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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."
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.
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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.
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Reduce, reuse, cycle
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).
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
http://use.perl.org
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.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
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
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.
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