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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.
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....
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.
I know what your saying and I agree with it, but having the legal right to make a copy doesn't mean that they don't have the right to try and stop you. I just wish that they would realize that most people like to buy stuff, I know I like to buy DVDs it makes me feel warm and fuzzy to be like "Hey I bought the whole (insert show or movie) series". But the truth is that its too expensive to buy everything I would like to. Production costs at this point of the DVD release have usually been covered(excluding making the menu releasing extra content and having a commentary that I never listen to except on south park dvds) the packaging and DVD for a season of south park is about 50 dollars canadian when it comes out. It probably cost them 5 dollars to make(my guess and some might say it was high some might say it was low theres 3 dvds in there with graphic lables and casing and maybe shipping not sure if the store pays for that or not) so lets say the store like HMV or Best Buy makes about 10 dollars off of the sale. Thats 35 dollar profit for the manufacture. Lets say you pay Matt Stone and Trey Parker to do their commentaries for it, they probably get a % of sales. so if you sell 100,000 dvds of one season you get 3.5 million dollars, say matt and trey take 10% each the studio is left with 2.8 million.
if you reduced the cost so that a box set costs 40 dollars using the same numbers you end up with 2 million. This gives you less profit right? Well if people are more willing to buy a dvd at 40 dollars and you get 150 000 dvd sales you end up with a final profit of 3.75 3 million dollars. Your making more money. I know nothing and I'm bored so don't take me too cereal. I know people will still pirate dvds but people will always pirate dvds, you won't stop them. Use the money that your putting into research to reduce the cost of the product and sell it and I bet you will have less people pirating or at least buying a legit copy after pirating or before making a backup. I know I would.
I find it bad form that I've paid 8*45+20(best of volume was cheaper) for my south park dvd collection. Thats almost 400 dollars. come to think of it that seems insane, and thats not my only collection. Most people can't aford that and I can see why they pirate or make backups. Would you want to go out and spend that again if your DVD got wrecked by a scratch?
Another Aacs Crack Soon
It's not a matter of one cracked key being easy, and another being hard. The fact of the matter is that once you crack a device, it's wide open, there is no more cracking left to be done on that device. It also means that once you crack one device, you have access to all the movies published to date, so cracking another device doesn't gain you anything.
From my understanding, the AACS system is already a very well understood system. It is actually documented and available for public viewing. The way these people are obtaining keys is by finding design flaws in the way different devices implement the system. For WinDVD, it was found that one of the keys is available in system memory at a given point while loading the disc content, and could be captured by reading the right memory address. I'm sure something similar is happening with the XBox360 keys.
The WinDVD key was revoked by AACS, and future movies will not be playable on the cracked version of WinDVD, but a free upgrade to WinDVD will use a new key that cannot be obtained the same way. Revoking the XBox key for future movies will be more problematic, since it would presumably require a firmware upgrade, and making the HD-DVD's most popular playback device unable to play the newest blockbuster movie won't be good for HD-DVD sales.
Brute-force cracking all, or even a small number, of the AACS device keys would take years, probably tens or hundreds of years (I'm not sure exactly what the device key length is). Finding ways to make a playback device give up that information is much faster and easier. Further more, once you crack a single device key, you can get the encryption key for the content of any movie, then anybody can decrypt that movie based on that key, without need of the device or device key. Going back to the WinDVD keys, any movie encrypted with the old WinDVD key can now be decrypted, making a whole generation of HD movies available DRM-free.
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