Slashdot Mirror
AACS Vows to Fight Bloggers
Jonas Wisser writes "The BBC is carrying the story that AACS has promised to take action against those who have posted the AACS crack online. Michael Ayers, chairperson of AACS, noted that the cracked key has now been revoked, and went on to say, 'Some people clearly think it's a First Amendment issue. There is no intent from us to interfere with people's right to discuss copy protection. We respect free speech.' The AACS website tells consumers how they can 'continue to enjoy content protected by AACS' by 'refreshing the encryption keys associated with their HD DVD and Blu-ray software players.'"
Actually, as I said yesterday, ignore these threats. Go out and blog. Understand that freedom of speech is NOT a government-granted freedom, it is an inherent one that all people of all citizenship must understand. The U.S. Constitution's (Bill of Rights) 1st Amendment does not say "You are free to speak," it says that Congress shall make NO LAW restricting the freedom of speech -- NO law. Discussing encryption mechanisms is free speech, and Congress shall not abridge that. As for patents and trademark and the rest, as long as you do not mimic the mechanism in your own hardware or software, you're fine, Constitutionally. As long as you do not quote verbatim the actual code used to create this mechanism, you're not violating copyright. The DMCA is unconstitional, and regardless of what Congress, the Supreme Court, the President, or any company says, it is non-binding in terms of the moral realization that Congress, and honestly no State organization, can prevent you from freely airing your opinions. You are free to talk, but no one has to listen.
From yesterday's post I made about "legal recommendations for bloggers," go out and blog. Say what you want to say. There are more of us than there are of them -- not only can they not afford to go after everyone, they can not afford to go after even a small percentage. Let some bloggers get caught, and all it will do is show other people that non-violent actions should not be criminalized or penalized.
AACS, your days are numbered. Your salaries will end. Your powers will be diminished. It won't be because of competition from another company (that you are likely in bed with, in terms of promoting the abuse of State power), it will be because millions upon millions of people will ignore you, and all you do, in trying to revoke our inherent (and in my opinion, God-given) right to speak freely amongst ourselves.
Well, he certainly has that part right. What he fails to appreciate is that he will be on the losing end of every single one of those rounds. Even as he tries to downplay the key by saying it has been revoked, AACS has already lost the second round (as hackers have created a hack that CAN'T be revoked).
Always a step behind, buddy. But feel free to keep wasting your money and pissing people off.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
RC4; Base64 Encoding; Key = "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0"
t Ds1V97iWQxx ySmgi8BdedG AsLVTLLTc0J Yg11Y576o"j Ue7R919DRxl wzs_UvVSRhh nyCcADUH6Gf GSm7HfCs_iy BTwMZnuZYLI Wn1KXh6_Rx2 q3ZzeFJD5MQ nlxHfxzWhlj P8of4TEJU0k Fg3voVVPEpn ceesWk6v0rG oYSEXQH_Bo_ qmXGJlSjF"w wPLEWhn1kzs A1_faWxcxe
mI0mUyOUE8S24UAsIVqR12Z8_P1WveIRFqpBO4FEeH_TPGuc0
QDhXbGpiERffrXz6lvQpcOFlDY_AXJWGw7f9saosuSBDj7c4e
l4APCHQIzYXETWu"xkhR4MNnw7zI_mBf5YJOLJ3DKD6wSQ6Pv
ZAPkCzunB7xarymAJEOOu0fe"tdhy"rZZY5XOSiipi6vf_84x
rPfhQQNneUX"JGXWhN3bgRIZwIOoIUu8c282MQ5_Grb6ALolI
j7cWlf2G2V467N4EjnJbR"9j_4oDCytfpkQBFX0jGOCsjRYcL
HH7DzXzB2tPz7i"L1Unvljgh05d1qoFs2N38qWugtaUMGM9RX
yUXVAbsO9ZcD33UKD80sulFF0FiSxIr4NOiRv4EZBoIU3eY1F
yi4NfhRLz3ai50dbx0CWCJwlvti_gsXgQLJrE70ihDROzdUyj
9AM2M99"s2d"hQxtoj7yTTki2M4dK3Y8_wvSyM8fp5fyyDpJW
z3W8iYIMIObDRG1H914rayBqj3EPhUDsz2NfVhjYBIxHBPgeW
saZXht6YNavXOyFLh24D84kXC4weBrJsI598yUpFhg41NB694
vZaHrMlSDxODtGlaU5rfJkODjrCr99Rr6hgQaegXnHE6Oe6iK
DwDtOw3"khTuVWYDStjRd4w2eOt2wvl24XvC3iDQBIA40uJQh
29XXEh_9hplaGD1YBw6pW2yiuyW8ifdaS4Mm7IGdH"6JMgSFg
k8"H70be7kCOdyDSLX9jLkz"4MF_LD"yaYdWopVnoryVQ9YD5
RqZmxLv2loAoM5WFs2""qGG4yATAMz9zhyuc4wMPZZLiZJhTt
pNNm045ma6vnqBdwtEE00zdjJBhBjz5VMoqPS6EZvQbwbEyiU
KJdzO7ATz47fYRWQZNWjy7Uda1P8RPnhSd2FbrL"aOegRzUX_
Azf
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I don't care how hard you fight the damn cat, it's out of the bag, and it's not getting back in.
One part of the article I find funny is this:
Isn't that the point? I'm neither trying to justify nor rebuke file sharers, but think about it, man, and be practical for a change. Among those who download and share movies, who really cares about the nitty-gritty details of how keys are cracked, who all gets them, which ones get revoked, what players are and aren't affected, and so on? Most of them only care about one thing: Can I download the HD-DVD of [insert movie titles here]?
And as long as a key out there is cracked enough for the answer to that question to be "yes," the copy protection industry has lost. They can fight all they want to, but the thing is that unless they literally shut everyone down everywhere, they're doomed. As soon as one single solitary person is able to crack a key and unlock the encrypted data, all of their massive—and expensive—efforts will be in vain.
I also thought this was funny:
To Mr. Ayers, I would say this: Get real. For one thing, how many times has it been proven that your technical efforts are futile? How much more time and money are you going to waste developing something that consumers at best don't want and at worst outright resent? For another, what exactly do you plan to legally do to people who live in places where publishing the cracked keys is not illegal? As much as people like you would love to have the U.S.'s misguided laws apply to the whole world, it will never happen, and even if it did, people would still break such laws in civil disobedience.
If only they could figure out how to fight a winning battle for the hearts and minds of paying customers instead of this inevitable losing battle against people who are much, much smarter than they are, maybe everyone could be happier. This industry could sure learn a few things about the direction the music industry is headed, finally dropping DRM after realizing how useless it is.
I wonder if anyone has told these guys that the idea of an uncrackable DRM scheme is fundamentally flawed. Encryption is about A sending information that B can't read, but C can. In DRM, B and C are the same person.
It's good to see the pretty even-handed way the BBC have approached this whole issue. I fear most mainstream news agencies would probably side 100% with the AACS and their media buddies, not least due to commercial interests and parent company ownership reasons.
I guess its times like these when it is good that there still are some news organizations independent of the big media conglomerates.
we can all 'continue to enjoy content protected by AACS' by 'refreshing the encryption keys associated with their HD DVD and Blu-ray software players.'
we can all 'continue to enjoy being ignorant slaves' by 'reaffirming our desire to be shackled.'
the audacity to think of people as so supplicant to corporate will is incredible
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I know, they should copyright the encryption key so nobody else can post it. Or maybe they could patent the process of posting encryption keys on the internet. I'm sure the USPTO would grant that one.
The bag, upon further inspection, seems to be devoid of any felines! It would appear they have recently vacated said container!
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
the **AA will not win. They do not have the resources to win it, will not have the resources to win at this game, and in the end, trying to win at IWaM(TM) will only make them look more foolish than they do now.
... did I just say secure? ooops mea culpa. The reason that MS is working so hard to ensure that you can only use genuine MS OS products is simple, they are trying to not play IWaM, and even this attempt won't work. From what I can see, people who used illegal copies of MS products before ARE turning to Linux now. Even if that is not huge numbers yet, it is happening.
The part where he says over 700,000 pages on the Internet reference the code is fscking hilarious. I want to see AACS group try to sue 700,000 people. Before they even get started there would be 1.4 million more references to it on Google. That is how the IWaM game works and exactly why they can't win. The sheer volume of people working against their worn out DRM business model will overwhelm both their resources and those of the court systems around the world.
In the US it appears that the courts are still willing to waste time on this. Other countries, not so much. Sure, if they find commercial pirates distributing DVDs for profit they will shut those operations down, but there just are not enough law enforcement resources to stop this hack, or any other.
Playing IWaM = stupid and the more you play, the more money you lose. period.
Certainly, some will be harmed, and there will be small wins for the AACS group and **AAs of the world, but in the end all their money will be gone. The DMCA was ostensibly implemented to protect them from exactly this. Legislating DRM doesn't work, DRM doesn't work, and if your business model depends on DRM, it won't work either. It's time that Wall Street and VC groups started to act on this one principle. If their business model is DRM it's a bad investment.
Sure, you might argue that MS is an exception but I think that the sales performance of Vista is going to prove me right on this. MS has been trying to play Whack A Mole with malicious software and spam. Yeah, that has been working out well. Their new flagship DRM laden secure operating system
Back on topic, the lawyers for the AACS group must be staggeringly stupefied. Maybe if they make an example of Digg and Mr Rose they can send a message, and if they try, every new key will be poste in blog comments on every blogging system around the globe. They literally need to surrender and rethink what they are doing. DRM DOES NOT work.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
The real target of this action is likely a different audience, namely Hollywood. The AACS doesn't have to make their DRM undefeatable. They do need to convince their customers - and remember, that's not us - of the value of their work. And when their DRM is broken and seen to be broken, they need to convince those who want to believe that they at least have not lost faith in the cause.
So we may talk about winning and losing, and people like use may be the targets of lawsuits. But I think we may be giving ourselves airs when we assume that for the other side it's about us. If, on the other hand, we figure out who our real audience is then we have a better chance.
Slashdotters, please dont get worked up.He knows it is a stupid thing to say to a tech savvy audience. He was talking to the chumps who paid big bucks to have their movies "protected by" the DRM. Some weasel clause in the contract would say something like, "while we dont guarantee that this mechanism will never be broken, all we promise to do is to take vigorous action". He will eventually argue that issuing such ridiculous statements constitutes vigorous action. That is all.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You just got a bad transmission. I believe the full quote was
"There is no intent from us to interfere with people's right to discuss how much they love copy protection, and how good we are at building it. We respect free speech."
Surely that's what he meant to say. Otherwise he'd be some kind of idiot.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Dear helpdesk,
I am trying to ping my server at
09F9:1102:9D74:E35B:D841:56C5:6356:88C0. However,
it seems like the address is in the unallocated space.
Perhaps there's a typo somewhere?
AACS LA:
That's the Processing key. You are not allowed to publish it.
Hacker:
No sir. That's a IPv6 address. Surely you won't deny me to have links on my website? =)
The problem with barring publication of an encryption key, without more, is that it really is impossible--and I don't mean in a "the internet will route around censorship" fashion.
One of the following series of hex values, according to the AACS, cannot be published by anyone besides them:
09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-BF
09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0
09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C1
Trying to bar one of them from publication will necessarily reveal what it is. As Wikipedia is discovering, you have to be able to describe what you're not allowed to publish in sufficient detail in order to effectively prevent its publication.
With other forms of intellectual property, the problem is avoided in various ways: in order to obtain a patent, the description itself becomes public domain. In copyright, the description is bounded by the creative content of that which you create. Trademarks are delimited by "confusion in the marketplace," and trade secrets are delimited by that which is actually kept secret.
The DMCA purports to create a fifth type of intellectual property, not limited in time, that would bar distribution of information (rather than just physical devices), but has no boundaries on the AACS's theory of what constitutes a "part" of an circumvention device. The boundary becomes "whatever the AACS moves to protect as a part of a circumvention device." But in order to enforce that right, we all have to know what we're not allowed to distribute.
So maybe the AACS, in order to avoid the paradox, can seek to protect a *range* of values. The scenario just gets even more absurd.
No. The answer is really that the key, without more, cannot be afforded protection as "part" of a circumvention device. It has to be a accompanied by something more, at the very least a description of how it can be used to circumvent. Otherwise it's just a string of text.
And that's where the DMCA falls apart, as people with an interest in circumventing can always break apart the information to such a degree to avoid any one part being classified as a "part."
It's a tough problem, and it should be brought to a court to evaluate. The court in Remierdes had an easy time, because the circumvention device was whole. Fair use will have to be read into the DMCA at some point when it comes to these alleged partial circumvention devices.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
(as hackers have created a hack that CAN'T be revoked)
... so the hackers will need to go back and sniff/debug an updated software player to figure out the new Processing Key.
... so if you made a "bit-perfect" copy of a disc, the Volume ID wouldn't be there (because you can't read it and/or because you can't write it to the new disc) and you'd be missing one of the elements required to decrypt.
I spent a while trying to get my head around AACS last night, and the bottom line is that what comes out of the un-revocable hack that you mention isn't the same thing as what's being posted around the internet, and what the AACSLA has the whole revocation scheme for.
Oversimplification ahead, and I may have some of the details wrong or, but this is the gist of it: the content -- the movie itself -- is encrypted with title keys. These title keys are encrypted with a volume unique key (VUK). The VUK is composed of two parts, a media key and a Volume ID.
The Media Key is the thing that you get with the code that's being posted all over the Internet (the Processing Key). Processing Keys can be revoked, but only for new discs -- so the discs that are out in circulation as of the compromise of the Processing Key, are out. They're cracked. However, future discs will use a new Processing Key, and that one that's around on the internet won't work
The "un-revocable hack" you mentioned, doesn't have anything to do with the Media Key, it's all about the Volume ID. The purpose of the Volume ID is to prevent bit-for-bit copying. In a lot of ways it's very similar to parts of the CSS system used on DVDs right now; it's a key specific to each batch of pressed discs, written to the disc in a way that's difficult to read off manually (the drive isn't supposed to let the user see it at all), and impossible to write to a blank disc
So: while the Volume ID hack involving the XBox360 drive is a major step forwards (backwards if you're the AACS!), it's not a silver bullet, and it doesn't make future titles trivial to compromise. There's still going to be a cat-and-mouse game in the near future, where the AACS will try to revoke Processing Keys and try to discourage the publication of new ones as discs are released. (It's been pointed out by several people now, that the AACS' over-the-top reaction to publication of the processing key, may indicate that they've realized that their revocation procedures aren't nearly as fast or as flexible as the people who are going to be compromising them.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I hope they publish the new keys. I don't want to post some random number and find myself in court because of it.