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HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Protections Fully Broken
gEvil (beta) writes "According to an article at BoingBoing, the processing keys for the AACS encryption scheme used by both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray video discs have been extracted, and a crack has been released. What this means is that there is now a method to extract the copy-protected content of any HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc out there. This is different from Muslix64's previous crack, which only extracted the volume key for each disc. This new method bypasses this step and allows anyone to extract the data without first requiring the volume key."
In five years, when I finally buy into HD television and content, there should be an assload of free content out there to download.
Blar.
The time has come to make the upgrade.
I wish Jon Johansen would have done it so he could be called HD-DVD Jon, or maybe Blu-Ray Jon.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
years to create, weeks to break- sounds about right.
HA! HA!
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
It puts a smile on my face knowing that a small group of unpaid media hackers are able to crack the AACS encryption scheme what tooks many developers and millions in R&D to create, in just a few short weeks.
Vista Help Forum
Windows Vista Help Forum
DRM is fundamentally broken by design. Ciphers of this kind rely on the attacker not getting hold of the key. At the same time, the recipient needs the key to get the data. I can never work because the attacker is the same person as the recipient.
In effect, DRM is security through obscurity.
How much longer will we have to put up with this crap before the media companies realise this and stop inconveniencing their customers and wasting our money and time as well as their own?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Exactly.
Error 001
Security Scan and Virus Detection do not work with your operating system.
After reading through the article I must conclude that while the author has made decoding current discs easier, AACS has NOT been "fully cracked". The key embedded in the current software may be expired in the future, rendering this method useless for discs produced after that expiration.
I'm not saying that this isn't a nice event, but we have further work to do.
When will the media industry learn that DRM strategies simply don't work?
As soon as you can see or hear it, it is then possible to duplicate it. No amount of copy protection will ever be able to prevent that short of preventing consumers from accessing the material altogether.
Learn to trust your consumers a little and focus on adding value to the material, and then people will buy your content. It might also help to provide some flexibility in the content licensing model, maybe giving people the option to upgrade DVD discs to HD-DVD for the same content may encourage them to continue buying media.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Can this be fixed by revoking a player key? Or is this a more extensive breach like what happened with DECSS? Will this work on all future discs, or does it just work on the discs that are currently being produced?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
...would get a dollar everytime someone claimed that something is/was/will be unbreakable...
and somehow a few weeks later it was "broken"...
uh, man. i'd be THAT rich.*
*a man can dream, can't he?
It all starts here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=121866&pag e=6
Later posts seem to confirm that it works for both BR and HD-DVD
So what is the industry's response to all this? Can they deal with the problem without breaking every DVD player in existence? Is the encryption completely symmetric? Can they start releasing DVDs with new keys, without creating a situation where some DVD players can read old dics, and others can read new ones? Are different keys used in Europe, U.S., etc.?
Find free books.
Now we get to see how effective the key revocation system (that forms part of aacs) is going to be.
Should be interesting...
Ian Ameline
I've said before, "safemaker, safebreaker."
Hollywood gets ONE move in the game: "Protecting" the content.
The rest of the world gets as many moves as it wants to get around the ConsumerRightsArentPermitted.
So Hollywood does everything it can to make itself hated by its customers and still expects to WIN this game?
Free, free at last. Free in HD.
I think they've made a mistake by breaking it too early. They should have waited until it was much more widespread. Then again, I would imagine it is psychologically virtually impossible to sit on a "breakthrough" like that.
Is this a weakness in a particular player, in a particular driver, or in the standard reference method of decrypting a disc that allowed the guy at Doom9 to figure out how to get the player key?
What exactly is this "processing key," and how fundamental / changeable is it?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
.... Is it not time for the media companies to drop this silly DRM crap? Seriously!
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
... there are developers clever enough to lie to the media companies that this can be done, and then get paid to do it over and over again. :) I kinda like the idea :) :) :)
Everyone who is surprised raise your hand...
Hello? Hello? Bueller....
I don't have a microwave. I do, however, have a clock that occasionally cooks shit.
from the open-season dept.
Of all the movies to pirate, why'd Zonk have to choose that one?!?
This guy's the limit!
...As most people know is that you're trying to copy protect an inherently open media format. Even in theory it's very difficult to copy protect media in a widely open, public format.
Until vastly different technology is available 20 or 30 years down the road, all that DRM is going to amount to doing is preventing the 'average joe' from copying en-mass. They just have to make it difficult enough for the casual user to be deterred from copying the content. Look at the copy protection scheme on the iPod - it's basically useless, but it prevents grandma from copying bulk amounts on content. It's like how photocopiers are not a danger to printed media, as it's just 'too' difficult to walk up to a copier and copy things on mass. The industry just has to make it hard enough to deter joe user.
The real problem for the recording industry comes in when now people are getting more and more saavy at copying content, and it's becoming more and more common place, and digital media sharing is now common place and digital media is now common place in the living room now. 10 years ago MP3's were just making there way on the scene and basically only very saavy users knew what an MP3 was, let alone what to do with it. What happens when 10 years from now mobile HD video players are just as common as MP3 players, and your average iPod video has a half a TB of flash storage? Copying (High-Def) DVD's at that point will be common place like MP3's are relatively common place now.
It's funny, the whole DRM thing really seemed to come on strong after Napster was busted. In an effort to thwart the hackers and file sharing people this DRM thing kicked into high gear, yet these groups of people are probably the most savvy and creative buggers out there. The only people this DRM crap will ultimately hurt is the record/movie companies because the average Joe will just get frustrated when his new $40 HD-DVD doesn't play and gives an error of "unauthorized copy" or some crap and go off and not buy stuff any more. The hackers, I am sure, welcome the challenge and probably truly enjoy this cat and mouse game.
New DRM protection methods are now in the works which were cracked last week.
The original generic sig.
One key thing to take away from this is that the authors of the software made it really easy to pull the device keys out of memory for two reasons
- They kept them in variables that were physically near the variables for the volume key
- They zero-ed them out after use, leaving big gaping holes of zeros in memory in a place where that kind of looked funny, drawing attention to those areas
If they are smart (and if the MPAA even give them another chance), the powerdvd/windvd authors will reimplement their AACS decryption code to never store the keys in memory. Without double-checking, I believe the keys are only 128 bits, they could be loaded into the SSE registers in encrypted form and then decrypted on chip. The authors will still need to take measures to prevent an OS context switch from storing the registers in kernel-private memory during the period in which the device keys are present, but that is not an extended period of time, presumably they can kick their priority up high enough that it won't happen without hurting the system much.Even that approach isn't hack-proof, but it is a lot harder to dump the cpu registers under such conditions than it is to trace memory accesses.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
yes, we're all laughing because this outcome was obvious to the slashdot crowd years ago. however, the people really laughing are the blokes who sell this drm technology to the MPAA/ RIAA
why laugh at them when you can steal their money?
we need a committee of slashdot readers to compile a list of buzzwords and concerns of the RIAA/ MPAA, and then sell them some technovoodoo that doesn't protect them in any way whatsoever (nothing can, obviously), but continues the RIAA's/ MPAA's illusion that drm can or ever will work
give them their false security blanket, steal their money outright, and then continue to rip them off and drive into extinction the antiquated notion of corporate media distribution channel ownership
they need us, we don't need them. make that point explicit by bleeding them dry via all possible avenues
win win! idiots
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
People still buy books, including audio books and eBooks, even though photocopier exist.
I think the recording and motion picture industries need to look at why, and follow that lead. Instead of millions in copy protection R&D, why not spend millions to improve the product? Make the product something people liked owning. (Notice how libophiles obsess over the actual tangible book?).
The one really viable way to control it would be to mandate that all players have an internet connection and it verify the purchaser has rights to the media before playing it. Of course if people have good high speed connections to the internet there's no reason to buy the physical media, which they recording and motion picture industries simply can't abide with.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
After reading through the article I must conclude that while the author has made decoding current discs easier, AACS has NOT been "fully cracked". The key embedded in the current software may be expired in the future, rendering this method useless for discs produced after that expiration.
In theory yes, but how easy do you believe it is to update all those specialized video players, all offline?
Don't forget: the people who buy those already had to put up with paying premium for a HDTV, expensive players, and also make sure the TV, cable and player play together through HDMI.
If you start demanding they are hooked non-stop to Internet so they can receive the daily patches, it may just be the thing crossing the line of tolerance.
Also: the hard part is retrieving keys from pure hardware. The new keys come as firmware updates over the network.. it's even easier to update those HD-DVD/BlueRay rippers. After all, you have even the keys they encrypted the patches with: you have the player, don't you.
All in all, the "super morphing update" ability of AACS seems more like a way for the AACS developers to claim "the war it's not over", when it effectively is over.
Companies will refuse to use the new keys for their disks, since they will be incompatible with plenty of the players out there, the AACS creators will whine a bit about how "they could fix it but they don't wanna, not our fault", and this is where it'll end.
And because of that, when I put my iPod shuffle through the wash I was able to replace it with a good AAC-playing MP3 phone and flip the bird to Steve Jobs. Same thing with these...I want my media in formats I can move around and use to my liking.
I'm not going to pay for the same content twice, ever. And if I can't get my content in a cracked DRM or DRM-free format, I'll just pirate it. That'll show 'em.
Headshot!
for this news. They will never learn!
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
The format war is over! We win!
Just like Google maps having certain areas blurred, clearing just the sensitive things draws more attention to them. Here it was just a simple matter of going back and finding what was there before it was "blurred".
Steve Jobs mentioned that iTunes DRM cannot be shared with others since sharing would compromise the integrity of DRM. The DVD DRM was cracked and now the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are cracked as well. This doesn't mean that DRM is not helping. Even though, the DRMs are cracked, the DMCA protects these cracked DRM systems and prevents commercial products from taking advantage of the cracks. Without the DRMs (even the broken ones) and DMCA, there would have been cheap legal DVD duplicators in the market.
Thank you to everyone who helped with this project, and thank you to doom9 for giving these guys a home.
The very fact that they put any sort of lock on it, means you have to pick that lock to get the content. Getting the content isnt illegal (fair use). Picking a lock is (DMCA). They still have the "legal framework" for pursuing copyright violations.
They'd have stuck with CSS, but to attract new investors they needed a "shiney new more unhackable scheme". It's impossible to implement such a scheme without complete control over all the hardware. But, in the end, the very act of protecting the content is, legally, protection enough.
The only good turnout for "us" (the consumer, fair use advocate, or even casual pirate) is if the industry decides it's not worth it to set the lock in the first place.
There was never a doubt that it'd be possible to extract the data.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
So which newsgroup is "my friend" supposed to be looking at for exciting new content?
We have the ability to copy books. Why do we not do that? Because books are cheap enough that it does not pay. Authors can still make a pile of money. Every other industry has went thru this phase. Content has to get less expensive, executives have to be reduced in number, pay cuts happen, then the industry can grow again. Resorting to DRM in any form, will be unsuccessful because, technology will overcome. The first company to recognize this, restructure appropriately, price appropriately, will win. Same as with book, computers, cars, even washing machines. My .02
Rod
DRM on a disk doesn't actually prevent copying either. It only seems to because you cannot buy blank disks that allow you to write to certain sections of the disk. In theory I could clone the HD-DVD or blu-ray disk bit for bit and produce identical pressed copies en mass. All this DRM does is allow movie companies to continue their questionable practice of price discrimination using artificial region locks and allows the media conglomerates to govern how and when you watch the content, extending copyright artificially.
Once upon a time I worked at a company encrypting CDs for digital data. This was over ten years ago... We too had a staged security, weak protection on key store, stronger protection on packages and data. We knew that the cost involved in high security was too high, from a functional and complexity cost POV.
First, making the volume information secure, and file content, was pretty pointless because if you had strong security on it, it would be too slow to do anything useful. For the data, you could wait longer, but at the end of the day, all of it was moot because once either catalog or data is decrypted... its there. So, you decrypt on the fly, or use adaptive methods that attempt to hide information, it all leads to...
The Cost of protection geometrically increases to the linear Time to break it.
And in the end, all the protection does is buy you a little bit of time, because for every couple of guys thinking up the next best protection scheme, once it hits the world, you have 100+* the resources trying to break it.
In the end, the best protection we came up with was something everyone hates... a hardware key that imlpemented the decryption, and sell that key with the media. Economically not viable to copy, but still does nothing once unprotected.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Everyone talks about the big problem being that you have to give the key to the fellow who's going to watch the movie, but even that understates the difficulties facing DRM schemes.
Recently, I put up a GeoCache puzzle cache. The idea was that folks would have to figure out the puzzle to find out the GPS coordinates of the cache. I was very clever and devious. I was humbled when the thing was found within 6 hours of publication.
How was it done?
To make a long story short, it was a "known plaintext attack." Since I am required to publicize a pair of coordinates somewhere within a couple miles of the cache (to make the geocache site's search engine work correctly - so that folks from New York won't solve the puzzle and get screwed when the cache is 2000 miles away), this lets attackers look for solutions that result in numbers "near" the posted coordinates.
This is what makes movie DRM untenable. Since the format of the disks is publicly known (to insure that UNencrypted disks operate correctly), attackers know that they can discard solutions after decrypting very little of the ciphertext (probably just one byte).
With sufficiently large keys, even that becomes a huge problem, but the fact that the format of the plaintext is known is still a huge advantage for the attackers.
Just wait. We'll all be required to have "reality filter" chips installed between our optic and auditory nerves, and our brain. Only properly licensed material will be permitted to be perceived. And you'll have to license EVERYTHING, because it potentially competes with MAFIAA controlled content. I'm guessing we have it by 2025. >:-(
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Crack authors, as soon as you get different keys (for different players), include them all in the software. This way, if they want to revoke keys to solve the problem, they'll have to piss off a lot of people by breaking their players, which they won't...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
We don't copy books because books can be purchased for less than the cost of printing our own copy. CDs and DVDs can be stamped out for less than the cost of recordable media. If the **AA would price recorded CDs and DVDs at less than the cost of blank media, then there would be very little unauthorized copying! But then the studios wouldn't have as much money to promote their latest offerings -- hey, buying hookers and coke for DJs and movie critics is expensive!
-- use a megabyte of the next movie disc release.
spiderman 3, now with firmware!
if EVERY movie released, includes the list of current 'bad' keys.. then the players can use that for updating.
no cabled network required
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
- This whole "one box contains one movie" thing is so 1980s. -
;-)
actually, more like "so 2002ish"; 1980s would be CD (which was introduced in 1982). butr you are essentially right, though i am not so sure about collectors; in vinyl, you have a physical equivalent to the music (though you need very sensitive fingertips to read LPs
Web Developers and Web Content-Maker-Guys YEARS ago gave the "no right click" a try. We quickly learned that if some one wants the content off the web site, they will get it, so there is no use in trying to introduce barriers that only hurt the casual user. You don't see "no-right-click" scripts anymore, but we are still producing tons of content for the web. Much of it copyrighted, and mostly the copyright honored.
I can't help but see this as a parent who is all too restrictive with thier child, leading the child into endless rebelion that would have been avoided if moderation was used instead of a billy club.
insight through the mind
I think it is good, ( no sarcasm )
I think I can decide for myself what is fair use, and what is not.
I also prefer to be a customer to be sold, and not a consumer to be culled.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Studios have put millions of $'s into this, and it is broken, the real protection is in file size. Imagine a 200+ gig movie, uncompressed with full DTS EX and DDHD, commentary and everything else that you could want. Now imagine trying to download that movie over the course of a few weeks or months, if your ISP allows that kind of transfer. The data rate should be high that modern computers stutter and playback is jerky. Compressing it down to a managable size would be defeating the idea of watching HD. This would suffice for today and maybe even a few years. Protection is in "an unmanagable file size" and "data transfer rate", for now.
"I do not see a terribly effective fix for this - your key has to exist somewhere, and even in a CPU register it is still in memory more often than not."
Ummm, how about no more new keys for software players. As long as there are software players it seems obvious that it will be possible to reverse engineer what they are doing to shake out the keys. But if the industry decides that SW players are too weak, they simply revoke keys for them and don't issue new ones. The end of software players and the end of the risk.
Now I can buy any format and just rip it to another one, great idea for sure!
Now it's time to print up all those T-Shirts with the Processing Key:
;)
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0...
Available for just $19.95
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There is a reason for DRM, even if it inherently flawed in design: to keep the average Joe buying your stuff. If they stop fighting completely, you'll end up with a flopped industry. The bigger the investment they put into DRM, the more returns they get from sales, because not everyone is computer literate. The more technical they make their schemes, the more people they get buying their product instead of stealing it. Gross value goes up, even if net stays the same. Lawsuits and copyright protection are designed to scare the AVERAGE consumer away from illegal activity and narrow the possible copyright infringement targets down to a manageable size, so they can treat it exactly like cops treat druggies: go for the dealers. Copyright protection in some form or another will never die out, because if it does, a larger percentage of the population will steal the product and it will cease being a manageable problem for them.
I believe that you're correct (and Wikipedia agrees with you at the moment, saying "the fully automated solution for decrypting HDDVD/BluRay is yet to be done with this approach"), however I've yet to see a really good explanation of how today's crack actually works. There seems to be a lot of conflicting terminology at work; VUK, "processing key," "media key," etc.
My understanding of AACS, gleaned from Wikipedia and other sources, is as follows: the whole thing begins with several keys. One is a title key, which is generated for each movie (or one pressing of a particular movie), and is actually used to encrypt the video stream. Then, there is a Volume Identifier, which is basically a serial number on each pressed disc, located on a part of the disc which can't be written to by consumer disc writers (just like on DVD discs). The Volume ID and the title key are combined (or hashed); I think this combination of the two is what's being called the "Volume Unique Key" (VUK).
In order to make sure that only approved players can decrypt this whole thing, the VUK is encrypted using a randomly generated, per-title key provided by the AACS people. This key (the one used to encrypt the VUK) is called the Media Key, and it's not provided on the disc in the clear at all. It's provided as part of a "Media Key Block," which is the Media Key, encrypted with all the current player keys (so, it's there several hundred times at least, one for every model of approved player).
On the receiving end, the player reads the disc and extracts the Volume ID, the encrypted VUK (which the AACS documentation refers to as the Encrypted Title Key), and the Media Key Block. It gets the Media Key from the Media Key Block by using its secret Device Key, and then uses the Media Key and the Volume ID to decrypt the Encrypted Title Key, and get the Title Key. And from there, plays the video.
What I don't quite get, though -- and it would be great if anyone could fill me in, here -- is how today's crack fits into this whole scheme. What the crack seems to provide, is a way of producing a VUK for any disk, given the Volume ID, which is transmitted from the drive to the host computer in the clear (and is stored on the disc in the clear). But I don't see how this is possible, since the VUK also depends on the Title Key -- and if you know the Title Key, you're already done.
Anyone want to take a stab at explaining how the whole thing works, in something approaching understandable (or at least consistent, defined) terms? The Wikipedia article is not a lot of help right now.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That means Miss Congeniality 2 will be availble in HD to download soon...
-It is more expensive to print out or photocopy most books than it is to buy them.
-Prints are inferior because they are hard to bind well.
-Electronic copies don't appeal to most readers because the display is uncomfortable (though I'm fine with it.)
In the few areas of book publishing where book prices exceed the cost to print up a tolerable copy, or where the original is incovenient to buy, book piracy is common. Most university textbooks and many reference volumes are available online. You can download complete archives of many comic book series.
Piracy aside, book publishers aren't exactly doing well in our economy. What the music industry can do that the book industry has trouble with is convince millions of people they have to own *this CD*, not any other CD. What has music industry execs terrified is the fear that the children who are five years old today will have too many choices available from their PCs in seven years, and they won't enter into the teen music mentality that dominated the late 20th century and trained most adults to keep buying RIAA titles. Restricting choice through DRM or whatever else they can dream up is their only hope.
What about the beloved Microsoft and Apple DRM?
Is it cracked too?
"But then the studios wouldn't have as much money to promote their latest offerings -- hey, buying hookers and coke for DJs and movie critics is expensive!"
So Peter Jackson was snorting cocaine instead of making a multimillion dollar movie.
"CDs and DVDs can be stamped out for less than the cost of recordable media. If the **AA would price recorded CDs and DVDs at less than the cost of blank media, then there would be very little unauthorized copying!"
All I have to say is you guys are fools! Period.
"We don't copy books because books can be purchased for less than the cost of printing our own copy."
There's also the time and effort to getting a perfect copy
"CDs and DVDs can be stamped out for less than the cost of recordable media. "
And code can be cranked out cheaply too. Now why do we pay all you programmers so much? Oh, right. Cost of creation. Maybe we all should pay you what you're really worth. The price of one thin CD.
Now i can watch the movies that I freaking paid for, on any device i want.
The whole concept of keeping me from the content i paid for is ludicrous, and is why i dont support IP of any kind now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...or does every single DRM related story of the past few weeks deserve a big fat OBVIOUS tag a la fark.
siener's youtube channel
Not to sound like a spokesperson for the movie industry, but their only options are:
1. Agressivley protect their content with DRM and lawsuits
2. Go out of business
They will probably go out of business anyway, and are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The way it will look in some years is probably:
1. Few movie budgets over say $1M. Just no ROI
2. No mega rich movie stars.
3. No mega rich rock stars.
4. most content is direct from producer to you. See youtube
This is probably overall good and will not kill the music or movies. We will probably see an exponential growth in sophisticated works of art available for a fair price. See http://allofmp3.com/ for example
"Fix it"
Then I guess you better call up IBM and tell them just how much smarter than them you are. I'm certain they would have never thought of an acid bath, or an electron microscope.
BTW to the poster who asked: when will media companies give up? I'll ask, when will people stop trying to get content without paying for it?
they'll be cracked. FairPlay (apple iDRM) contravention may even be a retail product Real Soon Now. at least in the nordic countries.
the only way to make this stuff secure is to put it in a vault, fill the vault with hydraulic concrete, cut off all the wires into the vault and push 'em through the holes before the stuff cures, and site crew-served weapons all around the vault.
then it doesn't work. but it's secure.
you know, maybe HelliWood might just decide that since you can't duplicate analog to 200 generations, they'll bring back vinyl LPs, film, and they'll get their evil satisfactions by owning all the needle and projection-bulb companies.
until they do go retro, all they are doing with DRM and magic security boxes are royally pissing off the Joe Sixpacks out here that they want to sell stuff to. uhh, make that "rent limited private usage rights to." the only way you buy entertainment is with the suits on one side of the boardroom and the artists on the other side. history says the artists get the short end of the straw no matter what the media or the ultimate usage of the product.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
I have paid for every single DVD I own. No good deed goes unpunished, I am repeatedly subjected to unskippable previews, FBI warnings, commentary disclaimers and the same fscking flying logo and equally annoying jingle at 4 places before actually getting to the content I purchased. If I were stupid enough to buy into HD/BR I additionally lose my control over the resolution I want. This isn't about Imaginary Property rights, it's about THEIR control of MY property.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I cant belive they keep making things that are forsure. This DRM is uncrackable. This ship is unsinkable. I just hope this DRM has enough lifeboats to save everyone from this stupidity. Give up trying to make uncrackable. Save the money, lower the prices of DvD's and im can tell you if my DvD's were 5 bucks cheaper i would be alot more enticed to go out and buy a copy compared to watching a lower quality ripped version. Give up now there will always be something that will break you.
The problem will be that they stop releasing HD players for non-TPM boxes. They will simply drop support, and tell you that if you want to play HD movies, to "upgrade" your hardware to their satisfaction. The only thing that will stop them from doing so is if they realize that the customers are on to them, are specifically avoiding TPM hardware, and that there are enough of them out there that they are cutting into the bottom line in a way that significantly comprimises their long-term market position.
The record companies, for example, are taking the long view of DRM for music: they are willing to wait for the CD to become obsolete while forcing DRM on the next generation (digital distribution), even though forcing DRM on digital distribution severely hampers adoption of digital distribution. The only thing that will change their strategy is if they realize that the market will *never* go digital enough for them to not have to release their content on CD until they drop DRM.
I doubt that the market for non-TPM boxes will be "_HUGE_" enough for the MPAA to abandon their plan to require it unless every-day consumers feel the sting of DRM in their every-day use.
The best way for this to happen is for devices to proliferate the market wich take advantage of the crack-ability of CSS: players that take ripped DVDs, store and organize them, and are as simple and intuitive as Apple products: it has to be an appliance.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
maybe that you are an eMule user?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
being encryption keys to no longer allow.
real useful.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
What you suggest requires more fundamental changes in the world.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Hmmmm.... Cracking AACS is just the first attack on Blu-Ray. They have BD+ held "in reserve", right? Or was BD+ left out of the final spec? I have a feeling that the fine folks behind Blu-Ray (those rootkitting folks from Sony) knew AACS was gonna bite the dust quick, so they put BD+ in there as backup insurance.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
"and then we sit back and watch a (small) mob storm movie execs because they can't play their HD movies with their brand-new $1,000 Blu-ray drives."
Is there some reason the obvious keeps passing you all by? Is dick-waving really that important to you? All they have to do is take the disk back to point of purchase, and get a new one with new keys. What you all also forget is that the world has changed markedly since the days of crackable games. Always-on (or nearly) are widely available. Being intouch is much easier. Computers courtesy of Moore's law have more power, are getting smaller, and storage is doubling each year. A scheme that keeps the majority honest is quite possible. It's how it's managed that seems to be the problem. Not technological issues (note that most schemes that have been broken is due to human failure).
So when does HD-shrink ship?
...they got something for their news-page.
You don't want to know.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As smart as "they" are in building TAMPER resistant chips, explain to me how the TPM chip knows whether or not it is in virtual environment?
Tell me why a software version of the TPM chip is not possible.
If you can explain that, I might agree with you more than the parent you replied to. However, until I hear an answer, I am decidedly with the parent post. Given enough time, even the TPM can be reverse engineered.
Trains put buggy makers out of work, did the governments do anything?
Yes, they did: Laws like: "When two trains approach each other at a track crossing, each must stop until the other is clear." (Not an error: A deliberate attempt to make it impossible to run the railroad legally.)
Similarly (when automobiles were putting buggy makers out of work): Laws like the one requiring a man with a red warning flag to precede the auto.
Of course they didn't work. B-)
Things like DMCA are the same thing revisited.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
MPAA take note: Now that we have fair use back, I will upgrade to HD-DVD and buy media. Well, as soon as blank media for legal backups becomes cost effective.
Arnezami, you have the appreciation and admiration of many legitimate consumers of media around the globe. Thank you for your efforts.
This is a rampant misunderstanding; it's the other way around: AACS *doesn't* do revocation by *adding* revocation lists to content. AACS actually encrypts the volume keys separately for *every valid player key*. When a player key is revoked, that player can no longer decrypt the volume keys, and consequently can't decrypt the content either.
So the way AACS works, the new PowerDVD will be the only one that "works" after the predicted key revocation. If folks want to keep using it to crack disks, they'll have to get past whatever walls the programmers put around the key storage mechanism.
This is the real story here. Mod parent up.
Essentially, what he is saying is this: while the crack is temporary, the method of attack is unassailable under the current model.
That's whats important here. If keys get revoked, its a trivial matter to go get them again. The hard work has been done. Now all you have to do is follow procedures and -voila- you can crack AACS too.
Despite other comments on this board, AACS IS cracked.
Now that you don't need a $2000 player and $10,000 plasma to play these things, it's time to say goodbye to DVD and splurge on BD.
The encryption is crackable only so long as there is not special hardware doing the decoding. Once the keys are hidden in embedded ROM inside integrated circuits, you won't be able to get to them without delaminating the IC -- which nobody but a chipmaker has the facilities to do.
We will only succeed at cracking DRM so long as it is done in software, or we can look at the signals on PCB traces. Once this stuff happens inside a single chip, we really are screwed.
Sony was just touting that BluRay was outselling HD-DVD by 2:1. Now watch sales skyrocket!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I don't know if you've read Alvin Toffler but you'd think that a room full of people that makes it's living with information would have. This issue is MUCH, MUCH bigger than just movies, or music, or even games. The very foundation of the information economy could be indermined by the attitudes that drive piracy. At least with the industrial age, there were natural barriers to how much damage greed could do. Not with digital. Combine that with the overall breakdown in social mores, and you have a recipe for disaster, because we can't go backwards, and forwards is playing right into societies failures. Something to keep in mind as we all gloat over our "victory".
Mission Accomplished!
The more technical they make their schemes, the more people they get buying their product instead of stealing it.
Please stop that.
Sharing, whether un-authorized or otherwise ought not to be mis-characterized as stealing. It is not stealing anymore than murder or rape.
...or consumption of forbidden fruit - which seems to be closer to the MPAA's worldview these days.
My karma and my firstborn are now forfeited, aren't they?
You know, an ass load! Duh!
Blar.
But we do copy books.
The bookz scene is alive and well, thank you very much.
We have the ability to copy books.
No, the average consumer has the ability to copy pieces of paper. Most people don't have doccutech machines in their basement capable of spitting out a paperback. There's a difference.
Why do we not do that? Because books are cheap enough that it does not pay.
No, because most book margins are so narrow that to make a "pirate" copy of a book (no, not a photocopy of a book, a functionally identical book) wouldn't be worth it.
Authors can still make a pile of money.
They can, but the vast majority do not. The JKs and the Stephen Kingss are the incredibly rare exceptions. Most authors don't make mad coin from their stuff.
The experience of reading a book versus reading either photocoped paper or a computer screen differs significantly, unlike listening to a digital copy of an analog song. Saying that books have survived piracy is like saying CDs survived the radio - yes, they're similar in ways, but the experience is vastly different to make comparison unfair. And you should read up a little more on the publishing industry and exactly how great the money is there.
TPMs chips are not tamper resistant, they are in the price range where adding effective tamper detection is impractical. You would need low-level physical access to get their secrets, but they are within reach of a bored grad student. Remember, some say the only hardware immune to tampering is on satellites. TPMs are not really designed against professional attackers, only interested amateurs ("Class 1 attackers" or even less).
Tamper resistance would be implicitly enhanced considerably if the TPM functionality would migrate to the inside of larger chips. There are signs of this happening, but the TPM chips found in current machines are easy targets. (I work on tamper-resistant hardware; usually, something else breaks before you have to resort to physical violence against a secure module.)
To pirate a movie I need to find a decent torrent of what I want to watch, d/l it, burn it and I'm good to go. Call it 2 hours start to finish. Now while most movies are pretty good rips and play just fine, you still run the risk of getting a crappy cam video with peoples heads in it, or some weird codec that won't play or maybe it's the wrong language.
Or, I can walk 2 blocks to my local video store and rent a movie for $5 (2 for $5 on Tuesdays or whatever). They have a freakin huge selection. They always play, and you get all the extras on the disc. For me the rental thing just is a better value for my time and money. (For as long as these numbers apply! Jack up the rental price to $8 and maybe I'll d/l movies. Sell the DVD's for $8 and maybe I'll just buy them.)
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Speaking of Apple products, have you ever wondered why iTunes can't rip DVDs just like it does with CDs? It's due to a thing called the DMCA, which makes it illegal for Apple to provide such a function regardless of how technologically easy (and valuable for Apple) it would be to do. And that's why we'll never see what you suggest happen -- at least, not as long as the DMCA still stands.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The RIAA probably doesn't care about movies getting cracked...
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
AACS/CSS/Security through telling people "don't do that" is trivial to implement, for as good as you can possibly get it (fundamental flaw in the design) and they STILL managed to fuck it up.
Basic concept: Encrypt a disk with a key that only the player has. If the player key is compromised, all disks are cracked.
"fix" #1: Encrypt the disk content a random key, encrypt that disk thousands of times with a library of pre-generated keys. Assign each player a key, quit putting that key on the disk when it's found to be compromised. Of course, you now have to re-encrypt thousands of keys for every title released, leading to possible exposure of the master database.
"fix the fix": Randomly create a single "production key", encrypt it with every player key, and give the 'blob' to every HD-DVD production facility. Now exposure is limited to one key that can be changed without exposing the master keylist.
Except someone was terminally lazy, and only did it ONCE. So EVERYONE USES THE SAME PRODUCTION KEY. Way to go! If you gave each studio their own, then compromises would be limited to a single studio's works (that were produced before the key was changed).
Worse, you introduce an attack vector to your management that effectively hides it's origin. Any hardware or software player could be compromised, or you could have an inside leak of the key. As long as the exploiter doesn't say "I got this key from Sony's HD-501 player" you have no idea how they aquired it. Basically, they completely and utterly shat on the key-revocation scheme, with no possible solution.
Whoops.
Dear MPAA: Please contact me before starting your next hairbrained content protection scheme. You can pay me millions rather then billions and I'll give you one that's not so embarassingly horrible. I'm no cryptogropher, but goddamn, it's not like you hired any security people for anything you've done yet anyway.
I really don't understand why the heck they even let someone write a software player, how big of a market slice can that be?
I believe you forget the studios' objective; they want a more pirate-resistant successor to the current standard DVD. Ergo, they must be able to displace the current DVD market. A sizable minority of college students use a Windows PC with DVD drive (and perhaps tuner card) in lieu of a TV and DVD player to conserve space in cramped dorm rooms. While there is a trend away from desktops to increased laptop usage, USB tuners and large LCD external monitors are common enough and easily available, almost all current laptops come with drives that read DVDs (at least), and (looking ahead again) LCD projectors are getting cheaper and correspondingly more common. Due to the disposable income levels, the college and immediately post-college crowd is THE target demographic to hook, and while a gaming console is a luxury, a computer is considered just short of a necessity.
The software player market is not one they can yet afford to ignore.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
What if I write my own virtual computer which reads the program code, the actual machine instructions, and executes them entirely in software? I can pass whatever I want back from the TPM instructions, I can fake any memory contents I want, I can fake any I/O inputs I want.
Given how fast computers are now, I suspect I could write a virtual computer which, when run on the fastest machine, looked about as fast as the slowest machine. By "fast" and "slow", I mean reasonable commercial home machines, ranging from cheap notebook to gamer's overclocked screamer. I would not be surprised if such a program could fake the entire boot process at a slow but reasonable speed, and I only have to do that to extract interesting data from the software being run.
Infuriate left and right
The full key does not necessarily need to be present in memory: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_(cryptography)
If the key is stored as an obscured algorithm and the disc selectively requires portions of the key, the full key is never given out. Next time you try and give the disc the same key portion as before, it will refuse.
I just hope this wasn't implemented with HDs and BlueRays.
Lil' rant!:
Dear big corporations, Give me high quality audio files and high quality video files for download and keeping and I will happily pay.
BUT WHY THE HELL MUST I DOWNLOAD MEDIA ILLEGALY!?!?!
You simply give me no other options!
DRM is not an option, If you don't trust your customers look to yourself, it is obvious that customers don't trust you!
On the side note: I've been looking for an online "blockbuster" where you can stream movies over the web legally... still didn't find it (not with well known movies at least).. does this exist or have I simply been looking for something that cannot be made legal?
The most amazing thing is to go and see speakers come to a university talking about the entertainment industry. The industries brought people in to discuss DRM, and the experts all explained to them that what they wanted was mathematically uncertain. Cryptography is designed to get a message from Alice to Bill where only Bill can read it, and Bill knows that it was sent by Alice. Cryptography CANNOT be used by Alice to make certain that only Bill can get a message, but that Bill can't make a copy of the message.
The data HAS to be unencrypted at the end source, and the industry knows this. They have been told this. Congress has been told this.
The people working on the DRM solutions told them that they are attempting the mathematically impossible. They don't care, they just keep trying this solution.
In Apple's case, the quasi-solution is that they can require you to update your player (iTunes) when things get compromised. They can't stop the old system from being used, but they can agree to only sell new material. I'm sure that some WANTED to require phone/Internet access to all HD/BR DVD players... which would have KILLED ANY chance for adoption, as DVD players, like VHS decks before them, get used all over the place where that is impractical... in cars, on airplanes, embedded in televisions that get thrown in little used guest rooms, converted garages, finished basements, etc.
But the executives were all WELL informed that it was a waste of money, they simply felt that they could get "secure enough" and that the experts were pointed headed academics.
This was bound to happen, no matter how tight someone makes a security feature. There is always a way to break it. Besides, it's not like one format is going to win over another. The funniest thing about this format war, is the fact of seeing which movies will come out on HD-DVD, which ones will come out on Blu-ray, and then knowing the fact that EVERYONE will buy the normal DVD version.
Today you don't even need to make the CD.
People will continue to make music of that I'm completely confident.
If the record executives aren't driving Ferrari s to their meetings with Clear Channel's program directors to talk about getting the next Van Halen CD to maximum saturation then so much the better. Fuck them all.
Bands make money putting on shows and selling CDs personally. What they can't do is get any radio play without selling their souls.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You have to develop a hardware decoder. A PCI card. Once it's on the market, revoke ALL software keys. You get bonus money from hardware sales, and diminished piracy! Go RIAA!
I got sold one (because it didn't cost a penny more then a DVD player).
Then never plugged it into the phone line. (a DVD player talking to someone about my viewing habits? Uh, no.)
I understand fully 50% of the players they sold never called home for the first time. They should have learned.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sony's PSP and several PDAs have 480 pixel wide screens, and they push the limit on how big a handheld device can be. Can you fit a 1280 pixel wide screen into the same package? Would you want to, given the focusing limits of the human visual system?
Think also about pocket radios vs. pocket TVs. Watching a movie takes much more concentration and for a longer time than listening to a song. So where would such a device be useful outside of the back seat of a car, train, bus, or plane on a two-hour trip?
You can debug Windows on a kernel level. You hook it up to another computer via the serial port and you can step one instruction at a time if you want. Not really anything a program can do about that. In theory I suppose you could check to see if the kernel debugger was active and refuse to run, but that's easy enough to patch around.
This is *very* good news for Seagate, et al.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
The IRS perfected it years ago... Ive been trying to decode my goddam tax return for the past two weeks and I still cant crack it.
We should just let them handle music distribution... "Put the song title from box 34 into this box, but only on a leap year that ends in an odd number...."
You'll see more and more companies doing this kind of thing!
...be broken in very short order. Now that the processing key is known, people know what to look for in RAM. How many versions of HD-DVD players are out there? I don't have an HD-DVD drive so I'm not up on the scene, but I'd guess a great deal. Each and every one of them (and perhaps some standalone ones, too) can now be scanned for the processing key in memory. We're talking about MAJOR instantaneous breakage. I'd imagine that the hacker groups will now be racing to break every player they can get their hands on, and they'll keep that list of players a closely guarded secret. It's death by a thousand cuts, all happening at once. Vaunted DRM...just wow. Talk about your spectacular failures.
DRM just ain't all it's cracked up to be.
"Then the industries wil have 'won', and freedom will have 'lost' ( since this is much larger then just being able to watch a DVD, its about the basic rights of freedom of information )."
No it isn't. You still can call up your representative and call him/her an asshole. You can still post on slashdot how much you hate things. You can grab either a digital camera, or a camcorder and make home movies. You can write the great american novel and print it out on your laserjet. What you CAN'T do is violate other people's copyright. Sucks to be unable to mass copy and distribute under the guise of "my rights", but you all declared this war, now you're going to have to suffer under it.
... for using this very off-topic space to say thank you.
:)
You probably don't remember, but you made my life easier, and now that I am fiddling with it at work as well, that extra knowledge came in very handy.
It's one of those cases where I meant to thank you but never got around to it... Well, finally, the thanks you deserve
(hopefully you read this)
If this is true then I guess that means HD-DVD and Blu-ray are now no worse than standard DVDs. Surely this would have to be good news for disc sales?
Very true, but not just to keep the average Joe from making illegal copies. It also prevents the average Joe from doing other things with your product, or from making backup copies. Media eventually goes bad. If an average Joe has his media go bad, he must go buy another copy. Without DRM he could make a copy himself. Without DRM, the average Joe could rip a movie to his computer or media center computer (MythTV, Windows Media Center, Sage TV, or other) and watch it anytime he wants without having to find the media. Wihout DRM the average Joe could probably even (or buy a program to) remove the 10 minutes of commercials that Disney DVDs force you to watch before watching your movie. Without DRM it would be easy for a media center appliance to record HD TV shows, as the supreme court decided in Sony v. Betamax that citizens had a fair use right to do (I know it's possible, but there are heavy restrictions especially on encrypted cable content when you need a CableCARD).
DRM is all about control. If you want to do something else with the movie you bought (that fair use says you should be able to do with it), the studio wants money for it. The problem is, they do not innovate in those areas and the control is so tight that these things really aren't available, the studios couldn't make money from them because people rightly don't think they should pay with them, and therefore there is neither supply nor demand. DRM may protect movies from some illegal copying, but for the most part I believe it stifles innovation in the hardware and application arena and leads to a much poorer experience. Take the Tivo Series 3 (HD) for instance. The Series 2 had the ability to link multiple units in the house so you could not only record multiple shows, but watch them from any unit and even link them to your computer and download shows to portable players like the iPod or store shows on your computer. With the Series 3 that is all gone because of CableCARD. In order to license the CableCARD specifications, Tivo had to do away with all of that. The Series 3 even includes a cutting-edge eSATA port for adding an external hard drive, which is nice since HD shows take up A LOT of space. Guess what... That is disabled because CableCARD wouldn't allow it. I would have two Tivo Series 3 in my house right now if it had the functionality of the Series 2 and the eSATA port worked.
If media companies had their way, you would not only have to buy the media, but you would have to pay every time you watched it. They tried to do that with DIVX (Digital Video Express, not the DivX codec). Consumers didn't want that and now it's gone. Not only that but they would probably like to charge you extra for viewing the "bonus features" and using extra functionality like chapter skip, pause, and rewinding. If media companies had their way, your house would be fitted with microphones and your would have money deducted from your account every time you sung a copyrighted song in your shower. Media companies have fought against nearly every new technology that has come along since they couldn't control it, even if it made them more money. Examples: Radio, Tape Recorders, Video Tapes, MP3. They haven't fought against Blu-ray and HD-DVD because they actually made protections and restrictions stronger, and because it would force people that have already purchased DVDs to spend more money to upgrade for high-definition. Back when people started playing music on the radio, media companies fought against it. It turned out that radio exposure vastly increased the sales of their albums. It didn't matter, they want money from every avenue available. They initially fought against tape recorders, then ended up turning it into a huge business. They fought against video tapes, even though the video tape rental business and sales lead to record profits. They fought ag
All we need is someone to break 5C protection...hopefully in time for Sopranos
"tamper-resistant. not tamper-proof. given enough time and manpower, hardware keys will be broken. and if they try to disable that key, they're stupider than i thought."
Such faith you "I'm not hurting anyone, because I never would have bought it anyway" have in someone else doing all the hard work so you can enjoy free content. Now why would they do that, unless they can get the money you all are too "principled" to pay to the artist in the first place.
Who the hell wants to download a twenty gigabyte file, and how many can you store on your hard drive? This protection will in fact be more effective than the DRM, possibly deterring many users for as long as a few years before connections get faster.
I join Ignignokt and rest of the online world in flipping the bird at the MAFIAA as hard as I can.
Oligatory fuck the MPAA song link.
*shrug*
Welcome to a combination of technofaith (in other words with technology all things are possible)*, and ignorance. One how many people here really understand electron microscopy well enough to say what it can and can't do? Bet it's a smaller number than the one's getting modded +5. How many here understand economics? That ties in to any pirate solution.
*You have humanism to thank for that.
[other poster]
"Unfortunately for the MPAA, it wouldn't come to that; there are no known, secure, digital watermarking schemes."
I wouldn't bet on that.
"Seems to me that the fix is obvious. Change the algorithm."
Or simply make all hardware players (remember even software players need hardware) watermark all copies. Copyright violations is about being anonymous.
Sounds like someone has a similiar idea. Notice how smooth it went down with the slashdot crowd?
I have paid for every single DVD I own.
Me too, every one.
Usually in spindles of 100.
"This isn't about Imaginary Property rights, it's about THEIR control of MY property."
No, YOU don't get it. It's NOT YOUR PROPERTY, you RENT IT FROM THEM.
"And the evil enemies of the binary revolution were defeated...again, but they'll be back..."
now if i owned a HD-DVD or a Blu-Ray player i'd be set....
"Stallman says add to this code and you are one of us. Gates says use this code and you belong to us."
I think Digital Right Management is dead. For most law abiding citizens will buy legitimate media from their appropriate sources and pay for it and don't want to worry about the CD/DVD police knocking on their door. However for those who love a challenge of doing something illegal no matter what so they will always find a way to bypass these things. It is waste of time for companies to make more complicated DRM so they can "generate" revenue.
Yarrr, matey! A thousand gold dubloons will be paid to the scalleywags who bring me the first release of a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD ripper! Yo ho and a bottle of Yoo-Hoo!
Signed,
Blu-Beard The Pirate
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Not to sound too pedantic, but DRM of some form still has a place. DRM should be there to discourage casual copying by non-geek people. For example, the DRM on DVD's is functionally useless against anyone who has spent an hour looking things up on the internet. But my sister still doesn't know how to burn duplicate DVD's for her friends... it's just not worth the effort to her to find out.
And maybe I have some not-so selfless interest in the subject, but old PS1 games had a light degree of copyprotection that ensured players who weren't savvy with a soldering iron couldn't copy games, and the ones who really wanted to, could. But those are the ones who still can anyway, despite massive expenditures and the closure of many legitimate retailers / gamers / hobbyists.
DRM needs to be put into proper perspective... it's a deterrent, not a lock. It's a mild annoyance like those old "register your shareware now" messages that keep ordinary people from slipping into bad habits. It's not an excuse to install a backdoor on everyone's machine, it's not a reason to throw kids in jail, it's not a good use of 20 million dollars of RnD. It's a mild deterrent.
In proper position in the overall ecosystem, DRM can be quite useful. Just keep it light, and you'll get 90% of the goodness for just 5% of the annoyance.
The ______ Agenda
There's another option to having the key exist in a register or a memory location, though, assuming eliminating software players (or eliminating them on anything but Vista x64; that ought to make Microsoft happy) is out of the question. The old NeTrek clients used "software RSA blackboxes" to try and prevent hacked clients. While I'm sure there's plenty of holes to poke in that (blessed binaries were more of a stumbling block for the technically inept than a bulletproof protection), the idea is still sound: Instead of having the key exist in a memory location for someone to stumble across with a debugger, the key exists as code, with the algorithm already configured. This avoids compromising the key, although it's still somewhat trivial just to take that lump of code and use it to do your decoding. But it at least gets around the problem of exposing the key itself, if that were somehow important. You'd have to disassemble the binary to reconstruct the key, and that is definitely a hard problem. In fact, it's a theoretically impossible one, though it's not usually so hard in practice.
I believe they actually want them to be cracked. Here's my reasoning:
;) It completely destroys the ability for legitimate
Once they have vista and AACS in place they can revoke the ability to play a DVD on a per title basis.
Then when a "nasty pirate" cracks the DVD code they can revoke the code for all copies of that DVD.
Now all copies of that DVD will not play, or will only play at poor
quality (correct me if I misunderstood this part).
The revocation for their protection, to prevent piracy, of course! All the legitimate
users are now just the owners of an expensive coaster instead of a movie. Hey, they might even offer an
exchange program, for a discounted fee of course.
users to own DVDs. Everyone will be forced to rent DVD's instead of owning them, because of the "rampant
piracy". And as a side effect, their sales go up because you pay every time you watch a movie, not just
once.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
There! You see? You don't need to spend millions developing a DRM scheme. Sooner rather later it *will* be broken. That money could have been spent on unifying the HD formats to one. Stupid lard brains!
..I'm only 33 and I can remember using a 300 baud modem BITD...
...if the RIAA revoked, say, WinDVD's key and declined to provide them with a new one on proof of "better" coding. Joe Public sees his WinDVD cease to work and promptly raises class actions left, right and center against the shop that sold him his DVD, the company that sold him his PC, the media companies themselves, the individuals that broke the encryption - it'd be mayhem.
the only people who'll win out of this are the lawyers. want to know why lawyers need such big salaries? IT'S BECAUSE THEY'LL BE THE ONLY ONES SPENDING ALL THEIR CASH ON ORIGINAL HD-DVD MOVIES.
Hey, if your piracy story doesn't check out you just make sure to alienate your customers so much that it's actually less of a hassle to risk legal problems and download a DVD image with the ads removed. Bam, suddenly your piracy story works...
Seriously, the studios seem to be pretty desperate to keep people from buying their products.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
So, has anyone managed to program the PS3 to decrypt a Blu-Ray movie disk yet?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
If the player can play it, it can be broken. The only thing you can do is make it difficult. It's like preventing software piracy. For every month of development time for copy protection, you delay a determined and knowledgeable attacker for maybe an hour. This is just another fine example of that truth. If they'd have spent 10 years and 2 billion dollars instead it would have just taken an additional two weeks to break. Don't they get it? This will never change.
As long as the DRM has been properly broken before I buy the unit, I'm happy. Kudos to you, keep up the good work.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"All this DRM does is allow movie companies to continue their questionable practice of price discrimination using artificial region locks and allows the media conglomerates to govern how and when you watch the content, extending copyright artificially."
That'd be well and good, but HD-DVD has no region locking... You can buy an HD-DVD from anywhere (and lots of people do - mainly because there's a lot of titles that are Blu-Ray exclusive in the States that are being released on HD-DVD in Europe, such as Rambo, Saw, etc. not to mention the fact that you can get Harry Potter Goblet of Fire on HD-DVD in the UK, but not in the states (yet).
Dude, if you have a High Def TV, and an XBox 360, and either Vista or Media Center edition of windows you can stream those Ripped HD DVD's or Blue Ray DVD's you downloaded to your 360 over your home network in high def...therefore you are correct in your assessment that you do not need the HD DVD player or be a sucker that got the betamax of 2007, however, you can enjoy the benefits right now...you may need Transcode 360 which I still can't get to work.
I think the end goal for the MPAA would be something like forcing your DVD HD BR whatever player to be connected to the Internet and you must register your player SN and each DVD SN. Then, the unique key from each DVD would be registered to your specific player. (if we are lucky, we can register more than one player) Then on top of that, the use of Public and Private keys would *authorize* the player to allow you to start playing the disk. For extra security, they could require you to use social security or some other private number as a password to encourage you to not share it.
Please note that I don't have all the details worked out for the above scenario, but if they REALLY, REALLY want to lock down use, then this would be the way to go. Alternatively, if Broadband speeds greatly increase over the next 5-10 years we could see everything go to download based with time sensitive usage (4-8hr). No more disks. If everything used to encrypt the disk is on the disk, it doesn't matter what type of technology they *secure* it with, someone will break it.
Mike
You would just need to find what kind of HD-video content Guido is into (my guess... German lederhosen-latex porn), distract him with it and then hit him on the back of the head with a lead pipe.
Don't worry. Guido's are just genetically engineered, they are not real people, so its not murder. But it still is breaking the copyright protection.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Global Climate Change deniers.
DRM supporters.
The same bloody side of the coin.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.