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New AACS Crack Called "Undefeatable"
Tuoqui writes "With all the focus on the infamous hexadecimal number, people may be ignoring a bigger weakness in the AACS armor, which emerged two weeks ago. Some hackers have figured out how to crack AACS in a way that cannot be defeated, even by revoking all the keys in circulation."
.... Then maybe media companies will give up this DRM non-sense which does nothing but frustrate consumers and slow the adoption rate of digital media in the mass market.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Punishing legitimate customers since it's inception. I got reminded of this again today after not being able to play a DVD in my Powerbook because of region encoding. Funny thing is, this DVD is only really of extreme local interest and any outside interest/sales are negligible - since it's only sold in one region so why do the authors enforce region encoding? Do they not know what it is?
Maybe it's better to pirate afterall. Less hassles that way.
If they didn't learn anything from the countless other times this has happened to other forms of DRM, I don't know what makes you think they'll learn anything from this one.
you are attempting to control the flow of ones and zeros in a world where an electronic communication system designed to withstand a nuclear attack is now ubiquitous
you should give up. you've lost, and will keep losing. it's just silly to keep going down this path. there is only more pain in store for you
people will still make movies. people will still make music. it's just that your particular pre-internet business model is now obsolete
go ask the aztecs or the incans if the appearance of new technology was fair to their empires
it wasn't. but it didn't stop technology in the form of gunpowder and sailing ships and metal armor from rendering them obsolete
so it is with you and the internet
sorry
reality is a bitch
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Keep your eyes to the sky.
Them: "Hey, want to buy a movie?"
You: "Sure, how much?"
Them: "$100,000,000.00."
You: "F*** off."
Them: "Sorry, that was the price to purchase all rights to the movie, including redistribution and royalties. Would you like to buy a subset of those rights instead?"
You: "Sure, like what?"
Them: "How about, the right to public exhibition, and reproduction of media for sale, but no royalties? That'll be just $5,000,000.00."
You: "No thanks, too much."
Them: "How about, the right to public exhibition? Just $500,000.00."
You: "Do I look like I'm made of money?"
Them: "Sorry. How about, the right to private exhibition? Only $5."
You: "Now you're talkin'!"
Them: "So we have a deal?"
You: "Yep." [you hand them a fiver, and they hand you a DVD.]
Them: "Have a nice day."
You: "Hey, wait, this DVD is copy-protected! I want to copy it!"
Them: "Yes, sorry, we didn't sell you the right to do that. If you have more money -- equal to the amount we'll lose on average for each copy-producing customer -- you can buy that right too."
You: "But I paid for this!" [you shake the DVD at them]
Them: "Do you understand that you paid for limited ownership, and that you consented to the limits stated and known to you at the time of sale?"
You: "No, I'm too dumb-stupid to grasp that. I can only handle concrete meanings of the idea of ownership."
Them: "Yeah, we figured. You probably also think HOAs are usurping your god-given right to paint your house pink, eh?"
Certainly the movie studios are obnoxiously attempting to prevent format-shifting, in order to sell you the same movie twice. But that doesn't mean they are violating any of your rights.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
And that is because hackers are much better at retaining tribal knowledge. Hackers tend to stay around a while, as their physical presence and on-line presence are disparate things, while corp. drones move to new jobs, taking the little bits of knowledge with them, as their on-line presence and physical presence within the company are immutable. New company, new on-line & physical presence, you are completely unavailable to your old company (there are exceptions of course, but the norm is the overwhelming majority).
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Interestingly enough, there is a very real defeat of the DMCA here: massive disobedience.
The DMCA is an unpopular law passed by surreptitious means. The more people run into it, the more they're disgusted with it.
Most Americans don't feel that it is ethically wrong to behave in ways that the DMCA marks as illegal. Worse, they're inconvenienced by the law and are actively looking for workarounds for the technology it impacts.
The Digg vs. Hex number story is a good example. Digg tried to comply with the law, but its users revolted and forced the site's admins to acquiesce. Even if Digg is shut down by federal authorities, arresting thousands of users for posting a 32bit number is going to prove... difficult.
The RIAA's spam lawsuit settlements have proven that it's massively difficult and probably more trouble than it's worth to go after widespread casual copyright infringement. Widespread casual DMCA infringement, like many other 'casual' crimes simply won't be prosecutable to the degree even the most vicious police force would like.
The Doom9 Xbox crack is much the same. It's certainly a very technical challenge to the AACS scheme. Both its undertaking and disseminating how it's done is illegal under the DMCA. However, nobody cares any more.
What's the worst that can happen? You get arrested, have to pay a fine, and maybe even go to jail. The RIAA is already trying to apply that same punishment to innocent people.
Obeying this law doesn't even carry the benefit of being free from prosecution. Why should anyone worry about breaking it if those behind it are going to press charges anyway?
The DMCA is dead-- killed by apathy.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Or, there's always "Hey, I want to exercise my rights under fair use laws, which have always existed and which you don't have to pay a penny for." Or "Hey, I want to exercise my private-exhibition right (which I paid you for) on a platform of my choosing." Or "I want to make a backup of this, so I can continue to exercise that private-exhibition right (which, again, I paid you for) if my kids scratch the crap out of the original." It's not quite so black-and-white as you put it there.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Except for one thing... That's not what they're selling.
They are selling you an entire physical copy, which you can do whatever the hell you want, short of selling copies.
Look at their advertising. They don't say, "Purchase a license to private exhibition today!" They say, "Own it on HD-DVD, today!!!".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
There is a rule in security: "Don't Prohibit what you can't Prevent" [1]. The same rule applies to laws.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Them: "Do you understand that you paid for limited ownership, and that you consented to the limits stated and known to you at the time of sale?"
No because it was never explained to anyone buying a DVD nor is it printed in legible and readable size fonts on the DVD. Also the Advertising done for said DVD is the reverse of that by proclaiming "OWN IT TODAY!"
therefore, your contract is null and void because it was not presented at the time of sale AND your advertising suggest the reverse of what you claim your contract to say.
I would give THEM the benefit of the doubt if they made that fact clear. They do not because they know for a fact it will significantly impact DVD sales in a bad way.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's fair to some extent. But remember:
1)Legally, you have a right to make fair-use excerpts. DRM prevents that.
2)Legally, everything goes into the public domain eventually. DRM prevents that.
3)DRM is an enabling technology for censorship (eg "un-leakable documents") Do we really want that?
Lastly, there is NO natural right to the so-called "intellectual property". Society grants a temporary monopoly to artists as a concession.
In the most pedantic sense, you're right. Nothing in copyright law dictates that the copyright owner make access to copyrighted works easy. Copyright law merely dictates that there are certain actions that an owner of a copy may not perform without the copyright owner's permission - namely distribution and public performance. The original intent was to insure that only the copyright owner could profit from distribution so that they'd be incented to create creative works.
The bit of the equation that violates my (and everyone else's rights) is the DMCA which says that it's illegal for the first guy to workaround the DRM to tell me and everybody else how he did it (remember, computer software is "speech" in the first ammendment sense). As soon as that law is properly neutered, then all will once again be right with the world.
Copyright law used to work just fine back in the days when making a copy of a copyrighted work was non-trivial. In the digital domain, because making a copy of a work is trivial, it is virtually impossible to police. As we have seen, DRM only makes it slightly more inconvenient for a little while.
Where this leads us, I don't know. The current system of copyrights is irreparably broken. Some new system based on the notion that copies are easy and trivial to create will need to replace it. But the problem there is that you need to compensate artists for their work. The Spiderman movie cost many hundreds of millions of dollars to create. If you want movies like that to be made in the future, then some way to gather those hundreds of millions to do it will need to be found. But there's more to copyright than huge Hollywood productions - it needs to work for the garage band selling CD-Rs at their concerts too.
No, Digg did MUCH MORE than simply try to comply with a DMCA takedown notice.
They censored all discussion critical of their actions. They banned users critical of them, even those who never posted the number. They deleted all commentary that pointed out their previous sponsorship by the AACS-LA, and banned anyone attempting to bring this to light.
Their apology pretended like they had never deleted or banned anyone for simple dissent, or even banned anyone, only just deleted the magic number. Even after the apology, they continued to suppress stories calling attention to their censorship of pure, non-infringing dissent speech and mention of their financial relationship with the AACS-LA.
THAT is what much of the Digg revolt was about. It's a LOT more than just the number. Here are a couple good articles with the real truth. The Digg folks would like nothing more than for everyone to believe this was ONLY about a 16 byte number. Please read these and next time you see this mistruth, you'll know better.
Digg fights user revolt over HD-DVD ban - Digg founders took HD-DVD sponsorship.
Digg still isn't telling the whole truth about its HD-DVD sponsorship
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
This is not just true with technology law. People obey laws because they are what they normally would do anyway, aren't overly inconvenienced by it, or it only affects a small percentage of people. Laws aren't effective ways to change behavior, which is why I just shake my head at all the folks who want more regulation to "fix" something.
Speed to work anyone?
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
i wonder why they didnt use a zero knowledge protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof to defend them disks, bundling the keys with the cds is only delaying the inevitable
Most users wouldn't be satisfied with being able to prove mathematically that the movie they wanted to watch really was on the disk, but still have zero knowledge of what it actually looked and sounded like.
I takes a bit of work to invert only one part and stay grammatically correct but Sécurité en Terme de Formats Indésirables would work.
We should concentrate on the garage bands and videos. Let the studios wither and die. Power to the People!!! and all that crap.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Because Satellite TV companies control the transmission and encryption...
The difference is that for HD-DVD you have both the source and the player, where for Satellites you have only the player and they can change the source to disable whatever smartcard was emulated.
Changing the source for already-shipped HD-DVDs is troublesome, at best.
I agree completely, and what baffles me even more about people accepting Kevin Rose's repsonse is that IT WAS NOT EVEN AN APOLOGY!
Nowhere in it did they admit wrong doing or say "I'm sorry". He only said "we get it." What is that shit??
Not to mention that the digg community would probably not have been mad if they removed posts with the numbers by court order, and were open about the process (like Slashdot did). Instead, they removed references to the numbers which the MPAA had not yet even complained about, and also banned the users! (none of which is required by the DMCA)
And, to add icing to the cake, rather than being open about this and saying "look, we're removing these posts because we have to, we're sorry! write your comgressman about the DMCA." Instead, they deleted stories and posts in secret, and hoped that the truth would not come out.
Why are people so willing to forgive Digg's admins for this offense without even an apology??
It's cool to complain, but when everyone is making idiotic complaints about slashdot not having the content they want to view, it just becomes tiring. In most threads, I have to skip about 5 to 10 comments where some bitch is whining about how they think there shouldn't be a funny moderation. When did everyone become such a little bitch?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So what? It's the content that sells the format, not the other way around. The studios can pick whatever standard they see fit, Sony's the one who has to sell the BlueRay dream to them to make their R&D profitable. I'd say the studios are in an excellent position to ask for a little financial assurance that they aren't releasing their content in an armored car made of aluminum foil.