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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."
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..
And if that doesn't work, I'll put an HD video camera in a dark box with a 52" HD Plasma and hit the record button.
I don't know why they bother. CSS was "easy" because the encryption didn't change, so once you'd broken it, it was done, unless they wanted to break the standard.
With AACS they "learned" something and used much beefier encryption, and mutable keys...Which makes the keys vulnerable. Some bright boy notices this, breaks the weak security on the keys, and voila! The system, while not broken, is seriously compromised.
It's all pointless though. The companies pushing the DRM have far fewer resources than the people who want to view the content, and the content itself cannot be truly secured because it's meant to be viewed! So they're just throwing away money, and, as Muselix64 himself cogently pointed out in the "interview", the turnaround for fixes from the companies is so long, that there is effectively no way they can stay ahead of the crackers.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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
I don't mean to flame your .sig... but you've got it exactly wrong. Laws about tech will always be bad, until enough techies become lawyers.
Hmm, person X is a lawyer. She makes mid six figures and works 80 hours a week. She have a staff to handle IT issues. Her motivation to 'become a techie' is...? I, on the other hand, got sick of the fact that other people were writing the rules that controlled my industry. So I left off being a netadmin and now I'm in law school. You want the laws to be sane? Start writing them, rather than leaving that to people who don't have a clue, and don't have the slightest reason to care.