Adobe Flaw Allows Full Movie Downloads For Free

webax writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "[An Adobe security hole] exposes online video content to the rampant piracy that plagued the music industry during the Napster era and is undermining efforts by retailers, movie studios and television networks to cash in on a huge Web audience. 'It's a fundamental flaw in the Adobe design. This was designed stupidly,' said Bruce Schneier ... The flaw rests in Adobe's Flash video servers that are connected to the company's players installed in nearly all of the world's Web-connected computers. The software doesn't encrypt online content, but only orders sent to a video player such as start and stop play. To boost download speeds, Adobe dropped a stringent security feature that protects the connection between the Adobe software and its players." webax also notes that the article suggests DRM as a potential solution to the problem.

Comments

Summary of "news" story...

[evilviper]

In summary:

Amazon.com is staffed by idiots... They thought it would be safe to stream the ENTIRE MOVIE, to anyone, FOR FREE. The ONLY protection being that they send a command to the Flash Player to "pause" playback after 2 minutes for those that haven't paid to watch the whole thing. Cheap software and instructions have sprung up all over the web, and everybody knows Amazon.com is going to get a boot up the ass by the media companies, and fix this "security" issue any second now.

DRM is utterly redundant. They just need someone with 3-digit IQ in the company to teach them how to make a 2 minute excerpt clip that is free and publicly accessible, while keeping the full video password-protected.

This is about on-par with an Apache "security announcement" that even if you don't make a link to a document on your HTTP server, it's still accessible! The horror!