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AACS Cracked Again
EmTeedee sends us to a blog post for a summary of the latest results in cracking AACS, from the Doom9 forums (as the earlier cracks have been) — after the DVD Security Group said it had patched the previous flaws. From the DLTV blog: "This time the target was the Xbox 360 HD DVD add on. Geremia on Doom9 forums has started a thread on how he has obtained the Volume ID without AACS authentication. With the aid of others like Arnezami they have managed to patch the Xbox 360 HD DVD add on... It appears that XT5 has released [an] application that allows the Volume ID to be read without the need to rewrite the firmware. This would mean that anyone could simply plug in the HD DVD drive and obtain the Volume ID from any HD DVD without the hassle of flashing it."
Owned.
No more movies! Ever! We quit!
The movie industry.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
...that head (->MPAA) that doesn't bang.
Or are their heads in the sand? Or both?
God just needs to invent a better fool. Or in this case, someone who cares about being able to watch stuff they buy, on other stuff they buy. No questions asked and no crud breaking because it thinks it's "illegal" due to some dust or something.
When will they learn? I'm remembering a phrase about old dogs and new tricks. The **AAs are very old dogs.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
It seems that the /. crowd, and the tech industry in general, knew well before AACS was ever released that it would be a flop. We knew it would do nothing to prevent disks from being copied, we knew it would do nothing but hurt the consumer, and we knew it was an utter waste of money.
Yet the movie industry pushed forward, and look where it got them... exactly where we said it would, nowhere.
I can't wait until they realize that it's not worth it, and just stop concerning themselves with copy-protecting their media and instead focus on creating good movies.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Someone really needs to fire whomever the MPAA uses for deciding on security for these things. Haven't they heard the golden rule of computer security? "Security by obscurity is no security" and that's all they are doing is trying to hide a key. Find the key... no security. Sheesh....
this should finally put the nail in the coffin of this stupid effort by the HD-DVD people to try and stop people doing what they have a legal right to do (make a personal back up copy under fair use). I hope they respond by stopping the Xbox player from playing HD-DVDs and then we can finally lose the whole damn crappy format
Next stop - PS3 and Blu-ray!
I'd try to crack the stuff from a number of different fronts, but keep quiet until I've cracked a few. With several cracks and exploits found, I'd be able to start working on higher level cracks, due to understanding the system.
Then I'd start releasing the cracks, starting with some of the simpler ones, only releasing another when they patch the exploit I released, resulting in an ongoing sense of futility as every time they fix the holes, I point out another.
Best exploit I think? Stealing or cracking the key to every code created for the discs. That way they'd have to throw the whole system out in order to achieve 'security' again. No current players would work. While a massive beowolf cluster cracking the whole thing would be neat and worthy of the NSA, I think that's unlikely. More possible but still pretty much 'mission impossible' would be a physical theft. If only the DVD Security Group protected those keys like government officials protect our information*...
hm...
*Yes, I'm still a bit irked about having my info stolen at least three times
I don't read AC A human right
I was reading parent post and did a double-take, as what I got of it was:
...which in a way seemed to make total sense, there is a perverse part of myself that thinks that this is almost where we are headed.
"I can't wait until they realize that it's not worth it, and just stop concerning themselves with creating good movies, and instead focus full-time on copy-protecting their media."
Z.
So, how long until my XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive, which I've yet to use even once (waiting for support in Leopard), officially becomes a doorstop, boatanchor, call-it-what-you-will?
"I could have you[r HD-DVD drive] revoked."
"Revoked?"
"Yeah, K-I-L-L-E-D, revoked."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The race is on, let me tell you from the perspective of online gaming and the cheat vs cheat detection wars:
;)
The hackers have the edge.
But if you develop the AACS standard at least you have job security
...this is just barely 24 hours after they announced it was fixed? Great work to those involved. Hell I can't get a change approved in 24 hours!
That really wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. There's a huge demand for movies, but they're expensive to make and the current movie industry sucks up most of the available investment dollars. There's no "secret sauce" involved in making a movie; it's just very, very expensive, and the people with enough cash to bankroll a film would rather go with an established, sure bet, rather than taking a chance on someone or something new.
If the current players just decided to pack up and go home, the new industry that would rise up in its place would doubtless be a lot more creative -- at least in the short term -- and we'd probably see a lot of new material out of it. In time, it would probably stagnate, too, because that's the way of things.
The main problem with the current situation is that the dinosaur companies have bought protection for their business models from the government, and essentially have propped themselves up. There's nothing bad with companies getting big, but there's also nothing that says they have a "right" to stay in business, either. Failing business models deserve to die, and the companies that rely on them deserve to die, too; when they don't, you're stopping what ought to be a natural economic progression.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
While I think everybody has been making good points so far, you have to remember that in the long term copy protection is actually winning. While these measures might be meant in name to stop piracy, their true value is in taking out fair use as collateral damage. The goal of DRM is not to stop piracy, but to make it difficult enough that Joe User will not be able to convert or make backups through a point and click interface. If this copy protection has done that, then it is making them money.... shame all it does is hurt the people who legitimately buy their products.
Doesn't the lack of HDMI output on the 360 make this a bit of a pointless exercise?
Summation 2
What if the famed power of the PS3 were utilised to break the AACS for every blue-ray disk ?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Another Aacs Crack Soon
Here's an outlandish idea:
Microsoft and Toshiba screwed this up on purpose to undermine the AACS. Defective by Design, sure, but this is probably one of the few times that it ROCKS.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
is the part where they left the commands in the firmware to "poke" into the drive's memory. That's just... not good for security. Alas, you still need access to the key from the MKB to create the processing key using the VolumeID, so there's still work to do.
When will all the various DRMorons figure out that whatever they create WILL get cracked. They can't win. What a bunch of wasted time & effort! If they adapted their business model to current technology they might see an increase in sales.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
When will they ever learn? What they can conceive, we can circumvent. Either the MPAA/RIAA will bow to consumer demand by (providing content at a much lower price) or they might as well close up shop. Really now, do actors need to be making 12 million dollars for a film? I think not. Likewise, start at the corporate top, and start making salary cuts at the CEO-level.
Might even make sence for them to produce two versions of the movies:
of course pirates would still try and rip the add free discs, and or remove the ads from the free version, but it might remove the incentive for many people to pirate the non free disks. I mean, most still watch tv with ads, instead of tivo-ing it and skipping the commercials or downloading it without commercials, right?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This is some sweet hacking.
How ironic that we need to hack hardware that we ourselves own.
Yup - no concievable way I can get a key for my own use to unlock the lock. Can't be done - not even gonna try! All those other cracks I've heard about - I know that none of them could possibly have worked, the *AA has seen to it that the deCSS debacle can't be repeated, right?
Tell ya what - I don't even pay attention to this - let me know when a movie worth watching comes out on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD and I'll start to pay attention - so far, the folks at *AA can just color me unimpressed!
joe user doesn't have to have a ripping utility to regain fair use from this copy protected media.
hd-dvd and bd rips have been showing up on trackers as early as the first crack, and to make things even cushier from a fair use perspective, the media files are generally small enough to burn to a single layer dvd-r (or at most double-layer).. much more accessible to joe user than an overpriced bd or hd-dvd burner (do those even exist yet? how many thousands if they do exist?)
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
There are plenty of entertainment options. You can watch regular TV, videos on YouTube or just take a walk in the park. Why go out of the way to patronize people who are not willing to serve content the way you like it?
I think you definitely have a point, but I think it may be like debating the relative merits of the poem versus a 1,000 page novel. They both have their place.
One of the reasons I think serialized TV shows have become popular lately is because they're not controlled by the big movie studios, at least not as directly. (Yeah, they're mostly bankrolled by the networks, and they're mostly owned by the same handful of media companies, but they're further from the centers of power.) There have been opportunities for and evidence of creativity in mainstream TV that just hasn't been seen in mainstream cinema in a while, and I don't think it's really because of the format itself. That probably helps, but really I don't think there's any fundamental superiority between a short film (think 5-10 mins), a traditional picture (90-120 mins), and a serialized show (as many hours as you want, usually in 20 or 45 minute semi-contained chunks, with seasonal plot arcs of ~10 hrs).
There's a lot of pretty dreadful TV out there, too (daytime soaps?), underlining the point that length may give you a bigger canvas, but it doesn't really make the painting any better. And not to mention the very good movies made over the past century, many of which probably wouldn't be good as serials.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That took longer than I thought it would.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
I don't know if I'd call those <DVD-size downloads HD-DVD "rips".
We could call them...I don't know...Is "shreds" taken?
If I post like this, it's redundant. Quit saying, cuz I've seen some redundantly repetitive first posts. Not this one, but I have seen some posts that completely repeat themselves quite frequently.
That's the best news I've read all week!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Sure, the money is a nice-to-have feature, but what DRM is about is control. Controling what you may see and what you may not (or no longer) see.
When a movie cannot be seen anymore, you can sell the same script again (as a "new and improved" version). When a song can't be played anymore, you can sell the remix, no matter how crappy it is. Nobody could prove that Han fired first because "the director changed his mind and thinks it's better that way". What you like about a movie doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter anymore if you liked an earlier version of a movie or song better, because it does not exist anymore.
Of course this game can be played by governments as well, if they don't want you to see/hear something because it is "inappropriate" for you. Freedom of speech? Sure, say what you want, but nobody ever said anything about some kind of freedom to listen or see.
Or to be heard.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Thanks for playing. Try again later.
If someone really wanted to hurt the AACS system they would find and release the playback keys for the top 10 standalone players preferably after one of the formats has achieved success. If the top 10 players suddenly couldn't play the discs anymore and a lot of people had the players, the difficulty in reflashing all those players by the common public would either hurt sales SEVERELY or cause them to not revoke the players for fear of the damage it would do to the reputation of the hi def format.
So if you really want to hurt them, pull out your soldering iron and pull those keys from the standalone players.
Money doesn't guarantee a movie will be good, but it does heavily indicate the movie won't be appallingly bad.
Except for Van Helsing. Sadly, I watched the entire thing because of a promise - trying to disprove a comment of "this movie has no redeeming value whatsoever"; I didn't think it was possible to spend $200 million and not have SOMETHING worth seeing.
I spent the last 90 minutes of that atrocity thinking up unique and interesting ways to gouge out my eyeballs.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Why do you guys so badly want to remove the DRM? If you have the disc, then your HD-DVD player will play it, so why strip the DRM? I've heard people saying, "Well, I want to transfer the movie to my iPod", to which I say, "Bullshit". Nobody gives a damn about watching a highdef movie on an iPod. So if you can, please provide legit reasons for "stealing or cracking the key to every code created for the discs". I know there are plenty of illegit reasons, but list some legit ones.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
"If they adapted their business model"? WTF is that supposed to mean? You mean, simply give the movies away for free and live off of "support"? Explain what you mean, if you will.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
"Interesting" x 5!
Smart input - MOD UP.
hackerkey://v4sw5/7BCHJMPRUY$hw3ln3pr6/7FOP$ck6ma8+9u6L$w4/7CGUXm0l6DLRi82NCe3+9t5Sb7HMOPRen5a17s0DSr1/2p-3.62/-5.23g3/5
Seriously, I used to buy that argument until I stopped wasting time with major-studio movies and major-label music. I haven't looked back. If that whole alleged "industry" were to disappear tomorrow I wouldn't miss it for a second, and I'd probably have an even wider array of independent local (and non-local) filmmakers and musicians to enjoy.
What's the big bad scary secret these middlemen-industries don't want you to know? They aren't necessary.
They aren't really that scared you're going to copy Pirates of the Carribean. I mean, sure, they would rather you not. But that's not what's keeping them up at night. What is scaring them is that without locked-down video and music playing hardware devices, anybody can make music or a movie and anybody can watch and listen to them. They've built their fortunes by standing in between artists and people who want art. And the technology just doesn't leave much of a place for them anymore.
All's true that is mistrusted
It's always nice when a crack applies to the largest installed base. Makes attempts to close it up all that much harder for the copyright mafia.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When will the DRM devs learn that it's generally a poor idea to encrypt stuff, and then send the encryption keys along?
Sure, it's hard to do otherwise in case they don't want to require an Internet connection to play pretty much anything, but that's when you should start realising that pumping R&D money in DRM techs is just a big waste of money.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
85 Megabucks to get Three Golden Raspberries. Kudos to Halle Berry for accepting hers with style, not to mention graciously thanking everyone who had helped her get there.
I suspect some more comparing via the BoxOfficeProphets.com database with the list of Razzie winners and nominees could turn up a few other coprolites.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
...and you know everyone loves a good puzzle!
...I consider this a selling point in favor of HD-DVD.
Please guys, start working on Blu-ray too. We want the DRM in both formats to be useless.
The difference is that television shows are mostly controlled by the writers. Movies are controlled by the director, the writer just works on the film like the carpenter building a set.
Pwned. Geez, it's like you've never played Urban Terror before.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Anally Anti-Consumer Security?
And recursive:
AACS Adds Cracked Security!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Sorry, while that would have worked for DVD players (had CSS not been so utterly braindead as to make it unnecessary), it won't work for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. The key revocation scheme in AACS allows individual players -- not brands of players or even models of players, individual physical units -- to be separately revoked. So, if you extracted the keys from one unit of each of the top 10 models, and published them so they'd be revoked, you'd have succeeded in disabling exactly 10 players. All other units of those 10 models would continue to work fine.
No, the thing to do is to extract the keys from one player, and then start extracting media keys from each movie published and put them in an on-line database. Put this centralized database in a county where the laws allow it, and get people all over the world to mirror it, and contribute to it.
They could defeat this attack by using media keys that are unique per disk, but that would make disk production vastly more expensive, since they couldn't just create a master image and stamp out copies.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Personally, I like listening to everything but the center speaker. Or even just the left and right channels on an iPod. Then I entertain thoughts about how fun it would be to create a season-long parody of it, substituting alternate dialog in the center channel. Maybe call it "Funny Tor".
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I know this is a waste of time, but..
The slashdot crowd seem to love news like this, and claim that copy protection etc limit freedom and choice. However, what if I choose to sell a piece of software, and not follow the OSS model? Where is my freedom from piracy? OSS and proprietry software both have their place, and if you don't believe in the right to sell software without having it pirated, you might just be a hypocrite...
Interesting, and very likely correct. I was under the naieve assumption that the manufacturers would be generating player keys themselves. That, of course, would be foolish from the AACSLA perspective.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If you're interested in the details, the specifications are available on the AACSLA web site, http://www.aacsla.com/
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
this same argument can be made for shutting down lowes to protect home depot, or shutting down the airlines to protect the railroads, or shutting down the auto industry to protect the buggy whip manufacturers.
no business has a "right" to sales. "potential sales" are only that, potential. every local restaurant around here has "potential sales" "stolen" from it by the others.. maybe we should shut down everything but fridays because fridays lost potential sales to longhorn steakhouse, sidelines grill, or ruby tuesday.
oh wait.. those are all huge companies, and only individuals are fair game for stripmining consumer and civil liberties.
and don't confuse copyright with real rights we should be guaranteed through constitutional limitation of government power, copyright was merely "allowed".. it is a priviledge granted ONLY for the promotion of progress. at this point it can best be classified as "regress".. oh wait.. bad pun comming!... "CONGRESS!"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
it's not my fault a group of teens and twenties in their garages and college dorms are vastly better at video encoding than the cartel mastering houses
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Well, they think they are. That's for sure. But if you want a horribly compressed DVD5 at 720p, why not take the DVD9, resize it to 720p, then compress that to H.264. You end up with almost the same result. In other words, it has the quality of the DVD. You might as well just get the DVD.
A 15 GB MPEG-2 HD movie might compress well to a DVD9. Not a DVD5. And not the 30-45 GB Blu-Ray rips. The smallest that makes any sense for those is 2x DVD9 (9-18 GB H.264).
H.264 is damn good. But it is not magic. MD5 and SHA-1 will compress an HD movie to fit on a DVD5 too, but it's a bit lossy...
that's not the point i was making.
no.. codecs are not "magic".
however, most processing houses, rather than apply proper filtering and encoding settings, will just "throw bitrate" at the problem until it goes away.
that's why dvds and their hd counterparts are FrIcKiN HuEg LiEk XbOx.
(that, and many simply want to make the files large enough to discourage fair use by requiring more expensive dual layer media.. which until recently was not even available)
the kids actually do a proper job and trim the fat.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Companies, corporations and cartels should have no input whatsoever in the political process as dontaors, sponsors, etc.
That skews the political system on their favour, instead of finding fair solutions for everybody involved, politicians find solutions for the people that make possible for them to remain in office ( not the voters, but their campaign contributors, campaign money is what gives them a chance to get elected in the first place. Money comes before voters).
As long as US people do not drill that on their skulls and make it a high priority to get it fixed, the corporations will continue waging war by proxy against the US citizenry (and against the rest of the world by proxy, given the influence the US has politically and economically).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My ex-gf was in a scifi film made in Death Valley by a couple of kids with a VHS camcorder and I couldn't stand to watch it even though it was my girlfriend and she took her shirt off.
Where's the torrent? thx.
I'm not a coward, just I dont see a point on stupid registering in every webpage for a single reply to a single article. :)))
The DRM will never beat the users, this was just another prove of PurePwnage
Yeah, I've been a fan since the early 2.x releases, and now it turns out this guy who runs the main studio where we've been recording is a huge fan.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.