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Blu-ray BD+ Cracked
An anonymous reader writes "In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD+ Standards Board) declared: 'BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years.' Only eight months have passed since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again. According to the press release,
the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD+ protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market."
I'm beginning to increasingly believe the old cliche, "Information wants to be free".
Well time for me to go buy a blu-ray player now that I know that if it fails, I can back up my data onto my PC, play them on Linux and actually be able to use blu-ray.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
When will people learn that making bold statements about their technology's security will only make them look like a fool when it is finally broken?
Now that that's been handled, looks like it's time to start shopping for a BD player.
The original was Posted by kdawson too... http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/30/2034242
wontbebreachedfor10years
These kinds of bold statements are all thoughout history. "Unsinkable Titanic" for example. Take with grain of salt.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Wikipedia states that it only enables backups, which are then played with a software player which is Blu-Ray compatible. It doesn't look like VLC will be playing BD+ protected media anytime soon.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Its not really details of how it works, its a FBI sting to get people that are intent on learning 'forbidden knowledge".
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is completely bogus marketing on Slysoft's part. They have "broken" the current titles by extracting the code from each one, but BD+ relies on code being downloaded from the disc itself to decode the data. The bar will just be raised now and new code will be added to newer titles.
"Admittedly, we are not really so fast with this because actually we had intended to publish this release already in December as promised. However, it was decided for strategic reasons to wait a bit for the outcome of the "format war" between HD DVD and Blu-ray."
Interesting that they wanted to wait for the outcome before releasing this. It's almost as if they were waiting to thumb their nose at the BD camp once all the companies had moved over to that side. And did anyone get the feeling the press release was run through a translator before they posted it?
This guy's the limit!
The vast majority of customers for blu-ray technology won't give a rats arse about this. I certainly don't
We've been able to crack dvd's for years, but every house I visit still has a pile of purchased dvd's, and I know of not one person who backs them up. The only people who use the cracking stuff that I know, do so either directly from borrowed dvd's, or indirectly through downloading movies. A know a few who never buy dvd's, because they prefer some dodgy rip. Beats me why, I know the average quality, and I don't think it's worth it, especially since they usually end up just taking up drive space.
The same will most likely occur with blu-ray. Most, if not all, purchased blu-ray discs will never be backed up. This cracking will be employed only by people who don't want to pay. They most likely wouldn't anyway.
So why don't we just drop this 'legal backup' crap and admit that this is only going to be of use to people who have no intention of buying the 'legal' dvd's in the first place.
Slysoft has made this claim before. It turned out to be bogus. The crack allowed a user to copy a BD to the harddrive and play it back from there using only a specific version of Cyberlink's PowerDVD (3319a), but not to transcode, otherwise manipulate the content or play it back from a burned BD-R or BD-RE. (Wiki)
Now I'd like everyone to remember that BD+ is not an `algorithm` per se. It's not a DRM one way function. BD+ is a virtual machine and a blu ray disk is a full fledged program that runs under the VM and can even run native code to patch and upgrade the virtual machine.
This is akin to running a java application that can inspect the java VM.
It's a cat and mouse game for now.
*Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD%2B
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
Envisioneering n.
a. The application of false promises to scam money from the gullible. From Envision "to see a way" and Profiteering "to improperly profit by".
b. The profession of or the work performed by an envisioneer.
The whole problem with encrypted media is that in order for the customer to want to purchase it, they will need to access the media they have purchased. In order to access that media, they will at some point need the key(s) that unlock it. Simply put, the purchaser of the media has the locked media, but they will also have the key. If you give people the key to the lock along with the lock, it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to get the key.
Wow, these guys are getting slow.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It really does. If they "delayed" release of this, then they must have been waiting to "lock in" the format war so that they wouldn't have to go supporting both standards. Apparently the Blu Ray was easy enough for them and now that there is "vendor lock-in", this pretty much says that they really are dictating the markets. This really speaks volumes about marketing tactics.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
First post modded redundant. Moderators, please send me an email with the specs for your time machines, I want one.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Let's face it, no matter how difficult the DRM becomes, there's always, always going to be the analogue component to deal with - the physical images which our eyes see, and the physical sound waves which our ears pick up. Capturing both outside of a digital signal is ALWAYS going to be possible - it's obviously the worst case scenario, and it might not be as elegant as capturing a digital signal directly, but you'll still get the content one way or the other.
:)
The only way I can see this being defeated is if the content providers forced people to bypass these analogue pickups by connecting directly to one's brain. Fucked if I can think of anyone daring enough to then install cracks to bypass the copy-protection in their brain - what if they comes with a trojan?
Or a root-kit? In a brain... Shit, maybe Sony have ulterior motives darker than anyone predicted.
I mean, come on. The HD war so far only has losers.
at the very end of the article it says this might make studios rethink their position and give HD-DVD a chance...
NO bad dog NO *gacks slysoft with newspaper*
I wish that they'd chosen to accompany what's actually a pretty good filk with something other than another lame video of WoW characters dancing.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
but shouldn't we start thinking more reponsible towards how technology advancement can occur?
Nope. Next question, please, and this time don't phrase it like you know what's best for me.
"Anachronistic" would be a more appropriate word choice than "arcane." Millions understand and practice Islam. The problem is that Islamic theology is essentially stuck in the middle ages, and that it is practiced largely by ignorant, overly-sensitive types who accuse the West of being Crusaders while they silently invade and outbreed the local population.
Ex: In light of the progress the women's movement had made in the West, the practice of female circumcision by the Islamic interlopers seemed anachronistic.
Spelling/grammar nazis welcome (English is not my first language and I am trying to improve my spelling/grammar)
The crack allows you to play the media at full quality on systems that do not have a fully HDCP compliant chain. Example: If you have a home theater TV hooked up to an older HDTV that only has component inputs, or if you have a non HDCP video card, you can use this "crack" to play your discs at full quality.
1. This won't affect piracy, the places where you can get pirated movies are already full of BD releases so obviously those creating the pirated releases were already able to get the data (probably by ripping it out of the decoded video stream at some point).
2. Software patents or no, I believe that I should be able to do what I want with something I purchase as long as it's not harming others. Moving my movies from physical disks to my media server is not harming anybody.
3. As others have already said, DRM is fundamentally broken. To view DRM encrypted content you have to have the keys. If you have the keys then the encryption can't be secure. The sooner people (the content industries) realise this the sooner they can stop pissing off their legitimate consumers without actually denting piracy. This is a win for all. EMI have realised this, and I think a couple of other music studios, now it's just a waiting game until the rest of them get it.
You are looking at old information about the 2007 release from SlySoft. The new version (March 18, 2008) *does* completely remove all protection from a BD+ movie, and you get unencrypted and unprotected files that you *can* play in VLC or any other player for the appropriate format (MP2, VC1, etc.) Or as most people do, reencode to H.264 or another MP4 format, ans they take up less space, store them on your media server, and play on any computer/playback device in the house.
As was posted earlier to /. regarding gaming, the studios et. al. should really focus on _customers_, not pirates because, duh, customers buy things. Some customers demand fair use rights by hook or crook (for example those that want for various reasons to have a lone htpc+speakers+monitor be your entire HT), and now that slysoft has provided for a fee, the _customer_ base for Fox. et. al. just expanded. The pirate base is probably unchanged by this, so really the studios should be celebrating, and the people that should really be cackeling incessantly are the ones that get the mandatory fee paid for providing the snake oil that is the useless AACS and BD+ "protections".
From the slysoft AnyDVD HD forum:
Xtrap1979
I can now make a collective order of all the Fox titles
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=14787&page=3
As long as the content ultimately gets decrypted/decoded to a format which is percievable to human senses, it can be cracked. There is nothing stopping a dedicated pirate from going, pixel by pixel, dumping the current pixel color values into a massive 2d array - in fact in the pre-deCSS days there was a program that worked with PowerDVD by doing that very thing. Dump all the pixelvalues as arrays into a screenshot bypassing Windows, then stream together the screenshots in a video format of your choice, and you've got uncompressed, perfect digital video. From there you can just run a male to male cable from your stereo out jack to an audio input, and you've got your sound. Mux them together and you've got everything you need to make your pirated copy. Its low tech, but it works. The fact is, no matter what these antipiracy groups do, they can *NOT* beat technology with more technology. Because all it takes is a bored geek with a soldering iron and some spare time to bring down their house of cards.
Gotta watch when I put my ass.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The blue ray encryption geniuses should read my subject line over and over and over and over.
Nope, I chose to wave away his (your?) irrelevant racist opinions with a wave of my hand and a sarcastic jab to his ribcage. If that's enough for you to derive my actual intelligence then well done! You must also be highly intelligent!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Just sort posts in different order :-).
But it will probably not help you with your problems.
How long until someone reverse engineers AnyDVD and releases a FOSS tool for Linux for backing up our own BD+ content?
Terabyte drives already cost only $200, so 50GB BDs cost only $10 each to store, though blank BD-Rs still cost $40 each.
--
make install -not war
Ok, yes, books are more than *just* dead trees with ink squirted on them. But guess what, they also *are* dead trees. . . with ink squirted on them. Meaning they share at least some of the properties dead trees. For example, if you needed to, you could burn them in a fire place for warmth, if it came down to it. They have a high quantity of cellulose, so if you needed a source of cellulose for some sort of chemical reaction, you could possibly use books (or other paper - magazines, newspapers, etc) if you had to.
I think the GP's point was, he should be able to backup his movies to his computer, because at a low level, Blue Ray movies are just data on the disc. He should be able to backup *any* data on a BD to his computer. Yes, movies are more than data, but they also *are* data too. The power of abstraction is that I can usually treat any two *similar* things similarly, even when they aren't identical.
So that I can drive a Chevy Corvette or a Cavalier, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, or a Toyota Camry all on the same road, because they are all automobiles. Yes, a pickup truck is *more than* a set of wheels, a frame, and a motor, which collectively fit within a certain standardized set of dimensions and under a certain maximum weight, but it *is* also a set of wheels, a frame, and a motor which collectively fit within a certain standardized set of dimensions and under a certain maximum weight, which is why it can drive on the same road as the other vehicles.
I think one of the distinguishing features of most geeks, that sets them apart from the general populace, is the fact that they have the ability to see, when it's useful, that "a book is just a dead tree", and to be able to figure out when that fact is useful. It is the foundational principle of much of engineering and computer science. Most people see the forest, or maybe the trees. A good hacker sees the forest *and* the trees.
Your response to the GP just shows that you just don't get it. It doesn't mean he's any less correct. I hope this post helps you to see that.
No, you don't. It's uncompressed, but not "perfect" because it still has the compression artifacts. Then, when you recompress it, it has two sets of compression artifacts. Although it's higher quality than aiming a video camera at the display, it's still more-or-less the same as the "analog hole."
To really count as "cracking," the attacker needs to get access to the decrypted but still encoded stream.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
24 Carat Pure Slashdot Gold.
We have a winner. I call for a slashdot version of the Godwin; any technical thread on the viability of any technology is over the moment anyone claims something to the effect of "... We could install Linux on it!"
However, asking "... does it run on Linux?" is still fair game.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Slysoft: BD+ will buy you time, but months only. From this moment on, no matter what we do, BluRay will be cracked.
Sony: But this DRM can't be cracked!
Slysoft: She is made of data, sir. I assure you, she can. And she *will*. It is a mathematical certainty.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Please check your email archives from September, 1998. Thank you for your interest.
#1 is crucially for me. I've consolidated all of my media for convenience. I don't want bookshelves full of plastic boxes - my house is only so big. Furthermore, when I play my media, I don't want to sit through corporate marketing and propaganda. I just want to play my movie. So I *always* rip and encode a movie, and never bother with the DVD player software. If media companies can't bring themselves to sell me the product that *I* want, then I'm going to put a little effort into converting the product into something that *I* want. The free market should be about empowering consumers.
#2 is also important, because it limits the amount of price gouging that media companies can engage in. DVDs are "good-enough", and will keep price pressure on blue-ray. In the distant future, movies will only be released on blue-ray, and we need to keep the price pressure.
Furthermore, a lot of media is simply overpriced. There's a glut of it on the market - so media companies *must* be making money out of it. I wouldn't bother with torrents at all if I could pay $1-$2 for a legit download. Watermark it if you want, but let me take control of the media, so I can use it however I like.
Regardless of torrents, I spend a certain amount of media each year. Trying to control the distribution channel is a vain attempt to artificially keep prices high.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
alternately, we could send them a dictionary with the entry for "redundant" flagged
I think that Sony does this for DVDs today shows that after BD+ gets cracked, they will do any crappy thing they can if they think it stops piracy. That means technically inelegant solutions that break existing standards and players. That means that they will successfully get Blu-rays to not play in mplayer for about 8 months, and as a consequence thousands (millions?) of consumers will have to buy a new player.
If you look at the Wikipedia page for BD+, it says that a BD+ disc can:I take that to mean that a BD+ can overwrite a player's firmware. From a security-minded person's perspective, that is an absolute nightmare. If only used by competent people who know what they are doing and have good faith not to screw up their customers' players, then there wouldn't be much to worry about there. But, we know that we can't trust the likes of Sony "rootkit" Entertainment to get things right from a technical or even ethical standpoint. So, I'm envisioning a future where Sony's latest flicks turn people's legitimately-purchased Blu-ray players into doorstops. Or maybe even flash your computer's drive when it detects you're running VLC.
Information hates to be anthropomorphised.
9/98 would tell us the cliché existed. it wouldnt tell us - as OP did - that the cliché seems to hold up even when that information is controlled by rich, powerful, DRM-ing corporations.
I'm beginning to increasingly believe the old cliche, "Information wants to be free".
I am also beginning to increasingly believe that if you create a good enough dare, people will take you up on it, just to prove you wrong.
Mother nature likes to join in too sometimes, as one ship has shown us.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Considering the amount of data (50GB AFAIK) one has to rip and to write to BD-R, how long will it take to do using current technology? Anyone knows?
I've been bitten too many times with CDs, DVDs (thanks Sony) and games that won't play due to so called "copy protection". It's more like "paying customer" protetion. That's the ironic thing, you get screwed only if you pay.
I simply don't have the time to screw around with products with working copy protection. Neither do I have the time to hunt down cracks (DVDs are so well cracked that it's not a problem).
The end result is that I don't end up buying these products, so I don't and up making any use of them at all. Since I like films, I'm glad to see that I won't be locked out of the market if/when Blu-Ray takes over.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But they don't need to make it impossible to find the key - just sufficiently hard that the cat and mouse game is too much effort for the pirates.
The same could be said of stealing satellite TV, but they eventually managed to make the cards sophisticated enough that reverse engineering them wasn't worth the effort.
I'm beginning to increasingly believe the old cliche, "Information wants to be free".
Please don't. You'll look as stupid as the cliche itself. Information does NOT want to be free. It doesn't want anything. It has no brain, no mind, no feelings, no heart, nothing. It is incapable of wanting.
"Marijuana wants to be lagle". Doesn't that sound like some stupid stoner got one of those brain farts and actually remembered it later and wrote it down?
I want information to be free, and you may also, but information itself doesn't want anything. This cliche does absolutely nothing to free information.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Why? Did the data on the disc somehow break the encryption on its own? Or is it that certain people want information to be free?
HAHAHAHAHahhahaha, oh man, that was funny.
"...just sufficiently hard that the cat and mouse game is too much effort for the pirates."
Except the pirate have the time, and the skills, and the same computer power as the companies. Add to that they don't have an arbitrary budget and they get an Ego boost from doing it? do you really think these snake oil salesmen have a chance?
What next, a scheme for hiding porn magazines in your house from teenagers?
At least more and more media companies are beginning to realize the futility of these scheme, hopefully they will go away. Really, I want to buy by disk, put it on my computer and call it up when ever I want. That's the future, that is what consumers want and expect.
"You can't hide secrets from the future with math." - MS Frontalot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Absolutely. I'm amazed Mr. Doherty was foolish enough to brag about the strength of BD+. Maybe he had to just to please his shareholders, or maybe it just didn't make any difference anyway (cracking BluRay just being too tempting regardless), but internet security companies learned long ago that bragging about the strength of your security just made you into a hacker magnet.
I read Usenet for the articles.
Here's something I've wondered about. It seems to me one could make a highly difficult media if media included a small write-once track somewhere. So I wonder why the manufacturers don't do this. Sure it would not have been possible to retrofit DVDs given the installed base but why not Something that was being designed from scratch with the hindsight of DVD, that is blue ray. The write-once track would not have to contain much data and so it could be quite a sub-optimal density that might be writable with modest changes to the lower power read-laser, and not require expensive added components. Or probably even better some sort of electrically addressable (eprom-like) chip on the disk. This would permit various modes of protection. For example, each disk could be given unique information during manufacturing. Or if that proved to be too slow for some reason, then the disk could be modified by the first player to play it. I think this could be used either 1) produce media that if you figured out a security code for one disk, would not work on another copy of the same disk. 2) or produce media that could be locked to a single player Not that I really want to see this, but given that this seems possible I wonder why it not done. ----- Also does anyone know if the new crack is a "master-key" kind of crack or a "player-key" kind of crack that they can if they want de-activate. ---
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
hmmm... I do see your point. However it does 'want to be free' in that people like to sharing information.
Which is a huge deal in that it's a very basic part of human nature. That is what the expressionmean. nobody believe information actually wants something, it's just a observation of human nature.
Like saying "Cars like to clump up in traffic." doesn't actually mean the cars like anything, it's just an observation of what car operators tend to do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How about, "The dead don't want revenge. They want nothing. They feel nothing !!"
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
and I don't think there is. Then again, I'm not a self-proclaimed encryption genius
I noticed this offer on AfterDawn a few minutes ago. One major news site tells us that BD+ has been cracked by company X and another offers us a 20% discount on company X products. Coincidental or clever marketing?
While I agree with your premise, I think it would help for the people behind the security schemes to not throw the gauntlet down at the feet of the hackers, that just pisses them off. I will give BD+ credit though, it managed to hold them off for 8 months, which is a pretty long time considering the brain power which was probably thrown at this.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
How long before the cost of DRM exceeds the protection it gives before being cracked? We may already be past that point - except that the idiot bean counters don't realize it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So we're having a low-UID pissing contest . . . but in reverse???
How do you do this?
I am just starting to think about this. What I want is to just bring up a menu, select the moive and have it behave exactly as if I put a Disk in. Linking to other disks in a set would be nice as well.
I would like to just be able to insert a disc and click 'Rip' and have it drop it onto my server.
I know this is feasible, but about 5 years ago I just got tired of coding at home and would rather get pre-made software.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What they need to do is get bandwidth increased for the average citizen and then allow them to download movies that have been watermarked.
True the watermarking can be removed, but it would catch the average idiot fool enough to share without removing the watermark.
I get a lot of PDFs and I hate the DRM protected PDFs. Mostly because I've changed computers 9 times in the last 6 years. It is a pain to get one computer removed from the list and another added...Luckly I haven't had to call Adobe in more than a year.
Now my watermarked pdfs I love and they work for their purpose...I'd never give them out and I have no interest in circumventing the watermarking...because after all, I have what I wanted.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
How about when it's quickly broken?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If the Satellite TV companies needed to protect a library built over years rather than just a current transitory stream, where they are in continuous contact with the player, their task would be much more difficult and conversely the rewards of cracking would be that much greater. Disk is different than broadcast.
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
cat and mouse game is too much effort for the pirates
Just to be clear, pirates aren't the ones playing that cat and mouse game. When you see a street vendor selling pirated copies of Star Wars, he's selling actual Blu-ray discs. He made bit-for-bit copies and he didn't need to decrypt anything to do it. The fact that Blu-ray is encrypted didn't do anything to prevent the pirate from stealing the content.
Decryption is needed by people who want to *gasp* watch the discs they legally purchased at BestBuy.
I will give BD+ credit though, it managed to hold them off for 8 months
Nope. 5 months.
According to the link they sat on this for 3 months for strategic reasons, waiting for the format war to end.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I don't think many people take the phrase literally. All it means is that it is very hard to keep a secret, human nature being what it is. Governments, companies, individuals all expend tons of effort to try and keep information locked down - and yet even the best systems are compromised.
In other words, the path of least resistance is to structure our society such that it isn't dependent on the keeping of secrets. The fewer secrets, the better - though all except the most extreme nuts would argue that some secrets are in fact necessary.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Since BD+ was one of the strong arguments movie studios were citing in their selection of BD, wait for them to commit, and then tell them they're getting NOTHING extra out of BD. Makes sense to me.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
and you should read mine over and over again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
OK, how about "pedantry wants to be annoying"?
And wtf is "lagle"?
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
emph mine.
It seems like an appropriate saying to me--when information is locked down by secrecy or DRM, people will leak it or break the DRM. It's a nice expression that has meaning packed into it.
...and do whatever you want with it?
This is a serious question, so I wouldn't mind, if you're going to reply, a little thought on the matter.
Look, I like to own my DVDs, too. It doesn't bother me _too_ terribly much that I can't simply make copies of them, because it's not something I tend to need to do.
But what tells me that I actually _should_ have the ability to do that?
I mean, there used to be a time when it wasn't possible to own the content. You merely went somewhere to see it (a theater) or, later, were able to watch it on broadcast television. It wasn't until home videotape technology came about that you were able to retain a physical copy -- whether recorded or purchased -- of content.
Call me unintelligent, but I simply can't see why purchasing a piece of physical media that allows me to view a program of some sort on a machine at home naturally proceeds to allowing me some imperative to freely copy however I want, for whatever anticipated or unanticipated use, on whatever devices I want.
Other than I might really, really want to.
I don't think it's very important that we've cracked it though. Quality BD-R dual layer media is pretty expensive, about just as expensive as the movie itself. Harddrives? 1TB drive is $225, you can only put 20, maybe 40 BD movies on there, taking the original mpeg4/vc-1/whatever stream and dumping it straight to harddrive. Factor in the cost of building a media center PC with a decent enough power supply to hold multiple 1TB hdds, and all the time (and therefor risk) you spend downloading these movies...and downloading them all/storing them yourself simply seems a little difficult. For me at least, I won't bother doing it. There's not a big enough savings advantage to downloading them and saving them vs. just buying them myself.
You should've been thinking "If man can make it, man can break it."
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The same thing happened with cd and dvd. At first blanks were expensive (and generally half the capacity) but once it became the dominant media the economies of scale kicked in.
I'd say if Bluray becomes the dominant media (which isn't certain, I happen to think discs are doomed) we'll see spools of blanks for $20, just like the last two times.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Ah, I stand corrected. Nice catch :) I thought that once DVD/HD-DVD was regular uncompressed MPEG-2 video that was simply encrypted? I'm by no means an expert on video.
Ah, your post takes me back to when DVDs were first being ripped. The same arguments of impracticality were being made then. "DVDs hold 8 gigs, and we only have ~40 gigs of HDD space to store the VOBs."
...or so I'm told.
There's a difference now, though. Back then, you had to recode the vobs with some crappy (by today's standards) codec like old QuickTime, or asf or something. Nowadays, DVDs can be recoded and stored in XviD format with a decent quality tradeoff. Likewise, BD can be recoded to x.264 and stored in about 4.5 gigs.
sig: sauer
I am beginning to ask myself: why are we always happy because of such news?
Let me guess, you're the same idiot who complains when someone creates cheaper generic brand razor blades and ink jet cartridges and replacement car parts and vacuum cleaner bags.
Do have some insane notion that there is something bad or wrong about playing a movie you bought using a different brand player?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
There's not a big enough savings advantage to downloading them and saving them vs. just buying them myself.
For some people, it's not about cost savings or convenience. It's about bucking the system, screwing the man, and not giving royalties to the MPAA and megacorps like Sony. Top it off with the fact that that you're doing something (arguably) illegal and immoral, and you have a movement. A revolution, if you will.
I'm not necessarily saying I support it, but I think that's the mindset of a lot of people.
My lack of God, it's Trotsky!
It's very easy to be critical of things we don't fully understand.
You must get absolutely no pleasure out of reading novels. It's an expression, okay? Sit down, relax, smoke some of that "lagle" marijuana...
Information does NOT want to be free. It doesn't want anything. It has no brain, no mind, no feelings, no heart, nothing. It is incapable of wanting
"Marijuana wants to be lagle". Doesn't that sound like some stupid stoner got one of those brain farts and actually remembered it later and wrote it down?
Information, due to its nature, tends to freedom. That doesn't make a catchy slogan though.
Marijuana, by its nature, tends to cost about $40 for 1/8 oz.
Actually, I think the whole meme reads as such :
- Information wants to be free
- Entertainment wants to be paid
- You just want to be cheap
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
If you knew your recent history about hacking DRM, you would know that DirecTV is a perfect example. Their older cards had a weak DRM scheme where it would validate PPV requests at a certain time in a sequence. If you dropped the voltage at just the right time, you could make the set-top box think your PPV request was valid. There was also an easier way where you could clone a valid card. DirecTV had as many as *1 million* people stealing their service, so they did a 10+ million card swap. Expensive for them, but their new card had a good challenge-response scheme in the chip. Their new chips might be hacked, but not by many. I don't know a single person who hacks DirecTV anymore (and believe me, my nerdy Slashdot-reading 'friend' had a lot of customers). All the old boards like alt.dss.hack are all but dead because most people have just moved on (or starting hacking Dish :P).
So although DirecTV didn't produce an uncrackable system, it's 'sufficiently hard' for most people. Hence, they succeeded.
>if you create a good enough dare, people will take you up on it, just to prove you wrong.
That's sounds like a dare to me.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Its also an entropy thing. It may well be that like almost everything else we observe information follows a concentration gradient. That is if you concentrate information with a small group of people you have to constantly expend energy keeping it there. So if you decide gee I only want people who purchase a certain bit of plastic to watch my move you have to put alot of energy into keeping the movie on the plastic. Eventually it will get off if you don't. It may well be that DRM is like heating your house; the more insulation you have(stronger DRM scheme) the better but as soon as you take the input energy away (turn off the heater)/(complete your encrypting) the temperature will always equalize with the outside(the movie will propagate to places where the disk is not present).
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
> You can't hide secrets from the future with math.
Sure you can! With one time pads no one knows because they're secret.
The problem BD+ and ALL other DRM schemes have is that you can't keep the movie a secret from your customers because they pay to watch it! On other words, the problem is that these movies are not secrets.
I don't know about satellite TV in the US, but...
Virtually every satellite TV encryption system available has been broken, often many times over. These range from simple hardware hacks, such as subscribing to all channels then sticking a resistor in the decoder to prevent the card's EEPROM from being changed then unsubscribing again, through complete reverse-engineering of the cards. Cards were routinely modified to recieve all channels, card details were copied onto deactivated cards, and some were even re-implemented from scratch using a PIC soldered onto a PCB, or even using programmable cards.
These systems relied on security through obscurity - the pirates didn't know how the cards worked, so there was no way they could compromise them. Yeah, right...
This continued until very recently. Most newer encryption systems follow the pattern that BSkyB used with their analog and digital encryption systems. BSkyB's analog system relied on replacing the cards. Each time a revision of the cards was breached, they would issue a new one that fixed the holes in the last, and often fundamentally changed the way the card worked. Sky retired the system before it was fully compromised, but other providers kept using it. They had to face the fact that computing power had advanced so much that it was possible to brute-force decode the signal in real-time with no card.
Most modern cards are programmable, as are the CAMs (the modules that talk to the card, and pass the final decryption keys to the STB). So the current encryption systems change the firmware in both card and CAM periodically. Any breach will only work for a limited time. Even after all these years, the arms race continues - pirates have found all kinds of creative ways around these things, such as sharing a single card across the internet.
It's also possible to buy a PCI satellite card that allows a PC to recieve satellite TV. Combine that with an official card and CAM, which work as normal. You can't change the card, but you can do whatever you like with the decryption keys it generates, or the decrypted TV signals. That includes recording it, and uploading it to the internet. You could even do that in real-time if you wanted to.
The continual update thing is what Sony are trying with BD+. The idea is that the BD+ portion contains code, unique to each disc, which verifies that the player is authentic and hasn't been compromised. Once it's done that, it provides decryption keys to the player.
The general idea is that, while it may be possible to compromise AACS in the same was as CSS, each BluRay disc will contain unique encrpytion code for that disc. The idea is that each disc will need to be cracked individually, just like PC games. And we all know how well that approach works in practice.
This assumes that each BluRay disc will have completely unique BD+ code, and that's just not going to happen - they have to maintain compatibility with existing players, which means the BD+ code has to be extensively tested. Hackers can move much more quickly - even if they did have to crack each batch of BluRay discs individually, they'll be able to update their decryption tools much quicker than Sony can update their BD+ code.
It also assumes that nobody knows how BD+ works (security through obscurity), and that nobody will be able to independently implement a BD+ VM that pretends to be a real player. That's exactly what SlySoft have done. Their VM isn't complete yet - it only implements the portions of BD+ that current discs are actually using. It is known not to work on one disc (Hitman, I believe), simply because it uses parts of the BD+ VM that they've not implemented. Yet.
The point is that the pirates are far more agile than Sony, and have unlimited time in which to devise a solution. There is no such thing as making it too much effort. At least with the satellite TV analogy, you can't keep using a hack once the hole it exploited has been patched, so there is a time factor. There is no time factor with BluR
Consumers don't expect that, that's just us computer geeks who get so demanding.
Yes and no. While there is a ton of industrial DVD piracy in other countries, the street vendor in the US I've seen are selling DVD-R rips they made on their home computer using the usual cracking methods.
Also, Sony is apparently trying to address industrial piracy by keeping the BD plants out of the "bad" places (China and so on), but that won't keep up if the format catches on to the extent that DVD has.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The worst thing you can ever do is tell the world how uncrackable your encryption is. Also, I am still bitter at Sony and crew for releasing an unfinished format and using their media muscle to push that premature format so hard that it killed HD-DVD. Every time I watch my HD-DVDs with real PiP extras it irks me.
This is what "Trusted Computing" is about. They (being Microsoft/IBM/Sun) control what software can unencrypt certain data (which is guaranteed not to do things like "Save", "Print" etc) using a piece of hardware called a TPM (Trusted Platform Module), they then license the control over your machine out to movie/music producers.
They enforce DRM, but only with near total control over the hardware and software platforms... which Microsoft and Vista, Sun and Trusted Solaris, and Apple and the latest TPM use in OSX are all keen to introduce... for obvious reasons.
I would say that you are only half right. If Dish is easier to hack, saying that DirectTV is unhacked is like saying that my front door is secure because it's easier to throw a rock through the 4x8 window right next to it. Largely pointless for the conversation. After all, have you succeeded if the hacker is still getting the data through another channel? Then there is Netflix. Most of the people I knew that hacked DirecTV did were subscribers to DirecTV. They hacked the system for the PPV channels. At $19 a month for way better selection, I know a lot of people switched from hacked DirectTV to Netflix because it was a better value.
DRM "crack" software is instructions on how to correctly read the the data. Nothing more, nothing less.
Apparently the currently available software is in a "middleware" application that translates the data so other existing player and software can read the data without difficulty, but the code will soon be directly integrated into other players to be able to directly natively play this video format. Like a player that has code to read MPEG format plus some code to read AVI format plus some code to read WMV format, this is the merely the code to read BluRay format. It does nothing more than add BluRay to the list of formats that are understood and playable by the application.
The only problem here is the DMCA, which will prevent software and hardware companies from actually offering such products on the American commercial market. The DMCA explicitly criminalizes noninfringing/I> usage and legitimate useful noninfringing products.
If you bought a movie and you want to watch it on your Mac or watch it on Linux box, well you won't be able to find any independent commercial players available for sale at WalMart. If you bought a movie and you want to watch it on your Mac or watch it on Linux box, you'll need to download an "illegal" free player over the internet from some other country.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Thanks to the recent demise of HDDVD, additional cracking manpower has recently become available to work the Blu-ray problem.
Yet another success for IT project management.
Have gnu, will travel.
uncompressed MPEG-2
MPEG-2 is a compression standard
If you're willing to downgrade the resolution to 720p, and reduce yourself to one soundtrack, then a figure of 4-6G for MPEG4 compression is possible, indeed that's exactly how the download services are doing HD.
But storing at 1080p... nope. Movies on Blu-ray are generally stored, today, as VC-1 or MPEG4, both of which are considered roughly equal in quality/byte. Early Blu-ray discs used MPEG2, but once HD DVD proved the viability of both codecs, studios were quick to switch. The video stream coupled with a single audio stream is probably in the region of 10-15G for an average movie stored this way.
That said, hard disk capacity seems to be way larger on average in comparison to the source material than it was back when DVD came out. A typical DVD movie took up (and I guess still does) 4G, and back in 1998 that was the total capacity of many HDs that came with computers. By comparison, a 250G HD, which is the bottom end of disk sizes today, can store 15-20 full size 1080p movies compressed as VC-1 or MPEG4. And by the time they discontinue Blu-ray in 2010, I'd expect most people to turn their noses up at anything under 1T.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There is nothing stopping a dedicated pirate from going, pixel by pixel, dumping the current pixel color values into a massive 2d array
Actually, there is. It's called HDCP, and means that only "authenticated" output devices will get digital data.
Why are you buying and/or consuming media with DRM to begin with? Isn't that against the prevailing slashdot philosophy?
We did the same thing when DVDs were first being ripped. We didn't have cheap DVDs, but we did have cheap CD-Rs, and lots of free time. With the pioneering Divx codec, attempting to put a full movie on a 1-2 CD-Rs wasn't all that crazy. By the time DVDs were cheap, you could actually create a fairly good copy of the movie on a single CD, or a pristine copy on two CDs.
Today, we have single-layer DVDs that are dirt-cheap, and dual-layer DVDs that aren't all that expensive. The single-layer disc is more than enough to store a 720p h.264 rip with reasonable quality, and the dual-layer disc can hold a 1080p rip using h.264 with only marginal quality losses.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I'm not sure about Blu-Ray discs but for DVDs the keys needed for the decryption process is stored in an area on the disc which is not writable on DVD-Rs.
Disclaimer: I can't remember exactly where I read this and may have remembered incorrectly.
I wish to remain anomalous
There's no such thing as "uncompressed MPEG-2 video". MPEG-2 is a video compression format; ergo, all MPEG-2 video is compressed to some degree.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
That is a good point. One interesting side effect of having higher resolution video is that as the analog portion gets to be more well defined, the easier it is for the human eye to ignore the compression artifacts.
In the past, when dealing with a lower resolutions stream, it was important to get every last detail out of the original source. You simply didn't have that much room for error. Yet with higher resolution sources, I'm willing to bet that the 'analog hole' is larger than ever since the resolution is so high to start with that any reduction or compression artifacts become less obvious to the human eye.
This is all a side thought though. In the end you are correct that the real method by which we can judge a succesful cracking attempt is if the original source is retrieved intact.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
There is nothing stopping a dedicated pirate from going, pixel by pixel, dumping the current pixel color values into a massive 2d array
-- -- --
Actually, there is. It's called HDCP, and means that only "authenticated" output devices will get digital data.
I doubt those devices will stop a dedicated pirate with good soldering talents. The data has to go to the screen at some point.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
You forgot the other major use. The crack will now allow people to play the discs. I own a bunch of DVDs, but I don't have a DVD player. I have a DVD drive. Without the DVD crack, I never would have bought a single movie or the drive. Same situation applies to BD: I haven't spent a dime, yet. But if it turns out that, despite the industry's desire, I am going to be able to play BD movies, then I just might start collecting them.
But it ain't happening until the crack is widespread knowledge, rather than a Slysoft trade secret. The format is still not quite open/usable yet.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And wtf is "lagle"?
"Lagle" is a typo. It should be "legal". And pedantry doesn't want to be anything either, but it can be annoying. But not nearly as annoying as something blatantly false and stupid that makes its utterer look like a fool. As I said, I want information to be free, and when you say "information wants to be free" it makes MY position look stupid.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You must get absolutely no pleasure out of reading novels
I'm sorry, I really didn't understand that. Can you please explain it to this old doddering fool?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Although you have some good points, there seems to be something you are missing. Have you ever actually downloaded one of those re-compressed hi-def movies? I have. The file was 9 GB. As far as I can tell it was the original resolution. So it has been *hugely* re-compressed. I was expecting it to be a huge mess. But you know what? It wasn't. Yes, there were numerous compression artifacts, but I was too distracted by the fact that the overall image quality and detail and dynamic range were about 1.78 gazillion times better than standard def DVD. It was one of the first hi-def movies I have watched on my computer and I was not at all disappointed. Would the original Blu-Ray or HD-DVD that it was derived from have better image quality? I have no doubt. You can't just throw away 60% or 70% of the information in an image and expect to retain the same quality. Is the difference noticeable? Almost certainly. But that doesn't change the fact that even at a reduced quality the re-compressed hi-def material is vastly superior in terms of the subjective viewing experience compared to the only other drive space friendly alternative, regular DVD. In fact I feel like throwing all of my DVDs in the trash. To me the difference seems that huge.
Generally speaking I do see myself as a videophile, as someone who cares very much about a small difference in image quality. But until hard drives become vastly larger I simply will not have enough space to store hi-def movies at the original quality. So, as much as it disturbs me, I am going to have to compromise. The re-compressed hi-def files are still an order of magnitude improvement over DVD. To me, the difference between regular DVD and hi-def is a much larger jump than between laser disc and DVD. I suppose it might more approximate the jump between VHS and laser disc. So as a videophile without infinite hard drive space (and without much money or an HDTV) I am quite happy with our new format and with the people responsible for cracking BD+.
Although I don't really claim to understand how it is possible to re-compress so much without completely degrading the quality to an unwatchable level, I am wondering if studios have really outdone themselves. Maybe they just have so much more space and the newer compression algorithms are so good that they are able to encode their film transfers at a bitrate that is nearly without artifacts, a format truly made for videophiles. Of course the irony is that they are doing this to try to tempt us all (not just videophiles) away from the fully cracked and easily copyable DVD format into their spider web of uber advanced DRM that is BD+ (and AACS). Call it what you will but it *is* much more advanced than DeCSS. Especially Blu-Ray.
But it probably takes a lot of extra storage space to get rid of that last 20% of compression artifacts (or whatever). So a non-perfectionist can still have relatively breathtaking video quality at a much smaller size if he is willing to make some visible but acceptable compromises. I am guessing that each video has its own sweet spot in this regard, a point where video quality starts to degrade sharply. That's the point that the re-encoder has to find.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
What is cheap about wanting to watch a blu-ray disc you purchased play on your computer?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Information, due to its nature, tends to freedom. That doesn't make a catchy slogan though.
What's wrong with "information should be free?" Or how about "when information isn't free, neither are you"?
Marijuana, by its nature, tends to cost about $40 for 1/8 oz.
Actually that's incorrect too. Marijuana doesn't cost $40 for 1/8 oz because of the nature of marijuana, but by the nature of the laws against it. Were it legal it probably would be free, since it's so easy to grow.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
It's the same problem as there is any IT security problem. Protectors need to be perfect every time, attackers need to be lucky/good (in that the protector missed something) once. Add to this basic fact the matter that there is an inherent architectural problem in content protection (you gotta give the attacker what they need or users can't see the media) and the fact that the usual relentless march of technology favors the attacker (more CPU power = easier key breaking, additional CPU power doesn't benefit the defenders) and I'm glad I'm not in the digital chastity belt biz, AKA content protection.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
It's better for the movie companies to have Bluray cracked anyway. I am a huge movie person but I mostly had stopped buying DVDs while I waited for Bluray to get cracked. I wasn't buying any movies until it was cracked because I want to be able to make backups and shift the movies to my computer hdd for playback. Now I can move forward and buy Bluray movies.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that doesn't want to be told what they can do with the media they buy.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
It DOES want to be free.
The smart companies will start creating multi-format media that contains high-quality, pre-ripped media.
Seriously, if I could buy an audio CD or a DVD with a high-quality Mp3 or Mpeg, etc. pre-ripped by the studio for use on my other equipment, I would never need to bittorrent again. I simply don't have the time to do all the ripping myself these days.
I may be in the minority, but I actually own a legitimate copy of every album and movie that I have in ripped format.
And what if I want to make a custom compilation? How about a disc with a compressed series of movies and/or TV shows?
The first companies that get on this bandwagon and work WITH the technology instead of AGAINST it are the ones that will profit in the end, with the rest of the competition howling in the cold.
Ironically, this news might make me consider buying a Blueray player - what's held me back is that I want to be guaranteed a way of copying the movies to my file server (so I don't have to have the disks easily accessible, or have to change them - yes I'm lazy) before I move to another format. Buying a format I can't copy is not something I'd consider even for a second.
You're right, but large scale pirates aren't exactly going to be using DVD-R's and consumer grade burners. They're using industrial production equipment not very unlike what the studios use. My wife just the other day had a friend offer to lend her a couple of pirated movies that was definitively not DVD-R's.
Its like mercenaries fighting against people defending their homeland. Money is a rather poor motivator compared to some other things...
Only applies to "consumer" grade equipment. The industrial-scale asian operations just use industrial presses that can write to the key area. They just do a bit-for-bit copy.
It's like what those wanna be Jack Baur types always say about fighting terrorism: we have to be right every single time; they only have to be right once. Honestly, I think these DRM folks go home and laugh themselves to sleep. In what other industry is total failure so acceptable? If condom manufacturers were held to the same low standards, half the planet would have AIDS (but not most /. readers, har har).
The various content providers will get it through their heads eventually that DRM punishes their paying customers while it barely slows the pirates down. The downside to the average consumer is that all of this content will have to be paid for somehow. ABC isn't going to keep cranking out Lost out of the goodness of their hearts. So what that will mean is more and more "product integration".
I actually sort of miss the old days. We had the ability to time shift - it was called a VCR, and it worked fine. You zapped the commercials with your remote, and you could keep the tape for years if you wanted. Now, I can get any show I want on Bit Torrent, but given that so many shows have become long commercials, do I really want them?
Sometimes product integration doesn't feel too intrusive - James Bond has always driven a flashy car. But sometimes, it's not nearly so feasible. If they find a way to work an ad for Red Bull into John Adams, I swear I will never watch TV again.
To be able to make bit-for-bit copies, you need access to a manufacturing plant. You can't make them at home with a consumer-level burner and media: that's how it's been since DVD-R was introduced.
So, the encryption system does prevent piracy on some level - or at least it did until it was cracked. It prevents you from selling exact copies on the street corner unless you have connections to someone who can go into the disc factory at night and stamp out his own copies, or steal them while they're being loaded onto a truck, or whatever.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Yeah. I had it cracked after like a day. But I sat on it, because I didn't want to make anybody feel dumb.
How do they get around the ROM-Mark without decryption?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
So THAT'S where the blue-ray porn I torrented the other day came from.
It's SWEET.
But the player in media-coder is the only one I have that can play the thing full speed on my system (with an occassional lag). I need an H264 codec that can use multiple cores.
Those who understand binary, and ...
clearly he really means 10 binary years ??
Novels tend to be full of analogies, metaphors, similes, and other devices of abstraction. "His heart rose like rocket reaching to the sky." Okay, I suck at writing, but the point is, I clearly don't mean that his heart literally rocketed out of his chest. Kind of like the saying, "Information wants to be free," which obviously is not meant to be taken literally.
Yeah its a shame no one said "beer and gasoline wants to be free" a few years ago...
the quality is not getting that degraded because it is using a different, probably more efficient codec. for example, you can compress a dvd at the same resolution with equal quality using a mpeg4 instead of mpeg2 and shave off quite a bit of space. though, i do realize that most dvd-rips are a less than the original resolution to conserve even more space. just a matter of time until the players can support x264 off of dvd-rs.
...
all it takes is a bored geek with a soldering iron and some spare time
That's a quote I'm going to have to remember. Maybe work it into a tshirt... thx
and I just put my soldering iron away for the evening.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Really? I would imagine that if you knew the codec and the uncompressed lossy output, you could reconstruct the compressed data. After all, the codec should work predictably, right? I doubt it would ever be worthwhile to bother -- it seems like a lot of effort, and there are surely easier ways -- but I really don't see why it isn't possible.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
One of the reasons that these 9GB re-encodes do look so good is because the competition sucks. Broadcast HDTV rarely lives up to its potential - the satellite guys have been screwing with the quality for years, preferring quantity over quality. So much so that the term "hd-lite" was invented to describe the bit-starved HDTV encoding from Dish and DirecTV.
But, regular over-the-air networks haven't done so well either. CBS is the only OTA broadcaster that seems to give a damn about quality - they generally run their bitrates at the max and try to do a good encoding job. But all the other networks - NBC, ABC, Fox, CW, and most PBS stations, do a really crappy job. Wasting bandwidth on channel multiplexing or just letting the bandwidth go unused - for example, most East Coast Fox affiliates broadcast their primetime at bitrates under 10mbps while the standard allows for up to about 18.5mbps. They just "null-pad" the video with empty packets.
When regular HDTV is so sub-par, it is no wonder that these reduced quality re-encodes are perceived as the bees-knees, they generally look so much better than regular HDTV that people are more than satisified with the quality.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The problem DirecTV faced was very different in just about every way. I can break that down by category.
First, the media itself. Directv's media is ephemeral. There is no value at all in knowing how the signal USED to be encoded, only the current method matters at all. With Blu-ray, knowing how to unlock any disk from (for example) 2007-2009 is still useful in 2015.
At the same time, Directv was free to make incompatible changes. The cards didn't have to be at all compatible with all previous versions of the encoding plus the new one, just the current one and the upcoming one.
Now, on the economic side for the pirate. Crack Blu-ray in 5 years and every disk produced up to that time is now yours. That can carry a considerable economic value. You don't get 5 years to crack satellite in the first place, but even if you crack it much faster, they can just change again and render your efforts completely worthless. Worse, they can cut over at a bad time like just before the Superbowl (they actually did that) and make your customers hate you.
From the perspective of the marketplace, a lot more people feel OK about making backup copies against the vendor's wishes (and even more willtell themselves that's why they're buying/downloading the ripping program) than there are that feel OK about hacking DirecTV for free cable. A fair number feel that a ripper for inter-operability with their OS is perfectly fine (and depending on local law, the courts might even agree).
In countries where marijuana is legal (the Netherlands) people go to stores and buy cultivated marijuana why? People aren't farmers, most city dwellers don't even own arable soil, and marijuana plants while they can be grown indoors, are tall, and processing them is an effort as well. So people pay money, for other people to grow, harvest, prepare, and package the marijuana... it's like saying tobacco is legal so people should grow their own to avoid the high price of taxes... growing tobacco is easy, refining it for smoking IS hard. That's why people pay other people to do it for them, even with absurd $2.50 a pack taxes on them.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Exactly correct. Its dead simple to create a device that reads bits from one source, and writes them to another. Does it care about 'scrambling' or 'encryption' during this process? NO! Can he do it and sell a bazillion copies? You Bet! The only issue is 1. being able to play anywhere on any device. Thats what this is good for. When I buy lumber, it might be for a house, or a shed, or I might just want to burn it. The store doesn't care. When I buy a CD, DVD, or Blu-Ray disk, its MY BUSINESS if I turn it into a frisbee or not.
"The same could be said of stealing satellite TV, but they eventually managed to make the cards sophisticated enough that reverse engineering them wasn't worth the effort."
No the sophistication of the cards has not changed in the slightest. What they did, was make a series of code updates, that both legit and cracked cards would run that would wind up putting a whole lot of garbage code on the card, and try to lock it down that way... the legit cards you simply hit reset, to clear the code updates, and the card worked again, the Cracked cards due to a flaw in their design Refused to reset to the new keys UNLESS REPROGRAMMED by a independent card programmer.
and those updates run every month, so pirate cards now need to be Reprogrammed Every month, while normal satellite users have to hit reset on their systems once in a while. (sometimes legit cards automatically fix but I've had to reset the boxes several times on legit cards )
the cards aren't rendered useless for pirate signals, as advertised, but you now need to get a new card every month and send back the old one from your pirate signal card source... so ironically the pirate sources are now making MORE money in recurrent fees for restoring the pirate signals for their customer base. yes it makes signal piracy less appealing to end users, but smart pirates are now making more money.
"for DVDs the keys needed for the decryption process is stored in an area on the disc which is not writable on DVD-Rs."
*cough* bullshit *cough*
DVD mastering involves, shockingly standard DVD recorders and Grade 1 recordable media.
and it's the other way around DVD-Rs contain data that pressed DVDs lack it's called the ATIP groove.
which helps recording software burn media at the correct speed.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I like to demonstrate the recompression effect to non-computer friends by opening up a picture in an editor and saving it as JPEG with something like 50% compression. I close and reopen the picture, then save it again. If I repeat this just a few times, instead of a picture of their dog we have something that looks like weather radar with a cloud layer in the shape of a shih-tzu. That's the point at which they get it.
John
Oh, then I guess we don't read the same kind of novels.
John
But that's a completely different algorithm than just running the compressor a second time -- different inputs will yield different outputs.
I know. And it's probably not productive to reverse the codec in that fashion. I just wanted to point out that that -- as opposed to lossily compressing already lossy data -- is possible, if impractical.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
JPEG works on 8x8 macroblocks, so I was thinking that a lookup table might work. MPEG-1 uses 16x16 macroblocks, and so would need a freakin' huge table. But then again MPEG-4 / H.264 uses variable sized blocks, so even that scheme is out.
Finally, a quick glance at the math tells me that if it is possible to reverse the compression, it'll have to be done by someone else! :-(
John
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
Thank you.
After all, you can't make MORE information out of the DVD than it has already, so teh fact that there are still compression artefacts is irrelevant: they are part of the system you copied.
So it is a perfect copy of what they sold you.
And people switching to Netflix because it's cheaper deals with economics, not DirecTV's effective DRM. Some people had access to every single channel ever put out by DirecTV with no DirecTV account. And as soon as the stronger DRM was put into place, such users then switched to Netflix - a testament to how successful DirecTV was.
True, but with those very high definition video's, it would be very easy to achieve DVD quality or better. So you are right, by definition it would not be cracked. But it would have been sufficiently cracked to satisfy a very large number of people.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
A quick search of Google shows that it is often used as a slogan for an ideal. There's also some stuff on the origin of the term, where apparently "free" was meant in opposite to "valuable", and described information as having both properties and so there was a constant tension.
:)
So in short, usage differs
Let's just hope Sony works around this soon or Blu-Ray is dead in the water.
No studio is going to release content for a known broken system.
Thanks pirates, you've just killed the HD disc industry before it could really be born.
Novels tend to be full of analogies, metaphors, similes, and other devices of abstraction
They also tend to be fiction.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I don't know, perhaps you're right, but tobacco is (so I've heard) a diggicult crop to grow, while marijuana is as easy to grow as dandelions. Non-farming city-clickers I know grow tomatos every summer just because the ones you buy in the store taste like cardboard.
If they legalized pot I know I'd be growing it!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
So metaphor is appropriate only in fictional contexts? Oooookay then. I guess I wouldn't want to stress your brain too much.
Actually, that's a good example: What if a certain type of DRM'd disks would only play on a certain very expensive brand of player, even all other players are cheap commodity items??
Yes, we've sortof had this situation (tape type X only plays on player brand Y) but you may notice such pairings typically do NOT dominate the consumer market, so long as any more-generic alternative still exists.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Now look who's being too literal! And-
1. a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in "A mighty fortress is our God." Compare mixed metaphor, simile (def. 1).
2. something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol.
I don't see how "information wants to be expensive" is a metaphor. What's more, the example I just put shows that the other side in the freedom war (those who want freedom and those who oppose it) can play the same game. What, exactly, is it a metaphor for? Sorry, I think th ephrase "information wants and ice cream cone" sounds no more unrealistic than "information wants to be free".
I still maintain that "when information isn't free, neither are you" is a far better slogan. If someone tries to turn it around it becomes patently false. It's literally true, and it isn't trying to be cute. And I'm sure someone can come up with a far better slogan than that even.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest