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Claim of a Blu-ray BD+ Crack
Google85 writes in with a brief Enquirer piece reporting on an announcement on a German site that SlySoft claims to have cracked BD+, the extra copy-protection layer in Blu-ray. Here is the German original.
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Was it this extra layer of protection that was causing some players to have some ungodly load times that was mentioned on /. a little while ago?
And if the companies spent half as much money on increasing space/fixing problems as they did useless protection schemes, we'd be on Terabyte sized dvd's by now :P
I'd like to see Fox (or any other studio) sue the MPAA asking for arbitrarily large amounts of cash to compensate them for all the piracy this weak crypto causes. It would be really nice for the tables to turn a bit.
This "War On Piracy" does nothing more than keep people in jobs, much like the "War On Drugs". Like the drug war, piracy cannot be stopped unless it's made legal, but to do that you would put those in charge of fighting said illegal activity out of a job.
It's stupid...
Any digital content that can be seen or heard can be duplicated with some form of analog technology. Copy protected CD's can be recorded with near perfect quality simply by flying the audio from a CD player into a PC equipped with a $100 pro-level audio card (like the Emu 0404 or M-Audio Audiophile 2496). DRM protected mp3/wma/etc files can be duplicated through two pc's in exactly the same fashion as a CD. Copy protected DVD's can be duplicated by recording it's content from a DVD player into a PC with a decent video capture card.
And that's just the tip of it.
Nothing they do keeps DVD's off the streets. Every trip to the grocery store I make, I get a guy or gal coming up to me selling the latest movie for $10 on DVD (3 for $25!) or the latest yet-to-be-released CD for $5.
It's not going to stop. No amount of copy protection will help, no law passed will deter, it's a useless waste of money, but it keeps a few folks in a job.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
It's great news but keep in mind the entire procedure has not been cracked yet. There are three major layers of security in a Blu Ray Player
1) AACS (currently we have ways to sniff the code out of software, cat and mouse game for now) (Cracked - sort of)
2) BD+ (The virtual machine decrypting the AACS content) (Cracked)
3) BD ROM MARK - A small key that has been stored on the cd using alternate technological means. This is an extra key that is read using only BLU RAY players using mysterious methods.
Without the BD ROM Mark the disk can't be decrypted quite yet.
The article makes no claim that this has been cracked.
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
This just brings me back to my original hypothesis that it is impossible to encrypt something one time that you want to be easily distributed to the masses. There's just no way to say "here's the encrypted content and the key, but the key only works when we say so" unless you have some kind of root server doing the authentication in real-time and creates randomize keys for every download/view (think TSL). Even then, the user on the recieving end can (in theory) just record the incoming stream and redistribute.
It's time for the media distributors of the world to wise up and realize that they just cannot protect their content through DRM. The best they can hope for is to make it tough on Joe Sixpack, and rely on legal means to tackle the large scale pirates. (think 1980's style).
If BD+ is cracked, then the writing is pretty much on the wall for DVDs and we'll see a faster migration to online, streaming content. So let the "you cannot save this file" wars begin (ala Flash and QuickTime) - soon people (smarter than me) will spend time on fixing, er um... breaking that too.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
This raises an interesting point... why don't the movie moguls just go to a smart card based system? All hardware players are shipped with a SIM that comes from the distributors, software players require a reader hooked up to the PC. If a key is cracked, the SIM range is blocked on future discs, and a person needs to get their SIM replaced but can keep the same hardware. As with Direct TV, there are multiple ways to beat the system, but the moving target is MUCH easier for the media moguls to keep up with. On the PC side, this SIM card could also be used to provide online content to people with a specific disc in their drive, which would tie the SIM into a service agreement that could be revoked when evidence of tampering is found. Not that I'm FOR any of this mind you (except for the online streaming content), but this system seems so much more obviously effective than what they're trying to do right now. Think about it: buy the box set to your favourite TV show and get access to bonus features, interviews, and a sampling of later shows not included in the set via an online service via keys stored on your SIM and on the disc. They wouldn't even need user-side DRM, but could use it as device verification for your free subscription account instead.