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Interview with Developer of BackupHDDVD
An anonymous reader writes "HD DVD and Blu-Ray were supposedly protected by an impenetrable fortress. However a programmer named "muslix64" discovered that this was not the case, and released BackupHDDVD. Now, Slyck.com has an interview with the individual responsible, who provides some interesting insight to his success."
Just an observation.
Unlike old DVD-Video, HD DVD and BluRay have a bit -- so far not set -- that degrades all output unless it is via an HDCP connection. This means my older Sharp 720p projector will be degraded along with all early adapter's HD gear
This creates a powerful incentive to not just "backup" your HiDef DVD, rather to remove an onerous limitation -- it may violate the DCMA in the USA, but it is morally and legally sound to most of the world.
Anyone have a cost estimate for producing the AACS DRM? I'm guessing the crack didn't cost nearly as much.
Mij
If he was a native English speaker, he'd probably be in a country that has some sort of DMCA-type law. And he'd probably be in custody by now.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Well, the server is being bombed now. Here's the text from the page if you don't want to wait for 5 minutes per sentence.
The next generation of optical disc technology holds the promise to change the way we interact with and store digital media. Perhaps the most exciting change is the arrival of High Definition (HD) video, with its glorious 1920x1080 pixel resolution. It's a quantum leap forward in terms of watching digital content, as its vast resolution reveals a quality never seen before in such fine detail.
Because of the rapid escalation of digital file-sharing - especially of video files - Hollywood has been working around the clock to protect HD content. This is especially relevant for one of its primary delivery mechanisms - HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs. These next generation discs, with capacities of 30 gigabytes and 50 gigabytes respectively, have their content protected with an array of DRM (Digital Rights Management.) Both are protected with a scheme called AACS, or Advanced Access Content System. This DRM is a great leap forward compared to the weak CSS, or Content Scrambling System, that currently "protects" DVDs. Thanks to Fox, Blu-Ray has an additional layer of protection, called BD+, although most discs have yet to support this protection.
Although Hollywood has constructed enough DRM architecture to rival the Pyramid of Giza, it has long been suspected that it would be only a matter of time before HD DVD and Blu-Ray content protection were compromised. Convinced the golden DRM egg had been laid, it seemed that nothing could penetrate the great AACS wall. And to this day, that great wall still stands.
But why crash through the main gates of Constantinople when you can just pick the lock of a long forgotten rear entrance?
On December 26, 2006, a member of the Doom9.com forums named muslix64 introduced himself as circumventing the content protection - not the copy protection - of HD DVD. Additionally, he made available an open source program named BackupHDDDVD. At the time, this program was a command line program that bypassed the content protection - providing the individual successfully obtained the title and volume keys associated with the HD DVD. Once the individual has the keys, the AACS protection can be sidestepped, and the HD movie content can be extracted. According to muslix64, it took all of eight days to successfully circumvent HD DVD content protection.
Much of the more difficult work, such as extracting the keys, has been alleviated as the once encrypted information has proliferated online. To understand where this stunning turn of events is heading, Slyck.com spoke with muslix64, who agreed to a PM (private message) interview.
The mainstream media tends to have many labels for you, i.e. hacker, cracker, pirate, etc., in response to your efforts. What would you call yourself and what would you label your efforts?
I'm just an upset customer. My efforts can be called "fair use enforcement"!
What motivated you to help circumvent the content protection scheme associated with HD DVD and Blu-Ray?
With the HD-DVD, I wasn't able to play my movie on my non-HDCP HD monitor. Not being able to play a movie that I have paid for, because some executive in Hollywood decided I cannot, made me mad...
After the HD-DVD crack, I realized that things where "unbalanced" by having just one format cracked, so I did Blu-Ray too.
Explain how decrypting the device and volume keys are critical to your success. Could you explain the difference between the two?
The device keys, are the keys associated to the player.
The volume key, is the key associated to the movie.
I don't care about device keys. I do care about volume keys, because by using volume keys instead of devices keys, I totally bypass the revocation system. There is no "volume key revocation". There is content revocation, but I really doubt they will ever use it. If you use device keys, they can revoke them. Having the volume key means that you can decrypt ti
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Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
Is disappear.
Because the shit they pulled with others who have
come out with a exploit / hack (decrypting encrypted PDF's to decss)
have gotten it in the pooper
It sure seems to me that the media companies chasing the people finding holes in their impenetrable fortress' is much like a dog that chases his own tail. Every once in a while he gets it, but then it hurts and he lets go, and then he off again chasing his tail. The time and money they spend protecting their stuff might be better spend on an ad campaign, or better yet drop the prices of the content so that maybe, just maybe they will sell a few more..
It seems DRM is on the way out? I wonder how easy it will be to circumvent other DRM aside from various media formats...
Some mod got their undies in a bundle over an inductive inference to muslix64's native language?
Sadly, you're probably correct regarding the US HS point.
It seems the interviewer knows _NOTHING_ about the subject:
You can play an unencrypted movie wherever you want; an update of the encryption-scheme will not magicalle re-encrypt the movie. DUH!
An unprotected movie does not require HDCP; HDCP has _NOTHING_ to do with this.
This comment is rot26 encrypted. By reading this comment, you have violated the DMCA.
This can't be stoped. It's not like the first DeCSS that used stolen Xing keys and could only work for as long as the keys weren't revoked.
This uses the keys specific for the DISC, which can't be changed anymore.
And the best part : In order to decrypt the movie and play it, every player *HAS* to have the volume ke in memory or SIMD register for a short period of time. No matter if players key are revoked, version upgraded, bugs fixed, etc... This technique doesn't rely on any bug that can be patched. It only rely to the fact that, whatever player you choose, at one moment it needs the volume key - which you can then grab and share on the net.
There's no way to patch this.
This is one more proof that the fundamental mechnics of the DRM - ie.: providing both the crypted data and the key in the same place - is flawed. You can't protect a content from the one who bought the disc. If data must be decrypted on the buyer's computer, then nothing cab prevent it from being circumvented.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
As I understand this it extracts the title or volume key from the PC memory. One could have gone after the upstream player keys since they are in memory too but then if they ever figured out what player you were using from the crack then all future titles and disks would remove that player key. That would of course break every player with that key, but it's not so bad with PC players as it would be with physical players, since the company with the broken player could offer a downloadable software upgrade. In any case that's moot for now since it's the title key that's being extracted from memory.
Now at some point the hddvd autorities will figure out which one of these PC players that is exposing the title key to attack. At that point the software will be upgraded to better obscure the title key. While in principle the title key will still be lurking in memory somewhere they can probably figure out a way of making is really hard to extract. e.g. self modifying code. Non determinsistic algorithms, and putting parts of it inside protected areas of Vista's kernel. This will make it so all future players will have a difficult time being exploited to grab the title key. I suspect they can pull this off even though it will be a moving target. Apple for example has managed to keep Hymm broken, and it uses the same attack.
But that does not solve the problem. Those old players will still exist and run. So they can still be used to extract the title keys. The only way they can beat this is if there is some way they can cause those old players to break on new movies. How might they do this?
Well here's an approach. just mangle the title key or move its location on disk. Now all the new players are told how to unmangle so they can play the disks, and of course they can still play the old unmangled disks. The people screwed by this are all the people who own exisisting DVD players. these are now broken.
But can they be upgraded? for example were they smart enough to allow the DVD players the ability to be reprogramed in firmware. Perhaps for example they could release some DVD that could be poped in the machine and it would reflash the firmware. That woul dmake this kind of breakage less painful to fix. Not painless however after millions of these are deployed. But at this stage pretty doable.
If they were smart they'd shut the whole thing down now when there's too few players in the wild to matter. change the system to make the title keys stealthier, then start over.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I don't care whether he's a native English speaker, this guy is the shit.
I would suck his dick if I wasn't a lesbian.
If I understand it correctly, my output resolution will be degraded unless I buy a MPAA-approved display device?
Why would I bother upgrading from DVD if I'm not going to get any better quality?
Tip to Hollywood: Deliberately crippling technology doesn't boost sales. As far as I'm concerned, there's no point in buying into this. Why would I bother to spend a lot of money for something that won't work with my existing equipment, and likely won't work in the manner I intend to use it?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
After the HD-DVD crack, I realized that things where "unbalanced" by having just one format cracked, so I did Blu-Ray too.
Bless you, muslix. Now the two formats can compete as true equals where it counts: in the ease of supplementing your legitimate media collection with illegal copies of things that you "kind of like".
Let's not pretend that there is one type of pirate. There are many levels of pirate, and by far the most common type (at least in my experience) is the "pirate" who buys plenty of legitimate media, but occasionally supplements their colleciton with an illegal copy of something that they don't care enough about to pay full price for. You can see the popularity of this line of thinking by watching people paw through the "bargain bin" at any major retailer. These are the movies that no one liked enough to pay full price for, but still maange to sell. This is more of a problem, as I see it, with the uniform pricing structure of DVDs. Let's not pretend that "Batman Begins" and "Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants" are worth the same amount of money to most people. They are simply not, and should be priced differently from the get-go. Sadly the media companies instead try to rake in bucks from the "gotta have it now" super-fans crowd by artificially inflating the price; the side-effect is piracy. I would wager that the media companies gain more money then they lose by this process; the convenience of the consumer does not enter into the equation (these companies have demonstrated, repeatedly and without a doubt, that the convenience of the consumer is a very, VERY low priority to them).
Of course I am deliberately discounting bring up That Guy. You know That Guy. He is the guy with the huge collection of pirated movies for the sake of having them. To be fair, unless That Guy has a lot of friends (and usually they do not) they are no real threat to media companies. That Guy would not have purchased the movies anyway, and his collection is (to put it bluntly) a dick-measuring contest to make himself feel better anyway. Every That Guy that I have ever met has had movies of laughably bad quality in their collection; their love is not for the cinema but rather, like a dragon, they hoard the wealth for it's own sake rather than an appreciation for it. And that might be the dorkiest thing I have ever written.
... if this encryption scheme was made intentionally easy to bypass/break after all think of all those MPAA lawyers that would be out of a job if these formats were 100% un-crackable.
---- There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't
"If I understand it correctly, my output resolution will be degraded unless I buy a MPAA-approved display device? Why would I bother upgrading from DVD if I'm not going to get any better quality?"
Devil's advocate here - don't label me pro-DRM.
If you're buying movies anyway, and the movie IS enforcing the downgrade requirement, then you won't see much difference from DVD... until you upgrade your television at some point in the future - at which time magically all the HD movies suddenly become viewable in their full glory.
Of course that assumes you buy a TV before they stop including HDMI ports on them.
Yes, and how Windows it self will know that it isn't running inside a "simulated" trusted computer (the TC chip is virtual and part of the emulator) running inside an actual regular computer (with no chip to prevent you from running whatever you want ?)
For this to work you actually need TC-enabled computers. There aren't currently enough of them.
So either Microsoft pisses of its customers with something like "HD DVD & BD can only played on Windows Vista running on special mother boards. The rest of 80% of you just can't play them at all" (and currently customers are already pissed enough because they can't always play in full HD when they don't have display systems that *are* getting popular those days). Or either microsofts accepts to let some player run outside it's protected models and you don't even need a virtual machine or root kit to extract the needed data from memory.
As said by another
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Have at it
The *IAA wastes so much time, energy and ultimately money on various DRM implementations and the end result is always the same. The DRM is eventually cracked so those who want to pirate material can and do yet the DRM is cumbersome enough to upset and turn off a certain percentage of legitimate customers.
My roommate purchased an HDTV a few years ago before the HDCP standard emerged and he recently bought a Playstation 3. He was seriously pissed when he found out he couldn't watch Blue Ray Discs at the highest resolution because his TV wasn't compatible.
Things like this only serve to alienate legitimate consumers who are already inclined to pay for the product. The pirates just wait for the DRM to be cracked.
Dont hold your breath. I dont see them going backwards, only forward, with even more restrictive technology.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Since the DRM on these new formats is so insulting, I'll always be happy to see it suffering setbacks like this. However, I'd be slightly less happy if the person who cracked it was just some guy who wanted to be able to get everything for free and impress his mates by giving them free movies. Assuming this muslix64 character is telling the truth, he seems like a decent sort. His story is just that he wanted to be able to use his own purchased movies in the way that he wants to, in his own home. So consider him thoroughly endorsed!
On a different subject, this still leaves Linux (and BSD, ReactOS, Haiku etc., etc.) users in a spot of bother. I don't understand if having a movie key would allow you to watch something on the disc even without the right player software to access the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive, but even if you don't need special software it still looks like extraction of the movie keys can only be done with Windows software, and presumably OSX software in the future. I'd still really like to see a proper, Free Software, libdvdcss-style crack for these formats. I'd like to think it's only a matter of time...
It seems likely to me that MS has a trick to allow protected processes to be debugged. It's either a secret mode of Vista, or they have debug builds of Vista that allow this type of snooping to take place.
I mean, in the perfect world, you develop non-protected, and then you turn it into a protected process once it's been debugged. But back in the real world, certain programs will break and you'll only be able to debug in "protected" mode.
If Hollywood is bright, they'll just ignore this. The DVD is certainly exploitable (in fact, in hindsight, it was trivial), but last I checked they make a ton of movies from selling DVD's. I fail to see this is any different.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
How do you know that Intel has not been putting a TPC module in every CPU for the last five years? They've had this ring architecture for a decade, could there not be one more ring they never told us about? in five more years they could turn it on and surprise! every computer less than a decade old is TPC complient. The remaineder still run but can't use the new OS or must run in a reduced privledge mode.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Someone who likes muesli and Intel architecture but isn't so good at spelling?
Actually I'm wrong. here's how they can fix their problem fairly well.
Those old players that arebeingused to extract the title key can have their player keys revoked. That will bust some limited number of players too. Now without those player keys the old players cant decode the title keys. So they have to migrate to new players. If those players are stealthier then they may not be able to figure out how to extract the title keys.
Finally what if the new players were to get some of their executables right off of the DVD itself. Then they could make it very difficult to have a universal method for subvering the player to get the title key.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Like they say: you don't attack the cryptography. You attack how it's used.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Q: What is the fastest way to crack a DRM scheme?
A: Label it as uncrackable.
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. The 9:00 show is completely different from the 7:00 show. Be sure to tip your bartenders and waitresses.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Rather, That Guy is just taking advantage of the education exception to the DMCA to learn more about computers, copyright, and digital restrictions. The thrill of the hunt is for the sake of learning to be a better hunter.
So HD Video is the smallest possible step forward then? Given all the hi-def kit that people have already bought that isn't compatible with the copy-protecto-flibberty-fuck I suppose "quantum leap" is a fair description.
Defense Contract Management Agency? [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
How about a player for linux?
Since, based on the past, none of the studios will license a key for a linux player, I propose we create a player that, as part of playback, incorporates this "crack".
To get around this, the player will prompt for the disc key before playback. Then, the disc is decrypted as playpack is performed, thereby bypassing the "Player Key".
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I haven't looked at the HD-DVD protection scheme in detail, but if it's like DVD then the content producers (CP) do have a way to retaliate. All HD-DVD players I've seen so far have a network connection on them "for updates", so....
So old discs can still be played, but new content retains protection on all players (vulnerable and non-vulnerable).
You have found the very reason why they have not enabled the flag and will not for years to come - way too much old equipment and way too many customers to be pissed off.
In the technical rounds it was easy enough to add the flag, but once the marketing people realized what it would do they nixed the use of it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not it's, it's its.
Which is why I will never "upgrade" to HD. When my lowdef stuff stops working, I'll simply opt out of the rat race and not buy anything. Books are still good.
I will not pour thousands of dollars into a HD system only to have some jerk in a corner office somewhere decide that my investment constitutes a risk to his profits, and be able to take it away from me without consequence, without my consent, and without buying me new geegaws. F'em. They don't generate ANY content I'd be willing to pay that much to watch.
But that's just me. Feel free to pour $BUCKs into their profiteering maws if you wish. It's your money... well, your's and mostly THEIRs, since they can decide to take it away from you.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
muslix64 isn't exactly a brilliant hacker here. Anyone who's in the software cracking scene knows about fravia's now defunct site and +ORC's set of DOS tutorials. We were ripping keys from memory in encrypted states years ago on the PC, and years before that on even older hardware.
That said, I am not impressed with what this person has done.
The HD-DVD and BluRay camps should start blacklisting the keys that they've given out to WinDVD and PowerDVD. There should be no software decoding of HD content until set-top boxes have saturated the market somewhat.
What will muslix64 and friends do when WinDVD starts using Armadillo to protect their software? What will they do when WinDVD requires a hardware dongle to run that contains a portion of the software's code, in an encrypted format itself?
There are crackers out there who can take care of such things, but it's just a matter of revoking keys again, and updating WinDVD and PowerDVD.
This trick is quite handy to stop services that you don't have rights to, by replacing them with dummy executables... *cough* corporate USB port disabling software *cough*
gcc: no input sig
I remember one conversation I had at a Crypto conference, early in my career. It was outside amongst the jumbo shrimp, chocolate-covered strawberries, and other delectables. A bunch of us were talking about some cryptographic system, including Brian Snow of the NSA. Someone described an unconventional attack, one that didn't follow the normal rules of cryptanalysis. I don't remember any of the details, but I remember my response after hearing the description of the attack.
"That's cheating," I said.
Because it was.
I also remember Brian turning to look at me. He didn't say anything, but his look conveyed everything. "There's no such thing as cheating in this business."
-- Bruce Schneier
There are HD movie torrents. Whoever says the system isn't broken is in denial. The system was supposed to stop pirates. Pirates have no trouble with the current exploits, so the system is broken. How it's broken is irrelevant. The only people who might care are the honest people who bought the discs and got burned by the DRM. So the studios get none of the benefit, all of the costs, and angry customers.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
there are rumors suggesting he's Canadian... Since there is evidence in his interview of some of the typical grammatical mistakes that Francophones make when speaking/writing English (using the word "his" when you want to say "its" for example), there's a good chance he's from Quebec. A good chunk of Quebec's population is distributed within two cities (Quebec City and Montreal)... Since his English is reasonably good, I'm gonna guess he's not from a rural area or Quebec City, where English is rarely spoken at all. So, just going by the numbers, I'm would speculate he's probably from the Montreal metro area. Anyway, the point is, Canada is a country *with* DMCA-type laws, so I suspect that he's not exactly home free if discovered.
And before you mod me down for giving the MPAA/authorities a lead, keep in mind there are literally a million people out there that could have arrived at the same hypothesis given the publicly available... ah nevermind, I'll just take this post AC.
Fry: Eeee! Now say nuclear wessels!
You have found the very reason why they have not enabled the flag and will not for years to come - way too much old equipment and way too many customers to be pissed off.
So basically... "We're going to hold this gun to your head, here, but don't worry -- we're not going to use it! It's just easier to put the gun there, now, than it would be to do it later...but we don't want to deal with the mess it would make if we used it, so just forget it's even there. Trust us!"
No, thanks. I think that as the media companies become more and more desperate, as it becomes painfully obvious that DRM just doesn't work, they're going to pull out all the stops and go down fighting. If they have a way to make every non-HDCP television in the world suddenly explode, they'll do it; it's just a question of when, and what level of desperation it will require.
Don't ever question what a broke junkie will do for a fix, and don't ever question what an obsolete corporation will do to protect its business model. Even when doomed, both will do ridiculous, irrational, self-defeating things in order to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. You probably don't want either one in your living room.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As Cory Doctorow put it (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found on craphound.com):
This is why DRM is bound to fail ... they always will have to provide the key. The algorithms for encryption themselves should be rather safe.
If movies were £2 a Disc and not £20 a disc then they'd suddenly find themselves selling a bucket load more. We're witnessing a slooooow move towards this: Batman begins came out simultaneously in 2 disc (toys!) and 1 disc (just the movie) editions.
... "premium" meaning "the new britney spears track" where they expect a bunch of consumers to want to pay more for it to get it ASAP than wait a month or two to get it at the usual $.99. By advertising these as "exclusive" and "VIP" they want to create a bizzarro false market where the only difference in the content is when exactly you get it... i.e. milking the happy consumers who want to be "cool" because they have the latest VIP exclusive britney release on their iPod and can brag to their clique who are obviously cheap because they dont want to fork over the cash.
It's unlikely to happen any time soon though because the exec's attitude at MAFIAA affiliates just isn't there yet. Hence the annual iTunes arguments about price, they currently want the ability to charge extra for premium tracks
Basically dumb-assed consumers hold plenty of the blame because they think that buying a pair of trousers for £200 is somehow better than getting a pair for £20 (or in my case: £2 from a charity shop, thank you very much) because having some other guy's name tattooed across your butt is so much cooler than saving cash and basically having warm legs.
oops, i ranted, i did have a point somewhere back there
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I have seen many people ( including myself ) 'upgrade' their tapes to DVD as the tape aged and quality starting to drop. Its getting harder to find anywhre local to buy replacement tapes ( new that is ).
But you are right, its not about piracy, its about content control: Who gets to view what/when/where.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This then beg the question as to why the bother but I'll leave that to the conspiracy nuts.
*Ok There not REAL pirates.. they rarely go "Arrgghh" for a start.
It's sad there will be no legal (read: MPAA approved) software open source player for HD content. If it is software and with open source it breaks all DRM schema. Such player can alway be modified to write decoded movie on disk instead to play it on screen. Closed source programs have some security by obscurity (not much as Muslim64 proved) and some legal security (cracking them is illegal in some countries). Realeasing player with keys to decrypt HD-DVD on GPL licence leads in a stright way to tools that could be used to copy content. No content producer will go this way. The only way I see is closed harware channel for HD content: encrypted disk read by HD-player, encrypted stream transmitted to PC and in encrypted form to graphic card and (again encrypted) to HD-screen. No software part on PC should ever see unencrypted content. Unfortunately encrypted hardware tunnel is very similar to closed-source approach. Open source and DRM just do not match.
either you would (after buying a movie) hit a site somewhere with a list of keys, and grab the one for your new movie (there will be SOMEONE with a Windows machine buying new movies and sharing the keys, just 'cos they can) or there's a server somewhere somewhat like CDDB storing a database of keys. Then your player would check the server on playback for a key. You could synchronise offline if you want to watch on the move.
Far from ideal, and maintaining the key servers in the face of constant lawsuits would be a tough task, but thepiratebay and co prove there are people out there more than willing to perform this service. Yeah, it would be illegal, but so is playing DVDs on Linux right now.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
I'm sorry, but I've got to call "shenanigans" here. AFAIK, no HD-DVD movies (or Blu-ray, for that matter) have ever been released with this "protection bit" enabled. I know that personally because I watch HD-DVD movies all the time on my Xbox 360 add-on through my component connection (without HDCP) and they DO NOT downconvert.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It seems likely to me that MS has a trick to allow protected processes to be debugged. It's either a secret mode of Vista, or they have debug builds of Vista that allow this type of snooping to take place.
Yes, they have CODE THAT IS SIGNED BY MICROSOFT. It's all about the keys in the world of trusted computing -- who used their key to sign your code. Not signed by the right organisation? Not Trusted... not allowed access. Currently, this sort of stuff has to be done in software -- but it can now be done in hardware... inside a chip that self-destructs if tampered with (a TPM, there's one in every Intel Apple Mac).
To quote an Intel engineer at a talk about 8 years ago: the next challenge in security is making a computer secure AGAINST ITS OWNER. That was back when Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, IBM etc etc started the Trusted Computing initiative and began plotting to ensure that every computer in future would be crippled to ensure that software would always remain under central control.
Your sig is missing a significant piece:
7 November 2006 - the day Americans forgot 11 September 2001 and remembered 4 July 1776.
Who says they haven't enabled the flag?
I have not yet heard of any titles that include it - then again I can't find a good list either. The first few may have had it but all new titles come without the flag, after Sony pledged not to use it and other studios followed suit.
The precise reason muslix64 wrote BackupHDDVD is because he could't see his legally purchased HD-DVDs in his legally purchased HP HD-DVD drive because his legally purchased HP Monitor lacked HDCP.
That may have been an additional restriction of the player beyond the ICT flag though. I read the interview with him as well; it was not specified.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
According to this guy, there are several reports of people that can't watch HD media on their monitors if they aren't HDCP compliant. Isn't that a sign that ITC has already been activated?
Not necessarily, it could be the player being evil and simply restricting playback for all HD content on a non-protected path, flag or no. I could easily imagine such players being built.
I am not saying the flag is not there, it may be - but it does not have to be to have that effect. Either way it sucks to be sure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley