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Censoring a Number
Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?
Remember De-CSS?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
There's a saying in the (physical) lock business. I am not in it, so I may have the wording wrong, but the gist is:
In the safe business, safes are rated by how long they take to crack. They never claim to be uncrackable.
Trying to make DRM better than locks and safes in the real world is futile.
If ever a story deserved to be tagged hex09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 then it's this one. Remember, your tag must start with an alphabetical character, and it takes a lot more tagging than it used to to get up there in lights.
How long must a number be to be copyrightable? Any digital file, including programs, can be written as a number, yet obviously pictures and programs can be copyrighted. The number 1 cannot be copyrighted, but the 98641-decimal-digit number corresponding to the original Super Mario Bros. ROM images can be. Where is the line drawn? Can cryptographic keys be copyrighted? Can the MPAA use a (long) key containing a copyrightable image so that the cryptographic key is copyrighted as well?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I wonder if you'd get busted passing around this one:
0
13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,64
or this one
1001 11111001 00010001 00000010 10011101 01110100 11100011 01011011 11011000 01000001 01010110 11000101 01100011 01010110 10001000 11000000
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
The processing key works with both HD-DVD and Bluray, unlike the summary that mentions only HD-DVD.
Use their own weapons against them! Let's learn from Turk 182 and use that same method. Who is going to be the first one to decorate MPAA property with 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 ?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Well, you may have a point about Cory in particular, I take exception to your use of the term "anyone". The majority of the world lives outside the US and therefore should not feel intimidated by its laws.
These people seem to crack it using Windows based soft-players using the X-Box USB attachment (USB connection is the unencrypted weak link). Perhaps the MPAA should leave the bloggers alone and look at what Microsoft is doing.
Microsoft is a cancer that attaches itself in an security sense to everything it touches...
My little Linux and tech blog
On a serious note, I am the owner of hdkeys.com, and I have felt the full brunt of this censorship. I established the site back when BackupHDDVD was released, and modified the source adding the ability for the program to automatically retrieve volume keys from the site when they were not found in the local key database. In addition, there was a searchable form on the index page where you could lookup keys. At first, I received a DMCA takedown sent to my dedicated host provider (Layered Technologies), demanding that my hosted copy of BackupHDDVD be removed. This demand arrived at the same time Sourceforge received a similar letter. A month or so passed by and I received another letter, this time through my registrar, GoDaddy, demanding that I remove all the volume keys from the site or be sued out of house and home. In addition, the second letter dictated that I must call the law firm and inform them that I have complied. I complied, but did not notify them. The site has been offline since then. As far as I'm concerned, they demanded something of me, it's up to them to confirm that I have complied. So in recap, I've been threatened, strong armed, and intimidated (you should have read those letters), via my webhost and registrar for simply hosting:
A) A textbook implementation of the AACS protocol and
B) Hex strings
Yeah, America rules.
mmm...muffins
For the unitiated, that's a reference to Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.
The mere fact that geeks regularly cooperate on a massive scale (i'd hazard the only people who cooperate on a larger scale are organised religions) illustrates that we do not lack the social skills necessary for our society.
If they're so upset about people saying what the processing key is, then surely they'd have no problem with saying what it's not.
-- Alastair
In fact I just started a blog about the legal side. I've never heard about a DMCA takedown based purely on a domain name before...
/
http://09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Am I the first to post Base64? "CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA"
Or, an even better idea...
If you treat the hex string as a sequence of unsigned big-endian U16s, and then look up the sequence of corresponding words in OSX's password dictionary, you get "edit view phosphor beautified sorcerous crushed kneader deadline".
88
Digg really screwed up this time. At the time of this posting their whole front-page is plastered with key related articles sharing the hex in various ways. Not to mention the other dozens of upcoming stories going up the digg rankings within minutes. The chaos reminds me of IRC channel take overs back in the day. This is truly a digital revolt. Today I am proud to be a geek.
[alk]
For extra fun, you can put the number in your user agent string. Since plenty of server logs are public, the number will be in lots of log files all over the place.
In Firefox, you can append a comment to the default existing user-agent string, by visiting about:config and adding a string property with the key general.useragent.extra.firefoxComment
Whatever you put in there is added to the end of the user agent string that is sent with every request your browser makes. Mine is now:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070426 Firefox/2.0.0.3 Version 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640
Thanks to ludwik on digg for the suggestion.
Apparently, according to the discoverer, this key also works on bluray. Almost all of the articles and posts I see forget to mention (or don't realize) that this key also works on bluray media. Either way, after reading through the forums on doom9, it seems like it was one hell of a fun endeavor. Hope the MPAA hasnt gotten their hands on the fellow. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=121866&pag e=9
The only consistency in life is the lack thereof
And here's the song.
I have a truly marvelous proof of the Riemann hypothesis which this sig is too short to contain...