New AACS Fix Hacked in a Day

VincenzoRomano writes "ArsTechnica has just published an update to the neverending story about copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs and hacker efforts against it. From the article: 'The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top. The hacker BtCB posted the new decryption key for AACS on the Freedom to Tinker web site, just one day after the AACS Licensing Authority (AACS LA) issued the key.' The article proposes a simple description of the protection schema and a brief look back at how the cracks have slowly chipped away at its effectiveness. It seems it'll be a long way to an effective solution ... if any. One could also argue whether all that money spent by the industry in this race will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment."

Comments

If it's viewable, it's hackable

[elrous0]

Blu-ray discs with a further layer of copy protection called BD+ are rumored to be nearing delivery

You know, they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Somewhere I picture entertainment execs, having been sold a big and expensive line of B.S. by the firm that developed BD+ (just as they had been sold the exact same line by the companies that developed CSS and AACS), sitting in some board room saying "Don't worry, THIS time it's going to work!" They just don't get it. If it's viewable, it's hackable--period.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[erroneus]

You're not looking far enough down the road to where this all leads. Hell, you're not even looking back on the road we've all be travelling where all of this is concerned. They know there is no knot that cannot be untied. What they are winning is the sympathy of lawmakers who are increasingly adding to the penaties of copyright infringement, writing new laws around the globe and generally extending copyright indefinitely. It's the quicksand they have us trapped in that they are after. The more people resist, the more legislative backing they receive. How long before whistling a tune as you walk down the street will get you arrested?

Music [and the arts] may have charms that will soothe the savage beasts in all of us, but these people want you to pay for the remedy and will do anything to make sure you do!

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[FauxPasIII]

> You know, they say the definition of insanity is doing the
> same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

And Bartcop's second law says that if someone makes a "mistake" that makes them a whole heap of money, then they will make the same "mistake" again and again and again. They keep making new protection scheme revisions, the content providers keep buying in and hardware manufacturers keep upgrading.

These protection schemes aren't a failure as you seem to think. They're accomplishing exactly what they're intended for.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[AlHunt]

Honestly, consumers just need to start voting with their dollars - don't buy copy-protected DVDs, don't buy CDs until RIAA knocks off intimidating people, don't patronize lawsuit-happy companies.

The bottom line is that Joe Average just doesn't mind being pushed around as long as he's comfortable. Very discouraging for the future of free will, independent thinking, privacy, security, liberty and other non-socialist, non-communist ideals in the USA.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[alienw]

Actually, there hasn't been an actual hack yet. These "hacks" are what the key revocation procedure is intended for. It isn't like DeCSS, where knowing the algorithm was enough to bruteforce thousands of keys. If the AACS LA wanted to, they could stop giving out new keys to software-only players and stop this type of hacking in its tracks.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Anonymous Coward]

When you pay a whore for her services and she does what you want, it's not out of sympathy. Don't kid yourself, they are selling other people's freedom because they're long on aspirations short on talent.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[c00rdb]

Except the less you buy, the more the industry claims that those losses are due to piracy. It's a never ending cycle.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[nuzak]

Simple answer: don't make it viewable, only processable. Bury it in the CPU itself. Remove all JTAG interfaces. Legislate the design of all new CPUs. Ban imports that don't meet the standards. Nothing's wholly impossible to get out, but if you make it expensive and take long enough, you can suppress it that much more easily. The tech industry has shown a complete willingness to bend over and say "deeper" this whole time, so don't think it can't happen.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[z0M6]

How long before whistling a tune as you walk down the street will get you arrested? Seriously, if you (as in all of us really) let that happen, then you deserve it.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[kinglink]

Exactly. Humans are analog creatures. We can't interpret digital signals in real time. Anything that is produced into a analogy copy will be capturable. Digital formats like Blue ray must be inevitably be converted into an analog form for our enjoyment. Trying to protect your product isn't going to change these facts. Want to sell more? Give us a reason to buy a new version of the product, and higher resolutions isn't selling it (uprezed DVDs still look amazing on my 50 inch TV).

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Kadin2048]

Well, you're right that the key-revocation scheme was designed to deal with this, however where the problem lies is in certain assumptions that the people designing the revocation system made.

I don't think they ever thought that the keys would get compromised this quickly. The AACSLA is fighting an asymmetric war. It takes them, what, about six months to revoke a key? Maybe they could get that down to a few months, but it's still going to be difficult. They have to realize that a key is compromised, decide to revoke it, make up a new MKB, master a new disc, send that disc master to Taiwan or China for pressing, and import and distribute the new disc. There's only a certain amount that a process like that can be expedited by.

The revocation scheme was designed to deal with insecure players, basically as a one-off process. Player gets compromised? Revoke it. It's not getting them any security in its current state. Right now, they revoke existing key. New key is compromised after one day in circulation. They begin revoking it. Six months later, they revoke new key. Rinse. Repeat. What's the steady state of this system? The hackers win, because at any given time, they probably have the keys to all the extant discs.

Now, you do bring up an interesting point about blocking software players, and just eliminating them altogether. Setting aside the problems this would cause with the likes of Microsoft and other players heavily invested in the concept of HTPCs, it might slow things down. However, I don't think there's any reason to think that they keys can't be extracted from the hardware -- that's just too good of a technical challenge to pass up. And again, if the rate at which keys get compromised is much, much faster than the rate at which compromised keys can be revoked, then the AACS loses control.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[sanjosanjo]

I know that a lot of people say "there is no secure DRM because the key is sent with the information" - or something to that effect. But I don't understand why DirectTV and the cable companies seemed to have figured out how to lock down their content and the DVD companies can't. Does anybody know the difference here? I've been curious about this for a while.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[mgblst]

Honestly, consumers just need to start voting with their dollars - don't buy copy-protected DVDs, don't buy CDs until RIAA knocks off intimidating people, don't patronize lawsuit-happy companies.
 
Which well never happen. It makes people feel very uncomfortable to have to think about the ethical choices they make before they buy (this counts for things like clothing and coffee as well). They would rather not hurt their brains that much. Those are the ones that even cared enough to find out that buying some products are bad, which the majority won't, unless some celebrity happens to take a stance. Have you noticed the shift to more and more brain-dead celebrities these days?

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

Well "they" are stupid, because that definition isn't in any respectable dictionary and is certainly not accurate in any medical sense of the word. In fact, the definition you have given qualifies as "persistence" or, at worst, a learning disability.

Yes, I know the quote isn't meant to be interpreted so literally. It is just a political device used to apply the label "insane" to one's opponents, even though it really does not apply. In that context I find it petty and deceptive.

The politicians in question are just responding to a current. That is what politicians do. If you want to change their behavior, get to work on the current that drives them.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[krunk7]

The only reason users (and not decryption enthusiasts) even care about cracking DRM is because the price of the product is not worth the hassle. Content providers are doing is the equivalent of chargin 25 dollars to watch a show with commercials. For Joe Consumer, that just doesn't cut it. Now give Joe Consumer a show for free and he'll glibbly tolerate a few commercials every 15m.

Bring the prices down to next to nothing (as they should be for digital media) and watch DRM be tolerated without any issue. My movie "expires" and can't be played in two days!? Oh, it's only a dollar. Ok, not worth my effort to crack it.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[alienw]

I don't think it would be possible to extract keys from hardware, if said hardware is well-implemented. Granted, I wouldn't be surprised if the keys were stored in a poorly-encrypted external ROM, but hacking hardware is still orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive than hacking software, and well-protected hardware is pretty much impossible to crack. Any kid with an internet connection, a decent debugger, and a pirated copy of IDA can crack a software player, but hardware usually takes inside knowledge. Of course, the main problem with key revocation is that owners of the revoked players will be rather pissed off. Unless the AACS LA wants to buy them new players, there has to be some kind of update mechanism -- which is a security hole. So yeah, this scheme still has pretty decent sized holes.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[veganboyjosh]

If current trends continue, media sales will continue to drop (be it from piracy, or disinterest, or whatever legitimate reason/s), they'll totally crumble and go away. At that point, it won't matter what the real reason is, so long as they go away.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[jZnat]

Why should we have to completely ignore our culture just because of some assholes at the top? The Libertarian solution to every problem doesn't always work, and in this case, it won't work. People are ignorant of the issue, and even if they knew about it, they'd rather continue indulging in their culture and entertainment rather than "fight the power". We need to think of a different solution, and continuing to break all the rights-restricting DRM they throw at us is, in my opinion, a good start.

If the law wasn't bought and paid for by them, a boycott might work, but since they are able to extend copyright to cover anything and everything for as long as they want, we cannot just vote with our wallets; they've got much bigger wallets than us.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[monk.e.boy]

When the next generation of iPod owning kids get into power, most of the copyright laws will be scrapped.

It's a shame I'll be dead by then ;-/

monk.e.boy

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[beckerist]

What if all HD/BR-DVD players were issued by MS or Sony or Toshiba? That's not to say they wouldn't be crackable, but it seems a big part of the "hacker problem" (though I would definitely argue the definition of "problem" here!) is in the insecurities of existing software and hardware. If MS/Toshiba or Sony buttoned down their own technologies (ie: HD-DVD drive for the 360, Sony's Blu-ray Disc-authoring software...), wouldn't the "problem" be solved?

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[yahooadam]

>Except the less you buy, the more the industry claims that those losses are due to piracy. It's a never ending cycle.
Pretty sad isn't it, its not due to the fact Hollywood is only capable of pumping crap movie after crap movie out

>They just don't get it. If it's viewable, it's hackable--period.
omg don't say that, they will start selling us films we cant watch to combat piracy

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[TheGavster]

I wouldn't put it past the record companies (and the current trend of economy-controlling governments) to get the American government to buy licenses for the whole population one day, under the argument that they can't effectively license individuals. This is something that has already been done on some college campuses with music subscription services.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[lilomar]

The bottom line is that Joe Average just doesn't mind being pushed around as long as he's comfortable. Very discouraging for the future of free will, independent thinking, privacy, security, liberty and other non-socialist, non-communist ideals in the USA.

It's also rather discouraging for the future of socialist/communist ideals. I think you meant to say fascist ideals. It's discouraging for some implementations of socialism/communism, but not for the ideals(PDF) as such.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[init100]

How long before whistling a tune as you walk down the street will get you arrested?

It is lucky that there are other countries than the United States.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[bberens]

Humans are analog creatures. We can't interpret digital signals in real time. Speak for yourself, chump. :-p

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[spun]

Free will, independent thinking, privacy, security, and liberty are ideals of socialism and communism. Wherever did you get the idea they weren't? Communism in practice leads to oligarchy, granted. That is because communism is meant to be a transitional form of government. It is meant to lead people from where they are to true anarchism, but because it assumes they can not lead themselves, it becomes paternal and hierarchal, just like the system it replaces. Socialism is not meant to lead anywhere, and can exist alongside the free market. I'm not sure what exactly you think socialism is, but it certainly doesn't preclude any of those things you mentioned, in theory or practice. In fact, it can easily be argued that in practice, it is more effective at bringing those things to a lrger number of people than a strictly market based system.

And to be honest, what we have in the USA is socialism. We redistribute the wealth all the time, from rich states to poor states, but from poor people to rich people. Think about all the government pork for the well connected. That's a form of socialism, only its socialism for the wealthy.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[dpilot]

My *next* letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy will have 3 focal points...
1: I like the work he's currently doing on Judiciary with the investigations. This stuff is IMPORTANT!
2: As far as copyright law goes, these days it's not really "all about the artists," as he has told me in letters in the past. If he really believes that, he's being sold a bill of goods by the mafiAA, and I need to dig up substantiation for his.

And the point germane to this thread...
3: Passing ever-more-draconian copyright/DRM legislation is HURTING our media industry. We will NEVER get a regimen this tough forced around the world, no matter how hard we try, and no matter that there are some early exceptions. NONE of this stuff has done spit to stop widespread violation in China and it never will.

Like it or not, the world is changing, and the mafiAA had darned well better learn to cope with it. The current legislative path in the US is coddling them, and allowing them to not cope with a changing world, and at some point they will be completely incapable of playing on the world stage. (figuratively and literally) For an analogy, a favorite on Slashdot is how the movie industry grew up in California, in order to get around the protective laws the stage industry had in New York. If the mafiAA doesn't learn to adapt, world entertainment WILL move elsewhere, it's just a matter of time.

Which is a harder problem - cracking the Chinese copyright violation problem, or teaching Bollywood to make good movies?

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but there have been plenty of films lately that *I* consider unwatchable. . .

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know about DirecTV specifically but I know a system used in a few IPTV systems and also Satellite in the UK - The keys for the TV content change every 10 seconds for each channel.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[LordWill]

Perhaps one day they'll spend their effort and money to create a payment system that is cheap enough to allow low-cost songs (or online transactions in general.) Today's credit card companies charge what? $0.35 per transaction and 2% to 5% of the gross price?

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[ArsenneLupin]

Which is a harder problem - cracking the Chinese copyright violation problem, or teaching Bollywood to make good movies? I'd say, teaching Hollywood to make good movies... *ducks*

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[TeXMaster]

hacking hardware is still orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive than hacking software

Oh is it? I guess that's the reason why most computer shops around here sold cheap PS mods that allowed them to play on pirated games, with minimum overprice if you wanted the mod installed by the shop techs instead of doing it yourself.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Auz]

My prediction is for visually scrambled movies that are descrambled by drugs you have to take just before viewing. Mind you, I'm still waiting for genetically engineered labrador perma-puppies...

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[xwipeoutx]

There is? Where? Alaska?

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[__aayurq3262]

How long before whistling a tune as you walk down the street will get you arrested? Whistling a tune as you walk down the street is already copyright infringement on two counts. It's a prohibited "public performance" and it's a prohibited "derivative work" unless you are following the original tune perfectly. Just because you haven't been sued yet doesn't mean it's right - think of the royalties being lost from all those unlicensed whistlers.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Ngwenya]

I don't think it would be possible to extract keys from hardware, if said hardware is well-implemented.

Yes - just a small matter of implementation :)

You are correct, of course, that hardware key storage is generally more effective than software storage. The problem, however, is that key storage isn't the end of the story. Sure, you can embed a TPM chip in epoxy resin, and surface mount that chip onto the motherboard - but it can still be removed. Tricky, yes - error prone, also true. But it can be done. Which means that, assuming it's not some totally proprietary design it can be inserted into a standard PC motherboard and exploited from there. If it is a completely proprietary chip, well, the record of such security systems working is less than stellar. Tends to be of the same order as proprietary crypto algorithms. In using AES, the AACS designers made at least one good technical decision.

Even if not removing the key storage device, the buses which connect it to the rest of the system are still subject to probing via ICEs. And all of this assumes that the electrical characteristics of the systems don't exhibit any exploitable variances like key-dependent delays in processing (side-channel attacks).

And even if you had that down pat, you've still got the fact that the connection from device to display is only protected by HDCP, which was cracked years ago. And there's no real protection on digital audio outputs, so capturing that frame-by-frame and remuxing to high quality rips would still be eminently possible. The only reason there aren't HDCP strippers and HD capture devices all over the place is because AACS has been rendered moot. If the keystream still held secure, you'd simply see another attack vector.

Now here's the other problem: in order to get the backing of people like Microsoft and other likely media centre manufacturers, the HD-DVD camp had to promise Managed Copy (Blu-Ray said they would also provide it). In other words, they had to promise that copying to a non-hardware-secured device would be possible. And if you just shift the problem onto the the PC that way, you haven't really bought anything.

All told - your analysis is spot on - h/w only operations are harder to crack. But from a technical and business commitment standpoint, it wouldn't make any real difference. The incentive to crack is far greater than the technical obstacles in place.

I suppose it all comes down to the age old cliché - security is a process, not a product. And with AACS, it seems that the content producers have only semi-digested that point. Without control of the entire delivery chain - something that is both technically and legally impossible you cannot square the circle of both giving someone the key and not giving it to them at the same time.

--Ng

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Angstroem]

I don't think it would be possible to extract keys from hardware,

What you think and what is possible does not necessarily match...

Obviously, you never heard about the whole BSkyB "war" about a decade ago. Even with later, well-implemented cards there still was a market to take a subscription card and just read the ROM using an electron microscope or whatever tools.

Expensive? Yes. But as long as there is a market... And I tell you something: I'd happily paypal 10 Euros to whereever when they provide me the current HD-DVD key in return so that I can play and convert the content I *bought* in whatever way I like.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[richlv]

...which has already been done.
leeches of the society are getting fees for most of the blank media, portable music players and whatnot in a lot of countries.
that's true for all of the media, and that includes those blank cds that you are writing your logfiles on.
of course, artists get very little out of this, and that's only few selected ones. most of the income is used for the "administering" of these fees.

i would define that as lucrative, legal stealing.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[mattpalmer1086]

I agree that the phrase doesn't define insanity. I do remember from my first degree, which touched on some psychology, a quote from Lawrence Kubie:

"The measure of health is flexibility, the freedom to learn from experience...to be influenced by reasonable arguments...and especially the freedom to cease when sated. The essence of illness is the freezing of behavior into unalterable and insatiable patterns."

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[zippthorne]

They don't seem particularly more brain dead to me. At least today's artists aren't out committing treason.

(unless by "these days," you were comparing the last fifty years or so of entertainment to the 19th century composers and opera houses, but even then, I suspect a certain amount of rose-tinted optical corrective devices)

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we talking about communims or socialism as a form of resistance of political capitalim (that is, the goverment interferes with the economy for political reasons alone) as Marx supposedly intended? Any economical system can be used to oppress the aforementioned liberties. What about anarchism? Is the concept here used to mean something else than what it meant in the 19th century?

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[elrous0]

If MS/Toshiba or Sony buttoned down their own technologies (ie: HD-DVD drive for the 360, Sony's Blu-ray Disc-authoring software...), wouldn't the "problem" be solved?

The problem is that they keep thinking that they HAVE "buttoned down the problem." But every time they think this, some hacker comes along and owns them yet again. As I said--if it's viewable, it's hackable. At some point the data HAS to be decrypted, it HAS to appear on that TV screen. No matter how secure you make that path with AACS, with BD+, with HDCP; it doesn't matter. At SOME point, it will be unencrypted and vulnerable.

Revoke all software keys, someone will figure out how to get them out of hardware players (which would make it almost impossible to revoke, barring nuking the entire hardware line). Encrypt it all the way into the TV, someone will hack the TV. Right now hackers are just using software keys because they are the easiest to get at. But you can bet that, if they had to, there are people out there capable of hacking the hardware too.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[smellsofbikes]

It's also a delaying action until the time when they can reasonably expect to sell video playback devices that are always connected to a network, at which point they can do crypto exchange of passwords with a remote server and the consumer is, officially, screwed. It's just that right now not enough consumers will buy stuff that demands connectivity before it'll work.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[elrous0]

You, but you're a bender unit. He was talking about us meatbags.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[elrous0]

So how does it get to my eyeball then?

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[erroneus]

Ah... my point in that statement was that we are not "there" yet. Being sued is different from being arrested.

But look at what the **AAs want: More than once they have lobbied for laws allowing them to break in to computers they suspect contains data that should be protected under their copyrights. (Which reminds me... today I'm lobbying for a law to allow me to break into anyone's home in order to find my remote control, my keys and my wallet... I know they were stolen and I suspect everyone!)

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[spun]

I'm using the term anarchism in the sense that Proudhon and Bakunin used it, so yes, what it meant in the 19th century. Sure, any economic system can be used to oppress people. I think that's a key point, economics can oppress just as surely as politics can. Do they automatically oppress? That's what we're debating here, I think, not whether they can, but whether they must. I'd say capitalism by its very nature creates an oppressed class. Communism will lead to a non-communistic structure that creates an oppressed class. Socialism won't necessarily. That's my take anyway. Although for me, a cooperative structure like that found in the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain sounds even better than socialism as practiced in, say, France.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[duerra]

Oh get off your high horse. The wealthiest 1 percent of earners in this country pay 37% of tax revenue. How that got modded as Informative is beyond me.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[elrous0]

Well, generally I have a very pro-drug stance. But something tells me this drug won't be one of the good kind.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[erroneus]

Now THERE is a scary look down the road. If that's their intention, why shouldn't they be pushing for more broadband? Hell, they could be painted as heroes if they can get broadband into every home!

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[bendodge]

Look farther. Black box hardware is the future.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[elrous0]

Of course I know that this isn't the literal definition of insanity (hence the "they say"), just a pithy saying. It's just a nice shorthand for the foolishness of making the same mistake over and over again, expecting that things will change no matter how many times the result is the same.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[nuzak]

> At least today's artists aren't out committing treason.

The word "treason" has gotten so diluted these days in no small part to the fact that pretty much every generation of artists has been accused of treasonous sentiments ever since Grog drew Grunk tripping over his spear on a hunt. A few years ago, people called it treason to oppose the Iraq war. Soon it'll be something else.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[alienw]

You are making some big assumptions here. Who says the chip has to be a standard, off-the-shelf device? For all intents and purposes, the decryption function could be performed by a specialized chip which takes in the data stream on one end and produces a decoded output on the other. You could get the data off the disc, but you won't be able to get the decryption key out of the chip. Hell, the chip could encrypt all of its output before it hands it over to the next chip. Unless you somehow find a way to get keys out of the chip, this will be 100% secure against key extraction. Probing buses with logic analyzers and power analysis were decent methods back when people were trying to crack 1980s-era smartcards running at a few hundred kilohertz. They don't work too well against modern hardware.

As far as attacking the HDMI stream: good luck doing real-time encoding of a raw, uncompressed HDTV stream. Currently, that requires extremely expensive hardware (if it even exists).

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[nuzak]

Camcorders will be required to obey some kind of macrovision signal. I wouldn't be surprised if Sony already built something like that into their cameras.

When you find a way to record from your eyeball, go pick up your nobel prize. You'll find that our perception is a pretty lossy compression algorithm though.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[teal]

What's amazing to me is that shareholders of the record companies aren't just slamming the RIAA for insisting on continuing supporting a brain dead business model. I wonder if an informational letter writing campaign to shareholders explaining the other side of the issue would get their attention? I've also thought about buying a few shares of some of the record companies stock and then attending the shareholders meetings. Then use this forum to slam the RIAA in front of the shareholders. I don't understand why the shareholders are allowing this crap to continue. It's pretty obvious from any rational look at the industry that the RIAA is not helping profits.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[adickerson0]

Think about all the government pork for the well connected. That's a form of socialism, only its socialism for the wealthy. I missed the memo, is that what we are calling Fascism these days? Oligarchy is kind of absurd sounding and Fudilisim is so 1200AD. In the end, people should be allowed to define their lack of freedom any way they want (how is that for a brain hurting paradox)...I think "officially-incorporated state sponsored corporatism" sounds better it kid of has that official sounding "we will bomb your village to support your freedom to chose" ring to it.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[alienw]

Smartcards are late 1970s technology. They are not sophisticated in any way, shape, or form. Even then, they have been quite resistant to attacks -- there is no cheap and simple way to steal satellite TV. Not to mention, modern VLSI chips have about 5 orders of magnitude more transistors than smartcards -- good luck figuring stuff out with an electron microscope.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Aceticon]

If i still remember correctly, from what i learned in my Philisophy classes:

In the original concept:
- Communism is the final status where everybody is equal to everybody else and has the same amount of things
- Socialism is one way to reach Communism. Socialism says that to reach Communism one must first have a revolution which establishes a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (The proletariat is basically the group name for all common workers). Under that Dictatorship, property will be redistributed until everybody has the same and Communism is achieved.
- Social Democracy is another way to reach Communism. Social Democracy says that richer people must be taxed more heavilly than poorer people which will eventually lead to the situation where everybody has the same, eg Communism.

All so called Communist countries actually started with Socialist revolutions (more preciselly, variants of Socialism such as Maoism and Marxism/Leninism), only they all stopped at the stage of "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (surprise, surprise)

Most Western European countries adopted a variant of Social Democracy in the sense that in most of Western Europe taxes are progressive (eg, the bigger the income the higher the percentage of tax), though the aim is to increase social equality, NOT achieving Communism.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Brycycle]

The problem as I see it, is that most consumers will want to listen to their favorite band's new album, and the fact that it has DRM on it won't be the deciding factor when they get to the cash register. There needs to be a way of combating DRM legally, without having to convince mainstream consumers that they might have to stop buying their favorite band's music.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Angstroem]

Smartcards are late 1970s technology.

Depends on what you consider a smartcard.

It's not like all of them are built around the stone-age MCS48 or MCS51 architecture; and if you visit current conferences on chip-level security then you will notice that the world indeed moved on since the 1970s.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[spun]

Learn some history. During the economic boom times of the fifties, the highest tax rate was 90% and that didn't seem to slow down the growth. Boo fucking hoo, 37%? My god, what a big whiner.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Xesdeeni]

This is so much like the court system is sometimes. Both parties work hard and spend effort fighting. In the end, only the intermediaries (lawyers or encryption "specialists") make any money.

If they just spent all that effort and money making things MORE compatible, and EASIER to get from legitimate sources, they'd be much more successful.

Xesdeeni

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[spun]

The anarchists of course defined things differently, and I am speaking from an anarchist perspective.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[f1055man]

"socialist" and "communist" are not synonyms for "policies I don't like." Remember, the relatively permissive home of our beloved Pirate Bay is "socialist" Sweden, and they don't even fluoridate their water.
The problem is not consumers voting or not voting with their dollars, the problem is consumers. A consumer does not produce. A consumer does not interact. They are merely recipients of information and entertainment rather than full participants in a fully democratic culture and society.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[bodan]

As far as attacking the HDMI stream: good luck doing real-time encoding of a raw, uncompressed HDTV stream. Currently, that requires extremely expensive hardware (if it even exists).

(1) You don't have to encode it real-time. (1') You don't even need to record it to disk uncompressed in real-time. (It may be convenient, but not necessary. You can record snippets to RAM, dump them to disk, rewind and continue. And encode it any now and then.)

(2) Hardware may be expensive now, but it gets cheaper quickly. Consider there already exist "consumer" HDTV cameras.

Of course, it's easier to crack the players and decrypt the stream. Of course, it's hard to capture and re-encode the movie from HDMI. But the question is, is it too hard to do?. Since you only need to do it once per movie, my guess is no.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[spun]

You know, that's not a brain hurting paradox, it's a cold hard fact of freedom. You have to give some up to have some. Want the freedom to walk down the street without getting punched in the face? You've got to give up the freedom to just swing your arms any old way. Freedom is a contract between individuals, nothing more. You give something to get something.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Thalaric]

It's not necessarily libertarian to believe in locking up information in perpetual copyright. Quite the opposite. I think a truly "Free Market" would not emphasize "intellectual property" to the same degree.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[glesga_kiss]

I don't think there's any reason to think that they keys can't be extracted from the hardware -- that's just too good of a technical challenge to pass up.

That statement sums up the whole thing to me. The harder they make it, the more people will want to break it. People enjoy puzzles and challenges.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Anonymous Coward]

First: sat-tv decryption has been hacked many times. There still are systems in use that have been hacked. Some systems are secure for now, or at least secure for "the public". Insiders sometimes have hacked them but don't publicize because the system would be changed when hacks became too widespread.

A fundamental difference is that sat-tv uses a smart card that essentially is a black box containing the decryption algorithm for the session keys, and the subscriber keys required for that. The receiver sends an encrypted session key to the smartcard every 10-15 seconds, and receives the decryption key to be used for the next interval from the card.
As the cards are issued by the company that transmits the programmes, there is no need to publicize any information about their internal workings, as there is for DVD players that are to be produced and distributed all over the world.

Early cards could be reverse-engineered, and that is how they were hacked. The programmers writing the firmware for the cards also made mistakes, like including debugging commands.
But of course they learn from every mistake.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[linguae]

The Libertarian solution to every problem doesn't always work, and in this case, it won't work

The truly libertarian solution would be to get rid of copyright. Copyright is a governmental construct, not a natural right. We wouldn't have all of these issues of the MPAA trying to increase copyright length if there were no copyright to increase in the first place.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[ricosalomar]

Sorry, it's "savage breast" not beast.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Maltheus]

We redistribute the wealth all the time, from rich states to poor states, but from poor people to rich people.

Really? It seems to me that it's NY and California (rich states) that always demand the largest share of the pie. These states are also home to liberals who'd like to tax me even more and restrict my freedom. They think everyone should pay to subsidize their social problems.

I also remember the debate after 9/11. People were arguing who should get the emergency preparedness funds. I recall many interviews with big-shot New Yorkers who claimed they need the biggest share, cause they're the biggest target and that the rest of the country was just being selfish. That argument never made sense to me cause if NY were locked down, the terrorists would just go somewhere else.

Also, NY is like a country that provokes all on it's own. Who's to say that Guliani, kicking Arafat out of that opera (or whatever) didn't in fact inspire the choice of NY as a target (or at least play a part). Why should I have to pay for another state's international grandstanding?

I got nothing against NY (I'm originally from there), I just think the rich cities having been stealing from the provinces since the beginning of time. And it's not right, regardless of whether it goes to the poor or the rich.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[TheoMurpse]

The Libertarian solution to every problem doesn't always work, and in this case, it won't work.

Under a pure Libertarian philosophy, the DMCA wouldn't exist. Probably copyright wouldn't exist. That would solve all these RIAA problems, becase there'd be no law under which to sue.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[TheoMurpse]

at which point they can do crypto exchange of passwords with a remote server

As long as routers exist, this won't work. Just sniff every bit that goes by. There has to be an initial key exchange at some point. If it is a predetermined key, then it's exactly like the system we have now (which, as I'm sure you've noticed, is getting broken over and over again).

And in Japan and other countries, each phone call (including local) costs money, so using a modem to do the key exchange would never fly because every time you wanted to watch an XQM-DVD, you'd have to pay more money. People would get pissed about this idea. Thank God for unsupervised kids, they'd run up crazy phone bills changing XQM-DVDs in and out of the players.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn some history. During the economic boom times of the fifties, the highest tax rate was 90% and that didn't seem to slow down the growth. Boo fucking hoo, 37%? My god, what a big whiner.

I'm pretty sure that saying 1% of the population pays 37% of taxes does not mean that their tax rate is 37%.

So... yer an idiot. Or at least comprehension-ally-challenged.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[smellsofbikes]

That depends on where the revenue stream is. If they can sell you a disk with 99% of the movie on it, and then, for free or a micropayment, let you log onto their server to get enough to decrypt what you have and watch it, then broadband costs more than it is worth. What it comes down to is: are the companies selling bandwidth or are they selling movies? Once they decide where the profit margin is, they'll decide which they're selling. Or, they'll sell you both and charge you for both, if that's the most profitable model. But, in any case, they want you online because it's likely the more attached to them you are, the more money they can extract from you.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Ngwenya]

Who says the chip has to be a standard, off-the-shelf device?

Economics of interoperability. If each device manufacturer goes with their own way for encryption then the devices will cost too much. As for ICEs not working against modern hardware, I think you may be incorrect there. Just as the crypto chips have got faster and harder, so have the ICEs. To take an example: TPM chips for PCs tend to come from one of three manufacturers - Infineon, Atmel and Nat Semi. Of course, HP, Dell, Sony, IBM, Toshiba and so on could all invent their own chips, their own bus controllers, etc, but then the interoperability costs become huge. So to make HD-DVDs/BDs work on all platforms, you'd basically be asking for each major manufacturer to spin custom silicon in each instance. The cost of that would be massive.

As far as attacking the HDMI stream: good luck doing real-time encoding of a raw, uncompressed HDTV stream. Currently, that requires extremely expensive hardware (if it even exists).

It does exist, and it is expensive. But were the demand higher, then those costs would come down. Secondly, it doesn't have to be real-time at all - you can do it frame by frame if you will. Or would you also authenticate and encrypt the control channels (ie, the remote controlling the player)? Pretty soon all of those encrypted channels start to require extra margins in the price of the device. It's not just a matter of signal security - it's a matter of signal security at a cost the market can bear.

The only reason that HD capture devices are so expensive is because it's much cheaper to decrypt the signals at source rather than the decoded ones. You've already demonstrated knowledge of this, but it's worth repeating - you have to protect the signal at all points, and protect it to an economically viable level. Honestly, if Sony thought it could pull the same stunt that it did with MiniDisc except for HD video, then I'm positive they would have done. They (and Toshiba) have got their own fab plants. Since they didn't do it, I don't think it was because they were stupid - it was because they didn't think it worth it.

--Ng

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[bracktra]

For all interested, Ari Fleischer -- ex-bush press secretary -- has made a more detailed whine using this same statistic.

It is also useful to consider other statistics such as how much income the wealthiest one percent actually makes. When it comes to actually living life, 50% of hundreds of thousands of dollars to billions of dollars is much different than 50% of ten to twenty grand. It's the difference between "Am I going to be able to buy a boat upon which to stand around and drink alcoholic beverages?" and "Can I afford a place to live and food to eat?".

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[jez9999]

There has to be a way of watching TV legally, without having to convince mainstream consumers that they might have to look at the TV or turn it on.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Extide]

He isnt talking about recording from his eye-- he is saying that if the video is never displayable how is he going to watch it, and if it is how are they going to protect it?

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Fred Ferrigno]

Now, you do bring up an interesting point about blocking software players, and just eliminating them altogether. Setting aside the problems this would cause with the likes of Microsoft and other players heavily invested in the concept of HTPCs, it might slow things down. However, I don't think there's any reason to think that they keys can't be extracted from the hardware -- that's just too good of a technical challenge to pass up. And again, if the rate at which keys get compromised is much, much faster than the rate at which compromised keys can be revoked, then the AACS loses control. In practice, there's no such thing as a true hardware player. The set top players out there use generic hardware to save cost and run AACS in software, meaning they're just as vulnerable as WinDVD. (Note that it's the XBox's HD-DVD drive that has enabled most of the current cracks.) If they really wanted to stump the hackers, they could implement AACS in a custom ASIC, which would require an electron microscope to crack. Device manufacturers (and users) would balk at the cost though.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[smellsofbikes]

I'm going to preface this by saying I don't know much about encryption.
From what I do know: your video player is Alice. The remote server is Bob. They exchange keys, and at that point Bob knows that Alice is authentic, and vice versa, and from then on, the encrypted material they exchange is as 'secure' as other symmetric key exchanges. From then on, you don't know what they're doing: the stuff you're sniffing is, essentially, random numbers.
If they choose to distribute the entire contents of the medium via that, you can use a camcorder to record it off the screen, sure, but you can't get a digital copy. For video, this would require a big fat broadband connection (which is why I said, in another comment in this thread, that I think it's quite possible media distribution companies are going to be investing in/buying communications companies.) They could also distribute only a part of the file -- essentially a long key -- used for decoding the encrypted information you have on the medium you purchased. Someone can probably make a good estimate where the profit maximum is, for how much they have to put on the disc and how much they have to stream.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[spun]

You are so wrong, and I have the data to prove it.

California and New York both receive $0.79 in Federal funds for every dollar in federal taxes paid.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Xtravar]

Do you think those iPod owning kids are fit to do anything?

Really.

Think about your average high schooler walking down the hall listening to his or her iPod.

Where do you see that person in 10 years? 20?

We're raising a(nother?) generation of cattle, addicted to pop culture and unaware of the world.

Like any of them will have a clue. They'll get into power and maintain the status quo.

But it's nice to have hopes!

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[gfilion]

You are correct, of course, that hardware key storage is generally more effective than software storage. The problem, however, is that key storage isn't the end of the story. Sure, you can embed a TPM chip in epoxy resin, and surface mount that chip onto the motherboard - but it can still be removed. Tricky, yes - error prone, also true. But it can be done.

That reminds me of the whole FTA/Nagravision war that was going on last summer. Dish Network and Bell ExpressVu (Bev) provide encrypted TV through their satellite network. Most FTA receivers can have hacked firmware that decrypt these streams in real time. Last summer, Dish/Bev released a new version of their encryption system (Nagravision). It took three months, with rumors that the hackers had to rent high precision equipment to read the new chips but they managed to reverse engineer the algorithm.

Now Joe Sixpack can watch 30 PPV channels and 8 hard core porn channels for free with a simple firmware upgrade.

My memory is fuzzy regarding all this, is there any reader that could point me to the whole story?

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Maltheus]

I stand corrected. Kind of makes you wonder why so much of New Mexico is a shit hole though. They're at the bottom of the list for so many other things.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[mistermiyagi]

Hell if I didn't really need my Harmony remote ( too many a/v gadgets) I would have taken it back after seeing that you can't use the software unless you are connected to the internet.

If my player required me to be online to watch movies I'd be on p2p faster than a fat chick on an ice cream buffet.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[spun]

I live in New Mexico and can tell you. The money goes to all the government labs here like Los Alamos and Sandia. Sure, some of that ends up circulating in the local economy, but a lot more is used to buy big ticket research items built elsewhere. New Mexico has the largest concentration of government labs in America.

You can even see why it tends to happen the way it does, because both rich and poor states each have two senators. So rich and poor states both have as much say in the budget. Even though rich states pay more in taxes, they are likely to receive about two senators worth of budget. Thus the discrepancy. And I'm not counting the House because, well, they're the House.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[alienw]

I believe most older Satellite TV smartcards were actually Microchip PIC16-based. At least that's what I remember reading a while ago. This is a few notches below MCS51. The newer stuff isn't getting more complex (that would increase costs), it is just being made more resistant to hacking.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[DragonWriter]

Honestly, consumers just need to start voting with their dollars - don't buy copy-protected DVDs, don't buy CDs until RIAA knocks off intimidating people, don't patronize lawsuit-happy companies.

I think the bigger thing people need to do is start voting with their votes. If giving in to the RIAA and MPAA cost elected representatives their jobs, they'd stop doing it no matter how much money was being dangled: the reason they want the money is to turn it into votes and maximize their own political prospects, but that only works because the people **AA's have lots of money, and there isn't a significant voting block that responds negatively to officials serving the **AA's interests. If that changed, then the **AA's money would be of no (or even negative) interest to politicians, and they'd start working to distance themselves from them.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[PrescriptionWarning]

If the wealthiest 1 percent of people have far more than 37% of all the money, then I'd say its fairly reasonable. Hell if I had a few billion I wouldn't care much if 50% of that went to taxes, I'd still be richer than most countries in the world! Greed is a human condition we all must deal with.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[moderatorrater]

Just for clarification, the parent was speaking of voting with your wallets being the libertarian solution.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[alienw]

I think the biggest issue as far as protecting the video stream is preventing casual copying. With DVDs, you can borrow one from a friend and easily make a copy for about a dollar (if you use dual-layer discs). The idea is to keep this from being possible with new generation discs. I don't think the net has enough bandwidth to distribute 50 gig movies easily, so that's an effective deterrent right there.

Besides, I am not sure why you think every manufacturer would need to spin their own chips. That would actually make it less secure. In my ideal scenario, a single trusted manufacturer would manufacture and distribute these chips, which would be tamper-resistant and have built-in secure ROM space for key storage and so on. If all of the specifications for these chips are kept secret, I don't see anyone cracking them.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[AlHunt]

>I think the bigger thing people need to do is start voting with their votes.

I agree. We should never re-elect an incumbent, ever. Power and influence start to grow around them. No matter how "good" they seem, send them home to live with the consequences of their actions while in office. But, it'll never happen that way because as I said earlier "The bottom line is that Joe Average just doesn't mind being pushed around as long as he's comfortable"

Truly a sad situation in America today.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[ahoehn]

Which well never happen. It makes people feel very uncomfortable to have to think about the ethical choices they make before they buy

I disagree, or at least sort of disagree with this. It's true that ethical obligations probably come pretty low on the list of priorities when people make purchases, far below concerns like quality and price. But, all other things being equal, ethics can be a wonderful marketing tool.

If you saw two t-shirts on the shelf, both indistinguishable in terms of quality and style and identically priced, and one claimed to be produced using ethical practices (whether that means environmentally friendly, treating its workers well, etc...), I'm guessing you - along with most of the American public - would choose the ethically produced product.

The problem with DRM is that most of the public doesn't care, or at least hasn't cared in the past. They'll care when either marketing tells them to care, or the arduous restrictions of DRM force them to care.

Maybe I should put my profession to good use and do some pro-bono marketing for DRM-free options.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[MMInterface]

Its been done extensively with slot machines at the worlds largest casinos and those were less excessible and much more expensive than consumer producsts like HD-DVD players. In the end casinos have to rely surveillance and not the security of their hardware to prevent cheating. Hardware is more diffricult to hack but deffinately possible and in this situation its a sure thing that plenty of people would be up for the job.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[russ1337]

>>> When the next generation of iPod owning kids get into power, most of the copyright laws will be scrapped.

Problems is... these kids are going to University/College and being taught to a curriculum that says you must 'protect your copyright at all costs', because 'the consumer is a criminal' and 'DRM, patents and copyright are the way to protect your IP'.

It will take some pretty big balls / tenured professors to start lecturing main stream business classes about alternative 'consumer friendly' ways to sell products, along with some very good and well proven alternative business models.

Only once these kids graduate and reach 'lawmaker' age, will things start to change. I give it 50 years from now. I see a depression & rebirth of the USA in 25.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[LunaticTippy]

The wealthiest 1 percent have 40% of the wealth. So they're being undertaxed.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[TheoMurpse]

your video player is Alice. The remote server is Bob. They exchange keys, and at that point Bob knows that Alice is authentic, and vice versa, and from then on, the encrypted material they exchange is as 'secure' as other symmetric key exchanges.

However, because you literally own Alice, and sit in between Alice and Bob, you can read whatever communications they send, which includes the keys they have exchanged.

Now, I'm no crypto expert, but at some point Alice has to receive the key required to decrypt the disc. If they key is sent in plaintext over the net, you can intercept it and decrypt the disc. If the key is sent encrypted, Alice must know how to decrypt this. However, as we keep seeing, hackers are already able to discover from Alice how to decrypt the disc. They would certainly be able to discover how to decrypt the encrypted disc-decrypting key. Thus, again, the key is know, and the disc can be decrypted.

The only way a secure communication can be had between Alice and Bob is if they do the initial key exchange in a channel where they know no one has eavesdropped. This is a cryptography fact. Because Carol owns Alice, there is only one time Alice can receive the key without Carol eavesdropping -- that is before Carol owns Alice.

However, again, as we keep seeing, the valiant Carols of doom9 and other places are able to get at anything Alice knows and has stored in her mind.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[piepkraak]

The consumers have the biggest wallets. They make the economy spin so companies can make profit. It's not the other way around.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[TheoMurpse]

I should point out what I said is true only for symmetrical keys. For asymmetrical keys, Alice has the private key and Bob has Alice's public key, and Alice can give Bob her public key at any point in public without fear of a typical Carol decrypting the communications. However, in this situation Carol owns Alice and thus owns Alice's private key; Carol effectively becomes Alice. Again, the encryption is broken.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[lgw]

Wealth != income. This whole thread is confused.

Many people with high incomes do in fact pay high taxes, spend most of what is left on things, and never become particularly wealthy nor leave much to their descendents.

Many people who are quite wealthy have incomes that are small compared to their wealth, and live quite well thanks to property they inherited and will pass on to their descendents.

We tax wealth and income with unrelated systems.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[God'sDuck]

I'm pretty sure that saying 1% of the population pays 37% of taxes does not mean that their tax rate is 37%. You're correct in interpreting the GP, but wrong in assuming the wealthy pay more.

The highest US tax bracket is 35%, before deductions.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Anomalyst]

> If all of the specifications for these chips are kept secret

Ahh, security by obscurity. Even in the military I doubt you'll find that depth of control generally implemented. The interest in this information is pretty high, the seekers wily, clever and motivated. The "secret" of interfacing with the hardware has to be distributed to the manufacturers. I wouldn't think your average OEM technician is going to be very trainable to that level of security consciousness either. Given the number of possible of leak sources, at some point a combination of social engineering, bribery, WEP cracking, dumpster diving, laptop loss, etc. will bring it into the public purview.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Mattcelt]

That's what YOUR grandparents said about anyone who listened to rock-and-roll.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[bhtooefr]

LEGALLY? Give a few BJs to your senators and representatives.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry I'm posting as AC (I have a thing for privacy.), but I beg to differ. As a current American high school student, that is not entirely true. I can imagine change coming when my generation gets into power. Yes, many of my classmates are complete idiots, but hasn't every generation had those? When the next generation of politicians, the ones aware of these new issues, take power, there will be change. I'm sure I could do it. Even if I don't enter politics, I'll at least know enough to support those politicians who do support electronic freedom. It's just that many current adults just don't understand these issues (You can't blame them. They didn't grow up around them.), but when those who do are voting, I assure you, there will be change.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[swillden]

I don't think the net has enough bandwidth to distribute 50 gig movies easily, so that's an effective deterrent right there.

No, it's not. Not for long, anyway. There are already places in the US (and lots of places in Asia), where 100Mbit (symmetric!) fiber is available to the home. At 100Mbps, you can download 50GB in less than 90 minutes -- you could stream HD in real time. Not only that, most people won't care about the difference in image quality between the 50GB download and the 10GB version, or even the 5GB version.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[DrSkwid]

You should judge treason by the prosecutions, not the accusations.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Old Benjamin]

Exactly. It applies to all security situations. You either have to let nothing in, or realize that everything will get in. The third option is the gray area, where you make it hard, but in the long run you lose. The only solution is either to let nobody in, which nobody wants, or let everybody in. So I can see the government buying the rights to movies in the future, and then distributing them to everyone.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[bdjacobson]

For all interested, Ari Fleischer -- ex-bush press secretary -- has made a more detailed whine using this same statistic.

It is also useful to consider other statistics such as how much income the wealthiest one percent actually makes. When it comes to actually living life, 50% of hundreds of thousands of dollars to billions of dollars is much different than 50% of ten to twenty grand. It's the difference between "Am I going to be able to buy a boat upon which to stand around and drink alcoholic beverages?" and "Can I afford a place to live and food to eat?". Well said.

The way I see it, the more you benefit from an organized, stable economy, the more you owe to it. People making $30k/year are not benefiting the same way that people receiving $200m retirement packages are. Besides, nobody needs $200m.

We need to tax wealth. When you no longer have to work to make money, but your money works for you, then something is wrong and you need to have some of it taken away until you have to return to working.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[mpe]

And to be honest, what we have in the USA is socialism. We redistribute the wealth all the time, from rich states to poor states, but from poor people to rich people. Think about all the government pork for the well connected. That's a form of socialism, only its socialism for the wealthy.

Another relevent term might be "corporate socialism" where the redistribution is more to corporate than actual people...

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[mpe]

I should point out what I said is true only for symmetrical keys. For asymmetrical keys, Alice has the private key and Bob has Alice's public key, and Alice can give Bob her public key at any point in public without fear of a typical Carol decrypting the communications. However, in this situation Carol owns Alice and thus owns Alice's private key; Carol effectively becomes Alice. Again, the encryption is broken.

Which is the reason the whole idea behind DRM is flawed.
When it comes to data stored on a readonly media the cyphertext, hence the key(s) needed to decrypt it are fixed anyway.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[mpe]

Unless you somehow find a way to get keys out of the chip, this will be 100% secure against key extraction. Probing buses with logic analyzers and power analysis were decent methods back when people were trying to crack 1980s-era smartcards running at a few hundred kilohertz. They don't work too well against modern hardware.

Except that the tools which can be used to perform such analysis have also gotten faster in the last 20 odd years.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[mpe]

If they really wanted to stump the hackers, they could implement AACS in a custom ASIC, which would require an electron microscope to crack.

Except that it wouldn't. There are no doubt "hackers" who could get the use of an electron microscope. Either by use of money or trickery or maybe because it's part of their job/studies.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Rudd-O]

And that is called Communism. The idea that it is abominable for people to derive income only through capital gains is exactly what Communism is about.

Fortunately, commies didn't succeed. I certainly hope that after 10 years, I can stop working forever and live off my capital gains. If you cannot achieve that yourself then I'm very sorry for you, but I couldn't give a flying fuck.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[roguenine19]

Which well never happen. It makes people feel very uncomfortable to have to think about the ethical choices they make before they buy (this counts for things like clothing and coffee as well). They would rather not hurt their brains that much. Those are the ones that even cared enough to find out that buying some products are bad, which the majority won't, unless some celebrity happens to take a stance. Have you noticed the shift to more and more brain-dead celebrities these days?

Oh, please. I'm as against excessive copy-protection as much as the next slashdotter, but your post is so arrogant it's disgusting. You're right that people aren't going to stop buying HD disks, and you're right that it's because they don't care, but it's not because they don't want to "hurt their brains." It's because they've got better things to do than worry about the ethical implications of buying movies. People just don't have time to care about everything, and most people don't see an HD format war as something worth caring about. Heck, most people don't care enough about the environment to do something about it, which most would agree is a more important issue. But that's not because they don't want to be uncomfortable, or think too hard, but because they're busy using that brainpower on other things, like working, or taking care of their family.

Sure, a lot of people seem to have messed up priorities, and I for one have no idea why certain celebrities are so popular. But I don't think lesser of the people who do pay attention, just as I expect them to not look down on me for my geeky obsessions. I mean, couldn't others say the same thing about us? You're getting indignant about people not being ethically sensitive to what entertainment they buy, and here I am taking the time to reply. We could be out finding a cure for cancer, or saving the environment or something.

People care about different things, some of which are probably more or less worthy. But really, it's hard to say objectively which is more or less worthy. Something one man devotes his life to might be something another just could care less about. Certainly a cause like fighting poverty is probably more important than, say, trying to get the world's highest score in Pac-Man, but the less clear-cut cases, the ones where you can make a case for both sides, are more difficult. And above-all, don't think less of others just because they could care less about your pet passion. Because then you'd have to give them the same courtesy and, to be honest, I could care less about knitting.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[koreth]

The highest US tax bracket is 35%, before deductions.

And of course there are no taxes in the US besides federal income tax. (Hint: Look at the top tax bracket in, say, California or Vermont.)

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[DarkOx]

Actually this article proves the Lib solution would work perfectly.

Try this, don't pass laws a bunch of laws to make it illegal to reverse engineer things.

Without the DMCA, DRM does not work period.

I say let the media organizations put as much DRM into their products as they like, we let any other manufacture build the products they want.

Then I say let the consume do whatever they want with their purchases that they like. Maytag did not beat my door down with an army of layers when I decided that the motor from my old electric dryer might be better suited to a small electric go kart. Sony should have no rite to beat down my door if the stream of bits they sold me on their little plastic disk would better suit me on a harddrive.

I say they can make that as difficult as they like, but all they will accomplish is biasing me and likely my firends AGAINST their other products. Sony has made me hate them so much I won't by something just because they manufacture it. I don't care if it is the best and least expensive item foo out there. I have come to feel so abused by them I will take my business else where. I don't don't buy music by bands on their lables, I don't buy tickets to movies they produce, I don't rent them on DVD, and I dismiss all their hardware without a look. I bet more people would do the same to manufactures and producers if they felt they could actually get away from the abuse.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[PhireN]

Sony's drug would install a rootkit, which made it impossible for you to ever pirate anything ever again, short of a complete re-install of your brain.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[arminw]

....The idea is to keep this from being possible with new generation discs......

If all that is needed is to make an exact copy, there is no need to decrypt at all. Just make a bit for bit copy of the original. This may require hacking the drive. That is something the real pirates can easily do. All that copy protections has ever done and will ONLY ALWAYS do is to inconvenience the consumers. It has never stopped those who "pirate" for money and it never will.

I sincerely hope that the EMI/ITUNES DRM free experiment works well and shows the content providers that people will pay extra for DRM less and higher quality music.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[arminw]

..... But I don't understand why DirectTV and the cable companies seemed to have figured out how to lock down their content .......

They can change the keys and the encryption as often as they like since the receiver is always connected to the transmitter. This is not the case with discs. Once they are recorded, both the keys and the material cannot be changed. Only if all DVD players were REQUIRED to be connected to a network, could the contents be harder to hack. So far that has not been economically feasible.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[1110110001]

The reason they get monkey is that someone likes the music or movies they sell and not copy protection. Still they try to screw this people.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[Laur]

Truly a sad situation in America today.

I think you'll find this isn't just an American problem, and is hardly new. Hint: it wasn't an American who coined the phrase about bread and circuses.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[LunaticTippy]

High wealth is sufficient to have high income, but high income is not sufficient to have high wealth. If I had $100 million in assets, I could easily generate a risk-free $5-10 million/year without doing any work. On the other hand, an earned $5-10 million/year can be blown away easily year after year, leaving a high income earner broke when they retire.

In general, the people making millions from their wealth don't pay much in taxes. They have shelters, pay capital gains rates, etc. People making millions from labor pay a lot in taxes. I don't entirely accept that income from wealth should be treated differently than income from labor, aside from the whole taxation on wealth issue.

I realize we need to encourage investment, but taxing income from wealth at a lower rate than income from work seems designed to increase the wealth gap.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[alienw]

Not too many leak sources, since there is only one company that needs to know how to program the chips, and interfacing information won't tell you much. The technicians don't need to know much beyond "put in the chip and push the red button". Information can be kept secret quite effectively -- the Coca-cola formula is a good example.

Security through obscurity is a VERY effective technique IF the obscurity is maintained. It doesn't work for software since there is no way to hide anything, but it works very well for hardware. For example, nobody has ever succeeded in cracking newer satellite boxes, even though it would be trivial if you had all the specs (the box firmware decides what you can and cannot see, and there is no two-way communication). When you don't even know the instruction set of the processor you are trying to crack, doing so becomes quite difficult.

The military knows this very well, which is why pretty much everything is classified and requires security clearances. The stuff you see leaked is nearly always leaked on purpose -- disinformation is a very effective tool. As far as WEP security and laptop loss: any company whose business actually depends on security would never allow anything like that.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[lgw]

The goal of taxation should not, however, be to reduce the wealth gap, but to make everyone better off. If the end result of lower taxes on income from investment means that the purchasing power of my take-home pay goes up, I'm for it! Worrying that I'm doing well but "that bastard is doing better" is merely petty.

In very rough outline the whole "don't overtax investment returns" thing seems to work out: new technologies do routinely make products I want cheaper.

BTW, the whole "tax shelter only available to the rich" thing is largely urban legend these days, as the IRS really does want their money. The main way the wealthy avoid income taxes is to avoid income. By definition, if you're upper class in America then you don't receive a salary, so it's only capital gains taxes and taxes on dividends. The whole AMT mess was started as a way to squeeze some taxes out of the wealthy who simply refuse to sell their valuable properties, thereby never incurring the capital gains tax to begin with.

Also, often overlooked, the wealthy also pay taxes in the form of the payroll tax for their household staff (aka the Nanny Tax). Of course, people try to dodge this all the time (as with any other sort of tax).

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[LunaticTippy]

If median income growth was lower than inflation for an extended amount of time would it be acceptable to be concerned? Especially if the top 1% doubled its wealth? I'm willing to accept the rising tide theory as long as all boats are being lifted. When most boats are sinking I stop trusting the theory. I'm quite comfortable with my income and wealth, but I don't want to live in a society with a Mexico-like wealth gap. I think it makes for a bad society, even if I'm among the "haves."

Tax shelters are a very big business. My father, whose net worth is only $1.5m makes a huge profit paying a tax advisor $20k/year. Some of the things he suggests are borderline illegal, and he tells my dad so. My dad is too honest (and chicken) to do any of these "borderline illegal" things even though the savings would be vast and everybody else is doing it. I'm nearly at the point where I'll need to consider these issues. I don't know how I'll handle it, but I'm sure I'll worry about getting audited. Poor & middle income people don't worry about taxes, they just take the standard deduction or itemize their mortgage and file their w-2s.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[lgw]

People spin economic number very hard to make whatever political point they want to make. I have strong personal evidence for the "rising tide" theory in my own life: the material things I find interesting/entertaining get substantially cheaper over time. It's just that people are more concerned with their relative success than their absolute standard of living. "Everything I own is lots better than my parents had at my age, but those rich bastards are doing so much better than me, so the system must suck." Terrible way to go through life.

Poor and middle income people essentially pay no taxes, so there's no market for tax shelters for them. The top 1%, income-wise, pay about 1/3 of all income taxes, while the bottom 1/3, income-wise, pay about 1% of all income taxes. I know people in the middle 1/3, income-wise, who obsess over every deduction and hire financial advisors, and people who just take the standard deduction. It's not like there's some special club that "rich people" get to join that has different tax laws. Small business owners have all sorts of tax "shelters" and cheats, but that's not a rich-poor thing, that's a run-your-own-business thing.

45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for the record.

Re:45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

[aj50]

Aww, man. Now I'll have to buy another rubber stamp...

Re:45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, my old T-shirt doesn't decrypt HDDVDs any more.

Re:45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

[Anonymous Coward]

Original source of key.

Re:45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, that just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re:45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

[StreetStealth]

Rubber stamp my arse; I knew I should have waited for that bicep tattoo!

Bad system

[FST]

The reason the current system will fail is because they are selling plastic and keys, and pretending they are selling culture. But they don't own the culture, except by a legal loophole, and the lesson is... the true owners of the culture, the people, will in the end will prevail.

Re:Bad system

[minginqunt]

But, you know, most of these hackers aren't even doing this because they desperately want to watch Pirates of the Opening Weekend IV: At Wits End, since most people have better things to do than watch Kiera Knightley and Orloomdo Bland do their best dining furniture impression.

No, these guys break AACS simply because it's _there_, and the movie industry *dared* them to do it.

And you know what? By making it more complicated than DeCSS, they made BD+ and AACS simply become *even more fun* to hack.

These guys should befriend some supply-side economists to learn about incentives and how they work.

Re:Bad system

[BosstonesOwn]

Or how about simply stop trying to protect "content" I paid for and let me use it as I see fit.

This "war on piracy" crap has to stop , all it is doing is creating a false market for companies to sell them content management (and I use the term loosely) systems.

They need to rally sit back and look at the hacks that are widely available. Satellite , software , hell even bank cards. They need to either make the system more expensive to break , so there is no point in cracking it , but just buying the disc or they need to embrace what the people want.

Since at this point you are driving your customers away I would choose the second option , don't DRM the discs and let people use the content they paid for. Why make them pay 3 times for the same content, that is just basic bad business and money mongering.

Re:Bad system

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason the current system will fail is because they are selling plastic and keys, and pretending they are selling culture. But they don't own the culture, except by a legal loophole, and the lesson is... the true owners of the culture, the people, will in the end will prevail.

But what does AACS have to do with yogurt?

Re:Bad system

[Ash Vince]

I wish I had some points for this. Funny and insightful in the same post.

The problem is that the people who are paying these systems know plenty of economists, but they only seem to consider the financial side of things. They dont seem to recognise that alot of people value other things above money. Personally I value things like achievement and self worth above the state of my bank balance.

Given a choice between a high paying job which I found dull (like being an executive) and doing something I enjoy I know what I would choose.

Re:Bad system

[OldeTimeGeek]

Since at this point you are driving your customers away I would choose the second option

When the customers that they're potentially driving away are a very small part of the overall base, why should they care?

The DVDs that that majority of people buy will never be used anywhere but in their DVD player. It'll work just fine in their home computer too - all DRM breaks is the ability to make copies, something that most people don't do. If the DRM doesn't break their player in some way, which it generally doesn't, they will never know no even care that it is there.

And why should they? These people aren't stupid, it's just that the encoding that is put on the disks is completely transparent to them and largely affects their ability to play the disks in not at all.

Re:Bad system

[PainKilleR-CE]

I find that most people need to understand the link between the encryption and the "features" that irritate them before they will actually realize why this is a big issue to a small number of people. For instance:

- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the FBI anti-piracy warning that everyone skipped on their VHS copies of the same movie.

- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the previews on all of the Disney movies they bought for their kids (therefore leading to their kids wanting all of the crap on the previews; and their kids complaining that the movie hasn't started yet).

- Not being able to copy the movie to their laptop hard drive before they go on a trip to prevent having to take that stack of DVDs through airport security and possibly damaging the disc in transit.

If they understood the reason for the things they have problems with, rather than just blaming it on their DVD player or a shortcoming in their computer, perhaps more people would be irritated by what the movie industry is doing. Instead, the focus of most press on DVD encryption breaks is piracy and copying movies, when the reality is that most people would be happy just to break the format restrictions and keep buying movies.

In a lot of ways I see the same issues with CDs, where the RIAA shot themselves in the foot by saying people were stealing their product by downloading MP3 files when they could have emphasized (and increased) the benefits of the CD format vs. MP3 files. Anyone that listens to a lot of Pink Floyd and hasn't listened to it in any format other than MP3 in a while should throw the CD in the drive and hear what's missing from their MP3 files. Instead, though, we get the music industry trying to make people buy their product again, in a more limited format, and trying to find a way to wrap the older product in a layer of encryption to keep people from ripping the files to use elsewhere.

Re:Bad system

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that listens to a lot of Pink Floyd and hasn't listened to it in any format other than MP3 in a while should throw the CD in the drive and hear what's missing from their MP3 files.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The CDs and the mp3s they're burned from sound identical to me...

Re:Bad system

[OldeTimeGeek]

- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the FBI anti-piracy warning that everyone skipped on their VHS copies of the same movie.

This isn't an issue because it doesn't bug them. Just like trailers in movies or the ads that some theaters show before the lights go down, it's just a minor annoyance.

- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the previews on all of the Disney movies they bought for their kids (therefore leading to their kids wanting all of the crap on the previews; and their kids complaining that the movie hasn't started yet).

Like commercials during live TV, its something that one has to sit through to get to what you're waiting to see. You can't skip through objectionable ads on live TV, so what's the difference?

- Not being able to copy the movie to their laptop hard drive before they go on a trip to prevent having to take that stack of DVDs through airport security and possibly damaging the disc in transit.

Once again, this isn't an issue with most people because most people (even the ones that have laptops in addition to their home systems) are never going to do it.

Most people don't make copies of DVDs, haven't had any problems playing them nor experienced anything other than mild annoyance in sitting through the stuff you get before you can see the movie, so discussing why DRM is bad is so completely out of context for them one might as well be discussing Ionic architecture in Aramaic. They haven't experienced problems nor know of anybody who has, so it just isn't important.

Re:Bad system

[lantenon]

- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the previews on all of the Disney movies they bought for their kids (therefore leading to their kids wanting all of the crap on the previews; and their kids complaining that the movie hasn't started yet).

Like commercials during live TV, its something that one has to sit through to get to what you're waiting to see. You can't skip through objectionable ads on live TV, so what's the difference?

You pay 25$ to watch your live TV shows? Ads pay for the content when there's not another revenue stream already paying for it. Don't make me pay for the content, AND watch your ads. That's the difference.

Re:Bad system

[arminw]

....all DRM breaks is the ability to make copies, something that most people don't do......

As hard drives bigger, especially in laptops, many want to watch their movies they bought without having to drag their DVD collection along. Others want to have a server on their home network to stream content to other rooms.

There are a number of reasons why the bits that represent some form of entertainment might be used in perfectly legal ways, all of which are thwarted by DRM. The ONE thing that DRM has never stopped and never will is the "pirating" of content for profit.

Haiku?

[packetmon]

the site posted the 128-bit key as a method of decrypting a small haiku that they placed on the same page, noting that it just might accidentally (wink, wink) be the same key that will decrypt new high-definition discs as well

I couldn't find that Haiku... Was it:

Broken it is now
Silly little execs
More Free DVD's

Re:Haiku?

[91degrees]

Now they need to sue the AACS LA for distributing a device to circumvent their encryption.

Re:Haiku?

[theTrueMikeBrown]

perhaps: I am so clever My password cannot be guessed... Inconceivable!

Re:Haiku?

[packetmon]

was sarcasm ... *rolls eyes* [NOTE: this slashdot-thread eye rolling is patented under the GPLv3]

Re:Haiku?

[jZnat]

Too bad it isn't a valid haiku. ;)

Re:Haiku?

[abb3w]

I couldn't find that Haiku

The article is misleading; the hacker posted the comment, not the site or its editors. I quoted the "Own Integers" Haiku ((copyright 2007 by Edward W. Felten)) as part of an Educational Post on the actual encryption. The F2T blog with the original seems to be Slashdotted... again. Imagine that.

I do admire BtCB sense of technical style.

Re:Haiku?

[TheoMurpse]

Inconceivable!

You always say that.
It does not mean what you think.
Shut up, Sicilian.

You killed my father.
I'm Inigo Montoya.
Hi, prepare to die!

Rhyme, time, ahead, dead--
No more rhymes now, I mean it!
You want a peanut?

I think Sicilian is three syllables. I imagine some places pronounce it si-ci-li-an, but I pronounce it si-ci-lian (lyun).

Is it worth their ROI?

[erroneus]

One could also argue whether all that money spent by the industry in this race will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment. Of course it will be worth their effort. With more "criminal acts" against their technology, they will win further legislation around the world criminalizing any resistance to their business model. In the end, resist their business model and lose your freedom. (Why does that somehow make me think of the east india company?)

Re:Is it worth their ROI?

[radtea]

Why does that somehow make me think of the east india company?

Because the East India Company made a lot of money for a while and then went into decline and ultimately failed due to the huge cost of trying to maintain control of the areas it had attempted unsuccessfully to monopolize?

At least the Company's business model didn't violate the laws of nature, which is more than can be said for the studios.

Bits can be copied. Basing your business on the belief that some bits can't be copied, or that some bits can even be made quite hard to copy, is like basing your business on the belief that some mass can be made to have just a little bit less inertia than it normally would.

Perpetual motion machines are the only thing that is unpatentable because they cannot work. We will eventually see the time come when DRM systems are unpatentable for exactly the same reason.

It's painful to watch...

[tygerstripes]

My cat does this with spiders. Once he's got one of the hairy buggers pinned, he just sits there and waits for it to make a dash for "freedom". Then he chews another leg off it, and goes back to waiting.
Whenever I see this happen, I'm torn between horror at the grisly spectacle of such torture, and the guilty pleasure of seeing something I hate being toyed with so cruelly. If I can live with it in my own home, I can live with it in the media market...

Re:It's painful to watch...

[Dogtanian]

My cat does this with spiders. Once he's got one of the hairy buggers pinned, he just sits there and waits for it to make a dash for "freedom". Then he chews another leg off it, and goes back to waiting. Whenever I see this happen, I'm torn between horror at the grisly spectacle of such torture, and the guilty pleasure of seeing something I hate being toyed with so cruelly. Let's hope he never comes across a Black Widow then.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[KillerBob]

Black Widow spiders are tiny. Usually less than 1/2 an inch long with very short legs. Nowhere near large enough for a cat to chew the leg off. The GF is probably talking about some of the larger spiders you see around, like dock spiders. Harmless things, but they grow to as much as 6" long around here, and other species in the family can get bigger.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[oliverthered]

"Harmless things,"

I'm a fly you insensitive clod

Re:It's painful to watch...

[Abcd1234]

something I hate being toyed with so cruelly

Totally OT, but OOC, why the hate for spiders? Personally, I love the little buggers. They eat flies and other pests, and otherwise mind their own business. Sounds like a good deal to me...

Re:It's painful to watch...

[drinkypoo]

Let's hope he never comes across a Black Widow then.

A black widow? My friend's cat caught a rattlesnake the day before yesterday. Several feet long, I might add.

Cats know what to do to spiders.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[mgblst]

Not in Australia, where they are called Red Backs - I have seen them almost 2 inches big. We used to have a few living arou nd the outside of the house. As well as about 3 other different types.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[jZnat]

My sister seems to have arachnophobia, so it's very annoying to hear, "OMG MATT/DAD COME KILL THE SPIDER! OMG HURRY! AIEEE!" I hate ants (well, not in a phobia sort of way) and pesky bugs in general, so I agree that spiders are awesome in this sense. They also make for good bosses in videogames. :)

Re:It's painful to watch...

[Skye16]

I love their function, I despise their implementation.

Just looking at them for an extended period of time gives me the gibblies and I can't stop until i /flee.

All the same, when I do see a spider in a non-important place in my house, I just do my best to not look at it and vacate the room as soon as possible. I know they do a good job, I just wish I never had to be confronted by their existence.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[tygerstripes]

Because saying "hate" sounds slightly less pathetic than saying "am irrationally afraid of".

Besides that, the whole issue about spiders controlling fly-population is a bit of a bizarre myth. They do have an impact, but it's barely perceptible. Populations reach an equilibrium on the basis of available resources (usually food and territory) rather than predatory impact, especially in such a stable and ancient food-table as spiders and flies. There really is no reason to "like" spiders, so I feel no guilt about hating them.

But yes, I'm a big girl when it comes to anything with more than four legs.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[Abcd1234]

Populations reach an equilibrium on the basis of available resources

Sure, but spiders play a role in reaching that equilibrium. After all, without predators, the only pressure to keep pest populations in check would be food sources (primarily), which is probably not enough to keep their populations comfortably low. Of course, in their absence, it's entirely possible that other predators would come in to fill their niche... but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the part they play. :)

There really is no reason to "like" spiders, so I feel no guilt about hating them.

I dunno... if it were me, I'd feel some guilt at watching my cat torture one. But, meh, it's not really my place to judge. Mostly just curious, as I've never understood arachnophobia...

Re:It's painful to watch...

[kimvette]

I hate spiders; they creep me out. I get the creepy crawlies when I see one. That has been since I got bit by one and my arm swelled up (and no, no spidey sense, no superhuman strength, no web slinging, and darn it, I cannot climb walls!). Ever since then I've had a fear of spiders. I hate the frigging things and if one is in my house and I see it, its life is forfeit. Irrational? Yes, but that is why it's called a phobia. If I had a cat I would enjoy watching it torture the damn things.

Now, as far as the music industry is concerned; I am no longer an RIAA customer, with few exceptions (as I've stated many times before). There is a fairly recent album I want (I think it is a four-CD set) but I decided if I am going to fork over money for a Sony-distributed CD/album, I'm going to buy it used. They will not be getting sales of new products for me, I will not be helping propel their slaves, er, "artists" to the top of the charts. I am going to watch RIAA members crash and burn, and I am going to enjoy it.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[Chris Burke]

Sure, but spiders play a role in reaching that equilibrium.

Right, so spiders are really good if you have a bug problem. It's not like they'll eliminate bugs, they can't or they'd starve, and the woods are full of spiders and also bugs.

Mostly just curious, as I've never understood arachnophobia...

Well it is, by definition, an irrational fear.

Me, I used to be very arachnophobic. Now I've toned it down to where small spiders don't bother me at all, and as their size increases they bother me more an a more or less exponential scale. I.e. thumbnail sized, still fairly okay, bananna spider sized is very creepy and definitely not something I want around my house, and tarantulas... well, they're sill abject terror. I can barely tolerate seeing those enourmous tarantulas with the abdomen the size of your fist at a museum/zoo when it's behind a full inch of plastic (to protect the spider of course, I know it's harmless, but please refer to afore-mentioned definition of phobia). If I ever ran across a free-roaming tarantula, I'd flee the state.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[BLKMGK]

I had a dog that was nearly killed by a Black Widow while visitng my girlfriend, put the dog into a coma for days and she awoke deaf and blind. She regained hearing but not sight except for on rare occasions when she could see for maybe a day and then go dark again. Took us forever to figure out it was a spider, we finally found the welt, and due to the symptoms we deduced it was a Black Widows vs a Brown Recluse which is also native to that area. It wasn't until we cleaned that place out for a move that we found the nest behind some furniture - spider still in residence. Black Widow are pretty nasty little buggers, this dog was a full up 50lbs and it took heroic measures by the Vet to save her. Not a spider to mess with for sure....

Re:It's painful to watch...

[drinkypoo]

Took us forever to figure out it was a spider, we finally found the welt, and due to the symptoms we deduced it was a Black Widows vs a Brown Recluse which is also native to that area.

Sure, if it was a brown recluse you wouldn't have been figuring out what kind of spider bit the dog, but where to bury it.

Black Widow are pretty nasty little buggers, this dog was a full up 50lbs and it took heroic measures by the Vet to save her. Not a spider to mess with for sure....

Eh, I've been bit on the leg by one and recovered without medical care. Depends on the bite, and the organism receiving it, I guess. It did make the side of my calf pretty much numb for the better part of a year... But the point is, my money's on the cat.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[elrous0]

It's probably the venom that bothers me. And by "bother," I mean "makes me feverish and vomit-prone."

Re:It's painful to watch...

[Abcd1234]

Bah, the number of dangerous spiders out there is greatly outnumbered by those that are entirely harmless. 'course, I blame movies and our general culture for overblowing the danger (the same is true of snakes, bats, etc).

Heck, you're far more likely to get hurt by a moose, but that doesn't stop idiot tourists from sidling up beside one to take a picture.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[elrous0]

People keep saying that bears and snakes are more afraid of me than I am of them. That's probably because of the gun I carry in the woods. If I stopped carrying it, I suspect this equation would change.

Re:It's painful to watch...

[dcam]

Eh, get bitten by a real spider. We can talk snakes after that if you want. /lives in Australia

The other side of the coin

[TripMaster Monkey]

From the summary:

One could also argue whether all that money spent by the industry in this race will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment."

Indeed...one could argue that a company would better serve its shareholders and its long term interests by eliminating copy protection completely. After all, at this stage of the game, anyone who wants a pirated copy can either make it themselves, or knows some techie guy who can. Eliminating all copy protection would save money otherwise pissed away on ineffective measures that only serve to annoy legitimate users, and would build a measure of good will and consumer loyalty that is worth more than anything deterring piracy could realize.

Re:The other side of the coin

[hal2814]

"...anyone who wants a pirated copy..." (emphasis mine)

Aha, but that's the key. Most people don't necessarily want a pirated copy. They just want a copy. If the copy protection can be difficult enough to get around to not make it worth the average person's time, then they won't bother getting a pirated version. People who make a conscious effort to pirate the material cannot be stopped, but if you can make it difficult enough to pirate nobody else will bother. I think the movie industry massively failed in that regard with DVDs. It became far too easy to pirate them. I also think they'll also fail here, but I do see why they keep trying. If they can just make it hard enough, most people won't bother.

Re:The other side of the coin

[jonnythan]

Man, the pirated copies are better than the retail copies.

I want pirated copies.

Re:The other side of the coin

[UF00]

The only thing I disagree with is that it's trivial to copy DVDs. Even the least technically savvy person can put a music CD into their computer and press the Copy Disc button that's built in to the operating system now. DVDs are more difficult, and the new breed of discs seem to be harder to copy still (not that I have a high def drive to say for sure, nor the desire to support the anti-consumer technology).

AACS won't stop actual piracy, but even CSS stops (or slows) casual playground/sneakernet piracy, so in that regard I think the actions of the AACS-LA are appropriate. People talk about the millions of dollars and years of time to develop the system that is broken in hours for free, but if it keeps 80% of the movie buying population from switching to the mindset that "movies are free like music is" then a cost/benefit analysis will probably say to implement the technology.

In any case, the aftermath is fun to watch.

Re:The other side of the coin

[LordSnooty]

But as long as there are unencrypted copies on the Internet, there'll be people savvy enough to download & dump them to disk, which they can then hand round to their non-savvy friends.

Re:The other side of the coin

[Anonymous Coward]

Enter the lawyers, stage left.

Re:The other side of the coin

[p0gue]

For every person making it harder, there are 100 making it easier.

Re:The other side of the coin

[TheRaven64]

Depends on what you mean by copy. I can put a DVD in my Mac, got to Disk Utility, and hit 'make image.' I then get a disk image of the DVD and watch that with Apple's own DVD player. I've not tried burning one of these back to a DVD (apparently you can't) because I don't have any dual layer blanks, but I can easily copy it between machines.

I do this for a lot of DVDs so I can watch them on my laptop without having the drive spinning loudly and flattening the battery.

Re:The other side of the coin

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing I disagree with is that it's trivial to copy DVDs. Even the least technically savvy person can put a music CD into their computer and press the Copy Disc button that's built in to the operating system now. DVDs are more difficult

Buy AnyDVD and that "Copy Disc button" works for every disc you put in the drive. Every tool that works with "non-copyprotected DVDs" works with every DVD when AnyDVD is running.

Yes, AnyDVD is a Windows program, but the majority of people who need the "Copy Disc button" are running Windows

Re:The other side of the coin

[deblau]

If the copy protection can be difficult enough to get around to not make it worth the average person's time, then they won't bother getting a pirated version.

Ah, but the harder it is to crack, the more likely it is that someone who takes the time to crack it will make the cracked version available to others for the ego boost. At which point, it's a simple download. The difficulty of the copy protection is only proportional to the length of time before anyone can download a cracked copy, not the difficulty of eventually obtaining a copy (which remains approximately zero).

Re:The other side of the coin

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people don't necessarily want a pirated copy. They just want a copy

I'd guess most people don't even want a copy. They just want to play the movie.

A part of development

[AltGrendel]

This could be deliberate in an effort to create a stronger DRM package by the Entertainment industry.

Like it is actually a standard part of the development life cycle for DRM. Kind of a "throw it to the wolves and see how long it lasts" mentality. Then it's back to the drawing board to try again.

Re:A part of development

[Dan Ost]

Have DRM schemes gotten any better over time?

Seems like they're getting cracked faster than ever.

DRM == FRAUD

[Concern]

When will the legal system in this country catch on to the fact that DRM is a garden variety fraud, perpetrated by shady "engineers" on gullible content producers?

There has never been a working DRM system in the history of mankind. There will very likely never be a working DRM system. And I only say "very likely" because the rest of history is a very long time - but it is impossible to imagine how any such system can be built in the future, regardless of technological progress.

The roster of DRM vendors is a list of failed charlatans, with a track record of consumer ire, ruined reputations (the vendors' own, and their customers), legal liability (remember Sony?), and of course, enormous costs for their customers - their true victims.

I wonder if the spectacle of AACS' failure will finally begin to wake them to the fact that no one can sell DRM, because it doesn't exist - and the people who claim it does are no better than those selling magic weight loss via email spam.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[Aladrin]

Other things there's never been a working system of:

Antigravity.
Perpetual Motion.
Sharks with Frickin Lasers on their heads.
Space Flight. -- Wait, we did that one.
Pocket Computers. -- No, sorry, that one too.

Seriously, just because it's never worked before is -not- proof that it never will. There's -plenty- of reasons, but this is -not- one of them.

To companies, copy protection is -not- completely useless, so we'll never see content completely free from DRM. Expensive DRM is pointless, though, as it provides nothing extra.

Why isn't it completely useless? Because their work is covered under additional laws other than just copyright. Cheap vs Expensive DRM makes no difference here, the law doesn't differentiate.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[ender-]

I wonder if the spectacle of AACS' failure will finally begin to wake them to the fact that no one can sell DRM, because it doesn't exist - and the people who claim it does are no better than those selling magic weight loss via email spam.

You are making a huge assumption that AACS was actively sold to the MPAA as a 'this will prevent piracy' option. I'm betting that it was not. Even if it was advertised as such, I don't think the MPAA is stupid enough to believe that it is. They knew it would be circumvented, although I'm sure they hoped it would take a bit longer than it has.
At most, I'm guessing the MPAA sees AACS as a deterrent. In the grand scheme of MPAA finances, I'm sure it didn't cost very much to develop and implement AACS, in the hopes that the "difficulty" and potential legal ramifications would stop just enough acts of piracy by Joe Schmoe. For them it's a small financial gamble to maybe sell a few more copies of the movie of the day.

Unfortunately, I think they are mistaken. I'd probably be buying more HD-DVD movies if it were easier [and legal] for me to rip them to a hard drive to play through my Xbox360.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[UbuntuDupe]

Define "working system". The point of DRM is not to make copying impossible, or even very difficult, but to make it difficult *enough* and leave *enough* of a trail for law enforcement, that profit margins on the production of the content remain competitive with that in other industries. And it mostly seems to accomplish that.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[ravenshrike]

You could make a DRM system work, but you would have to completely black box the media and player, and booby-trap it so when the case was cracked it would fry the DRM components. Even then it could theorectically still be done. But with an industry-wide standard this CANNOT be done. And therefore truly effective DRM will not be possible for a very long time, if ever.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[HoosierPeschke]

the law doesn't differentiate

</snip>
yet...

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[noidentity]

"There will very likely never be a working DRM system. And I only say "very likely" because the rest of history is a very long time [...]"

When you consider the rest of history, it's pretty guaranteed that all DRM systems will be broken, becuase the more time passes, the most likely someone has broken a given scheme.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[Anonymous Coward]

As some on earlier pointed out it is impossible for DRM to work longterm. Current encryption is great and for all practical purposes a good algorithm and a decent key length is currently unbreakable provided I don't have the key. Unfortunately when it comes to media, if you want me to be able to watch/listen to the encrypted content you have to give me the key as well. So the best DRM can do is try and find new and clever ways to hide the keys better from the end users. Even though most people don't want a 30Gb move file there is almost no better way to motivate smart people than by telling them they CAN'T do something.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[Deliveranc3]

Well online games with keys checked against an internet database have effectively reduced online game piracy to ~0%.

Considering WOW is making several million dollars a month they're probably pretty happy with their DRM scheme? The truth is it can work no matter how much we'd like it not to, and we need to legislate it out of commision before it does.

Right now they're pushing the DRM aspect, they're probably spending 10-15% of their revenue on it, considering the moral standpoint they've aquired I'm pretty worried where they'll turn next.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[bhalter80]

Taking this up one level to that of governments who last I checked were **supposed to** be role models, isn't the CIA/NSA's bread and butter circumventing DRM schemes in an effort to read documents that the originator (other country) wanted kept secret? If the DMCA isn't good enough for gov't work then it shouldn't be implemented on a civil level either.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[marcosdumay]

You missed that part:

"...it is impossible to imagine how any such system can be built in the future, regardless of technological progress."

That never applied to space travel and pocket computers, as it doesn't currently apply to antigravity, perpetual motion and sharks with lasers. Altough we are quite sure the last can't be done, we can at least imagine them.

Re:DRM == FRAUD

[Aladrin]

You don't think that as soon as people learned space was out there, and the sky wasn't just painted on, that they imagined traveling to the moon? And that there were plenty of people that said it was impossible?

And the same goes for pocket computers. Even 50 years ago, people would have said it was impossible. You just couldn't miniaturize like that. Well surprise, now we can!

And there's absolutely no reason we can't put lasers on the heads of sharks. Controlling them and making it not be completely pointless is the problem, not physically putting the lasers on their heads.

Neverending story, eh?

[Spy der Mann]

This reminds me of a famous song... let's see what we can do with it.

*ahem* *ahem*

Turn around
Look at what you see
In their face
The keyword of your dreams
Make believe they're everywhere
Just encrypted in the lines
Written on the DVD's
Is the answer to our never ending story
ah ah ah

See the cracks
In their fantasy
crush their dream
show them what they'll be
Codes that keep their secrets
Will unfold behind a yarr
zero nine eff nine one one...
Is the answer to our never ending story
ah ah ah

Show no fear
For they may fade away
In your hands
The birth of a new age
Codes that keep their secrets
Will unfold behind a yarr
zero nine eff nine one one...
Is the answer to our never ending story...
ah ah ah
Never ending story...
ah ah ah
Never ending story.

Re:Neverending story, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What The Filk?

Re:Neverending story, eh?

[andrewd18]

FSCKING HILARIOUS! Thanks. On a related note, my coworkers are staring at me now.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[SkyMunky]

I would have already bought an HD-DVD player had there not been DRM in place. If I knew I could make copies for myself, rip to a portable or my laptop easily, etc., I would already own an HD-DVD player an several movies for it. I guess the Industry doesn't take my demographic into account as it must be a minority, but surely there has to be some up-side to playing nice with consumers and letting us make copies/rips of their movies. I used to buy music, too, when I knew I could copy/mix/etc.
  Would they lose a sale here and there because somebody copies a movie for a friend/family/neighbor? Yes, of course. Are they going to anyway? Yes. But...are they losing sales because of DRM in place? I think lots.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[dAzED1]

eh, not really. You buy (I'd wager) dvds, and those have DRM.

Aside from the bad PR they get from displaying their greed, the only thing actually preventing sales is the format war itself.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[0123456]

"You buy (I'd wager) dvds, and those have DRM."

No they don't.

OK, technically they have CSS, but it's so totally broken I don't even understand why they bother with it anymore.

As with the earlier poster, I would have bought a player and disks, but not until they're as 'open' as current DVDs. I have no desire to be forced to watch them the way the IP Barons want me to watch them, rather than the way I want to watch them; for example, the fucking stupid piracy ads on recent DVDs that are unskippable with a 'closed' player that sticks to official standards. I don't need to spend two minutes being told not to pirate disks every single time I put a disk I've paid for into a player... I've bought the fucking disk in the first place.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You buy (I'd wager) dvds, and those have DRM.

Actually they don't. There es nothing that manages restrictions since there are no (effective) restrictions to be managed. My linux box plays DVDs just fine. That is not true for BD and HD-DVD.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[dAzED1]

think about what you're saying. Whether something is effective or not is clearly not an issue; GP isn't currently buying blueray/hd, despite what is also ineffective DRM.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[dAzED1]

sure CSS is broken...just as AACS is. GP is claiming that he won't buy blueray/hd unless it doesn't have DRM. DVD has DRM. CSS is broken. AACS is broken.

Thus my point - GP is inconsistent. DRM is clearly not stopping him from buying anything, as he buys (likely) DVDs.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[0123456]

"AACS is broken."

No it's not, because they'll release yet another key next week. People have to keep breaking it until the underlying algorithm is broken.

CSS, on the other hand, is totally, utterly and irrevocably broken.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[nuzak]

OK, technically they have CSS, but it's so totally broken I don't even understand why they bother with it anymore.

Not only do they still bother with it, they come up with new ones, like ARccOS (courtesy of our good friends at Sony). That was a PITA to rip properly til recently ... tho any decent one-click DVD ripper will handle it now.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[dAzED1]

so I get to use the same word someone tried to use earlier - "effectively."

When the scheme can be cracked in a day, AACS is effectively broken. So why not just go with it as is, since it won't really impact sales?

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[ucblockhead]

IIRC, the AACS is contractually bound to release new keys only every 90 days. If the hackers can prove that they can always get the key within a week or two, it will become essentially pointless to release new keys, and the entire scheme will be essentially worthless.

It is very unlikely the underlying algorithm will be broken, but then, the underlying algorithm isn't what makes DRM schemes impossible. The weakness of these schemes is that they require the key be somewhere in either the software or the hardware.

It is also very important to note that the hackers are just releasing the keys, not the methods they used to acquire them. I'm sure this is intentional as it means that the AACS has no way of knowing whether or not they can plug the hole that let the last key out before issuing a new one.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority, but...

[toddestan]

OK, technically they have CSS, but it's so totally broken I don't even understand why they bother with it anymore.

Because cracking it is still illegal under the DMCA, even for fair use. That tips the balance more in their favor than if they simply started releasing non-encrypted disks.

i've seen a few high-def vids online

[Adult film producer]

available via your favourite local torrent website.. I never infringe copyright but here's what I've seen so far,

Fantastic.Four.2005.DVD5.720p.BluRay.x264.PROPER-P ROGRESS
Crank.2006.720p.DVD5.BluRay.x264-SEPTiC
Reservoir.Dogs.1992.DVD5.720p.BluRay.x264-REVEiLLE

More to come very soon..

Re:i've seen a few high-def vids online

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm. Looks like people are dropping the resolution on them to fit on a single-layer DVD (disc source reference says 1080p), so already we're getting "lossy" copies, and not exact duplicates. Interesting.

Re:i've seen a few high-def vids online

[LordPhantom]

"Adult Film Producer"? I'm interested in your take on pirate pr0n.......

Re:i've seen a few high-def vids online

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like people are dropping the resolution on them to fit on a single-layer DVD (disc source reference says 1080p), so already we're getting "lossy" copies, and not exact duplicates.

The lossless copy would be around 15-20GB and would be impractical for sharing over bittorrent. Resizing to 720p helps decrease the filesize down to a single 4.37GB DVD, but more importantly, makes the movie playable on an average computer. If the movie was left at 1080p and re-encoded with h264, it would only be playable on the very high end processors.

Re:i've seen a few high-def vids online

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, understood. Basically, it shows that general purpose computing (hardware/network) isn't yet up to the task of rampantly distributing the full-resolution product, despite the shrill cries of the media producers. [Arguments as to the potential quality loss between 1080p and 720p can be left to the videophiles]

(It also speaks to the price jump between DVD5 and DVD9/BD-R/HDDVD-R media)

I'm still surprised that there isn't at least one group of lunatics trying to torrent the full-resolution data, though.

Re:i've seen a few high-def vids online

[0123456]

"Basically, it shows that general purpose computing (hardware/network) isn't yet up to the task of rampantly distributing the full-resolution product"

What's so difficult about downloading and playing 1080-line HD video on a PC with a half-decent broadband connection?

Re:i've seen a few high-def vids online

[Tony Hoyle]

Those aren't straight rips - 720p on a DVD5? They must have compressed the crap out of it.

If you're gonna get pirate stuff at least get the good stuff - the original material is 1080p/24 and takes up a few GB.

Re:i've seen a few high-def vids online

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite often HD discs only use MPEG2. Re-encodes with a good MPEG4 codec can therefore reduce the size considerably without affecting quality very much.

Re:i've seen a few high-def vids online

[Dan Ost]

ARRR!!! Thar she blows!!

Blank Stare

[WED Fan]

The reason the current system will fail is because they are selling plastic and keys, and pretending they are selling culture. But they don't own the culture, except by a legal loophole, and the lesson is... the true owners of the culture, the people, will in the end will prevail.

I'm sure you thought that was deep, but dude, put down the stick, exhale, and re-read your lines.

Re:Blank Stare

[notque]

I'm sure you thought that was deep, but dude, put down the stick, exhale, and re-read your lines.

There isn't anything deep about it, it just happens to be true.

You know, like this...

            The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
            We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
            Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
            They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons--a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million--who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

By the Creator of the Public Relations Industry, and Nephew of Sigmund Freud, Mr. Edward Bernays

Simple solution

[gr8_phk]

If the MPAA want to protect their stuff they shouldn't license the decryption algorithms to PC implementations. You'd think they would have learned that with DVD. Don't put secret algorithms on widely available hardware with lots of debuggers and hacking tools. Duh.
This would slow down the crackers a LOT - but not entirely.

Re:Simple solution

[pavera]

When DVD John hacked CSS wasn't it by taking apart a physical player? I thought he pulled apart an actual DVD player to do it, but maybe I heard wrong.

Re:Simple solution

[gEvil (beta)]

When DVD John hacked CSS wasn't it by taking apart a physical player? I thought he pulled apart an actual DVD player to do it, but maybe I heard wrong.

Nope. The keys were pulled from a software DVD player. A similar (but slightly more difficult) method was used for the AACS keys.

Re:Simple solution

[hAckz0r]

No, but somebody hacked a Xbox to read the HD-DVD keys. I bet that made Mr G very happy about the future prospects in negotiations with the MPAA to achieve world dominance. When will they learn that the whole concept of DRM is logically infeasible.

The actual purpose of DRM of course is to enforce their monopoly and price-fixing tactics. This scheme only works if the MPAA "contract" with the artists/producer is exclusive, iron clad, and has enough draconian clauses to keep the artist from profiting through multiple venues. Perhaps the real fix to the intentional "unusability" of DRM is to ignore the DRM itself and work instead on getting the artists better contract negotiations so the market has some real competition on the delivery end. Do that and DRM magically goes away through market forces and there will be a value based on the quality of the product. The artist themselves are the only justifiable monopoly, and they should be paid well for good material.

Re:Simple solution

[BoberFett]

And lose the backing of the entire computer industry? Not likely. When trying to launch a new media format, these companies need all they help they can get to foist the thing on the public. Telling huge swaths of the tech industry they're not needed doesn't help.

Re:Simple solution

[JasterBobaMereel]

The problem is that the MPAA do not "own" any content at all, they just police it on behalf of *some* of the distributors .. note not the makers/artists, the distributors ...

The only thing DRM does is stop the casual copier and annoy legitimate users (The more complicated something is the more it can break)

The abillity to withdraw a key means that you can have a customer who has a legally bought Movie and cannot play it on a legally bought player!

It's still doing it's primary job

[Dachannien]

AACS does stop casual copying, but it hasn't prevented unencrypted HD content from being distributed over the Internet.

That's really what the content cabal are most interested in. Piracy of their content is a foregone conclusion. It's been happening for decades, and in some countries, almost the entire market for their content is based on counterfeit copies. They've long since priced their "losses" into the cost of their product.

What AACS (and CSS before it) is really about is enforcing the other forms of DRM they've implemented, like user-operation prohibition (preventing you from skipping the pointless FBI notice, company credits, and best/worst of all, advertising) and region coding. Note that neither of those DRM schemes have anything to do with piracy prevention - they're just another route for indirectly extracting revenue from the consumer, by force-feeding advertising or by exploiting the arbitrage created when they don't release their content simultaneously around the world.

Re:It's still doing it's primary job

[Jeff DeMaagd]

exploiting the arbitrage created when they don't release their content simultaneously around the world.

Part of this is because the translated / adapted versions aren't ready for release at the same time. Dialogue and clips tend to get changed & tweaked up until release such that there is little point in trying to do simultaneous translations because it would be a never-ending chase. The English version can be released right away, other languages might take half a year longer.

Re:It's still doing it's primary job

[MMC Monster]

Yeah. It's tough giving Captain Jack Sparrow an Aussie accent.

Re:It's still doing it's primary job

[mpapet]

"Here Here!" It's refreshing to read someone who actually understands pricing models.

I think the previous limitations on DRM will slowly fade though. Right now it _has_ to carry the private key because most playback devices are off-line.

Once broadband is as common as television, TPM chips will be very cheap. By that time the media conglomerate execs _might_ figure out that PKI is the way to go. This also enables the media conglomerates to fully control the production of playback devices.

As another post so insightfully pointed out, the media conglomerates are using the cracks to justify ridiculous legislation.

Re:It's still doing it's primary job

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Where did I say that it was the case ALL the time? Sometimes it is just stupid, but if they do any localization, it does take time, then it can't be released simultaneoulsly everywhere. ADR takes time.

Re:It's still doing it's primary job

[MMC Monster]

I know. :-) I just feel that the studios can actually double-dip the foreign markets if they wanted to. First sell a U.S. edition of the DVD (for those that *have* to see the movie right away), and then a localized version a month later.

Re:It's still doing it's primary job

[Anonymous Coward]

This is still crackable in principle, since the downloaded keys can be sniffed. It does make it considerably harder though, especially as they will no doubt use frequently changing keys like satellite TV does. Somehow saving the data / keys then doing an offline crack would probably be best. Modern sat encryption like Sky's current system apparently can be cracked realtime, but it takes so much equipment and computer horsepower that it just doesn't make sense to do so.

Heard from an RIAA Studio exec .....

[Anonymous Coward]

Studio Exec: [pointing to a screen with code on it] This is a crypto program, to, uh, you know, what we use on DVDs, but it's very, very special, because, if you can see...
Hacker: Yeah...
Studio Exec: [pointing to the parameters] ...the numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the screen: eleven, eleven, eleven, eleven...
Hacker: Oh, I see. And most crypto keys go up to ten?
Studio Exec: Exactly.
Hacker: Does that mean it's better? Is that any better?
Studio Exec: Well, it's one better, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most... most blokes, you know, will be coding at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up... you're on ten on your algorithm. Where can you go from there? Where?
Hacker: I don't know...
Studio Exec: ...nowhere! Exactly! What we do is if we need that extra... push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Hacker: Put it up to eleven.
Studio Exec: ...Eleven. Exactly. One better.
Hacker: Why don't you just make ten better, and make ten be the top... number, and make that algorithm a little better?
Studio Exec: [pause, blank look and snapping chewing gum] This goes to eleven.

Re:Heard from an RIAA Studio exec .....

[Opportunist]

(*cue in DRM spin vendor)
And here we have an algorithm that goes up to SIXTEEN! You know, hexadecimal, all the way, a proven technology since the advent of the computer. Not ten, not eleven, we don't take little steps, ours goes up to 16 in a single big leap forwards to more protection!
Hacker: But still the same algorithm?
DRM vendor (*enthusiastic nod*): But up to 16!
Studio Exec: Brilliant! We buy!

dvd sales

[dAzED1]

I know this has been mentioned before a million times, but...have dvd sales really been hurt that bad by the encryption for dvd being broken years ago? Those that will rip, will find a way to rip. The rest will buy the blueray/hd dvds.

Unless the industry is wanting to try a dramatic price hike, which would cause those on and near the fence to rip too...?

Re:dvd sales

[Andy Dodd]

Probably not. I didn't buy a DVD-ROM drive (or any other DVD reading mechanism) until there was decent DVD playback support for Linux.

Guess when I bought my Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive? When the first AACS crack came out, that's when. While so far it can only be used for copying (quite inefficient), it's a matter of time before this gets used for realtime playback on unlicensed systems like my Linux box.

Re:dvd sales

[dAzED1]

I guess I'm one of the minority of people that watch DVDs on a TV instead of my computer, then. You are clearly the market force that drives the cost effectiveness of something. /sarcasm

Did you really answer my point? As a reminder: "have dvd sales really been hurt that bad by the encryption for dvd being broken years ago? Those that will rip, will find a way to rip."

The driving force of the market is not the guy who wants to watch a movie on his linux box, but the family that wants to watch a movie on their TV in the livingroom. Have dvd sales really been hurt by the breaking of CSS? Then what the fark are they diddling with AACS so much for?

Re:dvd sales

[Ngwenya]

Unless the industry is wanting to try a dramatic price hike, which would cause those on and near the fence to rip too...?

It has been suggested that the reason for AACS, HDCP, BD+ et al is not so much to protect content, but rather to ensure that players for HD media are maintained in a small, hopefully non-competitive market. For instance, DVD players now can be picked up for little more than the price of a DVD (OK, OK, pretty crappy ones, but you get the idea). But with all of the licensing agreements for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, together with the key issuance procedures and diligence, this imposes major costs on manufacturers, which will keep player prices high. Of course, it also ensures that TVs/computer displays have inflated prices as they struggle to build in HDCP type mechanisms.

Many of the major content producers have fingers in the consumer electronics markets too - having ultra cheap HD players isn't good for their margins. It won't last forever - nothing ever does. But perhaps the next big thing will have come along by then - HVD based disks with UHD resolution, perhaps; and the market exclusion game can begin another cycle.

--Ng

Re:dvd sales

[jZnat]

Ever heard of an HTPC? Linux tends to be one of the best operating systems for these things (along with MythTV, but that could use some improvements with the UI), and one usually hooks these up to a TV! If you didn't already know, you can also use an HDMI to DVI plug and plug your HDTV directly into a computer! No more need for a monitor when you've got your 60" 1080p HDTV in the living room for the family/girlfriend/wife to enjoy a nice movie or TV show. Isn't technology great?

Re:dvd sales

[dAzED1]

again, the market segment for those with PCs running Linux that they use as media centers is HUGE. Dwarfs the market segment of folks just wanting to watch a movie on a regular player they bought at walmart. The difference in #'s is so huge in fact, it's almost not worth mentioning those normal families buying walmart/bestbuy/etc players.

Shall I ask the question again? Has CSS being broken really hurt DVD sales? Then why keep messing around with AACS?

Re:dvd sales

[debest]

have dvd sales really been hurt that bad by the encryption for dvd being broken years ago?

Quite the opposite: I would not have purchased any DVDs or a DVD player until the copy scheme was broken. I have a small child in my house: you think I let her anywhere near the purchased copies of her movies? She gets the burned copies only.

I gotta say, though: to VHS's credit, those tapes are fairly tough. My daughter can handle the video tapes all she wants. But DVDs are far more fragile: I've had to re-burn "Madagascar" a couple of times for her, and she's really not that rough with the discs.

(Oh, and the fact that DVD Shrink lets me make discs that start playing the movie immediately on inserting the disc into the player is a huge bonus as well. If DVDs were indestructible, this feature makes the process worth it by itself.)

They are only hurting the people who won't copy

[thefinite]

If I understand how the new AACS implementation will work, consumers with devices using it will need to install the new key every time it is released, if they want new movies to play. The stupidity of this is that people who want to copy a movie probably have no problem finding the new crack. No matter how often a new key comes out, within a day they can crack and copy.

The only people inconvenienced by this system are the people who just want to watch the friggin' movie they just bought! I shudder to think of how my mom would deal with the situation if she just bought a new blu-ray movie and found it wouldn't play because she doesn't have the latest key. I hope they give up on releasing new keys soon.

Re:They are only hurting the people who won't copy

[r3m0t]

You are incorrect. Although software players do need free updates to read some new media, no hardware player has been made useless by this system. Yet.

If the problem can be fixed by updating firmware (e.g. somebody flashes their firmware to make the device region-free, to fix the problem the firmware mmust be reflashed) then the firmware can be placed on any new disc and the flashing happens transparently.

AACS asks for hacks

[Rastignac]

They chose a very bad name for this technology, indeed. ;)

Watch the news spread using Google

[giafly]

At the time of posting, this gives 973 results. Click the link see how much further the news has spread.

Re:Watch the news spread using Google

[Anonymous Coward]

14000+ now

Re:Watch the news spread using Google

[MartinJW]

14,200 and rising.

Re:Watch the news spread using Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Results 1 - 10 of about 14,200 for "45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2". (0.04 seconds)

man, this is going fast

Re:Watch the news spread using Google

[jZnat]

In a little over two hours later, we're already at 14200 results! Go internet!

Re:Watch the news spread using Google

[parme]

20,600

Interesting post, thanks.

Silent cheer for cracked DRM

[raw-sewage]

Does anyone else silently cheer whenever you read a headline about DRM being cracked?

I mean, I'm not an anarchist or cheering for piracy. I just think that DRM strips or at least greatly hinders fair use and artificially inflates the cost of media. The latter is particularly irksome: part of the cost of your CDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blueray Discs is to pay for the research, development and deployment of DRM. I'm sure that's not a trivial cost.

The more I think about this, the more worked up I get: it's paying for features that nobody wants. We are literally paying more to get less.

Making personal copies of media, I believe, should be totally within our fair use rights. I know lots of people with young children who make copies of their DVDs. Their kids watch the DVDs over and over again, and their grubby little hands aren't well-suited for handling the somewhat fragile media. Solution: make a cheap copy of a DVD, and let the kids use that one. Likewise, I copy and encode all the DVD movies I own to my hard drive for a movie-on-demand system. I still own the DVD, so why can't I copy it? (Maybe I should thank the DRM pushers for trying to combat my laziness?)

Just out of curiosity... how big are HD-DVD and Blueray movies? Last I recall, the media sizes were 30 and 60 GB, respectively. Do most movies take up all that space? I mean (in my experience), most 480p DVD movies seem to average just under 9 GB (the full capacity of a dual-layer DVD).

Re:Silent cheer for cracked DRM

[Magada]

Does anyone else silently cheer whenever you read a headline about DRM being cracked? Hell no. I cheer very loudly indeed.

Re:Silent cheer for cracked DRM

[Overzeetop]

I don't know about BD/HD discs, but full-length DVDs are often between 6 and 7.5GB, including all the trailers and extras. TV series often pack 8-9GB on a disc. Most animated movies are under the 5GB barrier, and when stripped of commercials and fluff often require no shrinking to fit within a single layer disc.

Yes, I do a little mental happy dance, too. It's actually infinitely frustrating for me, as I own about 300 DVDs and would like to stick them into an itune-ish interface on a single server so I can put the discs back in their cases and throw away my tempermental DVD jukebox. Except, of course, there's no cheap stock solution because of (1) DRM and (2) the "fear" that someone might use such a tool for netflix abuse. Bugs the hell out of me. I also like to rip my daughters discs down to just the movie so that it's easier to start the flick, and I don't have to sift through the enforced commercials and inane menus just to get the disc to play. She (4yo) can already work the pronto to select the disc from a paper thumbnail list I made for her, but since we try and keep the total TV time down, all that extra content is really just wasted time.

Re:Silent cheer for cracked DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

I cheer loudly, and I work for Sony. I cheer, because the sooner my company learns that DRM is idiocy, the sooner it'll stop wasting resources on bullshit and start recapturing markets by making more products that people want to buy.

Re:Silent cheer for cracked DRM

[jZnat]

The numbers you want are around 20 GB for HD movies, and these are 1080p. DVDs are only as large as they are because they use the older (and outdated at this point) MPEG-2 part 2 video codec; this can be compressed to around 1 GiB (rather than around 8.8 GiB in a dual-layer DVD) using a more modern video codec like MPEG-4 part 2 (Advanced Simple Profile) or part 10 (AVC, High Profile) while maintaining nearly the same quality. Just as how CDs are encoded as raw PCM data using 16-bit samples at 44.1 kHz which can be compressed to a much smaller level via either lossless or lossy compression, DVDs can be compressed quite a bit using modern technology.

Re:Silent cheer for cracked DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Except, of course, there's no cheap stock solution

*cough* Smartripper and *cough* FlaskMPEG *cough*
I'm sure there's better solutions out there but those work very quickly/nicely, according to, um, "friends" of mine.

Re:Silent cheer for cracked DRM

[BLKMGK]

I've done this for my DVD. 4+ TB NAS (unRAID), plus an old XBOX1 hacked to run XBMC = perfect HTPC front end for downloaded and ripped media. It will also play games, emulators like MAME, give weather info, allow me to watch YouTube vids, Apple Trailers, and plays all of my MP3s too. If it could record and play back greater than 720P I'd be in heaven.

$50 for old XBOX, $30 for chip, XBMC for free. XBMC is currently being ported to Linux and will be aimed at specific hardware platforms so stay tuned if hacking an XBOX is too hard for you ;-)

Re:Silent cheer for cracked DRM

[Overzeetop]

...plus an old XBOX1 hacked to run...

Yes, yes, yes. I know you can do that stuff. I've also built a HTPC with WMC (which is fuck-all unusable with ATI video card drivers). But it's still no good. Goddamnit, I want a TiVo w/ DVDprofiler. A seemingly trivial operation if it weren't for DRM and teams of swarming lawyers. WMC is close, though the browsing and asswipe driver and drm issues makes it damned near unusable.

Hell, I've got a Mivx box that will hold about 400 XviD movies, and I have some on there now, sorted by genre in the folder structure. But it looks like a hack job..or worse yet, a computer. I should be able to go to Target or some bix box electrocnics store) and pick up something more polished, like I can pick up a TiVo or a Philips DVD/Divx player. Or order a $75 software package to so the whole damned thing on generic hardware. But I've tried a couple out, and they all tend to center around recorded TV, photos, and music.

I can't do this with video, of course, because the content is DRMed with laywers. (The DRM is easy to get around, the lawyers are not). In fact, the content companies are so scared they won't even let you do the operation with "unencoded" discs - which would work fine since I have the slysoft software which decrypts in the background.

I dream of a day where I put a videodisc into the drive, and it rips, tags, files, and catalogs the content according to my predetermined scheme - a cross between Media Monkey (which does all of this for audio) and DVDprofiler (which catalogs my DVD collection).

Okay... How do we use a crack?

[MMC Monster]

Now that multiple keys are out, how does someone legitimately use a key to view a HD disc on Linux? (Assuming I have a HD-DVD or Bluray drive, that is) Is there a special player or something?

(I would like to know so that I can decide if getting a player for my media center computer is worth it.)

DRM is futile

[pavera]

We all know this, I just think its funny that these media execs can't figure it out. I will never forget a story I heard from Westwood Studios back before they were bought out by EA (96-97 timeframe). On Red Alert 2, they spent a large fraction of the budget of the game, had 4 PhD contractors come in, trying to build a DRM system that would keep people from copying the game. It was cracked within 10 minutes of release.

After that they vowed never to try to put DRM on a game ever again, it cost way too much, and it didn't do anything. Besides that they got people all the time filling out their registration cards saying "I bought this game after I played the hacked version and I liked it".

DRM hurts sales, it hurts acceptance of a system, and it is expensive and pointless to deploy.

Re:DRM is futile

[marcosdumay]

"We all know this, I just think its funny that these media execs can't figure it out."

I don't think it is funny! Not even a bit!!!

I'm waiting for the first key from a hardware player to get released... Then I'll laugth. A lot.

Re:DRM is futile

[johno.ie]

Rubbish. Red Alert 2 was not cracked. Even 10 years after release. I have 2 copies of Red Alert 2 and 2 copies of Yuris Revenge on the shelf right beside me here and I played it regularly for years after its release. There was a nocd crack available for it, but it didn't work. It appeared to work for the first 5 minutes of the game, then all your units blew up. That was a clever move on the part of Westwood.
This 'story' that you 'heard' is highly suspect because Red Alert 2 is the only game I know of that never had a working nocd crack.

Re:DRM is futile

[m50d]

If that's their response, any chance of them releasing a patch so I can install the damn thing under wine?

(Yes, I pirated a copy after discovering I couldn't. It works, but it's missing the movies)

Re:DRM is futile

[swillden]

"We all know this, I just think its funny that these media execs can't figure it out."

I don't think it is funny! Not even a bit!!!

I'm waiting for the first key from a hardware player to get released... Then I'll laugth. A lot.

Why? What's so special about a hardware player?

Re:DRM is futile

[dcam]

BS. I have used these no CD cracks.

Re:DRM is futile

[Ernesto Alvarez]

Why? What's so special about a hardware player?

A software player, when compromised, simply gets a "security upgrade" and that's it. With the current quality of software, nobody would complain if their viewer "broke", provided it gets "fixed" with a simple update. Software breaks, shit happens, or at least that's what Joe Windows think.

With a hardware player matters are very different, something that Joe Windows might accept as natural on windows vista, he will not tolerate on his standalone player, and the impact will be harder to correct. The hardware player cannot easily get an upgrade, since it probably does not have a connection to the Internet. If a hardware player gets compromised, AACSLA has a tough choice: either keep the hole open and let everyone copy anything they want or close the hole and piss lots of users that have paid for a player and expect it to work, with no reason to "break".

Imagine if Sony facing a tough choice like that, it could either mean a big ass lawsuit from the customers if they close the hole, or a permanent crack if they don't. And saying it was AACSLA the entity that revoked the key will not help. For the regular Joe, "his Sony Blueray thingy broke, it sucks and wants his money back". They will certainly try to influence AACSLA in order to avoid that situation. Wouldn't you laugh too?

Re:DRM is futile

[swillden]

AACSLA has a tough choice: either keep the hole open and let everyone copy anything they want or close the hole and piss lots of users that have paid for a player and expect it to work, with no reason to "break".

That's what I thought you were thinking, which is why I asked. It's a reasonable thing to think, but in this case it's not correct.

AACS is an extremely clever system, designed specifically to avoid the exact issue you're referring to. While CSS had only a few keys, so that every unit in a given model of DVD player had the same key, AACS provides each *individual* player with a unique set of keys. This means that if you manage to compromise your player, AACSLA can revoke just your player, without affecting mine at all even if I have the same model and, indeed, even if mine came off the assembly line immediately before or after yours.

The math that makes this work is very cool. The original paper is at http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/2nl. pdf, and a decent layman's explanation is at http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122363.

Because of this, there's nothing particularly special about breaking a hardware player, and no need to try to remotely update thousands or millions of uncompromised players. Also, there's no practical limit to the number of player keys the AACSLA can revoke. On average, the AACSLA has to "waste" 39 bytes of space on each HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disk for each revoked player. Given the capacities of the disks in question, it's no problem to produce disks that are unplayable on millions of compromised players, without affecting playability on millions more uncompromised players.

Re:DRM is futile

[marcosdumay]

Ok, now I stopped laugthing... :(

Do you know if it is really done that way on practice (they must overcome some economical problems to give each player it set of keys)?

Re:DRM is futile

[swillden]

Do you know if it is really done that way on practice (they must overcome some economical problems to give each player it set of keys)?

I know that an AACS licensee must do it that way or else be in violation of their licensing agreement, which could result in them not being allowed to make players at all. Also, if the AACSLA needed to revoke the keys of one unit of a particular model, and the manufacturer had not done ther per-unit keying correctly, then the whole model line would be shut down and it would be the manufacturer's fault, not the AACSLA's. Plus, it's not that difficult to have a small NVRAM chip that is loaded with different values for each player.

Short of actually auditing the production processes, it's impossible to know if manufacturers are really doing it right, but there's lots of incentive for them to do so and very little reason not to, so I strongly suspect that they are.

Re:DRM is futile

[pavera]

You are correct and I mis-spoke, it was the first red alert that was the last straw for westwood studios proper. After they were purchased by EA in 1998, the rules probably changed. Red alert 2 was released in 2000, after the purchase, so EA would have been calling the shots at that point. It hasn't been 10 years since the release of red alert 2 though.

Fifteen. It goes all the way to 15.

[giafly]

Studio Exec: [pointing to the parameters] ...the numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the screen: eleven, eleven, eleven, eleven...
Hacker: Oh, I see. And most crypto keys go up to ten?
Studio Exec: Exactly.

That's why there are "F"s in: "45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2"

Perhaps the next version will go all the way to "Z".

Re:Fifteen. It goes all the way to 15.

[Anonymous Coward]

Alas, I could not easily weave a proper hex key into it without ruining the quote. I was hoping many people would assume that the key they had chosen was

"11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11"

as opposed to:

"10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10"

but that has to stay unsaid as well!

Mind you, key 1 above IS one better than key 2! Isn't it?

Re:Fifteen. It goes all the way to 15.

[Quince alPillan]

This is a parody of a movie quote. I can't believe no one has seen that scene from "This is Spinal Tap".

Re:Fifteen. It goes all the way to 15.

[Anonymous Coward]

True. And your point is...?

I think our 15 friend (15, 16, hey what's the difference)wanted me to have included a full hex key - I had thought about that, but decided that 'ELEVEN!!!' was far too charismatic a figure to drop.

Re:Fifteen. It goes all the way to 15.

[jombeewoof]

can't you hear the sustain...
well you could if it was on

That was quick

[dgr73]

Usually userfriendly.org can run atleast a few strips poking fun at the inevitability of the crack before one is actually delivered. I guess in the future they should make a stock strip and replace the daily strip with it the second a new AACS fix is announced.

Then again, considering all those pre-release movies out there, I wonder when we'll start getting pre-fix cracks.

Re:That was quick

[nuzak]

I guess in the future they should make a stock strip and replace the daily strip with it the second a new AACS fix is announced.

I kind of figured that's how UF was produced in the first place.

Nearing the end of the DRM fight.

[Vellmont]

When CSS was first cracked it was the beginning of the end. With the latest cracks of AACS, we're nearing the end of the DRM battle. The content producers are pretty dumb, but if you beat them enough times eventually they'll learn.

My prediction is that this fight will wind up as a small footnote in the history of digital media. "In the late 90s through the 2000s content producers tried, and failed to protect digital content from being copied. Eventually they realized that providing easy paid access to content and extras was a far more effective means of ensuring people paid for content rather than freely exchanging it."

Re:Nearing the end of the DRM fight.

[thethibs]

Actually, when Lotus 1-2-3 was cracked, it was the beginning of the end. It's just taking longer to die than a cowboy in a spaghetti western. Not only has software DRM never worked, there's more than one theoretical work showing that it can't. The simple answer is that the key is always available to the hacker if the system functions at all.

On the other hand, CSS and AACS are especially weak because they were designed by relative amateurs. The movie and music industries are richer than Croesus; they can afford to buy the best cryptographic talent there is. But the best talent there is told them things they didn't want to hear (like "it will never work"), whereas the snake-oil salesmen assured them they could have effective DRM. That's why AACS is so clumsy and obvious. Reminds me of the flurry of teeny-bopper-designed "unbreakable, 1,000-bit, one-time-pad" encryption products that followed PGP's release. Anybody remember the encryption in MS Word 2, or WordPerfect 5? Even though both companies could afford to hire competent help, both implementations were somewhere short of a Captain Corbett decoder ring, .

But what keeps DRM alive is not some expected return on investment. You need to take into account the culture around the key people involved and where they come from. The driving factor is avoidance—they can't abide being cheated of even the smallest bit of what they believe is their entitlement—and they have lawyers who encourage this attitude. These kind of folk have no trouble at all spending a dollar to avoid losing a dime. It's not about money; it's about a pathological principle: "Nobody cheats me, period". This is why they have no trouble going after children and little old ladies—in their war, they are on the side of the angels, and on the other side there are no innocents.

Re:Nearing the end of the DRM fight.

[Vellmont]

It's not about money; it's about a pathological principle: "Nobody cheats me, period".

I think you're right. But I also think eventually that money going to force these people to give up the idea they can stop people from "cheating" them. Either that, or they'll be replaced with people who will.

Isn't the title wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that DRM media is fundamentally broken, shouldn't the title change from:
New AACS Fix Hacked in a Day
to
New AACS Hack Fixed in a Day

No argument whatsoever!

[dm0527]

One could also argue whether all that money spent by the industry in this race will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment.

No. One absolutely can NOT argue. I can't believe that any rational, sane individual would look at this situation and come to the conclusion that it is worth spending even one THIN DIME on furthering this effort. Why, on God's green earth do these imbeciles believe that they can come out with something that no one can break? Are these people really that conceded and sport such a God complex that they somehow believe that their team of what, 10 developers maybe, versus THE ENTIRE WORLD are going to come out on top?

Who are these idiots? What we all need for a good laugh is a video of these guys being told time after time, day after day that their crap has been hacked yet again. It will certainly have diminishing results, but it should be a good laugh five or ten times and then also that final time when they come to the realization that they are, in fact, NEVER going to win. Look at my quote people who are doing this...I'm looking directly at you >:|

Re:No argument whatsoever!

[edbob]

Are these people really that conceded and sport such a God complex that they somehow believe that their team of what, 10 developers maybe, versus THE ENTIRE WORLD are going to come out on top? As far as I know, these conceited people have conceded nothing.

Pretty funny

[gweihir]

Personally I believe that as long as they allow software players, they do not have a chance to lock this down. Hardware-only players, on the other hand, will be expensive and are currently not available. And then it will still be possible to record the movie, just a little more expensive and using some hardware-hacking. Nothing that a bright EE student could not do in 2-3 months of spare time....

Will be interesting to see whether they learn that this is not the way before or after ther business will have entirely gone away.

crapflooding with keys

[nuzak]

We all know how to google for "09 F9". Some of have that key committed to memory. Or emblazoned on a sticker. Or you can google for "digg revolt". How many people know to google for "45 5F"? How many tshirts will have that? How many hits are on the front page of Digg?

After a dozen more iterations, how visible will those keys be? Easily available, yes. News, no. They go back to being "eeeeevil underground hacking codes" they can more easily legislate against.

Re:crapflooding with keys

[A beautiful mind]

I have both keys on my webserver. It is not located in the USA. Have fun litigating... :)

Re:crapflooding with keys

[Anonymous Coward]

Joe user doesn't need to know or care about what the current processing key(s) etc are. He just runs the latest version of the nice GUI ripper program, e.g. AnyDVD HD, or downloads the torrent a release group has already made.

The Digg "rebellion" was mostly a pointless masturbatory exercise in people making themselves feel like important ZOMG H4X0R REBELS, despite not having a clue what the hex string actually was or how to use it. It helped publicise the break which was no bad thing, but it was completely unnecessary to actually ensure circumvention, the hackers who needed to know it already did.

Re:crapflooding with keys

[Anonymous Coward]

So, assign a code name to each new key released. Problem solved. We'll call it the Key Naming System, and the webspiders will be the Key Name Servers.

Re:crapflooding with keys

[Anonymous Coward]

I have both keys on my webserver. It is not located in the USA. Have fun litigating... :)

For every hour you keep the keys up on your server, I will drown a kitten.

Re:crapflooding with keys

[Ash-Fox]

Too bad Macs don't have virtualization hardware?

Go total digital

[sobolwolf]

They should have learned by now from the music industry - they need strip down all expenses, ie packaging, etc and just provide the content digitally. They could then distribute to selected centers such as blockbuster, etc where people buy a blank dvd and get it burned for a few bucks, and get to keep it as well. Make it so much easier / and cheap for people to get it from offical outlets than to download. I tell you, I would rather stroll around the blockbuster then sift thru shady torrents, plus I can't download pringles... - they could also give away a free toy with kids movies as well... (this seems to work for McDonalds..). They also have one distinct advantage over music in regards to movies - people only watch a movie a few times at most anyway before they are after their next fix. This should be the main focus of a new paradigm in movie distribution. They need to get this infrastructure in place now, as opposed to waiting, for as bandwidth speed increases it is inevitable that people will start to download movies like they do music.

AACS v. RSA/TLS

[eldepeche]

I don't know much about encryption, so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but what does this mean apropos the security of other encryption techniques, like RSA or SSL/TLS? If it's so easy to crack AACS, what about the others?

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[nuzak]

The algorithms underlying AACS are quite strong. However, in order to be able to play, AACS not only delivers the encrypted content on the disk, it delivers the key itself, in an encrypted format. And they deliver the key for that in the guts of every single player. Kind of daft, isn't it?

The AACS algorithm itelf hasn't been cracked. The encryption itself is based on AES, and it has no known practical attacks against it. The industry was smart about it this time, and made the spec fully open for review. What is happening is that they keep hiding the key under the mat, and we keep finding out where it is.

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[tppublic]

Very little (read: nothing)

RSA is based on a computationally difficult calculation (factoring large numbers). The difference is that there is a secret key and a public key (same with SSL/TLS). Reconstructing the secret key from the public key is computationally difficult (NP-complete).

AACS is a form of a symmetric key system. There is some complicated math in calculating the derivative keys and allowing key revocation (the AACS encryption method is available on the net), but fundamentallly, they have a problem: The key to decode the disk must be present on the disc. Because this is a symmetric system (again, requiring some calculation from the master key in a hardware device doesn't complicate it that much), it simply cannot be made to be as secure as a system with a secret key. "Hacking" AACS doesn't actually require re-derivation from the master key, since there are so many opportunities to intercept the derived keys when they are "in flight" (in software decoders, for example)

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[Anonymous Coward]

Asymmetric encryption only enables you to secure untrusted communication canals. It keeps Carl from reading what Ann sends to Bob.
For DRM, that concept is widened for you, the consumer, to be Ann, Bob and Carl at the same time (Well, Ann = Your Movie Disk and player, Bob being your sense of sight, and Carl being some a/v-grabbing-device in between of the former two). That's why it simply cannot work - you (and therefore Carl, too) know the keys involved in the encrption and decryption, they're just hidden somewhere in loads of other binary junk, and possibly somehow encoded. You still don't need to factorize gazillions of numbers to break the scheme, you just need to look for the keys thoroughly.

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[J_Darnley]

From what I understand of the 'hack' is that they have simply looked (a rather simple comparison) at the discs/players and seen the encryption key and then using a known way to decrypt the content using that key. I don't think they have brute forced anything or reverse engineered. As far as I know the conent would still be secure if those keys weren't known just like SSL connections.

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[Fnord666]

I don't know much about encryption, so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but what does this mean apropos the security of other encryption techniques, like RSA or SSL/TLS? If it's so easy to crack AACS, what about the others?

First we need to realize that it is the communications protocol that is being attacked, not the encryption method. The underlying encryption used in AACS remains uncompromised. The difference is in the protocol and the amount of knowledge that the "attacker" has. In the case of SSL/TLS, the protocol used to establish the session key for the communications is designed to prevent an attacker from gaining access. The sender, receiver, and attacker are all distinct entities. In the case of AACS the receiver and the attacker are the same entity. It's just a matter of figuring out when and where to look to find the desired data. In this case they are recovering the cryptographic keys used in the decryption process. There was an attack against the DRM protection of itunes tracks that recovered the audio data frames right after decryption using breakpoints.

The whole thing is an exercise in tilting at windmills, yet the industry continues on in a Don Quixote like manner. So strange!

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[Anonymous Coward]

Reconstructing the secret key from the public key is computationally difficult (NP-complete). It is not known to be NP-complete. It is as hard as factoring a number. Factoring is hard but not really suspected to be NP-complete.

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[edwdig]

Your understanding is correct. However, the point is, it's extremely easy to find the keys, making the strength of the algorithm irrelevant.

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[masdog]

So they essentially botched the implementation of an effective system?

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[nuzak]

No, it's a pretty good implementation of a system that's broken by design. Cryptography is no good at keeping information from its intended recipient.

About that war...

[guruevi]

This war on pirates has become even more entertaining than the pirate movies they are pirating.

So?

[Opportunist]

What if I'd be happy with the US-English version? What if I wanted to buy an Anime in the original Japanese version 'cause the translation is crappy at best anyway?

It's a given that translations take time. Ok, no problem, I don't care, gimme the original. Why can't I buy it? Because distributors get area protection so they can charge whatever they want, since there's no competition.

Global market appearantly isn't when it's in favor of the customer.

Re:So?

[jZnat]

The good thing about anime is that the studios in Japan don't use CSS and region codes much (if at all) anymore since it is just a waste of money. The downside, however, is that they still don't know shit about encoding DVDs and thus we end up with mixed hard- and soft-telecine with progressive and sometimes interlaced content in about 5 different framerates. This makes it nearly impossible to get a good copy of a DVD to watch on your progressive-scan laptop monitor or your HDTV. :/

Re:So?

[Opportunist]

And here I was, thinking I can play those DVDs 'cause the Japanese share a region code with Europe... Another myth destroyed.

In addition.

[pavon]

To add to erroneus's nonerroneus post, the main thing that they get out of DRM and the DMCA is the ability to dictate exactly what every electronic media device in this country can and cannot do. DVD burners are becoming as common as CD burners, but burning DVDs for your friend is not as common as burning CDs as because you cannot legally purchase software to do so. At the same time it hurts customers (especially ones with young kids) who cannot legitimately backup their DVDs. You cannot copy videos from DVDs onto portable media players, because the companies that sell them are afraid of being sued. Only one company that I know of has prevailed in court over something like this, and they had were sued despite having copy-protection mechanisms built into their device. They want you to buy multiple copies of your videos because that makes them more money.

And it has been working. The number of people who practice wholesale piracy is and always has been fairly low - what scares them is that it might become more widespread if the general public were allowed access to technology which they might abuse. I don't think that is true, and I think it is fundamentally wrong to put restrictions on an entire country just because you fear that some might abuse their freedoms, but that is where they are coming from, and in their eyes DRM has been successful in achieving that goal.

But the real heart of the issue is that they want control for its own sake - not just because they have specific things they want to enforce, but because they have been in control for so long and letting go of any of that frightens them. They don't know what the future holds, and so their reflex is to tighten their grip as much as possible.

Dupe or Dejavu?

[Vexorian]

I am confussed!

Re:Dupe or Dejavu?

[Anonymous Coward]

you would be confused since you're a fucking moron. Appropriately, the captcha for this post was "reject", which is what you also are.

Silent?

[Opportunist]

Well, no, my coworkers just looked quite puzzled at my expression of joy. And sorry, Dave, I owe you a cleaning of that shirt.

(Note to self, don't drink coffee and read /.)

Garbage in Garbage out

[DarthVain]

I had the same problem with DVD's. Unless the movie was made using the technology (in this case HD), what is the point? I look at the movies that were posted, and I mean FF4 sucked, and while I never watched Crank, I think I can safely say that it also sucked and I have no intention of watching it free or not. The last movie Reservoir Dogs was a great movie, but it was made like what.... 15 years ago! Somehow I doubt it uses HD technology. Which begs the question, other than to just offer it on yet another media and suck profits up why bother. If it was filmed at a particular resolution, using a particular quality film, what more can be done. Digital magic can be done to it, but it is all just interpolation, and anyone that bought a digital camera that only has 3x digital zoom can tell you that generally speaking it helps, but basically it sucks balls. The big excuse last time around (normal DVD) was that why you could fit all these extras on the disk, in addition to the movie, what a deal! Well by and large I don't know about you, but I ignore most of these as they are pretty pathetic for the most part. So now we have HD and Blu-Ray, 15GB and 25GB respectively (approximately), whereas the lowly DVD was only like 3GB and change or 6GB and change. How much extra freakin' content do they think we need on these things? Sure new stuff that is filmed in HD, on an HD disc, on an HD player, on an HD TV, using HD cables ad connectors will look great. However everything else, or skip one of the HD steps, and you have to ask, is this just another profit grab (notice that Sony and they rest make all these devices), and if so, after all the media changes, does this industry deserve to have protection in this respect? Anyway my rant was a bit longer than expected, but this cycle just keeps going and going. I understand the need for profit, it is the number one goal of any company. However at some point you have to take a step back, and look at what is being done to the consumer and ask is this right? (and by that I don't mean the consumer or the company, although that would be nice... The law makers who provide law for society should be the ones thinking about this. Though the current trend that I see, it could be hard for them to think coherently when they are swimming in a bathtub of money given to them by lobby groups associated with this issue, or see their opponents swimming it it)

Re:Garbage in Garbage out

[walt-sjc]

Most movies are filmed on FILM, which is much higher resolution than a normal DVD. Most of the HD movies (especially those broadcast on HD channels) just digitized the film. The fifth generation copy you get in a theater isn't so hot, especially after several weeks of play, but the original content is very good, and much better than 1080p.

AACS - Another Automatically Cracked System

[Anonymous Coward]

silly wabbits!

2 down...

[Evil Cretin]

Just (2^128 - 2) more to go!

Re:2 down...

[Anonymous Coward]

The subset/difference tree is 22 levels high and each node contains a processing key, so there are actually 2^22-2 more to go.

STOP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Rapidly busting AACS is helping the DRM evildoers. On the other hand, s-l-o-w-l-y busting it is very effective. Let them issue a new key, declare victory, start using it, give them a little while to get it into production, and THEN pull the rug out from under them. Even better would be to set a self-imposed deadline. 30 days after the new DVDs are in production, the key is published. Easy to achieve and fun to do. It would certainly demonstrate the futility of the situation if the hackers schedule a release date for a hack.

An optimist!

[Anonymous Coward]

My prediction is that this fight will wind up as a small footnote in the history of digital media

You are certainly an optimist. I hope that, in the long run, you are right -- but I think that in the meantime, opponents of DRM have much fighting to do. The corporations that sell media, whether it be software, music, or video, have realised that their business is selling information. As all types of information can now be trivially copied, there are two strategies: (1) accept that information can and will be copied, and concentrate on selling services instead, or (2) try to get rid of the new environment through legislation.

Naturally, established businesses do not want to adapt, and would rather keep their surroundings as they were. We can, of course, hope that these dinosaurs will die out, but in practice that is unlikely to happen soon as they are deeply entrenched, and have the support of lawmakers. So we will see many more idiotic DRM schemes, probably leading to some quite successful TCPA-based DRM in the next decade, which will do its bit to kill off Microsoft, Apple and Adobe's competition. People will eventually realise how they have been ripped off, and that will be the turning point, but it will be a slow and painful process. We have a long way to go.

MythTV

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, in fact, ANY media server.

Have a look for the region-2 version of "Of Mice and Men", the black-and-white version.

Not available?

Well, ripping to Windows Media will not work, because it needs to be hacked to take R2 disks AND R1.

Or you can use Linux, a RPC hack on the drive, and save the file as region-free, to be played back off you windows media centre edition home theatre box on your TV.

And in answer to your question: no.

Full size rips are available

[Overzeetop]

...on oosenetyea. I think Casino Royale was up about a month ago. Even at 3Mbps it would take a while to download and I don't have the horsepower/setup to play it back, yet. And, seriously, even if I had the computer to play it what good is a 1080p movie if I have to watch it on my little 24" LCD monitor to see all 1080x1920 pixels - I want to see that baby at 100+ inches. For me, in the $15-$25 price range, I'm probably going to buy the disc rather than waste the d/l bandwidth. And, surprise, the BD version of CR is available at half.com for $21+$3 shipping.

Re:Full size rips are available

[Anonymous Coward]

hd-dvd and bluray rips are compressed using mkv. the format allows for far greater compression than simple xvid or mpeg-2/4, without loss of detail. You can compress a dvd in under 1gb file size and hdtv quality in 4gb-8gb per download, without loss of detail. 720p is around 4gb, whereas 1080p will go over 8gb for a 2hr movie.

So if you consider, that with a half decent pipe (3mbps) you download at 375Kb/s, so one movie in just over 3 hours, worst case 4 hours. The quality even on your computer monitor is going to be far greater than normal dvd or xvid. With far fewer artifacts, and the sitting distance between you and your computer lcd is close enough where you can tell the difference between a crappy xvid rip and a high quality mkv file. Plus once you can afford a bigger lcd you will be able to watch them in their full glory, through a media center.

Finally your computer (unless you prefer to purchase your machines starting with an 'e') has far more than enough "horsepower" to run any hdtv file. These aren't as cpu intensive as you might think. On my 3.2ghz p4 (prescott) it only uses 20% in vlc, and that's an old processor.

Also just some fun math:
At 4 hour per movie (worst case) you could download more than 170 movies in one month, all hdtv mkv files. Of course I am not supporting piracy, and buy all your movies, its just for your backups.

Re:Okay... How do we use a crack?

[Ngwenya]

Now that multiple keys are out, how does someone legitimately use a key to view a HD disc on Linux?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormat s/BluRayAndHDDVD is one method which can help; but a few caveats. The problem for Linux play is no longer the video codecs (recent ffmpeg builds have VC-1 support pretty much down pat, and H.264 has been fine for ages if you have a sufficiently powerful rig).

The problem is audio codecs. Most HD-DVDs/BRDs have either E-AC3 (A/52B) or TruHD audio, which ffmpeg currently cannot decode. There are folks working away on it, but it might be a while before concrete results are available. Until then, one possibility - if fiddly - is to demux the video/audio/subtitle streams under Windows using some of the tools available on Doom9 and then transcoding the E-AC3 tracks to AC-3 (or TruHD to FLAC) using EAC3To. You can then remux the video/audio/subtitle tracks into Matroska, and use mplayer or VLC to watch it under Linux. Cumbersome, and not very friendly, but you won't lose any video quality, and if it's FLAC, you won't lose audio quality either.

--Ng

Effective solution???

[corpsmoderne]

It seems it'll be a long way to an effective solution ... if any You mean, "to an effective problem", because from my point of view, the solution has just been found: AACS cracked, problem solved.

What I don't get...

[rAiNsT0rm]

is how do they expect to come up with some new scheme that will be so hard to crack but be playable in the existing players? Is everyone going to have to upgrade their firmware? This is all just so silly at this point, the only thing I can hope for is that they finally give up on these inane "protection" systems.

If anything I would be fine with a physical protection scheme that would make it impossible to duplicate the disc for a specific period of time. That's really all that is needed anyhow, it keeps sales up and then when they would drop off naturally it is no longer an issue. After that folks that would buy the movie still will anyhow.

The problem really is the substandard, safe, crap that is being put out. No one is clamoring to Best Buy to buy Big Mommas House, or RV... and in a years time they are long forgotten. But I'd still be happy to buy a copy of Pi, Clockwork Orange, or movies of their ilk at any point in time because they deserve it. It has nothing to do with pirating but all to do with disposable garbage films that are barely worth the time and bandwidth to download illegally even for free. But it is easier to blame the Oh NOES!!11!!1 PIRATEZ!

Reimer the charlatan & libeller? hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Rated Flamebait?

Tell us - How can facts and the libellous criminal actions from Jeremy Reimer's own words and actions (and lack of expertise in the area of computer sciences on the author's part in Jeremy Reimer as well) be cited via his own words be considered that??

Last time I checked, facts are facts, not flamebait. Are the words & actions of Jeremy Reimer, quoted in this url below:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?art icleid=41095&cpage=195#feedbackAnchor

Not fact?

(Not only does slashdot cite the words of a fake like Jeremy Reimer, their moderators/administrators can't even rate factual information correctly).

Re:Reimer the charlatan & libeller? hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, maybe it's the fact nobody gives a fuck?

Re:Reimer the charlatan & libeller? hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, maybe not. Still I found the entire read funny. Reimer is a serious idiot. Talk about professional suicide. Reimer certainly got slaughtered in that one.

directv

[svallarian]

theoretical, hell, just look at a directTV box. The keys change every 60 seconds and the cards will fry when electrically stimulated.

So far, uncrackable.

That's what happens when you get hacked for years and finally decide to do it right...you hire the people that did the best hacking over to your team.

The latest tactic is to make it worthless.

[crovira]

In their efforts to stop piracy, the MPAA and announced that they'll start re-making movies (like "My Mother the Car",) starring only people you've seen before (like Adam Sandler and J-Lo,) and whose quality is guaranteed to be worth less that the value of a pirate's CD copy.

Gives new meaning to cosmology: "dark matter" and "dark energy" are coming to a theater near you.

Re:The latest tactic is to make it worthless.

[elrous0]

At some point they'll loop around and start making remakes of remakes, making them worth even less than they are now.

Oh no, it's already happening. We're doomed.

Memo

[Nom du Keyboard]

Memo to Movie and Record Industries:

Give up on DRM!

DRM & Performance

[787style]

How much CPU time does this decryption take place? In addition to being annoying, is there a considerable burden on hardware/software requirements?

That is an EXCELLENT point.

[crovira]

Who gives a flying fuck if Spiderman I is locked-up behind impenetrable flame proof walls of encryption.

It frankly stopped having any value to an audience as soon as Spiderman II came out.

Most media is filled with 'paid for hire' excrement anyway.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable-Another Importa

[Nom du Keyboard]

Another important point to your excellent post:

Whether a key is cracked the day the first disc containing it is sold, or weeks/months later, once cracked it's cracked permanently. This means that all discs will be available unencoded sooner or later.

So the question becomes, is the industry striving for a few weeks of exclusivity for their product that's worth this high cost and customer anger? I think the answer is yes, and that's why they continue to go through this long, arduous exercise. After all, people aren't very patient. Many (too many, IMHO) have to buy new discs the day they're released, rather than wait for a DRM-free solution that lets you decide which parts and how you'll watch the disc (skip that redundant FBI warning), rather than them.

I also think they tried -- very unsuccessfully -- to scare away the hackers by saying, it's all wasted effort on your part. Even if you ever break our much stronger than CSS encryption, we'll just revoke the key on you anyway. Didn't work, but then their real goal was maybe to just hold the fort for the first 3 weeks of sales.

As for the BD+ extra security for BluRay -- talk abut one way to lose the format wars quickly as everyone moves to HD-DVD to avoid it.

As far as attacking the HDMI stream ...

[crovira]

You can just capture it and decode it at your leisure.

Title should be: New AACS Hack Fixed in a Day

[Hmmble]

Incorrect story subject. It should be the other way around: " New AACS Hack Fixed in a Day".

Re:Title should be: New AACS Hack Fixed in a Day

[n6mod]

You know, that's actually how I read it the first time.

I'm sorry but you're wrong

[BLKMGK]

Ripping DVDs has become commonplace. I've been surprised more than once while working on someone's computer to find that they not only have DVD ripping software but several movies ON their computer. Generally I'm working on these computers because the person was too clueless to know how to stop spyware from installing itself and they have come to me for help. Don't know how to protect their computer but many savvy enough to rip DVDs and nearly all capable of ripping CDs. If I had a dollar for every parent that asked me how to copy DVD so their kids wouldn't damage the originals or how to rip DVD to a laptop or PSP for traveling I'd be rich. If you think this isn't in demand you're fooling yourself or not getting out enough. It's become so common that one day when my SO bought a movie in the grocery store the clerk behind the counter went on and on to tell her how she could rent and rip DVDs for "practically free" and that it was "legal". She knows better and we buy our DVDs (I promptly rip them to the NAS) but she got quite the chuckle telling me about the guy behind the counter. He was even telling her what software to download! (lol)

Like it or not ripping media for use on computers, iPODs, PSP, and other devices has become pretty mainstream. There are lots of advantages to being able to do this with the media when you've bought it and this hasn't escaped notice by Joe Consumer, taking that ability away from them will NOT make them happy.

P.S. And yeah, not being able to forward past the FBI warnings and previews DOES piss people off - they do not simply accept it. I help moderate a tech forum for both the knowledgable and the novice techy types - whenever the subject of DVD players comes up the Chinese models that allow you to forward past those warnings (and upscale) are always highly recommended\sought after. No one likes to be force fed and that stupid FBI warning is bitched about a great deal!

You could say the same about Iraq and Afghanistan

[Master of Transhuman]

"One could also argue whether all that money spent by the industry in this race will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment."

Or going back to my day, Vietnam.

There is no shortage of human stupidity.

Adobe software has all this "license management" crap built in that screws everything up - and one day I put the word Adobe into a Google search box - and the top site on the results page was a crack site...which pretty much tells you all you need to know about copy protection.

Hackers on Top

[Anonymous Coward]

"...as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top."
Ummmm...hasn't this ALWAYS been the case? Can anyone name un-hackable (computer) software?

Re:Hackers on Top

[Ash-Fox]

Truecrypt ?

How many senators does my car get per mile?

[Ayanami Rei]

If each senator gets 1/100th of a Congressional budget, then how many senators does it cost per gallon of gas, and how many of them does it cost me per mile? Can we work LoC's in there somehow?

Re:You could say the same about Iraq and Afghanist

[someguyfromdenmark]

Man, you should've just gone with a car analogy..

same s***, different day

[yakumo.unr]

Small group of bright to exceptionally bright people, working to a deadline being paid a load of cash, in a closed environment vs. several thousand people of varying intelligence, some likely far brighter, with an endless time limit, all over the world sharing their ideas, doing it for fun, maybe a security project, a challenge, or yes perhaps maliciously, working for free, because for whatever reason they're really passionate about it, and that alone makes it more powerful than those doing it for money.

Doesn't really take an even an IQ of 50 to see where this is going to go, every time..

through all these systems the only inevitable fact other than the system being circumvented, is the building infuriation of the paying customer with the increasing hoops they're having to jump through, equipment they have to replace/update simply because the next movie, and the next, that they bought won't run in their machine.

Re:same s***, different day

[maxwell demon]

Isn't it in the interest of the bright to exceptionally bright people, working to a deadline being paid a load of cash, to have the scheme broken, so they get the next load of cash for the next version?

Re:same s***, different day

[yakumo.unr]

lol, yeah, that too

Next up...

[Namlak]

Pirates of Pirates of the Carribean

One Crack in the Wall

[bill_mcgonigle]

Except the less you buy, the more the industry claims that those losses are due to piracy. It's a never ending cycle.

Interestingly, though, it only takes one to fall out of ranks to prove the entire industry wrong.

It will be interesting to see what people make of the iTunes/EMI deal. Their servers were slammed for two days straight with people upgrading to DRM-free music. The days after Christmas saw a lighter road.

Here's hoping the writing's on the wall.

Better article title

[Vlijmen Fileer]

Shouldn't the article title really have been "New AACS hack fixed in a day"?
I mean, it was broken intentionally by the makers with an ugly hack, and its functionality swiftly fixed by the community.

Shouldn't this be

[Anonymous Coward]

New Fair Use Hack Fixed in a Day

The suits don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Scince the suits don't get it, I will say this in itty bitty words even they can understand

people don't like to have their files locked. Locking files is bad. people want to play the files on their own device they choose. Keeping people from doing this makes them mad.
The war on consumers is bad. Pirates don't care about quality. Pirates care about content.
Pirates copy content even if it looks bad. People even watch it when it looks bad.
consumers don't like being treated as criminals. Treating customers as criminals is bad.
pirates are smart enough to bypass encryption. Encryption is a waste. Waste is bad.
making customers angry is bad. most consumers are honest. treating honest people like criminals is bad.

Insanity? try my job

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello. I do IT. I tell people to do things at least five times before I try something else. Does that make me insane? No, it makes the shit work; IT is making people do the same thing over and over again. That's how it works.

Jeremy Reimer is a hack and a disgrace

[Anonymous Coward]

quote: "You know, they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results" by elrous0 (869638) * on Friday June 01, @09:24AM

Jeremy Reimer the author of that piece ought to take a page from your playbook in that statement. Read this and see how that fool Jeremy Reimer was caught impersonating other on his website and got nailed for email harassment of others with his arstechnica friends. Top that off with the fact Reimer and his friends from arstechnica had their personal websites removed from their hosting providers here for it:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?art icleid=41095&cpage=195

They also were shown to have pursued the same person here, and to many other websites trying to harass that person to no end and they paid for it. More importantly you can see that Jeremy Reimer has no degree, certification, or professional experience in the area of computers at all. Within that read which was very funny, I saw that Jeremy Reimer will lie and do just about anything to avoid the facts he was challenged to disprove and was unable to. Jeremy Reimer and all of his arstechnica friends really know squat about computing because just 1 person they have been giving a hard time to for years online by stalking him all over the internet like psychos absolutely trashed them on technical issues. I thought the people from arstechnica are supposed to be the best their is online as far as computers and technical things. They turned out to be anything but that and were either proven wrong at every turn, left speechless, or had to resort to making libellous photos, death threats, and libellous .mp3 songs about that person. What a disgrace to the arstechnica website Jeremy Reimer is.

Bad for the economy?

[jtull89]

If large industries (the entertainment and software industries) are continually paying for a product that simply doesn't work, and their profits go down even farther, isn't that bad for the world economy?

Re:Is it worth their ROI? (copypasta)

[ozphx]

Its a simple formula. You take the cost per day of developing and pimping DRM (DEV), the fat wads of cash you make per a day (FATCASH), the daily % of sales lost to piracy when a high def release is out (OHNOES), the number of days that your shitty DRM delays a release (PWNTIME) the amount of money lost because geeks are angry at your DRM (RMS), the incidental benefits of making money selling people the same shit twice (JSIXPK) and the amount of extra daily profit needed to get your annual executive bonus (GOAL).

(JSIXPK + (FATCASH / OHNOES) * PWNTIME) - DEV - RMS. If this is more than GOAL then you win!

I submit to you that FATCASH is extremely large, and OHNOES is very small. PWNTIME is probably in the order of a week. JSIXPACK is a fairly substantial bonus. DEV is tiny compared to (FATCASH / OHNOES) * PWNTIME. RMS is insignificant compared to JSIXPK.

Sounds like hitting GOAL would be a trivial task which would imply you win FERRARI and HOOKERS.