that is nothing but a slowdown.

Re:No more software players?

[tkrotchko]

Prohibiting PC playback of HD content, in my opinion, is a death knell for either format. I don't believe any new format is viable as something that can only be played in the living room.

Re:No more software players?

[packeteer]

I think you referred to a "pyrrhic" victory incorrectly. The idea with a pyrrhic victory is that you end up worse off then before. The people winning the victory here are the pirates and fair use crowd. The ones who would lose out from their victory are the third party home users who want nothing more than software playback and dont even try to circumvent the AACS.

Fair use?

[JFMulder]

Seriously, the more and more I read about "fair use" on Slashdot in conjonction with DRM for DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray, the more I can't help but think that it's an euphemism for "piracy". Seriously, stop kidding yourselves. The majority of people who rip and burn movies are pirating them, not practicing their fair use right to show clips in schools or make backup copies.

Re:Fair use?

[grimJester]

Bullshit. If I pirate something, I don't buy it and get no DRM. If I buy it and then copy it, it's not piracy.

Re:Fair use?

[Sloppy]

Seriously, the more and more I read about "fair use" on Slashdot in conjonction with DRM for DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray, the more I can't help but think that it's an euphemism for "piracy".

Then you've been thinking the wrong thing. For many of us, defeating the DRM is the only way to use non pirated material. For example, if I want to play a DVD, then I have to break CSS. If I can't break CSS, then I don't have a way to watch the movie. It's that simple, unless DVDCCA wants to issue keys to the xine and mplayer teams.

So, what seems more probable:

• I want to break the CSS on DVDs so I can watch an original DVD that I have in my possession.
• I want to break the CSS on DVDs so I can watch pirated movies that I download from the Internet, which aren't CSS-protected anyway.

If you think the majority of users are in the second category, then you're the one who is kidding himself.

Almost nobody who wants to break CSS, is working with anything other than an original DVD. So if you don't think they bought it, how did they get it? Did they shoplift it? Did it "fall off the back of a truck?"

Re:Fair use?

[JFMulder]

WHAT? The majority of people who break CSS are not Linux users or people with problems playing a movie on their "el cheapo DVD player", it's the people renting stuff and then ripping it. I couldn't care less about these people, they're thieves, period.

The fact that fair uses allows you to rip your own copy for personal use is good. I just think a little too many people are pretending to be fighting for fair use when in fact they just don't want to pay for stuff.

I understand the reason for breaking these schemes under Linux, but I'd rather have the community force the industry to release the spec to Linux developers so we don't have to care about the fact that the movie is protected. I mean, if every HD-DVD under the sun can play HD-DVDs, who really cares, except people who want free stuff, that you can't copy them? Teachers and other people who cite fair use. But as far as other people, no I don't care at all what they think.

Besides, what's the rationale behind making a backup copy of something you bought? It's not because you CAN that it means it's ok. If you break something, you broke it, period. You should cared for it better. If I wreck my car, I buy another one. Why should movies and CDs be any different? Because they are so simple to copy? When are people going to cite fair use with books? I mean, they can catch fire! Let's scan them as we buy them!

Re:Fair use?

[Lehk228]

actually the pirated comes with the copy protection already removed, dumbass

Re:Fair use?

[JeffElkins]

"WHAT? The majority of people who break CSS are not Linux users or people with problems playing a movie on their "el cheapo DVD player", it's the people renting stuff and then ripping it. I couldn't care less about these people, they're thieves, period."

On one hand, I subscribe to HBO and record content. On the other, I subscribe to Netflix and rip content. What's the moral difference?

Re:Fair use?

[JFMulder]

We have laws that apply to everyone because we all have different morals. The service contract that you have with HBO allows you to. I'm pretty sure the video store doesn't.

Re:Fair use?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and should the copy protection have been removed in the first place?

Removal of copy protection facilitates piracy, not fair use for most people.

Re:Fair use?

[JeffElkins]

So, if I violate the terms of a service contract with Netflix am I a thief? Do you think Netflix would rather keep my $20/mo and throttle back my service, or drop me as a customer and lose the $20?

Terms like "stealing," "pirate," and "theft" don't belong in discussions about IP and copyright. This terminology has been injected into the debate by the *AAs and their minions. Downloading an MP3 from Limewire or copying a DVD from Netflix is not theft, it's at most a copyright violation. Apples and oranges.

Re:Fair use?

[JFMulder]

People can call this what they want. It doesn't change the fact that the owner hasn't given their approval in duplicating their media, and your doing so violates the terms of the agreement.

As for Netflix, their are not going to bother, I mean, not a lot of people are going to rent a movie multiple times, so for them if you copy the movie, they don't care, it's not as if you would have probably rented it again.

If a friend asked you to keep your word on something, you would do it. Why is it different with a media company?

Re:Fair use?

[JeffElkins]

"People can call this what they want. It doesn't change the fact that the owner hasn't given their approval in duplicating their media, and your doing so violates the terms of the agreement."

No, people can't call it what they want. Words have meaning.

"As for Netflix, their are not going to bother..."

That's correct, because I haven't "stolen" anything from Netflix. I (a theoretical I) have broken their terms of service. Their response is to keep my $20/mo and throttle back my deliveries. Which is a perfectly acceptable response.

If I record "Rome" or "The Sopranos," off HBO, then lend the DVDs to a friend, that's a violation of HBO's terms of service. Is that theft too? How about taking a leak during a commercial? According to a widely quoted statement from a Times-Warner executive, that's "stealing" their content. Do you agree?

"If a friend asked you to keep your word on something, you would do it. Why is it different with a media company?"

Breaking one's word is not theft. It's breaking one's word. And that's not clear-cut either. I'd view breaking one's word to a friend over a serious matter as a much worse moral offense than ignoring the terms of a click-through license or loaning a friend a DVD recorded from HBO.

Re:Fair use?

[JFMulder]

I hate Internet arguments like these beecuse they always degenerate with one person not understanding what the other meant.

Breaking one's word is not theft.
I know that. You seem to be assuming that I always assume theft, which is not the case. Back to my example, the fact is, you gave your word to a friend. When you rent a movie, there's that annoying license that plays at the beginning. It's stating that you don't have the right to distribute the movie in a non "fair use" way. By continuing watching and keeping the item, you are basically giving your word, sort of. I mean, they are not making you sign a contract. Just like a friend would assume from you, they assume that you will keep your word not copying and distributing the media in unfair ways to them.

No, people can't call it what they want. Words have meaning.
I was referring to "stealing" vs "violating copyright". Sure, they are not the same, but the end result is the same : you didn't pay for something you now own. I call that stealing. It's just a spin on words I guess.

That's correct, because I haven't "stolen" anything from Netflix..
That's debatable. I mean, by copying the movie, you are stating that you desire to continue watching a given movie, but you refuse to pay anymore for it. The fees that you pay with Netflix don't give you the right to copy the movie. Maybe they should, but that's not the case right now, so copying a movie from Netflix is almost as bad as downloading it from the web : well, you did pay a small amount. It's not clear who are you exactly "refusing profit" to. But you are indeed doing just that. If you think the current laws are unfair fine, but this doesn't make it right to violate them because you think they are outdated.

If I record "Rome" or "The Sopranos," off HBO, then lend the DVDs to a friend, that's a violation of HBO's terms of service.
I don't know about HBO's term of service, so I can't pass judgment on that. From my limited knowledge of copyright law, I would assume that fair use would grant you the right to lend it to a friend, as long as you don't distribute it on massive scale and/or sell it.

Re:Fair use?

[JeffElkins]

What you originally said:

"WHAT? The majority of people who break CSS are not Linux users or people with problems playing a movie on their "el cheapo DVD player", it's the people renting stuff and then ripping it. I couldn't care less about these people, they're thieves, period."

Sorry, I still take exception to your opinion of copyright violators. Copyright violation is not theft, nor is copying a rental.

"If you think the current laws are unfair fine, but this doesn't make it right to violate them because you think they are outdated."

You just disowned the Suffragets, the 60's Civil Rights movement and God knows what else. You don't really mean that :)

Re: Don't like Movies Much?

[KDR_11k]

Naah, it was a communication error. It was supposed to be called Digital Rights Manhandling.

Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[I'm Don Giovanni]

"By admitting DRM is useless and treating customers like clients instead of criminals?"

Customers shouldn't be treated like criminals, but they shouldn't act like criminals either. Many "customers" act as criminals then bitch and moan when they're being treated as such.

What is needed is a DRM that is advanced enough to be flexible enough to allow all "fair use" while curtailing piracy. That would be the ideal. But the reality is that DRM isn't advanced enough and won't be any time soon, if ever. So the best would be to get rid of DRM altogether. But please do NOT pretend that DRM is broken primarily for "fair use". It's broken for piracy over torrents and P2P and warez sites. In other words, it's broken for "criminal" activity, so I seen no reason why those engaged in such should be treated as "criminals".

Note: I put "criminal" in quotes, because copyright infringement is actually a "civil" offense rather than "criminal", in the US. Unless one pirates more than $1000 worth of works in 180 days, in which case it does become "criminal".

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[Anonymous Coward]

But please do NOT pretend that DRM is broken primarily for "fair use". It's broken for piracy over torrents and P2P and warez sites. In other words, it's broken for "criminal" activity, so I seen no reason why those engaged in such should be treated as "criminals".

That's complete nonsense. All of those torrents out there result from breaking the DRM once. Meanwhile, every time I use VLC to play a DVD I'm breaking the DRM, just because I like VLC better, or because my discs have the "wrong" region code. Whenever I rip a DVD to an MP4 so I can play it on my iPod, I'm breaking the DRM.

All DRM really does is make fair use harder, without affecting piracy. I break DRM just so I can timeshift or format shift, but when I actually pirate stuff off the internet I'm never breaking the DRM.

Meanwhile I get pissed off because I can't legally develop an application that captures the video stream of a DVD, even though that app wouldn't be breaking any copyrights. Why is that criminal?

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[HTH NE1]

Many "customers" act as criminals then bitch and moan when they're being treated as such.

Only because exercising fair use is acting like a criminal. Except its only acting; it isn't being.

The actions of a criminal can also be the actions of a law-abiding citizen legally exercising his rights. It is to what ends the acts are performed that (are supposed to) define them as criminal.

I can swing my fists in the air as long as I like as long as I don't hit your nose. It's bad laws like the DMCA that would make swinging my fists in the privacy of my single-occupancy home a crime.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[The Master Control P]

"What is needed is a DRM that is advanced enough to be flexible enough to allow all "fair use" while curtailing piracy."

DRM will never be this advanced, because this proposal is fundamentally impossible, because it implies logically inconsistent outcomes. Either I can copy no part of the video for any reason, or I can copy some part of the video (no matter how small) for any reason. If I can copy any part, even screenshot by screenshot, for any reason, I can re-assemble it outside the player and the DRM is therefore useless. If I can't, fair use is violated.

DRM, in all it's manifold and perverted forms, can go to hell.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[wolrahnaes]

But please do NOT pretend that DRM is broken primarily for "fair use". I would argue that the majority of users breaking DRM are doing so exactly for fair use. More often than not, there's no reason for a pirate to break the DRM on a retail DVD because that work has already been done. Within mere hours of the discs arriving at stores (generally a few days before the official launch) and occasionally weeks or months earlier (see Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story) one person has ripped the DVD and released it in to the wild. That's all it takes. Once there is a raw DVD copy floating around, the DRM never has to be broken for piracy again. Because of this, DRM can't even stop casual piracy. The only people a broken DRM scheme has left to get in the way of are those who are trying to legitimately make fair use copies.

Like others in this discussion, I have a homebrew VoD system set up in my apartment. A media server with a few terabytes of hard drive space and a trio of TV tuners (two analog for cable and one OTA HD) stores all of my movies and every episode of my favorite TV shows. Thanks to this, my roommates and I have point-and-click access to all of those videos from every computer, Xbox, and Xbox 360 in the apartment. It's very convenient and I never have to worry about a scratched disc or missing a single episode. Thanks to DRM + the DMCA, every single movie on the server is technically illegal even though I can point at the shelf where the DVDs sit gathering dust.

There are commercial hard drive based DVD library devices, but they're overpriced (in to the thousands of dollars for a mere terabyte last time I checked) and nowhere near as compatible as my solution. The one I looked at would only stream to proprietary set-top boxes and even now I'd wager only possibly the Xbox 360 out of my current line up would be compatible with any similar products on the market now (due to its support for streaming DRM). None would support streaming to my modified Xbox and certainly not to any of my computers.

I would say the home media server is a substantial example of fair use which is legally blocked by DRM+DMCA issues. One like I have is trivial to set up (Myth + Linux + Samba or XP/Vista MCE) and works with a number of clients (I intend to test using my DS as a client once I get the adapter card which enables homebrew and I've already used a PSP as a client in the past). Everyone I know who's seen my setup wants to clone it and if it weren't for the legal issues I'm sure the market would be flooded with such devices.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[Alsee]

What is needed is a DRM that is advanced enough to be flexible enough to allow all "fair use" while curtailing piracy.

What is needed is a carpet bomb that is advanced enough to be flexible enough not to kill children and innocent bystanders while blowing people who plot terrorism to smithereens.

You then proceed to state that DRM currently cannot do what you suggest, but you still step in the fecal matter in suggesting that it might be possible at all. My suggested bomb and your suggested "fair use allowing DRM" are both physically impossible... short of full blown AI hardware... full blown AI hardware with telepathy and/or precognition. It is literally impossible to technologically detect the difference between an act of infringment and an act of fair use because because they are often physically identical and only differ in the mental state and intent of the person doing the copying. It's good that you are basically opposing DRM, but please do not feed the fantasy notion of chasing after a "better DRM" as a solution.

But please do NOT pretend that DRM is broken primarily for "fair use".

I think you're quite wrong there.

Commercial piracy operations generally don't bother breaking DRM, they just copy and press the encrypted disks in entirety, encryption in tact. And if for some reason they did want decrypted content, they could far more easily grab the hardware to do a studio quality rip of the output playing the disk.

And if someone breaks DRM to put something up as a torrent or whatnot, well that mostly only happens once by a single person on a given peice of content. There is really no point (other than ignorance of being the second person) to break DRM to torrent or P2P or warez post something that is already out there pre-broken.

No, I would say that the people doing the work to break DRM systems and posting those methods *are* doing so overwhelmingly out of fair-use philospophical objection to DRM. And I would say that there are vast hordes more people who make use of those published DRM-circumvention methods to play DVDs on their Linux machines or to move their MP3 players and countless other fair use purposes, than the tiny handful (or even single person!) to break and post something to torrent or P2P or warez sites.

copyright infringement is actually a "civil" offense rather than "criminal", in the US. Unless one pirates more than $1000 worth of works in 180 days, in which case it does become "criminal".

I suggest you read your own link, and notice that there is an *OR* clause in there that you neglected.

And then allow me to point out the fact that out idiot legislators have actually been so astoundingly brain damaged as to allow lawyers employed by the publishing industry to literally write the text of the copyright bills they then blindly pss into copyright law. And surprise surprise, those laywers have a routine habit of inserting trick language into that legislation they write. Trick legaleese to twist (at times drastically twist) the law in service of their employers.

And that is exactly what we have here. Now if you look at your own link, and look at the other half of the "or" clause, you'll naturally consider me an idiot for even bringing it up. The other half of the "or" says something that is (in itself) quite reasonable:
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain

Copyright was primarily intended (as your post suggests and assumes) to be a civil matter CRIMINAL copyright law, FELONY copyright law, was intended and expected to only apply to serious crime, intended to apply only to commercial piracy.

So where is the legal trick? It is actually buried elsewhere. It is buried in section 101 Definitions. The N.E.T. act slipped in this lovely little redefinition of terms:
The term "financial gain" includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.

The ob

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[hypocrat]

The problem with this whole issue is that the "pirates" are simply over (or mis-) using a right that we all need to be able to exercise.
It is impossible to stop piracy while preserving the rights of the legal user.

Companies must convince us not to steal their property.

They could start with fair prices and convenient formats.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[Anonymous Coward]

I act like a criminal because I make backups. I've (actually my 7 year old son) have gone through at least 4 copies of some disks. I find it morally acceptable for me to make copies of a disk that I bought so that I don't have to re buy it when the media gets scratched. That the media companies want to legislate the requirement to re buy it, makes them criminal in my eyes. So I don't really care if other people become criminals against them. Basically when they try to screw me, I don't care who screws them. So for me DRM *IS* broken for fair use. I have to use software that is illegal in the U.S. to make my copy, that I still have a right to have and definitely have the need for.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[Balthisar]

How do the use the XBox 360? I thought it only worked with Windows Media Center edition on the back end? If there's anything like XBMC for the 360, I'd jump onto a 360 right away (can't view HD with my old school XBoxes).

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[wolrahnaes]

The November Xbox360 update unlocked the video playback so that it can now play videos (still limited to WMV and I think MPEG) from any UPnP server. This includes XP machines with Windows Media Connect, Macs with Connect360, a number of standalone media servers, and of course Linux boxes.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[I'm Don Giovanni]

"Companies must convince us not to steal their property."

That doesn't say much for the parenting going on around here if people have to be convinced by companies "not to steal". That should be lesson number 1 from a parent (or at least in the top 3).

Now that it has been hacked, I hope HD-DVD wins

[pyite69]

This may be a good way to show that lack of DRM will make HD-DVD more successful than Blu Ray. Combine this with HD-DVD's more pr0n-friendly attitude, and it is clear that Sony is really in trouble.

This talk is all fine and well, but, , ,

[Slugster]

If I can't get the crack printed as a Perl script on a T-shirt, I ain't interested.
~

Tin Foil Hats On!

[Anonymous Coward]

HD-DVD was cracked by the Blu-Ray crowd!

Rewriting History

[Phil John]

I'm sure the porn thing didn't help, but what really killed Betamax in the early days was the shorter length of the tapes. Sony refused to back down on this and add a "long-play" mode until it was too late.

They did tie up the pro crowd however, I had the pleasure of using one of their BetaCAM's in the 90's and it was a lovely piece of kit.

President Bush here....

[Frodo Crockett]

The DMCA only applies to the US, it doesn't apply to those outside the US.

That's what you think, bucko!

Re:President Bush here....

[falconwolf]

The DMCA only applies to the US, it doesn't apply to those outside the US.

That's what you think, bucko! --

It's true! However that does not mean the RI/MP-AA and their government stooges won't try to force other countries to enforce it.

Falcon

half right..

[way2trivial]

it does trash the original book.

I have one of these
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40& satitle=qcm-1200e
and one of these
http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/perip herals/scanners/workgroup/fi-5120c.html
and I can cut the spine off a book, and feed it through the scanner, and turn it into searchable PDF PDQ

I do this to search books for specific text.. research.. I haven't shared any files, but I'll bet I could have a new harry potter book scanned in & trackerable before stores even opened on the west coast...

SHITTY PRODUCTS

[Vo0k]

The difference being that a good paper book is definitely the best medium for reading. No e-book readers, no xeros, no audiobooks can replace it. Meanwhile what RIAA and MPAA are pushing as the "official standart" is about the worst there is. 6o minutes of music on a disk that won't fit in a pocket. Forced commercials before the movie. Disks preloaded with crapware that breaks your computer and makes them unplayable in car CD players. For many people the first thing after buying a CD is to rip it to mp3, upload to mp3 player and store the disk away, never returning to it. Who's to scan and OCR a newly-bought book and read it from their laptop?

So 1 software player won't be supported anymore

[heroine]

If AACS works like they said it would, the compromised software player won't be supported anymore, leaving 999,999 more keys still uncracked.

KVM w/ DVI + HDCP

[NFN_NLN]

Once this encryption is turned on, it stays turned on until the computer or the monitor are turned off. So if you read slashdot after watching a DVD, everything you see on the screen has gone through encryption and decryption. Doesn't matter, because you couldn't read the signal from the cable anyway.

Does this mean KVMs won't work for DVI connections with HDCP?

Re:KVM w/ DVI + HDCP

[gnasher719]

'' Does this mean KVMs won't work for DVI connections with HDCP?''

Not quite. Encryption stays turned on forever because there is no reason to turn it off. If you have say four computers connected to one monitor, three of them will think that encryption doesn't work and turn off HD output, which doesn't matter because you can't see a thing anyway. The fourth works. Now say you switch output from comp #2 to #3. #2 has been encrypting, #3 wanted to encrypt but didn't. Initially the monitor won't display correctly. Computer #3 should detect within two seconds that there is encryption capable hardware available on the other side, which wasn't there before. Then it should reset the monitor decryption, and turn encryption on again.

Just hope that the drivers get it all right.

Recording raw HD ... uh yes you can! [Blu-Ray?]

[joe_n_bloe]

Truth is, you can't. You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk. Well, I can't and no normal consumer can. There are people who could build stuff that could do it, but those people are probably happily building graphics cards for NVidia and ATI, or building DVD players.
You absolutely can record 1080i composite video. You need a $1000 capture card and a roughly $2500 SATA array. But that'll be cheaper as time goes on. It's true that there aren't many uses for 300MB/s throughput right now, but the progression is inevitable. In 2-3 years, recording HD composite video will be as mundane as recording SD is today. Perhaps by then composite video will be the exception, but alienating the large numbers of consumers (most of them early adopters) who own very expensive composite input equipment may not be such a good idea.

Why the HD DRM is worse

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

First you have to explain how the AACS DRM on HD-DVDs is any worse than CSS on DVDs...

The DRM technology is just a tool. The point is that what it's being used to prevent is different.

For example, the standard DRM used on DVDs inhibits copying. I can, however, put my DVD in any standard DVD player, or in my computer running whatever OS, and watch my movie/TV show/whatever. The most annoying things for many people are the disabling of user controls while the DVD runs trailers and copyright warnings, and the region coding, neither of which is really a copy protection issue per se.

With the HD stuff, on the other hand, the copy protection will get in the way even if you just want to watch your legally purchased movie. For example, if your new HDTV cost you $2,000 but dates from pre-HDPC-as-standard days (which really isn't that long ago) then your new HD-DVD or Blu-ray player isn't going to give you full-res output and you might as well have just bought the DVD. Don't even mention all the crap that's going into locking down Vista, inevitably a futile gesture that will be cracked anyway, but which will annoy a lot of legitimate users in the meantime by deliberately screwing up the video quality or blocking the audio output.

I predict, with considerable confidence, that if the big studios, Microsoft and everyone else involved push forward down this path, they will suffer the consumer backlash they have been avoiding so far. This is simply a matter of market forces. Upsetting the geeks who run Linux or want to duplicate the content onto another disk without the ads only gets a relatively small proportion of the market. Cutting off everyone with an HDTV older than a year or two -- basically, telling them that by being early adopters, they wasted their money, because they're never going to watch HD movies on that TV -- and screwing with the most popular desktop OS on the planet in a similar way? Those are going to have repercussions.

Re:Why the HD DRM is worse

[evilviper]

I can, however, put my DVD in any standard DVD player, or in my computer running whatever OS, and watch my movie/TV show/whatever.

No, you couldn't, unless "whatever OS" only includes Windows and MacOS. It took many many years before licensed DVD player software appeared for Linux.

For example, if your new HDTV cost you $2,000 but dates from pre-HDPC-as-standard days (which really isn't that long ago) then your new HD-DVD or Blu-ray player isn't going to give you full-res output

People without A/V inputs on their TV (which wasn't that long ago) had similar problems trying to play DVDs through their VCRs.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I predict, with considerable confidence, that if the big studios, Microsoft and everyone else involved push forward down this path, they will suffer the consumer backlash they have been avoiding so far.

MANY people were predicting that with DVDs as well... After all, nobody will accept copy protection like DVD CSS.

Re:Why the HD DRM is worse

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

No, you couldn't, unless "whatever OS" only includes Windows and MacOS. It took many many years before licensed DVD player software appeared for Linux.

So in other words, what I wrote is pretty much right. It just wasn't right a few years ago.

People without A/V inputs on their TV (which wasn't that long ago) had similar problems trying to play DVDs through their VCRs.

My previous TV, until I upgraded a few months ago, was many years old, and even that had no trouble playing direct from the DVD player. You have to go back probably a decade or more to find TVs with no SCART sockets, and there aren't a lot of people still using such old TVs today. This is hardly comparable to the situation where someone who went out and bought an HDTV, whose main selling point was HD resolution, as little as a year ago, without HDCP, and now finds that they can't watch HD movies on their HD TV because of the DRM rubbish.

MANY people were predicting that with DVDs as well... After all, nobody will accept copy protection like DVD CSS.

Have you been following the thread at all? The point is that the DVD copy protection did not significantly inhibit the vast majority of legitimate users from basic use of the product. The HD versions may do so, particularly in markets where HDTVs didn't come with HDCP as standard for a long time. If it does, then that's likely to bring a consumer backlash with it.

Re:Why the HD DRM is worse

[evilviper]

So in other words, what I wrote is pretty much right. It just wasn't right a few years ago.

It wasn't right a few years ago, WHEN IT MATTERED for DVD adoption.

In a few years, what you've said about HD-DVD won't be true anymore, either.

You have to go back probably a decade or more to find TVs with no SCART sockets

You're obviously in Europe. While my experience is based on the US. We don't have SCART today, let alone a decade ago. A/V inputs were uncommon on average (smaller) TVs until just a couple years before DVDs came into the picture. RF converters were being sold EVERYWHERE.

This is hardly comparable to the situation where someone who went out and bought an HDTV, whose main selling point was HD resolution, as little as a year ago, without HDCP,

I haven't seen any HDTVs in stores for SEVERAL YEARS that didn't have HDMI inputs. My own HDTV is a couple years old now, and absolutely everything had at least one HDMI input.

The point is that the DVD copy protection did not significantly inhibit the vast majority of legitimate users from basic use of the product. The HD versions may do so,

Yes, and I already explained why you're completely wrong on both accounts.

Re:Why the HD DRM is worse

[wolrahnaes]

I haven't seen any HDTVs in stores for SEVERAL YEARS that didn't have HDMI inputs. My own HDTV is a couple years old now, and absolutely everything had at least one HDMI input. Several years is still long enough to hurt a lot of people. I bought my HDTV in the spring of 2002. At that point HDMI did not yet exist and even VGA or DVI inputs were things you had to hunt for. DVI-HDCP support was next to impossible to find. Even so, the majority of large screen TVs in retail stores were HDTVs, and thus most if not all of those will be affected if the Image Constraint Token is ever enabled.

My particular TV is a 61" CRT rear projection set made by RCA with an internal DirecTV HD + ATSC tuner along with the expected NTSC tuner. The only high definition input it offers is a single set of RCA jacks for component video. This was about average at the time, with some having two sets of component inputs, a few having VGA, and the expensive high end models sometimes having DVI. This example was not long ago, and while HD penetration certainly wasn't as great as it is today, we were by no means early adopters. We just happened to be looking for a large-screen TV and it wasn't worth it to spend thousands of dollars on a standard definition set with the digital switch supposedly looming (I'm still waiting...).

But history is on my side :-)

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think you miss the point. On-line distribution is a reality, and is not realistically going to stop. Therefore, in the long run, it will be more profitable for Big Media to take advantage of this. Things move slowly, but eventually businesses do get it, as iTMS and the like demonstrate. Why do you think anything different will happen with movies and the like?

Similarly, markets tend to accept crap for a while, but after a few years they get bored of putting up with it. Then a consumer backlash occurs, resulting in either a change in the products available or an exodus from the market. Just ask cinemas how business is going since large TVs and DVD players became common at home.

Re:The 'Fair Use' crowd? You mean the 'pirates' wo

[julesh]

How does this have anything to do with "fair use"? You already had the ability to play these discs in any HD-DVD player.

No, you don't. Put an HDDVD drive in your PC, and more likely than not it will refuse to play, because your system components don't support setting up an encrypted communication channel between the software player and your monitor. Frankly, I don't have the money to spend on a new video card and monitor, and don't see why I should when there is no technical reason to do so. It is "fair use" to be able to play the video from media you have bought fairly. And when the copyright holder tries to stop me from doing so, because he happens to *not like* the computer I want to do it on, I don't see why I should listen.

WIPO Copyright Treaty

[tepples]

If his servers are physically located outside of the USA, then he can't be legally threatened by civil suits, and he's not subject to DMCA.

Other countries have counterparts to the DMCA.

The third thing is that the website is http://www.doom9.org/ , not doom9.com.

Because if it were, wouldn't Id Software get upset?

"Reparations" to "repair" Korea

[tepples]

Do you know that the DRKP still, to this day, tell it's citizens that food given as humanitarian relief are war reparations?

Of course they're "reparations". Humanitarian relief is intended to help "repair" Korea after its Civil War of the early 1950s.

Re:"Reparations" to "repair" Korea

[danbeck]

Bzzt! Wrong.

What, did you just look up the word "reparations" over at dictionary.com so you could chime in? Humanitarian relief sent to DRKP is most certainly not reparations and has never been. It's HUMANITARIAN AID in the form of food and other things in order to relieve the daily suffering of the North Korean people under a totalitarian dictatorship. They are starving and we are helping feed them. Absolutely nothing about it is reparations for the Korean war.

Where do you people come up with this crap?

Re:"Reparations" to "repair" Korea

[tepples]

What, did you just look up the word "reparations" over at dictionary.com so you could chime in?

No, I know what "reparations" means. I was giving an example of how Kim Jong-il and his friends could twist a mistranslation.

It doesn't matter if they revoke the keys

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they revoke the keys used (which were NOT included in the source) it doesn't matter. The keys are located in the same place on every disk, if you can grab them from memory once you can do it again. As long as someone keeps providing the most recent batch of movies released, anyone with the experiance can grab new keys at any time and update the program.

Yes, Blu-Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

From the lead poster:

now how will the industry respond?

The answer: Blu-Ray.

I wouldn't be surprised if Sony were behind the cracking of HD-DVD.

Digital Eyeballs

[Cassini2]

Obviously, the only solution to the Analog hole is Digital Eyeballs. Everyone needs to have their eyes replaced with suitably DRM encumbered devices that are uncrackable. Then the high definition TV can be fed directly to your brain, the connection will be secure, and the MPAA will be rich!!!

So the format war is over

[alphax45]

So I guess we have a winner!
First point: Hackability Blue Ray: 0 HD: 1
Second point: Pr0n Blue Ray: 0 HD: 1
Final score: Blue Ray: 0 HD: 2
Well I think we have a winner!
Thanks for making it easy Sony.
I think Sony's new motto should be "Sony: Give us a few months and we can kill a format"

You are so right, sort of...

[symbolset]

For Windows users, anyway. Windows users need to be geeklords to get anything done at all.

Linux users whose computers don't come with the software automatically will just choose Applications->Add/Remove Software and choose "HDCrack", which by then will be a graphical frontend for mplayer. Mplayer and the cracking software will be downloaded automagically and probably will access a network of online database of title keys hosted in openness friendly countries. Thereafter when they insert a supported HD-DVD, it will just play. It will, as usual, contain ripping software for translating the content into a more accessible, device shiftable and back-up possible format.

When you run Windows, freely available (and commercial) software (and even sometimes simple media!) often comes with evil code. Linux users usually don't have to deal with that. Linux users can use trusted repositories and the free choices available are an embarassment of riches. The question isn't if the software is available, but which package best suits your goal. Access to this global pool of application resources is built in to the standard interface on most distributions.

It must be tough to be a Windows only user these days. All that going to the store and giving your credit card number to anonymous websites and all... Not knowing whether you're installing something that works, doesn't work, crashes your computer or is just a trojan horse program that surrenders your computer to anonymous remote control whether you paid for it or not. So sad. And the OS comes with absolutely no real applications, except of course the world's least secure browser. And that's just the stuff you install on purpose. Stuff that installs itself unbidden or hacks that come preinstalled by the OEM (without an OS-Only install CD!) are an entirely different level of sad.

Don't worry, though. The world understands. They expect less of you because of the poverty of your tools.

Re:You are so right, sort of...

[Anonymous Coward]

How's that 'Gaming on LINUX' thing working out for ya?

Sit down, boy

[Rix]

You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about. No matter how well coded, any information used by a program is available to someone determined to extract it.

Re:Sit down, boy

[Talchas]

Even with TPM/TCPA? If the *IAA makes all software players require TCPA support in the OS and the hardware, and that no memory access is allowed during playing, won't that make it much harder?

Re:Sit down, boy

[maxwell demon]

No memory access allowed during playing? As in, the rest of the computer simply stops working while you watch a movie? Good luck with that!

Re:Sit down, boy

[Talchas]

Sigh, I meant no debuggers or similar programs that access memory of other programs (as you probably knew). No memory access would be a problem I admit.

Re:Sit down, boy

[araemo]

If it was that easy, why is the current iTunes encryption unbroken? The only working 'decryption' that I know about is a different type of memory sniffing - qtfairuse6 watches the iTunes memory space for AAC header and data(after decryption) and just copies it during playback, 'using' iTunes/quicktime to do the actual decryption.

In the distant pass there was a program called (j)Hymn that could look up the system keys wherever iTunes stored them and just run through your library decrypting the files and saving decrypted versions, no running iTunes processes required.

For some reason, it sounds as if the current software players are being entirely too obvious about their use, not trying to obscure it at all.

Re:Sit down, boy

[araemo]

No - it's basically just some accessible memory(Maybe in physical ram(encrypted?), maybe only physically in the TPM chip..), where the keys are stored, and in the more fancy implementations, decryption is done. From there, it passes, via memory that only the 'trusted' functions are allowed to access, to the display subsystem, which either passes it to a 'trusted' display device, or downsamples it(If the image constraint token is enabled on the content) and passes it to an 'untrusted' device.

The idea is that the TPM will require any access to the keys to be authenticated each time. I do not believe this will stop motivated hackers(I am willing to bet that the hackers who are VERY good at binary patching executables will be able to modify a powerDVD or whatever to do its TPM voodoo, and then save the keys to file, or store them in memory location 0xdeadbeef or whatever.)

Question

[slapout]

I'm not totally up on all this stuff (some, but not all.) What about this: I copy a HD-DVD to my harddrive. Then I find the decryption key for it. I decrypt it and convert it to another format. Couldn't I then distribute it without them knowing what player was used?

Re:Question

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Probably, but you'd be transfering a reencode, which is really frowned upon in the copyright infringement scene. You also don't need to go through that many steps, instead you just watch the movie on your computer and record the playback with a tool like Fraps. I've seen that method to get around WMV's DRM on porn, but on movies it would just get nuked for being a transcode.

HDCP and the 'secure pathway' stuff tries to stop this, for what its worth, but I just don't predict that working long.

Re:Question

[Renegade Lisp]

What about this: I copy a HD-DVD to my harddrive. Then I find the decryption key for it. I decrypt it and convert it to another format. Couldn't I then distribute it without them knowing what player was used?

That's exactly the scenario that has been characterized as the fundamental weakness of AACS, the encryption mechanism of both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Congratulations for finding this out in less time than the engineers who designed it.

Re:The 'Fair Use' crowd? You mean the 'pirates' wo

[tkrotchko]

"What would happen if the "industry" responded by saying, "Fuck it. We'll just release DVDs. "

That is clearly their right to do that. What would happen if they said "Hey, all those dirty pirates, we're not releasing anything in DVD ever again, much less hi-def formats"

But what would "happen" is they'd make less money. As I said earlier, the MPAA doesn't care about copyright infringement in the sense that they feel it hurts moral rights of content owners. They care because it makes less money.

Their attempts at copy protection of discs are not an attempt to stop piracy, rather they are attempt to increase sales and revenue. What I mean is that if the industry feels that 10% of all movie content is pirated, and copy protection changes that to 8%, they do the math to determine which gets them more money (since copy protection costs them money). If they make enough additional revenue to justify the cost they do it.

Do you see my point? They certainly could stop selling hi-def content, they could stop licensing of software to play back on PCs but the effect would be to endanger adoption of their pet format and ultimately less money. So they won't do those things.

At the risk of being a broken record, copy protection is not a moral crusade, it is simply a route to more revenue.

keys and keys

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Game Over for all released movies, no matter if AACS-LA revokes everything. Any successful attacker can put the decrypted movie on Internet.

Authenticating the kernel, video, and codec

[tepples]

The TPM does slow public key authentication. It doesn't have the throughput to do high data rate AES which is what's necessary to decrypt the video stream.

Unless this public key authentication is of the list of drivers installed in your system, which the TPM also collects. The hash for kernel+video+codec isn't going to match the hash for kernel+video+cracked codec or kernel+cracked video+codec or cracked kernel+video+codec.

Call me Heston

[thanksforthecrabs]

They will revoke my keys from my cold, dead hands! Once a disc is ripped and re-burned this entire key thing becomes a moot point. I don't seem them making a public war out of this. The 99% of people who will never make illegal copies will just continue to pay a jacked-up price to cover perceived losses.

opensource alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

why not make an openstandard/opensource non drm alternative, think firefox vs. internet explorer.. opensource alt. vs drm-infested garbage. given a few years it will be regarded as cheaper and smart movie producers would use open standard format oover these lames version..

Another simple answer for Disney et al.

[chris_sawtell]

Just stop releasing your content on portable electronic media.

The DVD has very nearly destroyed the pleasure of a night out at the movies/pictures watching 'the content' on the big screen.

Please don't give one of life's few remaining legal pleasures the coup de grace.

Hi-def DVD, coming closer to my adoption

[sweepkick]

Well this is a great first step for me, now I just need a Linux player with which to take the title keys, decode the content, and play on my system. You see, I would have gone HD-DVD when they first hit the shelves, if it weren't for all of this DRM bullshit. I've had an HDTV for over 3 years. I use MythTV throughout the house. I have absolutely no interest in piracy... I just want to watch the damn movies on my MythTV system, and on non-HDCP monitors I have throughout the house. I'm happy to give the MPAA my money. In fact, my last count of DVDs that I own is over 350. 350!! I've since stopped purchasing DVDs in anticipation for HD format. Yet the MPAA won't get one dime from my hide until this DRM is cracked, or removed altogether. Dumbasses.

Sesame open ..

[AftanGustur]

1828B68D292D2EA1E9EEA1C7044DC864FDBC3EB6=12 Monkeys |V|MM/DD/YY| 2662C05B5238B0C50BD1BDF693223712
1BAB7EEBB20C5425F5911E0272F07DD8F7208747=Aeon Flux |V|MM/DD/YY| A5F1A71839B666A68B1138B1DDDDEBAB
4ACABE525F5CBF77DAA43EA2B83E04918D5FA6D4=Apollo 13 |V|MM/DD/YY| 8BA9C422F93C9B4B4247814530B29C48
B9A62093767C0E7CB2BF16447A52E864A45FE50D=Batman Begins |V|MM/DD/YY| 423C48E5ABB185FC7FB8DB2BF764BEB0
A236F74A67CC51270E328F94BC6B4D905A628F9F=Casino |V|MM/DD/YY| A1DC17F6FA052A4BB4A0D66A7C49DBD9
4DF295764864556F3B44B71C0B8828DB80D84CA0=Chronicle s of Riddick |V|01/02/07| 69197293FCEF6F0ADE4BD33C4B1F132E
E34FBD5B8ABDC5312B38028002865BB3530AE3CE=Enter the Dragon |V|MM/DD/YY| 15C7F34076AED16E75637DC3BFDE84F8
419D740F2288CEE1EEB60613DAD9D74D7B63203B=Equilibri um (Jap) |V|MM/DD/YY| 343CE9EE7DCB4018AA064BA09FF19B6F
A6EF2686A417863FEC63D1F7824F9406DEEB5ACC=Fear & Loathing Las V |V|MM/DD/YY| 246D84CBD2B6F747B6962B53BE026BF2
0E75082678AAD5CD4410A28A662D6832D21EB325=King Kong |V|09/18/06| 802F78B1B20D1183638D84E1A96D6EDD
EBC08E19B2059140DFF133E2B953D3A1538D7669=Miami Vice |V|MM/DD/YY| 3CB25E9C23BED3A496D049B9FCD0915B
EDEA3051F5802CB7FF80A24DFE7C720705D36A0F=Mission: Impossible |V|MM/DD/YY| 10CA125A572A96AE6EB74F6574CCC24D
1DBFD499BC05FB33F14FB76BBDD847B79B190AEA=Mission: Impossible 2 |V|MM/DD/YY| 8FD8341028A8A300AA16D7F8CCAB7E89
AF4BC7D6A55B08E6175204CABE862ECBB33B1DED=Mission: Impossible 3 |V|MM/DD/YY| 11D6A8CD59494EF3D4EC4E9002E902F9
A85B0043201474AC56794EA4AAE2C35577752FB3=The Mummy |V|MM/DD/YY| D6984C6B80D56F96CAE369474345E2B9
EB7A44A88AE2AF4B14C0B69B5DD5C621DE988593=Pitch Black |V|MM/DD/YY| 9D82A55BF2DAC3995AD24B40B802D71F
BA3C0208848EA13383F34E9E5BB95BDF0D89F1C8=Red Dragon |V|MM/DD/YY| 80596E6D9A94D2A3FDB094B9BA2D0A0A
C8A57242AF4CB5C0D7848BDA10821F984DC656E0=Serenity |V|MM/DD/YY| D075568AE6BB0B3F85446927B3794C28
17C8312A7BEA25A08606F118AD265FD657161D0D=SuperMan Returns |V|MM/DD/YY| EC2EC7F847F6D304B3C26F121CA578DA
87A660A656EDD1E07F66DB1A7DE594028A9587E2=V for Vendetta |V|00/00/00| AE196597E6A87A04AE6A24655990A4A6
B32592B86E782DBAEB4801FC1CD1B64CB3FF94A3=World Trade Center |V|01/13/07| DA41B36D90C25E533EE84A307EB2D929

They have to get rid of software players

[spitzak]

Uploaders don't want to hear this, the hardware manufactures don't want to hear it, and Microsoft *certainly* does not want to hear this. But the content guys, if they want their DRM to work, have to stop listening to Microsoft's promises and require the decoding to be done in *hardware*.

A more complex requirement, one that is going to be difficult to explain, is that the hardware API must be completely documented and exposed, so that a Linux driver is easy to create. Obfuscation never works, while exposing everything will mean that any mistakes will be pointed out instantly by hackers trying to get fame by showing how smart they are. Being secretive about the card is *proof* that the design is not sufficently safe and the content industry should not license it. It is also pretty obvious that about 90% of the work in breaking DRM is by people trying to play them on Linux (real pirates (not uploaders) are much more interested in copying the disk image including the DRM, not in decoding it), so this would greatly reduce the number of smart people trying to crack it. Note that a custom driver will be pretty much equivalent to building your own IR remote for a dvd player, it won't do a lot.

My guess is the card will actually be inline between the graphics card and the display. It would replace a keyed area with the video and force the HDCP on and send it out the cable to the display. It probably also needs to directly connect to the disk player so that a disk image could not be fed to it. There may be schemes of key exchange so that such hardware connections are not needed (software only has access to encrypted and un-reusable data). The system api would probably be pretty much the same as the buttons on a remote control.

Re:They have to get rid of software players

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that won't work either.
You can rent lab time to effectivitly x-ray working chips in real time, read out super dooper protected key areas, and even reconnect cut diagnostic lines - even FIPS hardened stuff.
And people know full well, the 'secret' tracks and preamble stuff on DVD's where its not supposed to be changable.

Just as software and firmware are on the chopping board, Digital Hardware Logic analysers are cheap to rent, and personally affordable. Just tap the bus, and listen = game over.
Like X'boxes, programmable logic arrays can be retrofitted to DVD's and the like - cheaply.

Forget trusted platform nonsense and MS. A high level hole will turn up, then it is history to all previous known titles.

Reproducing each movie with a unique code, and a visual barcode on the top of the disc, would be better, but costs more.
HD will win by a country mile. People want cheap. See how DVD-R has won over from +R. Then figure the cost of HD players should only be 10 bucks per drive more when production cranks up.

You really CAN'T stop the Signal!

[stupidnickname]

Still waiting to figure out if you can take the sky from me.

Wow. 1080i 5th element

[Creepy Crawler]

The floodgates are open.

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3213467/The_Fifth_Elem ent_16_9_1280x720p_WM9_HD-DVD

Re:Wow. 1080i 5th element

[getnate]

I am not sure what that file is but The Fifth Element was never released on HD-DVD.

Re:Wow. 1080i 5th element

[Liinux]

Uploaded: 2004-04-22 21:15:39

It seems like the floodgates has been open for quite a while now, I sure hope that the stream hasn't hurt anyone. It must have created quite a torrent.

Now that's actually a sensible idea...

[ScaryMonkey]

Problem is, the studios typically don't make anything on the box office anymore; In fact, they expect to post a loss on ticket sales, and make their profit on DVDs. The theater has basically become a giant marketing project for the DVD.

What's so hard about ripping a DVD?

[symbolset]

You open it in vlc, choose File->Wizard, select the current item and the output file and format.

Oh. You meant windows users. The ones that haven't heard of DVDDecrypter and AutoGK. I get it now.

It would be pretty hard for them to rip a DVD. And that's a shame, because it's so cool to be able to watch your dvd's on your phone, or your ipod, or on your driveless linux settop box.

Enter the bilayer display...

[symbolset]

Which attaches to each diode in the LCD array and captures the images.

They should give up. It's hopeless.

There are enough honest folk to sell their content to that they can make a good living. The crooks can and will always cheat. Hiring armed guards to escort and live with each recorded disc is cost prohibitive and nothing else is going to solve this problem for them. Any content that can be played can be recorded. Period. Anything one program can do, another program can do. That is not going to change ever.

They should just sell us honest folk a disc that contains the content we want in a form that is easily copied onto our home servers and transcoded into our desired format, trust us not to cheat, and be happy with the money we give them.

Yeah, they'll still sell only one copy for all of China, but that's not going to change ever either. The pirates get their content before it's even on the master of the disc we buy. Strangely, it seems they sometimes get it even before the final edit.

The big time pirates don't care...

[atcurtis]

The sad thing about all this DRM is that the big time pirates don't care and it doesn't affect them one iota.

Why?

Very simply - a CD/DVD duplication service stamps out thousands of CDs. They get an order to make a master and stamp out 20,000 CDs. Just for safety in case there is a sales surge, they actually stamp out 25,000 CDs, so that if the customer wants an urgent extra supply if the product proves popular, they can ship out the extras while they retool to do another production run.

What is to stop a pirate from bribing some technician to stamp out a few more CDs? There is a spoilage rate as not all the CDs manufactured are up to quality - what if a few more were "spoiled" and instead of being immediately shredded, they were diverted to a pirate?

Since when have you seen a good-quality pirate DVD printed on a recordable DVD? They always seem to be manufactured as professionally as the genuine article. Dollars to donuts, they both came out of the same CD duplication service.

Just my $0.02 worth's opinion.

Somebody please mod parent post as funny

[Anonymous Coward]

The "on a platter" part is what really makes it happen. A hoot.

Well, the cat's out of the bag

[cursorx]

A real HD DVDrip of Serenity is already out and making the rounds.

What happens if you don't connect them to the'net?

[Joce640k]

>"all the HDDVD and BluRay players have internet connectivity."

What happens if you never connect the cable?

Not so

[Paul Crowley]

A constant IV in CBC mode can leak information about the plaintext, but it doesn't make it any easier to crack the key. In this instance AIUI the key is only used once, so I don't think there are any attacks.

Just to correct some other misinformation in this thread: a constant IV doesnt' make a "dictionary attack" noticeably easier. The ciphertext isn't "completely random" unless you're using a one time pad, but it may be (and usually should be) indistinguishable from random. It's indistinguishable from random if and only if you're unable to make a good guess about a single bit given the other bits (IIRC). However a distinguishing attack does not imply that key material is leaked by any means.

Still, the choice of CBC mode shows that they didn't have the best expertise on board - these days CTR mode is more often the mode of choice.

If you see people making assertions about cryptographic topics such as these on Slashdot, feel free to comment on my journal asking me to comment on them and if it's within my expertise I'll try to clarify.

You can only buy what exists

[Opportunist]

If HDDVD is considered "insecure", studios won't produce for it. If they have to expect their content to be copied if they distribute it on HDDVD, they will avoid the medium and prefer to sell on BluRay.

Merely "Guaging" popular feeling...

[adamofgreyskull]

But will No Holes Barred, be released on HD-DVD?

The Only Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The only question is whether they have the guts to do it.

I suspect the only question is when will they have the guts to do it.

Gaming on LINUX

[symbolset]

How's that 'Gaming on LINUX' thing working out for ya?

My favorite game is gcc. If playing games ever does become important to me, I'll get a PS3.

I'm pretty sure they can't.

[Grendel Drago]

There are presumably a thick raft of consumer-protection laws which prevent the industry from turning your shiny new $500 HD player into a shiny boat anchor because some nitwit cracked the player key. If the industry ever did that sort of thing, I'd expect either a product recall with free replacements/servicing or a class-action lawsuit against either the revoking authority or the manufacturer for not offering replacements.

Come to think of it, who is responsible when a manufacturer makes a product and a revoking authority with which they'd signed a contract turns it into a paperweight? Whose responsibility, whose fault?

Re:I'm pretty sure they can't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever ends up looking down the barrel of a shotgun over it. And with a product like a DVD player (y-type-thing) it won't take long before doing it annoys someone unstable enough to go on a rampage with a shotgun over it. (If 0.0001% of people are psychos who'd kill over a DVD player, you'll hit 1 psycho for every million players turned into useless paperweights.)

I'm not that psycho (for one thing, I haven't got a shotgun), I just thought I'd mention the possibility.

That's not how piracy works.

[Grendel Drago]

You know you'll "ruin the industry" exactly as much by not pirating anything (and not buying anything either, or buying second-hand) as you would by pirating? If you're cheap, say you're cheap. If you loathe playback controls (those fucking unskippable ads), say that. But piracy only hurts the industry if you used to buy scads of DVDs and stopped because you now prefer to pirate them.

It is all monstrously short-sighted, isn't it, though? I mean, how will we copy these films when they leave copyright? Or if a public-domain film is distributed in a DRM'd format? A stopgap solution might be to require an unencrypted version be deposited with the Library of Congress of any commercially distributed work with total sales over $100 or something like that... but any copyright wonkery at this point is simply wishful thinking.

I suppose I'll go cry in my beer now.

Re:That's not how piracy works.

[croddy]

It is all monstrously short-sighted, isn't it, though? I mean, how will we copy these films when they leave copyright? Or if a public-domain film is distributed in a DRM'd format?

Hell, we'll be lucky to get the ciphertext off the disk 100 years from now. The historians are going to think we were all insane with paranoia. And they'd be right!

A stopgap solution might be to require an unencrypted version be deposited with the Library of Congress of any commercially distributed work with total sales over $100 or something like that... but any copyright wonkery at this point is simply wishful thinking.

No offense, but that plan didn't work so well at Alexandria, and I doubt it will work at the Library of Congress. Lots of copies keep stuff safe, and we need lots and lots of plaintext (not encrypted) copies if anyone is going to remember this artistic medium a few centuries from now. Depositing one copy at one library is too much of a crapshoot.

Re:That's not how piracy works.

[WNight]

If it were me pirating, yes. But I hook people up with p2p programs in direct response to their DRM woes. I don't suggest that you can get some indie band's music online, but they usually don't have DRM. I do tell people about cracks, rips, etc when they complain about any DRM feature of hardware or software. "Annoyed by unskippable ads? Just download the movie via piratebay.org!" "Game CD woes? Rip and crack the game, play without swapping disks." "Don't like remembering reg #s? Just download a keygen, always a new one - perfect for lan games!"

Hopefully it ads up to something in the ballpark of wasted taxes supporting one-sided laws.

I loathe playback controls, and the like. You're right. And the majority of my games, programs, media, and the like were purchased at one time, in one form. But I'm unabashedly a pirate by the standards of the industry, in that I'll freely time-shift, backup, crack DRM to do so, etc. So I figure, why deny myself the odd movie just because I'm opposed to those who made it. I'll just take advantage of legal loopholes to do so.

For instance, I'm taxed on CDs for the music industry, so I'll call all music fair game. DVDs are all DRMed, and I don't respect the copyrights on DRMed works. Ditto with most games, etc.

You may not agree with the last step, but I think it's fair. A DRMed product is a crappy one. Sixth Sense the movie has unskippable ads, Windows XP has hardware/activation issues, Starcraft wouldn't play in my machine because of my CD-Burner, etc. All of these are products I legally own, Win XP came on my laptop, Sixth Sense I misguidedly bought, etc. All of them have failed to work as advertised, because of DRM, and each was made to work properly with an open-source solution that ignored the DRM (Linux DVD players) or cracked the registration or anti-anti-anti-piracy checks...

In all of these cases I was unhappy with the product and had "legal" way to remedy the situation.

However, by applying common sense, for instance that EULAs are post-sale restrictions and don't apply, that binary modifications to software are no more "derivative works" than margin-notes in a book, and that CD and cd-key checks are another post-sale restiction, I come up with a workable solution that provides a just solution, that I get to use a product I purchased.

Needless to say, Blizzard's opinion of me cracking Starcraft to play it is that I was a thief. They didn't seem to want to offer me a refund for a game that wouldn't play - they wanted me to buy a new CD-ROM drive.

DRM = no copyright. It's not just justice, it's the best strategy for getting this changed - a massive public backlash against the 'rights' of those who do this.

Why does that matter to anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Ernst Zündel was arrested for overstaying his visa in the US, he sought asylum in Canada but was denied, and was eventually deported back to Germany. I know the guy thinks he's Gandhi, but I don't see how it relates. The guy was deported back to a country in which he was arrested and tried, and that was that. Where exactly did the Jews used their magical nose rays in this process?

Doesn't this affect all current movies?

[Grendel Drago]

Doesn't this mean that you can use the broken version of WinDVD and a key-extractor to decrypt any currently-released HD-DVD movie? That's considerably more than just Serenity, isn't it?

Oh exploitable!

[Grendel Drago]

Oh, snap! Did you just break the DMCA?

Re:What happens if you don't connect them to the'n

[iainl]

You don't get firmware updates. Which means that if your player's key is revoked (pretty unlikely, anyway; the player key responsible for this leak is almost certainly the one in PowerDVD for Windows) you're stuffed with new discs.

Also, it means that you won't get lovely improvements like the 5.1 TrueHD support that A1 and XA1 received with the 2.0 firmware.

For those that don't have a broadband connection, though, Toshiba will send you the latest firmware on a disc, which is nice of them.

What is TPM?

[Snaller]

?What is TPM?

Distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

At 20 GB a movie, I don't suspect there's going to be significant downloading, although perhaps more than one would expected. Anyway, it is somewhat beyond the point. For the leechers it might be the point, but for those behind this it's mostly about fair use.

Here's what I mean:

I have the XBOX HD-DVD player which is usable on both PC and XBOX.
On the PC side, I have a kickass machine with a dual dvi video card beyond my needs (I don't play PC games, this is a DAW), updated drivers for HDCP, two very nice 1920x1200 widescreen lcd monitors connected by DVI, and a legit copy of WinDvd HD.
On the home theatre side, I just spent about 5K on a 1080P setup, with one of the best 8th gen LCDs Sharp has to offer.
I bought about 500$ worth of legit HD-DVD titles...

Yet, on the home theatre I can only playback in 1080i because AACS disalows 1080P playback over component (what XBOX has), and on the PC I can't playback at all. So here I am a few thousand bucks later and I don't have what I paid for and should have.

The only way for me to watch the movies in Full HD resolution was to decode the AACS. Then by hooking up my PC to my LCD TV with DVI I can watch in 1080P. My PC doesn't have onboard DTS support, and my DAW soundcard has XLR output, so I still lose the 6.1 sound.

So now, to watch movies in HD, I must connect my XBOX 360 drive to a friend's PC that supports HDCP, load the movie in WinDVD HD, dump the memory, get the volume key, dump the HD DVD to my USB hard drive, go back home, move my PC to my living room, connect the cables and hard drive, and watch it in 1080P without DTS.

I'm not sure if i've broken any laws, maybe I broke a few dozen, certainly spent quite a few thousand dollars and countless hours, and my HD DVD playback is still crippled.

Good thing I'm in Canada, because I'd be affraid of MPAA serving me a nice lawsuit of $250,000 multiplied by the 20 HD DVDs I bought from them and dumped to an external hard drive. This article here makes me believe I acted lawfully in Canada but that it may change in the very near future: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/01/11/copy right-canada.html

That's the point of what is going on.

BTW, I didn't post my movie keys to the net either. I'm tempted, but I wont. I want the actors, studios and MPAA to get the hard earned money they deserve, poor starving fucks ;)

hmm, the only thing this will accomplish...

[gral]

Is give Sony and the BluRay crowd more advertising slogans.